Jesus Christ

To hell and back

highway hearse 2014

I went to visit a parishioner in the hospital once and was completely thrown by what I discovered when I walked into her room.

Maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention. Someone had told me what this woman was in for, I remember that. But I’m afraid it had gone straight in one ear and out the other. So when I walked into the hospital room, I was surprised to discover there was no bed. Instead there was this thing in the centre of a large space. It looked like some kind of miniature circus ride. Or a space-ship pod, or a climbing frame or something.

Hello? I said, tentatively. I stopped in the doorway. Was I in the right place? Then from the middle of the tubing and bars I heard the small voice of my parishioner: “hello….I’m down here.” I peered closer. Near the floor. And there she was, strapped right into the middle of that contraption. Hanging upside down.

I walked up to it. There was a bed there, all right. I could see it at this point. But it was an upside down bed. There was also a chair beside it. When I sat in the chair I couldn’t see the woman at all. It’s called a Stryker frame, she informed me dryly, while I sat down, got up again, and then kind of wandered in a circle around her, looking for some way I could actually make eye contact. Are you having trouble, pastor?

Obviously, it should have been me asking HER this question. But there we were. I have a spinal cord injury, she told me, while I dithered and fidgeted. I’m going to be in this thing a month, at least. My poor husband’s stuck at home working his job and taking care of three kids. We’ll be lucky if we’re still together by the time I’m out of this thing. You can stop shuffling around like that. She sounded annoyed. I’m not going anywhere.

I stopped shuffling around.

Are you okay? She asked.

I’m okay, I answered her.

Well, I’m not, she said. Welcome to my own personal hell.

Now when all the people were baptized, it says, and when Jesus likewise had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “you are my son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.”

So pleased, apparently, that God would lead this Beloved Jesus, also, to his own personal hell, tortured and dying, on a cross. Someone once said: beware of being one of God’s favourites. It gets you into trouble every time.

And when you think about it, isn’t that true? Martin Luther would’ve been burned at the stake if they could’ve gotten hold of him. Or Martin Luther King, shattered with a bullet for speaking up for justice. Or Thomas a Becket, run through with a sword right there, on the steps of his altar. Or Saint Paul, persecuted and ridiculed and shipwrecked and murdered. Or any of a thousand Syrian Christians right now, in a country that was one of the first blessed with the Gospel, fleeing desperately to save their lives.

With you I am well pleased. That’s what the voice said to Jesus when he was baptized.

It’s an odd sort of pleasure.

In trying to understand the mystery of why Jesus was baptized at all, I think about the woman in the hospital, who told me she was in her own personal hell. Or the comment I saw on Facebook yesterday, congratulating another woman on her first cancer-free diagnosis. After five years of hell, said the Facebook post, finally free!

Yes, I think. I understand hell, when you put it like that. Probably all of us do. Certainly any of us over – I don’t know – 40 years of age. You don’t make it that far without a few cuts and bruises: cancer, divorce, separation, child problems, parent problems, dreams lost, dreams found. Who knows? Life, we eventually realize, isn’t what we do when we’re not suffering. Life eventually becomes, more than we might think, the ways in which we DEAL with suffering. Live through it. Rise, not above it, exactly, but with it. Sometimes, even, because of it.

So maybe the baptism of Jesus makes sense if we think of baptism, not as something that leads away from suffering, but something that leads straight through it. And then, if that’s it, the fact that Jesus was baptized means that he was willing to take on, willingly, the kind of voyage into hell that the woman in the Stryker frame was talking about, or that the Facebook post person was just getting over. The human condition.

I felt like such a fool for the first few minutes I was visiting that woman in the Stryker frame. I just stood there, towering over her while she complained bitterly and then cried about what she was going through. I felt completely out of place, awkward and embarrassed. It took me forever to realize the simplest thing: that I didn’t need to be standing at all. Eventually, when the nurse came in, she found me where – if I’d been sensitive enough to realize it – I could have been from the beginning: on my back, on the floor, parallel to the bed, looking up at this parishioner. Sharing her perspective.

What really pleases God, it turns out, is solidarity. That’s what the baptism of Jesus is probably really about. For Jesus emptied himself, Paul writes, taking on the form of a slave, and in that form – on the floor, lying beside our human suffering, he became obedient, in love, to the human condition, even death on a cross. Only then was he raised. Like Jesus, it will be for us only when, trusting in the compassion and community we see in the cross, and finally beginning to understand this strange way of being God’s favourites, that we too, through death, in solidarity with the one who went first, will know what it means to rise again.

Face to Face (a spoken word)

Jesus tattoo

I know a woman, my age, who told me that when she was fifteen she and a young boy of her acquaintance, shy as her, spent a whole hour in her basement. 60 minutes. Exquisite, painfully adolescent, effervescent minutes. faces pressed together, lips and noses so close they were breathing each other’s air. Never once kissing. But their breath, back and forth, back and forth. Giddy with the excitement, the carbon dioxide of it all. And then she smiled, and looked over at her husband of 25 years, and said: “Do you remember Stew?”

Breath to breath. Oh there’s got to be something to that.

And God took clay, and formed it into the shape of a man, but it was empty. A ragged, lifeless doll, until God breathed into that doll, took a long deep breath and blew, Michelangelo had it wrong. Not Sistine Chapel fingertips at a distance, but this Adam, this man so close, cheek to cheek with the creator, chaos and nothingness, tohu webohu, face to face, the image of God in something new, receiving life. Do you remember Stew? Earth to earth, ashes to ashes. But then what of the spirit, that returns from whence it came?

In olden days, or so it says in our scriptures, the disciples of Jesus were locked in a room by fear, dead on the inside, or as good as dead with dread. Until, in the midst of prayer, flames appeared above every head, sucking the air out of that room, and leaving only the new breath, of power and might, of courage and of the fear of the Lord. the breath of joy, the sharp intake, the shock, the short sharp inhalation in that moment of divine wonder. Breath to breath. Spirit to spirit. And it was dark that evening, the dark of things hidden, or hiding, sweet sandlewood hanging on heavy summer air, How can a man enter into his mother’s womb, asked the elder, his face in the shadows. Careful. Those who have much to lose sometimes have trouble breathing. How is one born again? How is that possible? And Jesus leaned in toward that shadow: with God, all things are. And have been. And will be. The blessed breath moves where it will. It passes, yet no one knows where it has gone. Will it be long? asked the elder. Any moment now, Jesus answered. And then, spent and empty, on a cross, in pain he cried out: “receive my spirit!” And it was hard to tell in that moment – and sometimes still – if it was a blessing, or a curse.

Where I grew up, the wind blew so hard sometimes that as a young child you could open your coat and feel it billow like a sail, or perhaps like wings, And lean into it, and dance, and feel it carry you. But that was then. This is now. When I was a child, said Paul, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, Then when I grew up, I gave up childish things. But: we all have to breathe. So: May we open our coats and let them fill, to that breath that goes where it will, that sometimes takes ours away that sometimes fills us to overflowing, that spins us around, and sends us elsewhere. May we lean in, and breathe. May we learn, and dare. 60 minutes would be fine. But a lifetime better. And more than a lifetime, longer. For now we breathe into a mirror darkly, but then, nose to nose, cheek to cheek with the blessed, giddy with excitement, the spirit of it all, in the presence of our Creator, may we breathe like Stew, back and forth, back and forth, Breath to breath. Spirit to spirit. Face to face.

The Jesus who didn’t want to be Christ

memorial Christmas 2012 copy

This last week they buried Nelson Mandela. I talked about him quite a bit last Sunday. So I don’t need to go over all of that again, even though singing those liberation songs was fun! But in light of today’s Gospel lesson, and the aftermath of a South Africa withOUT Mandela, there may be something here still worth connecting to. Part of it is that when the current leader of South Africa and of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, came to pay his respects at the funeral, he was resoundingly booed by the crowds. Why? It’s not hard to imagine: Zuma is corrupt in the style of so many African dictators, he is making millions while the people are in worse and worse shape, he is out of touch with the heritage of the ANC as a freedom and liberation party, he has been implicated in scandal and mismanagement, and on and on. It seems like he’s more than just inefficient. He may be a very bad man.

But then why are all these awful things even more obvious than usual for a corrupt politician? One main reason: Zuma is NOT Mandela.

I remember when I played basketball in high school, there was one player who was far and away better than any of the rest of us. He could dribble, and shoot, and jump, better than any of us, and he made what we found hard, look easy. But the coach wouldn’t let him play all the time, and the reason was this: if I let one person do all the work, the coach said, then the rest of you won’t learn. The TEAM won’t be as strong, and the wins won’t come, no matter what.

The cult of “one special person” was a trap, our coach thought. And it’s a trap for Mandela’s South Africa and for faith, too. It’s wonderful that Nelson Mandela became such a symbol of liberation and justice. But there’s a danger. When one man or woman becomes the focal point for all such hopes, and the only one thought capable of fulfilling them, then the problem is: what happens when they’re gone? If the world considers them, not just a hero, but a super-hero, then no one else can do it. And justice and liberation should be everyone’s concern. Even a non-Mandela’s.

Which brings me to today’s Gospel lesson. Notice what happens. Go to Jesus, the Baptist tells his disciples, and when you see him, ask Jesus if he is the one.

That kind of language makes what I would call the same “cult of personality” or “cult of person over process” mistake. Yes, the people of God had been waiting, many of them, for a Messiah, someone to rise up and be another David. And yes, there was also in some circles the anticipation of a prophet who would announce this political figure and prepare the way. I guess that Messiahship – if you can call it that – was and is inevitably a kind of single-person, cult phenomenon.

So maybe it was natural that John should be reported as using such language: “Is he THE ONE?” But then, given that, we should also notice how Jesus answers:

Jesus is very careful. He never ever says, to John, or to John’s disciples: “Yes. I am the one.” To their question about whether he is the Messiah, Jesus doesn’t answer with his own person at all. Go and tell John, Jesus answers “not who I am, or who I say I am, but what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.

As I read this, what Jesus is saying is this: I’m not important. Tell John that the Kingdom of God is what’s important. And that kingdom has come.

At least in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke (John is a different case), Jesus pretty consistently refuses to get involved in a cult of personality. Which raises all kinds of questions for us modern-day Christians.

Firstly, as the theologian Bultmann once said: Jesus preached the Kingdom and Paul preached Jesus. Meaning, our faith has an awful lot to do with the person on the cross, and in light of the message of Easter and of Paul and of all of Christian orthodoxy, rightly so. But . But there’s a question we need to answer: in our emphasis on Jesus, do we sometimes miss the very reign of God he was crucified for proclaiming? I believe so.

This coming season is a prime example of the cult of personality. Firstly, Christmas is of course overwhelmingly secularized. We could go on and on about the commercialization and the buy buy buy and the sentimentality and all the other overindulgences. And perhaps we should. But even those Christians who want to oppose this phenomenon of our societal “binge and purge” usually say something like this: let’s put the CHRIST back in Christmas.

WRONG! Let’s NOT put the Christ back in Christmas! Maybe, in light of the Gospel this morning, we should be saying: let’s put Christ’s MISSION back in Christmas. Because that would be even better.

That means helping the poor. That means clothing the naked. That means visiting the sick. That means standing up for justice for the outcast and marginalized. That means doing something – anything – for those who cannot always do things for themselves.

I’m not sure if any theologian has ever talked about the Jesus who didn’t want to be Christ. Maybe that sounds silly. Even unchristian. But maybe there were times when Nelson didn’t want to be the ONLY Mandela, if you know what I mean. And the Gospel of Matthew, near the end, makes it painfully clear that Jesus is to be found in everyone who needs our help. When were you sick? When were you in prison? When were you naked, and we did not clothe you? say the damned, to which the Lamb on the throne answers: Whatsoever you did to the least of these, you did to me.

We need a new category of Messiahship. A new kind of Christ. A realization that Christ is in the people who most need our help. And Christ’s work is in US, when we do what the Gospel says.

Our music and films, our history, our Nobel prizes, our governments…just about everything about our society is based on the cult of important, seemingly indispensable, people. Christs, of a sort. From the latest American Idol winner to the latest supermodel to the latest Youtube hit. On the surface, Jesus seems to be the ultimate example of that kind of cult – the most important person of all. The little carpenter’s son who changed the world.

But as we approach Christ mass, may we reflect on where Jesus himself pointed. Don’t look at me. Look at the work, he said: let the blind receive their sight, help the lame to walk, work so that the sick and diseased are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. In South Africa, we should honour Nelson, but pray that there will be a thousand Mandelas raised up to continue his work. And on this side of the ocean, we should be praying that there will be a hundred thousand of US to do messiah’s work. And then Christmas will truly come, truly blessed will we be, and happy will be anyone who takes no offence at such great good news. Are you the one? No, not the one……AMEN. Come Lord Jesus, in this way.