In the name of God, the
Almighty: who is, and who was, and who is to come. Amen.
One of the ways that I
made my way through college was as a bank teller. I loved it.
While my friends worked in malls or at restaurants and had unpredictable
hours and worked on holidays, I had a set schedule. And though I didn’t make as much money as
many of my friends, I always knew how much I would make – I wasn’t dependant on
tips or sales quotas or anything like that.
I just showed up when I was supposed to and counted money.
It was strangely satisfying
work. I could look back at the end of
the day and see the thousands of dollars that had come across my desk, the
hundreds of transactions that I would perform, and as if by magic, it almost
always added up. And on those rare
occasions when it didn’t, it would always become clear what had gone wrong in
the days ahead: some paper misfiled or some rogue number inverted.
There was order and
clarity.
I worked for two rather
small, locally owned banks that both, while I was working at them, “merged”
with larger, more corporate institutions.
In both cases, the new corporations brought with them better pay, better
benefits, and new technologies that made my work even easier.
It was a good life.
At the second bank I
worked for, I worked as a floating teller.
Each day I would get a call telling me where I was to work for that
day. I filled in for other tellers who
were out sick or on vacation, and I rarely worked at any one branch for more
than a few weeks at a time. It appealed
to my burgeoning wanderlust, even though I was only traveling within a few
dozen miles in a corner of southeast Louisiana.
I enjoyed having the opportunity to work with a variety of people and in
a variety of markets. There were the
typical suburban branches, but I also got to work in downtown branches, rural
branches, and branches on what most would have called “the wrong side of the
tracks”.
Those were my favorites.
I remember in particular
the Plank Road branch in Baton Rouge. It
was in an impoverished neighborhood very much on the “wrong side of the
tracks”. There were off-duty police
officers stationed at the branch at all times – mostly to keep the homeless
people from loitering and drinking all the coffee. But it gave my time there a sense of
adventure.
I loved the ladies who
worked in that branch. They were from
the neighborhood, but had “made good”.
They were somewhat looked down upon by the rest of the bank, but in this
little corner of the kingdom, they were on top – respected in the community as
some of their own who had risen above.
It didn’t take me long to
encounter the reality that the corporate policies in which I had been so
thoroughly trained didn’t work quite the same on Plank Road as they in the
other parts of the bank.
One of my first customers
at the Plank Road Branch was an older, African American woman named Mrs.
Jackson. I forget exactly what it was,
but the transaction that she was requesting was something perfectly innocent,
but that required a variation from our normal corporate policies. Policies were rigid things meant to protect
the bank – and me – from the customers.
I’ll never forget Mrs.
Jackson’s face when I refused her transaction.
She wasn’t angry, but seemed to be hurt, more than anything. She looked at me with sad eyes and said, “But
I’m a member of this bank!”
There was an essential
difference between how I had been trained to see her, and how she had come to
see herself.
I had been trained to see
myself – in my capacity as a teller – as belonging to the bank. As one who belonged, it was my duty to
protect the bank from all those individual invaders on the outside.
But Mrs. Jackson saw
herself differently. Through years of
coming to the same building and building relationships with the same people,
she saw herself not as an outsider – not even as an individual, but as one who
belonged – part of the body of that institution. She saw her relationship with the bank as
corporeal as my own. Through all of the
corporate transitions she had not been trained in her new role: she saw herself
as a member, but I had been taught that it was my job to dis-member her – to
make her into an outsider.
Mrs. Jackson was from a
different time in the life of that institution – a time when people
belonged. And while she asserted her
belonging, I worked to cut her off – to make her no more than an individual.
It’s not unlike the story
that we hear in the Gospel lesson today.
As was the case with Mrs. Jackson and me, we hear Pilate and Jesus
engaging in fundamentally different understandings of belonging. In the arraignment, Pilate seizes the issue
of belonging to determine the charges against Jesus. As the designate of the Roman Emperor, Pilate
knows to whom Jesus belongs. Or at least
he thinks he knows. The question is, to
whom does Jesus believe that he belongs – or perhaps more importantly, who does
Jesus believe belongs to him?
It’s no wonder that this
passage should come across as sounding kind of confusing. Jesus is answering questions that are
different from the ones that Pilate is asking.
They are coming from such different perspectives that they are only
barely speaking the same language.
Jesus is accused of
insurrection. To determine the validity
of the accusation, Pilate presents Jesus with the only two possibilities that
he can imagine: are you claiming to be a king in opposition to the emperor, or
do you belong to our kingdom? Jesus’
answer is beyond Pilate’s ability to imagine: “My kingdom is not from this
world.”
They volley back and
forth, but Pilate was never able to find a common language with Jesus.
Today, in the church
calendar, on the cusp of a new liturgical year, we find ourselves in a position
not unlike Pilate’s. We celebrate today,
the idea of the Reign of Christ. But our
culture is centuries removed from any experience of this kind of monarchy. Even in those Western societies where
monarchs still exist, they are by no means the kind of absolute monarchy that
would have posed a serious threat to the Roman Empire.
Though we don’t have a
common language to speak about this kind of ruler or monarch, what we can
understand is the same kind of thing that Mrs. Jackson understood – something
about belonging. In proclaiming the
Reign of Christ we are saying that we belong.
We are not just
individuals at worship, but members of the Body of Christ.
We are not just customers
of some Christian Enterprise, but we are members – sharing a stake.
So much of our culture
tries to dis-member us – to make us individuals. Individuals are so much easier to control
than members of a Body that is greater than its parts. Just as I participated in a system that tried
to dis-member Mrs. Jackson, so, too, are all of us tempted by different kinds
of participation in the cult of individualism.
Christianity is about
belonging. And belonging is never about
individualism. It is about recognizing
the myriad of ways that our existence is tied up in one another. In proclaiming the Reign of Christ, we are
proclaiming our belonging and our membership.
Like Mrs. Jackson, we are
called to claim that membership. Amen.
(this sermon was previously posted here)
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