“The Empire of Vulnerability”
a sermon by Robert J. Faser
21 November 2010 (Christ the King / the Reign of Christ): Jeremiah 23:1-6, Luke 23:33-43

On this day, Christian churches of many denominations around the world celebrate a day called either “Christ the King” or “The Reign of Christ”. On this day, we reflect on the challenge that Jesus presents to all who exercise power over others, particularly to those who abuse their power. In contrast to all who dominate others by force and raw power, Christ reigns by the power of love.

In our gospel lesson, we see the extent of this love at its most stark. Jesus was being killed. Bluntly, he was being tortured and killed. Jesus’ death was authorised by Pontius Pilate, representative of Tiberius Caesar. So, Jesus was being tortured and killed by one of the world’s first superpowers: the Roman Empire. Jesus was being crucified between two other men who were also being tortured and killed by the same Roman superpower.

There was one big difference, however, among the three men killed in Caesar’s name that day.

Two of the men killed by the Empire, even as they resisted the Empire, adopted the Empire’s methods of force and violence. They rejected Caesar, but they embraced Caesar’s methods.

The man in the middle of the three – Jesus – rejected the Empire’s methods of force and violence. This made him unique among Caesar’s three victims that day.

In the midst of his death, Jesus issued a challenge to the Empire of Force: a challenge to Pilate, to Tiberius Caesar, and to all who seek to exercise raw power over other people.

Part of Jesus’ challenge to the Empire of Force was in the definite way he pronounced God’s mercy toward people. Only a sovereign leader, only a leader with confidence in one’s own authority, really had the power to pardon. That was the case in Jesus’ day, and it is the case today. By exercising the power of pardon, Jesus claimed his true authority in opposition to the authority usurped by the Empire of Force and its representatives.

Jesus demonstrated his power to pardon, not once, but twice in this lesson.
• He pronounced God’s mercy and forgiveness to the man in the cross next to his: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
• But not only that, Jesus also prayed for God’s forgiveness for the Roman soldiers who were torturing and killing him: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”

In contrast to the empire of force,
• the Empire of Force of which Pontius Pilate was an enthusiastic representative in his day,
• the Empire of Force which has many enthusiastic representatives (and would-be representatives) in our own day;
Jesus presented an alternate realm, an Empire of Vulnerability. Jesus still presents an alternative to the Empire of Force today. As a result, our celebration of the Reign of Christ, of Christ the King, is a very subversive celebration.

We see a similar sense of holy subversion in our lesson from Jeremiah. The passage begins with a complaint against the “shepherds” of the people. Now when we use a “shepherd” as a symbol for people in leadership roles, we’ve been accustomed to thinking in terms of religious leaders.

This was not the case at the time of Jeremiah. Jeremiah used “shepherd” as a symbol for political leadership, for the king and his flunkies. This was typical of the Old Testament. The use of “shepherd” as a symbol for religious leadership was found later, but Jeremiah was thinking about political leaders, not religious ones, in his criticism of the unworthy shepherds.

After criticising the unworthy shepherds, Jeremiah tells of how God shall raise up a “righteous Branch” of the house of David, who shall reign as king justly and wisely. And this king will be called “The Lord is our righteousness”.

At the same time, a new king was beginning to reign in Jerusalem. His name was Zedekiah. He was a puppet king, a quisling appointed by the Babylonians to lead a sort of “Vichy” administration in Jerusalem. It was during Zedekiah’s puppet reign that Jerusalem fell and the Jews went into exile.

The writers of the books of Kings and the books of Chronicles judged Zedekiah harshly. They described him as an evil king. Jeremiah wasn’t quite so harsh. Jeremiah seemed to regard Zedekiah not so much as an evil leader, but as a mediocre one.

But, interestingly, there was a veiled criticism of Zedekiah in today’s passage. The name of this new wise leader “The Lord is our righteousness” is, in Hebrew, “Adonai zedekenu”. The similarity between “zedekenu” and “Zedekiah” probably wasn’t accidental. As Jeremiah celebrated a future reign of righteousness and wisdom, his exasperation with the mediocre leadership of his own day was clear.

In both our lessons today, there is this sense of holy subversion against those who exercise power over others:
• In Jeremiah, we see a harsh contrast between God’s call to practice justice and the mediocre leadership that was the reality of his own day.
• In Luke’s gospel, we see Jesus exercising his sovereign power to pardon even when he himself was at his most vulnerable.

In each case, the Empire of Force was challenged by the Empire of Vulnerability.

And for us, God calls us to be representatives of Christ’s Empire of Vulnerability. It’s a tall order, but in all of this, God promises us his strength.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

(Copyright: Robert J. Faser, 2010)

“Jesus is also the question.”
a sermon by Robert J. Faser
Luke 20: 27-38, 7th November 2010

I heard a story about the time the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth visited the United States.

In his travels, he saw a sign painted on the side of a barn, with the words: “Jesus is the answer.”

Barth looked at the words on the side of the barn, thought for a while, and said: “Ja, but Jesus is also the question.”

In today’s lesson, Jesus is also the question.

Our lesson begins with the Sadducees asking Jesus a stupid question.

Sometimes, if you’re at a public meeting and the speaker consents to have a period of questions and answers, you’re often apt to hear at least one stupid question. Now, by “stupid question”, I don’t mean the sort of question that is asked by the person who doesn’t understand the issue and is honestly seeking information or clarification. That’s not a stupid question. I’m thinking of the sort of question that is aggressive in its stupidity, the question that’s asked by the person who wants to demonstrate his own knowledge of the topic, at the expense of the speaker. That’s the sort of aggressively stupid question the Sadducees asked Jesus.

But, first, we may want some background to the Sadducees and who they were. The Sadducees were the extreme conservatives of Jesus’ day. They held to the Law literally. For them, there was no room for interpretation where the law was concerned. The Sadducees were opposed to the Pharisees who were of a more progressive bent, despite their bad press and the way we use the word “Pharisee” today. (Even if we use the word “Pharisee” in English to mean a small-minded religious bigot, this use of the word is highly unjust to the Pharisees.)

One important thing about the Sadducees was that they did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. In the Old Testament, any belief in a life after this physical life was very slow in developing. In fact, it was only around the years immediately before the time of Jesus that much of a belief in a life after this one was found among the Jews.

The Sadducees opposed this development. The reason the Sadducees opposed this new emerging belief in the life of the world to come was that they couldn’t fit the idea into a literal view of the law. The question they asked Jesus in our lesson was the standard Sadducee-type question: “If a woman married seven men, whose wife would she be after the resurrection?”
This question has a background. The Jewish law said that if a man died without leaving an heir, his brother (or his nearest unmarried male relative) was obliged to marry his widow and produce an heir. This was the theme of the book of Ruth.

Anyway, for Sadducees with a literal view of the law and with a tendency to downplay the resurrection of the dead, this was the standard trick question to discredit those who seemed to accept an idea of the life of the world to come.

Jesus responded to the question. Not only did he give a good answer, but he tried to assist the Sadducees to find a better question. This was just as important, if not more so. As Karl Barth said: “Jesus is also the question.”

The Sadducees asked Jesus the wrong question on a number of grounds:

1. The question assumed that the woman involved had no dignity of her own, that the woman’s status in God’s future life depended on whose wife she was. It was a bad question just on this basis alone.

2. The question assumed, as well, that the men involved had a reduced dignity in God’s future life if they were without a wife or without heirs. It was a bad question just on this basis alone.

3. And worst of all, the question assumed that God’s truth is set in the past, that people cannot discover new aspects of God’s emerging truth for a new era. The emerging new truth of the life of God’s future was seen as somehow without merit if it was seen as contradicting those treasured truths of the past. It was a bad question just on this basis alone.

And we still find this today. There are many people of faith who, even with the best will in the world, cannot for the life of them see new aspects of God’s truth emerging for a new time and a new place. As we frequently sing in the classic hymn, “The Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from the word.” Sadly, many Christians cannot grasp this.
• To give one example, many Christians cannot see the presence of God in the lives of people of other faiths (Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Buddhists, and others.). “The Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from the word.”
• To give another example, many Christians cannot see faithful, life-giving, God-blessed relationships among couples that have not entered into a formal marriage. “The Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from the word.”

God’s truth comes freshly to God’s people in every generation. “The Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from the word.”

Today, as it was two thousand years ago, Jesus is also the question.

May God grant each of us the sensitivity to receive with enthusiasm God’s new truth in our new day.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

(Copyright: Robert J. Faser, 2010)

“From social climber to tree-hugger”
a sermon by Robert J. Faser
31 October 2010, Luke 19:1-10

Even though today is the day before All Saints’ Day, our gospel lesson for today is about Jesus’ encounter with a person who wasn’t very saintly, a person whose name is pronounced either Zacchaeus or Zacchaeus and, as far as I can tell, either pronunciation is as good as the other.

But before I go to the story of Zacchaeus, I want to mention that simple, brief statement in scripture “God is love.” This statement may seem self-evident to many of us. We think, “Of course, God is love. That’s pretty obvious.”

But there are many people for whom this is not obvious.
• There are many people who were never taught a view of God as one who primarily loves, but as one who primarily judges and condemns. For many who have rejected any sort of religious faith, this view of God is a major reason why they have done so.
• But, as well, there are many people of faith, including many people of Christian faith, who see God’s love as very selective, and for whom their life of faith seems to be centered on pleasing a potentially angry deity.

The well-known title of one of Jonathan Edwards’s sermons from eighteenth-century Massachusetts may sum up their attitude to their god: “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.” As some of us may soon sing about someone else in a few months’ time:
“He’s making a list, and checking it twice;
going to find out who’s naughty or nice.”

And there are some people in the community who worship that sort of god. There are many people who cannot get their minds around the idea that God’s love seeks to embrace the whole world, without exception.

In this vein, the British writer Adrian Plass wrote a series of humourous books about the members of a small congregation, one of whom was a man named Leonard Thynne. Leonard grew up within a very rigid sort of Christian denomination, possibly Plymouth Brethren or something similar. In his adult life, Leonard Thynne still wore the emotional scars of this aspect of his upbringing through very low self-esteem. He was an alcoholic – trying with rather mixed success to become a recovering alcoholic. One day, Leonard heard a sermon at his church by a visiting preacher – a monk, no less. He was impressed with the monk’s talk and commented: “He knows a different God to the one I do. His God’s nice!”

Like Leonard Thynne in this story, there are many people who are not aware that God loves … that God loves all people … that God loves the whole creation. They have picked up the notion of a petty, little small-g godlet whose love is very, very selective:
• the small-g godlet of “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”;
• the small-g godlet who makes and double-checks a list of those who are naughty and those who are nice;
• the small-g godlet that led Leonard Thynne in Adrian Plass’s story (and many more people in real life) to assume that their god is some scary, unwelcoming being – a god who is definitely not nice!

And in relation to all this, we hear the story of Zacchaeus.

Now, all too often, when we tell the story about Zacchaeus to children, we emphasise the part about his size. He was “short in stature”, as the New Revised Standard Version tells us. He was “vertically-challenged”. We often emphasise the part about the little bloke climbing up the tree to get a good look at what was going on, and we may even use the old song about:
“Zacchaeus was a wee little man,
a wee little man was he …,”
even if we know that “wee” only means “little” these days in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and New Zealand.

Those who know the songs of the Medical Mission Sisters from the 1960s may also remember the refrain about,
“Now the Hebrews, they were tall,
But Zacchaeus, he was small …” etc.
We tend to get hung up on the bit about Zacchaeus’s height.

More importantly than his height, Zacchaeus was a tax collector. Not only was he a tax collector, but he was a chief tax collector. Luke used the Greek word architelones to describe Zacchaeus. It was the only time Luke used that word in his gospel. The tax collector in Jesus’ parable that we heard last week was only an ordinary tax collector, a telones, not an architelones like Zacchaeus. An architelones like Zacchaeus had other tax collectors working for him, shaking down the people, while he dealt directly with his Roman masters. He would have had many more opportunities for personal corruption than an ordinary tax collector. The comments made by Habakkuk in our first lesson about the ethical breakdown of society in his own day were also relevant for the ethical situation in which Zacchaeus operated.

If an ordinary tax collector was considered a collaborator, an architelones like Zacchaeus was an absolute traitor. If an ordinary tax collector was unpopular with his neighbours, an architelones like Zacchaeus would have been absolutely hated.

There was one very ironic thing about Zacchaeus: his name. The name Zacchaeus was based on the Hebrew word zakkai, which means “innocent” or “righteous”. It was the sort of pious and hopeful thing that parents would have once done, and still do in many cultures, to name their child after a virtue they hope he or she would emulate. The New England Puritans were known for giving their sons names such as Perseverance. We still occasionally encounter such names, most frequently female names such as Grace, Faith, or Hope. Africans today do this to a great extent, not only naming their daughters Charity or Mercy, but also giving their sons names such as Courage or Justice.

But if Zacchaeus’s parents gave him the name in the hope that he would be zakkai (“innocent”, “righteous”), he may well have been a deep disappointment to them.
But when Jesus noticed Zacchaeus up in the tree, he didn’t examine him as to his ethics. He didn’t give Zacchaeus a conditional offer of God’s love. (“Get your act together, and you’ll be right, one of these days.”) That’s what some people in our culture think the churches are on about. But it’s not what Jesus is on about.

Instead of examining Zacchaeus’s ethical credentials, Jesus offered him God’s unconditional love and, to seal the deal, invited himself to stay at Zacchaeus’s home.

Zacchaeus did a few things as a result. He made a big donation to the poor. He offered to repay anyone he had cheated … four times over. In this process, Zacchaeus began to live up to his name. Zacchaeus actually started to become zakkai. He became a “saint”.

But he also set about the task of providing hospitality to Jesus, to the group of disciples travelling with him, and (given the custom of the times), to the community at large.
Jesus expressed God’s unconditional love to Zacchaeus.

Part of Zacchaeus’s response was to throw a party.

In this process, Zacchaeus began to live up to his name. Zacchaeus actually started to become zakkai. He became a “saint”. And the transformation that Jesus drew forth from Zacchaeus had a social justice dimension to it. Zacchaeus committed himself to make restitution to anyone he cheated and to give to the poor. The transformation that Jesus draws forth from any one necessarily has an ethical dimension, a social justice dimension, to it, or else it is not genuine.

There are many religious people today – both within Christianity and within other faiths - who see the life of faith merely in terms of such things as talking about religion a lot or taking on a few austerities in one’s personal life-style. In whatever faith tradition we may think of, if your faith does not have the result of increasing your level of basic human compassion in both your personal and your social ethics, it is just so much religious busy-work. In any faith tradition, including Christianity, if your faith does not make you a more compassionate person, your faith does you no good at all.

In this encounter from Luke’s gospel, Jesus encountered Zacchaeus and drew forth from him the level of compassion that his name implied. Zacchaeus became zakkai; he became a “saint”.

In our worship, Jesus promises us a similar transformation.
• The same water in which we shower becomes the means in which we are decisively identified with the cause of Christ.
• Simple gifts of bread and wine become the means of Christ’s fullest presence in our midst.
• People gathered for worship become the saints of God.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

(Copyright: Robert J. Faser, 2010)