From the Pulpit:

 
When I was studying creative writing and believing full well that by now I would have published the great American novel, one of the first things I learned  was to be a good eavesdropper, to listen carefully to the words real people spoke and then to find a way to put to good use the amazingly strange things that people say.  

So it was with great alacrity  that I jumped to attention one Thursday at Bible study when Charlotte Peck said, “I was in the HEB the other day, and I wasn’t looking for Jesus.”

I think I told her right then and there that I thought that was one of the best opening sentences that I had ever heard for a short story, and I’ve been waiting to use it ever since.

Well, the day has come. I was in the HEB the other day, and I wasn’t looking for Jesus.

I always check out the magazines as I wait in the checkout line to see what the celebrities are doing, even though I know 90% of it is not true. I like to look at Martha Stewart’s cover recipes, to see what’s on the cover of Texas Monthly, who has lost 100 pounds and how they did it, but there he was, Jesus on the cover of U.S. News and World Report.

Granted, it’s a special edition, Mysteries of Faith: Secrets of Christianity, and it is no coincidence that this issue coming out just prior to the beginning of Holy Week. How awesome, I thought, to have Jesus right here next to People Magazine and the display of Burt’s Bees lip balm. This is where Jesus belongs, and I want you to know  that this is not a wishy-washy Nordic looking Jesus. No, he is distinctly Semitic looking and he holds what appears to be a communion wafer embossed with a portrayal of himself hanging on the cross. This is not the Jesus of the prosperity gospel, the one who tells you that God wants you  to have all the designer stuff you want. This Jesus is inviting you, as you unpack the tuna fish and the paper towels and the green bananas and yogurt smoothies he’s inviting you to dare to enter into a relationship with him, and his look promises that you will not be unscathed by it. I’m all for its placement right where people make impulse purchases. Reach for the Milky Way. Reach for Jesus. How awesome. Jesus in the HEB .

What really intrigued me, though, was the choice of words for the title, Secrets of Christianity. Lordy mercy. We have not been trying to keep it a secret. For two thousand years we’ve been shouting from rooftops. I do my level best every week here in the pulpit and in the Almanac and on our website and in Bible study and in my dealings with that big world out there where I go wearing my attention getting black shirt and white collar, golly, all I try to do is spill the beans. We try our darnedest to let our friends and neighbors know that we have found a most special place up on this hill, someplace where we gather with some pretty unlikely people, not because of who we are, but because Jesus is here, but somehow the good news has receded  to the point that a large percentage of grocery shoppers  will be as intrigued by this magazine as we might be by the covert shenanigans of the Knights Templar or the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012.

I say three cheers for the editors. Whatever it gets to make the world pay attention, titillation with juicy sounding articles about exorcism tucked between the real Jesus and the three Mary's. Go for it.  Our job as Christians is not only to spill the beans but to invite these newly intrigued people to come and dine with us on this most precious meal. And thanks, Charlotte , for the really great opening line.

This is the one Sunday  when I do not follow the crucifer and acolytes down the aisle  to stand in the midst of you to read the gospel. This is the one Sunday when we act out the parts of the characters in our defining story as we knowingly walk into the deepest darkness the world has ever known. There is something very visceral  about our dramatization of the scripture, something distinctively and uncomfortably incarnational about it.

It’s not about something that happened a long time ago. It’s about us. We say hosanna, hosanna. We say crucify him, crucify him. We begin our liturgy in a unique way as well, singing those hosannas from the back of the church embodying the voices of the crowds who threw their coats on the ground for their redeemer king to march into the city and take control. We know, however, that at another gate on the opposite side of the city the Emperor’s storm troopers are marching in, rank by rank and regiment by regiment armored, riding their hundreds of  war horses, not a pitiful purloined donkey, and it’s pretty clear who is going to win the day. Their hopes are high, but it spirals out of control pretty quickly, and we read the whole story today because not everybody here is going to be able to come for our emotion-filled worship services on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Today we get at least a small dose of the pain of it.

There are plenty of churches who celebrate Easter Sunday with nary a nod to the penitential season of Lent let alone the agony of the garden  or the silence of the grave.

When one Sunday school teacher asked the class how do you find the date of Easter,one little boy answered, “It’s four weeks after the Reese’s peanut butter eggs show up in the grocery store.” That’s the world’s Easter, all candy and pastel plush, and we’ll get there, but it will be all the sweeter after we’ve waited in the garden and participated in the agony. All this – the stark reality of it, the injustice, the agony – this darkness is what makes it real, meaningful, worth the wait.

I remember when I was in college and I’d taken art history and one summer when I was traveling in Europe I found myself in the Rijksmuseum,  where they have Rembrandt’s enormous painting, the Night Watch.  In my memory, which may not be accurate, I came into the room and was standing at the top of a staircase looking at the Night Watch from quite a distance, and I stopped there.

The painting is eleven feet tall and fourteen feet wide, and Rembrandt’s colors are dark and subtle, but I had the sense that I had to wait there at that distance and experience the painting as a whole before I dared to get closer to it. I had to absorb its wholeness before I dared to draw near. To have dwelt on the details right off would have robbed the painting of its meaning.

The pioneer cinematographer, D. W. Griffith, who made the groundbreaking and still controversial film the Birth of a Nation in 1915, before anybody knew anything about camera angles or lighting or even the first thing about making movies --  he was asked how he knew to do this thing which had never been done before, and he answered that he had learned it all from Dickens. He noticed how at the beginning of Great Expectations Dickens begins with a wide angle shot, as if from a satellite over the fields of England, and then draws us in to where we can see the graveyard, and then the figure in the graveyard, and finally the lettering on the tombstone.

Today we get our wide angle shot, the sweep of the story, with all its whiplash of emotions, and with this story fresh on our hearts, with our emotional floodgates open in just a moment we are going to welcome a young woman as she declares her intention to cross the threshold towards baptism, to claim her place in the heart of the Christian family. We don’t very often celebrate adult baptisms in our church, and so it is a rare and privileged event for us to vicariously experience what it must be like for her, what it was like for the catechumens of the early church, as they eagerly anticipate  their initiation into the family of this mystery.

A mystery is much deeper and infinitely more profound than a secret. I imagine the editors of U.S. News knew that full well when they chose that word. Yes, their job is to sell magazines, but if you sell a few magazines while you intrigue people to take a taste of what they are hungry for but cannot name, well, more power to them. Let the idea of the secret get them in the door, but what they will find, what Jade will find, what we all find again and again is an ever expanding invitation into mystery, the mystery of a life freely given that we might live and live abundantly, the mystery of the community of faith drawn together to live out the promise of God’s love, the mystery of transformation and healing, and all we have to do is spill the beans.

Amen.