Last Sunday after Pentecost

If you should want to change the world as you know it, I mean really change it, change it in a fundamental way, to what power do you appeal? This is the question for this last Sunday of the year, the Feast of Christ the King, and for the beginning of the new year.

During the past eleven weeks, we have seen quite a lot of the way the world answers this question. Terrorists who seek a change hijack airplanes. They fly them into buildings and kill several thousand people, and misery and fear are created. Then, in an attempt to check their efforts, governments are alerted, armies and navies are deployed, the country in which terrorists are suspected of hiding is bombed, and more buildings are destroyed and more people killed, and more misery and fear are created.

And the news on Friday reported that a recent poll discovered that 60-70% of Americans now favor the use of whatever means it takes to defeat terrorism and to change the world. These approved means include, it seems, the possible assassination of foreign leaders, torture, the indefinite detentions of persons who have been been charged with no crime, and the effective annulment of other parts of our own Bill of Rights.

These are not new means. They are the same old means that have been tried since the beginning of the world, an appeal to force and fear and submission: if I want to change the world, then, if I am strong enough or others are weak enough, I demand the change, or else!

But do these means achieve the ends we desire? Have they ever achieved the ends desired? With means like these, does anything really change fundamentally?

Things weren't so very different two thousand years ago. The Romans had their armies deployed to the ends of the world. In Judea, Rome ruled a local people against their will. Some in Judea wanted a change. They wanted the Romans to leave. But since the Romans wouldn't leave on their own, these Jewish zealots resorted to insurrection and riot, to early forms of terror. The Romans met this terror with their own terror, with crucifixions: hundreds of them, thousands of them, a show of force meant to keep the peace, to keep the people in line.

On that Friday we call Good, three criminals were crucified on a hill outside Jerusalem. Two of them were guilty as charged. It's very likely they all knew each other, you know. The two thieves on either side of Jesus were probably not just ordinary street criminals. It is likely that they were zealots, freedom fighters who had spent much of their lives stealing in order to supply the local forces who wanted to drive Rome out of Judea. And they had heard of Jesus. They had heard of how people said that Jesus was the hoped-for messiah, the king who would finally lead the successful rebellion against Rome. And that's why these two thieves and Jesus were crucified together; they had been painted with the same brush by the authorities.

But Jesus seems in fact to have been little more than a pain in the neck to the local Jewish authorities, because he was always preaching and teaching things that irritated them. He proclaimed the coming of a kingdom for the people of God. And while this made the real insurrectionists think he might be one of them, maybe sent by God to lead the revolt, it made the priests, and most of the other Jewish authorities, nervous and angry, because, if an insurrection got under way, they were sure to lose the little power that Rome had let them keep.

So something had to be done about Jesus, whether he was guilty or not, whether he was really a threat to Rome or not. "If we let him go on like this," they said, "then all the people will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our Temple and our nation." "It's better that one man should die, whether he is guilty or not," added Caiaphas, the high priest, "than that the whole nation perish."

So they took a poll. and they all decided that the ends justified the means. If, in order to save the law, they had to destroy the law by violating their own legal procedures, then they would do it. So they had Jesus arrested. And Peter took out his sword and was going to fight back to save Jesus, and maybe to start the rebellion, but Jesus said, "Put your sword back in its scabbard, Peter, because those who live by the sword, die by the sword."

And they brought Jesus in, under cover of darkness, even though their own law, a law they had a sacred duty to uphold, prohibited secret trials at night. And even though Jesus insisted that his kingdom was not a kingdom of this world, and even though there were no credible witnesses to testify to his disloyalty to Rome, they turned him over to Rome, who beat him and tortured him and crucified him along with two real threats, because the Roman governor, too, although he knew Jesus was innocent, thought it was better that Jesus die than that an angry mob get any angrier.

So the ends justified the means, and peace was restored. For a time. But was anything changed, really changed, fundamentally?

Power. Everyone is impressed and awed by genuine power.

Take a locomotive. Standing by the tracks, perhaps you have had, as I have had, a sense of a locomotive's power as it approaches the station, and perhaps a greater sense of it yet as it stops, and you get an idea of the great power necessary to stop it. Or take a storm, such as a tornado. What awesome power wind has, wind that can, in a matter of minutes, destroy a town, or can, if controlled, light the town or heat it. Or our great rockets, engines that can lift tons of hardware off the earth and place them in orbit around the planet.

But power, impressive, awesome power, is not always so dazzling as a locomotive or a storm or a rocket. Consider the power of a few drops of water, which can fall into a crack, and simply by freezing and expanding can rip open your concrete steps or tear up the city's streets.

And ivy. Consider the persistent power of ivy, which sometimes adorns the brick walls of buildings. It's lovely there on the wall, but you've got to keep your eye on it, because if it's left to its own devices, ivy will, in time, slowly tear the building apart, brick by brick.

Power, deep, persistent power, quietly surrounds us all our lives, and most of the time we're simply unaware of it!

One scientist (Waldermar Kaempffert) estimates that there is enough energy in a single drop of water, controlled and released, to supply 200 horse power for a year, and enough buried power in an ordinary business card to drive a ferry across the Hudson River for a year.

Much of the time, however, perhaps most of the time, we confuse power with force. Just a century ago, England thought that it had great power because it had such great imperial forces. Didn't England have the greatest navy on the seas? Hadn't the Crown's soldiers, with their superior weapons, gained control of much of the world, including the whole of the sub-continent of India and all its people?

So it seemed, until a small, funny-looking little man named Gandhi, working as quietly and persistently as the ivy on the wall, brought the British Empire to its knees. Not by leading an armed force of his own, but by the power of faith and prayer and personal sacrifice and by his refusal to meet force with force. And so Gandhi changed the life of his people and gave them new hope.

No one should ever underestimate the strength of force. It can be, and often is, an ugly and dangerous strength. But is force what you want to appeal to if you want to change the world fundamentally, if you want to make something new and different? There are, after all, some things that force can never do. No force on earth can change a mind or a heart! Only power can do that!

Have you ever considered, for example, what the greatest miracle recorded in the Bible is? Often, when asked, people suggest that it might be Jesus' changing of water into wine, or the raising of Lazarus from the dead, or the resurrection itself. But these are child's play for the God who created the world out of nothing. They weren't much at all compared to a miracle of much greater power, the conversion of St. Paul! St. Paul's conversion, I argue, was the greatest miracle recorded in the Bible, because the miracle was a change of heart and mind. It took real power to do that. No army could have done it. It was only the power of Jesus' love for him and the world, which Paul came to experience personally, that could change Paul from a zealot who breathed murderous threats against the followers of Jesus into the strongest apostle of the Gospel of grace.

As you know, one of my favorite movies is "A River Runs Through It." It's about a father and his two sons, and their relationships with each other. Mother is there too, but it's mostly about the males. And early in the movie, when the younger brother, Paul, is eight years old, there is a confrontation of power around the breakfast table. Everyone's bowl is empty, except Paul's. Paul's oatmeal is still there, with his spoon turned defiantly upside down on the rim of his bowl.

"We're not saying 'Grace' and leaving this table until every spoonful of oatmeal is eaten," Paul's father tells him. But time passes, lots of time, and still Paul sits there without touching his oatmeal. "People have been eating the Lord's oats for centuries," Paul's father adds, in an appeal to authority, "and it's not the place of an 8-year-old to change that tradition." But Paul does change it. It takes all day, but in the end, he outlasts his father.

Paul's father, with his superior strength, could, of course, have shoved the oatmeal down his son's throat. But would that have changed Paul's mind about oatmeal? Would it have changed his heart? Something else, some real power, not brute force, would have to do that.

Armies can force their way, for a time. They did so with Gandhi, and also with Jesus. They may in Afghanistan. But which, in the end, prevailed, the soldiers and the empire that marched Jesus to the Cross or the power of the love of One who willingly gave his life to make a real difference in life?

Salvador Dali painted a most interesting portrait of the Crucifixion. And it is said that shortly after he finished it, a friend said to him, "But you've made a mistake! There are no nails in his hands or feet." "Oh, that's all right," said Dali, "It was love alone that held him there."

Force, the force of armies, drove the nails into Jesus' hands and feet and put up the mocking sign, "This is the King of the Jews." But it is the power of the love of the One on the Cross that moved Handel to acclaim him King of kings and that inspired Matthew Bridges to write the words we will sing later this morning, "Crown Him with many crowns, the Lamb upon his throne.... Awake, my soul, and sing of Him who died for thee, and hail Him as thy matchless King through all eternity."

Funny, isn't it? Rome is no more. And the British Empire and the Third Reich and the Soviet Union have all followed Rome. And now, like the empires before us, the United States struggles to maintain our empire through force. But the deep power of the love and example of Jesus continues to work its way, like the ivy on the wall, into the lives of all who are open to him, continuing to change them and move them, from the Cross.

Jesus knew the truth, that if, in order to defeat the beast, one acts like the beast, then bestiality prevails. Jesus knew that the ends never justify the means, because the means with which we seek to change things are really part of the ends we seek. And therefore, if you really want to change something, to make it really new, different in a fundamental way, then an appeal to force is futile. And that's why Christ, the King, appealed not to the armed forces, but to the Cross.

Three men dying together on crosses. There is Jesus on his cross, and two others dying beside him, one on his right and one on his left, all of them arrested and nailed to crosses to die as enemies of the state. Broken men, all three of them, scandalous to all the strong soldiers and all the good people, Jewish and Roman alike, who stood around and mocked them.

And one of the thieves himself took up the mockery of the crowd. "Jesus," he said, "if you're the king everyone says you are, if you're the king I believed you might be, then do something. Call out your armed forces! Use your power to change things! Get yourself, and us, down from here!" Afraid to let go of his old vision of defeating Rome by force, this dying man shouted at Jesus derisively, "If you are a king, use the power of a king and save yourself, and us, too!"

But the other thief, also broken and dying beside Jesus, saw something different. Somehow, when he heard Jesus say, "Father, let it be, forgive them, pardon them, because they don't know what they're doing," he knew that it was not the nails and the soldiers that kept Jesus on the cross. Love alone was keeping him there. A desire to make things new, a desire to change things fundamentally, a desire for real power, for a power that would make the nails and the forces of the Romans puny by comparison, led Jesus to appeal to the Cross rather than to the army.

This second dying man knew that, ironically, the sign on Jesus' cross was correct. This is a king. Because the power of his love for them all was greater than all the forces that put him there. So he turned to Jesus and said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And Jesus said, "Today, friend, you are with me in paradise."

In "A River Runs Through it," Paul's father is unable to understand Paul's rebellious ways, a rebelliousness that ultimately leads to his death. And after Paul's death, when his father is talking with Paul's brother about Paul, he says, "It is not necessary to understand completely in order to love completely. This I have always believed and taught."

Isn't that true? With all the things in our world we don't understand, and all the people who are different from us whom we don't understand, isn't it true that it is not necessary to understand completely in order to love completely? The Cross still stands, throwing its shadow across life as we know it, whether we understand it or not, inviting an appeal to the court of love and sacrifice rather than to the court of force.

This, at least, is the power to which Christ, the King, appealed when he wanted to change things fundamentally. It is what he thought, and what he believed, and how he lived and died.

The ivy and the water, in the end, always have their way. And love, too, is like that. The Cross prevails over Rome, and over the British Empire, and over the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, and over the United States, and over every throne and dominion and sovereignty and power of the world, even over the power of death itself.

The Cross is the power whose praise we sing today.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.