Child's Play

            I miss having little children.  I miss the trips we took when my two daughters were small.  We figured out within a few years that long trips, like the ones we frequently took from Connecticut to Virginia, went much better if we could start at about four o’clock in the morning while the girls were still sleeping.  After we packed the car, I would lift each one of them from their beds and carry them out, packing them carefully into the back seat.  With luck, we would hit New Jersey or maybe even Maryland before they woke up.  From the back seat every once in awhile came complaints.  Somebody was kicking somebody else.  “Make her stop.”  One morning about the George Washington Bridge we heard, “Stop.”  Silence.  “Stop it.  Now.” One of us parents checked to see what the problem was.  “Mom, make her stop!”

            “Stop what?”

            “Make her stop breathing.”

            Jesus’ disciples were not children, but they apparently had their difficulties with each other on trips.  Several references in the gospel refer to an argument that apparently was fairly serious.  The issue was who was the greatest.  In Luke’s account of the last supper, a quarrel broke out among the disciples there about who was the greatest.  Did they squabble about this all the time?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that if they did, they were not alone.  Human beings seem preoccupied with that question and frequently worry about it, fight about it, and spend enormous time and sums of money trying to make sure that one’s status is secure and protected.  All of these efforts are versions of the argument about who is the greatest.  I suppose we won’t be through with it until some Cosmic Mom or other actually makes our competition stop breathing.

            There is a difference between acting like children and becoming children.  To say that an adult is acting like a child is not exactly a compliment, and Jesus might well have put his disciples down by saying exactly that to them, had he wished to slap their wrists for wrangling with each other.  But instead he uses a child as a model, a touchstone for aspiration, a living example of what the Reign of God is like.  Mark’s story has it that Jesus, having taught his disciples privately about his own impending passion and death, responds to their arguing about who is the greatest by saying, “Whoever would be first among you must be last of all and servant of all.”  Then he takes a child and places it first among then, then takes the child into his arms and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” 

            Matthew’s story is a bit different.  There, Jesus predicts his passion, and as in Mark, comes to Capernaum.  When they arrive some of the temple tax collectors approach Peter asking if his teacher pays the temple tax.  Peter says yes.  A bit later, at home, Jesus asks Peter, “From whom do kings take toll or tribute?  From their children or from others?”  And Peter says, “From others.”  Jesus says, “Then the children are free.”  Clearly he is referring to himself and his band of disciples and possibly others who identify with him.  But he does not stop with that.  He tells Peter to go cast a line into the sea, and to open the mouth of the first fish he catches where he will find a coin that he can use to pay the temple tax.  Now there’s a great story for you!  It is one of the places in the gospel where Jesus’ sense of playfulness is fairly obvious—unless of course you prefer to imagine Jesus as deadly seriously about everything. 

            And that may have something to do with what follows, this playfulness.  For, in Matthew’s story, the disciples then come up to Jesus and ask him who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, a question that seems to have enchanted them endlessly.  Jesus responds by calling a child, whom he puts in the middle of them, and says, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”  He then goes on to say that anyone who puts a stumbling block before one of these “tiny little ones” would be better off to have a great millstone draped around the neck and be drowned into the middle of the sea.”  Now that sounds pretty serious.  Jesus is not joking when he warns against being stumbling blocks to “little ones” who give their hearts to him.

            Luke’s story is much like Mark’s.  There the disciples are arguing about who is the greatest and Jesus, knowing what the argument is about, takes a child, places it by his side and says, “whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me; for the tiniest one among all of you is the greatest.” 

            John has no story about any of this, but does have a major story about Nicodemus, a leader of the party of the Pharisees, coming to him for a conversation.  In that dialogue, Jesus tells Nicodemus that the way one enters the kingdom of God is to be born “from above,” and he speaks of that birth as birth by “water and Spirit.” 

            Take all of this together and you begin to see a pattern.  First of all, Jesus is not talking about what takes place in an afterlife.  To think otherwise is completely to miss the point of the disciples’ question as well as Jesus’ response.  No doubt Jesus expected the cataclysmic end of history as we know it, and the beginning of a new creation.  But for Jesus the “kingdom of God” is a matter of right relationships, between God and humans and among humans and other humans.  The substance of the kingdom is life lived differently.  It involves a radical change.  It entails total transformation.  No person on the planet more aptly depicts that state of the kingdom than a child.  Why?  Don’t be fooled by the romantic and sentimental notion that some people have that children are innocent, or that they are obedient.  Anybody who has been to elementary school (or pre-school, for that matter), or anyone who has had children knows that children are hardly innocent past being able to walk and talk, and are born naturally and totally self-centered for survival purposes.  And anyone who has ever been in charge of children knows how all children are naturally obedient.  What Jesus is saying here is that children are powerless.  His argument is precisely that the child does not count.  The child is “last and least.” 

            You and I don’t understand that because in the two millennia since Jesus, thanks to a God who did not in fact bring the world to a screeching halt, we have made some progress in treating children at least somewhat and sometimes a bit better than they were treated back then.  But in Jesus’ day and for a long time afterward (and still in some parts of the world today) children are absolutely without power or influence or station.  And his point is that if we want to share the life of God, we need to divest ourselves of status, image, privilege, and all the things like money and possessions and influence that prop up those things. 

            I think he means something else as well.  I think he quite possibly means that the kingdom of God is more about play than it is about working for rewards.  Now I could be wrong, but I consistently notice one thing about children no matter who they are.  And that is that they are forever playing.  They play with toys even if they have to make them. They play roles. They play little games seeing how far they can walk on edges without falling.  They play with things in their mom’s pocketbook when she is trying to check out in front of me at Giant.  They walk down the street playing with things that bounce or roll or make noise.  Adults generally don’t play quite the same way.   In fact it can be said of many adults that we simply have forgotten how to play.  We take ourselves seriously.  We “play” the stock market or we “play” music or we “play both ends against the middle.” See what I mean?  Sometimes our plays are deadly.  And I think that none of that has a place in God’s realm.

            Robert Quinn, in his book Building the Bridge As You Walk On It, contrasts the normal state and the state of leadership.  In the normal state we tend to be driven by our egos, putting our interests ahead of others’.  We are internally closed, wanting to stay in our comfort zones, denying external signals for change.  We tend to definite ourselves by how we think we are seen and by how well be achieve.  And we like comfort, much preferring so solve problems that get in the way of our comfort than living in something besides a reactive state.  Quinn posits that there is another way to live, which he calls “the fundamental state of leadership.”  When we live in that state, we transcend our egos, and begin to put others’ welfare above our own.  We move outside our comfort zones and being risking, seeking real feedback, moving towards higher levels of discovery and awareness.  We move towards examining our own hypocrisy, closing the gaps between our behavior and our values.  And we are purpose-centered, full of energy, pursuing meaningful tasks. 

            Now that might not sound much like children to you.  But I wonder if what Quinn is driving at isn’t quite close to the irony of what Jesus is saying about welcoming children and becoming like children and being born from above.  I wonder if we don’t see in all this a connection between his prediction of suffering and death and the ironical argument among unreconstructed disciples about who is the greatest.  Life in the kingdom, or eternal life, or the life of God, or the Presence of heaven, has to do with giving, with emptying, with returning to that place where the speedometer and all the other meters is at zero.  It is at zero where there is nothing and therefore no limitation.  And where there is nothing, then all is possible.  At zero, with zero striving, zero achieving, zero competition, zero power, zero influence, we are children newly born.  We are just beginning.  We have heaven before us and we have earth beneath us.  We can live completely differently from any way we have ever lived before.  We can pour out or lives for those who are barely living, spend our resources serving the cause of those who have no claim on us, give ourselves to those who can’t pay a cent to tip us.  And the kingdom of heaven, says Jesus, is like that.  Welcome that state as if you are embracing a little child (the child is you!), and right there at zero you are welcoming me, and the one who sent me.

            I want to live in that kingdom.  Do you?

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012  

Dear Gabe,

Dear Gabe,

            When I met with your mom and dad to plan your baptism, they told me that you have a thing about getting water in your face.  They said you don’t particularly like it.  “He’ll not be too upset,” they assured me.  “He’ll just turn his head and try to avoid it.”  So I sent them home with an assignment to practice with you.  I don’t want for your first experience in the Christian Church to be unnecessarily disturbing.  And, Gabe, I’ve been practicing too, in my mind at least.  I have been thinking that I want to make sure that the water that comes over you, even if it stuns you and takes your breath away, even if it jars you a bit, will run back into the font and not into your face.  Because the last thing I want to do is to give you a scratch in your soul that, though you can’t remember it consciously, will on some level make you ever feel that somehow your Christian community or Jesus or God’s Spirit, would do anything at all that would not respect your little body.

            The truth is, Gabe, we have been waiting for you all our lives.  I don’t mean that, of course, in a literal way.  I mean that you come, as does every child and every person, as Jesus himself came to us.  You came as a baby.  Already you are no longer a baby, but a visibly growing boy.  We don’t yet know what your life will bring, or what all the gifts are that you’ll share with us, your family and friends, as a companion on our journey.  But just as Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, so you will as well.  And little by little we’ll glimpse things like hope, joy, promise, humor, and insight from the things you do and say.  It was like that with Jesus, I feel sure.  He did not start being wise when he was grown.  He did not start being loving or caring or sensitive when he started his public ministry.  He, like all of us, grew into what he became from seeds that were planted when he was born and even before he was born.  His parents cultivated those seeds, tended them, nurtured them so that in time they would bear fruit.  All the while, what they saw coming to life in him was the Life of God.  We don’t have many stories—only one really—of Jesus as a boy.  It is a story about how his parents got all upset because he stayed behind to talk to the teachers in the Jerusalem Temple while they were making the trip home to Nazareth.  He was inquisitive, probing, searching, and interesting.  People began to see in him glimpses of what God is like.

            So when I say that we have been waiting for you all our lives, I mean that we are always eager to see how God shows up and comes out in a person’s life.  Would it happen if we did nothing but just observe you, listen to you, let you alone to be whatever you will be?  Perhaps.  But most of us, like your parents and godparents, think it is probably a good idea if we give you a little structure, a bit of support, some steady help.  We recognize that structure, support, and help are not any better than the degree to which they enable you to be Gabe.  So that is why we have come together today to baptize you.  We really believe, Gabe, that God’s spirit does live within you, and that by making a place for you in this community of God’s people, that spirit will grow stronger and begin to flourish.  Today we are making promises that we will do everything in our power to hold you up as you grow and develop.  And we believe that if we do this, you’ll have every opportunity to show us God in the life of Gabe.

            And speaking of Gabe, Gabe, it won’t be long before you hear your name in church in another way.  If you were a Joseph or a Mary or a Moses or a Daniel, you’d hear your name quite often in stories.  But you’ll hear a story along about Christmas time every year that the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee to a girl whose name was Mary.  You’ll hear how Gabriel announced to her that she would have a son and that she would name him Jesus.  You’ll hear how she had a hard time believing that such a thing could happen, and you’ll hear how Gabriel assured her that nothing was impossible to God.  I wonder if you will wonder about the connection between that Gabriel and you.  I wonder if you’ll begin to see yourself as someone who, in your own way, does the work of God.  I wonder if you’ll begin thinking of yourself as one who announces good news at important moments in people’s lives.   I don’t know.  But what I do know is that we’ll be here to help you figure out who you are and what you are going to do and how you can live for and with God.  And I can tell you that we are going to be very interested in what you tell us.  Your story, whatever it is, will be as holy as the Angel Gabriel’s story, as Mary’s story.   And you will have a place in the great big story of how God loved the world, and gave his Son to heal and save the world so that everything and everybody could share God’s life and love.

            One of those stories in the great story is about a time that a woman encountered Jesus, desperate to get him to heal her little girl who was seriously sick.  It is a strange story in many ways, because Jesus at first seemed not to want to help the woman, we are not quite sure why.  The easiest explanation is that the woman was “different,” and she seems to have been something of a pest, poor thing.  What we know is that the woman stood toe to toe with Jesus and said that even though she came from a different people and spoke with a strange accent and perhaps worshiped in an odd way, she still had a claim on him and his healing power.  And what we also know is that Jesus was deeply impressed with the woman’s faith, and promised her that her daughter was whole and well because of the mom’s faith.  That story, Gabe, has a lot to do with your baptism, believe it or not.  When we take you today and pour that water on you—carefully, Gabe, making sure that it doesn’t get in your face!—you’ll be like that woman, totally at the mercy of the priest, the people, the world, even God.  If you were a grown man, you might even put words to it all like, “God, have mercy!”  You might feel that life was bigger than you could manage, and that you’d somehow reached the limit of what you could do on your own, that you were like a little toy duck in your bathtub, just bouncing around with nothing to say and hardly anything to do beyond bobbing till someone picked up you and put you back in your place.  But at the moment the water touches you, it is like the finger of God connects with you, Gabriel, as the one who is going to announce God’s News.  You’ll come alive (maybe with a cry—it often happens) like a black-and-white drawing coming to full color, a still picture coming to animation.  You won’t see it and neither will we, but you’ll be as full of God’s life as the Angel Gabriel ever was, as close to God as Mary when she said, “Let it be, let it be,” as much a child of God as Jesus was when at his baptism he heard God say, “You are my son, in whom I am well pleased.”

           

© Frank Gasque Dunn 2012

            

Capital Project

            King Solomon built a temple.  That is quite a story.  His father, David, had established the capital in the old Jebusite city of Jerusalem, and had brought there the central symbols of Israelite religion:  the Ark of the Covenant, the tabernacle, and the priesthood.  David had wanted to build a temple, but God had said, “No thank you,” and insisted instead on establishing a house, a dynasty, for David.  Whatever the reason, somehow or other David never got around to building it.  There was always a strand of tradition that was fundamentally skeptical about, if not opposed to, the notion of a temple.  The Ark of the Covenant was moveable.  So was the tabernacle.  People sensed from the beginning that when Israel settled down, something would change.  They said that they feared becoming like all the other nations.  And they were right.  For the old basis of unity, the covenant allegiance with Yahweh, gradually gave way to empire.  Loyalty to the king and the king’s agenda supplanted loyalty to the Covenant and the Covenant’s God. 

            By the time Solomon ascended the throne, conditions were right for going ahead with the capital campaign and the resulting building project.  Borders were secure.   The throne, by the time Solomon had executed his competition, was established.   And, as people would soon find out, the new king was an ambitious king.  He liked building things.  He was fond of great big projects.  And he was wise.  He knew that if he could organize the religious personnel, rites, and rituals and keep them not only centrally located but within spitting distance of the royal palace, religion would be much more of a unifying than a dividing force.   Politicians like that.  They like having a tame religion that operates on schedule, preferably one that blesses their projects.

            Brand new, a stunning architectural achievement, the temple was ready to be dedicated.  Solomon was virtually the whole program that day.  Imagine.  The king himself, not merely attending and participating in the ceremonies, but in the role of the chief consecrator.  Of course, the report we have is from a later historian [the Deuteronomist]  who puts his language into the mouth of Solomon.  But no matter.  Knowing what we know about Solomon, we find none of it surprising.  He invoked tradition and reminded God that God had made an everlasting covenant with the house of David.  He asked for help.  He acknowledged that God, who could not be contained in the highest heaven, certainly couldn’t live in such a temple as he, Solomon, had built.  Nevertheless, he prayed that God would regard this house as special.  And he prayed for God to protect the people, forgive the people, responding to their crises like droughts and famines with caring intervention.  He even prayed for the foreigner who might come and pray towards the temple, that God would hear that prayer as well.  He prayed that God would prosper the causes for which armies fought, and hear prayers for the warriors directed towards the temple.  And he wrapped it up with a peroration again pleading for mercy and forgiveness (who does not need both?) for all and sundry who prayed towards or were connected to the temple. 

            We might be tempted to say that this whole episode, interesting as it is, is little more than an example of old-time religion of little use today.   It has a tribal quality to it.  And some of that tribalism lives on.  Indeed a good bit of geopolitics in the 21^st century is played out around the nation of Israel and its traditions, its enemies, and its past.  But the scriptures are like an onion.  There are all sorts of layers well beneath the obvious.  This is no exception.  “But will God indeed dwell on the earth?  Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!”  That is an amazing insight in any age.  The “thick darkness” in which God is said to dwell resonates with anyone who has tried to meditate or who has practiced centering prayer.  Underneath all the prayers for protection and forgiveness, we still hear the unmistakably familiar cries of help that come out of us almost despite ourselves when we are in deep trouble.

            And although it is not as magnificent as Solomon’s temple, St. Stephen and the Incarnation is a church that is just as holy a place.  About everything you can imagine has gone on here over the eight decades these walls have stood.  Not all of those things would make it into the Bible, but some of them would and did.  Here people have prayed.  Here they have sought peace and reconciliation.  Here they have fed the hungry and consoled the grieving and dying.  Here they have celebrated the arts and made music and laughed and cried and applauded courage and organized efforts for justice.  In short, here in these walls, people have done the work of, and sung the songs of, and argued the nature of, and met God.  We did it and we do it because those are human things to do, all of them.  And humans never meet God outside human experience, always within those things that make us human.  We encounter the Divine whenever we do what the Divine does, whenever we love what God loves, whenever we allow ourselves to become vessels that hold God’s spirit or conduits that transmit God’s power.  We treasure times when that happens, and sometimes put up tablets or monuments to mark a sacred event.  But even more than that, we build altars and light candles and say prayers in sacred places.  We keep returning to those places even when the religion changes.  You can go to Rome today and worship in Christian churches built on the sites of pagan temples in antiquity, and you can go to Britain and drink from wells that once were holy to Druids and whose gushing water of life we associate with our Christ.

            But it is never the temple or the church that needs to be dedicated, though we do it to mark it off as sacred.  It is the life of the people, the community, the relationships that beg for dedication.  In the sacred places, the most that we can hope to do is to sense the Presence that others have sensed, to catch the beam of holy light that others have spied.  And most of the time, if what we catch or spy is genuine, it will not keep us inside the building, it will impel us to go forth.  Because God really never settles down, but is always on the move.  The Ark may stop, but God keeps going and calling us to follow. 

            The highest heaven cannot contain thee, much less this house that we have built and are rebuilding.  We know that. And to borrow some words from one of our best poets, R. S. Thomas, we sometimes find ourselves pretending, maybe, that we lay this trap for you God, entice you with candles, as though you would come out of the darkness like some gigantic moth, to beat here.  We know better.  But we return to the patterns and memories so deep within us that we are only dimly conscious of what they are.  We whisper a prayer—help—thank you—forgive—I’m sorry—I love you, I love you, I love you—striking our prayers on our stony hearts, hoping to God that one of them might ignite, and cast on these walls its light, so that we can see the shadow of one greater than we can understand.*

*  “The Empty Church,” in R. S. Thomas, The Poems of R. S. Thomas (Fayetteville, AR:  University of Arkansas Press, 1985), 122.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

THE SPOKEN WORD: Giving

Don't give until it hurts; give until your heart sings.

THE SPOKEN WORD: Waiting

Keep Imagining the Arrival

THE SPOKEN WORD: Letting Go

A Sermon for St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, July 30, 2010

Tragic Consequences?

            “Everything happens for a reason.”  Is that what you think?  Lots of people do.  I don’t know whether I agree or not.   That is because I’ve no idea what people mean when they say that.  Do they mean that there is behind the scenes an all-knowing and perhaps all-powerful God that ordains events to happen just as they do?  Do they mean that God might not be manipulating events, but is indeed working through them to bring about God’s own purposes for God knows what reasons?  Do they mean that there is a non-personal but very real meaning in any or all events that, if you have enough courage and discernment, you may discover?  Do they mean that life is just full of endless lessons to be learned and that we humans have the possibility and capacity of learning those lessons from whatever happens to us? 

            Some of these positions make more sense to me than others.  The Bible and the larger Christian tradition certainly make plain that God does not always get what God actually wills.  Yet there is no denying that ultimately, God’s Will is sovereign.  In the end, God’s will for love and justice and peace will indeed win out.  Stories bear that out on a small scale.  And in the larger scheme of things, Christian faith sees that there is an end towards which all things are moving, and that in the end, God will be all in all. 

            Because Christianity is often, and in my opinion quite incorrectly, assumed to be a system of belief rather than a way of life, such thinking as the notion that God’s will finally will be victorious, supreme, indeed ultimately uncontested, seems to provide considerable comfort to a great many people.  I myself find it attractive, and like lots of other people, can fill my mind with images of a world that is healed, a humanity no longer full of people at each other’s throats, a creation restored to pristine beauty.  I am, as possibly you are, able to imagine that God is at work in human efforts, willing to bring about peace, equality, justice, and shared abundance, through the very energies we exert towards those things.  They are the will of God, aren’t they?

            But then there is tragedy. You are familiar with tragedy, because the way we know about it at all is that it continually shows up in our lives.  Tragedy has its own particular niche in our experience.  It is different from disaster, which might be caused by natural forces or by a collision of things that happen to get in the way of each other and spoil life for any and all things touched by the resulting wreckage.  Tragedy is different, too, from stories that simply have sad endings, even terrible endings, as melodramas frequently do.  Tragedy in the sense that I am talking about it involves a good person who is in many ways exemplary, whose very strengths become the impetus for a bad mistake—an error in judgment.  You will notice that your very strengths are the things that give birth every once in a while to such an error, usually when your strengths tempt you to go beyond human limits, so that like a misguided Icarus, flying for the first time, you get carried away with what you can do and fail to take into account that what goes up must come down.  Tragedy results when such a failure leads to ruin, misery, and even death. 

            David in today’s story is a tragic hero.  Indeed in the story of the Absalom rebellion, he is more tragic than hero.  If you have been tuned in to the unfolding story the last several weeks, you may recall that things start to unravel one afternoon in Jerusalem, when David, left in his palace while his army was off fighting, notices a woman bathing, sends for her, lies with her, and gets her pregnant.  Bathsheba, the woman, is the wife of Uriah the Hittite, exemplary boy scout.  David has him come home on leave, does his best to get him drunk so that he will sleep with Bathsheba, fails to crack Uriah’s moral vow of sexual abstinence, and sends him back to the front with a note pinned to his uniform meant for the Commander Joab, saying, “Please kill me.  Send me to the front.”   For doing such a dastardly deed, Nathan the prophet assures David that the sword will never depart from his house and that what he has done surreptitiously will in fact be done to him when his neighbor invades his harem and sleeps with his wives in the sight of all Israel.

            Darling of God, a man after God’s own heart, David has royally messed up.  He knows it.  He admits it.  But that does not avert the tragic consequences.  The example that he has set is one that his sons quickly pick up on and emulate.  Amnon, oldest son and heir apparent, seduces his half-sister Tamar, rapes her, and then spurns her.  Tamar goes public with the story.  David professes anger, but does not say quite why he is angry or at whom.  Absalom, next in line, is Tamar’s brother who bides his time to avenge his sister’s shame.  After a couple of years, he kills Amnon, for which deed David banishes him from the royal court.  More time passes.  Absalom is determined to get David’s attention and burns the field of General Joab to do just that.  David welcomes Absalom back, yet won’t quite reconcile with him.  Perhaps David knows that Absalom is a real threat to his own kingship.  Again, Absalom bides his time, interjects himself into the judicial system where David is obviously weak, wins the hearts of a large slice of the population, and ultimately sets himself up as king, ensuring thereby that civil war has begun. 

            Brilliant and charismatic though he is, Absalom is no match for the wily old king, who knows just what to do to bring down the rebellion.  He and the royal entourage flee Jerusalem, while Absalom comes into town and proceeds to fulfill the prophecy of Nathan by sleeping with all the royal concubines.  While keeping some spies in Jerusalem and by making sure that one of his trusted allies infiltrates Absalom’s circle of advisors, David is nonetheless anxious.  When the day of battle arrives, in his headquarters down near the Jordan River, the king gives orders to his commanders to “deal gently with the young man Absalom” for his, David’s sake.  They do no such of the kind.  Riding through the thick Forest of Ephraim, Absalom is caught by his beautiful hair in the branches of an oak, while his mule goes on riderless.  Told where he is, the impetuous, efficient, loyal, no-nonsense General Joab takes three javelins and spears Absalom through the heart as he remains hanging in the oak.  Joab’s men surround Absalom and finish the job.  They throw his body into a pit and cover it with stones.

            David hears the news from the Cushite messenger.  “May all the enemies of my lord the King be like that young man.”  And the tragedy has come to its head.  David is deeply moved.  As he goes up to the chamber over the gate, they can hear him grieving:  “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom.  Would I had died instead of you!  O Absalom, my son, my son!”

            What to do about tragedy:  that is the question.  We cannot undo the past.  We cannot go back to some afternoon years ago, when passion got the best of us and we lost our heads there for awhile.  We cannot retreat to several years ago when it seemed so right to hold on to our grudges while somebody else squirmed.  We cannot erase injudiciously chosen words, spoken in anger, or take back poisonous gossip we have injected into a conversation.  We are lucky if bad choices do not get away from us causing more damage than we could fathom.  Nor can we ease ourselves off the hook by noting that whatever tragedy is unfolding is somebody else’s tragedy, not our own.  For if it is happening to somebody in your life, even remotely in your life, it is indeed your tragedy.  For all Jerusalem and all Israel pay the price for the tragedy of David.  Sometimes one terrible negligence can set off a bombing or a shooting spree or an assassination that plunges half the world into chaos and mourning.  So it is with the choice of somebody else’s wife or husband on a spring afternoon.  Tragedy unfolds with no denouement until hell has been paid right and left. 

            There are various kinds of tragedy, as different people have pointed out.  Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche all looked deeply at tragedy and saw if from differing angles.  Sometimes people are caught in the grip of circumstances that they simply cannot escape.  Sometimes a Hamlet will carry so much loathing and disgust that his spirit is weighted down to death long before the sword fatally pierces him.  Sometimes a Lear will rave in the wilds about treacheries that have only taken place in his warped and paranoid mind.  Many times, as in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy a Clyde Griffiths will be so enchanted with society’s promised trophy of success that he will kill rather than risk losing what he can never really have.  Sometimes, as in Faulkner’s tale, Absalom, Absalom, the hate-filled, racist structures of society will conspire to wreck the lives of people who on occasion try to act nobly but cannot find a way to do it.  What do we do about tragedy? 

            Frederick Buechner, writing about David’s tragedy, said that when David wished he had died instead of Absalom, “he meant it, of course.  If he could have done the boy’s dying for him, he would have done it.  If he could have paid the price for the boy’s betrayal of him, he would have paid it.  If he could have given his own life to make the boy alive again, he would have given it.  But even a king can’t do things like that.  As later history was to prove, it takes a God.”* 

            That is the gospel.  It is not that God wills everything to happen just as it does.   But it is that a Divine Presence, a thoroughly moral Presence, makes itself felt in the midst of the deepest human tragedies.  We may or may not learn from them, but God does not appear to give up providentially watching over us, nor to withdraw a loving-kindness that extends to the most broken of us.  God is at work on human made crosses to loosen the grip of death in what we call resurrection.  God takes the stupid blunders made by the best of people and redeems both the people and their blunders.  The tragic Hamlet himself says to his friend Horatio, “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”  No purpose of God can ultimately be thwarted.  And though we do not know and may never know how to avert the tragedies in which we are the main characters and supporting characters, we do know that our Redeemer lives, and that at the last day, he will stand upon the earth; and though our bodies be destroyed, yet shall we see God, whom we shall see for ourselves, and our eyes shall behold as our Friend, and not a stranger.

*  Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures:  A Biblical Who’s Who (San Francisco:  Harper and Row, 1979), p. 6.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

Political Theatre

            Sometime during the last year I saw for the first time Richard Strauss’s one-act opera, Salome.  The story is based on the passage that you just heard proclaimed as the Good News of Jesus Christ a minute ago, namely the beheading of John the Baptist.  Strauss, upon seeing Oscar Wilde’s play by that name which Wilde wrote in French, composed his German opera, giving to audiences in 1905 something so stunning and shocking that the work was banned for several years in London and then performed only with alteration.  The Vienna State Opera did not perform it until 1918.  And when it premiered in New York in 1907, wealthy patrons insisted that further performances be canceled and kicked up a fuss trying to get the British composer Sir Edward Elgar to join them, an invitation he flatly refused, calling Strauss “the greatest genius of the age.”  Such drama!

            Salome, a name not given in the Bible in connection with this story, is in the opera the daughter of Herodias.  Her lecherous step-father Herod persistently flirts with her.  The Strauss opera builds to a climax when Salome dances the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” for King Herod until, having removed one veil at a time, she finally lies naked at his feet.  She then demands the severed head of John the Baptist on a silver platter.  No one, to my knowledge, retched at The Kennedy Center when in a final act of decadence Salome passionately kissed the lips of the beheaded prophet; but it does not take much to appreciate how audiences of an earlier day, unused to the stage and cinematic violence that we see all the time, were totally repulsed by the scene.  Wilde, of course, and Strauss, boldly embraced just such shocking eroticism partly, perhaps, because doing so jolted a prissy and repressed public with images calculated to dent, if not smash, their hypocrisy.

            So far, no one seems terribly sickened by all this on a warm July Sunday in 2012.  Not only do we have little trouble appropriating the grotesque, inured as we are to blood and gore in everything from cartoons to computer games; but also we have at best only the vaguest sense of unease about the biblical story to begin with, caring not very much about John the Baptist’s ill fate, and understanding even less what it all has to do with anything remotely touching our lives at the moment.  I am making a heap of assumptions here, to be sure.  I allow that it is possible that you may be indeed feeling a little queasy with the thought of a severed head, even if it is found in the pages of the Evangel of Jesus Christ according to Mark.  And I allow that you might be disturbed that on this, of all Sundays, I should preach on the gospel as opposed to another passage about a dance, namely the exuberant, handsome young David, dancing with all his might before the Ark of the Covenant.  There is plenty of eroticism in that story, too, which would make a good opera if someone were inclined to compose it.  But let’s stick with this gruesome gospel tale today.  It might have something to say to us worth our hearing.  And, who knows?  There might even be some good news here before we are finished.

            What is the story even doing in Mark’s gospel?  It is the only story in that short book that is not directly about Jesus.  Why would he have included it?  Its style, so different from Mark’s rather crude Greek, reflects the fact that he borrowed an already existing story, perhaps even one circulating in print.  Why?  For one thing, he inserts it exactly at the point at which Jesus sends out his disciples in pairs, giving them authority to cast out demons and to anoint and cure the afflicted and diseased.  Mark says that Herod got wind of all this because Jesus’ name was beginning to be in the news.  Folks, ever quick to jump to conclusions, were saying that John the Baptizer had been raised from the dead (the idea of resurrection in those days was not the stumbling block that it later became).  Others were saying no, that Elijah or one of the other old prophets had reappeared.  Herod no more heard the name “John the Baptizer” than he flipped into a terror imagining that one whom he had arrested, imprisoned, and later executed had indeed risen and come back to life, perhaps to haunt, or at least to embarrass him, Herod.

            The digression into the ghoulish story of John the Baptizer’s death functions for Mark as a time-filler while the pairs of disciples are out doing their work.  When the story ends, the disciples return and report to Jesus all that they have done and taught.  But surely there is more to the story than that.  In fact it does have something to do with Jesus.  Harking back to the Old Testament, the scene of Herod and Herodias recalls another king and queen, namely Ahab and Jezebel.  Jezebel had a serious problem with another prophet, Elijah.  She tried every way she could to have him put to death.  So, Mark seems to be saying, this is the kind of thing that happens to prophets who speak truth to power.  What happened to Elijah back then and to John the Baptist more recently is exactly what is in store for Jesus.  He too will suffer death at the hands of the politico- religious establishment.  One does not take on the big boys without paying dearly for it. 

            If you follow Mark’s story really closely, you cannot help but see that it is laden with messages to disciples, followers of Jesus.  Of course it is, for that is what gospels are for.  Mark, however, is quite obviously conscious of disciples specifically as targets of persecution.  There is more than a good chance that the very thing that motivated him to write a gospel was the first, or at least a very early, wave of persecution that tested the faith and mettle of disciples.  Why should one confess the faith of Jesus Christ if to do so means to die, perhaps a painfully violent death?  What is to keep one, feeling the breath of lions and seeing one’s buddies torn apart for sport just because they happen to be Christian, from quickly rethinking the value of following Jesus and tossing in the towel before it is too late?  Mark’s basic answer is that faith in Jesus is worth the risk because Jesus is truly the Son of God, and hence the Truth.

            It is not incidental that the story of John the Baptist’s fate takes the spotlight just as the disciples are being sent by Jesus on a mission with authority over unclean spirits.  Those who are sent are apostles, for that is what the verb “αποστελλω=to send” means.  And apostles are sent not into a friendly, hospitable world, but into a world that is riddled with evil, bewitched by power, and largely in the grip of forces that sooner or later will turn with a vengeance on anything that attacks their entrenched interests.  Apostles had better watch out.  John the Baptist opened his mouth one too many times about immorality in the royal household.  Jesus paid the price by taking on the powers and principalities.  Disciples, apostles, will pay dearly too.

            There are, of course, many people in many places in the 21^st century who know this all too well.  One thinks of Jawani Luwum, Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., and even some like Nelson Mandela who have survived.  The narrative that Americans cherish is that we in this country are spared those awful outcomes of Christian witness.  Don’t be too sure.  Although we can be thankful that many lives are protected from outright persecution and death, we need to understand some basic things.  One is that the essential meaning of the gospel is precisely that one cannot in fact be a follower of Jesus unless one’s loyalty to what he called the Kingdom of God or the Realm of God is paramount to national and political ties.  Telling the truth, whether in protesting the massive imprisonment of black men, or supporting those whose status puts them outside the law, or opposing political parties and politicians that lie, cheat, and steal on many different levels, will land today’s disciples in deep trouble with power structures.  In that sense, this society, while restrained by a constitution and laws, is little different from any other political culture.   Prophets, apostles, evangelists, and ordinary faithful Christians are not in the business of being popular, but rather of being loyal to the God of Justice, Peace, and Love.  We have to make up our minds whether we are going to go on the mission of Jesus or sit it out.  But one thing is for certain:  discipleship costs.

            It is frankly much harder to jolt an easy-going, peace-loving population like the great array of the American middle class (if there is still such a thing) with a message like Mark’s or Jesus’ than it was to crash into Victorian morality with a character like Salome.  Notice what gets peoples’ dander up and their blood boiling these days.  Generally it is stuff about as relevant to our lives as a Salome making love to the severed head of a man of God whom she has repeatedly tried to seduce.  It is a bevy of things like nudity, pornography, and sexual orientation and behavior different from the norm.  None of that is especially threatening to power, political or otherwise, though many in power would have us think so.  Then, too, people argue on and on, talking about things that no one can disagree with, antiseptic things like “creating safe environments” and “relieving stress.”  None of it gets at the root of the evils truly infecting humanity and the planet.  Hyperbolic phrases like “the undoing of civilization,” “the moral decay of the nation,” “the undermining of the sacred foundations of society,” and other such claptrap is sounding brass to cover the real noise of economic injustice, the damage done by unbridled greed at all levels, racism, militarism, gender inequality, and financial vulnerability, not to mention more global crises like inhumane prison conditions, genocide, the persistent rape and poisoning of the environment by economic engines, and the wholesale rip-off of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable by powerful corporate interests that own whole political systems and protect them with armies and navies.  I am not talking just about the United States.  I am talking about Egypt, Sudan, Syria, China, Russia, and a host of other places that participate in versions of the same macabre games that silence Truth by chopping its head off and then in tawdry scenes, kissing the relics and memories of dead radicals as if they had blessed them all along. 

            Is there any good news, or do you hear this as just one more rant that can be classified loosely as liberal Christianity echoing in an empty room?  Well, there is good news, but you have to listen very closely and very quietly to hear it sometimes.  Believe it or not, there is some good news in that little ending of Mark’s beheading story when the disciples of John the Baptist come and take his body and bury it in a tomb.  In the midst of violence and wholesale degradation, there are pockets of Presence that pick up the pieces.  There are disciples that nurse the sick, who care for the wounded, who look out for children, who feed the monks and nuns that pray and the prophets that protest.  Burying the dead might not be a glamorous job, but it is one that makes the grief of the world a little easier to bear.  And it is good news that some disciples do that.

           

            That is only one piece of the Good News.  If the bad news was that John was not in fact raised from the dead, the Good News is that Jesus was.  And Jesus is still being raised from the dead, just as creation itself is still in the process of happening.  Communities of disciples gather together to share the kind of love that Jesus modeled and taught.  One by one, people are bringing into his fellowship those who come to him in faith, baptizing them in the name of the Living God and of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  Two by two and sometimes in larger numbers, disciples are going out into the world with a real sense of authority over unclean spirits, taking on the powers of disease and insanity, speaking up for Truth, defending the orphan and the widow, taking time to listen to the powerless and dispossessed, feeding the hungry, educating the ignorant, and welcoming the stranger.   Herod is still on the throne in many places, and Salome is still doing the bidding of her irate mother.  But,

            Though the cause of evil prosper,

            Yet ‘tis truth alone is strong,

            Though her portion be the scaffold,

            And upon the throne be wrong,

            Yet that scaffold sways the future

            And behind the dim unknown

            Standeth God within the shadows

            Keeping watch above God’s own. [1]

[1] James Russell Lowell, "Once to Every Man and Nation," 1845

 

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012