Excited to start a new series for the blog today! “Chaplain Barb,” a clergywoman who is a friend of Christians for Abolition and functions as our chaplain, is offering sermons based on the Revised Common Lectionary texts read through a prison-abolitionist perspective.
Here’s her first homily for us, based on the readings for this coming Sunday, 11/25/18, the Feast of Christ the King:
A Homily on John 18:33-37
The former Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts-Schori, tells the story of going to the prayer service after the inauguration of President Obama. The Presiding Bishop was in full vestments, carrying her shepherd’s staff. When she posed with Obama and VP Joe Biden for a picture, President Obama saw her staff, and said, “I need one of those sticks!”
All leaders, she opined, yearn for something that will make the work of leadership easier or more straightforward.
In today’s Gospel passage, Pontius Pilate has plenty of signs of authority, and not just symbols of power, but actual physical evidence of it. Pilate was cruel and unpredictable, with an inclination to violence. So it is completely natural, Passover being historically a time of unrest and rebellion, that Pilate is in Jerusalem to keep things under control. He is worried, and for good reason.
The guards bring Jesus before Pilate. Jesus is beat up from his previous interrogation. Pilate gets snarky with Jesus. “Are YOU the king of the Jews? … What have you done?” You can imagine what Pilate was thinking but didn’t say out loud…who are YOU, you pitiful prisoner?
Jesus answers, “My kingdom is not from this world.”
Pilate asks, “So you are a king?”
Jesus says, “You say so. But my purpose is to speak the truth. And if you had a bone of truth in your body, you would listen to me.”
Pilate doesn’t understand. He can’t. Pilate can’t conceive that the beat-up prisoner in front of him is any kind of king. What kind of king could this Jesus character possibly be?
The answer is that Jesus is a different kind of king than Pilate could ever possibly imagine. He is a kind of king whose authority is not based in brute force, or violence, but in speaking the truth.
During the height of the midterm campaigning a few weeks ago, just after the pipe bomb mailings and the synagogue shooting, a news story about a congressional candidate in Florida caught my eye. It caught my eye because it was such a different kind of story from all the others we have heard over and over again. A death threat against the congressman was posted on Twitter. The Capitol Police and FBI tracked down the 19 year old fellow who tweeted the death threat, and arrested him. What happened next really caught my attention: the congressman asked to meet with the man who issued the death threat. The two talked.
The congressman later said, “First, I want to understand why it is someone would say something like this or express themselves with so much hate, and secondly, I’d really like to try to turn this into something positive … He explained to me that he had some issues in his personal life that he thinks pushed him to do something like this, and he also talked about how nasty and negative everything is …”
The young man apologized. And the congressman asked the attorney general to drop all charges.
How amazing.
THAT is the kind of king Jesus is, and that is what life is like in his kingdom. The main weapon of Jesus’ kingdom is not violence; but truth. The sticks in Jesus’ kingdom are not the kind that break your bones, but the sticks that form a cross.
There is a prayer in the Morning Prayer service in the Book of Common Prayer called a “collect for peace:”
O God, the author of peace and lover of concord, to know you is eternal life and to serve you is perfect freedom…
The paradox of the kingdom of God is that in submitting ourselves to truth and non-violence, we discover what perfect freedom is. It is the freedom of Jesus, the freedom of every prisoner like him who possesses no sign of office and exercises no authority except to the extent that the truth is spoken.
We celebrate this feast of Christ the King on the very last Sunday of the Christian liturgical year. It reminds us in no uncertain terms from where real authority comes. Not presidential powers or bishops’ staffs. But truth spoken by a powerless prisoner.
Amen.
Credit: the story about Obama is from the November 2009 Episcopal Diocese of Central New York Diocesan Convention address of the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts-Schori.