Salvation by Malarky

Today's guest post for Jessica Bratt comes from Mark Roeda, pastor of South Bend Christian Reformed Church.

The first season of Louie contains an episode entitled “God.”  Bookended by bits from the title character’s stand-up routine, the episode takes place in 1977.  A pre-adolescent Louie attends catholic school.  While the nun relays the story of Christ’s passion, Louie’s smart-mouthed friend Nick whispers to him some joke.  The nun, who’d had her back to the class, interrupts her description of Christ’s passion and turns abruptly.  “Who finds this funny?”

Nick raises his hand, “Sister Carson, if Jesus did for all my sins, isn’t it a waste if I don’t sin a lot?”  A nervous, titter of laughter.  Sister Carson barely masks her outrage by speaking with great solemnity. “I can see I have not done my job.  I can see I have not imparted to you the true nature of Christ’s suffering.  Tomorrow you’ll know.”

In the next scene, the class fills three rows of pews.  Sister Carson introduces them to Dr. Hatherford. Dressed in a coat and tie and carrying a large medical bag, the doctor strides to the front of the sanctuary.  “You,” he says calmly, pointing to Nick, “You’ll be our Jesus.”  Nick happily obliges.  He positions Nick so that he’s holding the Christ candle like a whipping post, pulls a scourge from his bag, and describes the trauma a centurion’s lashes would inflict on Jesus.

While talking in an intense but matter-of-fact tone, he places a paper crown on Nick’s head and with a red marker draws blood drips on the boy’s forehead.  He pulls a mallet and a small spike from his bag.  He calls Louie to the front, places the mallet in his hand. Then, holding up Nick’s hand and placing the spike to his palm, he invites Louie to pound it in.  Louie looks at him, confused. 

“Go ahead.  Pound it in.” 

“What?”

“Pound it in.  You did it to the Son of God.  Why not him?”

It is a bit of an exaggeration-- even for 1977.  But only a bit.  It rings true enough that one senses that this scene arose out of, if not Louie’s, then someone’s connected to the writing of the episode.  This bears resemblance to the way we teach the atonement.  We, after all, rented theaters to evangelize friends and neighbors by showing Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.  Dr. Hatherford presents a kid-friendly equivalent.  Well, he presents it to kids anyway.  I don’t know that it’s “friendly.”

That evening nightmares haunt Louie’s fitful sleep.  A dream sequence quick cuts between images of the crucifix, Louie crucifying Nick, Louie reading a Playboy and performing other disobedient acts.  Eventually he wakes up, rifles through his father’s tool box, and, though still late at night, runs back to the sanctuary.  Approaching the crucifix in tears, he looks up at Jesus, apologizing profusely.  Then he leans the cross slowly to the floor, takes a pair of pliers from his pocket and pulls the nails out of Jesus’ hands.

This scene cuts to the next morning.  Sister Carson stands with Louie’s mother in the sanctuary.  “I trust that he will be punished for this when he gets home,” says the nun.  Louie’s mother assures her that he will be.

In the car with Louie slouched in the front seat, she asks her son, “What happened in there?” 

Louie unloads his guilt, interspersing confessions of specific sins with references to how he severed Jesus’ nerves, cut his flesh to ribbons-- how he killed Jesus. 

“Wait,” says his mother.  “Is that what they’re teaching you in there?”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“No, it’s not true.  Look at me, Louie, it’s not true.”  She then assures him that he’s a good kid, that he makes mistakes, but that’s because she’s not through raising him yet.

“But Jesus came back.”

“No, he didn’t.  Think about.  It’s malarky.”

Their conversation concludes by determining he should attend public school and they should go get donuts.  (But then the car won’t start.)

Among the remarkable things about this episode is its affirmation that we desperately need what the church, ostensibly at least, strives to offer.  We need freedom from our guilt.  We sense that early on.  There are times I am sure my own children are psychopaths, incapable of genuine remorse.  At others, often as they’re being tucked in for the night, this guilt and shame and tears just pours out of them.  The load they were carrying-- it nearly overwhelms me.

Sister Carson calls on Dr. Hatherford assuming she is trying to get through to psychopaths. She is wrong.  His presentation and many of our presentations of Christ’s suffering and death do not alert us to our guilt as much as they complicate it, make it seem insurmountable.  We assume that the distinction between “he did this for you” and “you did this to him” should be clear. 

For Louie, it is not the resurrection that offers promise of salvation.  It’s the denial of the resurrection.  It’s the fact that the resurrection is “malarky.”  That saves him from his guilt and shame.

I suspect that this too rings true for a lot of people.  They don’t leave the church because they suffer from psychopathology.  They carry their share of guilt and shame.  But they find salvation from it not in Jesus Christ but in learning to put Jesus Christ in perspective-- according to Louie’s mom, “a good man who wanted people to love each other.  And, boy, did he get his for it.” 

Training to see

Today's guest post comes from Mark Roeda, pastor of South Bend Christian Reformed Church:   

Learning to read resembles learning to ride a bike.  In the beginning it feels impossible.  You can’t imagine how people zip down a page full of words or around a neighborhood.  They never even wobble-- not when flying off curbs or encountering silent letters.  It’s as easy as breathing.

As my daughter struggled to read, I would remind her of this.  “Remember how frustrated you became?  How you’d want me to let you go and, as soon as I did, want to grab on again before you’d fall?  When is the last time I’ve had to do that?”  It offered some consolation, I think. 

But reading has not come like pedaling or breathing.  In fact, as she sat with a book, her breathing became like her reading-- halting and labored.  Reading with her was like running alongside the bicycle.  You could never just release your grip on the back of the seat and watch her go.  This past summer, the summer before her third grade year, she still wobbled through books for first graders.

So we had some testing done.  As part of the process, we were told to schedule an appointment with a doctor in St. Joseph, Michigan-- forty-five minutes north of us.  He would check her visual processing.  This seemed silly.  We had just taken her for an eye exam.  She had perfect eyesight. 

The optometrist attended our church so I gave him a call, hoping he could write a note indicating that such tests were unnecessary.  Instead Dr. Rhodes assured me that they were not prescribing an eye exam.  Visual processing is different than vision.  He then reminded me how complicated a task reading is.  Parallels to Eden aside, we evolved eyesight to detect snakes hidden in high grass and to distinguish ripe fruit from unripe.  Staring intently for sustained periods of time at a close object covered in small, intricate markings-- that’s complicated, foreign to most species and relatively new to our own. To read you don’t need to simply see well, you need to be able to process what you see well.  All the neurological cables have to be plugged in properly.

So we saw the doctor in St. Joseph.  In fact, we have made trips back up there twice a week for the last couple of months and will continue to do so into next month.  Between trips there are exercises she must do every day.  In one, for example, we tape to the wall in front of her a sheet with rows of p’s and q’s, b’s and d’s.  Then each hand tosses and catches a scarf while she reads the letters to a metronome’s beat. 

This hasn’t transformed her into the Lance Armstrong of reading-- and not just because we have yet to dope her blood.  But her reading has improved.  She picks up books and reads-- sometimes just because.  The way some one just decides to go for a bike ride.  That is new.

I have thought about this in terms of Lent. Throughout the year we proclaim the truth of the gospel.  In Lent, however, we confess the fact proclaiming the truth is not enough.  We have truth-processing deficiencies.  To phrase it biblically, we hear but do not understand.  Our efforts to embody the truth are wobbly.  And so in Lent we do therapy, we engage in exercises intended to correct those deficiencies.  Giving up something for Lent, fasting, praying the hours-- these are less about hearing the truth than about developing minds more receptive to the truth, being better able to process it.  It’s about getting those truths into our hard wiring.  Brains quick to operate in ways that are self-serving, learn over time things like self-sacrifice.  

In this we follow the example of Jesus.  Jesus begins his ministry with a forty-day fast, each of those forty days an opportunity to process the truth that one does not live by bread alone.  By the end of that stretch of time, the wiring is in place.  As Mark Buchanan writes, “Jesus actually stood at his strongest when his belly was empty. Jesus is in peak condition, a fighter who has been training hard.”  The lies of Satan fall on ears not deaf so much as fine-tuned.  Hard-wired for the truth.

A Good Day

Good morning. Happy Monday. Happy busy, lots-to-do, didn't-get-enough-done-this-weekend-or-enough-rest-either kind of morning. Welcome to another brief interval between sunrise and sunset. If you're anything like me this morning, you could use a little perspective. A little reminder to be present, not to get too far ahead of yourself. A tidbit of encouragement and inspiration. A wake-up call, not to all the tasks and appointments that your day holds, but to the simple wonder and beauty of this day, this unrepeatable gift of a day. So I share with you this lovely short meditation, "A Good Day," from Br. David Steindl-Rast. Get comfy, get your coffee or whatnot, take a deep breath, and receive the day.  

...and if you don't have five minutes to reflect (which itself might merit some reflection), here's a tidbit in the form of Mary Oliver's poem "Mindful," from Why I Wake Early. 

Every day

I see or hear

something

that more or less

kills me

with delight,

that leaves me

like a needle

in the haystack

of light.

It was what I was born for -

to look, to listen,

to lose myself

inside this soft world -

to instruct myself

over and over

in joy,

and acclamation.

Nor am I talking

about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,

the very extravagant -

but of the ordinary,

the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.

Oh, good scholar,

I say to myself,

how can you help

but grow wise

with such teachings

as these -

the untrimmable light

of the world,

the ocean's shine,

the prayers that are made

out of grass?

Martins and Luthers and Misquotes

 

I snapped this photo from my seat at the Washington, D.C. restaurant where I had brunch with a friend last Sunday. I admired the chalk mural, and wasn’t surprised by the MLK Jr. and Obama visages—D.C. was abuzz with inauguration and MLK Jr. Day festivities, decorations, and souvenirs.

But something wasn’t right. Ah, I thought, it’s the quote. 

“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would fall to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t say that. It’s attributed to Martin Luther. And there’s some debate about whether Luther himself ever actually said it.

After quickly confirming this (thanks, smartphone, and thanks, Wikipedia!) I mused with my friend about whether the artist knew or cared that MLK Jr. didn’t really say this. And about what difference, if any, it makes that the restaurant patrons will come away from their meal thinking that he did. And about how our 500-year-old Reformation rockstar Martin Luther is getting no credit. (Maybe I was sensitive to this, having just come from an Episcopalian worship service. I think the smell of incense is still clinging to me.)

Out of curiosity, I asked a waiter. No, he said, he didn’t realize that the quote was misattributed. And no, the artist wasn’t working at the restaurant today. Hm, I said, well, it’s just interesting to me. A little defensively, he replied, “Well, it’s not gonna get changed now, she spent a long time on it!”

Now, I won’t disclose the name of the name of the restaurant, lest I impact their Yelp reviews. Not that the foodies who come for brunch are all that concerned with historical accuracy regarding 16^th and 20^th century reformers. (Although I bet they’d be indignant if they discovered, say, that their ethically sourced specialty coffees were actually Folgers).

The thing is, this restaurant is located in the Columbia Heights area of D.C., less than a quarter mile from the intersection that was one of the flashpoints for the riots that erupted within hours of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968. The area was burned out, ravaged by the riots, and didn’t recover for decades. In the past 15 years, with the extension of the D.C. metro out that way, and the accompanying economic recovery, it has become one of the nation’s most rapidly gentrifying zipcodes. The white population there is booming, in the midst of what was a predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhood. 

All that to say, I tend to think there is significance in what we choose to remember or misremember when it comes to the people who have pushed for change, even given their lives for it. As the rector’s sermon that morning had pointed out, ours is a nation rife with historical amnesia, and we have a hard time maintaining enthusiasm for social change for more than about 20 years at a time. So I guess the quote is harmless to some degree, but I do wonder what harm ensues over time if we collectively neglect to let ourselves be confronted, really confronted, by the more pointed exposures of injustice and the summons to toil for justice that marked most of what MLK Jr. really did say.

At least it’s a quote that sounds like it could have been something MLK Jr. said. He planted every seed he could until the very end, when he reached the tomorrow when his world and work did come to an end, leaving a nation scattered with seeds that are still waiting to be watered and tended.

Meanwhile, in our nation’s capital, where every sound bite and slip of the tongue is subject to media scrutiny, I suppose time will tell which words we adhere to, whose inspirational and articulate ideas we really invest in. We choose what to remember. 

Little children to lead us

Today marks a month since the school shooting in Newtown. The media have moved on, of course, and discussions continue about what changes can or should be made to our gun laws. Meanwhile, we try to “process” what happened and our thoughts drift back to those at the epicenter of the tragedy who have embarked on the long, slow journey of grief.

I want to pick up where I left off a month ago:
“May the God who meets us in our fear and sorrow take us by the hand and lead us out in love.”

I wanted to share those words that Monday, but I also deeply needed to hear them myself. My own sorrow and fear felt overwhelming. From my work in recent years I know all too well what the immediate aftermath of a child’s death can look like for parents and siblings and communities. I can picture all too easily the raw expressions of grief when it seems the future has been snatched away forever, and the bewilderment of those who must somehow go on living in the aftermath of such tragic and premature loss.

Comfort emerges in different ways for different people, of course, and there’s no unilateral prescription for when and how healing might unfold. Over and over again, though, I’ve been moved by the way in which children themselves often have a sense of what to do or say in order to face heavy tomorrows. For as much as we adults fret about what to tell the children about grownup-sized tragedies, we also witness the mysterious ways in which their youth gives them access to deep knowing, the kind of knowing we have often become too jaded to recall. We worry about what to tell them; sometimes we just need to listen to what they are telling us.

Maybe that’s why we can hear truth when a child utters something that, were it to come from the lips of an adult, would sound like an empty platitude. When I listened to a 9 year old boy, a surviving Sandy Hook student, tell the evening news reporter that Sunday, “Well, we already made it through one day, two days, three days....I think it’s going to be okay,” I wanted to believe him (help my unbelief!) in a way that no grownup could convince me.

Children, while causing our hearts to fill with fear at the thought of something happening to them, can also surprise us as the bearers of pure hope and love. I’m not talking about cutesy ‘kids say the darndest things’ entertainment; I’m talking about the real wisdom embodied in their wonder, curiosity, and trust.

I’m sure many of us can recount times when “the God who meets us in our fear and sorrow and takes us by the hand to lead us out in love” has appeared to us in the form of a child--not just the Christ-child, but any child.

I’m remembering the huge stack of Christmas and holiday cards I distributed a year ago on Christmas eve as I roamed the halls of the children’s hospital where I was a chaplain. Made and donated by local elementary school students, they carried messages of cheer to kids and families who would be spending Christmas in a hospital room. Some were awkwardly funny (“Hi! I’m so sorry for you that you’re in the hospital. That’s terrible.”) and others were just poignant and honest, like this one (which I take the editorial license of translating as “I want you to feel better”):



I left handfuls of cards with various families, dropping them on bedside tables as anxious parents dozed or looked for ways to pass the time. The recipient I remember most, though, was the 19 year old boy who was all alone, his home life not much better than life in the hospital, whose incurable cancer would take his life just a few months later. On what would be his last Christmas eve, this young man who had so often bitterly expressed his anger and sadness was able to laugh and smile without restraint as he leafed through these crayon-scribbled notes. I watched as the honest well-wishes of those anonymous children touched his heart in ways that no one else could.

I think, too, of the 13 year old boy who unwittingly ministered to me recently, two days after the Sandy Hook tragedy, as I felt weighed down not only with Newtown, but with the pager I was carrying as the weekend on-call chaplain for two local hospitals. My mind and heart were heavy, and even my trusty “Be Not Afraid” reminder above the door in my kitchen could not forestall the sensation that the world is just teeming with brokenness and pain, that all we can do is wait for the other shoe to drop. Well, it was early Sunday morning, and I encountered the boy and his uncle in the hospital chapel; the boy’s 10 year old sister, his only sibling, had died during the night after a lifelong struggle with chronic illness. We sat, talked, lit a candle, and prayed, and then he picked up a Bible and suggested that we read his sister’s favorite Bible passage. Great idea, I said, what is it? “The ten plagues,” he replied, and proceeded to read aloud, about eight chapters of Exodus in their entirety. He calmly read, clearly comforted by the familiarity of the story and the feeling of connection to his sister.

And I, I who was worried about finding the right thing to say or do, I who was burdened by the thought of my Connecticut clergy friends who were facing their congregations that morning, I who felt helpless to change a culture of rampant violence and media circuses, I was given the gift of sitting and listening. Just listening, for nearly an hour, as this dear teenager read to me and to his weeping uncle. Just listening, reminded of how long and drawn-out those terrible plagues were, how long those Hebrews waited for deliverance, how long Pharaoh’s oppression was allowed to persist. Just listening, and letting my prayer align with the ageless cry to God: How long must we endure this pestilence?!

Are we really listening to kids? What are they saying? What are they really asking for?
How great would it be if the conflicting parties around the gun control debate could take a few cues from children. First do some playing, take a nap, and have a snack, and then let’s talk about assault weapons. We forget how adult-centric is the very notion of the right to bear arms. Enough votive candles and teddy bears--if we really want to honor the youngest victims of Newtown, let’s ask children their age whether 300 million guns in this nation make them feel more protected or more imperiled.

We have a long way to go until the wolf dwells peacefully with the lamb, but we get glimpses now and then of the little children who will lead us on that day when Isaiah’s vision becomes reality. Lead on, kiddos.