Sermon: The Christ between you and me
Text: John 18:33- 37
Our scripture reading today challenges us to ask, Who is Jesus? Who is Christ?
In today’s story, Pilate tries to figure out who this Jewish man is, whom the peasants call ‘king’ and the Jewish authorities want dead for fear that this social threat might overturn everything they hold dear. He might, both sides say, become a king in the future, overturn the social hierarchy, the old political and religious order, and lead the peasants to revolt. Pilate releases his feeling of responsibility, absolving his morals and conscience with the excuse that, “Well, I am not Jewish. I have no relation to their political controversy.” His concern about the identity of Jesus is utilized only to measure personal loss and gain, and to find out, “Is he a social threat to the Roman Empire?”. He fails to link his concern to the deeper questions, What is his Kingdom like? What is the Truth? (In their dialogue, Jesus said to Pilate, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”) and finally, Who belongs to the Truth?
Today, I invite everyone to engage with our questions, Who is Jesus, Who is Christ, through the lens of interdependence.
By the way, thank you, many of you, for asking how my last week was! It was my study leave week, and it was great, and I gave a lot of you the same answer, but I was a little shy to say it in a more colloquial English way, like “It was a blast!” It really was a blast, because both from reading and experientially, I learned a deep truth which seems to be everyone’s truth, (‘everyone belongs to the truth.’), and the truth is that we are inter-dependent. This may sound easy, but it is very profound, a fundamental truth. Please let me tell you more.
Some of you might have read my reflection which I shared in the most recent newsletter about my mom and me, the story of us linking arms. As I wrote down each paragraph in the story, I went a little deeper, revisiting the emotions that I (and my mom) had neglected, and then I had an epiphany: I discovered that I tend to experience love and express love when I feel that I can and want to let myself be dependent on another person for certain things, and let others depend on me. What’s at work here, in this voluntary opening of one self to the other? It is our solidarity based on mutual dependency and the trust that we can call on the other person’s acceptance; we need it, we desire it, and, more importantly, being able to be dependent is a beautiful thing, not a sign of weakness. Very human. We all begin our lives with dependence. Interdependence begins with dependence. Our own life and the survival, health and well-being of our human race, our earth community, really relies on our ability to let the other depend on our care and to allow ourselves to depend on the other’s care. In relationships of caring and dependency, we truly learn to become a whole, secure, healthy people. (Ha Na’s ad lib on a baby and her mother/parent/grandparent/others) Only through this continuous, repetitive, fundamental condition of inter-dependency, can we learn who we are. We grow. We fill up with the vital energy of faith and this ability of deep-engagement grows the community of people inside and out. In relationships of caring and dependency, we do not easily break into ‘me’ and ‘you’, with the ‘me’ and the ‘you’, as exclusive, self-sufficient, fully independent, separate two selves. (In today's story, Pilate was not able to find the fundamental link between Jesus and himself.) If we don’t take it for granted, our ability to let ourselves be dependent on one another, and to let others trust our care in their need of relationship and support is incredibly human or creaturely, (think about the mother and baby whales) and it shows immense strength.
What really made last week a blast started with one article, written by Jonathan Herring, Oxford Law professor. (I was impressed, thinking, "Wow, an Oxford Don, the representative of the most formidable ivy tower in the English speaking world teaches this!") : “Health as Vulnerability; Interdependence and Relationality”. Being truly thought-provoking, this 12-page article helped me really understand the fatal limitations of individualism, and inspired the desire to overcome it. The article makes many great points, but today I would like to focus on vulnerability and care, because this lens of interdependence will, eventually, lead us to see the church as the People of God, the Body of Christ. The people of God (The Old Testament), the body of Christ (The New Testament), is more than just the collective sum of independent individuals who have faith. Truly what we profess with these expressions is that we are the care community, and our essential energy and vitality must come from solidarity-based, interdependent, crazy and courageous love for God, our neighbours and ourselves. The church is not the special, elected group to whom God has guaranteed salvation; I would like to invite everyone to consider the church as a microcosm.
The whole world, the macrocosm should see us as a model for how we love one another, how we love the creation, how we love the Creator. If we do not do loving well, we are not doing the microcosm, the model, well. Then, the question for us is, how do we belong to the truth? How do we listen to the voice of Christ?
Our society in general seems to praise independence (mobility, finance, etc.) more than anything, and tells us that we have to keep this pretense, this facade that “We are independent.” The default concept of self in this model is that each one of us is/should be an essentially independent adult person, able-bodied, self-willed. Then, this model which understand health as being independent, free of illness and free of impairment, persistently isolates and excludes disability, our emotional need of interdependence, and the understanding of health as embracing vulnerability. Our indigenous kins have held this vision and faith for a long time that health is the social, emotional and cultural well-being of the whole community, not just the physical well-being of an individual.
However, the good news is that even secular care professionals have begun to understand and research and promote a vulnerability-centered view of the self, instead of the self-sufficient, autonomous self. In this view, not only a certain percentage of people are vulnerable- we all are. This new view says, first of all, our bodies are ‘profoundly leaky’. In fact, “Our bodies are constantly changing with new material being added to them and old material being discarded. By the end of each day we have lost a whole host of cells and grown new ones. By our deaths there is little of us that is biologically the same as when we were born. Further, our bodies are not all human. Inside they are dependent on a wide range of non-human organisms." The truth is our bodies are deeply dependent on other bodies and our environment.
We are called to be the People of God, and that really means shalom, peace, which is not the same as security. Peace and security are two different things. In shalom, we, who make the People of God, who become the body of Christ, are one vulnerable self, the self who lives the truth of interdependent care, love and solidarity. Our default being is not a superpowered, able-bodied self, free of illness, free of impairment. The bodily fleshy natures of all of us make us all vulnerable. Deep emotion, which flows in us, moves in us, and so changes us, makes us all vulnerable.
When we ask the questions: Who is Jesus? Who is Christ? What is his Kingdom like? What is the Truth? Who belongs to the Truth? One key to answer these questions seems to be that we really need a new model of self and the community. Our faith and hope is to become a beloved community, and when we do so, our relationship sparkles, marked by the interdependency between you and me who learn to receive, learn to give such starry human qualities: gratitude, love, acknowledgement, emotional support, solidarity and care.
What I would like to stress here is that in the community of beloveds, there are no divides, or distinction, or even separate roles between caregivers and those who are cared-for. Those who receive. Those who give. Those who are spiritually more competent, those who are less. Those who are more professional in giving. Those who are in the laity. The beloved community must teach, by experience, its members true self-worth, everyone’s equal, diamond self-worth, which is born of God, guaranteed by God. If we neglect certain people to feel any extent of self-doubt that they are not 'yet' or not good ‘enough', we are doing the community care work, Christ’s calling, only in half-measures. We all are inter-dependent, we are mutual, we make this solidarity of equals, the beloved community of equals, together. Every one of you has already participated in this mighty task. That’s the whole point of becoming a Godward community. It is distinct, because its sharing love must be inspired by our inherent self-worth, Christ-like love. In the beloved community, we do not easily break into ‘me’ and ‘you’, because the vulnerability of the one becomes the vulnerability of the other, and in the same sense, the health of the one becomes the health of the other.
Who is Jesus? Who is Christ? We sing that Christ has no body but ours, and God calls us, the body of miraculously delicate, interdependent selves, (Hosea 2:23; Paul quotes) “Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’ and he [sic] who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved.’” Amen.
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