Tuesday, December 4, 2012

What's the Takeaway?




There is a cartoon in last week’s New Yorker magazine that shows a family seated at a table formally laid with roast turkey and all the fixings.  Their hands are folded and their heads are bowed in prayer, and at the head of the table the father is standing with his eyes closed, speaking, and the caption says, “The takeaway tonight is ‘Thanks.’”
Today is the final Sunday of the church year, which means the end to another cycle in the lectionary readings, the end of another re-telling of the story of God’s words and deeds in Jesus Christ.  And so, it’s only natural to ask “what is the ‘takeaway’?”  “What does another year’s rendition of the Gospel all boil down to?”  One traditional way of summing it all up is that Jesus Christ is the King, the true ruler of the world.  
That seems simple enough, but, of course, it’s not.  In the Gospel text this morning we hear Pontius Pilate wrestling with this notion that Jesus is a King, trying to grasp it in some simple and definite way.  In Mark, which is the shortest and most likely the earliest of the Gospels, the conversation between Pilate and Jesus is just this: Pilate says “Are you the King of the Jews?” and Jesus answers, “You have said so.” Later Pilate asks him more questions about the charges brought against him, but Jesus says no more. 
This telling of the story is compelling in its own way.  That curt answer of Jesus is not a throwaway, and neither is the silence that follows it, but the imagination of the church wanted more.  As our apostolic ancestors kept contemplating the significance of Jesus Christ for the world, and as their own project in the world got larger and more complex, they came back to this moment, to Jesus and to this man who held the power to condemn him to death or to set him free.   Their communities kept thinking about this representative of the Roman Emperor, the ostensible ruler of the world.  They kept pondering his question, “Are you the King?” and some of those communities decided that a little more needed to be said.
And so the Gospel of John gives us this conversation between Pilate and Jesus about who is king, and what it means to be king, and what is the kingdom anyway.  It’s a curious kind of conversation because although both men seem to be talking about the same thing, one of them means something else entirely.   Jesus understands exactly what Pilate is saying, but Pilate hasn’t the foggiest notion what Jesus is.   
And this gives Jesus the power.  To be sure, Pilate has the power to kill and to terrorize and to force people to submit to his will.  Jesus understands this power, knows how it works, is willing to allow that Pilate has it, and even to submit to it, because he knows that in the end it is weakness.  But Jesus has the power of truth, the truth of God, of God’s sovereignty and freedom that he gives in boundless love to everyone who loves him.  Jesus has the knowledge that is the light of the world, which no darkness can ever overcome, the knowledge that is eternal life.   Pilate doesn’t have a clue.  

In 1984 I had a conversation with a man named Franklin Miller.   He was the civilian Director of Strategic Planning for the United States Department of Defense, and an alumnus of the college I was attending.  He’d accepted an invitation to a conference on campus about nuclear weapons and disarmament, which was a hot topic at the time.  It was a topic I personally was deeply concerned about, in that brooding, overwrought way that adolescents have.    The main event of the conference, on a Saturday evening in the main college assembly hall, was to be a debate on the merits of an immediate “freeze” on the production, testing, and deployment of new nuclear weapons.  A retired rear admiral, Gene La Rocque, the founder of the Center for Defense Information, was to argue for the proposed “nuclear freeze.”  Franklin Miller would be against it.
But the afternoon before the debate there were a number of workshops in various places around campus.  I signed up for Franklin Miller’s.  I didn’t know exactly what the Pentagon’s Director of Strategic Planning did until I spent a couple of hours with him on that rainy day.  It turned out that his job was to plan nuclear war.  I’ll never forget watching him write numbers on the classroom chalkboard, row after row of six- and seven-figure numbers in neat columns representing population centers in the Soviet Union that he was planning to incinerate.  Each integer was a human life—tens, even hundreds of millions of them on the chalkboard, adding up to the number we would need to kill in order to be able to say that we’d won.  The whole thing was so easy, a child could understand it.  And at the same time it was completely incomprehensible and utterly unreal.
That night, at the end of the debate, they turned on a microphone in the center of the auditorium and invited questions from the audience.  With my heart racing and my voice shaking I went the microphone and I addressed Franklin Miller.  I told him that he seemed like an intelligent and well-meaning person who loved his country.  I asked him why he couldn’t use those gifts to try to understand the people of the Soviet Union, to learn their language and history and culture and politics, what their hopes and dreams and motivations might be.  I asked him why he couldn’t work for understanding and friendship between us and them, instead of threatening to murder them all.  He didn’t answer my question, which I admit was asked with a little more disrespect and self-righteousness than I’m bringing to it now.  He told me that I was only free to stand there at that microphone because of people like him, and then it was my turn to get defensive.  “Well, God bless the bomb!” I said, and returned to my seat.
Now  I don’t want to make it sound like I did something noble that night, because Franklin Miller was certainly right about this much—whether or not he deserved any credit for it, I was free to stand at that microphone and mouth off at the United States Director of Strategic Planning and it didn’t cost me a thing.  But I do want to honor something about that moment in my life, which is that I tried to speak up for the power of the truth as truth, even if I could have done a better job of exemplifying it. 
The truth doesn’t need weapons, be they verbal or nuclear.  The truth doesn’t need to threaten or to dominate to hold its place in the world.  If we truly understood what it is like to live on the other side of the barrier that divides us from our enemies, we would start to imagine new possibilities for the ordering of the world.   If we dealt with our enemies as if both of us were able to know the truth about the good and evil, in our own hearts and one another’s, we open a space through which healing can flow into the world.   This is as true of our everyday lives with our spouses, our co-workers, and our children as it is of international relations. 
But to live with this kind of deep trust in the power of the truth is risky.  Not everyone wants to know the truth.   Pontius Pilate is a good example, and we know how his conversation with Jesus ends.  The truth might not be worth the effort and the sacrifice that it requires if weren’t for the way that it opens us to the gift of knowledge.  To be vulnerable for the sake of truth is to the only way to directly experience a power that comes from somewhere outside our existing frame of reference.  It is the power that created the universe, that keeps it in order, and sustains it in an everlasting harmony.  This power is not fear.  It is not strength.  It is not greed, or lust, or ambition.  It is not random variation.  It is love.  Love rules the universe.  There’s your takeaway.

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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.