Playing our part

Why, of all the Sundays of the year, is this the one when we do this long dramatic reading of the gospel?  Why is this the one where the congregation enacts the parts?  It’s not for educational purposes.  This is not a historical re-enactment, as there are all kinds of historical problems with the passion gospels.  For one thing, the different versions don’t agree about the details of what happened.  For another, the authors obviously shaped their telling of these events to minimize the fault of the Romans and accentuate the guilt of the Jews; and the problems go on from there.  We also don’t do this for entertainment.  With apologies to everyone who read a part—please, don’t misunderstand me, you were terrific—this wasn’t great theater. 

But there is a reason for doing it, and I’ve been thinking about it again this year, it has struck me that it must be because this story is the climax of each one of the gospels, and in each case it drives home the gospel’s central message—that we are involved.  All of us are responsible.  Now there’s been a tendency over the years for the church to give that responsibility a particular color, the color of guilt.  It has insisted that just as the Jews are guilty, we are too.  This happened to Jesus, the thinking goes, because you pulled your little sister’s hair, and now don’t you feel terrible?   But, while I’m not saying that we should rule out guilt entirely as one response to this story, I’m not sure it is the only or even the best one.  And I don’t think it’s the one that Jesus had in mind.

I imagine Jesus wanted us to be responsible, not out of guilt, but out of faith.  He wanted us to take responsibility the way that he did, by playing the unique part that each of us has to play, that part that only we can play in the great unfolding drama of God’s salvation of the world.  And taking responsibility like that is something you can only teach by example.  So in the final week of Jesus’ life, he didn’t just sit teaching in the temple, taking on all comers and refuting his opponents with his wisdom and his wit.  Because when your mission is to completely deconstruct the way that people understand holiness and power, and give them a radical new vision of God, it’s not enough to make convincing arguments.

 He also performed a number of symbolically-potent acts, to demonstrate what he was talking about in an unforgettable way.  He made gestures that people could re-experience again and again until they began to re-imagine themselves and the world from his vantage point, to understand what he was up to, and be inspired to play their part in carrying on his work.  So the church doesn’t just remember those events—like the parade with the waving palms and the king riding through the gates on a donkey, or the bread and wine and the washing of feet at the supper, or the vigil in the garden, or the way that leads through the streets of the city to the cross—it also participates in them.  It makes these deeds of Jesus central to its teaching and practice, so that the power of his acts, and his imagination, could live in us and set us free.

The drama in the story pivots around the question of who Jesus is—is he the Messiah?  Is he the King of Israel?  Jesus’ knows that the only true answer he can give to those questions is to do the will of God.  Deeds will give the answer, and in the process completely redefine the terms of the question.   I don’t think Jesus ever intended to become king of Israel in the political sense.  He didn’t call himself “Messiah” and rally people around his claim to the throne.  He didn’t mobilize the crowds to storm the temple by force.  And yet I do think he saw himself as having a unique role to play.  He felt called to go to Jerusalem and enter the city in the way that he did, called to go to the temple, and on his own authority to issue a challenge to the rulers of Israel.  He confronted them with a radical alternative vision of what it meant to be the people of God, and he did not pretend that his was just another opinion, compatible with theirs.

In fact, it was a vision that was his and his alone, or only his and God’s.  Even his closest disciples didn’t get it.  The crowd in the streets certainly didn’t—they just wanted to be a part of something big, popular, and unstoppable.  As for Pilate and the Chief Priests and scribes, all they knew, or wanted to know, was that anyone who put forward an idea of how the world ought to be that was different from theirs, let alone taught it to others and inspired them with its truth and power, was an existential threat.  He had to be eliminated—swiftly, efficiently, publicly, and as brutally as possible, as a warning to others.

So Jesus went alone.  One man who, alone of all the people, understood God’s will for the nation.  That knowledge could not be taken from him by betraying him, mocking him, spitting in his face, scourging him, or nailing him to a cross, because it came to him from God.  That is why, after spending the entire Gospel of Mark telling everyone to keep it a secret, it is at the moment when he stands, a prisoner, before the one man who alone may enter the Holy of Holies and represent Israel before God, and the High Priest asks him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed?” Jesus finally says “I am.”  It is here that it is unmistakably clear that only one of these two men has any idea what that really means.

Jesus is king of Israel because he has consented to be Israel: Israel suffering under the humiliation of foriegn idolatry and oppression; Israel sold out by a cynical, self-serving elite; Israel beset by false messiahs preaching violence and hate; Israel abandoned and sentenced to death, yet still crying out for justice to her God.  Jesus takes personal responsibility, in this hopeless situation, for hope: hope the moral strength to bear witness to the truth in love; hope in the ultimate victory of God over evil and injustice; hope that the smallest act of a single person, done with integrity, freedom, and loving obedience to God, has more power to change the world than an entire nation of fearful men who are just following orders.  Jesus is powerful because you don’t have to be powerful to do what he does.  You only need faith, and hope, and love. 

 Not that you have to go riding into Jerusalem at the head of crowd, or hang upon a cross.  But you can’t know ahead of time, one you start on the way of Jesus, exactly where it’s going to take you.  And even in our everyday, comfortable, middle-class American lives, in our relationships with spouses, and parents, and friends, in our roles as workers, as church members, and as citizens, there are times when we don’t say what needs to be said.  There are times we are passive when we know we have to act.  We don’t ask for what we need, or stand up for what is true, because we’re afraid to be rejected or abused, and because we doubt ourselves.  We doubt our worth, and whether we deserve what we’re asking for.  We doubt our own authority to know what we know.  And we doubt we have the power to make a difference. 

  

But the gospel of the passion of Jesus invites us to speak up, to act out, for his sake.  He is worthy, even if we are not.  His words are true, even if ours are not.  His is the power and authority of the Christ, our true king and great High Priest, and he shares his office with everyone who walks the way of his humanity.  We are citizens of his kingdom, not because of any particular group we belong to, or belief we espouse, or rule of life we follow, but by faith in the grace of God. 

The grace of that faith is the strength, the patience, the willingness to play the part that is ours alone, that no one else can play for us.  Jesus put that faith on public display for us on the cross, and so we dedicate our effort, our suffering, our gifts, and our achievements to the merit of his unsurpassable self-offering.  We honor him as Christ and Lord, because that is the role God chose him for, and his faithfulness in playing it out, all the way to end, is our inspiration and our goal.   

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.