Of all the sermons I have preached since I stepped into this pulpit, I am probably more worried about this one than any other. I have worked diligently this week to research it and to ponder, not only the facts of the case, but also to look deep within my own heart. For twenty-five years my main purpose in life has been to be a student of the Holy Writ and to convey a faith that I love dearly in a way that is good and healthy and open, always aware that religion itself is not a neutral term. I have tried to see the good our religion has done, but also to be brutally honest about where it has done harm.

 I had decided I was not going to say anything about the movie The Passion of the Christ, but it has become a media blitz and people lined up for miles to watch it. Carol, Sara, and I have had long conversations about it this week, as would any staff with a healthy relationship. We have much in common in our opinions about it, and also our differences.  I suspect that same variety of opinion exists in this congregation. I want to share my thoughts about this movie.  I also want to share some serious issues that concern American Christianity and some positions historically taken in these debates.  I foresee some danger in moving away from established positions.

My best friend in Prescott is Billy Berkowitz.   As many of you know he is the former Rabbi here.  He and I were friends in Flagstaff before I moved here. My son Joel is named after a Jewish law student whom I knew in seminary, probably the finest human being I will ever know in my life. In part my sensitivity to this subject comes from these kinds of friendships, and I hope it comes from the passion and the grace of God and from the Gospel texts that are the heart of our faith.

Several years ago I was looking through some old newspapers from the county where I grew up.  I came across an article written in 1905 from the county seat town. This little town was not industrialized; it was very rural and isolated.  This article spoke of how the business interests in this town were really looking forward to a very profitable week.  The biggest social event of the year was about to take place. At this time people were still doing public hangings and someone was going to be hung that week. It was later reported in the paper that several thousand people had gathered in this rural community for the hanging. There was a carnival atmosphere with vendors selling food and those vendors made a good profit. I read that article in horror, thinking not so much about a man being hung, but about what attracted us humans to this kind of vicious violence.  Watching someone hung publicly in a gruesome fashion, watching them die was a social event. I have friends who are policemen who constantly complain about the “rubber neckers.”  If there is a wreck, what do we do? We can’t help but turn our necks around to see what is going on. There is something in our nature that is drawn to such things. When I was a child I was never allowed to watch violent movies. I was sixteen when I saw my first horror movie and my parents didn’t know I went to see it.  Because of the way I was reared, I didn’t sleep for two weeks. That kind of violence has never appealed to me because of the home that nurtured me and the values it taught me.

I have only walked out of a movie twice.  One received wonderful reviews and I took my children to see it.  The movie was about physical child abuse and within a few minutes I realized it was far too graphic for my children. The other was a movie that had been given a lot of support from the media.  Because of my Scottish heritage I was excited about seeing it.  Although it had an R rating, I figured, “How can you tell history without a few bloody shots here and there?”  I realized within fifteen minutes that this movie was one graphically violent scene after another.  The violence was non-stop. The movie was Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. To show you I’m pushing against a cultural norm, that film won picture of the year. That says something to me, not so much about Mel Gibson, but something very serious about the culture in which we live and our attraction and obsession with violence.

I intentionally put two pictures of the Last Supper in the narthex this morning.  I want to talk a little bit about art because movies are art. There are two focuses in works of art. First, art engages some universal element of human experience. Second, art represents a very personal sense of that experience by the artist.   If you look at those two pictures and ask about the subject matter, we would agree that they represent the Last Supper.  Then ask, “Is this a true representation of the Last Supper?”   You would get nervous because you wouldn’t know what to say. Why is that?  One of the pictures in the narthex came from a print made in Kenya.  All the disciples are Africans.  I’m fairly sure Jesus’ disciples were not African. The other is a paint-by-number rendition of Leonardo DiVinci’s Last Supper that was painted for me by a young woman who is mentally handicapped. All of the disciples in that picture are Italian, and we are also fairly sure that Jesus wasn’t Italian.  In the Kenyan picture people wear African robes and beat African drums.  We are fairly certain that there were no African drums at the Last Supper.   We look at the Leonardo picture and everyone wears an Italian robe, and the setting looks like an Italian villa. Because you’ve seen that picture so often, you almost think that the Last Supper was in a similar room, don’t you? Well, it wasn’t. Art always is a personal expression of some bigger value. The experience hits at us on an emotional level, especially when viewing religious art.

I think that is part of the reason why there is so much emotion involved in peoples’ feelings about this movie. The General Secretary of the Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church issued one of the most balanced statements that I’ve seen about this movie. He said that one side says the movie is an inspiration, and the other side says it is dangerous. We live in a culture in which we want to make a decision between the two of those opinions.  The truth is that this movie is both things.  If this movie is a work of art and represents Mr.Gibson’s personal expression of faith, we as the public have a right to ask some questions about that faith, not to say that he is wrong, but simply to be informed about his beliefs.

Mel Gibson attends a church in California that he built himself.  It is part of a movement, which has rejected the Vatican II reforms of the Catholic Church.   Vatican II was an attempt by the Catholic Church to come to grips with the modern world and relationships, not only among Christians, but with other faiths and other cultures as well. Using the language of the people to celebrate the mass was the best known accomplishment of Vatican II. There was strong pressure to give more power to the laity and there was a public denouncement of the Catholic Church’s old position holding the Jewish people responsible for the death of Jesus. It emphasized that Christianity will always be an evangelical faith. The position on evangelism is at the heart of outreach to other peoples. The church has made major blunders in years past in our evangelizing, and we need to show deep respect for other religions and cultures, not force-feed our religion down their throats.  Mainline Protestants have accomplished those goals.

There is another issue that came with Vatican II.   As I have watched the media play this week, I understand why there is such a struggle within the Christian community, particularly between mainline Christianity and the more conservative evangelical churches. About 150 years ago, if you were to ask someone about the source of the text of the Bible, most people would say that the authors of the Gospels are obvious. John wrote The Gospel according to John. Doesn’t it say right there that John the disciple literally wrote that book? Who wrote the Gospel of Mark? Doesn’t it say The Gospel according to Mark?  Then Mark wrote it!

At that time serious Biblical scholars from England, Germany and America began to take a closer look, not only at the texts but also to study early church fathers.  They discovered some interesting things about the complexity of the books we call the New Testament. The major discovery was that none of the four Gospels was written at the time of Jesus.   The earliest one, Mark, was written forty years after Jesus’ death. The latest one, John, was written as late as 100 AD. Each of the Gospels reflects the character of the disciple who had founded the community in which it was written and was attributed to that disciple.  If one looks closely, it becomes apparent that those texts reveal not only the life of Jesus, but also the struggles and the pains of the early communities two or three generations after Jesus died.   Nothing illustrates that point better than the Gospel of John.

Let me tell you a little bit about what was going on at that time. The Romans were ticked off at all the Jews, and Christianity was just one branch of Judaism. They were angry because the Jews refused to worship Caesar.  The Romans were not as tolerant as we have been led to believe.   Twenty thousand Jews were crucified during the Roman occupation in Palestine. By 70 AD the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem and scattered the Jews across the world.  That is how the Romans tried to get rid of the nuisance of Judaism. But everywhere Judaism was sent, it remained intact. And something else interesting was happening. Rabbinical Jews, suddenly realizing that Christians were out evangelizing and bringing attention to the community in which they were trying to keep a low profile, began systematically kicking Christians out of the synagogue. We find direct quotes in John’s Gospel from liturgies that originated in the first century synagogues that were ousting the Christians. The writer of John’s gospel retells the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection and we love these accounts because they are so poetic and contain such profound theological statements. But there are problems within the text. One is immediately drawn to Jesus’ continuous references to the Jews, an indication to us that this is not Jesus speaking but a writer of the Gospel speaking some years later.  For example, if I were angry at a bunch of people in Prescott and started referring to “those white boys”, I wouldn’t need to define myself because I’m a “white boy” too.  Biblical scholars are very clear about one thing. It was the Romans who killed Jesus and not the Jews.  We know that because Jesus was crucified.  If, in fact, the Jews had killed him, he would have been stoned to death. We wouldn’t have a cross in our church; we would have a rock. The problem is not in John’s Gospel itself but in how John’s Gospel has been used by succeeding generations of Christians.  How was the writer of John’s Gospel to know about a battle between two Jewish sects in the first century?   What is reflected in John’s Gospel would be played out a very different way a few centuries later when Christianity became the dominant religion in the western world.

When Christians finally got the upper hand, one of their first projects was to condemn their Jewish brothers and to give them a lot of problems. The historical record is not clean and it is not good. It is important how we use our sacred texts. Our subtle understanding of those texts is important so that we don’t use them in ways that violate the very thing that Jesus came to this earth to do.  He came to show God’s grace, not God’s condemnation.  The issue between Jesus and Rabbinic Judaism was a subtitle of that Gospel; it is not its major theme.  John’s Gospel tells of the power of God’s love, God’s radical love, expressed in His willingness even to suffer and die that we might know His grace.

Those who put the Holy Text together were very careful to keep balance. Eighty to ninety percent of the Gospels deal with Jesus teaching, preaching, and healing ministry. A chapter or two deal with the crucifixion.  To the Gospel writers it was important that we understand that the reason why Jesus is our savior is found in what he did. His death, though an important part of the story, must be in balance.  The reforming church in the 1600’s pulled dead bodies off the cross, the cross we see in Protestant churches all over Christendom.   It is a cross that reminds us of Jesus’ suffering, but does not do it in such a gratuitous way. The gospels were carefully written so that Jesus’ suffering might play its role in our understanding of our salvation, but that it must be balanced in the formula that Paul gives us over and over---Jesus’ life, his teaching, and his death.

I’ve said a lot for you to absorb. I want you to know that I am not going to go see the movie The Passion. And my main reason is that I am not the kind of person who enjoys the kind of graphic violence that is depicted in that movie. It is not a central part of my faith.  I am concerned about the anti-Semitic elements that are embedded within the film. You have to make your own choice about whether you go to see that film. In the end, whether or not we see the Passion is not the point. The point is that we need to see the broad sweep of our faith and that we understand the main purposes of our faith.  We need to grasp the balance that the church has always tried to keep in presenting Jesus’ suffering. We all as Christians must face the reality of history, understanding the brutal suffering of Jesus, and also understanding the brutal suffering and death of Jewish brothers and sisters by the millions for 2000 years because of Christian intolerance. Somehow we have to take responsibility as modern Christians.  To be Christian demands nothing less than that.

In the end the Passion is probably a good name for this movie, because it wells up strong emotions in all of us.   Some of us are repulsed by the violence, while others feel strongly that it may bring people to Christ. The verdict is out.  I suspect that the man from the Board of Discipleship is right. Neither of those things is untrue; they both are true.

May God be with us in the days ahead and may continue to keep Jesus at the center of all that we do. Let’s bow our heads now for a word of prayer.