A Mother's Testament

On the Saturday before Easter, Lisa and I found ourselves in one of our favorite places in the world—New York City—with a free evening.  After a little online fishing, we landed two tickets to the Broadway production of The Testament of Mary.  Based on Colm Toibin’s novella of the same name, the one-woman play stars Fiona Shaw and is directed by Deborah Warner. 

Years ago, Lisa and I were fortunate enough to see Shaw in a production of Euripides’ Medea that was directed by Warner.  It was, without question, one of the most powerful, memorable, and unsettling pieces of theater we’ve ever witnessed.  So we were excited at the prospect of seeing the fruits of their latest project together.

We anticipated that The Testament of Mary might shock us and shake us a bit, and we were not disappointed.  Some of the credit here goes to the subject matter of the work.  In the monologue, Mary describes the events that led—with a horrible inevitability—to the crucifixion of Jesus; the unspeakable suffering she witnessed; the confusion and anger she experienced over the things His followers seemed to expect of her.  But most of the credit for the emotional power of the play goes to Shaw.  Her capacity to manifest raw pain and injured rage is, in my amateur judgment at least, unparalleled on the stage.

As with Medea, I would not recommend The Testament of Mary to everyone.  I know many people who would find it too abrasive, too detached from traditional and scriptural portrayals of the mother of Jesus, and too disquieting in its implications.  I myself have reservations about some parts of the play.  But I left the theater with two overarching impressions that I am confident will linger with me and will continue to inform my faith for a very, very long time.

The first impression relates to the loneliness of Jesus.  Certainly, He was often surrounded by crowds and disciples (Mary calls them “misfits” in the play).  But Mary’s description of her son clearly, if for the most part implicitly, offers up an image of a man who kept his own counsel, who moved with his own sense of time, and who was always at the center of things—and yet somehow apart from them.  It is commonplace for us to envision Jesus alone at the time of his temptations or in the Garden of Gethsemane or on the cross.  But I do not think that, until I saw Jesus through the eyes of His mother, I fully appreciated how much of His life must have been haunted by the unique loneliness that could only have belonged to Him.

The second impression relates to His suffering on the cross.  Over the years, I have attended countless Good Friday services that have attempted in one way or another to convey the horrible torture that the practice of crucifixion involved.  I think this is theologically legitimate.  After all, our talk of Jesus dying for us loses some of its force if we forget what this entailed for him as a human being.  But legitimate questions can also be raised as to the point at which graphic depictions of the crucifixion begin to distract us from our understanding of this sacrifice as an act of love and redemption.  I took a pass on Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ for these sorts of reasons.

The Testament of Mary persuaded me that this was the right call.  If you want to try to get your head around the sacrifice that the crucifixion entailed, you do not need to see gory images of nails piercing flesh.  You simply need to hear the act described by the mother of the man being tortured.  On a March night in New York City, I feel like I heard that voice, and I will never forget it. 

For that, I am profoundly grateful.

And I am not just a little changed.

In Witness Shouting and Silent

Scripture: Luke 19:29-40

        In Chelsea, Michigan, we know a thing or two about parades.  Take, for example, our Christmas electric light parade.  It gives you a little bit of everything.  There are rows of school marching band members playing festive tunes; floats featuring carolers, preschoolers dressed like elves, and a nativity scene; and busloads of merry senior citizens wearing Santa hats and belting out “Jingle Bells.”  The first year I attended the parade, the Common Grill restaurant sent someone to participate who was adorned in a lobster costume, covered with a strand of tiny twinkling Italian light bulbs.  I was new to town, but I couldn’t help spontaneously calling out “Christmas Lobster, thank God you’re here!”  Without missing a beat, the woman standing next to me responded “Now do you believe?!”

        Or take our beloved Chelsea Fair Parade.  How could this parade possibly be better?  It starts with the proud veterans who served our country.  Then you get the marching bands; the twirlers and the gymnasts; the equestrian team; the local political leaders and the aspiring candidates; men in helmets in giant fire trucks—and men in fezzes on tiny motorcycles; a vast array of antique cars and tractors; floats proudly bearing the wreckage of the demolition derby and the figure eight; our citizens of the year; the fair queen; Frisbees tossed from the window of an old hearse; bag loads of incoming candy that rain on you like hailstones; and a semi rig full of Jiffy products that helpers cheerfully distribute to the crowd.  Indeed, as you look up and down Main Street you can see our entire community united in a single, common goal: to bring home a few free boxes of corn muffin mix.

        In the passage we read this morning, the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem has some of the festive craziness we associate with all great parades.  The disciples stacked the colt high with their cloaks and seated Jesus atop them.  As he rode along, people rushed before him to spread their cloaks in his path.  People were shouting joyfully and celebrating and enjoying themselves.  Luke makes a point of expressly telling us that this was all very loud—although I think we could have guessed as much.

Luke also tells us that the Pharisees—who never failed to protest when something good was happening—complained to Jesus about the racket.  Jesus responded by saying: “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”  This apparently left the Pharisees dumbstruck, because we hear nothing more from them for the time being.  And we can understand why.  The response that Jesus makes is rich in meaning—or, more accurately, meanings.

To begin, it is interesting to note that Jesus phrased his response conditionally: “if these were silent.”  I take this to be a less confrontational way of saying: “You want to silence them?  Go ahead and give it a try!  Knock yourself out!  It’s not going to happen!”  But Jesus artfully glides right past this point, because the time for confrontation has not yet arrived.  That moment will come when Jesus enters the Temple—His Father’s House—and drives out those who are selling things there.    

So Jesus continues: “the stones would shout out.”  Now, this is a remarkable statement for several reasons.  First, the statement underscores that the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem has a divine inevitability to it; the unfolding events are under the power of God, not of mankind, and their course will not be altered by human beings—whether crowds of rooting disciples or clusters of skeptical Pharisees.  Second, the statement makes clear that the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem will be celebrated with shouts of joy—whether they come from women and children and men or from the very earth itself.  And, finally, the statement reinforces the idea that the Pharisees should stop whining and get accustomed to the noise.  Indeed, as Easter teaches us, the greatest cries of triumph and amazement are yet to come.

This is, of course, one of the ways in which we are sometimes called to bear witness: loudly; extravagantly; in our grand and proudest voices; maybe even a little crazily.  “Enthusiasm” has its root in Greek words that literally mean “God inside”—and that is how the spirit occasionally moves us: vigorously, demonstratively, dancingly, with arms and voices raised.   Abraham Lincoln once declared that when he heard a man preach “he liked to see him act as if he were fighting bees,” and from time to time that is how we must go about this business of living our faith, showing our faith, celebrating our faith.      

But there are other ways as well, and to highlight them we need look no further than to this story as it is told by Luke.  But, first, permit me a brief digression to talk about how the other gospel writers report the story.  All of them tell it; each of them tells it differently; and, in my view, this story serves as a sort of theological Rorschach test that reveals the principal interest of the individual gospel writers.

When Matthew tells the story, he exhibits his characteristic preoccupation with the fact that Jesus was fulfilling a Hebrew prophecy.  This probably helps explain why Matthew says that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on both a donkey and a colt—that is what the prophecy described—though he pays little attention to how these animals were obtained or, for that matter, how one person can ride on two of them at the same time.  Mark, with characteristic efficiency, omits the donkey from the story altogether and explains that a group of bystanders allowed the colt to be taken.  John, for whom Jesus is always the sole focus of attention, has Jesus go find the donkey himself!

But look at what Luke, our master storyteller, does here.  He introduces us to some of the great unsung heroes of the gospels.  He does not tell us their names, their gender, their ages, their social status, or their vocations.  He gives us only a brief and indirect glimpse of them, almost flirtatious in its subtlety: “As the disciples were untying the colt, its owners asked them, ‘Why are you untying the colt?’  And the disciples said, ‘The Lord needs it.’”  And then from those people—the owners who readily surrendered their colt on the strength of nothing more than a suggestion that the Lord was in need of it—we hear absolutely nothing more.  

This, too, is how we are sometimes called to bear witness: softly, quietly, cooperatively, sacrificially, instantly, unhesitatingly.  We hear the voice of the Lord say “this is what I need” and we simply give it up.  In all candor, I think that this is some of the toughest witnessing we do.  We can all throw ourselves into some good-old-fashioned palm-waving when the spirit moves us.  But hearing God’s call and untying our prized colt—whatever that means in our lives—is something else altogether.  Through this short and apparently insignificant reference to the owners of the colt, Luke brilliantly reminds us of one of the questions Jesus invites us to ponder over and over again:

Where is our treasure? 

Where is our treasure?

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we are fond of saying that we are an Easter people—and so we are.  We believe in an empty tomb.  We believe in the resurrection.  We believe in life beyond this life, life beyond suffering, life beyond time, life beyond imagining.

But there is no getting to Easter without walking the hard and sometimes discomforting pathways of Lent.  It is a season of tough questions.  And, today, in the midst of our joyful celebration and our waving of palms, it asks this one: What will you say when the Lord says that He has need of something that you have, something that you can contribute, something that you can do, or, perhaps most importantly, something that you are?

Amen.

Of Faults and Secrets and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Scripture: Psalm 19

I wonder whether anyone has ever had a keener understanding of human nature than Mark Twain.  Consider his observations on unproductive anxiety: “I’ve lived through terrible things in my life; some of which actually happened.”  On happiness: “Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.”  On maturing—and perhaps also on parenting: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.  But when I got to be 21 I was astonished at how much [he] had learned in seven years.”  On shame: “Man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to.”  On moral purity: “A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”  And on New Year’s resolutions: “Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

We are not a full month into a new year and yet many of us can already see the wreckage of our resolutions strewn about us.  I recall one January 1^st when I discovered that in the course of that first and single day I had laid asunder all three of my New Year’s resolutions—to lose a little weight, get more exercise, and watch less football on television—by engaging in a ten-hour-long marathon of college bowl games interrupted only by stuporous excursions to the refrigerator for more French onion dip.  This was, shall we say, an inauspicious beginning. 

And, of course, the higher we aim the harder we fall.  So if we find ourselves in February or March without a perfect record of keeping our checkbook balanced or sending birthday cards to relatives or reading the New York Times from cover to cover then it is possible that we will feel a tad of frustration—but unlikely we will experience a sense of deep personal disappointment.  We may, however, take our failures harder if our pledges involved making truly profound changes in ourselves: to be more loving, more generous, more grateful, more patient, more forgiving, more faithful, more selfless, more like followers of Jesus Christ.  In such circumstances, we may cry with Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment if the same old law-breaker is to keep them?”

For many of us, this emotional struggle is made worse by the fact that we don’t feel comfortable talking about it with other people—perhaps even those who are closest to us.  After all, our “heroic vows of amendment” often involve a battle with an inner demon, and demons tend to be scary, unattractive, and alienating—not exactly the sort of thing you want to show off in front of your friends, your family, your co-workers, your partner, or your children. 

Yet again, Mark Twain understood perfectly.  “Everyone is a moon,” he declared, “and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”  Trying to bring light to that long-hidden and darkened territory is daunting and challenging stuff, particularly if we think we need to go it alone.

We find references to this problem throughout the scriptures.  One of my favorite examples appears in the seventh chapter of Romans, where we hear Paul’s full-blown exasperation with his own failures of resolve. “I do not do the thing I want, but I do the very thing I hate,” he laments in verse 15.  But he continues.  In verse 18: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it!”  And in verse 19: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do!”  Now, notice this: amidst all this confession, Paul still keeps the details of his transgressions to himself.  “Everyone is a moon,” indeed; even our sainted friend, Paul, who in these passages sounds an awful lot like the rest of us.

Of course, the obstacles are still more imposing when we cannot, or do not, or will not see the faults we need to work on.  This is the special genius of those wonderful lines in Psalm 19, thrown in so casually they are almost thrown away: “But who can detect their own errors?  Oh, cleanse me from hidden faults.”  These verses offset the psalm’s theme of praise with one of humility—we may not even know what we don’t know—that presses straight through to those magnificent closing verses: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”

This morning, I want to try to persuade you that this dilemma—how we go about working deep changes in ourselves given our fondness for our faults, and sometimes our blindness to them—is a solvable one as long as we do not engage in three different kinds of mistaken thinking.   If we fall into those errors, we run the risk of convincing ourselves that we are stuck in the mud of our old habits and that our efforts to live differently amount to nothing more than wheel spinning.  But, if we can see those errors for what they are, and move past them, then we have good reasons to be confident that we can shed our old skin and put on some new.

The first error occurs when our self-doubt, prior failures, or observations of the struggles of others convince us that we cannot change—a self-fulfilling prophecy that prompts us to abandon the project.  My friends, this is simply wrong.  Indeed, it is twice wrong.

It is wrong as a matter of human psychology and development; we human beings are hardwired for change—more change than we tend to believe.  Just a few weeks ago, a team of psychologists, led by Dr. Dan Gilbert of Harvard, issued a new report finding that people generally underestimate how much they can and will change.  Based on a study of more than 19,000 people (ranging from ages 18 to 68), Dr. Gilbert and his colleagues concluded that we are inclined to think of who we are as a relatively settled thing—even though later we see how much changing we still had before  us.  Dr. Gilbert says: “[We often look back on our earlier selves] with a mixture of amusement and chagrin.  What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us.  At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”

Dr. Daniel McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University who has studied the same phenomenon, offers this example to illustrate the point.  In the 1980s, at the height of the craze over Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dr. McAdams had a conversation with his four-year-old daughter.  When he told her that someday the Ninja Turtles might not be her favorite thing in the whole wide world, she resisted—indeed, she refused to entertain the possibility.  Of course, eventually other things did indeed come to take their place in her heart, but here’s the most interesting point: this illusion is not limited to four-year-olds; studies show that it appears throughout young adulthood, middle age, and even our later years.  (John Tierney, “Why You Won’t Be The Person You Expect to Be,” The New York Times, January 3, 2013).  It goes with the territory of being human.        

More significantly, though, a belief that we cannot or will not change is inconsistent with the central tenets of our faith.  If we cannot change, then the calls we hear to do so from Moses, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Paul, and Jesus of Nazareth amount to nothing more than a cruel joke.  And our faith does not just subscribe to the idea that we can change; it adheres, with a sacred confidence, to the belief that in our searching encounter with God we are already changed.  As Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; everything has become new.”

This reminds me of one of my favorite passages from the writings of C.S. Lewis: “I pray because I can’t help myself.  I pray because I’m helpless.  I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping.  It doesn’t change God.  It changes me.” 

So the first error—which, as I say, is wrong both psychologically and theologically—is thinking that we cannot and will not change.  We can.  We will.  By the holy grace of God, we are doing so right now, at this very instant.  

The second error occurs when we think—and therefore behave—as though our faults are hidden.  I think that this, too, is twice wrong.  I suspect that more people know more about our weaknesses than we would like to believe.  But, more importantly, God knows about them, every last one of them, no matter how vigorously we have labored to conceal or deny them.

Indeed, the Bible is so absolutely clear on this point that it makes it two times in its first four chapters.  As we all know, in Chapter 3 of Genesis, Adam and Eve try to hide their disobedience from God, and, in Chapter 4, Cain does the same—and all of them meet with the same level of success.  God is not fooled and, at the risk of an extravagant understatement, is not amused.  Proverb 15 tells us that “the eyes of the Lord are in every place,” and that includes all the places in ours hearts, minds, and souls—even the darkest places.

So the second error lies in believing that we can keep our faults and our need to address them to ourselves.  We cannot, at least with respect to God.  Indeed, God already has a very good grasp on those issues—thank you very much—and already knows, infinitely better than we do, what needs to happen next.

Well, that leads us to the third error, which occurs when we think that we have to effect deep changes in ourselves alone and on our own horsepower.  This, I want to suggest to you, is the biggest mistake of all.  And, to get at just what a whopper it is, I want you to think about what it would mean if it were true.

If this were true, then there would be no reason for God to know what is in our hearts that has anything to do with love.  God would just be like some kind of omniscient CIA agent, spying on us and collecting data and turning us over to the proper authorities when we mess up—as we invariably do.  God would embody the most sinister version imaginable of those unsettling holiday lyrics: “he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!”

No, no, and no.  God sees our faults and understands what we need to do differently in these sloppy rag-tag lives of ours.  But God puts this perfect knowledge of us to work on our behalf.  God uses it to bless us, to move us, to illumine us, to inspire us, to connect us, sometimes even to block and tackle for us, always to change us.  And, while we may give up on ourselves, God never gives up on us.

Toward the end of her book “Help, Thanks, Wow: Three Essential Prayers,” Anne Lamott writes this:

“God keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back.  [A friend] says this is a scandal, and that God has no common sense.  God doesn’t say: ‘I have had it this time.  You have taken this course four times and you flunked again.  What a joke.’  We get to keep starting over.  Lives change, sometimes quickly, but usually slowly.”

If you are like me, your own change probably seems the slowest and most halting of all.  But I suppose we can take some consolation in a God who could say “You think you’re a tough nut to crack?!  Let me tell you about some guys named Moses and David and Peter and Paul.  And how they struggled!  I know; they talked to me about it ... all the time.”

Sisters and brothers in Christ, ours is a God of hope and love.  And, where hope and love are possible, change is possible.  That is not just good news; it is, for our sordid and stubborn old hearts, the best news—ever. 

Amen.

A benediction: When I look out my window on this icy and frozen day, I can see no evidence that God is busily at work on spring.  And, yet, I know that He is.  Go forth into this good day knowing that--even when you cannot see it--God is also busily at work on you, with you, for you.  And know that you are blessed that this is so.