Poolesville Presbyterian Church
11.25.12; Rev. David Williams
As the Thanksgiving week passes, and four days of extra-high-density family time wrap up, it’s a time of reflecting on not just where we are in life, but also noticing where things have changed. Every year is the same, or so it seems, until you realize it isn’t. There are changes, subtle and slow, from year to year. You notice them.
I used to sit next to my oldest son, I recall, and carefully spoonfeed him food. Now, I watch with a mix of horror and admiration as he ingests a second mounded-high plateful of turkey as big as his head. Things change, and there are things you miss after they pass.
I miss storytime.
For almost a decade when the kids were little, storytime was how we spent the ending of every evening. With dinner eaten and homework done, the boys and Rache would curl up on the sofa and I’d curl up with a fermented beverage in Daddy’s chair. Then, I’d start in with whatever book was on tap for that evening. These were tales of far off places, places where the world was very different from the suburban world around us.
We read our way together through the Narnia books, and through the Harry Potter books. We read the Hobbit, which was and is just about the perfect book for reading to your kids, one snippet at a time, night after night. We read Eragon, and Stuart Little, and the Mouse and the Motorcycle, and the Little House on the Prairie books, and many, many others. And every evening right before bedtime, the story would be told so the boys would be nice and calm and ready for bed. That meant, honestly, that boys would listen quietly until we were done, and my wife would conk right out.
Storytime was such a hit that the boys began to demand stories at every possible moment. Every day when they were little, and I was shuttling them to preschool or kindergarten, they’d hop into the van and before we were even twelve point five seconds out of the driveway, they’d ask, “Daddy, can you tell us a story?” This happened Every. Single. Day.
How could I say no? I knew what was coming, that there’d come a day when that question was no longer asked, when childhood would vanish and I’d be in the company of tweens and teens who’d disappeared forever into their iPod Touches. So I had to say yes, and that was a “yes” that really pushed me. After I’d exhausted Bible stories, and retold the Harry Potter books, and retold the Lord of the Rings books and retold the Star Wars saga, I began to take requests. I did that, right up until the prospect of having to make up another “Pikachu and Bulbasaur meet the Rescue Heroes” story made me break out in hives.
One day, as we were going God-knows-where in the van and I was grasping desperately around for an idea, an old story came rising up unbidden out of my subconscious. From out of nowhere, I found myself telling them the story of King Arthur. The version I served up was a mashup, a strange blended Arthurian tale that was equal parts of all of the tellings I had ever heard or seen. It was Disney and Camelot and Excalibur...well, not that much Excalibur, given that I was telling it to small children. Those bits and pieces were woven together with whatever I could remember of T.H. White’s wonderful and bittersweet novel The Once and Future King. It was a sprawling mess of a tale I spun, one that filled three whole days of minivan shuttling. They loved it.
There’s something compelling about the stories of kings, about the idea of a single leader who guides their people in peace and yet remains a noble warrior. Even in our democratic republic, where we celebrate having thrown off the yoke of monarchy, there’s still this latent yearning. Human beings seek an emblem, the impossibly perfect individual, someone who can completely express the ideals of a nation.
That person becomes the expression of the power of a people. They represent power, the ability to control and to overpower. It represents pomp and circumstance, shine and sparkle. It manifests our own human yearnings for control over our lives.
The story told in John’s Gospel today is a story about kingship, and about power. Here we are, one week out from the beginning of the Advent season, and we find ourselves in a strange place in the story of Jesus. It’s not particularly Christmasy, frankly. In John’s narrative, we’ve moved to the very beginning of the Passion narrative, which describes the events immediately leading up to the crucifixion.
Jesus is in conversation with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, who had been assigned to lead the Judean province between 26 and 36 BCE. There are many stories about Pilate, most of which come to us from various Jewish or Christian sources. In the Jewish histories of that period, he’s viewed as insensitive at best, and brutal at worst, being willing to do whatever it took to maintain power over that restive region.
His time as governor was interspersed with moments of raw force, as he repeatedly brought the spears and the swords at his disposal into play to keep Rome’s authority unquestioned in the region. While his brutality may have troubled the Jews who were under his control, it didn’t apparently bother Rome all that much, as Pilate was one of the longest serving governors of that region. He was just doing his job. He may have been a stranger in a strange land, but no matter where you were from, everyone spoke the language of power.
And in his capacity as governor, John’s story of Jesus brings Pilate into a peculiar conversation with Jesus. Jesus has just been brought to Pilate from the Sanhedrin, the Jewish High Council. What is being done is a political gesture, as the Sanhedrin acknowledges the power of Pilate, which is a projection of the power of Rome. Here, they said, was a potential revolutionary, someone who is seeking to overthrow both our power and yours. Here, they said, was someone who sought to be king, and to seek to be king was to subvert the power of both state and temple.
So Pilate finds himself confronted with this potential subversive, yet another in a long line of individuals who had declared themselves messiah, and he asks him a series of questions. But in every one of the responses Jesus gives to Pilate’s questions leads further and further away from the place Pilate was familiar with. Jesus refuses to enter into the kind of conversations about power that Pilate would have expected.
Instead of staking claim over land or over a people, asserting his right to defend or destroy, Jesus takes a completely different approach to kingship.
Pilate asks a pointed question. Jesus replies, “Are you asking because you think that, or because you’re relying on the witness of others?”
Pilate asks another question, trying to draw Jesus out. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus says. “If it were, my followers would be fighting to prevent my arrest.”
Jesus simply refuses to engage in the kind of leadership that would have been familiar to Pilate. He is not a king, not as Pilate understood kingship. He was not powerful, not in the way that Pilate understood power. The story Jesus had been telling about himself and the role that he plays in the coming of the Kingdom of God was completely different.
Jesus presents us with a way of living that is completely at odds with the dynamics of power that have always governed human society. He was not the sort of leader who would take more power for himself, consolidating an iron grip on a nation for “the good of the people and their security.” We’ve seen plenty of that in the world. He was not the sort of leader who stirred violence for the sake of violence, motivating his people by turning them in hatred towards a demonized enemy. We see plenty of that out there, too.
Those approaches to our life together are familiar, consistent, and have never, ever worked. And while Christ’s strange and transformative teachings speak to how our leaders should live and act, they also speak directly to our own lives.
Jesus lived to speak the truth of God’s grace, mercy, and kindness into the world. That truth is radically generous, open, and selfless. Christ understood that as the root of his power, a power that bore no resemblance to the power of this world. That, quite frankly, is how we are to live our lives out, moment by moment, day by day.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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