Stand Up and Raise Your Heads!
For many years, decades, we took our acolytes to the Acolyte Festival. That always began with a service in our cathedral followed by an afternoon and evening at Wet ‘n Wild, a water park in Orlando that is now closed. And as each of our four children hit about age 7, I would take them up to the Mach 5 Alpha Flight. It had, by far, the longest slides in the park. There were three tracks, so you could race, and you went down on a foam mat with handles on it. While it started pretty high, it wasn’t very steep and it wound a long, long way down until at the end it sent you skittering across a pool.
All four of our kids went through the same process. We’d go up the long set of ramps and steps with them to the top. They would be in a detached fog. Then, when it came time to go, they’d get scared, protest, maybe cry a little. I’d encourage them, tell them how much they would love it. I’d point out the smaller kids who were doing it. Eventually just tell them to hang on and shove them down the track. Then I’d go on another track, knowing I’d get to the bottom first because, well, gravity.
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Of First Importance
Today’s Gospel is one of my favorite scenes in scripture, but I think we need to go just one more verse. The very next verse frames the conversation between Pilate and Jesus. Please turn in your Bibles to John 18:38. “Pilate answered him, ‘What is truth?’”
What is truth? There seems to be a growing assumption that the only real truth is fact, that only whatever we can prove by math or scientific experiment is real. The rest is superstition or something. Our world has been improved immeasurably in many ways by scientific and technological advancement, but facts don’t define truth and they don’t define reality.
Most of us have a smart phone. That is a great tool with a ton of brilliant science, engineering and design that went into it. It’s a phone, a camera, a video recorder, and on and on. It’s a computer more powerful than the computers they used to go to the moon. We can find out news from anywhere in the whole world, translate any language, read almost any book and listen to almost any song.
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Come out!
Each of us answers a specific question about our faith: How important is this? We answer it internally as we make some sense about who we are, what our lives mean and even how much we decide to think about that at all. We answer it externally in the ways that it affects the ways we talk and the ways we act in the world. Each Gospel passage challenges us some way, usually pushing us to be better people. We learn to give and forgive, to see the potential in others, to endure temptation and so on.
Today’s Gospel pushes us hard on faith in Jesus.
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