New Testament Reading—John 18: 28-36
This past year while I was visiting a friend’s house I happened to find myself watching a reality TV show that bares the sexist title “Wife Swap.” Maybe some of you have watched this? I had never seen it. In the show, two real life families trade mothers for two weeks. For the first week, the mothers have to abide by the rules of their new family. To acclimate the new mother to her family, the original mother leaves behind a manual explaining what she normally does on a daily basis. For the second week of the show, the new mother then introduces her own set of rules for her new family to follow. To make the show provocative, they typically pair families that are polar opposites.
The episode that I happened to watch involved the Meeks family and the Hoover family. Tish and Tony are the parents of the Meeks’ household with their two young kids Benji and Hannah. In their former life, Tony was a pastor and Tish was a missionary. At some point, however, they decided to leave all that behind. They cashed in their life savings to pursue their dreams of becoming rock stars. Tish and Tony are punk rockers. (This is what happens when you aren’t nice to your pastor.) During the day, the 48-year old Tony is a hospice administrator, while Tish books their gigs and promotes the band. When it comes to chores around the house, the two are equals and share responsibilities. When they are not performing at night in a bar, Tish and Tony typically throw wild, keg parties in their house. Tony asserts that if someone were to ask what church he goes to, he would say “The First Church of Rock and Roll.”
Some of you might be wondering what life is like for the kids in this household. In the morning, the six and five year old Benji and Hannah are left to fend for themselves as they get dressed and eat breakfast. After school, Benji plays video games that go uncensored by his parents. At night, the kids join the partying and stay up until 3 am in the morning. In a telling moment, Benji confides to the camera in a sad voice that his mom and dad pay more attention to their band than they pay to him.
Now that you know what the Meeks family is like you might guess what the Hoovers are like. They are an ultra-conservative Christian family that believes alcohol is evil and that rock is a negative influence never to be allowed in the house. The parents—Steve and Kristin—believe in the traditional gender roles. Kristin explains, “My husband Steve is the patriarch of the house and I am his helpmate.” Steve acts as the breadwinner with his job as a chimney sweep, while Kristin cleans the house, cooks every dinner from scratch, and home-schools their children with a Bible-based curriculum. They have three young girls. Steve wants to eventually have eight kids, but Kristin feels like her hands are already full. Nevertheless to remind Kristin of his desires, Steve leaves a crib near their bed so that she can see it every morning when she wakes up.
During the day, Kristin keeps their kids under close supervision. She explains that her daughters are being raised to “one day be good mothers and a good spouse to their husband.” As part of their strict Christian upbringing, the daughters are not allowed to wear pants because the Bible wants women to dress modestly. Steve believes that his role as father is to shield his family from negative influences like television programming, video games, and modern music. For fun, the Hoover family invites friends over to the house for an evening of pie and prayer.
During the first week of the swap, both mothers endure their newly imposed lifestyles equally horrified by their surroundings. In the second week, the action picks up as the mothers take charge and lay down their own rules. Steve, the patriarch, has to where an empathy suit. For those of you unfamiliar with this device, it is a foam suit that essentially gives men the breasts and stomach of a pregnant woman. The crib that had reminded Kristin of his procreative desires is placed by Tish in the middle of the street for a snowplow to run over. Steve’s kids wear pants for the first time in their life and instead of having a Bible-based curriculum, they have a rock-and-roll-based curriculum. Tish teaches the kids that ladies don’t have to be bakers and mommies. They can also be rock stars. Their main assignment is to produce a rock video.
Meanwhile, in the Meeks household, the alcohol is removed and the kids now have rules: no more video games and late night parties. Benji and Hannah stay home for school. They begin class with a pledge of allegiance to the Bible. They then color pictures of Jesus dying on the cross. Kristin explains how Jesus was beat and had nails put in his hands. When their father Tony gets home, he looks at the wall where the kids have placed the pictures that they colored. He observes aloud that he sees three people being murdered. He explains to Kristin that he sees an inconsistency in this. He points to how Benji is not allowed to play violent video games, but yet the pictures would seem to show that it would be perfectly okay for him to play a video game that had someone being crucified.
As I watched this part of the show, I felt a momentary pang of discomfort as I wondered whether or not Christianity is a kid-friendly religion. The Bible is not exactly “G-rated.” As I later thought about it some more, I thought about a couple of things. First, I thought about how for starters we don’t live in a kid-friendly world. In one way or another, Christianity has to engage that world. A key question is whether we reflect and promote the violence of the world or whether we challenge and confront it. A second thing I realized is that the problem isn’t so much the content of the Bible. It’s what we do with it. Some Christians often seem to have an obsessive, fixation on the blood and violence of the crucifixion. Take Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, for example. The movie is not at all concerned with why Jesus’s life led to those in power wanting to kill him. It instead fetishizes the blood of Jesus into a magical concoction so that viewers can have a vicarious experience of their guilt and sins being washed away in Jesus’s red agony.
Besides being grotesque, another way to think about the theology implied in this movie is to imagine a late night television program that uncovers the grisly details of a murder—let’s say a murder that took place in the backwoods of Oregon some years ago. In a grave and titillating voice, the narrator tells of how ten children lived in a house of horrors where a savage father beat and killed one of his children while the others watched. In an exclusive interview with the father behind prison bars, the father explains how he believed that in order to forgive his other children for their bad behavior he had to punish and sacrifice his most beloved child. Sounds kind of sick and perverted, right? Well, this is exactly the kind of outlook that Christian theology has often attributed to God. Jesus is punished by God for the sins of all of God’s other children. But what kind of loving God would bring about forgiveness in such a savage and sadistic way?
In our scripture for today, we get a sense of one of the things that was important for the Jewish Christians of John’s community as they told the story of the passion. In the trial of Jesus, the tables of judgment are turned as Jesus confronts Pilate. It is suddenly the Roman Empire that is on trial. Jesus points out to Pilate that his Kingdom is nothing like the Roman Empire. He essentially says, “If my kingdom were like yours, my followers would be coming for me with arms.” Jesus does not say this in any of the other gospels which were all written earlier. So why is this? First, think about the context of John’s community. They are in a situation of persecution. They identify with the nonviolence of Jesus in the face of a violent empire, so it is from this perspective that, they imaginatively fill out the story of Jesus’s final days with the help of scriptures and prophecies. They imagine Jesus’s followers choosing not to pick up arms. They imagine a trial that points to the existence of a movement for the Kingdom of God that is nonviolent. It is this nonviolent movement that I think we can share with our kids today and invite them to join.
One of the exciting things our church has done this past year is become involved in learning about Nonviolent Communication. A number of our teachers for Bible Adventures have been trained in Nonviolent Communication, and Kristina is developing a curriculum that embodies and facilitates compassionate ways of communicating. After talking with Kristina, I have become persuaded that if we were to also practice this kind of compassionate communication in our families, it might help men—even money changers—talk about their feelings. It might help women express their own needs and desires when their partners want eight kids. It might help children eventually become well-socialized and functioning adults who don’t need therapy because they receive the attention and compassion they deserve in a family that knows how to deal with conflict.
Right now our world might not be a kid-friendly world. We can work to shelter and protect our kids from actual violence, but eventually there will come a point in their lives when they will start making their own decisions about how they are going to relate to that broader world. By telling them the story of Jesus and his nonviolent opposition to a violent empire, we can present to them an alternative path. We can present to them a path that runs against the norms of violent society. We can present to them a path in which a loving God neither punishes nor condemns us but instead joins us in our struggle for a world in which peace and justice reign. Amen.