Holy Week-Holy Thursday
This week demands of the faithful that we meditate on a series of dramatic images told in Biblical stories:
a Palm branch; a dinner with bread and wine; a crown of thorns and cross;
finally, an empty tomb…
A lot can happen in a week.
Do I need to tell you that though? Haven’t you been to celebrations with the music turned up?
Have you who been to places where petty and jealous ones show up to break bread with you?
Are you acquainted with grief in the halls of hospitals or hospice?
Of course you are acquainted.
Which means, yes, in fact; I do need, if not to tell you, at least remind you, a lot can happen in a week.
***
Last week I was sitting at my dining room table having breakfast. Next to me was a book by Kurt Vonnegut—Fates Worse Than Death, my laptop, and a box of Life cereal. I was reading the Vonnegut because just a few days earlier I had quoted him from this pulpit; talking about a sermon he delivered at an Episcopal Church in Manhattan meditating on a woman washing Jesus’ feet. I was hoping to glean some more spiritual wisdom.
That’s when in between spoonful’s of Life a Facebook post popped up.
The post was a newspaper column from another Hoosier writer from my hometown of Muncie, Indiana, John Carlson. John called his column, “A Life Filled With Wonder.”
It ends with these words, “Whatever your belief, whatever the truth, we all have an irrevocable rendezvous with the end.
And the simple fact is, nobody knows more about it than anyone else,
from the wisest scientists, philosophers and theologians to the most witless among us.
I am just grateful to ponder it, not with fear, but with wonder.”
John’s wife Nancy called it his final column.
She shared the sad news that John died the night before surrounded by his family in hospice care.
A lot can happen in a week.
***
I didn’t know the newspaper columnist well. John was a member of my home church. I was just a teenage babysitter for his children in the early 1990’s. Yet, last week I found myself crying big wet tears at the news of his death. As a writer and spiritual leader I tried to put words to my grief…the first word was in front of me was—Life.
***
L’ chaim our ancestors in faith, the Jewish people, might say as they raise a toast, affirming the breath within us and the world around us.
Dayenu they specifically say tonight. “It would have been enough…”
15 times they’ll say it.
Dayenu; “It would have been enough…”
5 times about being freed from slavery.
5 times about miracles.
5 times about life with God.
Dayenu “It would have been enough…”
***
I didn’t channel the profundity of the Jewish Seder when I worked at Columbia University. I did get some of the performativity though. I created a Service of the Senses at the University Chapel, St. Paul’s. Its intention was, as Episcopal theologian Patricia Lyons says, to come into contact with material faith—sacramental—some call it.
First, I poked fun at a contemporary culture that says we can literally buy Life, Bounty; Luv; or All at the grocery store.
Then in a much more serious way I invited students to encounter faith in incense; music; and finally in bread and wine. I was nervous when I created the service. I spent considerable time writing what I was trying to accomplish by quoting Episcopal historian and ethicist, Gary Dorrien. I footnoted Cornel West and tried to explain two millennium of liturgy in a few paragraphs. The gist of it was this…we need not just ideas, images, or stories to meditate on; we need faith we can taste and touch and see and smell.
***
That’s what John Carlson’s final column in the newspaper did. Except he didn’t footnote or justify his religious convictions. He kind of shrugged his shoulders, told some jokes and said, we’re all going to die…and no one really knows what’s next, not the scientists, the philosophers, the theologians; even the witless ones. It's then that John goes on to profess his faith in God who loves us by confessing perhaps his lack of it.
(Which sounds to me like Peter and friends who fall asleep while Jesus is praying.)
“My first real exposure to death was inside an ambulance.” John Carlson writes.
He talked about an earlier marriage, and his wife going into labor two months early…which then meant something much different than now. “It was there I soon found myself sitting alone,” he says, “praying for hours outside the room where my son was being treated with the best that modern medicine could offer.”
Every now and then, a kind young doctor came out to give me updates, but as the day dragged on, it became obvious where this was headed.
The doctor came back out one last time.
Did I want to hold my son’s hand through one of the ports in his incubator?
God knows I did want to, and God knows I should have.
But at the door, I froze. “I can’t,” I told the doctor, shakily, absolutely terrified of the crashing depth of emotion I knew would bury me in there.
“I’m sorry, I just can’t.”
And turning around, I left.
***
The spiritual experiment I tried in St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University; inviting people to taste and touch, see and smell faith, is something I tried to capture here in Jersey City today. I invited people to sit in a sacred place where grace and peace dwell; to meditate on a series of dramatic images told in Biblical stories:
a Palm branch;
a dinner with bread and wine;
a crown of thorns and cross;
finally, an empty tomb…
I invited the meditation because a lot can happen in a week.
If celebration, betrayal, and death are left just to Jesus; then so too is an empty tomb that has very little to do with us…But if these are also our stories; not dramatic reenactments—then the story of Jesus, especially the empty tomb part is also our story.
***
Like our namesake St. Paul, I have been writing to you dear people of the Church of St. Paul and Incarnation about making the story of Jesus your story every day in blog posts during the season of Lent. In a series of reflections, I mailed to your house last week I anticipated this week. I told you about an experience I had in a hospital room in San Francisco.
Do you remember?
A well-respected CEO, the life of the party, was suddenly struck mute and immobile by a brain aneurysm.
The family made a painful decision to turn off life support. They invited me to pray and share words of scripture. However, it wasn’t my prayers or an invitation to meditate on a series of images or stories that brought Jesus to that hospital room. It was a teenage girl with something you can touch and see; a brown bag, like you’d carry lunch in, that carried love.
The dying man’s niece brought a scrub brush and wash cloth and lotion…to give him a foot massage.
Wait what?
“I always asked Uncle Paul for a back massage. I told him if he did I would massage his feet. He always rubbed my back; not once did I keep up my end of the bargain. Today, I wanted to keep my promise.”
Dayenu “It would have been enough…”
To my ears I heard to story of a foot washing. Of a commandment to love one another. Do you know this story?
I don’t know. Maybe. I might have heard heard it before. I just came to massage his feet.
And what is faith?
To meditate on stories? Or to live them?
***
Two weeks ago I realized the noon service I planned with the Minister of Music wasn’t an official Book of Common Prayer Service. I got nervous. What if people think, horror of horrors, I don’t know what I’m doing.
Wait.
If this is what I think as a trained theologian; an ordained minister with 20 years of experience in congregations and universities… what does this say of faith expressed with music that’s not hymns. Words of spiritual challenge and comfort that aren’t biblical?
It’s one of the reasons I print in full the words of two professors: Martin Marty and Amy Jill Levine.
Marty’s words are to affirm the idea that faith must be personal. For you!
Levine’s is to talk about the impersonal and horrible ways faith has been used not to love but to excuse hate.
***
Back to the images:
a Palm branch;
a dinner with bread and wine;
a crown of thorns;
finally an empty tomb…
A lot can happen in a week.
Do I need to tell you that? I do; because I want you to embrace Palm Sunday, whether told by Vonnegut or the Gospel of John as your story of triumph! We need parades. Reversals, celebrations when we are not used to or expecting them. We need, and surely have, dinner tables. The invitation is not to mindlessly eat but to savor Life.
To use love not as a commodity, but as an awareness that even when people, who do not have your best interests—and will hurt you— there’s virtue in not hurting them back. The crown of thorns and cross of death remind us, “we all have an irrevocable rendezvous with death in the end.”
Here’s the thing, the newspaper columnist; friend, husband, and father says, “the simple fact is, nobody knows more about it than anyone else, from the wisest scientists, philosophers and theologians to the most witless among us.”
He also says, “I am just grateful to ponder it, not with fear, but with wonder.”
That we ponder a story which is not just Jesus’, but ours, means anything is possible:
A lot can happen in a week.
This is my body. It is given for you.