A couple of weeks ago, Mary and I watched the new documentary filmed by Rory Kennedy about Abu Grahib, the infamous Iraqi prison where American soldiers tortured and humiliated prisoners. It was what you could call a feel bad movie, because it left me feeling bad about my country. But it also left me with a bad feeling about the fact that very ordinary and good people could so easily be turned into unquestioning torturers.

  And what made this a feel worse movie was the fact that the only people who have been held accountable for the atrocities at the prison were the low level guards who claim they were ordered to commit these acts. Despite the protestations from governmental officials that the investigations by the Defense Department of the torture and human rights violations at the prison were solely to blame on a ‘few bad apples’ serving as guards, the film makes it clear that such behavior was initiated throughout the command structure of the Pentagon, including the Secretary of Defense, and may well have been sanctioned by the White House. There never has been an investigation of Abu Grahib other than Defense Department investigations.

  It’s a sad and hard commentary on our country that, in the highest levels of its administration torture has been adopted as a normative procedure. This past fall the Congress of the United States, with the support of Ohio’s two current Senators, endorsed the administration’s use of torture, by enacting the Military Commissions Act. That act not only allows torture by U.S. officials, but suspends such basic rights as habeas corpus in Abu Grahib, Guantanamo Bay, and places throughout the world and maybe even in this country. There is no requirement that prisoners be informed of the charges, if any, that have been filed against them, they have no right to an attorney, nor the right to petition a court of law if they believe they have been wrongfully detained.

  It’s not a pretty picture. And that is just one situation we are talking about. What is it like to be living in Iraq or Israel these days when at any moment a suicide bomber may walk into a restaurant, school, synagogue, mosque, and kills dozens of people? What it is like to be a Palestinian with a forty foot Israeli built wall cutting you off from your family, your farmland, your place of work?

  Can you imagine living in the Sudan when gunmen come riding into your village or living with your family, or what’s left of it, in any of the refugee camps scattered around the world? What’s it like to live in the slums of Jakarta or Cleveland? Have we already passed the point of no return when it comes to global warming?  Have we destroyed the earth?

  In our own country, as well as most others, the poor are neglected. We would rather spend money on weapons than health care. It takes ten years to get a raise in the minimum wage and there are still precious few jobs to support people and families in this country.       What adds to the frustration is that all of these issues of torture, poverty, war, terrorism, global warming, corporate greed, governmental corruption, could be addressed in good ways by the governments of this world. But most, including our own, are more of a problem than a solution.

  If that is not enough, there are issues like broken marriages at every turn, people groping for meaning in life and settling for things like fancy cars and houses, MTV, and hooking up. People are lonely, people are hurting and struggling. Everywhere you turn, as in Jesus’ day, life is being devalued by forces political and personal. I could go on and on and on. What is a Christian to do?

The best advise we get from the New Testament is pretty simple. Keep figuring out what it means to follow Jesus. And nobody in the New Testament struggled with that more than the Apostle Paul. At his core, Paul was a theologian. He was driven by a desire to make this whole Jesus thing fit on paper. He was attached firmly to his Jewish roots, but in Jesus he saw something that was Jewish, but not Jewish.

  In the best way he knew how he tried to give voice to what it meant for him to be a follower of Jesus. So he wrote, he preached, he debated. He would argue with philosophers and slaves. But in today’s reading from Philippians we get Paul away from the debates and pulpits. What it all comes down to for him was that he had his eyes on Jesus and there was no turning back.

  As I always like to remind folk, you’ve got to take the good with the bad with the Apostle Paul, like you have to do with most of us. He said some things that I wish had never been scrawled on parchment. And there were some things he should have written down that never occurred to him. But as he said to the folk at Philippi, he wasn’t making any claim to having this thing figured out. But he was trying to do the best he could to grab hold of Jesus because Jesus had grabbed hold of him.

  Paul revels in the fact that his citizenship is in God’s realm, not any realm on this earth. And he believed with every thing in him that because he had been raised from the dead Jesus could make us beautiful and whole.

That’s a key for me. What do you imagine being beautiful and whole looks like to Jesus? I’ll bet in Paul’s mind it has nothing to do with Glamour Magazine or so many of the other representations of beauty we find in the media and in our culture. Paul just wanted to be a beautiful and whole person in Jesus’ eyes.

  I think one can argue pretty easily that beautiful people to Jesus are those who are living their lives in ways that will make this world better for everyone, people who really want to love God and each other.

  Wholeness for Jesus comes from vulnerability. I love that story about Jesus’ response to the warnings that Herod is out to get him. “You tell that fox that I’m going to keep on doing what I’m doing. He may have the power of the empire behind him. He can kill and maim and destroy. But until he gets hold of me I’m going to be casting out the demons he and others have unleashed upon this world. I am going to bring healing to this world that he has helped make so sick. And he can come after me like a fox after a mother hen. But I am going to protect the little ones with everything within me. They have made a mess of Jerusalem to where the people can’t even recognize how ugly it all is. But the day is coming when people will see how beautiful Jerusalem, and they, and this world can be. Yes. That’s what you tell that fox.”

Following Jesus is about taking Herod and demons head on. And they are everywhere. But in the midst of it all, healing happens. This is why Paul and the others in the New Testament said our job is simply to be witnesses of Jesus. In this world that is full of death, and death dealers, the only thing we have to bring is the life that we know in Jesus Christ. And people want to live.

  When those evangelists were going out and calling others to be followers of Jesus, it wasn’t just so things could be better for his followers. It wasn’t lets wash them off and get them cleaned-up for heaven. They were looking for people who wanted to build a church, that would look Herod in the eye, and say, “Come after us. But until you get us, we are going to to bring healing and life to this world, just like our Savior Jesus did.”

  We frame the issue is too narrow of a way. It’s not only that people need to follow Jesus, be a part of the Church, and experience healing in their lives. It’s that Jesus needs them. The Church needs them to come and be beautiful and whole and vulnerable for the sake of this world.

  It’s not simply that we all we need is our own personal Jesus. This world needs witnesses to his life and love and desires for this world. This world needs people who are willing to follow Jesus and build a new humanity.

During Communion Lunch we are going to learn a bit about Dred Scott. I don’t want to give too much away. But here’s what I can say now. Dred Scott was a slave whose case before the Supreme Court of the United States of America was a challenge to lower court rulings denying his free status. It was 150 years ago this week that the Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott.

  That decision by the Supreme Court did not go over well in many places in the North, including Oberlin. Our ancestors like many others, understood their Christian responsibility was to disobey any laws that sanctioned slavery, no matter what the Supreme Court or anyone else said.

  The people in Oberlin were going to continue to gather escaped slaves under their wings and protect them from the foxes. These were people who were renowned for their Christian piety, but they also knew that following Jesus had something to do with casting out the demon of slavery. It’s what beautiful and whole people did, no matter how vulnerable it made them. It’s what people who loved Jesus did.

Bearing witness to Jesus by living the lives he has called us to live is the best thing we can do in the midst of the torture, the corruption, the war, the corporate greed, the loneliness, and the isolation. It was for the sake of the people who inhabit this planet with us that Paul was so careful to call us to commit our lives to Jesus Christ.

  There are demons of torture and greed and injustice and emptiness. Death is everywhere. But what kept the Apostle Paul going was that life is in Jesus Christ, and resurrection trumps death. That fox, Herod, did get Jesus. But Jesus came out the tomb, bringing life and reclaiming this world for the mother hens. People in Oberlin were bearing witness to that in 1857, and the witness is ours today.