Today’s author is Interim Pastor Steve Sylvester.
Every now and then as a pastor I will make a statement about something that’s going on in the world and a businessperson—or businessman, actually, because I think it has always been a man—will tell me to stay in my lane and do religious stuff because I don’t understand how the real world works. They go on to tell me that the real world is about money and making a living. They employ people, while I do religious stuff. I usually just shrug. I mean, it’s true, there are things I don’t know. Occasionally, however, I’ve pointed out that I don’t manufacture widgets that I talk people into buying, and I don’t make fake food no one should ever put into their bodies. But, I tell them, I have sat and held hands with people as they die. I have prayed with a couple heading for a divorce or tried to round up rent money for a single mom with three kids, and I have talked to and prayed with shocked and grieving parents in their living room as their daughter is brought up from the basement stairs in a body bag. And then I’ll ask whether those things are “real world” enough for them. I don’t do that kind of thing often, but there are times when people need to have explained to them that living as a person of faith in this world is as real as it gets.
As we begin our Holy Week, we are called to remember that being a person of faith is real world stuff. It’s not religious ceremony. It’s Jesus confronting the puffed up might of Rome and saying, “Your threat of violence to keep control is not what God intended. Your division of people into master and servant is not what God intended. Your state-sponsored terror to make people toe the line is not what God intended.”
This really is real-world stuff. It was real world stuff for Jesus, of course, because Jesus was the grain of wheat that fell into the earth to die in order to bear much fruit. And it’s real-world stuff for us, because we are called to follow Jesus by loving as he loved. Living as a person of faith is not play-acting avoidance of the real world. Living as a person of faith means daring to enter ever more deeply into the real world. It means choosing Jesus’ donkey over Pilate’s chariot, and it means making that choice every single day.
With the Holy Week story that we started on this Palm Sunday, we will remember that for Jesus, living as a person of faith meant challenging Caesar, and challenging Caesar meant dying. But it also meant aligning his life with God’s intentions, and that meant life. It meant living fully in this present world, and it meant being raised up to new life in the world to come. And there is nothing more real than those two things. There is nothing more real in the here and now and there is nothing more real in the new life God will give us.