Scripture: John 18:28–40
It’s a wonder and a joy — to come together to worship together each week; to consider and give thanks for the sacred of creation; to remind ourselves that we are love and we are loved by a God who goes with us always, even unto the end; to restore our souls together on this set-apart sabbath day in order to charge back into challenge, and joy, and complexity in the week ahead. What a wonder; what a joy.
Let us pray together.
God of the new creation. God of mercy. God of lasting peace. Use this your congregation as instruments of your beloved community as we seek to hear and live your Word. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your site, our rock, our tower, and our redeemer. Amen.
A Christian church community is a unique thing. We are a people of covenant — meaning we make promises to each other and God to work together and respond to the sacred as it is revealed in our mist. This is not your average organizational mission statement. And we model ourselves on the practices of the earliest churched that were established thousands of years ago by Jesus’s friends and apostles that began in the days and months and years following Jesus’s final days.
Like them, we are in the business of changing lives and transforming society. We are in the business of creating deep relationships using ancient, shared values and theological commitments.
But we face the challenges we face. It’s an unfortunate twenty-first-century fact that email fraudsters and scammers often target churches because of the good will and generous energy and radical compassion that churches thrive on.
A few weeks ago, there were email scammers posing as several different members of the clergy in our area, including me. Many of us here this morning may have received an email claiming to be from a clergyperson, asking for a reply. Channel 12 profiled one Catholic priest, Fr. William Ledoux, who reported that emails impersonating him were sent to his parishioners asking for donations in the form of gift cards.
The jovial priest said his parishioners should have known it was a scam when the impersonator asked for gift cards from the makeup store Sephora, saying, “there’s no makeup on this face.”
A minister will never ask for funds via emails or texts. Always verify. Please notify the church office if you ever receive one of these messages. And when in doubt, be like Pontius Pilate in today’s reading and ask the person who is writing to you: are you who you say you are? Email scammers won’t be able to answer. Pilate also asks Jesus: what is truth? Another good question to deter an email scammer.
A good question is a powerful tool.
In this morning’s relatively short scripture reading that continues our journey through John’s gospel — we are nearing the end — Pontius Pilate asks six good questions. Pilate is the Roman governor of the Judean province. Jesus is now a prisoner and has been hustled through the night and questioned by the levels of hierarchical authority — Judas Iscariot handed Jesus to the temple police, who brought him to Annas, the former high priest, who sent him to Caiaphas, the current high priest, who brought him finally to Pilate, the Roman Governor.
Pilate seems genuinely curious about Jesus. He asks questions to learn about this famous figure who the people are calling the King of the Jews. Remember that everyone who is not a Roman citizen in this story is Jewish, so the term “Jews” here is used to refer to the masses of people of the region, perhaps especially referring to those who are not religious elites. The title “King of the Jews” is more of a class commentary about Jesus than a religious commentary. Pilate says that he has found nothing wrong about what Jesus has done.
Pilate asks Jesus, are you who the people say you are — “are you the King of the Jews?” And Jesus says something to the effect of, “do you want to know, or did they tell you to ask that.” So Pilate replies, “Look, it was your high priests who brought you to me and asked me to approve your execution . . . what have you done?” And Jesus answers, “I’m not of this world. If I was, my followers would be fighting back to save me.” He finishes, “I came into the world, to testify to the truth.” And Pilate says finally, “What is truth?” meaning, “what is your kingdom like?”
Howard Zehr is a well-known restorative justice practitioner in the United States, who teaches us that good questions open up new possibilities, while bad questions slam doors.
For example, after someone causes harm — we often ask some version of What laws have been broken? Who did it? What do they deserve? These questions seek resolution without healing. Zehr says, the good version of these questions is Who has been hurt? What do they need? Who is obligated to make repair? How can we make things right?
Take for example the harm caused by email impersonators seeking money. What laws are broken and what do they deserve? Are the limiting questions. Scammers break all kinds of internet laws. If they’re ever caught they may be fined or jailed. But Howard Zehr’s better questions lead us to new possibilities — what do people who have been hurt need, and how can we make repair? We can help restore people to and we can work systemically to educate people about scamming threats. We all can take part in repair and making things right.
It works for little things like emails; and it works for big things like war. Who is harmed and what do they need? It’s not just people with wounds who are harmed.
This is Jesus’s message to Pilate. The old and familiar ways lead to war and bloodshed. I am a king, he says, but not like Caesar in Rome. He says he is a king of another way of thinking, not the way Pilate thinks of being a king, with power and might and military — Jesus is king of a truer way of living and seeing the world. Pilate is curious, and goes out of his way to try and shield Jesus from his fate. To no avail.
The people who condemn and crucify Jesus plaster him with this title, King of the Jews — that is the charge they have leveled against him.
All around the world there are museums filled with artistic depictions of this part of the Christian story, with depictions of Jesus on the cross — some highlight his humanity and others depict his divinity. Often there is a placard or card shown above him with the letters INRI.
I always remember this detail because as a child, all I could make of this was “IN RI” and if to say in Rhode Island is Jesus Christ on a cross. Which I knew was not the case from the geographical sense. But it took me a long time to figure out what this really meant. It’s Latin letters, the language used in the Roman Empire: I is for Jesus because J is a later evolution of the alphabet. N is for Nazareth, where Jesus is from. R is for Rex, meaning King. And I is for Iudaerum: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.
The title is intended to mock Jesus; but the words are true if we take Jesus at his word that he is a king of a kingdom that is not of this world…
Jesus came to bring us closer to a truer, balanced, and more peaceful way of living; his witness of the world as it is can help us see the façade of power and glory when people in power use power and glory for their own personal gain. Jesus holds these things lightly and pours them out so that they are available for us all. That’s good news, friends.
Help us to live in the abundance of Jesus, is Kingdom. Thanks be to God on the journey. Amen.
