When Jesus is not all the world to me

John 18:33-37
Then Pilate entered again the praetorium and summoned Jesus and said to him, “You are the king of the Jews.”
Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own or did others say this to you about me?”
Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own people and the high priests handed you over to me. What did you do?”
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would be fighting in order that I am not handed over to the Jews. But now my kingdom is not from here.”
Then Pilate said to him, “So, then, you are a king.”
Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world – that I might bear witness to truth. Everyone whose being is from truth hears my voice.”

There are times when I wish that Jesus was NOT all the world to me. You know that old song—“Jesus is All the World to Me”? There are times when I wish that wasn’t true. This is a test, folks. I’ve got to do a lot of preaching to redeem myself from that beginning, don’t I? I just thought I’d get your attention at the beginning of the sermon today.

Now what would make me say such a thing? Well, let me tell you about a dinner I once attended. In 2001, shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I went to my first Ramadan feast. Now that doesn’t mean I had a feast at the Ramada Inn. It was a Ramadan feast. I was director of the Wesley Foundation at UVA at the time and the Islamic Society of Central Virginia had rented the dining hall to hold a feast to recognize the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

To tell you the truth, if it hadn’t been for the noticeable absence of pork and beans and fried chicken, I would have been tempted to call it a potluck dinner, but no, this was a Ramadan feast and the Muslim community from all around Charlottesville, which is not very large, gathered in the dining hall. There was rice and fruit and garbanzo beans, and somebody brought burritos—it was quite a spread.

When we hear about Ramadan—IF we hear about Ramadan--we often hear it called a month of fasting, but dedicated Muslims only fast during the daylight hours as a way of rededicating themselves to God and strengthening their spiritual practices. Each day before sunrise they eat a meal and then, as soon after the sun sets as is possible, they eat a date to break their fast, offer prayers to God, and then eat a meal, which is often pretty big. During the month they are also supposed to give to the poor and read through the whole Qur’an. What if Christians read the whole Bible through every Lent? Actually that’s not a bad idea, is it?

Well, I was invited to attend the dinner. I accepted because it seemed to me to be an important thing to do. As a university community we had been trying to build some bridges with the Muslim community after September 11. Right after the attacks we held an interfaith vigil on the Lawn. Later we had an interfaith dinner of Methodist, Presbyterian and Muslim students and talked about what it means to be a person of faith and an American. We recognized that we lived together and didn’t know much about one another and so were trying to remedy that.

But here’s where I found myself wondering about Jesus that night. The head of the Islamic Society welcomed the two or three of us who had accepted their invitation for dinner and thanked us profusely for coming. He should have been on the Chamber of Commerce because he praised Charlottesville up and down for being a great place to live, and a safe place to live for Muslim people, and there were people from all over the Islamic world there. Then he said, “I’m not going to talk much, because I want you to talk with each other at the table. But please ask questions and we will try to answer them. We must learn about each other if we are going to live together.”

So I did. I asked about how the Muslim calendar worked and what Ramadan was about. They asked me about the United Methodist Church and what happened at the Wesley Foundation. Then I started talking with a man who used to be a Baptist but who had become a Muslim, and if you can imagine what a Baptist Muslim would be like, well, that was him. He was a tall man, born in the U.S., wearing a turban and using phrases like, “You can’t just talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk, too.” And he was ready to get down to brass tacks. He wasn’t going to gloss over the issues.

He said, “Now Muslims believe in Jesus. We believe that he was one of the messengers sent from God to show us the way. He was a prophet the same way Moses was a prophet. What we don’t believe is all that stuff about Jesus actually being God. But what I’m challenging my Christian friends to do is to show me how Muslims are not doing the things that Jesus taught, because I believe that the things Jesus told us to do are the same for Christians as they are for Muslims. We’re supposed to love, we’re supposed to worship one God, we’re supposed to dedicate ourselves wholly to God. You can be a Christian or a Muslim and believe that.”

Now here’s where the “Jesus is All the World To Me” stuff comes in, because I think there is a lot to be gained by Christians and Muslims studying their scriptures together. When we go the Bible and they go to the Qur’an, we both find stories about Abraham. We both find stories about David. We both find stories about Jesus. We both find a God who demands holiness from the chosen people, who is a jealous God who wants us to love the one true God and the one true God alone. There are many ways things that it seems that we share.

But Jesus is not all the world to Muslim believers. What they say about Jesus and what we say about Jesus are very different. And, here’s the scary thing: I sometimes suspect that Jesus is not all the world to Christians. Oh, we sing those words and many other words like them. “Take the whole world, but give me Jesus.” “Victory in Jesus, my savior forever.” “Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Are these ringing any bells? But I sometimes suspect that for all of our lip service to King Jesus, our lives look like they are more at the service of Oprah Winfrey or Dr. Phil or Rachel Ray. Oh boy, it’s getting personal today. When the pursuit of lower interest rates or higher living standards turn our labor into meaningless work, when we anesthetize ourselves with video games or alcohol, when we look forward more to lunch at the Burger King than to worship with Christ the King—there is a problem! And maybe you think I’m just preaching to you here. This is me I’m talking about! ‘We’ is me and I know that the challenge is to claim the Christ that makes Christians Christians.

What do I mean by that? Well, take a look at our bible passages this morning. In 2 Samuel we read about David recalling God’s promises to him. God has promised to build a kingdom, a dynasty, from David’s descendents who will rule over the people. It’s a promise that has resonated with God’s people ever since. There has never been a time when we have not been looking for a Messiah to come and bring redemption to the people.

That was certainly true in Jesus’ time when he appeared before Pilate. The charge against him was blasphemy against the promise God had made to David, though it had a political edge for Pilate. Pilate represented the empire. Pilate represented the real power of the age. The only king the Jewish people should have been recognizing, in his eyes, was the Emperor.
But the local leaders bring this wandering religious teacher in before him claiming that Jesus was a threat to the empire. Pilate looks him over and seems to be amused. “You are the king of the Jews,” he says. “What could you have done to earn this title?”

But Jesus seems to be living on another plane. He’s not from around here. He talks about a kingdom not of this world. The real threat to Pilate and the empire is not from his followers, who would be fighting if the kingdom were of this world. No, the real threat to them is their failure to see the kingdom coming in their midst – something far more threatening to the way things were than they could even imagine.

“So you are a king then,” Pilate says.

Jesus answers, “You say that I am king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world – that I might bear witness to truth. If your being is from truth, you will hear my voice.” It’s tough when you bring truth into the equation because it makes everything else small talk. Just like my Baptist Muslim friend did. We suddenly had to talk to each other from our hearts.

Paul talks about this in his letter to the Colossians. He knew that the new Christians he was establishing across the empire were going to have to talk from their hearts and talk about truth and it was not going to be easy. When Paul gave a pep talk to the new Christians in Colossae and he did it, not by telling the Colossian Christians how much they had in common with the people all around them, but by reminding them of the thing that made them different. They had not found salvation by discovering that Jesus Christ was a nice model hero that we could tell stories about and seek to emulate. They had not found salvation because Jesus was a good storyteller and a good teacher who was a real hit at parties because of the pearls of wisdom that fell from his lips. They had found salvation, their lives had been turned upside down, their world had been rocked, their paradigm had been shifted, they were thinking outside of the box because Jesus was God. Check that—Jesus IS God!

Paul is not going to let them explain away who Jesus is. He just piles on the descriptions. Jesus is the “visible image of the invisible God.” Jesus is “the firstborn of all creation—through him everything in heaven and on earth was made.” Before all things, he is, and everything in the whole cosmos holds together because of him. He is the head of the body that is the Church. He is the beginning, the firstborn of the dead. Through him God was pleased to reconcile all things in earth and heaven to Godself. You want the first light and the last word—it’s Jesus. You want the gospel truth and the final edition—it’s Jesus. You want the preview and the postlude—it’s Jesus. When Paul Harvey talks about the rest of the story, who do you think he’s talking about? It’s Jesus!

Now how do you take that Jesus to a Ramadan dinner? When Christians talk about Jesus this way, when we talk about Jesus this way, (because even when we’re not sure we’re being Christian, we do talk about Jesus this way), when we talk about Jesus this way we are staking a claim about the way the whole universe hangs together. We are saying that we have found one point in the whole great big cosmos, we have found one place in history, one moment in time, where God was revealed, where our salvation was assured, and where we began to understand who we are and what we were always meant to be. That one point of all the many others we could choose is in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

And because we look to this point and this person, we have something unique to offer the world. It’s uncomfortable at times. That’s why I said at the outset that there are times when I wish that Jesus was NOT all the world to me. I would like to reach out across that table to my Muslim brother with the Baptist language and say, “Yes, we are the same. Can’t we all just get along?” But if I go to the Ramadan table without my belief in Jesus, then I have nothing to offer to the conversation. Because if Christians have hope, it is a hope in Jesus Christ. If Christians work for peace, it is because they have seen God working for peace and reconciliation in Jesus. If Christians love others, even their Muslim and Jewish brothers and sisters, it is because they have seen sacrificial love in its most complete form as God poured out love for us on the cross.
The truth of the matter is that I cannot be reconciled to my Muslim brother unless I hold on to the Christ Paul talks about and expect the kingdom God promises David and believe that that kingdom entered the world in Christ.

But listen, that’s not even the best news. That’s not even the best thing that there is to say on this day, this Christ the King Sunday. Did you know that’s what this is? Christ the King Sunday. The last Sunday in the Christian year. The day when we look ahead to Christ’s final revelation as the ruler of all creation. Next week, we’ll be back to Advent and we’ll start to think about babies and shepherds and other smelly things that are the mundane stuff of Christmas. But today…oh, today I’m dreaming of a cosmic Christmas when we let it all hang out and we declare that Jesus Christ is not just a baby in a manger, but the ruler of the universe.

And why does it make a difference that we use this language for Christ? Why do we use all of these grandiose titles and high-falutin’ imagery? Isn’t it all a little…abstract?

Oh, friends, this is the best news of all. This is good news because the world is falling apart but the kingdom is just coming together. If we had any illusions that history had finally come to an end when the Berlin Wall fell, if we thought that there was nothing that could really threaten our sense of national security ever again, if we were deluded into thinking that a rising stock market and a comfortable future were birthrights we were all entitled to—if we thought any of those things, we learned again on September 11 that the world is still a dangerous place and that we are still vulnerable people. We learned in this awful war in Iraq and Afghanistan that struggles and trials and ideologies that threaten death and destruction continue. We have been shaken in ways we didn’t know we could be. We have grieved and worried about things we never worried about before. The world is not a place and we are not people who can say, “Every day and in every way we are getting better and better.”

But Christians have a different timeline. It’s a timeline that has a destination and we are all on a journey toward it. Sometimes we forget where we’re headed. Like when you go to the grocery store without a shopping list and find yourself wandering through the aisles saying, “Now what did I come for?” That’s us sometimes as we fall away from the promise, as we fall into sin, as we get confused and misdirected. But the journey set out for us in Christ has a destination. This train is bound for glory, this train.

So when we realize that this train is the one we’re meant to be on. When we recognize that our liberation, our salvation has already been won for us in Christ before we were even aware that we needed to be freed. When you see that the whole universe has its meaning tied up in Christ, well, things just look different. It’s not that we don’t grieve because we do--deeply. It’s not that we don’t hurt because we are often in deep pain. It’s not that we don’t believe in the reality of evil because it is at the heart of our story—there is no Exodus without slavery in Egypt and there is no resurrection without crucifixion on the cross—the powers of this world do have their day.

But we work for a new day and a new kingdom because we know that death can never have the last word. We work for justice because we know that violence cannot break the power of love. We work for peace because we know the Prince of Peace will throw down every sword. We proclaim hope because our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. We search for truth because the truth will set us free from every bond that keeps us from God. We worship because we know that all creation praises God and that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. And we go to Ramadan feasts and talk about truth because we know that even though it makes us uncomfortable, Christ’s final prayer was that we should all be one—from every tribe and race and nation. And as we are reconciled to each other, we are reconciled to God. And as we are reconciled to God, we are reconciled to each other.

There is a welcome sign outside a dilapidated town in the grasslands of southern Oklahoma. I saw it one time on a trip Suzanne and I took in seminary. The sign is pockmarked from where some folks shot it up with a shotgun some boring night on the prairie when they didn’t have anything better to do. You can barely read the name of the town and you can barely read the words right under it. But the words say, “Welcome to Henrietta, Oklahoma. The best is yet to come.”

When the world seems darkest. When the world is falling apart. When you are tempted to say, “Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?” In those times Christians say, “The best is yet to come.” And we say it with straight faces. And we believe it. And we stake our lives on it because Jesus is all the world to us. Jesus is all the world to me. My life, my help, my all. Jesus is all the world to us. Thanks be to God.