Love Reigns

The Passion According to Saint John. Act II, Scene 2: Jesus and Pilate.

John’s Passion story is a complex and detailed drama that carries us along to multiple places in the company of multiple characters. The beginning of the Passion – Act I – centers on the interactions between Jesus and the leadership of the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus is arrested by temple police, beaten and bound, and brought before one religious leader after another. Act II, though, is the act of Pontius Pilate, prefect of Rome. Pilate governs each little scene in this act – every moment is focused on his thoughts, his objections, his questions. It is Pilate who speaks, Pilate who acts, Pilate who draws lines between other characters. In the first scene, he is outside, talking to the crowds and religious leaders, in the second, back inside to talk to Jesus, then back outside, and back and forth and back and forth until the moment he finally hands Jesus over to Act 3, the Act of Golgotha.

But today we are back at Act 2, Scene 2. Inside the Praetorium. Jesus stands stage right, Pilate stage left. A conversation. Not much action, here; the drama is in the dialogue. It is the question and answer that inches us along in the plot. Pilate – are you the King of the Jews? Jesus – why are you asking me this? Pilate – I don’t know; your people say that you’re claiming to be King. Jesus – I am. But not the kind of king you’re thinking of. Pilate – so you are a king? Jesus – you tell me.* I came into the world, to witness to the truth.

It’s a wordy, weighty interchange. Jesus and Pilate talk to each other and past each other, bending the conversation in the direction they desire, working their sentences to accomplish their own purposes. It’s a classic confrontation scene, written in rapid-fire style, like the Gospel written by Aaron Sorkin. Are you who I think you are? Well who says that I am? I’m not sure, but I’m asking. Well, I might be, but not in the way you imagine. This could be any host of dramatic confrontations between characters who are trying to feel each other out while also saying only the things that they want to: Thomas More and Henry VIII, Darcy and Elizabeth, Lord Grantham and Tom Branson. It would be easy for us to get lost in the lines themselves, in the landscape of the language. And if this scene were all we had, we might imagine that this Act of the Passion were mostly about discourse, about dialogue, mostly about the words.

But to see only the words here is to miss one critically important part of this particular dramatic moment. And that is the scene’s backdrop. For all of this scene, indeed the entirety of the Passion, takes place against a vibrant, pulsing backdrop of fear. Everyone here is afraid. The disciples are so terrified they take off and keep on running. The religious leadership feels like they have been backed so far into a corner by this man Jesus that the only thing they can do to survive is to come out with their teeth bared and slashing. Even Pilate, Pilate the powerful, Pilate the prefect, Pilate the picture of Roman imperial might, is afraid that this man’s charisma plus his people’s frustration with the Roman occupation, combined with the sheer number of those people present in the capital city for the Passover, will add up to an uprising and downputting that can only end bloody. This scene is far from just banter or verbal jousting. Jesus is bound, Pilate is desperate, the crowds are angry and about to boil over. Fear is all around.

And it is hard to make sense when fear is all around. It is hard to speak clearly, to say what you mean, to even know what you mean, when you are living against a backdrop of blood-red fear. You ask questions and don’t listen to the answers; you give answers to questions that haven’t even been asked. There can be no wittiness, no thoughtfulness, no real attention to the words when your heart is racing and the hairs are standing up on the back of your neck. When we are afraid, we see only threats, only the darkness that is coming, and it is hard to be thoughtful and attentive when we are also preparing to run for our lives, or lash out, or smash anything that comes within arm’s reach that seems shadowy and menacing. Left unchecked, fear can warp us into creatures God never created us to be. It is hard to make sense when fear is all around.

This may be true for us. It is not true of Christ. Jesus does not react in fear. Jesus does not lash out in terror. Jesus is not panicked or desperate. Jesus is not blaming or pointing fingers. Jesus is not belittling or rolling his eyes. Jesus is not even putting up walls to defend himself from what is coming his way, because to do so would be to put a stumbling block between himself and his very purpose. To keep all of this at arm’s length – these people, these politics, these threats – would be to keep the world at arm’s length, and distance is antithetical to Jesus’ mission. He came to us, came into this world, to testify to the truth. And that truth is love.

Christ stands in the middle of that terrifying scene as love, speaks to Pilate as love, waits in silence as love, allows himself to be taken and pushed and beaten and questioned and bloodied and mocked and dragged to his death as love. Christ hangs upon the cross as love, a love that acts with mercy and kindness, a love that serves with a full heart, even those people who won’t love back. Whatever the chaos, whatever the betrayal, whatever the insults and pain and hatred, Christ testifies to the truth, then and now and always, and that truth is love.

We must not forget that when fear is all around us it is also all around Christ, who stands in the center as love. And that center will hold. And we must hold fast to it. For it is there that we belong – it is there, in the center of that perfect love that we ourselves can testify to the truth that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it. Act 3 on the heights of Golgotha was not the curtain. “The powerful play goes on, and you and I may contribute a verse.”** More than that, the play goes on and Christ commands us to contribute a verse – to listen to his voice, to claim our allegiance and loyalty and place – to him, with him, and in him. Christ commands us to cry out in witness to the truth, to claim the perfect love that casts fear out into the darkness whence it comes.

This does not mean that fear and darkness are figments of our imagination. The darkness that is swirling over the globe right now is not an illusion; the light may have come into the world such that the darkness will not overcome it, but that doesn’t mean that the darkness is a mirage. “The fear is real,” our new presiding bishop Michael Curry wrote this week, and then he continues, “So we pray. We go to church. We remember who we are in Jesus. Our resurrection hope is larger than fear.”

Now hope that is seen is not hope. As frustrating as that might be sometimes, Paul was right about that one. But all that means is that you and I hope for what we do not see – for more than we could imagine, for God’s own kingdom, where terror holds no sway; where forgiveness is mightier than vengeance; where doors are opened, not shut; where love is seen as an opportunity and not a risk, where all things will be subject to the gracious, merciful, righteous reign of Christ. That is the world for which we hope – a world which we do not yet see, but a world for which we wait with patience.

And where we wait matters. We must wait in that holy center, where Christ reigns in love, where Christ stands, reaching out to draw us in, beloved one by beloved one, widening and widening the circle until hatred and violence and darkness and blood-red fear have no room on the stage. “You say that I am a king, Jesus says. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” The world needs us to listen to his voice now. The world needs that truth. Christ is King. “To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.” Christ is King. Love reigns. Love, not darkness nor hatred, nor fear nor terror, nor prejudice nor protectionism, nor the media nor the politicians, nor the night nor death. Only love. Christ is King. Love reigns.

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

22 November 2015, Christ the King

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

*Language borrowed from Eugene Peterson

**Borrowed from the movie "Dead Poet's Society"

Hefted

It’s not every day at my age that you learn a new word, so I was thrilled this summer to come across a word that was unknown to me, while reading a book about sheep farming and shepherding.  The word is “heft,” but not in the sense of lifting or carrying.

A “heft” in northern England is “a piece of upland pasture to which a farm animal has become hefted.”  Or, to put it from the animal’s point of view, to be hefted is “to become accustomed and attached to an area of upland pasture.”  The word is in use in the Lake District in the north of England, where the sheep are grazed on the fells – the high green hills – on “unfenced common land.”  Without walls or fences, “in theory,” writes James Rebanks in his excellent book, The Shepherd’s Life, the “sheep could wander right across the Lake District.  But they don’t, because they know their place on the mountain.  They are ‘hefted,’ taught their sense of belonging by their mothers as lambs – an unbroken chain of learning that goes back thousands of years.”

So, on the one hand there are the sheep.  And on the other hand is the land: common land, not in the sense that it is completely without ownership or rent, but in the sense that ownership notwithstanding, the land is used by the farmers in common with one another.  And so, on yet another hand, there are the farmers, who are “commoners.”  As Rebanks writes, “‘commoner’ isn’t a dirty word here; it is a thing to be proud of.  It means you have rights to something of value, that you contribute to the management of the fells, and that you take part in our way of life as an equal with the other farmers.”[i]  Apparently the sheep aren’t the only thing hefted to the land.  It would seem that the people are, in a real sense, “hefted” there too. It means you have rights to something of value, that you contribute to it, and that you take part in a way of life as an equal.  Hefted.

Reading about the hefting of sheep and they way they graze on common land plucks at rural strings of my heart that I hardly know exist, bringing out my inner Wordsworth, the great poet of the Lake District:

“The world is too much with us – late and soon.

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away….”[ii]

Yes, we have given our hearts away.  If there is one thing we modern, urban people are not, it is hefted.  We are not hefted to place or family or custom.  And often, we are not hefted to church or to God.  The world is too much with us, getting and spending; we lay waste our powers, all too ready to move on to the next adventure or opportunity.  And who can say that this is all good or all bad?  Not me.  What I can say, is that even though we live here in the city, it may be that there is still hefting to be done, if any will do it. Because it means you have rights to something of value, that you contribute to it, and that you take part in a way of life as an equal.  And that’s a good thing, I am certain.  Hefted.

Every year at this time, we open up the Bible and who should pop out of it but someone like this poor widow with her two copper coins worth only a penny, whom Jesus espies from across the temple courts.  (Yes, she had to scrape together two coins just to come up with a penny!)  And Jesus calls his disciples to him because it’s a teaching moment. “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on."  You don’t really need me to explain this to you further, I think.  Nor do you need me to turn it into a guilt trip, or a pep talk – though on the right day, I am willing to do either.  I think you understand this teaching moment.

And that poor widow didn’t show up faithfully with her two copper coins (her widow’s mite) because some preacher had convinced her to with a guilt trip or a pep talk the previous week.  No, she gave what she had, what she could, what she wanted to give; she gave so generously, so sacrificially, because she had been hefted to God long ago, and to the worship of God in his temple.  She knew she had rights to something of value, that she needed to contribute to it, and that she took part in a holy way of life as an equal.

Every year - as we think about what it means to be good stewards of all that God has given to us, and of the work and ministry to which God has called us – every year we are presented with these widows, or these servants and their talents, or with this farmer who has two sons.  And every year you brace yourselves, I suppose, as I walk up to the pulpit with some clever way to ask you, or tell you, or beg you to give your money to the church, to give it to God, to give it away!  (And on any given day, I am generally willing to ask you, or tell you, or beg you to do so!)

But, frankly, I am not all that interested in fund raising here.  And, while I think there is a time and a place for fund raising in the church, I do not think that November is it, just because the widow, and the talents, and the farmer and his sons, or whoever, pops out of the Bible at this time of year.  No, I am not principally interested in fund raising with all of you.  I am not principally interested in getting you to give your money to the church, believe it or not!

I am principally interested in getting you hefted: hefted to the church, and hefted to Jesus.  I am principally interested in getting you to become accustomed and attached to an area of upland pasture – and I hope that pasture will be here on Locust Street.  More particularly, I hope that high green hill will be Jesus.  And that means that I am principally interested in showing you that you have rights to something of value here, that you should contribute to it, and that you will be happier if you will take part in this way of life as an equal.  Then you will be, God willing, hefted.  Hefted to Saint Mark’s, and hefted to Jesus.  Hefted.

When you are hefted to the church and hefted to Jesus, in theory, you could still wander right across the globe, for there is nothing to keep you here, certainly nothing to keep you giving.  But when you are hefted to the church and to Jesus, you don’t wander so much, even though you may, in fact, go far afield, because you know your place on the mountain, so to speak, you have been taught your sense of belonging in an unbroken chain of learning that goes back thousands of years.  And when you are hefted to these high green hills then it will be of little worry to me that you have to make decisions every year about how much to give.  Because when you are hefted, you give more than I would ever dream of asking you to give.

In a gorgeous short film about the sheep and people who are hefted to the Lake District, a woman is talking about the sheep, but she might as well be talking about herself, or about us:  “Once they’ve got hefted,” she says, “it’ll be very difficult to drive them off, as well.”  “It’s about where you belong.”  You “want to be on [your] heft.”

And another voice tells a story about how as a child he used to sneak up on sleeping lambs, up in the fells, to try to surprise them and catch them, and snuggle their wooly bodies before letting them run off.  And there was, he said, a flat stone in a field, that was warmed by the sun, and so it was a favorite place for lambs to lie, on the stone, to get warm.  And it was an easy place to sneak up on a sleeping lamb, as a child, and catch that little lamb, and snuggle its wooly coat.  And they called that flat stone the “Lamb Stone.”[iii]

And I delight in the complexity, and craziness, and sophistication of this urban world we inhabit, and I know I wouldn’t last very long at all on a sheep farm in the Penines.  And I think it’s a good idea to be hefted, and to find your heft in a place where there’s a flat stone, that we might as well think of as the Lamb Stone, and that it’s warmed by the Sun.

And I pray that you and I will always be drawn back to this stone, the Lamb Stone, by some divine gift of homing.  For it means we have rights to something of value here on Locust Street, that we contribute to it, and that we take part in a holy way of life here as equals. 

It means we are hefted.  Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

8 November 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life, Flatiron Books, New York, 2015, pp 21-23

[ii] William Wordsworth, “The World is too much with us,” c. 1802

[iii] Hefted, produced and directed by Tom Lloyd, from Dreamtime Arts and Edenarts, 2012