When to Walk Away

When to Walk Away

Sermon text: John 18-33-37
Preached November 25, 2012 at Cullowhee Baptist Church

Rather than being Advent 1, this year the Sunday after thanksgiving fell on Christ the King Sunday. So I had some new texts on which to preach. Naturally, and contrary to the more consistent message of Cullowhee Baptist Church, I chose to preach about Pilate, and about Peter, and about us, rather than about Christ. It had been a long time since I felt quite the way I did about the sermon. I hit all the points I wanted to hit, and yet I felt that I did not do justice to the urgency of the message I was preaching–that we so often look at the past and wish we could have been there to commit some violent act to prevent an injustice, that we forget that we have the opportunity to insist on peaceful solutions every day. We find it so easy to tell a story and have no sympathy for the characters we recognize to be “bad,” that we get used to thinking about life in that way, rather than as the complicated, messy milieu we encounter every day. We are sometimes so focused on what we would have done that we sometimes miss out on opportunities to do now, in the way our Prince of Peace showed us.

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