"Jesus, the Prisoner," a Good Friday sermon given at First Baptist Church, Austin, by the Rev. Dr. Roger Paynter, Instructor in Homiletics and Senior Pastor at First Baptist, on April 14, 2006

Luke 23:26-31

Wars have a way of instilling a new vocabulary that we would be happier not to have. In particular, place-names that most of us had not heard now loom before us with vivid, unspeakable horrors attached. Auschwitz, My Lai, Tiananmen Square…and now, Abu Ghraib.

For years most Iraqis loathed it. Countless victims of Sadaam Hussein's government were tortured there and thousands more were hung there. Now, for new and equally terrible reasons, it has moved into our vocabulary, and perhaps, our conscience. Now, our side holds it. Now, men and women who represent us have done despicable deeds there.

The catalogue of crimes includes various deprivations, beatings, sexual abuses, and humiliations, including using army dogs on naked prisoners and electrical shock. The images that we have seen, and some are only now being released, show American soldiers severely beating Iraqi prisoners, sexually abusing a female Iraqi prisoner and acting inappropriately with naked bodies. There is also videotape, apparently taken by American personnel, showing Iraqi guards sexually assaulting young boys. Several deaths have occurred there, possibly homicides committed by American soldiers.

Not all of the questions have been answered, not even now, two years later. But is it very clear that the perpetrators did what they did because they were directed by personnel in military intelligence, agents of the C.I.A. and even certain civilian contractors to do such things. This much is in the report of the Army's investigation. Beyond the fact that the perpetrators clearly enjoyed being sadistic, they were also acting under directives to "break their victims down" for purposes of interrogation.

I have no intent of fixing blame this day. This is Good Friday and I want to examine this event in light of that reality. I don't know what you remember was said when it happened, but as I have gone back and read transcripts, especially listening for the "tone" of the pronouncements on who is to blame and on what this scandal says or does not say about who we are, I have been once more amazed and distressed. I am personally remiss, terribly remiss in only now setting this under the light of Scripture. It occurred in April of 2004 and it is now April of 2006 for heaven's sake. Yet, I also know that most pulpits remain silent to this day about something so troubling. But, because of a conversation with a young woman by the name of Bonnie Tamares-Moore, who carries a profound conviction about torture, and because this is Good Friday, I simply have to offer some kind of biblical/theological response.

It seems that much of what we have heard and still hear, comes down to this: "This isn't us." The President of the United States, in his interview on Arab television kept making this point. "This is not the America I know." He described the America he does know, all in glowing terms. And the few individuals who did these abhorrent things, he insisted, "are not like us. They are not what we are about." And so the President preached to other nations and to our enemies about our essential goodness, a questionable theological position to take under any circumstances and certainly not one with overwhelming biblical support.

But variations on this theme came from other quarters as well. As the point gets rightly made, our military has higher standards than this and the United States has always been strongly in opposition to torture. Indeed, our military has stern laws against these tactics and systems in place to correct this kind of abhorrent behavior. Indeed, I think our record shows that, for the most part, our troops have acted honorably. As all these valid points were being made, one had the sense, however, that the perpetrators were being pushed further and further away from all of the rest of us. They are "aberrational, rogue soldiers, freaks and not of us." You continue to hear that kind of rhetoric from supporters of the war. Yet, from opponents of the war, you hear something not all that different. The group they blame is much larger, of course, but their tones are equally self-righteous as they also make stark division between those who are guilty and ugly and wrong and all the rest of us whose principles are morally superior and whose hands, clearly, are clean. It sounds much like the Gospel of John where only Judas gets all the blame for betrayal of Jesus.

I am not suggesting that the abuses of Abu Ghraib are everybody's fault. There are very particular faults still being sorted through, some of which have been named and in some cases, rightly punished. There are people who are distinctly, reprehensibly culprits and it is right that they suffer the consequences.

But something else is afoot here. From the highest places to local coffee shops, we have witnessed an incredible scramble to distance ourselves from this ugliness, to point fingers as we back away and say, "not us, not us , not us…they are not of us."

But of course they are of us. And we are of them. This is what Scripture tells us. And if we're honest, it is what our experience tells us as well.

On the Via Dolorosa, on his way to die, Jesus is followed by a "great multitude," says Luke, and "by the women who bewailed and lamented him." And Jesus said a very strange thing to these women. "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children."

How could they keep from weeping? How could they not weep, when one so truly innocent suffered such cruelty? We who observe Holy Week come to join their weeping. We come to do our part, like Paul, "to share in Christ's sufferings." We come, even as Peter said, "to rejoice to share in Christ's sufferings." We would feel guilty if we did not come. But, like a fallen leader insisting that his followers go on without him, he says to us, "Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children."

In my twenties, I read Carlyle Marney's wisdom on this: "If you're going to weep, weep for those things that made Jesus weep." Marney said we focused so exclusively on Jesus that we have been diverted from our crosses by his cross. This still seems true. There is no redemption in being a spectator. None.

Jesus would have us lament, not just for him, but even more, for others who have died in at least relative innocence or in torture, innocent or not.

Consider the magnitude of our worldwide grief. How much longer can we bear the reports from Darfur, 200,000 dead and counting? How long can we watch the continued search for bodies in the wake of Katrina, not to mention the miles of devastated homes that leave the living half-dead and all but hopeless? How long? How long can we look at the photographs of young Americans coming home from Iraq in coffins? And how long can we wonder about the unnumbered Iraqi citizens, men, women and children, dying for reasons they do not understand and whose deaths get reported as "collateral damage."

How long can we manage our anxiety about the next tsunami, earthquake, mudslide or hurricane? How long will we turn our heads away what happens on our borders not only in terms of deaths and physical abuses, but also in the destruction of human hope? How long will our children die at the hands of those whom they trust and at their own hands and in lifestyle tragedies like drug use and binge drinking and gang shootings? How long will people die simply because they cannot pay doctors or do not have basic health insurance? How long on this bountiful planet will hunger be epidemic? How long in our fragile biosphere will lethal pollutants be justified as the price of progress? How long will we continue letting people with DUI's and DWI's back on the streets because they can afford better lawyers? How long will a person's racial or religious or national identity make him or her the target of hate? All of us die, yes. But the cries of the needlessly, senselessly dead echo in our brains and will not, SHOULD not be silenced. How long? How long? How long?

How do we deal with all of this? If we believe in God, do we sweep it all away by saying, "Everything happens for a reason?" Surely that makes God a monster. So, maybe we just mumble that "God has a lot to answer for." Or maybe we rage against God, like Job. Or, if we can't possibly believe that God actually causes such things, what kind of God remains silent in the face of such suffering? There seems, at times, to be a cosmic indifference.

The opposite of love, says Elie Wiesel, is not hate, but indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, but indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, but indifference. The opposite of life is not death, but indifference. We hear the truth of this and know that an indifferent God cannot be a God of love.

On this day a radical, almost incomprehensible claim is made by us. It is found in the St. James liturgy, written into the worship of the church in the third century, not to mention into the early hymnody, and it contains this one, powerful line: The Lord hath reigned from a tree. There is it, written into the very fabric of the worship of the church from almost the beginning of our history, written, I suspect, so that the church would never forget the character of the God they found in Jesus. This Jesus, a prisoner himself of the Empire, was whipped, beaten, brutalized, tortured and nailed to a tree. And from that place of torture, the Lord of the Cosmos, joined us forever in suffering Love.

Where is God in the face of such horrors as we know in our world? He is there, suffering in Darfur. He is there, being tortured in Abu Ghraib. He is there, weeping with mothers of missing children, lamenting with parents of young soldiers, giving solace to those whose illness knows no relief. He is there bringing hope to those who have been falsely prosecuted, serving time for crimes they did not commit. He is there among the hurting, the unemployed, the forgotten, the alien, the tortured and the torturer alike. He is there, weeping for all the pain, weeping that we might weep with him. He is there, weeping that his church, his Body, too often averts its eyes and turns its back on that which discomforts us. He's there, beckoning us, to be there with him.

William Sloane Coffin, the great prophet and preacher who died Wednesday at age 81, was at Riverside Church in New York City when his son, Alex, was killed in an automobile accident. When he returned to the pulpit after a six week absence, he said, "You, my beloved church, have given me what God gives us all…minimum protection and maximum support." If God is seen most clearly in Jesus…if God is like Jesus, there is a Cross at heart of God. And in the suffering of the world, through that Cross, God gives us minimum protection and maximum support.

Is this Good News? It is. It is because in our kind of world, a loving God is a suffering God, and only a suffering God can help us.

Today is Good Friday, the day when we commemorate the sacrifice of Love that has been made on our behalf. It is the day when we remember that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. It is the day when we remember that God came to us in Jesus, a prisoner. Tortured by the forces of an unbridled government, tortured to maintain the Pax Romana, the peace that all governments want. He was tortured on our behalf, that we might a peace, a different kind of peace that would lead us to join God in the world of genuine reconciliation the whole world over.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit….