Reflections on "Lincoln" and Christ the King

       

       The wonderful thing about really well-crafted movies is that they bring one-dimensional images to life, sucking the audience into the world of the film, tearing down the strong barriers of time and place and even self. For me, the recent movie, Lincoln, is just such a film. I knew a little bit about Abraham Lincoln’s life before I saw the movie, but in my imagination, he was just one more heroic American figure, a writer of beautiful speeches, a martyr whose tragic death changed history, the stereotype of a self-made man. The movie, however, brought the flat historical figure to life. It gave him an imperfect human voice with an accent that I recognize and a penchant for saying dumb things like my dad and for wandering off into annoying stories like my colleagues at clergy meetings. It gave him a marriage strained by tragedy and death. It made him a real politician, not above buying votes and manipulating his opponents. It made him a real lawyer, ready to stretch the truth to reach his ends. It made him a real father, in conflict with his oldest son and distractedly spoiling his youngest, all while trying to do his job. It gave him the depths of anger and frustration and grief common to each of us human beings, no matter when or where we live or what we do.

        Even more importantly, however, the movie took the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution and brought it to life. The movie might be called Lincoln, but its real heart is Lincoln’s courageous testimony to freedom in fighting for the passage of the amendment that banned slavery once and for all in this country. Indeed, the movie shows that the Amendment is a document born not only of Abraham Lincoln’s all too human gifts and frailties, but of the courage and cowardice of politicians, the sacrifice of soldiers, the hopes of slaves, the prophetic power of abolitionists, the grief of widows, and the brilliance of statesmen. Freedom for all human beings is the truth that lies beneath the lives and the politics that we watch on the screen, and Spielberg’s genius is to use that truth as the backlighting that illumines the whole story.

          After seeing what Spielberg did with Lincoln, I couldn’t help but wonder what he would have done with Christ the King? I can imagine an exciting movie about King David, making real the one-dimensional idealized portrait of the King that we read today in 2 Samuel. The piety of these supposed “last words of David,” could be ripped open to unveil the lustful David who uses his position as King to make the married Bathsheba his own, and the conniving David who has her husband Uriah killed. The movie could portray the difficult relationship that David has with his children, especially his son Absalom, against whom he goes to war, and at whose tragic death he sobs in shattered grief. The movie could even show how David’s relationship with God connects—or fails to connect—with his political aspirations as King of Israel. Jesus, however, is more than King David.

          Or, Spielberg could make a great movie about Pontius Pilate and the political dilemma that he faces in sentencing Jesus. The flat “crucified under Pontius Pilate” of the Creeds could become, in Spielberg’s talented hands, the story of a multifaceted Roman functionary, negotiating a rocky marriage and the troubled path between his Roman superiors and the rebellious Jews with whom he must deal. Bringing Jesus’ trial to life would have us sitting on the edges of our seats as Pilate hesitates over and over between his scruples and political expediency.

          A movie about Christ the King, however, would be much more complicated. Spielberg could certainly bring the real humanity of Jesus to life on the screen, a hero dealing with fear and exhaustion and bickering disciples (and perhaps even a wife who wants more of his time….?) But he would also need to show Jesus somehow negotiating the complex historical inheritance of King David’s political mantel, not to mention reflecting the power and majesty of the cosmic Judge on the heavenly Throne, the Alpha and the Omega that we read about in our second lesson today. Could even such a talented director as Spielberg convincingly portray humanity and divinity in the same frame?

Nevertheless, just as Spielberg’s movie conjures up the hope of freedom through the political story of the 13^th Amendment and Lincoln as its champion, the intangible and illusive truth, hope, freedom, and justice of the Kingdom of God must focus on the face of its King, this divine King with a human face. “The reason that I have been born, the reason I have come into the world,” says Jesus in our Gospel lesson, “is to testify to the truth:” the Truth of God’s reign of grace, love, freedom and justice on earth. Behind the politics of Christ the King lies the truth of God’s Kingdom, a truth that is the backlighting of our story.

          Richard Lischer asks in another context, “What is more important, the political power that openly rules the world, or the kingdom of God that secretly consecrates [the world]?”[1] The secret consecration of the mundane, the slow process of goodness eating away at evil, the one-step-forward, two-steps-back character of God’s action in the world, is often hidden by politics and institutions and other tainted human constructions. Perhaps perceived conflict between human politics, on the one hand, and divine power, on the other, is one reason why Christians tend to pull our collective hair these days over the image of Christ the King.

“Kings are autocratic rulers,” we grumble, stuck on politics, “an outmoded image for our Savior.”

“Talking about Christ as King leaves out women,” others protest.

“The whole metaphor is too political,” say yet others, yearning for the spiritual.

Many of our brothers and sisters in England were in despair this week over a very political vote at their national synod on whether or not to approve the ordination of women as bishops. Most people in the church and in the government, after years of debate and study, thought that a yes-vote was assured. Surprisingly, the motion did not pass. One priest wrote, in an attempt to move on from disappointment: “Sometimes when we feel furious with or hurt by the church, the only thing to do is to reinvest in the kingdom. Maybe, today, in this moment of despair, that’s where hope lies.”[2] Hope does indeed lie in the Kingdom, and in the deeds of love that build it up, but I’m not so sure that the kingdom and politics, whether that is church politics or secular politics, can be entirely separated one from another. They lie intertwined, waiting for the right story, the right testimony—not just from Spielberg but from each one of us—to bring one-dimensional images to life, to tear down the strong barriers of time and place and even self, to suck us into the world of the Gospel, into the world of Christ crucified and risen.

Lights. Camera. Action.

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[1] Richard Lischer, Open Secrets, 212.

[2] Sam Wells, “Talking Points,” November 21, 2012, found at http://www.smitf.org/press-releases/response-to-women-bishops-vote/

Where is God When Skyscrapers Fall off of Cliffs and Barren Lives Hold us Captive?

         So, as Jesus turned the corner onto Wall Street, one of his disciples, who had never visited the City before, said to him, “Wow! Look, teacher, what immense stones, what huge buildings! It looks like they reach all the way up to heaven ….!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great skyscrapers? Not one stone will be left here upon another, all will be thrown down.” Once they were settled on a grassy hill in Central Park, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, in voices filled with both fear and complicity: “Tell us, did you really mean that Wall Street will soon fall? It’s the Fiscal Cliff, isn’t it? It’s all going to come toppling down as we fall with it into chaos in January, right? The devastation of Superstorm Sandy was surely just a sign of the ruin that is upon us?”

          I don’t think that it takes much of a stretch of the imagination to replace the power-structure of the Jerusalem Temple, over 2000 years ago, with the power structure of Wall Street these days. The Temple, like our stock market and our banks, was a powerful institution; some people lived from its thriving, and others recoiled from it as a center of political and religious corruption. The Temple, with its immense stones and its holy origins, looked invincible. The prediction of its fall by Jesus signaled more than the collapse of a building; it signaled an entirely new way of being in the world. Indeed, only some forty years after Jesus’ death, the powerful Temple and the world of Jesus’ Jewish listeners lay in ruins—destroyed by war with Rome—yet ripe for amazing new beginnings in both Judaism and, of course, in Christianity.

          The imminent collapse of the foundations that structure our world—that is something that we can identify with these days. Wall Street, the institutional Church, family, industry, even our climate and coastlines … all look like fair game for some kind of massive divine reordering. Even the sensible Christian writer and humorist Anne Lamott posted this week on Facebook: “It’s all hopeless. Even for a crabby optimist like me, things couldn’t be worse. Everywhere you turn, our lives and marriages and morale and government are falling to pieces. So many friends have broken children. The planet does not seem long for this world. Repent! Oh, wait, never mind. I meant: Help.”[1]

Apocalyptic language, such as we see today in Mark 13, is a powerful response to the kind of despair that Lamott describes. God hears the world’s cries of pain and injustice, this language says, and God is going to act. “Apocalypse” does not mean the end of the world; it means “uncovering,” the revealing of what has been hidden. It is powerful language for urgent times, for times when something new simply must be born, for times when the “birth pangs” of change can no longer be held back. Wild, apocalyptic language screams, “Repent!” “Pay attention!” “Watch out!” “Hold on!” God is coming soon with power and great glory…. and urgent change!”

However, before we get swept away into too much fear or too much drama, I would like for us to catch ourselves, following Anne Lamott’s lead in the quote that I just read. Our first lesson for today offers us another kind of language for desperate times, a quiet language just as urgent and just as powerful as “repent,” a quiet language that can herald earth-shattering change just as much as the apocalyptic can: the little word, “help!” uttered in prayer. These are words of prayer for new birth, rather than heralds of the labor pains to come. Listen to Hannah’s story.

Hannah is trapped and in trouble. In a world in which a woman’s worth and security are tied to her ability to give birth to sons, Hannah is a loser. Year after year, despite her prayers and her efforts and the love of her husband, she endures shame and ridicule for her childless state, and she has become “bitter of soul,” angry at her destiny, and at the end of her rope. She refers to herself as a woman of “hard days” and “troubled spirit,” a helpless servant of the Lord, imploring God—and us—to “see, yes, see” into her misery and despair. Eli the priest, representing the upstanding religious structures of her society, certainly feels as if he has the right to treat her sharply, watching her suspiciously, calling her drunk, and then ordering her to get rid of her wine. Surprisingly, however, Hannah speaks to God with firmness and confidence. She speaks of what God will do for her, bargaining with the Lord about what God will give and what she will give in return. As she prays and makes her vow to God, this powerless, doomed woman speaks as if there is hope for her future, speaks as if God is listening to her prayer, and she even finds the strength to stand up for herself to Eli. A life of continual misery, prolonged in time and carefully described in the first half of the story, evaporates quietly like mist in a single moment of baring her soul to God. In response to her silent, heart-felt “help,” God transforms and heals her. As soon as she prays, her countenance lifts, and Hannah knows that God will act. It is as if her unborn son is already snuggled in her arms.

After her son is born, in the verses that follow today’s lesson, Hannah fulfills her vow to God, leaving baby Samuel at Shiloh as promised, and she continues her prayers in the beautiful poem that later gives rise to Mary’s Magnificat, praising God for raising up the lowly and bringing the mighty to their knees. Hannah’s strong, quiet prayer soon becomes Hannah’s powerful song …. a song that sounds an awful lot like Jesus declaring that the great stones of the Temple will fall and like Mark proclaiming in the vocabulary of apocalypse that the Day of Judgment is at hand. For Hannah, the birth pangs of change follow her labor, rather than precede it. “The bows of the mighty are broken,” Hannah cries, “but the feeble gird on strength …The Lord will judge the ends of the earth … and exalt the power of his anointed.”

Apocalyptic language says, “Look at the outside world and hang on, because God is going to fix what is broken!” Hannah’s prayer says, “Know in your heart that you have been heard, that God is going to fix what is broken!” Looking from the outside in or from the inside out, we hear today that God’s presence means change, God’s healing action means measurable transformation, a total shaking of the foundations.

Three years ago, before beginning Year B in the lectionary, diocesan clergy were invited to spend a few days at All Saints’, studying the Gospel of Mark with a New Testament scholar in order to prepare for the upcoming year in preaching. After listening to her lectures and reading chapter 13’s “Little Apocalypse,” I escaped for a walk in the woods before dinner. Walking through the barren winter landscape, I was given the gift of a spectacular sunset, a burning, frightening glory of a sunset that could have come straight out of the best apocalyptic literature. I went back to my room and wrote the following poem:

Heart fire,

Embers of divine vindication

Ablaze in a dark, icy plain

Like an urgent secret

That silently devours the horizon,

Looming red intensity

Tamed only by the delicate

Slivers of branches raised

Like hands outstretched

In welcome--

Or to keep the change

At bay?

With Hannah, we cry out for saving change. With the disciples, we tremble and ask when it will come. Behind our cries of “help!” or “repent!” lies the urgent intensity of a God who holds us, and all of our fragile constructions, in a strong and merciful embrace.

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[1] Anne Lamott, “My secret little prayer,” found at http://www.salon.com/2012/11/13/anne_lamott_my_secret_little_prayer.

Unbinding with words

        “Unbind him, and let him go,” Jesus orders Lazarus’ family after he raises his friend from the grave. We assume that the family obeys, freeing Lazarus’ arms and legs and face from the stinking burial cloths as they welcome him back into the world of the living.

“Unbind him, and let him go,” Jesus always whispers gravely to me, as I sit down to write a funeral homily. As a writer, I can imagine what it might be like to write fiction, freely to create my own world of characters, each with their own personality, their own quirks, their own way of acting in the world. I don’t think that such a task would be nearly as meaningful for me, though, as the parish priest’s privilege of getting to know the true hearts and souls of real human beings, characters of God’s creation, and attempting to distill with words, some approximation of the essence of a person’s soul in a funeral homily. The funeral homily is a kind of unbinding: an unwrapping from hospital smells, funeral parlors, and images of lifelessness; a removal of the trappings of death so that the individual stands before us just as she is standing in God’s living presence, on the other side of that horizon that falls away so steeply from our view.

In thinking about All Saints’ Day, and having just buried Aleece (on Friday,) this process of unbinding has been on my mind as I have remembered our St. Thomas saints. Listen to a brief litany of just a few of the saints who have entered into God's presence from this parish in the past 18 months:

 “Aleece would take my hand firmly in hers, and pulling forward toward me, she would look directly into my eyes before speaking her greeting. Most people mutter a hasty hello or stick out a half-hearted hand in welcome, but Aleece pulled you into her heart with her handshake.”

“In her long years of illness and of patient waiting, Darlene was given the grace to embody God’s steadfast love, God’s ever-faithful loving-kindness.”

“Fred took on the world with gusto, with his boisterous jokes and hearty laugh after church, his generosity, and his ability to read Holy Scripture and coach others with authority and self-assurance.”

“Jerry’s wise eyes brimmed with a deep understanding of human joy and sorrow, and his wry smile offered a tacit acknowledgment of life’s absurdities. In Jerry’s presence, you knew that you were safe and accepted just as you were.”

“Joe faced death with a determination to leave this world in the honorable, upright way in which he had lived his life. Just like he got up early every Sunday morning, put on his suit, and came to worship, he wanted to be ready when God called him to heaven.”

“What I will always remember when I think of Martie is the loving twinkle in her eyes. It was not really a mischievous twinkle, although that might have been part of it, but it was rather a kind twinkle, a sparkling of her soul.”

“If Daryl had been standing near the self-important disciples who were turning away the little children as they came curiously sidling up to Jesus, he would have been the one motioning to the children with a nod and a wink to stand behind him until he could get Jesus’ attention and smuggle them over to him. I can picture Daryl now in a comfortable shirt and with a giant mug of sweet tea, sitting on a stump and listening intently to Jesus’ words while quietly engaging the children around him, the children that nobody else was paying any attention to.”

Can you see them with us again now, our beloved saints? Here with us, in all of their sometimes maddening yet always magnificent individuality? Here with us and yet free from the bonds of death? In unbinding our saints, all that I have are words to cut a small sliver into their deep and eternal holiness, pulling it away from their death, and then calling your attention to it. Rowan Williams writes that holiness is not some kind of human characteristic along with others, such as “she was short, fair-haired, overweight, and holy.” Notice that I did not use the word “holy” itself in any of my funeral descriptions. To be holy, however, is to let God’s presence shine through us, like light shines through a window. One can be good without necessarily being holy, and one can be terribly flawed and yet act as an essential bearer of God’s light.[1] As our little Preschool children sing to one another every week in chapel: “I see the love of God in you, the light of Christ come shining through. And I am blessed to be with you, O holy child of God.”[2] To be holy, to be a “saint” if you will, is to stand consistently and courageously in a place where God’s light is going to come through, to stand in relationship with others while standing in relationship with God.[3] And as we all know, God’s persistent, unstoppable light will seep through any crack that it can find.

It is all about connecting, isn’t it? God’s light shining through human beings; God binding Godself to the world in the form of Jesus; the dead unbound from death and the living unbound from the sin that sucks away our life; the saints in heaven present with the saints on earth. “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them,” writes the author of the book of Revelation. All Saints’ Day is our celebration of the connectedness of Christ’s Body in heaven with Christ’s Body on earth, the connectedness of the living and the dead in Christ. All of this All Saints’ theological talk can sound so abstract, so implausible, until we put it in these terms of individual relationships, relationships with people with whom we have experienced a love that is stronger than death. All of the images of heavenly cities paved in gold and of throne rooms ringed with cherubim and seraphim are word-pictures rather than factual statements, word-pictures like the ones that I use to talk about the twinkle in Martie’s eyes or the wisdom in Jerry’s smile. They too are words that create images stronger than fiction, images that connect, images that show what it is to unbind what is living from what is dead.

My daughter, who spent six months in Peru, wrote in a blog post several years ago that she never really understood our Episcopal All Saints’ Day in this country until she spent it with her host family in Chijnaja. There, high in the Andes mountains, families would prepare all of their departed loved ones’ favorite foods and gather, not in the church, but in the cemetery. Then, beside the graves of friends and family, they would drink lots of beer, pray, play, celebrate, and then share all of the food with one another. The Peruvian Christians seem to understand that, in order to remain in relationship with heaven, they must feed one another on earth. They seem to understand the eternal and timeless nature of relationship in God. After all, only God in Jesus Christ was able to discard his own burial cloths in the darkness of the tomb. The rest of us, like Lazarus, need a community to unbind us.

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[1] Rowan Williams and Joan Chittister, For All That Has Been, Thanks: Growing a Sense of Gratitude, (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2010), 65-67.

[2] From the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd curriculum.

[3] Williams and Chittister, 67.