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.

In Behind the Disillusionment

Mark 13:1-8
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Following Jesus can be disillusioning at times.  I can’t help but imagine what the twelve disciples must have thought and felt at this point in the journey. Jesus simply was not meeting their expectations.  They had left everything to follow this wandering, parable teaching, preacher who proclaimed in both word and deed that the Kingdom of God was at hand.  They had even healed the sick and cast out demons themselves.  They had walked a long way in their three years with Jesus listening to teaching after teaching and were convinced that Jesus was the expected Messiah.  It would just be a matter of time and Jesus would deliver Israel from the Romans and establish the Kingdom of God and he would reward their faithfulness with perks, power, and privilege.

But something had changed in the last couple of months for them since they were in Caesarea Philippi and Peter confessed their belief that Jesus was indeed the Messiah.  It all started when Jesus fed nearly 15,000 people on two fish and five loaves of bread leaving them with twelve basketfuls of crumbs that they took on a long journey all over Israel and then beyond to share them even with the neighboring Gentile people.  Jesus had done things that only the Messiah, indeed only God, could do.  But when Peter made that confession, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God”, things changed.  Jesus started walking towards Jerusalem.  The healings became sparser.  He taught less except to tell them odd things like they needed to become like children if they wanted to enter his Kingdom and that being the least is what would make one great in the Kingdom.  Mostly, he said nothing only breaking the silence to say that in Jerusalem the authorities would mock him and put him to death.

The day came when they finally arrived in Jerusalem.  Mark said the crowd following Jesus was greatly afraid.  No one knew what to expect.  Then Jesus’ uprising started.  He sent two of the disciples to get him a donkey (the most impressive and regal of all animals) and he rode into town like a king.  But, no war started.  No armies of angels came.  Jesus just went to the temple and got on a table turning rant saying that his Father’s house was to be a house of prayer not big business.  Then they left Jerusalem for the night.  The next day they returned to the temple where Jesus rather successfully debated all day with the religious authorities pointing out that their position and wealth came at the expense of taking the homes of widows.  Then they went to the temple treasury where Jesus just sat and watched the people noting that it was nothing more than a charade of rich people throwing in large donations that really cost them nothing.  Then a widow put in her last two copper coins.  Jesus made note to his disciples that she had just given all she had.  They got up and left the city again. 

They come out of the temple and it was a magnificent temple.  It wasn’t some small, brick box set off on a sideroad somewhere.  It was masterfully constructed from massive, flawlessly hewn blocks each weighing tons and set one atop the other.  You could have set several buildings the size of this church inside it. It would take dozens of teams of elephants working themselves to death to destroy those walls. The whole courtyard and complex was several city blocks big.  It would have given Robert Schuler’s Crystal Cathedral a run for the money…it was the Fort Knox of Israelite faith…the Vatican City of Jerusalem. 

As they were leaving the temple one of the disciples looked back and probably in hopes this was where their new palace would be, he said to Jesus, “Look Teacher, what massive stones and what magnificent buildings!”…That is something any of us would say upon seeing a beautiful old church or one of those new Christian worship centers.  “Wow!  What a wonderfully big multipurpose worship space this is!  What a magnificent gymnasium!  It even has a Christian bookstore and a Starbucks in the foyer!  They must really love Jesus here!  People will flock to the Lord here because of these superior facilities.” 

Well, Jesus wasn’t as impressed and replied in a rather peculiar way as if he hadn’t even heard what the disciple had said.  “Do you see these great buildings?”  It was as if there was something profound there that this disciple was supposed to clue in on but wasn’t.  “Not one stone will be left here upon another; every one will be thrown down!”  Well, that shut everybody up for a couple of hours.  This was unexpected behavior from Jesus the Messiah.  They believed the Temple was to be the hallmark of the Kingdom not become a pile of rubble.

 Jesus then led the Twelve west out of Jerusalem, across the Kidron Valley where lay the rich people’s tombs, and climbed the Mount of Olives.  Jesus just sat down and started staring again, staring across that valley of whitewashed tombs towards the temple.  It seemed that rather than be a man of action Jesus preferred to sit and stare at things.  The four senior disciples finally broke the silence and asked Jesus something to the effect of, “Why are you sitting around watching and waiting?  What sign are you looking for, Jesus?  When’s it going to start?  Messiah, when are you going to take your throne?”  Except, the question they asked showed a little more polite restraint.  Jesus gave his classic reply, “Beware that no one leads you astray.  Many will come in my name saying, ‘I am’ and they will lead many astray.”

If I were one of the disciples at that moment I believe the irony of the statement would have been a little too much.  I would have had to say to him, “it seems that misleading is exactly what you, Jesus of Nazareth, have been doing with us and here we have left everything behind to follow you.  What were we thinking? How foolish could we be?” 

This disillusionment would have gotten even worse after Jesus was crucified.  Was he, Jesus, just leading them astray?  Could it really have been like his mother and brothers thought in the early days?  Was he just an extremely intelligent nut trying to teach a handful of people in grand fashion not to follow nuts that act like messiahs?  “Beware that no one leads you astray.”  What an ironic thing for Jesus to say at that moment.  One would expect him to say something like, “Keep watching.  Any moment now the sky will catch fire.  An army of angels will come cleanse the city.  The dead in these tombs will rise and then we will go to the Temple and I will establish the Kingdom and take my place as Messiah.”  But, he just says wars and famines and earthquakes will continue to happen, but they’re not the end. The end is still coming.  Do not let yourselves be misled.

Following Jesus can be disillusioning at times.  Things will not go as we expect them.  We so often hear people say God’s got a plan for our lives and imply that all things will be wonderful for us if we just trust God and be faithful.  This is a misleading teaching for several reasons and the primary one is that we tend to put the plan, the dreams, we have for our lives in the place of God’s plan and expect God to come through on working our plans and dreams out for us.  We make God a servant to us rather than the other way around and that’s not faith.  Another thing wrong with saying that God has a wonderful plan for our lives that he’ll bring about if we stay faithful is that it can’t hold water when terrible, senseless, and undeserved things happen to humble, faithful people.

This is a fallen world in which terrible things do happen for no reason even to the most Jesus-like of people.  If we take the Book of Job seriously it is often the case that the faithful suffer simply because they are faithful.  The point of evil and the Evil One is to destroy the faithful.  The point of faith is that we cannot know what God is up and we have to simply be satisfied with his presence with us when we suffer.  As Jesus says the end is coming God will put all things right, but in ways we don’t expect.  God takes our tragedies and works good from them all the while behind the scenes he is doing stuff that we are un aware of that usual involves people praying that we don’t know about. 

Back in my early twenties my brother had his son baptized at the church we went to as children, but didn’t go to much because my parents divorced and churches back then didn’t know how to handle divorce. After the service an elderly women walked up and said she had taught me in Sunday school.  I had no idea who she was.  I was too young to remember.  But she said, I have often thought about you.  That is Presbyterian for, “I have often prayed for you.”  Suddenly, I knew why I had this sort of back in my mind feeling throughout my teens that something, someone, was watching over me and I needed to find out who.  I believed in God, but the God I believed in was just some way out there distant moral judge and not actually a God who was looking out for me.  We will likely not know what God is up to or why things happen the way they do, but God will let us know that we are not alone, that he loves us, that there are people who love and pray for us that we don’t even know about.  And it all means that somehow he’s working things out to the good.

So, God’s Kingdom comes to us on bended knee, not necessarily our own, but the bended knees of a multitude of people we aren’t aware of.  Have you ever felt the need to pray for someone?  Amen.

The New Jerusalem

Revelation21:1-6
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One afternoon while coming out of the Jerusalem temple one of Jesus’ disciples remarked how beautiful the temple was saying, “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!"  And then Jesus dropped a bomb.  He prophesied saying, "Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down."  In 70 AD that prophecy came to pass. 

Flavius Josephus was a Jewish historian in the first century AD.  In his book The Jewish Wars he recounts how the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in the year 70 AD.  He writes: “Now as soon as the army had no more people to slay or to plunder, because there remained none to be the objects of their fury, Titus Caesar gave orders that they should now demolish the entire city and Temple, but should leave the towers standing as they were of the greatest eminence as well as the wall on the west side…in order to demonstrate to posterity what kind of city it was, and how well fortified, which the Roman valour had subdued; but for all the rest of the wall surrounding Jerusalem, it was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came there believe Jerusalem had ever been inhabited.  This was the end which Jerusalem came to; a city otherwise of great magnificence, and of mighty fame among all mankind.”

Josephus claims that 1,100,000 people were killed during the siege, of which the majority were Jews, and that 97,000 were captured, enslaved, and most were made gladiators.  The Jews that were left mostly fled to areas around the Mediterranean. Josephus reported that Titus refused to accept a wreath of victory for his routing of Jerusalem, as there is "no merit in vanquishing a people forsaken by their own God". 

Building further on that note, the God forsaken note, the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem on the last day of the Jewish month of Av (our July), a day Jews call the Day of Five Calamities.  On that same date in 586 BC, the Babylonians destroyed the first temple, the temple Solomon built.  In those days the prophet Ezekiel had a vision in which he saw the glory of the Lord leaving the temple in Jerusalem and heading east to be with the exiles in Babylon.  A very touching message proclaiming that God had not abandoned his people even though he had cast them off of the land.  Seventy years later when a remnant returned none of the prophets in that day claim a vision of the glory of the Lord ever returning to the temple.  In fact, Isaiah 65:1 which dates to this time indicates that God didn’t want to live in a temple anymore.  God said to Isaiah,  “Heaven is my throne, earth is my footstool.  What is this house that you would build for me?”  The Lord God did not return to the temple.  It was not until Jesus that the presence of the LORD God of Israel again dwells among his people.

It is into this context of Jerusalem’s destruction that we must place this climatic vision of John’s in the Book of Revelation.  He saw a new creation, a new Heaven and a new Earth.  The old had passed.  Jerusalem and the Temple, the centerpieces of the identity of the people of God, were gone, never to be again.  The old was gone yet the new had come.  There in the midst of this utterly new creation where heaven and earth are openly now joined as one, where it finally is on earth as it is in heaven, John sees the New Jerusalem coming from God from Heaven to Earth.  The heart of John the Jew must have leapt for joy.

As John watches the New Jerusalem descend, he hears a voice.  For the very first time in the Revelation a voice comes from the throne of God saying that God himself is with his people and he himself will comfort them.  Not only would a new esteem be given to his people, Jew and Gentile alike, but God would once again be with his people and this time personally.  He was going to intimately involve himself with each of his people to heal and comfort them.  God himself will wipe away their tears.  Moreover, death will be no more and mourning, crying out, and toilsome suffering will be no more.

Then, God himself speaks, the one seated on the throne declares, “Behold, I am making all things new.  Write this down.  It is trustworthy and the Truth.”  This is the most important word spoken in the entire book, indeed in history.  God is making all things new.  Time in the Book of Revelation is two faceted.  John sees what is and what is to be.  Sometimes, it’s skewed to one side more than the other, but in this passage John is seeing both what God is doing now and what will be in the future.  In this world that is a mess, God is presently working to make all things new until the day comes when the old is utterly gone and everything is made utterly new with the glory of God.  It may not seem like it to us, but behind the scenes of history God is making all things new.  That’s the Truth; capital “T”.

Then God speaks directly to John and it is a message for John to give to his churches in Turkey who are about to undergo great persecution for refusing to call Emperor Domitian Lord as if he were a god.  God says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” This means the buck stops with God.  God has the final word in every matter and his final word is that all things are being made new; all things on earth will be as they are in heaven.  He says to those Christians about to suffer and some even to be martyred that the one who conquers, which means who keeps the faith even unto death, will be given freely of the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Living Water.

Well, breaking into the code-like imagery of the Book of Revelation, the New Jerusalem, the new heaven and new earth are not things we should simply ascribe to the future and forget them until they come about.   The new heaven and the new earth are as much present realities as they are future.  As God has made us alive in Christ Jesus by giving the Holy Spirit to dwell in us we experience heaven and earth now being made new as if they are the new heaven and the new earth.

Moreover, since God dwells in us now what we are as the church is the New Jerusalem.  Ever since Pentecost the New Jerusalem has been coming from God from heaven to earth.  God has come to dwell with his people.  We are the New Jerusalem you and I, this congregation, all congregations, the church all over the world is the New Jerusalem.  Yet, don't think about it in terms of the institution called the church.  Think of it in terms of a relational network, of people's bonded together in the new humanity in Jesus Christ formed by means of the “communioning” work of the Hoy Spirit.  The glory of God shines through us, through our relational bond.  The light of Christ shines through us.  The light of God-glorifying, other-centered, self-sacrificing love shines through us.  No matter how small and insignificant we may appear we are the New Jerusalem coming from God from heaven to earth.  In us and among us is the place on earth where God dwells among the nations, where he wipes away every tear.

For now, we, the church, the New Jerusalem, are a signpost of God’s working to make all things new.  Love one another.  Comfort one another in grief.   It’s important.  It proves God is making all things new.  Feed the hungry. Give drink to the thirsty.  Give home to the homeless.  Clothe the naked.  Visit the prisoner.  Care for the orphaned and the widowed.  Make things just and beautiful.  These things prove God is making all things new.  We are a vital part of what God is doing to heal his Creation of sin and death and to make it here on earth as it is in heaven.   We are the New Jerusalem. Amen.