Loading...Sermon November 22, 2015
The Rev. Rebecca S. Myers, LSW
The Church of the Nativity and St. Stephen, Newport, PA
The Last Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 28, Track 2, Year B
Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here." John 18:36
Please be seated.
One of the joys of being in Newport is that I’m much closer to my grandchildren. My grandson, Logan, is swimming competitively and last Saturday I was able to attend one of his meets. These meets start early in the morning and this one was in Spring Grove. I wasn’t exactly sure how to get there, but I have a GPS, so plugged in the address for the high school and off I went.
But, I had miscalculated the timing and didn’t leave as early as I would have liked, so I was wanting to go quickly. Also, I wasn’t exactly familiar with the roads. I came to an intersection with a traffic light and stopped since the light was red.
I was turning right and I looked to see if there was a sign saying you couldn’t turn right on red. I didn’t see a sign, although I thought the intersection was a little dangerous. But being in a hurry, I turned right on red. The next thing I knew, there was a police officer with lights on pulling me over! Sure enough, there was a sign saying “no turn on red” that I had completely missed. (I even went back to check and it was plainly visible!) Now I was even later for the meet AND had a pretty hefty traffic fine to boot!
Of course I did what we all do. I went into the “if onlys.” If only I had left just a little earlier like I planned to do; I would have missed the police officer. He said he happened to be coming down the road and saw me. He wasn’t sitting there waiting. If only I had paid better attention. If only I had listened to my common sense about it being a dangerous intersection. I would have preferred to use the $170 needed to pay the fine in a different way.
This is such a small incident; however, moving into the “if onlys” is entirely natural, particularly after going through a traumatic event. When we experience or witness something traumatic, we feel helpless, powerless and anxious.
Those feelings are especially strong from an event where other people have caused the trauma, such as the recent terrorist attacks around the world. We look for ways to prevent the trauma from happening again. We tend to simplify complex situations by finding someone or some group to blame. We want to find one cause…just one thing that would have prevented the incident from occurring. We do this in order to assure ourselves that we can be safe. That something like this will never happen to us or be witnessed by us again.
We find living with the ambiguity of chance happenings too difficult. We are just trying to feel safe once again and believing that somehow we could have prevented a bad thing from happening is part of that process.
Yet, the truth is, this feeling of regaining control is only an illusion. We probably couldn’t have prevented the trauma from happening. It’s just part of life. The point is to try not to go into the “if onlys.” Or to somehow realize we are playing a game with ourselves and should not take action based upon our “if only” thoughts. The trauma happened. We feel so much hurt and grief. We don’t want it to happen to us, that’s true; however, we can’t really totally prevent these traumas from occurring.
In response to the terrorist attacks and incidents in Paris, mainly, there have been many calls to prevent people fleeing Syria from coming to resettle in the United States. It’s our way of thinking we can prevent the trauma of that event in Paris from happening to us. Yes, any kind of attack like that is so awful and we hate to think of a death like that for ourselves or our loved ones.
Yet, to put this in perspective, according to the 2011 list of lifetime odds of dying from selected causes, we in the United States have a 1 in 28 chance of dying from chronic lower respiratory disease and 1 in 100 chance of dying from self-inflicted harm. //www.nsc.org/NSC%20Images_Corporate/odds-of-dying-graphic.jpg By contrast, in 2011, it was estimated that our chance of dying from a terrorist attack was 1 in 20 million! https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/16/eight-facts-about-terrorism-in-the-united-states/ Our chance of dying from a terrorist attack on the United States is slim indeed.
In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus is being questioned by Pontius Pilate. The religious authorities of Jesus’ time had turned him over to Pilate, hoping Jesus would be killed and Jesus’ teachings about love and equality and caring for people would be stopped. Jesus’ teachings were upsetting the rules and normal organization of life at the time. Now, Jesus knew he was thwarting the power structure of his time, which we might even say was terroristic towards groups of people like people who were poor and women.
Yet, Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem. Jesus walks right towards the terrorists, so to speak. Jesus does not fight the terrorists who would destroy him. Jesus walks right towards his own death.
"My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here."
“My kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus tells Pilate and those around him. A kingdom of the world would mount armies and wage wars to keep Jesus alive. Jesus’ teaching is different. It is love in the face of hate. It is going to death to ultimately give abundant and liberating life.
Yes, Jesus walked right towards the terrorists of his time… the religious authorities, who had perverted the love of God, and the Roman occupiers and oppressors. Yes, Jesus was killed. Jesus died. But oh my, what happened next? He was raised and his teachings live on nearly 2,000 years later.
Jesus walked right into the terrorism of his time and was killed, but nearly 2,000 years later, we are getting up on a Sunday morning and coming to this place to be with people we love and care for, to worship together and get strengthened by the teachings of this lover of peace and demander of justice. We come together at this table, where we know Jesus is present with us.
We strive to live our lives in alignment with Jesus’ teachings to love God with all of our heart and all of our soul and all of our mind; and to love our neighbor as ourselves. We work to live out our baptismal promise to respect the dignity of every human being and to strive for peace and justice.
We live in this world in such a way that is not of this world. Our response to the traumas and happenings in this world is not of this world. Because Jesus walked into his death, we are at peace with death. Because Jesus commands us to love our neighbors, we welcome those fleeing oppression and persecution in their own countries.
We do this, knowing we may face danger and even our own death. We do this in the full and certain assurance that God is here and still working. We do this knowing, as writer of Revelation says, that our God is “…the Alpha and the Omega,… who is and who was and who is to come." Revelation 1:8
Amen
