Jesus and Schrodinger's Cat

Matthew 1:26-38
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Christmas Eve, we gather to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Christ-child, God the Son become human.  It’s a fairly nostalgic moment that we share – a time to appreciate beauty in song and seasonal aesthetics, a time of warmth in reunion with family friends, a time of giving and a realization that we need to do more for those in need, a time to receive.  We come to worship in an effort to let God know we haven’t forgotten the reason for the season – somehow this Baby Jesus changes us; saves us; saves everything; changes everything.

To say why God has done what God has done for us in, through, and as Jesus is fairly easy.  God is love.  God loves.  God loves his good creation.  God loves us.  God loves each of us.  Yet, something has gone terribly wrong in God’s good creation, in us, in each of us.  There is good and there is evil.  There is futility and there is death.  The root of it is a disease called sin.  We all have it. 

Our disease is not a naive either/or problem where we simply know the difference between what is good and what is evil and at times do good and at times do evil.  When we speak of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Book of Genesis from which Adam and Eve eat, it is not the Tree of the Knowledge of Good or Evil, but rather Good and Evil.  Good and Evil are juxtaposed but mixed.  So often we do Good and it winds being Evil or have to do what we know is Evil to bring about Good, war being an example. 

Good and Evil are confused and entwined within us.  We cannot just do one without doing the other because we are both at the same time.  It makes me think of the state of quantum superposition that gives rise to the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat – an evil thought.  If you put a cat in a steel box with a poisonous gas distribution mechanism in which the triggering device relies on the nuclear decay of an atom in which the probability/possibility of it decaying and releasing the gas is 50% (either the atom will decay or not), from the point of the observer the cat in the box is in a state of both being dead and/or alive.  You don’t know which until you open the box.  When it comes to Good and Evil, it isn’t that we have the capacity/possibility/probability of doing either Good or Evil and we wont know which we are until we are observed in action observe us in action.  We exist in a state of being both Good and Evil and when we observe each other in action everything we do, even right done to how we interpret our observations of each other’s actions, is both Good and Evil to varying degrees on a spectrum.  This illustration is my case in in point.  It’s a really Good explanation, but virtually impossible to understand and I am Evil to have inflicted it upon you just to observe the confusion on your faces and ruin your Christmas.

We are sick with a disease that is killing us, killing the Creation.  We are as good as dead; dead though we live.  We really are in the box in the state of being both dead and alive.  The only cure for our disease is that God infuse us with God’s very self and so we talk about God becoming human.  God the Son became human as the man Jesus of Nazareth.  God took upon himself our sin diseased state of existence and as one of us he lived a life in communion with God and us in which he did no evil.  This infusion began the healing.  Jesus death once and for all removes the disease of sin from humanity like a tea bag drawing the infection from an infected wound.  Jesus’ resurrection set in motion the rubrics of a new humanity, a new creation in which Sin and Death will be no more.  In the fullness of time, whenever that will be, whenever God decides to open the box, we will either simply be changed if we’re still around or resurrected from the dead to live anew in a bodily existence that neither sins nor dies but is rather filled with the living, glorious presence of God right down to every subatomic particle from which we are made.  Until then, God has poured his Spirit upon those whom has called to follow Jesus as proof of what is to come.

The Son of God became human and in so doing God has set in motion the healing of his Creation, of humanity, and of us each. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, an important leader in the church back in the 300’s wrote: “The unassumed is the unhealed”.  God took upon his very self our very selves and it heals us.  St. Athanasius of Alexandria who lived at the same time said, “He became what we are that we might become what he is” meaning a new humanity, human beings filled with the very life of God.  In Christ we exist at the same time as dead but healed and alive. 

This all sounds like metaphysics until you realize that it is love we are talking about.  Not that warm, fuzzy, nostalgic, feel-good stuff; but rather the kind of love in which we put ourselves aside and moved with compassion we act for justice, for economic equity, for human rights.  The kind of love that says we’re going to stop waiting for trickle-down, supply-side economics to work (which it likely won’t because it’s diseased with greed), and make sure the people who live on our street, in our town, in our county, in our province, in our nation, in our world have enough to eat and if they don’t we’re going to take food from our tables to feed them, and then we’re going to find out why, and then we’re going to talk to our local politicians and to our provincial ministers and to our members of parliament and in the name of Jesus tell them quit politicking, quit back-benching, solve the problem.  If they say it’s too big a problem and they are too insignificant to do anything about, then we say next election we’ll vote for the candidate who will.  You see, it’s time we stopped voting party allegiance or for the candidate we think will make us more economically secure and start voting according to the mandate of food for the hungry, clean water for the thirsty, homes for the stranger, clothes for ill-clothed, health-care for the sick, hospitality and proper care for even those who have broken the law and our trust.   When we start thinking about costly love in action then the vulnerable baby in the manger makes sense.  Amen.

Blessed Is She Who Believed

Luke1:26-45
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Every December when I read Luke’s account of Mary and Elizabeth I think to myself, “Here goes God again pullin’ out the big guns.  Y’all men just step aside and let the sisters take over.  If it’s gonna get done, then the women gonna do it.”  Then I start thinking of some special people with whom I have had the privilege of sharing in ministry, and they are women who had seen difficult days but through whom God worked to build his people up.

I think of Francis Pugh.  She was a widow, in her 80’s, thyroid problem that caused her eyes to bulge right out there at you.  She spoke with this wonderful south-central Virginia southern accent that was high class Southern not no Gomer Pyle.  She was a resident at the Masonic Home of Virginia in Richmond, VA.  My last two years of Seminary I conducted their Sunday evening chapel service.  Frances played the organ and directed the little choir of about 10 people which included Mr. Hesslebeck who was all but deaf as well as tone deaf but loved to sing loudly.  He was a real Southern gentleman himself; a former schoolteacher and always wore a suit jacket and a bow tie.  Francis always kept me informed of the pastoral needs and who needed prayers and there was frequently a “Randy, if you’ve got a minute could we just go see...”. She was an “information hub”, up on things in the way people we would call gossips are up on things, but she wasn’t a gossip.  She was full of compassion and believed in prayers and visits, and so she did a lot of that herself and so knowledge of needs just came her way.  She also organized the Wednesday night Bible Study.

During my two years of conducting that chapel service attendance went from 20 something to 80 something.  That’s 300% growth if you’re interested.  Francis’ little choir doubled in size.  The service was so important to the residents that the Home did some remodelling of the sanctuary to accommodate more wheel chair space.  Part of the growth came from the addition of small houses for active life-styler’s to occupy.  But, the real reason was Frances.  She was always inviting people to come, new residents and old, and they came and they enjoyed it and found it helped.  I preached resurrection and hope to people who had made their last move and many were just waiting to go home while enduring those difficult challenges the aging brings.  God hadn’t forgotten them. In the midst of them God had put Frances, who for the last ten years of her life, herself suffering the aches and pains and heartbreaks that accompany aging, she just wanted her neighbours to know God was in their midst.

In my first church, in the little town of Marlinton, WV there were several women who kept that church thriving: Jane Price Sharp, Ruth Morgan, Francis Graham, Louise Burns, Jean Thomas, Demetria Moore, Jaynell Graham, Annette Graham, and more.  I would not have wound up in that church had not Jane Price Sharp felt I was the one.  She lost her husband in WWII and never remarried.  She raised three children, served in the State legislature, and ran the local paper.  She was one of the most generous people who ever lived.  Jaynell, well I have to be careful what I say about her.  She’s still alive and might find out.  She lost her husband to physician-assisted opioid addiction.  She fought a long, hard losing battle on that.  Without her help and insight into people I likely would not have been able to negotiate the “politics” of my first charge.  She is also a very involved and influential person in the area around Marlinton.   If anything is getting done, she’s likely got a hand in it.

In my church in Caledon, I’ll only mention one woman.  We were a small fellowship and men and women both carried the load.  Doreen Shackleton was a notable constant support.  She went through a divorce and raised four children on her own.  She was faithful to Jesus and to his church and probably the longest active member at Claude.  Due to her longevity there she always reminded us that when we would lose a person or a family at Claude due to death or moving or whatever, that God would always bring someone in to take their place.  For the most part that held true.  There was a time in my ministry there that she kept telling me that she kept telling people in the church, “The best minister you can have is the one God has given you right now.”  After I had been there about two years and people weren’t flocking in by the droves as was hoped and in those days the tendency was to blame the minister, there was some grumbling.  Doreen was an avid supporter of the one she knew was called there.  Doreen was also the one who kept me abreast of the pastoral needs in the congregation.  It surprised me that in her last two years she kept her struggle with cancer so secret.  She died this past August.  I unfortunately had a funeral that day and could not go to hers.

All these women were/are blessed as Elizabeth said of Mary.  “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what had been spoken to her by the Lord”.  The grace of the Lord was/is also on these women as the angel Gabriel said to Mary, “Greetings, favoured one.  The Lord is with you.”  The Lord was/is with these women and worked his grace through them.  Being blessed, being favoured didn’t mean that their lives were free from suffering because they all suffered.  It meant the Lord was with them through their sufferings and they knew it and they kept faith and were faithful and felt a particular urging to be involved pastorally in the life of their churches.  Jesus worked through them.

In this church there are blessed women, favoured by the Lord.  Women who, like Elizabeth, hold in themselves the faithfulness of many generations of God’s people and are bringing it to fulfillment.  There are also young women like Mary who will see the birthing of a new way of being church in these days when the institution of the Church is waning.  Today women are taking a greater, upfront role in ordained ministry.  Our seminaries are turning out more women for ministry than men and we would be dolts if we didn’t admit that this is the Lord’s doing.  The expert’s are wondering what effect the “feminization” of the Church will have in our culture.  Most are expecting a more compassionate and less political Church to arise, a more Christ-like church that functions less like a hierarchical empire.  In my own journey in ministry, I have found that women more than men have been the pastoral backbone of the ministry that Christ Jesus has done in the churches that I have served.  And so it is now in this church, so thanks to all the sisters who are getting it done.  I won’t name names, but do know I am appreciative.  Amen.

Live Fair - Share

Luke3:7-18
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Luke here gives us a rare, one-off taste of a John the Baptist sermon.  Droves of people flocked to him out in the wilderness of the Jordan River Valley, a barren place well-known to be dangerous for travellers.  These crowds came to him looking for a way to make themselves ready for the coming Messiah and his kingdom, a way to let their God know who’s side they were on.  They wanted to cry out to the God who heard the cries of his people and saved them out of slavery in Egypt from under Pharaoh by a mighty hand.  They wanted God to act and send his promised Anointed king, the Messiah, and deliver them from the Romans who had come and occupied their land.

Ancient Israel had an interesting relationship with God.  Being his special people whom he gave a land and made to be a nation as he promised to their forefather Abraham, God expected them to live according to the Law he gave to Moses, a way of life that would distinguish them as a just and good nation among the nations – a nation that acted like their just and good God. 

Yet, history shows that the Israelites had a habit of following the gods of their neighbouring nations and living like their neighbours.  When they did this, they inevitably fell into the greedy practice of oppressing and enslaving one another.  Instead of a fair and good nation where everyone had land and had enough, they became an unjust nation of a few very rich citizens who conscripted thugs to exploit and enslave the poor. 

Not willing to abandon his people nor renege on his promise to be their God, God always acted to restore his people to faithfulness.  God would send foreign powers to dominate them until they had a change of heart and returned to Yahweh as their only God.  At one point they got so bad in their living like the nations they not only abused the poor in their midst to their own advantage, but their kings did evil.  These kings sought power from foreign gods by sacrificing their own children, and God’s people danced in celebration.  That’s when God sent the Babylonians and they destroyed Jerusalem, levelled that beautiful Temple that Solomon built, and carried away anybody who was anybody back to Babylon to live in exile.

Roughly 400 years later and back on the land, we find John the Baptist out in the wilderness with the masses of people coming to him turning back to God in faithfulness.  They were under Roman oppression, something the Romans did well.  Their own royalty were appointed by the Romans and were well steeped in the hedonism of the “Greek” lifestyle.  Their religious leaders were also Roman puppets who enjoyed the power and prestige and mostly the money the “big business” of the Jerusalem Temple provided them.  The people as a whole were faced with having to like Romans if they wanted to have a life at all. 

For the everyday Israelite, times were tough; Roman taxes, temple taxes, extortion, corruption, soldiers everywhere, living on pins and needles – there was just no peace.  So, the people flocked to John, the one true prophet who called them back to their God and had them symbolically declare their faithfulness by washing in the waters of the Jordan River, the river the people of God crossed when they first entered this Promised Land centuries before – a new beginning. 

John preached an interesting sermon to those people crying out in the wilderness.  He proclaimed the Gospel to them. Verse 18 says that.  His Gospel was prepare the way for the Coming One who would baptize them with the Holy Spirit and the fire of refining.  Now listen up here!  The way John told them to prepare had to do with practising economic justice not believing the right things.  He didn’t say “Just have faith and believe the Coming One is coming and you’ll be ready”. That’s like what people today say, “All you got to do is believe Jesus died for your sins and you’ll go to heaven when you die.”  That’s cheap grace; the kind of Gospel that keeps empires in power rather than confronts them and frees us from tyranny. 

John’s Gospel was that the Coming One is coming, therefore do this – If you have two coats and plenty of food, share with those who have not; if you have a job that affords you power and position, don’t bully and extort others out of their stuff to make yourself rich.  Be satisfied with what you have.”  The way that God’s people are to prepare themselves for the Coming Messiah and life in the Kingdom of God is to immediately start practising economic justice – live fair and share.  The way of the Roman Empire (that persists today) was to get whatever you could for yourself no matter the means.  Yet, if the people of God wanted to be free of the Roman Empire then they themselves had to stop living according to the Roman way.  The Gospel according to John the Baptist is that God will put the world to rights, therefore you, we, the people of God right now must start living fair and share. 

If John the Baptist were alive today what would his sermon be?  Well, first, we would probably have to journey into the wilderness of Facebook to find him.  In the wilderness of Facebook one will find people calling us adamantly to a lifestyle of economic justice and one will see these modern day John the Baptists getting trolled and bullied for sounding too Liberal if I may.  I came across one the other day.  Someone I know shared a quote from somebody who shared it from someone else and so on and so on.  You know how Facebook works.  The quote came from Barbara Ehrenreich who wrote Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America.  The book was about what its like to be a woman in the States who has to try to make ends meet on a minimum wage job and I suspect its not too different here in Canada.  She writes: “Shame at our own dependence on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on--when she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently--then she has made a great sacrifice for you. The working poor are the major philanthropists of our society."

I have to admit I feel that shame and I am a hypocrite and a coward.  I’m one of the brood of vipers scrolling through the wilderness of Facebook.  I live in a house full of stuff that underpaid workers made.  I’ve got a belly carefully crafted by eating food raised and processed by underpaid workers employed by corporate extortionists.  The lifestyle that I, that we live, here in this society in which there is no way to control the cost of living, our lifestyle results in people having to stay poor due to working jobs that don’t pay enough because we undervalue human labour so that we can have the stuff we want cheap and conveniently on demand.  We aren’t satisfied with what we have.  There’s the endless stream of newer and better stuff produced by underpaid workers perpetually marketed to us as the means happiness which we readily consume by means of going into debt.  If Ehrenreich is right, and I believe she is, there are masses of underpaid workers making a huge sacrifice for me/us to have the privilege of scrolling through the wilderness of Facebook…and to think we celebrate the birth of Jesus -- born a child and yet a king, born his people to deliver, born to set his people free – with a well-meaning, gift-giving retail feeding frenzy that requires a huge sacrifice by the underpaid.  Friends, it’s time we woke up.  Amen.

Backbenching in the Wilderness

Luke3:1-6
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Doug was an Elder in a small Presbyterian church.  He at one time became quite motivated about finding an outreach project for his little church.  It just happened that he happened to meet the minister of the Presbyterian church in Puslinch, ON who was deeply involved in a newly founded organization called North-South Partnership for Children.  This ministry was a cooperative venture between First Nations Reserves in Northern Ontario and various organizations in Southern Ontario to help relieve poverty on the more isolated northern Reserves. 

North-South Partnership had a unique approach.  It let the Reserves say what they needed and then it resourced those needs.  The typical protocol in these matters is that the government or some other organization tells the Reserves what the Reserves need and tells them to take it or nothing.  When actual needs are ignored, the system remains paternalistic and nothing changes.

One of North-South’s success stories involved a Northern Reserve needing clean drinking water.  Government solutions were proving inadequate and slow…and yet the people still needed water.  Someone in the Puslinch church looked over at the Nestle water plant and said “They have water” and went and asked if Nestle would help.  Nestle did…by the truckload.  A common sense solution to a sickeningly unnecessarily common problem.

Inspired by such successes, Doug became more involved in the North-South organization along with his church.  Then for some reason he decided to go to his local Member of Parliament to see if he could maybe possibly see if the government might maybe want to endorse such an ingenious way of helping people.  Doug asked his minister to come along and together they had a very cordial meeting with the MP.  The MP said there was really nothing he could do.  He said, “I’m just a backbencher in the party and I don’t have a say in anything.” In the conversation the MP noticed that the minister had a Southern accent and offered to do what he could to help him become a Canadian citizen which amounted to nothing more than giving him paper copies of Citizenship documents and forms that are readily available online.

The minster left that meeting a bit astounded.  Here was a government official drawing a salary over three times his own, a member of the governing party of Canada, elected to represent his constituents, saying he really could not represent or help anybody because he was a backbencher in his party and in Parliament.  He was good for photo ops, but not for much else.  

This is troubling for a society.  If any MP elected to represent the people of a constituency is effectively voiceless in Parliament, this means that in the end Canada is little more than a functional oligarchy, a nation ruled by a few who weren’t elected by the majority of the people but are simply powerful in their party.  How these few gain their power is always an interesting story.  Nevertheless, such is power.

Looking at Luke’s Gospel, it is interesting that he begins his account of John the Baptist’s ministry of preparing the way for the Messiah by naming “the few” in the land who had “the power”.  There were the Roman powers at the top: Tiberius, the Emperor; Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea.  There were the Jewish powers appointed by Rome: Herod, his brother Phillip, and Lysanias.  And, there were the Roman appointed Jerusalem Temple authorities: the High Priests Annas and Caiaphas.  This was the rule of one imposed by a few.  That’s how power work’s in an Empire.

It was during the rule of this band of cronies that the Word of God came to John the Baptizer out in the backwater region of the wilderness of Jordan. As we remember from Sunday School and Children’s Sermons of yore, John was a bit of an odd cookie.  He was a hermit, very hairy and dishevelled, wore clothes made of camel’s hair, and ate locusts and honey.  He was the son of a rural priest named Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth.  They were too old to have children but God gave them John, a child of promise.  And remember the wilderness?  For eighty years after the Exodus God’s people wandered in the wilderness of Sinai and there learned to rely on God and believe his promises. 

In the scheme of how political change happened in the world of first century Israel John was a backwater, backbenching prophet.  He had no “power” at all in the government.  Yet, when prophets start talking about valleys being filled, mountains being brought low, the crooked being made straight, and the rough being smoothened they are talking about the people being empowered, the powerful being brought low, corruption ending, and life becoming easier.  But, his own attempts to hold the powers that be accountable to the way God gave his people to live only got him arrested and in the end beheaded.  Regardless, the “grassroots” movement he started paved the way for Jesus, the Messiah, and did in time destabilize the Roman Empire and change the world. 

John the Baptist didn’t do bad for a backwater backbencher.  If we think that his call to repent to those people of God flocking to him in the wilderness was simply a non-political matter of private religion, we are mistaken.  More over, if we think that following Jesus is just a private matter of personal faith, we are mistaken.  Following Jesus is a public matter that will involve confronting the “powers” from the backbench in backwater places.

The people flocking to John in the wilderness were desperate people who were expecting their God, the God who had delivered them from Pharaoh out of slavery in Egypt, to deliver them from Roman domination.  John’s calling them from the wilderness of Jordan to return to the ways given them by God was a grassroots call to the people of God to stop participating in the elements of their way of life that fed on the Roman way of life and in turn start living as the faithful people of their God.  Faithful living was the way to prepare the way for the Lord God to come and establish peace.

We could learn something from what God was doing through John the Baptist.  The way to overthrow an Empire is to stop living according to the ways of that Empire; ways to which we ourselves have grown accustomed if not addicted and in turn, start doing as Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself” (Lk 10:27). 

John’s call to repentance was the call to the people of God to start acting like people of God and in so doing find that the Kingdom of God is near.  Love for God lived out looks like love for neighbour…even if and especially if that neighbour comes from Syria or Guatemala.  How different would this world be if we stopped with the Consumerism, the Materialism, the Militarism, the Patriotism, the Racism, the Individualism, and all those “ism’s” that make empire’s strong and simply made a practice of loving our neighbours?  Amen.

Stand Up in Hope

Luke 21:25-36
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I stand here this morning with a daunting task: to say something meaningful about the weirdest things Jesus ever said and to do it in half the time I normally have because we’re celebrating Communion this morning.  But perhaps Communion is the best sermon we could have today because the topic for this first Sunday of Advent is hope, particularly our hope of Jesus’ return from Glory to set up his Kingdom and put the world to right.  The earliest understanding of what the Lord Supper is is that it is a rehearsal of and participation by the Holy Spirit in the feast we will share with Jesus when he comes again.  Today we remind ourselves to look forward to that and live now accordingly.

But anyway, back to the weird stuff.  Jesus painted a pretty scary picture here of the way things will be when as he says the “times of the Nations (Gentiles) will be fulfilled”.  The sun, the moon, and the stars are going to show forth signs.  The nations will be in distress and it will get all the more confusing because the sea will roar and there will be waves, big waves.  People are going to faint in fear and there will be an overwhelming sense of doom because the world order as we know is going to end because the powers of the heavens are getting shaken.  And,…that’s when Jesus comes back.  And so Jesus says, “Stand up and raise your heads because your redemption is drawing near.”  These things are like fig trees sprouting leaves being a sure indicator that summer is no doubt coming.  So also, when these weird, scary things begin to happen and the end of world order as we know it is upon us, so we can know that the kingdom of God is near.

Please notice just how vague Jesus is being.  What he is saying, the signs and so forth, are simply unimaginable events but yet it will be scary times.  It won’t be the end of the creation.  The word he uses for “world” in verse 26 isn’t “cosmos” which would mean the creation.  It’s a different word that means the world order, a word that was often used to mean the Roman Empire.  I don’t think Jesus was being so specific as to mean the end of the Roman Empire, which piddled out in the 400’s.  Rather, I think he means a world order structured on empires, a way of doing human civilization that tenaciously persists to the oppression of many peoples.  I think Jesus is saying that the Age of Empire will come to an end and will be replaced with the Kingdom of God.  When we see that happening, we, the followers of Jesus, are to stand up and raise our heads in hope because everything God has promised us will come to pass – new life, eternal life, life filled with the glory and presence of God; New Creation, Resurrection, no more sickness, sorrow, or death; no more evil; just peace, justice, and wholeness. 

Well, I probably just freaked you all out so I’ll rein it in a bit.  Again Jesus was quite vague I describing something that is unimaginable.  Just as no one expected him to enter the world as a baby, live life as we do, suffer the death of a treasoner, and then be resurrected; so what his second coming will be like is likely outside our box of expectations and imaginations.  But the lesson remains, when all Hell seems to be breaking loose on Earth, he is coming.

I think that’s something we can grasp onto in our own lives in the here and now.  When that diagnosis comes and our lives turn upside down, Jesus comes to be with us.  When marriages end, when families fall apart, when friendships fail, when death takes someone from us, Jesus comes to be with us.  When work ends, when our kids are in trouble, Jesus comes to be with us.  When all Hell breaks loose in our lives Jesus comes to be with us.

Therefore we must be those who when calamity strikes, we stand up and raise up our heads for we know there is reason to hope in Jesus.  Jesus does not leave us to fend for ourselves, to stand strong with a stiff upper lip, or to put our lives back together.  He comes to us and causes our relationship with him to deepen in faith, in the certainty of his love for us.  When Hell breaks loose on us, Jesus comes to be with us.  Y’all know how it goes:

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll;

Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,

It is well, it is well, with my soul.

And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,

The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;

The trumpet shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,

Even so, it is well with my soul.

Let us gather to his table looking forward to that day. Amen.

Truth and Power

John 18:33-38a
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It was February 5, 2003 only 15 years ago that General Colin Powell, then Secretary of State and the man I personally believed was the most honest person in the American government, went before the United Nations Security Council in an internationally televised event to lay out an argument laden with detailed information proving that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and the means of rapidly producing them.  The most memorable moment of his speech was when Secretary Powell held up a little vial of white powder pretending it could be anthrax.  This briefing convinced the people of the U.S. and its Allies that we needed to invade Iraq because it’s leader, Saddam Hussein, was a narcissistic, despotic madman who could not be trusted WMD’s.  It was therefore the moral duty of the global community to use military power to remove Hussein and free the Iraqi people from oppression and to do it immediately before he again uses such weapons against his own people or sells them to terrorists. 

In early March of 2003 the invasion began.  Nine months later Hussein was captured.  Surprisingly, Secretary Powell then said that based on information he wished he had had months earlier it was not likely any WMD’s would be found.  In the ensuing months, it was determined that Iraq had had no weapons of mass destruction or the facilities to manufacture them.  Hussein had in fact destroyed everything he had years prior in accordance with the agreement reached after the Kuwait War.  Yet, he never truthfully admitted doing so because as a narcissistic despot he, himself, and him were the people he had to answer to.  The invasion was thus unnecessary.  General Powell later said that he had been fed misinformation by the Defense department and the Vice-President’s office and that there were those in the intelligence community who at the time knew the truth but the Vice-president’s office apparently suppressed that information.  They even fed President Bush inaccurate information.  Eleven months after the capture of Hussein, Powell was asked to resign for no reason other than he may have been getting too close to the “truth”.  This mishandling of the “truth” for unknown reason has given conspiracy theorists a field day. 

I believe that this moment in history was the moment the world should have clued in that “truth” was not a matter of collecting accurate information from which to determine what really is going on so that one might respond in a manor of the highest moral integrity.  We should have learned that “truth” is that we will believe what we want to believe and seek facts to reinforce what we already believe regardless of their validity.  Quite simply, after 9/11 Westerners wanted to go to war on Middle Eastern soil and we listened only to what we wanted to believe.  On the conspiracy side of things, Vice-President Chenney had something to gain from a war in Iraq in particular and manipulated the information at hand for his own reasons.

That moment in history was an exposé on the odd relationship between truth and power.  Those who have the power to control information can control what people accept as truth.  Moreover, those who have the power to control the information from which truth is derived will only tell the truth to those whom they perceive to have power over them and only if they then feel it is in their own best interest to do so.  This is as true for news agencies as it for those in public office.  This basically means that powerful people are not going to tell the truth to those who need them to tell the truth unless they see benefit in it for themselves.

That moment in history is now eclipsed by an even more crucial moment in history.  Today, “truth” is the blurb that somebody has posted to their Twitter or Facebook account regardless of fact.  People will believe Tweets before they will believe facts from otherwise reliable news sources.  If you have enough celebrity appeal to draw a large audience on Twitter or Facebook then you have the capacity to be a powerful broker of “truth” even if the truth as you believe it to be has no basis in fact or in reality period.  Just say what you want and in an instant your followers will en masse believe it to be true and it will happen so fast that no one has the time to think it through…not that anybody these days would anyway.  It is troubling, indeed dangerous when global leaders broker in “truth” in this way. 

Never has Pilate’s vague “What is truth?” question been so critical as it is in this moment in time.  Pilate asked that question after Jesus said he had come into the world to testify to the truth and that everybody who listens to the truth hears his voice.  So and thus, if we want to know what truth is we need to pay particular attention to Jesus.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus said several things about himself that we can hold to as Truth because they lead us to life in God:

“I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). 

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). 

“I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.” (John 10:9).

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). 

“I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25-26).  

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). 

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If anyone remains in me and I in them, they will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

If you hunger and thirst for meaningful life, if you need to know the way to go, if you need safety, if you feel dead and need new life, if you need a fruitful life, then come to King Jesus, who didn’t lord power over us but rather gave up everything and suffered and died for our healing.  He is the Truth, the Life and the Way.

Jesus came to create a transnational, transracial, trans-ethnic, transgender community of followers who act like him and who are indwelt by the Spirit of God, a community marked by unconditional, healing love and hospitality, a community whose economy is marked by those who have too much considering those who have too little in tangible ways, a community where greed, lust, and power mongering are just utterly out of place if not tacky.  If your favourite source of truth on Twitter or whatever doesn’t invite you to Jesus and this type of community then it is not truth.  It is Lie.  Amen.