Poolesville Presbyterian Church
11.22.2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: John 18:33-37; 1 Samuel 8:10-20
LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:
Here we are, right on the cusp of that holiday of all holidays, the day of giving thanks, the day when we are thankful that we invested in larger belts and for the miracle of elastic waistbands.
Thanksgiving is a holiday of welcome, a day when we celebrate the old story of the arrival of the pilgrims, and the sharing of a meal with the stranger. I remember, faintly, my first American thanksgiving, from first grade in Ms. Baumgartner’s class, as the week before we cut out feathers and made construction paper pilgrim hats, and in the carpeted common area there was an object made of boxes that when viewed from 1000 meters might have looked something like a ship. There was lots of candy corn involved, which made it awesome and entirely historically accurate.
I mean, here the Wampanoag people brought maize to the meal, and I was eating congealed nuggets of high fructose corn syrup. It was like I’m part of history!
Somehow, in the thick of all of that, the core idea of that simplified story of the Pilgrims arrival on our shores managed to sink in. They arrived because they were seeking a place where they could live without persecution, a place where they didn’t have to worry about being shot with a blunderbuss just because they happened to practice a particular strain of Jesus faith.
That myth...and by myth I mean a story that defines a people...stuck around in my head, as one of those things that’s worth giving thanks for.
I am, in point of fact, very thankful for that story, thankful that I’m in a position to stand here on a Sunday and talk about Jesus in a singularly Presbyterian way without worrying about the aforementioned blunderbusses being pointed in my direction. I am thankful for a Thursday when I can gather together with my family in all its complex blend of beliefs and traditions, and know that a person’s beliefs can be practiced out in the open without fear of persecution.
And by that, I mean not just my beliefs, that peculiar set of particular understandings that defines me and guides my actions. I mean the beliefs of those who come from a very different perspective, those who have chosen different paths or come from different cultures.
In so far as they do not force themselves on others, I am particularly, singularly, uniquely thankful that they, too, can practice what they believe, without anyone harassing them or using the power given them to dominate and control.
Because the lesson learned from the bloody history of faith, of every faith and the Way of Jesus in particular, is that the temptation of coercive power and the desire to hold on to such power always corrupts. The power to rule over others, to bend them to your will? Human beings have proven themselves unable to wield that sword.
The story told in John’s Gospel today is a story about the power to ruling, and it lands right here on the cusp of Thanksgiving. 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 having a little chat with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, a dismally unsuccessful functionary who had been given power over the Judean province between 26 and 36 BCE. This was not a choice assignment. 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.
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 human being who was trying to take power for himself, yet another in a long line of crazies 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.
In its difference, it sings out against all Israel faced were surrounding peoples who were increasingly organized around consolidated, central authority. Individual tribes or city-states were merging into kingdoms, which could leverage that consolidated power into more and more organized military systems. Their armies were better equipped.
And so the pressure was on, and the struggled to come to terms with their seeming lack of power. The solution was simple. In order to provide the unifying and concentrated power that would permit the Israelites to compete with other nations, the elders of all of the tribes approached Samuel. “Give us a king like the other nations.”
This was, for Samuel, frustrating, but as he sought the counsel of God, he receives an odd response.
Faced with what appears to be a rejection of the balance that has maintained the integrity of the covenant people, God tells Samuel in verse 7: “Listen to the voice of the people,” and again in verse 9, “Listen to their voice.” For all of Samuel’s frustration, he is told, listen...and then told to just tell them precisely what will happen if he does what they ask.
What the leaders of Israel hope is that the king will serve them. Samuel predicts is what always happens when human power concentrates in the hands of a few. The powerful will take what they need to maintain power. The king will take sons as soldiers and daughters for his courts. He will take taxes and take land, which will be distributed to those who hover around the riches of power. The king will serve the people, alright, but not quite in the way they’d hoped.
Because as historian Mel Brooks noted, it's good ta be da king, pretty much all the time. But for those who aren't? It's not quite so great.
This is the model of power that has always been the enemy of God’s reign among us.
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.
And there, there we are called to ask ourselves, from this place of power that we inhabit, what our responsibility is towards those who are suffering under oppression, who may be different, and whose hope is for a better future, whose hope for nothing more and nothing less than the God-given rights that I myself am thankful for.
Our task, as we give thanks in this season of thanksgiving, is not to maintain a fierce and ungiving grip on what we have. It is to maintain an attitude of grace and abundance, which is and has always been the best spirit of this nation.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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