I’ve been staring at the screen for awhile now, trying to think of a way to bring this year’s Lenten Journal to an end and I have not found them — at least, I haven’t found words of my own. What I have found are words I first heard on Bob Bennett’s record, First Things First: the hymn, “My Reedemer Lives,” written by Samuel Medley in 1775.
I know that my Redeemer lives; What comfort this sweet sentence gives! He lives, He lives, who once was dead; He lives, my ever-living Head.
He lives triumphant from the grave, He lives eternally to save, He lives all-glorious in the sky, He lives exalted there on high.
He lives to bless me with His love, He lives to plead for me above. He lives my hungry soul to feed, He lives to help in time of need.
He lives to grant me rich supply, He lives to guide me with His eye, He lives to comfort me when faint, He lives to hear my soul’s complaint.
He lives to silence all my fears, He lives to wipe away my tears He lives to calm my troubled heart, He lives all blessings to impart.
He lives, my kind, wise, heavenly Friend, He lives and loves me to the end; He lives, and while He lives, I’ll sing; He lives, my Prophet, Priest, and King.
He lives and grants me daily breath; He lives, and I shall conquer death: He lives my mansion to prepare; He Iives to bring me safely there.
He lives, all glory to His name! He lives, my Jesus, still the same. Oh, the sweet joy this sentence gives, “I know that my Redeemer lives!”
Holy Week has had to jockey for space on the calendar this week like an NCAA basketball player working to get in position under the basket. Monday was Saint Patrick’s Day. Tuesday, Barack Obama made his amazing speech on race in America in which, as John Stewart said, “talked to us as if we were adults. Wednesday marked the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq even as we near the tragic milestone of the deaths of 4000 American service men and women there, not to mention the thousands of Iraqis who have perished.
In my reading today (and I can’t remember where I first found the link), I learned about a benefit that was held this week in New York for Jack Agüeros, a Puerto Rican poet who is living with Alzheimer’s and who writes psalms like this one, so applicable this week after Obama’s speech:
Psalm for Open Clouds and Windows
Lord, reserve a place for me in heaven on a cloud with Indians, Blacks, Jews, Irish, Italians, Portuguese, and lots of Asians and Arabs, and Hispanics. Lord, I don’t mind if they play their music too loudly, or if they leave their windows open – I like the smell of ethnic foods. But Lord, if heaven isn’t integrated, and if any Angels are racists, I swear I’m going to be a no-show because, Lord, I have already seen hell.
from “Lord, Is This a Psalm?”
Today, according to The Writer’s Almanac, marks the birthdays of Stephen Sondheim, Billy Collins, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. I’ll admit I’m more a fan of the first two than the last, yet Webber’s show, Jesus Christ Superstar, holds a special significance to me. The first live rock event I ever attended was a concert version of the musical that came to the Tarrant County Convention Center when I was in high school. My dad took my brother and me. I was mesmerized from start to finish. I saw the show years later in full musical form and have watched the movie more than once or twice. I think what pulls me most is the way the disciples are presented as both flawed and well-intentioned: faithful failures, if you will – like you and me.
As my personal calendar has run parallel to Holy Week, Good Friday and Holy Saturday have been unpacking and hanging picture days at our house. As the hours of the Crucifixion passed, I was driving nails into the walls to hold keepsakes to make our new house begin to feel like home – and I watched my fair share of basketball, a microcosm of my Lenten season as a whole: flawed and well-intentioned. In the midst of my tasks, I looked up tonight and it was dark outside, before I had a chance to mow the yard, and the metaphor was not lost on me. While I was busy doing what I was doing, Holy Week moved from the cross to the tomb and the darkest days of the year.
Our observance of Jesus’ journey through death should probably carry a spoiler alert because we know the triumphant ending before he even dies. As Tony Campolo has often said, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.” Those who were with him in real time didn’t have that assurance. In Superstar, those who were left behind sing, “Could We Start Again Please.”
MARY MAGDALENE
I’ve been living to see you. Dying to see you, but it shouldn’t be like this. This was unexpected, What do I do now? Could we start again please? I’ve been very hopeful, so far. Now for the first time, I think we’re going wrong. Hurry up and tell me, This is just a dream. Oh could we start again please?
PETER
I think you’ve made your point now. You’ve even gone a bit too far to get the message home. Before it gets too frightening, We ought to call a vote, So could we start again please?
ALL
I’ve been living to see you. Dying to see you, but it shouldn’t be like this. This was unexpected, What do I do now? Could we start again please? I think you’ve made your point now. You’ve even gone a bit too far to get the message home. Before it gets too frightening, We ought to call a vote, So could we start again please? Could we start again please? (Repeat 5 times)
MARY MAGDALENE
Could we start again?
A significant source of the hope I find in the Resurrection is the stone rolls away to answer that question with a resounding, “YES.” As Kyle Matthews wrote,
we fall down, we get up we fall down, we get up, we fall down, we get up and the saints are just the sinners who fall down and get up
Today is also World Water Day. The event has gone largely unnoticed by the general public over the last several years, but the state of our world is such that, before long, we will begin speaking of water in much the same language we now speak of oil. Agüeros has a psalm that speaks to that as well:
Psalm for Distribution
Lord, on 8th Street between 6th Avenue and Broadway there are enough shoe stores with enough shoes to make me wonder why there are shoeless people on the earth.
Lord, You have to fire the Angel in charge of distribution.
–from “Lord, Is This a Psalm?” (Hanging Loose Press, 2002)
As we prepare to start again come Sunday, let us pray for eyes to see that we are the angels of distribution, that we are the incarnation of God’s love in our world, that we are the conduits of God’s grace and not the arbiters of God’s judgment.
One of the things my friend Mia have in common is we both spent part of our adolescence in Kenya. She sent me a link today to the NPR program, Speaking of Faith with Katrina Tippet, which was new to me because it doesn’t play on our local station. This week’s program revisits an interview Tippet did with Jaroslav Pelikan, who died in 2006 and was an amazing church historian. She was talking to him about the role creeds have played and still play in Christianity.
The part that caught Mia’s ear, and that she passed on to me, had to do with the Maasai Creed, written by and for one of Kenya’s tribes. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Ms. Tippett: This is giving me a lovely and exalted way to think about a remark you make in your book, that one thing that someone who studies all these creeds, as you’ve done, is struck by is the sheer repetitiveness of them. Right?
Dr. Pelikan: You should try to proofread them all in the course of a few weeks, as we did, and then you discover just how — you wonder, didn’t I just read this one yesterday?
Ms. Tippett: No, and it — but it’s so interesting because I think that where someone goes when they hear that there are these thousands of creeds is that everybody’s doing it differently all the time, and that’s not really what you find. But I did want to dwell briefly on one that I sense is near and dear to your heart, which is this Maasai Creed…would you like to read some of your favorite?
Dr. Pelikan: Like most creeds, it is designed on a threefold pattern of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and comes out of the experience of Christians in Africa who were animists, fetishists who worshiped things in nature and the mystery of life and who then, upon receiving the Christian faith, began reciting the creeds as they had been taught, in this case by Roman Catholic missionaries, in other cases by Evangelical or Orthodox missionaries. But after a couple of generations of that, a Christian community gradually comes of age, achieves a level of maturation where you want to do it for yourself, do it your way, speaking in your context, using the images of your culture. And the question is can you do that without sacrificing the integrity of what you have received? It’s easy just to repeat, but then it’s not your own. It’s easy to say what is your own as though nobody had ever said it before, but then the question is whether it’s authentically Christian. And I think this manages to do both of those in a remarkable way.
Dr. Pelikan: “We believe in one high God, who out of love created the beautiful world. We believe that God made good His promise by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and [humanity], and showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by His people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He was buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch Him, and on the third day He rose from the grave. He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord.
We believe that all our sins are forgiven through him. All who have faith in him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love, and share the bread together in love, to announce the good news to others until Jesus comes again. We are waiting for him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen.”
Dr. Pelikan: Now for one thing, the Nicene Creed as well as the Apostles’ Creed go directly from born of the Virgin Mary to suffered under Pontius Pilate. And the whole story in the Gospels…
Ms. Tippett: The life of Christ.
Dr. Pelikan: …yeah, is just leapt over.
Ms. Tippett: And that’s what a lot of modern people have criticized in the creeds.
Dr. Pelikan: You go from Alpha to Omega. And here, see, He was born, as the creed said, He left His home — the creeds don’t say that — and He was always on safari in Africa. When I read that the first time, a student of mine who’d been a member of a religious order, she was a sister, and she had been in a hospital in east Nigeria, and that’s the creed they recited at their liturgy. And so she brought it to me, and I just got shivers, just the thought, you know, the hyenas did not touch Him and the act of defiance — God lives even in spite of the hyenas. But it’s a good example of this model that I quoted earlier, that it is not enough to Christianize Africa. We have to Africanize Christianity.
Some time ago, I read an article online, whose link I can’t find now, making the case for the church to adopt the “Starbucks model” in relating to nonchurch folks. The author, a pastor as I remember, talked about how Starbucks has made us learn to ask for tall, grande, and venti sized drinks instead of small, medium, and large, and to learn all the espresso lingo as well. We’ve had to become initiated to be able to drink their coffee. The church, he said, should do the same with those who visit or come to see what is going on. Make them learn our language, our traditions, our way of doing things rather than trying to put what the church does in their terms.
When the Maasai speak of Jesus always being on safari doing good – always traveling – all I could think of was the sense of connection those nomadic people must of felt with him. He traveled all his life just as they did; he knew what it was like to be them. And when he died, the hyenas – the filthiest scavengers on the African landscape – didn’t touch him. I love the imagery.
When we were in Greece a couple of years ago, we arrived on the Saturday before Orthodox Easter and walked down from our hotel in Athens to the vigil that turned into celebration at midnight. One of the men at the hotel taught the Greek Easter greeting Ginger and me.
One person says, “Christos anisti.” The other responds, “Alethos anisti.”
(I think I transliterated it correctly.) He then translated:
“The first person says, ‘Christ is risen,’ and the second person says, ‘He really did it.’”
As we wait for the Resurrection, may we tell the story in words we all understand.
My most significant Christmas present came from my whole family: sessions with a personal trainer. Since the first of the year, I’ve been seeing Chad (or as I like to call him, “Hanging Chad”) and he has been kicking my butt. The sessions are paying off because I have significantly less butt to kick. One of the things I’ve noticed is he pushes me to the point of muscle fatigue, as he calls it, when I’m doing sets on whatever machine the gym imported from Guantánamo Bay. Today I asked him why he pushed so hard.
“When your muscles reach fatigue, they begin to grow,” he said. “If you come in here and do the same routine, even if you increase the weights, your body figures out what you’re doing to it and adapts. You won’t get the results you want. When you push your muscles to fatigue, you shock your body – catch it by surprise – and your muscles think, ‘Man, we’ve got to get with it to keep up with this stuff’ and they grow.”
On the drive home, my mind went back to the sleeping disciples:
And he came to the disciples and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, “So, could you not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
The boys had hit the wall, much like I do in the middle of the second set of most any exercise Chad puts me through, and had fallen victim to faithfulness fatigue. Things were not staying the same and they were exhausted from trying to keep up with what was going on, not to mention to grief and uncertainty. One betrayed Jesus, hoping (I think) he would force Jesus to play his cards and finally become the kind of butt-kicking king the people were looking for. One got up from his nap and followed Jesus into Caiaphas’ courtyard only to deny even knowing Jesus three times. They all ran away after the crucifixion, hiding out in the Upper Room, or going back to their boats, to the same safe routine they had known before they got to know Jesus. All that trusting and believing had worn them out.
It had also prepared them to grow.
We shared Communion tonight as a part of our Maundy Thursday service. Communion is my favorite act of worship. Taking Communion by intinction (take the bread, dip it in the cup, take both elements at once – more casually, rip and dip) is my least favorite way of observing the sacrament. I love passing the trays down the aisle, being served by one person (“the priest at my elbow,” as Carlyle Marney said) and then getting to serve the next. I also love going to the altar and being served, as they do in Episcopal masses. In both cases, I feel like we expand the holy moment in the meal, taking our time to eat, to pray, and to be together. Intinction, for me, feels more pragmatic (my value judgment), as though we are working to get everyone fed and get on with things. It’s not what I’m used to, it’s not my style, it’s not my preference. When I sat down in the pew and saw the elements prepared for us to take and dip, I was called to exercise an unused muscle. I don’t know it’s name, but it’s the one I use when I have to come to terms with the reality that whatever is going on is not ultimately about me.
The last three times we’ve had Communion at our church it has been by intinction. I’m suffering from form fatigue. As I prepared for worship tonight, my exercise was to move from being bothered about the method of sharing the Bread and the Cup to relishing the fact that we had gathered to share the Lord’s Supper on the very night he had first served it to his disciples. Knowing the nature of Middle Eastern food, chances are there was a fair amount of ripping and dipping around that table. None of the methods of serving we employ exactly mimics what Jesus did around that table. What matters is the meal.
Maundy Thursday is one of my favorite worship services all year. And so I stretched beyond my preferences and critiques and stepped into the line of hungry believers moving forward to take and eat, symbolic in its own right of how we join the Communion of all the saints when we take and eat as all those who have come before us have done and all those who will come after us will also do. By the time we got to the part of the service for us to move forward, we had been sitting for a while. When I began to stand up, my thighs started to scream, still sore from Chad’s work on Tuesday. I had to stifle my groan and move as silently as I could to the front where I took the bread and dipped it in the cup and was nourished in Jesus’ name.
Truly, I’ve got to keep up with this stuff and grow.
Tomorrow is the official beginning of March Madness, or the NCAA Basketball Tournaments for both men and women. In our area basketball matters perhaps as much as anywhere on the planet and the shade of blue you wear to the game is a crucial decision (Duke – dark blue; UNC – light, or Carolina, blue). In a test of allegiances for many, Maundy Thursday services will be taking place just as Duke takes the court against Belmont for their opening round game.
Tournament games are known for their big finishes. I knew an old man in Texas who thought all college basketball games should be two minutes long because everything that mattered happened in the last two minutes. Why bother with the other part? Good question, if only endings matter.
Truth is we live as though beginnings and endings are what matter most. Middles? Not so much. Even our ecclesiastical year turns from the climax of Easter to a liturgical drop off into “ordinary time,” which are the days we mark until we get back to Advent where we can begin again.
Even Holy Week has a middle. The big days are Palm Sunday (big start), Maundy Thursday (Communion), Good Friday (Crucifixion), Holy Saturday (Vigil), and Easter Sunday (Resurrection). But what of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday? What were Jesus and his disciples doing during the middle of the week? We have a couple of incidents and parables, but the gospel writers didn’t have much to say about these three days. Yet to get from the Triumphal Entry to Golgotha and then to the empty tomb, he had to live through Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. He had some ordinary time of his own.
One of the great omissions of the gospels is they give no account of Jesus laughing , or anyone else for that matter. They tell us that Jesus wept, but they never say, “Jesus laughed.” In the core of my being, I know Jesus laughed. Anyone who started the majority of his poems with, “A certain man had two sons . . .” knew how to tell a joke. Listen to the words. The rhythm is no different than, “A guy walks into a bar . . .” Intentionality is not synonymous with humorlessness.
Jesus’ laughter comes to mind because I know how crucial laughter is in times of grief. He knew the events unfolding were the beginning of saying goodbye to his disciples. Because they had identified with him, they were in great pain. They didn’t understand what was unfolding, but they knew things were changing. When I think about the three nondescript days in Holy Week, I imagine Jesus and his closest friends recounting memories, laughing, and crying. Seriously – all it would take would be a retelling of some of Peter’s exploits and the whole Upper Room would be in stitches.
This particular day was not an eventful one for me. I had to take inventory at the restaurant at Duke and do a couple of other things. I went by the other restaurant where one of the guys was talking to Chef about a difficult decision she had to make about one of her employees that we all knew. She said to him, “I’m feeling a little less guilty about it today.”
In a stroke of quick wit and friendship, he peered over his glasses and said, “You just took Kubler-Ross’ stages and banged right through ‘em last night, huh?”
And we laughed – and I saw how it helped her, even if just for a moment.
In my mind’s eye (my heart’s eye, too), Nameless Wednesday was not wasted, even though it was not recorded. I can picture Jesus and the disciples coming to the end of the day grateful for the ordinary day together. Maybe that’s how it happened. Maybe I just need some ordinary time of my own.
When we lived in New England, one of the staples in my day was listening to a show called The Connection, a call-in show hosted by a man named Dick Gordon who had a marvelous way of drawing people into conversation and making connections for those who both talked and listened. One morning, he was no longer on the radio. WBUR made some (bad) choices based on the bottom lined and killed their best show. And I wondered what happened to Dick Gordon.
Soon after we moved to Durham, I was in the car listening to WUNC, our local and excellent NPR station, and heard a familiar voice say, “I’m Dick Gordon and this is The Story.” I had no idea he had come to prepare a place for me, or at least to help me feel more, well, connected to my new town. His new show is not a call-in, but an interview with a single person, usually, simply because he feels they have a story worth telling. Some of them are sensational, some quite emotional, some humorous, some wrenching, and all of them helping to paint a picture of what it means to be human.
Today, as I was driving to work, I came in on the story of Peter Turnley, a man who has been a photojournalist for a quarter of a century, and he was telling the story of his experiences as the first non-Soviet journalist allowed to see and record the aftermath of the Spitak earthquake in Armenia in 1988, when it was still part of the USSR. He talked about several things, but the enduring part of the story that was still very fresh to him as he told it, was one particular encounter (What follows is what I remember from listening and quotes from Turnley’s website):
I will never forget the man in Armenia in 1988 who had only the day before lost his wife, children, and his home, all casualties of a massive earthquake in which 35,000 people lost their lives. As I drove with my twin brother David in a Russian taxi in this devastated region, we stopped to pick up an elderly man who was hitchhiking. He sat in the back with me. I was so tired after days and days of work with little rest I was falling asleep and then I realized he was motioning to put my head in his lap and sleep. I put my head down and listened, first, as he recounted to the driver that he had lost everything and then, as I drifted off, he began to stoke my head and sing softly and beautifully in Armenian. (Turnley paused, his voice full of emotion.) I think he just wanted to be connected to life.
When we arrived at his village, Sptiak, he directed the driver tot he spot where his house had once stood; all that remained was a pile of rubble. He fell to the ground sobbing and pounding the earth for minutes. He then rose to thank us for the lift. We told him how sorry we were and that we had to go, but wanted to know if we could be of any help. The temperature was below zero Celcius, and the only things the man had were the clothes on his back. Still, he was determined to stay near the ruins of his home for a while longer. As we got ready to leave, he hugged us both for a long time and then offered me the wool scarf from around his neck. I declined politely. I’ll never forget that gesture.
Turnley was beginning to tell how that encounter had changed his life and the way he thought about his profession when I had to get out of the car and go to my job, so I didn’t get to hear the punchline, but I walked through the old stone buildings on the Duke campus a little changed myself.
Somewhere along the way today, I started thinking about this story, from Matthew 26:
While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table. When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. “Why this waste?” they asked. “This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.”
Aware of this, Jesus said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”
How ever cosmic the epic is, whether the aftermath of an earthquake or the road to the Cross and the Resurrection, the best stories gets told in the one on one encounters in the midst of the struggle and grief, where we fight to find our connection to life in things like lullabies and physical touch. One of the things I loved about Turnley’s story is he never talked about the pictures he took or how he photographed the man as he wept and wailed in front of the wreckage of his home. In fact, in the segment I heard, he never mentioned his camera. He just told the story of how he was changed by what the man did.
One afternoon in Marshfield, I got to speak to Dick Gordon. I called in because his guest was Kenneth Kaunda, the first president of Zambia. In October of 1964, the British colony of Northern Rhodesia became the free nation of Zambia, and Kaunda was our president. I say “our” because I was there. We went to City Stadium early on the evening of October 23 and watched all kinds of dances and exhibitions. A little before midnight, the band played “God Save the Queen” and we watched the Union Jack come down for the last time. At the stroke of midnight, the Zambian flag was raised and we all sang our national anthem together (we had been practicing in school):
Stand and sing of Zambia proud and free Land of work and joy in unity Victors in the struggle for the right We’ve one freedom’s fight All one strong and free
A year or two later, at Christmas, my cub scout troop went to carol at State House, the presidential residence. President Kaunda answered the door as we began to sing and, after we had finished, invited us in for tea and biscuits (cookies, to you Americans). While we sat in the big living room munching away and trying not to spill anything, he said, “You have sung of our Savior’s birth; now I will sing to you of my faith.” He sat down at the piano and sang and played “Psalm 23.” That moment indelibly shaped my life in Africa and, on that afternoon in Marshfield, I finally got the chance to say thank you.
I started listening to a story today of what happens when people connect and went from Durham to Armenia to Palestine to Zambia to Marshfield and back home. “I love to tell the story,” goes the old hymn, “for those who know it best seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.”
Sunday night I had fun at work. About three weeks ago, we began trying a new thing on Sunday nights because they are usually very slow. We now do a “Sunday Night Special” that I serve from a buffet in the dining room: one meat entrée, one vegetarian entrée, each with vegetable and sides (last night was either chicken and cheese or sweet potato, mushroom, onion, and spinach enchiladas with red beans and rice and salad) for ten dollars. We’ve had a few more people each week and several who are return customers, not the least of which is a group of football players that come to eat. They were the last table, so after I served them, I spent some time talking to them and even learning their names. I left work feeling encouraged and exhilarated.
Today was going to be the day I broke out new menu items (pecan crusted monkfish with bleu cheese polenta and sweet corn sauce and spicy orange hummus, to name a couple). I had worked hard on getting things ready and was looking forward to a great evening. Then I walked in the kitchen to find out the person at our catering shop who does our ordering had failed to order any of my proteins. I was without my meat, fish, or chicken and had to scramble to pull things out of the freezer and make the best of what was available. I was livid. As Ginger will attest, I don’t do well when people don’t do their jobs well.
My friend John also knows this to be true. In a moment a number of years ago (and one I’m not proud of) we were in New Orleans one Sunday afternoon and John had to leave to get back to his church in Mississippi. When we got to the parking garage, the guy who had parked John’s car had failed to put the keys on the appropriate hook and had gone home because his shift had ended while we were eating. The woman behind the counter informed us that the guy must have taken the keys home with him, but didn’t seem to feel any sense of urgency in sorting things out beyond that point. I let my frustration get the best of me and said, “Let me get this straight: this guy’s job is park the car and hang the key on the hook. How could he forget to do half of his job?” When she did nothing to move our situation along, I picked up the phone and said, “Why don’t we call him to bring the keys back?”
I don’t remember exactly how the keys came back. I do know John got his car and the more I reflected on my words and deeds in the moment, the more embarrassed I became. I thought about that Sunday afternoon more than once today, mostly to help me keep some sense of perspective, because I could feel the other little details of the day – Ramon was forty-five minutes late, for instance – inviting me to believe, and even proclaim, that I was the only one doing my job. When I get to the place where I think I’m the only one who isn’t phoning it in or screwing it up, it’s a pretty safe bet I’ve lost my sense of reality.
The first challenge was to make sure my anger was addressed to the right person, and delivered in a way that was not damaging to him or the possibility of a relationship that will allow us to work together in the future. I believe the biblical phrase for all of the above is, “Be angry and sin not.” In the same vein, the second challenge was to make sure my anger didn’t come out sideways on the folks who were working with me tonight, particularly at the servers who take a fairly combative approach to life under the best of circumstances. The third challenge was to do my job well and make a faithful offering of the things over which I do have control.
One of the most intriguing Holy Week scenes to me is Jesus pulling away to pray and taking Peter, James, and John with him and then asking them to stay awake while he went a bit farther to ask God if there was a chance things might turn out differently. He went to pray three times and each time he returned he found the three men fast asleep on the job, failures at meeting his request, and he asked each time,
Couldn’t you stay awake with me for one hour?
No. They couldn’t.
Let me be clear here: I’m not drawing any analogies between my day and that night in Jesus’ life, as if to say Jesus, like me, knew what it felt like to be at the mercy of people not doing what they were expected to do. I thought about the story tonight because I wanted to think more about what I might learn from Jesus’ response to the failure of his friends to meet his one simple request. You see, my general response to that story is to see myself in the disciples. Sleep is my escape. In the depths of my depression, sleep was one of the places I could find some relief. The other was the kitchen. So I look at their inability to stay awake and I can postulate about the exhaustion of their grief getting the best of them. The fear and sorrow were too much. While Jesus prayed for his life, Peter, James, and John found their solace in sleep.
Admitting I’m much more like the dozing disciples than I am like Jesus, in this story or in most any situation gives me a chance to find grace and redemption in the ineptness and inefficiency I encountered today. I don’t know what was behind the missed orders. I do know the guy has a lot of stuff going on in his life that would make it hard for me to concentrate if I were in his shoes. I know the catering crew is diving into the busy season and are anxious about it. I also know missing my monkfish is not the end of the world, regardless of how world-ending it may have seemed twenty minutes before service.
About three verses after Jesus woke the tired three from their slumber, Matthew’s gospel recounts:
Then the men stepped forward, seized Jesus and arrested him. With that, one of Jesus’ companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”
Kicking ass and taking names may feel good (no – it does feel good), but it is not the path of life that leads to resurrection and redemption. Be angry and sin not: get it out of your system appropriately, forgive, and move on. I worked hard tonight to not wrap my anger in the violence I so often use as a package. I think I was reasonably successful.
I didn’t find any ears on the floor when I swept at the end of the shift, so I guess I’ve got that going for me.
When Ginger calls us to worship each Sunday, after the announcements, she says,
Take a deep breath; now let it out. Breathe in the breath of God; breathe out the love of God.
As we stood in the spring sunshine this morning, our palm leaves in hand, I could see the faces of people as they inhaled sacred air, many of them closing their eyes, and then exhaled that same holiness after it had passed through their lungs, part of their DNA attached to the love of God they were breathing back into the world. The rhythm of the service was like breathing for me, inhaling a word or idea or song and exhaling a connection (sometimes serious, sometimes humorous) to the Larger Story Being Told. Then we sang as we processed together into the sanctuary,
Ride on, ride on, in majesty! Hark! all the tribes Hosanna cry; O Savior meek, pursue Thy road With palms and scattered garments strowed
And all I could hear was the cranking guitars of Eric Clapton and B. B. King covering John Hiatt’s “Riding with the King.”
Get on a TWA to the promised land. Everybody clap your hands. And don’t you just love the way that he sings? Don’t you know we’re riding with the king?
It’s not the lyric as much as it is the song – and the sense that we are riding with Jesus through this week, moving from celebration to curses, from pain to death to resurrection. And that cranking guitar lick would make for a mean processional next year.
When we moved back from Africa to live in Houston, Texas, I started to Westbury High School in January, a week after everyone else had returned from the winter break. It was the first time I ever started a new school during the year and, of all the different schools I attended (ten in twelve years) it was the hardest transition to make. I signed up for drama class as a way of coping, I suppose. The people on the fringe were (are?) generally more welcoming. One of our first assignments was to lip-sync a song with original choreography. We were assigned the songs. Mine was Grover, from Sesame Street, singing,
Around and around and around and around; over, under, through.
The preposition song came to mind in church this morning as we sang, “Before the Cross of Jesus” as one of our hymns. It is a new(er) text set to the same tune as “Beneath the Cross of Jesus,” which also includes a stanza that begins,
Upon the cross of Jesus mine eyes at times can see The very dying form of One who suffered there for me
Beneath, before, behind, upon, around, within, without, through – together they describe the directions from whence comes the relentless love of God that will not be bound or blocked from getting to us. As the stanza finishes:
And from my stricken heart with tears two wonders I confess; The wonders of redeeming love and my unworthiness.
We made the transition from Palms to Passion reading Matthew’s account from the Triumphal Entry to Jesus’ arrest. What caught me in the reading were the behind the scenes people that made the story happen.
Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, tell him that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away. (21:2,3)
“Go into the city to a certain man and tell him, ‘The Teacher says: My appointed time is near. I am going to celebrate the Passover with my disciples at your house.’” (26:18)
Either Jesus had messianic minions or he knew people – well – that we know little or nothing about. When I was a kid, I thought Jesus had a way of casting spells on people, as though when the disciples said the right words the guy just gave up the donkey and then regained consciousness later and wondered what happened to his animal. The truth is there were fringe people who helped Jesus follow his calling, encouraging him, providing for him, befriending him beyond the disciples we know by name. Whether it’s the Passion narrative or our life stories, lots of folks are never listed in the credits but were in the right place at pivotal moments, exhaling the love of God that we might breathe in hope beyond our understanding of the circumstances at hand.
Ramon, my line cook/dishwasher at the restaurant is one of those folks. He works hard, does good work, and goes unnoticed by most of the folks who eat his food. This afternoon, he was an hour late for work. When he came into the kitchen, I told him I was beginning to get concerned about him.
“I was at church,” he said. “I had to save my life.”
Ginger closed her sermon with a prayer offered by Yousif Al-saka, an elder in the Presbyterian Church in Baghdad:
We beseech You, we humble ourselves for the name of our Savior Jesus Christ, to send your Holy Spirit to shade the land of Iraq, so that peace may prevail in its dwellings, and the acts of violence, kidnapping and persecution may cease; so that the displaced may return to their homes, the churches may reopen their gates without fear from shells and explosion; so that smiles may be seen again on the faces of children that have been stolen from them here in this difficult time; so that the elderly may lean back on their chairs in comfort and tranquility saying farewell to their children when leaving for school or work without anxiety or fear; so that mothers think only of happy, prosperous, and peaceful futures for their daughters and sons.
O Lord, have pity on us, we Iraqis. Let the light of your face shine on us, bless us, strengthen our belief, and bestow patience upon us.
And then we sang:
What wondrous love is this? Oh my soul, oh my soul. What wondrous love is this? Oh my soul.
Breathe in the breath of God; breathe out the love of God.
on the road home the miles feel faster than those on the road out of town – my body responds from muscle memory, my mind working like a pace car,knowing what to feel with each passing billboard, how long to wait, how to titrate the anticipation. familiar roads are shorter roads
the road from here to resurrection is mapped in my mind (and my heart), from palms to parables, crowds to cross. I know the days, the steps, the words, the mileposts. my feet are covered with the dust from the feet of disciples who walked this way when the road was not so well marked
and Holy Week had not yet become so hurried or harried. I don’t want to get to Easter because the road is familiar, or the liturgy expected. I want to be stricken and surprised, lost and found, broken and spilled out; I want to find my old footprints and know
I walked the neighborhood tonight to The Green Room, our neighborhood bar, “serving Durham since Prohibition” in a small square building whose green walls are as infused with smoke as it is with stories. Beer and basketball were my menu tonight, as others shot pool and played table shuffleboard, each of us speaking to the other as we crisscrossed the room like billard balls on green felt. Michael, the owner, sock hat pulled over his head, smiled and worked the room to create another night that would sink into the plaster and hold the place together. Six rules are posted at the register:
we don’t serve drunks; use common sense; respect others; take care of the equipment; no drinks on the tables; don’t talk with your mouth full.
I kept the rules, watched the game, and helped the young bartender practice the art of conversartion. Then I finished my beer and walked the block back home.
