A Sermon for the Last Sunday after Pentecost

O send out thy light and thy truth, that they may lead me, and bring me unto thy holy hill and to thy dwelling (Psalm 43:3). Amen.

That is not my usual prayer before the sermon, this verse of Psalm 43: “Send out your light and your truth …” But it is so very appropriate for this Day. For on this Christ the King Sunday my topic is “truth”: speaking the truth, hearing the truth. I will focus on the latter—hearing the truth—because one cannot speak the truth unless one has heard the truth.

Now, as Frederick Buechner has suggested, all hearers of the truth are at bottom the same. We hearers of the truth are all empty, and we listen out of the same emptiness for a truth to fill us and so to make us true.

In today’s gospel Jesus speaks truth to power. It is the morning of his Passion—Good Friday—and he has been bound and beaten and now he is brought to Pilate, who, in the imagination of writer Frederick Buechner, took a long drag on his cigarette and looked at him through narrowed eyed and asked, “What is truth?”

I must confess that I cannot think of Pontius Pilate, except through Buechner’s take on him in his book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. Pilate is of course the Roman prefect (governor) of Judea, where Jerusalem is situated.

As Buechner imagines it, on that day he asks his famous question, there are other things he has seen and done. He makes his first major decision before he has even had his breakfast. While still in his pajamas, he walks downstairs to the bar closet where he keeps his store of cigarettes, takes the two and a half cartons he finds there and throws them in the trash. He finds the remains of a pack in his dinner jacket and some other loose smokes in various boxes around the house, and resolutely throws the collection in the garage right on top of last night’s dinner scraps. The evening before, after the dinner, the talk had turned to politics, and he was up for hours, talking and smoking. When he woke up that morning, his whole chest was raw inside like a wound. His tongue felt hot and dry. He knows about the surgeon general’s warnings, and he’s seen the gruesome photos of smokers’ lungs. For 30 years he has been a chain-smoker—so he sees his pre-breakfast decision to quit smoking as a decision for life over death.

It is a good start, and he feels better for it. Not even the morning paper—being old school, he insists on seeing his news in print—upsets him, as he leafs through it in the back seat of his limousine as he is driven into the city. It contains the usual grim recital—disasters, disease, poverty, crime, corruption in high places, ignorance, and superstition and indifference in low places and everywhere else.

Instead, he feels wonderfully insulated from it as his car rolls along and he glances at the world from time to time through the tinted windows. Children playing in parks, police on patrol, sightseers outside the temple.

He is essentially a law-and-order man. Let pointy-headed professors, cable-news commentators and bleeding hearts carry on about the rottenness at the heart of things, that is their business. His concern is about the rottenness on the streets, enforcing the laws, maintaining order, keeping the ship afloat, pleasing his boss Caesar Tiberius, who seems to be happy with the job he is doing. And he himself, if not exactly happy, is happy enough.

His youthful dreams of greatness have not been realized, and his marriage is not what it was. But he is successful and has educated his children. And when his wife calls because she is anxious about something, he can remind her that their retirement villa in Ostia awaits them, and there they may watch the sun set over the Mediterranean and enjoy the ritual of a cocktail. As he talks, he looks out his window at a soldier who is talking to a child and then at a pigeon, which has landed outside the window and is preening its wings. When he turns back to his desk, he sees that he is no longer alone. They have brought this up-country messiah in for questioning. Pilate is caught off-guard, and before he knows what he is doing, he takes a cigarette from the box on his desk, a gift from Herod, and lights it.

The man stands in front of the desk. His hands are tied behind his back. His face is bruised and swollen; he’s been roughed up. He looks like a peasant, or from the smell of him, someone from the street. Nothing kingly about this guy. If it were just the two of them, he would probably just buy the man a one-way ticket back to wherever he was from. But the guards are watching, and on the wall the official portrait of Caesar is watching. So he goes through the formalities. He does his job.

He interrogates the man: “So you are the king of the Jews?”

The man says, “My kingdom is not like the kingdoms of this world. My kingdom is not of human origin.” And then he says, through his swollen lip, “I came into this world to bear witness to the truth.”

He takes a deep drag on his cigarette. His head begins to spin. He pushes back from his desk. He hears the flutter of wings as the pigeon flies off. The smoke of his cigarette drifts over the surface of his desk, over the photo of his wife, and the art projects his kids made in nursery school. The guards don’t seem to be paying attention; one is picking his nose. He squints through the smoke and then he asks his question.

He asks because part of him would give everything for the answer. Of course, part of him doesn’t believe there is an answer to the question, and it would be a relief to get that out of the way. He says, “What is truth?”

He asks—and then there was silence. You could hear a pin drop in the high-ceilinged room, with Caesar staring down from the wall like a jack-o-lantern, a swirl of smoke rising silently upward.

The one who hears the truth that is silence before it is a word is Pilate, and he hears it because he has asked to hear it—“What is truth?” he asks—because in a world of many truths and half-truths, he is hungry for truth itself, or at least for the truth that there is no truth. And truth be told, all of us are Pilate in our asking after truth, whether we ask it at home or at church, we would do well to welcome the silence, because, as Buechner writes, the truth and the Gospel are one, and before the Gospel is a word, it too like truth is silence—not an ordinary silence, silence as nothing to hear, but silence that makes itself heard if you listen to it the way Pilate listens to the silence of the handcuffed man with the split lip.

Maybe you can recall an encounter with such a silence: a moment when in the silence the truth broke you, pierced you, caused you to question, sent you searching, turned your life around, healed you, gave you peace—or else provoked you to end the interview, change the topic, or run the other way. I bet we all have had such moments. What was one of yours?

In my experience, the Gospel usually comes to us as a question, a strong question, not a yes-no question, but an open question that invites us to answer by reaching inside to speak the truth of our lives and to speak the Gospel to our lives. The strong question may be asked by a dear friend or a trusted counselor, one is not a fixer or advice-giver, but who is skilled at asking strong questions and holding a space for silence, so that we may go deep into the silence, where we will encounter the truth we long to hear and the truth we need to say, which is the Gospel.

It is hard to sit in silence with a question. The silence makes us aware of an emptiness that we would fill with what is beautiful, good and just. But that emptiness is also a vacuum, which forces and personalities in this world would fill with untruth: half-truths, falsehoods, lies, balderdash, bluster, conspiracy theories, snake oil remedies, mind-numbing substances, entertainments, commercial come-ons, digital distractions, false messiahs, demagogues, conmen, and the cancers of personal grievances and self-pity. These untruths depress us, demoralize us, and demobilize us, leaving us apathetic, indifferent, and cynical, unwilling to resist their siren call, or to seek health and justice for our lives and our world.

If you today are feeling stuck or empty, the good news is that Jesus speaks a word that speaks from the truth of our lives to the truth of our lives. Your life will not be changed by listening to what others have to say about a prescription for personal growth or happiness, or even by hearing what they have to say about Jesus.

Our lives are truly changed when Jesus looks at us and asks us a question, which invites us into a silence, which surprises us with a life-changing word, a truth we are to speak in answer to the question. To be clear, we are not on trial today, but we are worshipping Jesus Christ as king. Jesus is Savior and Lord. Are you ready for Jesus to reign in your heart?

Not sure? Something holding you back? We have this assurance from Jesus himself in the eighth chapter of John (8:32): “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Amen.

The Rev. Gregory Bezilla