Have you ever sat through a sermon and when it was over you felt like you just attended a self-improvement seminar? I have. I usually fall asleep during such a talk. You know what I mean, it's where the message is: "You Should Behave Differently than You Do!" It's the most common theme in current Evangelical pop culture. In the Evangelical world it seems to be a favorite pastime - telling people to shape up.
I've been around the block a time or two in my life and when I say I've heard it all before I am one of the few who who actually has heard it all before. Believe me, I would not recommend my spiritual path to anybody and I don't know much about what God is trying to say to us, but I have become something of a whiz at knowing what he is not saying to us. I'm the professor of what it ain't.
God's message to humanity is not, "You people should do better." He is not telling us to clean our act up and then he will get close to us. He is not saying we need to gradually improve ourselves until our behavior finally represents his character. He isn't trying to whip us into shape. He is not saying, "Get it together or you'll be sorry." That's what we think ought to be said. That's our idea of what a god-like god would tell us. Instead, he has a different message than we think he should have. I think he even has a different personality than we think he should. That's why we so often don't get what he is trying to tell us. Our problem is a different problem than we think it is and God has done something in Jesus other than what we would have recommended if God had polled us first instead of acting unilaterally as he has.
You know what the oldest profession in the world is? No, not that. It is religion: finger-wagging let-me-tell-you-how-to-live religion. It's older than that other profession.
Now think about this with me for a moment. If finger-wagging did any good, if telling people how they should look, act, sound, etc. actually worked the world would have changed dramatically for the better by now, and long ago too. We should be living in a moral paradise. I mean every religion and philosophy in the world does that - finger wagging - and has done that throughout the ages. And guess what? We're still broken and we still can't fix ourselves (see the last blog concerning David Nystrom's message). All that moral exhortation, week after week, for at least a thousand years and we're still exactly the same, morally as we were. Amazing.
Moral exhortation, finger-wagging, pastors kicking their sheep yelling, "Get fat! Get fat!" "Ought to" sermons, the raising of the moral bar, trying to fix our inner problem by using outer means just doesn't work. It's a bust. Always has been, always will be. Whatever the gospel is, it is something else.
Listen to what the great Tim Keller, famous Presbyterian preacher said about all this:
To "get the gospel" is to turn from self-justification and rely of Jesus' record for a relationship with God. The irreligious don't repent at all, and the religious only repent of sins. But Christians also repent of their righteousness. That is the distinction between the three groups - Christian, moralists (religious), and pragmatists (irreligious).
I know, most of you probably think I should go find something important to worry about. I don't know why all this stuff seems so important to me, I just think that motives matter more than we think they do. But what do I know? Maybe it turns out that motives don't matter much. Maybe the exterior is more important than the interior, just as preachers have preached through the ages. Maybe I should just take my meds and go back to sleep.
The Gospel Crank
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Monday, April 19, 2010
What's-a-Matta whitch You, Baby?
How about that David Nystrom? He was good. He was “on” yesterday. He snuck the gospel in on us while we were looking at something else. He was a master of misdirection.
Did you notice what he said after he told a little story on himself? Remember, he told us he had just finished preaching a sermon on the topic of patience and then on the way to lunch after church he had a fit when someone cut him off in traffic. In fact he said he became “apoplectic,” which means he looked like he was having a stroke.
It was funny. We could see the irony, and we could relate to the lack of consistency that plagues us all. And then he took a step forward and squatted down right on the stage and looked us straight in the eye and was quiet for a beat or two and then, in a soft voice he offered us something special - if we had ears to hear it. He said, “We are all broken and we can’t fix ourselves.”
Oh! If we only knew that. If only we could actually believe that truth. If only we could become truly convinced it was so. I say that because it is evident to me that we need a constant reminder of that primary element in our relationship with God – we can, of ourselves, do nothing. This gospel-truth describes the way it is. It is not a should be. This is not a reminder of how we all ought to be. This is not a “you must try harder” message. We are not supposed to leave the building with a new found resolve to “do nothing” for Christ.
We can, of ourselves, do nothing. It is a fact. It is, like 186,000 miles per second, not just a good idea – it’s the law!
We are supposed to notice. We should become a little more aware. We should be able, at this point, to observe the truth – that we can’t fix ourselves and that we can, of ourselves, do nothing.
Why is this important? Why does it matter whether we “get” this or not? It is important because otherwise we are trapped in Revelation chapter three where the Laodicians didn’t realize, they couldn’t grasp, they failed to arrive at the only possible conclusion regarding their own spiritual condition – that they were poor and miserable and blind and naked. And so their relationship with Jesus couldn’t really get going. Jesus was still on the front porch knocking to be let in.
And because they didn’t get it they were unable, they had no chance, they did not have the equipment to relate to God on the only terms and conditions that work. The conditions are these: we got nothing; He has everything; He wants us that way. Letting Him in and receiving the revelation that we got nothing are two sides of the same coin.
It was Earth Day recently. I think Evangelical Christians need a lesson in Sustainable Energy. We could power a small city with the energy we waste trying to improve ourselves. It’s like we waste al that energy in an effort to avoid Jesus rather than simply coming to Christ as we are and telling the truth to Him and to ourselves. Nobody knows better than Jesus that “We are all broken and we can’t fix ourselves.”
Thanks David.
The Gospel Crank
Did you notice what he said after he told a little story on himself? Remember, he told us he had just finished preaching a sermon on the topic of patience and then on the way to lunch after church he had a fit when someone cut him off in traffic. In fact he said he became “apoplectic,” which means he looked like he was having a stroke.
It was funny. We could see the irony, and we could relate to the lack of consistency that plagues us all. And then he took a step forward and squatted down right on the stage and looked us straight in the eye and was quiet for a beat or two and then, in a soft voice he offered us something special - if we had ears to hear it. He said, “We are all broken and we can’t fix ourselves.”
Oh! If we only knew that. If only we could actually believe that truth. If only we could become truly convinced it was so. I say that because it is evident to me that we need a constant reminder of that primary element in our relationship with God – we can, of ourselves, do nothing. This gospel-truth describes the way it is. It is not a should be. This is not a reminder of how we all ought to be. This is not a “you must try harder” message. We are not supposed to leave the building with a new found resolve to “do nothing” for Christ.
We can, of ourselves, do nothing. It is a fact. It is, like 186,000 miles per second, not just a good idea – it’s the law!
We are supposed to notice. We should become a little more aware. We should be able, at this point, to observe the truth – that we can’t fix ourselves and that we can, of ourselves, do nothing.
Why is this important? Why does it matter whether we “get” this or not? It is important because otherwise we are trapped in Revelation chapter three where the Laodicians didn’t realize, they couldn’t grasp, they failed to arrive at the only possible conclusion regarding their own spiritual condition – that they were poor and miserable and blind and naked. And so their relationship with Jesus couldn’t really get going. Jesus was still on the front porch knocking to be let in.
And because they didn’t get it they were unable, they had no chance, they did not have the equipment to relate to God on the only terms and conditions that work. The conditions are these: we got nothing; He has everything; He wants us that way. Letting Him in and receiving the revelation that we got nothing are two sides of the same coin.
It was Earth Day recently. I think Evangelical Christians need a lesson in Sustainable Energy. We could power a small city with the energy we waste trying to improve ourselves. It’s like we waste al that energy in an effort to avoid Jesus rather than simply coming to Christ as we are and telling the truth to Him and to ourselves. Nobody knows better than Jesus that “We are all broken and we can’t fix ourselves.”
Thanks David.
The Gospel Crank
Friday, April 2, 2010
Eat or Be Last
Mixing metaphors, it’s a favorite pastime of mine. I used to collect mixed metaphors. Coworkers used to give them to me for free. One coworker was talking about doing a job in a client’s kitchen while the clients were living in the house. Everything was a big problem plus, as my coworker explained, “They smoked like a sieve.”
It’s probably too late to change hats in midstream, I guess.
As another coworker offered, “I feel like I’m grasping at strings.” Like maybe he should have been pulling straws to get what he wanted?
There are many, many metaphors expressed in scripture. Our problem isn’t so much mixing the metaphors (e.g. I am the vine and you are the sheep) as it is confusing the metaphor with the reality. Jesus uses the device of metaphor constantly. He does so for a reason, and this is really important so pay attention: He uses metaphor because there is nothing that is exactly like Him. As Aladdin’s genie sang, “You ain’t never had a friend like me.”
The world had never, and has never, seen anything like Jesus. We were not equipped to fully understand who and what he was. Even after two thousand years of trying to figure him out, we barely understand. So in an effort to give some frame of reference to himself Jesus resorted to parable and metaphor.
You see? Jesus is like a shepherd and he is like rock you can build on and he is like a man almost beaten to death by the side of the road that the religious leaders wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, and he is like a vine, and he is like a very forgiving father, and he is like an unfair employer. Yet he is not any of those things. He’s bigger than any of those things and all those things combined.
And his work, the things that Jesus came to accomplish, the Gospel, is not like anything we have ever run across before. Even though God designed the covenant of Moses to point to the coming of Jesus, and what Jesus accomplished on our behalf is like the Day of Atonement where the sins of the nation are transferred to the goat, nevertheless his work is not the Atonement. His work is like that but the Atonement picture is an inadequate and incomplete picture, it is not the reality. It is not even an analogy, a this-equals-that equation.
The Religious Thought Police would like to have me arrested right now, if they only knew I was thinking like this. Please don’t tell them about me. The Atonement inadequate? Very much so. Okay, we have the forgiveness of sins. Great! Where is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit? Where is being “born from above?” Where is the creation of the “new man?” Where is being seated with Christ at the right hand of God? Where is the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace and the One New Man made up of all the kindred tongues and nations of the world? Where is the return of Christ and the resurrection from the dead? All this and more is the gospel. It’s not just four spiritual laws, you know. Besides, there is a sheep and a goat in the atonement ceremony. What do you do with them? To name just a few inadequacies.
As the writer of Hebrews tells us (chapter 8) the sanctuary of David, for example, and the succeeding Temple are only “shadows of the good things to come.” They’re only a picture, not the reality. The writer further tells us why the picture of the sanctuary is inadequate, “because the blood of bulls and goats can never take away sins.” Oops! The Old Covenant was never reality. It never worked. It only pointed to Jesus who, as John the Baptist declared, “…takes away the sin of the world.” Now you’re talking.
I’ve heard the Gospel described through many a metaphor. It is like a courtroom scene where God the Father is the judge and the devil is the prosecuting attorney and Jesus is our defense attorney. It is like the Jewish Passover where Israel’s firstborn are spared and God leads them out of slavery. It is like the lamb in the bushes when Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac. It is like a kingdom. It is like a city of God. It is like a building. It is like a living temple, it is like a body, a corpus, it is like a new man, it is like all these things and yet the Gospel is still none of the above!
“This piece of unleavened bread I give you is like my body broken for you. This cup of the Seder dinner is like my blood which I am about to shed for you.” Now I know that Jesus did not use the word “like” in the accounts of the Last Supper. But look what happens when you don’t separate metaphor from reality:
During the early Reformation, say 1550 or so the followers of Luther and the followers of Zwingli, a Swiss reformer, had a falling out. Luther, a former Catholic and good son of the church, never questioned the doctrine of “transubstantiation,” which states that when a priest prays over the elements of the mass they “change substance” as the believer partakes of them, turning into the literal body and blood of Christ inside the believer. Zwingli advanced the theory of “consubstantiation” which states that Christ was with the substance but did not become the substance. Get it? Sort of?
Well the followers of the two reformers killed each other over who was right and who was wrong about this. In fact one faction would capture instigators of the other faction, tie their hands to their feet and then throw them into the North Sea, alive (briefly). Hallelujah.
In John chapter 6 Jesus says that unless we drink his blood and eat his flesh we have no life in us. That’s just plain creepy! And he follows that up by saying that his flesh is real food and his blood is real drink. Real? And that’s how the church, being run by a bunch of non-imaginative legalistic literalists came up with the doctrine of transubstantiation. They couldn’t distinguish between metaphor and reality. The bread and wine turn into the literal flesh and blood of Jesus as you eat it? That’s even creepier!
What does Jesus mean when he says “real?” He means that the fish and the bread that they all just ate, five thousand of them, is temporal, transient, not forever, impermanent, you get hungry again. And in that sense what we would call “real” bread is declared unreal by Jesus and what we would call “symbolic” or “metaphorical” bread is real because “eating” is the metaphor for “believing” and if we believe in him he will, as he says plainly, raise us up (from the grave) on the last day. The bread is the symbol for faith, Rising from the dead is not a symbol it is reality.
Bread – metaphor. Resurrection – real. Can you tell the difference?
It is unbelievable. It is incredible. It is stark madness that the church has grown and thrived while its most fundamental practice, the practice of “communion” or the taking of the elements of the mass, which has defined everything from church membership to absolution from sin, has been essentially misunderstood and essentially misrepresented.
How did we become so neurotic that we severed the elements of communion from their context? Their context is the Passover meal. It’s Jewish. It is entirely Jewish from beginning (wine) to end (singing). When Jesus said “this is my body” he meant “this unleavened bread that we all traditionally eat every year at our Passover celebration is not about the Exodus, it is about me. Don’t confuse the picture with the reality.” And so we didn’t confuse the unleavened bread with the Exodus. We confused it with something else – the creepy notion that Jesus wants us to eat him.
Inconceivable! Have you ever read in Luke 14 where Jesus is adjuring the leading Pharisee not to invite his rich friends and relatives next time he gives a banquet? Jesus tells him to invite losers and the physically impaired instead. I am amazed. I am astounded that in all the years that have followed since Jesus uttered those words; someone has not started a new church movement condemning the practice of inviting one’s friends over for lunch. “The Church of the Dining Exclusion” it could have called itself. I mean given the influence of legalistic unimaginative literalists in the church’s history, how did we avoid this?
Given that we can’t tell the difference between the picture and the reality how did this not happen?
Wow. This whole discussion has really made me cranky.
I need a shot of love. Happy Easter.
The Gospel Crank
P.S What you just read is the second post this week. Keep reading to see part one. I know I am really sporadic in my publishing schedule, but that’s just the way the Crank rolls.
It’s probably too late to change hats in midstream, I guess.
As another coworker offered, “I feel like I’m grasping at strings.” Like maybe he should have been pulling straws to get what he wanted?
There are many, many metaphors expressed in scripture. Our problem isn’t so much mixing the metaphors (e.g. I am the vine and you are the sheep) as it is confusing the metaphor with the reality. Jesus uses the device of metaphor constantly. He does so for a reason, and this is really important so pay attention: He uses metaphor because there is nothing that is exactly like Him. As Aladdin’s genie sang, “You ain’t never had a friend like me.”
The world had never, and has never, seen anything like Jesus. We were not equipped to fully understand who and what he was. Even after two thousand years of trying to figure him out, we barely understand. So in an effort to give some frame of reference to himself Jesus resorted to parable and metaphor.
You see? Jesus is like a shepherd and he is like rock you can build on and he is like a man almost beaten to death by the side of the road that the religious leaders wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, and he is like a vine, and he is like a very forgiving father, and he is like an unfair employer. Yet he is not any of those things. He’s bigger than any of those things and all those things combined.
And his work, the things that Jesus came to accomplish, the Gospel, is not like anything we have ever run across before. Even though God designed the covenant of Moses to point to the coming of Jesus, and what Jesus accomplished on our behalf is like the Day of Atonement where the sins of the nation are transferred to the goat, nevertheless his work is not the Atonement. His work is like that but the Atonement picture is an inadequate and incomplete picture, it is not the reality. It is not even an analogy, a this-equals-that equation.
The Religious Thought Police would like to have me arrested right now, if they only knew I was thinking like this. Please don’t tell them about me. The Atonement inadequate? Very much so. Okay, we have the forgiveness of sins. Great! Where is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit? Where is being “born from above?” Where is the creation of the “new man?” Where is being seated with Christ at the right hand of God? Where is the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace and the One New Man made up of all the kindred tongues and nations of the world? Where is the return of Christ and the resurrection from the dead? All this and more is the gospel. It’s not just four spiritual laws, you know. Besides, there is a sheep and a goat in the atonement ceremony. What do you do with them? To name just a few inadequacies.
As the writer of Hebrews tells us (chapter 8) the sanctuary of David, for example, and the succeeding Temple are only “shadows of the good things to come.” They’re only a picture, not the reality. The writer further tells us why the picture of the sanctuary is inadequate, “because the blood of bulls and goats can never take away sins.” Oops! The Old Covenant was never reality. It never worked. It only pointed to Jesus who, as John the Baptist declared, “…takes away the sin of the world.” Now you’re talking.
I’ve heard the Gospel described through many a metaphor. It is like a courtroom scene where God the Father is the judge and the devil is the prosecuting attorney and Jesus is our defense attorney. It is like the Jewish Passover where Israel’s firstborn are spared and God leads them out of slavery. It is like the lamb in the bushes when Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac. It is like a kingdom. It is like a city of God. It is like a building. It is like a living temple, it is like a body, a corpus, it is like a new man, it is like all these things and yet the Gospel is still none of the above!
“This piece of unleavened bread I give you is like my body broken for you. This cup of the Seder dinner is like my blood which I am about to shed for you.” Now I know that Jesus did not use the word “like” in the accounts of the Last Supper. But look what happens when you don’t separate metaphor from reality:
During the early Reformation, say 1550 or so the followers of Luther and the followers of Zwingli, a Swiss reformer, had a falling out. Luther, a former Catholic and good son of the church, never questioned the doctrine of “transubstantiation,” which states that when a priest prays over the elements of the mass they “change substance” as the believer partakes of them, turning into the literal body and blood of Christ inside the believer. Zwingli advanced the theory of “consubstantiation” which states that Christ was with the substance but did not become the substance. Get it? Sort of?
Well the followers of the two reformers killed each other over who was right and who was wrong about this. In fact one faction would capture instigators of the other faction, tie their hands to their feet and then throw them into the North Sea, alive (briefly). Hallelujah.
In John chapter 6 Jesus says that unless we drink his blood and eat his flesh we have no life in us. That’s just plain creepy! And he follows that up by saying that his flesh is real food and his blood is real drink. Real? And that’s how the church, being run by a bunch of non-imaginative legalistic literalists came up with the doctrine of transubstantiation. They couldn’t distinguish between metaphor and reality. The bread and wine turn into the literal flesh and blood of Jesus as you eat it? That’s even creepier!
What does Jesus mean when he says “real?” He means that the fish and the bread that they all just ate, five thousand of them, is temporal, transient, not forever, impermanent, you get hungry again. And in that sense what we would call “real” bread is declared unreal by Jesus and what we would call “symbolic” or “metaphorical” bread is real because “eating” is the metaphor for “believing” and if we believe in him he will, as he says plainly, raise us up (from the grave) on the last day. The bread is the symbol for faith, Rising from the dead is not a symbol it is reality.
Bread – metaphor. Resurrection – real. Can you tell the difference?
It is unbelievable. It is incredible. It is stark madness that the church has grown and thrived while its most fundamental practice, the practice of “communion” or the taking of the elements of the mass, which has defined everything from church membership to absolution from sin, has been essentially misunderstood and essentially misrepresented.
How did we become so neurotic that we severed the elements of communion from their context? Their context is the Passover meal. It’s Jewish. It is entirely Jewish from beginning (wine) to end (singing). When Jesus said “this is my body” he meant “this unleavened bread that we all traditionally eat every year at our Passover celebration is not about the Exodus, it is about me. Don’t confuse the picture with the reality.” And so we didn’t confuse the unleavened bread with the Exodus. We confused it with something else – the creepy notion that Jesus wants us to eat him.
Inconceivable! Have you ever read in Luke 14 where Jesus is adjuring the leading Pharisee not to invite his rich friends and relatives next time he gives a banquet? Jesus tells him to invite losers and the physically impaired instead. I am amazed. I am astounded that in all the years that have followed since Jesus uttered those words; someone has not started a new church movement condemning the practice of inviting one’s friends over for lunch. “The Church of the Dining Exclusion” it could have called itself. I mean given the influence of legalistic unimaginative literalists in the church’s history, how did we avoid this?
Given that we can’t tell the difference between the picture and the reality how did this not happen?
Wow. This whole discussion has really made me cranky.
I need a shot of love. Happy Easter.
The Gospel Crank
P.S What you just read is the second post this week. Keep reading to see part one. I know I am really sporadic in my publishing schedule, but that’s just the way the Crank rolls.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
The Curious Incident
Have you ever read any Sherlock Holmes stories? Remember “Silver Blaze?” The mystery is solved by Holmes and in the dénouement he recaps the case for the Scotland Yard detective, a Mr. Gregory.
Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the nighttime.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
Tim Dally dropped a little one-liner in his sermon last Sunday. It was a footnote, a by-the-way. He pointed out that the roast lamb, which we think would be central to the Passover meal that Jesus and the twelve were eating in Luke 22, was missing. The Lamb is AWOL. Jesus made comments about the unleavened bread and he mentioned the various rounds of wine that were drunk, but no lamb.
I draw your attention to the curious incident of the lamb in the Last Supper. What’s that you say? There was no lamb mentioned in the Last Supper of Luke 22 – or of Matthew 26 – or of Mark 14? Well, that was the curious incident.
We who are Goyim (gentiles) generally don’t know squat about “Seder” or the Jewish Passover meal. I certainly knew nothing but now I know as much as you can learn from nosing around various websites for a couple of hours. Bless you, Wikipedia. It was interesting to me to find the lamb AWOL from all the websites too. The Seder meal apparently has several variations and permutations but there is one thing that is common to all forms, namely that the Passover Lamb is represented by a lamb bone on the Seder plate. It can be old – the same bone year after year. From what I could gather from the sites I visited nobody eats lamb, at least there is no requirement to eat lamb. Most eat gefilte fish and matzo soup. Some eat beef brisket. Chicken and turkey is okay too.
So lamb-eating is not central to the feast. But there is a central feature to the feast. The Pesach celebration is referred to as “the Feast of Unleavened Bread.” The feast is all about ridding the bread, the house and the camp from the taint of leaven (yeast). What’s so bad about yeast, you ask? I don’t know. Ask God. My point is that the point of the feast is about yeast, not lamb.
So, apparently, it is a Gentile misconception that assumes the feast of Pesach centered around lamb. Well, we may be excused our ignorance because the first Passover lamb meal did revolve around a rather weird lamb dinner, the instructions for which lie in Exodus 12 for all to read. The people were commanded to roast the lamb (not boil) with all its entrails and hooves and eat it quickly and eat it all. No leftovers allowed. And even though the entire feast happens because God is about to deliver Israel from slavery and spare their first-born from the Death Angel because of the blood of the lamb sprinkled on the lintels of their doorways, despite all that, the people were not commanded to eat lamb each year after that. They were commanded to drink certain cups of wine and to eat certain servings of unleavened bread and to ask specific questions and to recite, remember and rehearse God’s deliverance from Egypt. Each phase of the Passover meal had its significance and its explanations that are carefully laid out and choreographed in Torah, Talmud, and Midrash. And so the matzo is important and the bitter herbs and the wine and the bowl of salt water and all are important. But the eating of lamb does not appear in the ritual.
Go figure.
All of this adds mind-boggling (at least it boggles my mind, which isn’t hard to do I’ve heard) context to the Last Supper story as related in Matthew, Mark and Luke. We Goy need to grasp that the meal is scripted. Jesus & Co. are following the script as all of them had since they were children. In fact the meal is designed to teach children the story of the Exodus (the “Exit” from Egypt into the Promised Land). Everything from the first cup of wine to the hymn sung at the end is scripted. The meal centers around having children ask four important questions around the theme of , “Why is this night different from other nights?” The questions set the parents up to recite the story of deliverance.
And so there are several breaking of bread and giving of thanks ceremonies in the script. Additionally, the thank-you prayers are scripted and there are four rounds of wine, each one focusing its meaning on an aspect of the story. The fruit paste represents mortar I read. And the bitter herbs (romaine lettuce and horseradish) represent hard times. You see, it all has pre-scripted meaning and significance.
And here’s the mind-boggling part: Jesus is following the script. They all knew it by heart. He takes the unleavened bread and says the scripted thank-you prayer and breaks it as he is supposed to…but then he adds, then he ad-libs, then he steps outside the script and says, “This is my body…”
And it’s like he ruins the moment. He’s not thinking about Egypt fifteen hundred years previously, he’s thinking about this night, his night. This is what he came for. This is his life they’re talking about. No doubt the disciples are a little confused.
Then they go back to the script. Things settle down. The youngest person present (John?) would have asked the next question. Jesus would have explained the answer, “This night is different because we all recline and no one sits.” At some point they dip their vegetables in salt water. At some point they are required to dip their unleavened bread into the salt water too, it appears. Was this when Jesus might have said “One of you will betray me…the one who dips his bread in the bowl with me…?”
Then comes round three and four of the wine. Jesus follows the script but again as he is passing the cup (in Matthew we are told they all drank from the same cup) Jesus strays. He does not explain that this is how God delivered his people from slavery. No. He says “This is my blood, which is poured out for you.”
Whoa. Kind of creepy. Jesus is getting weird. What is he talking about? He is talking about his death, he is talking about bleeding to death. He is talking about flogging and crucifixion. He is not about Passover. Passover is about him.
And by saying these things, by adding to the script, Jesus co-opts, steals one of the three most important annual feasts in the culture of Israel (the other two would be Succoth, the Feast of Tabernacles and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement). He steals the story from the Exodus and claims it for Himself. In so doing he declares that “It is the Exodus that points to me. The Exodus is the metaphor. I am the reality.”
Funny. All I wanted to do in this blog was talk about how we get the metaphor confused with the reality. We mistake the symbol for the truth. We tend to view the reality of Christ (his life, his death, resurrection, the outpouring of the Spirit, his soon return, the resurrection of all) through the lens of the type. But I’m going to stop here and try to pick up the metaphor angle next time.
Meanwhile, I want to draw your attention to the curious incident of the lamb during the Passover dinner.
Happy Easter!
The Gospel Crank
Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the nighttime.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
Tim Dally dropped a little one-liner in his sermon last Sunday. It was a footnote, a by-the-way. He pointed out that the roast lamb, which we think would be central to the Passover meal that Jesus and the twelve were eating in Luke 22, was missing. The Lamb is AWOL. Jesus made comments about the unleavened bread and he mentioned the various rounds of wine that were drunk, but no lamb.
I draw your attention to the curious incident of the lamb in the Last Supper. What’s that you say? There was no lamb mentioned in the Last Supper of Luke 22 – or of Matthew 26 – or of Mark 14? Well, that was the curious incident.
We who are Goyim (gentiles) generally don’t know squat about “Seder” or the Jewish Passover meal. I certainly knew nothing but now I know as much as you can learn from nosing around various websites for a couple of hours. Bless you, Wikipedia. It was interesting to me to find the lamb AWOL from all the websites too. The Seder meal apparently has several variations and permutations but there is one thing that is common to all forms, namely that the Passover Lamb is represented by a lamb bone on the Seder plate. It can be old – the same bone year after year. From what I could gather from the sites I visited nobody eats lamb, at least there is no requirement to eat lamb. Most eat gefilte fish and matzo soup. Some eat beef brisket. Chicken and turkey is okay too.
So lamb-eating is not central to the feast. But there is a central feature to the feast. The Pesach celebration is referred to as “the Feast of Unleavened Bread.” The feast is all about ridding the bread, the house and the camp from the taint of leaven (yeast). What’s so bad about yeast, you ask? I don’t know. Ask God. My point is that the point of the feast is about yeast, not lamb.
So, apparently, it is a Gentile misconception that assumes the feast of Pesach centered around lamb. Well, we may be excused our ignorance because the first Passover lamb meal did revolve around a rather weird lamb dinner, the instructions for which lie in Exodus 12 for all to read. The people were commanded to roast the lamb (not boil) with all its entrails and hooves and eat it quickly and eat it all. No leftovers allowed. And even though the entire feast happens because God is about to deliver Israel from slavery and spare their first-born from the Death Angel because of the blood of the lamb sprinkled on the lintels of their doorways, despite all that, the people were not commanded to eat lamb each year after that. They were commanded to drink certain cups of wine and to eat certain servings of unleavened bread and to ask specific questions and to recite, remember and rehearse God’s deliverance from Egypt. Each phase of the Passover meal had its significance and its explanations that are carefully laid out and choreographed in Torah, Talmud, and Midrash. And so the matzo is important and the bitter herbs and the wine and the bowl of salt water and all are important. But the eating of lamb does not appear in the ritual.
Go figure.
All of this adds mind-boggling (at least it boggles my mind, which isn’t hard to do I’ve heard) context to the Last Supper story as related in Matthew, Mark and Luke. We Goy need to grasp that the meal is scripted. Jesus & Co. are following the script as all of them had since they were children. In fact the meal is designed to teach children the story of the Exodus (the “Exit” from Egypt into the Promised Land). Everything from the first cup of wine to the hymn sung at the end is scripted. The meal centers around having children ask four important questions around the theme of , “Why is this night different from other nights?” The questions set the parents up to recite the story of deliverance.
And so there are several breaking of bread and giving of thanks ceremonies in the script. Additionally, the thank-you prayers are scripted and there are four rounds of wine, each one focusing its meaning on an aspect of the story. The fruit paste represents mortar I read. And the bitter herbs (romaine lettuce and horseradish) represent hard times. You see, it all has pre-scripted meaning and significance.
And here’s the mind-boggling part: Jesus is following the script. They all knew it by heart. He takes the unleavened bread and says the scripted thank-you prayer and breaks it as he is supposed to…but then he adds, then he ad-libs, then he steps outside the script and says, “This is my body…”
And it’s like he ruins the moment. He’s not thinking about Egypt fifteen hundred years previously, he’s thinking about this night, his night. This is what he came for. This is his life they’re talking about. No doubt the disciples are a little confused.
Then they go back to the script. Things settle down. The youngest person present (John?) would have asked the next question. Jesus would have explained the answer, “This night is different because we all recline and no one sits.” At some point they dip their vegetables in salt water. At some point they are required to dip their unleavened bread into the salt water too, it appears. Was this when Jesus might have said “One of you will betray me…the one who dips his bread in the bowl with me…?”
Then comes round three and four of the wine. Jesus follows the script but again as he is passing the cup (in Matthew we are told they all drank from the same cup) Jesus strays. He does not explain that this is how God delivered his people from slavery. No. He says “This is my blood, which is poured out for you.”
Whoa. Kind of creepy. Jesus is getting weird. What is he talking about? He is talking about his death, he is talking about bleeding to death. He is talking about flogging and crucifixion. He is not about Passover. Passover is about him.
And by saying these things, by adding to the script, Jesus co-opts, steals one of the three most important annual feasts in the culture of Israel (the other two would be Succoth, the Feast of Tabernacles and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement). He steals the story from the Exodus and claims it for Himself. In so doing he declares that “It is the Exodus that points to me. The Exodus is the metaphor. I am the reality.”
Funny. All I wanted to do in this blog was talk about how we get the metaphor confused with the reality. We mistake the symbol for the truth. We tend to view the reality of Christ (his life, his death, resurrection, the outpouring of the Spirit, his soon return, the resurrection of all) through the lens of the type. But I’m going to stop here and try to pick up the metaphor angle next time.
Meanwhile, I want to draw your attention to the curious incident of the lamb during the Passover dinner.
Happy Easter!
The Gospel Crank
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
The Guy in the Back Row
The Guy in Back Row
Luke 14. The parable of the Great Banquet. The focus of Tim’s sermon this week. Did you ever notice the launching pad for this wonderful parable? What was the stimulus that caused Jesus to go on such a “God wants quantity not quality” tirade? The whole point of the parable seems a little odd, but when we consider it as a response to a small, short, seemingly harmless remark made by an unnamed, probably slightly tipsy, little guy in the back row, well, it’s even odder.
Here’s the situation. Jesus has been asked to lunch by a prominent religious and community leader. A man of great social standing and probably some wealth, he is a leader of the Pharisees which means he is a Torah-abiding, clean living soul who would have been regarded by all to have been “blessed by God.” Well, almost all. Jesus seems to be rather unimpressed.
Whatever the glad-handed reason the Pharisee gave for inviting Jesus we are told that the Pharisee’s real motive was to “carefully watch” Jesus as they tempt Him to heal on the Sabbath. This is an old ruse that Jesus has seen before and He is not caught off-guard. It is Jesus Himself who forces the action by taking hold of the bait (a man sick with “dropsy”) and healing the guy before anyone could figure out what was happening.
Jesus seems to be telling his host, “Healing on Sabbath? Don’t be stupid. Of course you heal on Sabbath if you can.” He sends the healed man on his way in perfect health. “Next!” Jesus seems to say. Actually He says, “You tell me, Legal or notlegal?”
But the Pharisees are dumbstruck and say nothing. So Jesus continues on the offensive. He is sarcastic and in-their-face. He challenges His host and the host’s friends, “Which of you wouldn’t help your own son if he fell into a well on Sabbath? Oh wait. I forgot who I was talking to. Never mind your own children, you probably aren’t that attached to your own children. How about your cow? If your prize cow fell into a ditch on Sabbath you’d fetch it out pronto, right?”
Can you imagine? The nerve of the guy. But Jesus isn’t done. He then presumes to lecture them on proper seating etiquette. Now if there is one thing a group of Mid-Eastern religious leaders understand, it is proper seating arrangements and customs. Their status in the community depended upon it. They would never break the rules, either way. First they would never, ever sit in a too-high seat. They all knew the pecking order and rehearsed it every time they ate together. Likewise they would never, ever sit in a seat too low because, why should they? They earned the seat they’re in. Their whole value system of who’s who was manifested in these seating arrangements. It was their system of evaluating who’s who and they took it very seriously.
And this brings us to the whole point of Luke 14 - that man’s way of evaluating the worth of other human beings is all wrong, that mankind’s system of valuing and evaluating stinks. As Jesus said of the Pharisees in Luke 17 a couple of weeks ago, “You are the ones who justify themselves in the eyes of men. But God know your hearts. What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight.
This is more of that. You guys have not the understanding to be evaluating anything. All of your judgments are wrong. You should heal on the Sabbath, of course you should. What are you, nuts? You should not just invite your friends, and important people to lunch. You don’t know who is important and who is not. You don’t understand how God looks at people, how He sees them, what He sees in them, how He loves them, why He loves them. You guys don’t get it, can’t get it, have not the capacity to get it.
That, in essence is what Jesus tell them. “You’re upside down. You’re backwards. You value all the wrong stuff. You think you are good with God but you are not. God detests the way you guys think.
Jesus is letting them have it with both barrels. He is blasting them. He continues blasting them, “Don’t invite winners to your partys. You don’t know the difference between winners and losers. Invite losers. Even though you won’t know why, you’ll have a better chance of getting something right.”
And it is at this particular moment, at this tense juncture, it is this moment when Jesus is about to really tell them the whole truth about themselves that our little Guy in the Back decides to pipe up and participate in the conversation. He probably has not understood anything Jesus has said. It probably has not occurred to him that Jesus is ripping on their whole life-structure. He is still secure in his little hierarchy-good-time-bubble. And he squeaks what appears to be the most innocuous little amen blessing known to man, “Blessed is the man who shall eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.”
Oops. Dead quiet. The wiser Pharisees wince and put their hands to their foreheads and look down, Jesus takes a breath, looks them in the eye and decides not to tell them the whole truth, He changes course and tells them the parable of the Great Banquet instead.
Here’s is the short paraphrase. Blessed is the man who eats you say? That’s true Cy but it ain’t gonna be you. You think you are “in” by virtue of belonging to the right club but here’s the thing about God: Everybody you invite God rejects and everybody you reject God invites. You can’t be more wrong about this than you are.
And here is the hard truth for us: we’re the Pharisees. They are stand-ins for all humanity. They aren’t the Keystone Cops of the Neaar East. They aren’t Curly, Moe and Larry. They’re us. Our judgments, what we value, who we think is important it’s all dead thinking. Our value system, the things we tell ourselves to make our little souls feel okay is 180 degrees out of phase with reality. Happily, as it turns out, all of humanity gets invited to the Banquet too. But we must first abandon our natural value system for one that aligns with God’s values if we can sus them out. Nothing can keep us out except this bit right here – that we think we know something when we don’t.
The guy in the back row then turned to his neighbor and whipered, “What did he day?”
Luke 14. The parable of the Great Banquet. The focus of Tim’s sermon this week. Did you ever notice the launching pad for this wonderful parable? What was the stimulus that caused Jesus to go on such a “God wants quantity not quality” tirade? The whole point of the parable seems a little odd, but when we consider it as a response to a small, short, seemingly harmless remark made by an unnamed, probably slightly tipsy, little guy in the back row, well, it’s even odder.
Here’s the situation. Jesus has been asked to lunch by a prominent religious and community leader. A man of great social standing and probably some wealth, he is a leader of the Pharisees which means he is a Torah-abiding, clean living soul who would have been regarded by all to have been “blessed by God.” Well, almost all. Jesus seems to be rather unimpressed.
Whatever the glad-handed reason the Pharisee gave for inviting Jesus we are told that the Pharisee’s real motive was to “carefully watch” Jesus as they tempt Him to heal on the Sabbath. This is an old ruse that Jesus has seen before and He is not caught off-guard. It is Jesus Himself who forces the action by taking hold of the bait (a man sick with “dropsy”) and healing the guy before anyone could figure out what was happening.
Jesus seems to be telling his host, “Healing on Sabbath? Don’t be stupid. Of course you heal on Sabbath if you can.” He sends the healed man on his way in perfect health. “Next!” Jesus seems to say. Actually He says, “You tell me, Legal or notlegal?”
But the Pharisees are dumbstruck and say nothing. So Jesus continues on the offensive. He is sarcastic and in-their-face. He challenges His host and the host’s friends, “Which of you wouldn’t help your own son if he fell into a well on Sabbath? Oh wait. I forgot who I was talking to. Never mind your own children, you probably aren’t that attached to your own children. How about your cow? If your prize cow fell into a ditch on Sabbath you’d fetch it out pronto, right?”
Can you imagine? The nerve of the guy. But Jesus isn’t done. He then presumes to lecture them on proper seating etiquette. Now if there is one thing a group of Mid-Eastern religious leaders understand, it is proper seating arrangements and customs. Their status in the community depended upon it. They would never break the rules, either way. First they would never, ever sit in a too-high seat. They all knew the pecking order and rehearsed it every time they ate together. Likewise they would never, ever sit in a seat too low because, why should they? They earned the seat they’re in. Their whole value system of who’s who was manifested in these seating arrangements. It was their system of evaluating who’s who and they took it very seriously.
And this brings us to the whole point of Luke 14 - that man’s way of evaluating the worth of other human beings is all wrong, that mankind’s system of valuing and evaluating stinks. As Jesus said of the Pharisees in Luke 17 a couple of weeks ago, “You are the ones who justify themselves in the eyes of men. But God know your hearts. What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight.
This is more of that. You guys have not the understanding to be evaluating anything. All of your judgments are wrong. You should heal on the Sabbath, of course you should. What are you, nuts? You should not just invite your friends, and important people to lunch. You don’t know who is important and who is not. You don’t understand how God looks at people, how He sees them, what He sees in them, how He loves them, why He loves them. You guys don’t get it, can’t get it, have not the capacity to get it.
That, in essence is what Jesus tell them. “You’re upside down. You’re backwards. You value all the wrong stuff. You think you are good with God but you are not. God detests the way you guys think.
Jesus is letting them have it with both barrels. He is blasting them. He continues blasting them, “Don’t invite winners to your partys. You don’t know the difference between winners and losers. Invite losers. Even though you won’t know why, you’ll have a better chance of getting something right.”
And it is at this particular moment, at this tense juncture, it is this moment when Jesus is about to really tell them the whole truth about themselves that our little Guy in the Back decides to pipe up and participate in the conversation. He probably has not understood anything Jesus has said. It probably has not occurred to him that Jesus is ripping on their whole life-structure. He is still secure in his little hierarchy-good-time-bubble. And he squeaks what appears to be the most innocuous little amen blessing known to man, “Blessed is the man who shall eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.”
Oops. Dead quiet. The wiser Pharisees wince and put their hands to their foreheads and look down, Jesus takes a breath, looks them in the eye and decides not to tell them the whole truth, He changes course and tells them the parable of the Great Banquet instead.
Here’s is the short paraphrase. Blessed is the man who eats you say? That’s true Cy but it ain’t gonna be you. You think you are “in” by virtue of belonging to the right club but here’s the thing about God: Everybody you invite God rejects and everybody you reject God invites. You can’t be more wrong about this than you are.
And here is the hard truth for us: we’re the Pharisees. They are stand-ins for all humanity. They aren’t the Keystone Cops of the Neaar East. They aren’t Curly, Moe and Larry. They’re us. Our judgments, what we value, who we think is important it’s all dead thinking. Our value system, the things we tell ourselves to make our little souls feel okay is 180 degrees out of phase with reality. Happily, as it turns out, all of humanity gets invited to the Banquet too. But we must first abandon our natural value system for one that aligns with God’s values if we can sus them out. Nothing can keep us out except this bit right here – that we think we know something when we don’t.
The guy in the back row then turned to his neighbor and whipered, “What did he day?”
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Happy Crank
Yes, the Gospel Crank is very happy. I was gone this weekend and didn’t get to hear Tim’s sermon. I had to listen to it online. It made me smile. In fact, I was dancing in my seat. I was doing the Bar Stool Boogie in my seat. I loved what Tim had to say about gratitude.
He implied that gratitude cannot be forced or contrived, but must be a genuine appreciation for what some one has done for you. In terms of God and the gospel, gratitude comes when we “get” what Jesus has done for us. Or maybe I should say the degree to which we “get” the gospel is the degree to which we have gratitude.
If you are a do-it-yourself religionist, a self-remodeler, if you are spending your life’s energies trying to make your dead soul become Jesus-like, if you are busy fixing the “outer man” but have no clue what is happening to the “inner man,” well, you’re not going to be grateful for a teaching like this one. Why? Because this kind of gratitude comes from the heart, the inner man, that’s why. Faking it on the outside, on the exterior means nothing, zip, nada. Doesn’t count with God.
The story of Simon the Pharisee and the slutty ‘ho with the hair is a living object lesson. It’s an ambulatory parable. Jesus has been trying, with no success, to make a dent in the Pharisee’s well defended religious helmet of self-justification. He seems to be, in this passage, ratcheting up the energy. You have to hand it to Him for not giving up on this bunch. You and I would have just thought, “You know, you’re right. I don’t like you either. The hell with the lot of you.” But Jesus keeps on coming with these guys.
In Luke 15 you have Jesus reassuring the poor and down-trodden with parables of the lost and the losers: lost sheep, lost coin, lost sons. Only, one of the Sons obviously represents the religious leaders in Israel who don’t want to come to the party anymore because Jesus is letting in the losers and the riff-raff. They are offended. They are not losers and riff-raff, they believe, so they don’t want that kind of party.
Jesus tells them “you are the ones who justify themselves in the eyes of men. But God knows your hearts. What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight (Luke 16:15).” Ouch! Detestable? Yes, detestable. And then Jesus tells the Rich Man and Lazarus parable where the apparent loser is the winner and the apparent winner is the loser. Jesus is warning them that they are going to end up like the Rich Man because their value system is upside down.
And then Tim skips back to Luke chapter seven where Jesus is at lunch with Simon the Pharisee and the slutty ‘ho walks in and starts weeping in gratitude and her tears splash on Jesus’ feet (she is standing behind Him while He is reclining at the table) so she wipes them with her hair and pours perfume on them. It’s not a parable; it’s real life. And Jesus tries to make the same point with Simon as with the other Pharisees of later chapters – their value system is upside down. Simon is not thinking like God thinks. He doesn’t love what God loves.
What does it mean to be “blessed by God?” That you have wealth, health, general happiness, a good looking spouse, smart obedient kids? Almost all of would say, “Heck yeah, such a person would be blessed.” How could we not say that? For many of us being blessed means not being like others. Being blessed means having a better car or house than most. It means catching a few breaks. It means not having any inconvenient crisis and trouble in our life. We are blessed. Thank you God.
But Jesus is telling Simon, Jesus is telling us, that our default value system of comparisons to other people is not only wrong, but it gets in the way of what God is trying to communicate to us. Therefore our value system is detestable to God.
How can we be grateful if we think the ‘ho with the hair and Lazerus at the rich man’s gate are not blessed? I mean, challenge yourself. If you were driving by the rich man’s gate and saw the two characters what would you think. I’ll tell you what you would think, “Rich guy, pillar of society, got it all together, blessed. Guy with dog licking his sores, loser, must have made some really bad decisions to get to this place, not blessed.”
That’s what we would all think. I’m the Gospel Crank and I know these things. And our thoughts would be detestable to God … unless … unless our faith in what God has done for us in Christ has converted our thinking. I firmly believe that the Spirit of God would guide us to assume that they both need help. The rich man primarily needs spiritual help. Lazerus needs to be taken to the emergency ward. The Spirit would give us compassion for both. God wants to work through us to meet their individual needs, whatever that may be.
Our gratitude for what Christ has done for us in the gospel would cause us to “regard no one from a worldly point of view (2Corinthians 5:16)” or “after the flesh” as some translations say. At least this is our only hope of seeing past our default detestable value system. We really are blind, you know. Have you figured out that you don’t see what God sees?
And so we end up right back at the feet of Jesus where we belong. And that makes the Crank happy.Lord, we are blind. Help us Jesus. You’re our only hope.
The Gospel Crank
Monday, February 22, 2010
Our Own, Personal, Secret Garden?
I was delighted to hear Pastor Tim refer to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett last Sunday. I was not acquainted with this story growing up, but my wife knew it and read it out loud to our two daughters as they grew up. So I got to hear it as an adult.
The story centers around a girl named Mary who is sickly and unwell but discovers a secret garden where she is so filled with the joie d’vivre that she becomes healthy. She then meets a sickly boy named Colin who is depressed and bedridden. He can’t believe that he can gain health or vitality as Mary did. But Mary is relentless in forcing him up and out and into activity. She shares her secret garden with him and lo and behold, he in fact finds health and vitality after all.
But Mary is relentless. Not only that she is quite unsympathetic, obnoxious sometimes, never taking no for an answer, and always poking and prodding Colin into further action. Her message to the unwell Colin was (my paraphrase) “Oh, get over yourself and do as you’re told.” She is quite pushy, very insistent, and is more stubborn and determined to get Colin up than Colin is determined to stay put. It is a battle of wills that Colin, much to his own happiness, loses.
And the brilliant part about using this story in a sermon is that Pastor Tim clearly intended us to see young Mary, the eleven or twelve year old cousin of Colin, as a type of Christ, the Christ-figure of the story. Tim seemed to be suggesting that Jesus pushes us to expand when we contract. That he is capable of forcing himself upon us when we become frightened and make the wrong choices based on a scared-to-death view of ourselves, of the world, and of God - that maybe Jesus doesn’t give up on us when we give up on ourselves and maybe he pushes and pulls and prods us toward spiritual health and freedom and usefulness and productivity.
I think Tim hinted at all that. And that’s good because we really, really need to be pursued and helped. Because truth-to-tell we are all spiritually like Colin, we are not at all like Mary, no matter who we think we are. We are Colin not Mary. Jesus is Mary.
Generosity, compassion, gratitude. Those are the themes of this series. Who among us doesn’t know we should be more generous? Who among us does not believe we could use a little (or a lot) more compassion? Which one of us can say we are filled with gratitude and thankfulness all the time?
Nobody, that’s who.
It is like the great commandment, love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. Who among us has ever managed that kind of a spiritual state of mind for more than two seconds, consecutively? Hmm? (Don’t lie to me, this is the Gospel Crank you’re talking to).
Where are we going to get the gumption to do, be, or have any of these things - generosity, compassion, gratitude? From within ourselves? Should we do a gut check and tap into our secret stash of will-power and make ourselves behave in these ways? C’mon now, everybody, grab those spiritual boot straps and PULL!
Doesn’t work? Maybe just fake it then. Put on a happy face.
Or does the power, is the source, does the force come from somewhere else, or from someone else or from somewhere outside of us?
If we are all Colins (and we are, don’t argue with me on this one), is there a Mary who will come and get us and show us who we are in her world? Is there a rescuer who will not believe in our version of ourselves, but show us a new version to believe in?
Is there?
The Gospel Crank
I was delighted to hear Pastor Tim refer to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett last Sunday. I was not acquainted with this story growing up, but my wife knew it and read it out loud to our two daughters as they grew up. So I got to hear it as an adult.
The story centers around a girl named Mary who is sickly and unwell but discovers a secret garden where she is so filled with the joie d’vivre that she becomes healthy. She then meets a sickly boy named Colin who is depressed and bedridden. He can’t believe that he can gain health or vitality as Mary did. But Mary is relentless in forcing him up and out and into activity. She shares her secret garden with him and lo and behold, he in fact finds health and vitality after all.
But Mary is relentless. Not only that she is quite unsympathetic, obnoxious sometimes, never taking no for an answer, and always poking and prodding Colin into further action. Her message to the unwell Colin was (my paraphrase) “Oh, get over yourself and do as you’re told.” She is quite pushy, very insistent, and is more stubborn and determined to get Colin up than Colin is determined to stay put. It is a battle of wills that Colin, much to his own happiness, loses.
And the brilliant part about using this story in a sermon is that Pastor Tim clearly intended us to see young Mary, the eleven or twelve year old cousin of Colin, as a type of Christ, the Christ-figure of the story. Tim seemed to be suggesting that Jesus pushes us to expand when we contract. That he is capable of forcing himself upon us when we become frightened and make the wrong choices based on a scared-to-death view of ourselves, of the world, and of God - that maybe Jesus doesn’t give up on us when we give up on ourselves and maybe he pushes and pulls and prods us toward spiritual health and freedom and usefulness and productivity.
I think Tim hinted at all that. And that’s good because we really, really need to be pursued and helped. Because truth-to-tell we are all spiritually like Colin, we are not at all like Mary, no matter who we think we are. We are Colin not Mary. Jesus is Mary.
Generosity, compassion, gratitude. Those are the themes of this series. Who among us doesn’t know we should be more generous? Who among us does not believe we could use a little (or a lot) more compassion? Which one of us can say we are filled with gratitude and thankfulness all the time?
Nobody, that’s who.
It is like the great commandment, love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. Who among us has ever managed that kind of a spiritual state of mind for more than two seconds, consecutively? Hmm? (Don’t lie to me, this is the Gospel Crank you’re talking to).
Where are we going to get the gumption to do, be, or have any of these things - generosity, compassion, gratitude? From within ourselves? Should we do a gut check and tap into our secret stash of will-power and make ourselves behave in these ways? C’mon now, everybody, grab those spiritual boot straps and PULL!
Doesn’t work? Maybe just fake it then. Put on a happy face.
Or does the power, is the source, does the force come from somewhere else, or from someone else or from somewhere outside of us?
If we are all Colins (and we are, don’t argue with me on this one), is there a Mary who will come and get us and show us who we are in her world? Is there a rescuer who will not believe in our version of ourselves, but show us a new version to believe in?
Is there?
The Gospel Crank
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