Taking the stage

1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Psalm 111
 Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58

I’m not a huge Bruce Springsteen fan.  I respect him as a person and as an artist, but his music has never really moved me.  Then again, I’ve never been to one of his concerts.  And Springsteen is one of those musicians whose reputation is founded on the quality of his live performances.  The people I’ve met who are fans of his have told me as much— “You don’t really know the Boss,” as his followers call him, “‘til you’ve seen him live.”

There is a profile of Springsteen in the July 30^th New Yorker magazine, and I’d like to quote from it at length, because when I read what he had to say about his current concert tour, I thought about us:   

“We hope to send people out of the building we play in with a slightly more enhanced sense of what their options might be, emotionally, maybe communally.  You empower them a little bit, they empower you…It’s all a battle against the futility and the existential loneliness!  That’s what we do for one another…Our effort is to stay with you, period, to have you join us and allow us to join you for the ride—the whole ride.  That’s what we’ve been working on the whole time, and this show is the latest installment, and, in many ways, it’s the most complicated installment, because… it has to do with the end of that ride.  There are kids who are coming to the show who will never have seen the band with Clarence Clemons in it or Danny Federici—people who were in the band for thirty years.  So our job is to honor the people who stood on that stage by putting on the best show we’ve ever put on.  To do that, you’ve got to acknowledge your losses and your defeats as well as your victories.  There is a finiteness to it, though the end may be a long time away.  We end the night with a party of sorts, but it’s not an uncomplicated party.  It’s a life party—that’s what we try to deliver up.”

The liturgy of the church is not a rock-and-roll show, and yet in some ways what Bruce Springsteen is describing is what we are trying to do when we gather on Sundays.  We want to empower one another.  We want to enhance each other’s sense of emotional and communal options.  We want to assure one another that this is a community where we belong and that belongs to us, and that we will stick together for the whole ride.  The liturgy is about life, so it is also complicated in the way that Springsteen talks about.  It includes the awareness of finitude, and the desire to honor the people who used to be here but are not any more.

When Bruce Springsteen talks about the commitment that he and his fans have to each other, his remarks are tinged with the sadness of knowing that, at age 62, the energy is getting harder and harder to muster.   There is the understanding that someday, maybe soon, he’ll hang up his guitar, and maybe it won’t be long after that that he, too, will be an empty place on the stage.  His younger fans will remain, and maybe they will listen to his recordings and hang on to the ticket stubs in their scrapbooks and their memories of this or that incredible show, but these will be the fading traces of a ride that is over, and in time the last living person to have seen Bruce Springsteen in concert will be gone from the face of the earth.

But Jesus of Nazareth is still on tour.  Here in this building, and down the block at the Methodists’, and over the other way at the Open Door and at St. Vincent’s, and further on at Elim Lutheran, and even across town at the Petaluma Community Center, his band is playing live in concert this morning, as we have been every Sunday for almost two thousand years.  Somehow the connection that Jesus established with his followers didn’t depend on fancy light shows or electronic amplifiers.  It didn’t even depend on having him on stage, fronting the band.  When Jesus came to the end of his life, his fans couldn’t fill this room, let alone a 45,000-seat stadium, but when it was over they didn’t go home to nurse their fading memories of his amazing performances.  Instead they took the stage in his place.   The enhanced possibility for life that they experienced in the presence of Jesus simply would not die. 

It wouldn’t die because it wasn’t about him.  We can admire Bruce Springsteen for his commitment to his music and to his fans, for his desire to give them an experience that exalts their emotions and replaces their isolation with a sense of community.  But always it is Springsteen, his artistry, his charisma, his personality that is at the center of that community.  What holds it together is the excitement of being in the real living presence of the man himself.  But Jesus’ hope for his disciples was more ambitious than that.  For him the only real solution to their futility and existential loneliness, their only real possibility of community, their only hope of staying together all the way, was that they would come through him into a relationship with the one that he called “Father.”  Through his finite words and acts, they would come into the presence of the infinite. 

Everything that Jesus does in the gospel of John is a sign of something greater, a dramatic performance that points beyond itself to the infinite generosity, the infinite love, the infinite faithfulness, and compassion of God.   Jesus gives his finite self completely and without reservation to that performance, and it culminates in the great sign whereby he offers his own flesh and his own blood.  And when he gets to that point, he calls his disciples together one last time, and he kneels and washes their feet and says, “I no longer call you servants, but friends.” And the message is clear—  “I’ll be gone, but the performance of the Holy Spirit goes on.   Now it’s up to you to put on the show.”   

A liturgy is not a concert, but it is a performance.  It’s a performance where everyone is in the band, and no one is in the audience.  Its purpose is not to entertain, but to transform, and the raw material of the transformation is our lives, our selves.  So we need to bring them with us here.  We come with our real finite lives, with our modest victories and our intractable griefs, and they become the substance of the drama that we enact together.  Our struggles to have faith, our worries about whether we belong, our arguments with the scriptures and the creeds and the church, all that also is part of the texture of the performance.  All of it is part of the sign.  All of it is brought forward and presented with open, outstretched hands at the altar.  And all of it is fed with bread and wine.  Bread and wine that is chewed and swallowed.  Bread and wine that is flesh and blood. 

It is something that we all do together, and only the participation of everyone makes the sign complete.  But the life that comes through it, the Spirit that transforms, comes from somewhere else, and it is going somewhere else.  That is what makes it work.  That is what keeps it real.  It isn’t something we do to please ourselves, but to be transformed into the living flesh and blood of Christ, for the life of the world.  So we give ourselves, with sincere effort, to the liturgy, which is an ancient word that means “the work of the people.” 

In our praying and our singing, our speaking and our listening, our standing and sitting and kneeling and sitting and standing, our hugging and kissing, and crying and laughing, and our eating and our drinking, we are a performing a sign of the living bread that comes down from heaven.  All of us are needed to play along, to do our part, to help put on the best show that we can, so that we become a sign pointing beyond this temporary place, beyond our passing moment on the stage, pointing to eternity.