Howdy folks. I've shared links to our Steampunk Theology project in the past, and wanted to give the link to my latest contribution. For those who wonder what a steampunk is, in short, it's a kind of literary subgenre, based in the Victorian area (though encompassing much of the world at that time) that dabbles in re-imagining and re-visioning history as if steam technology, and not fossil fuels, maintained primacy. Much of it is concerned with exploration, adventure, discovery and invention. A few fellow nerds and I have decided to bring theology into the mix.
The past few posts have taken the form of a kind of dialogue between our steampunk alter-egos (the Magus, the Ecclesiast, and me, the Alpinist - alter-ego personae are also vital to steampunk). We're trying to weave together various threads we've created in order to make an emerging overall story-arc, so if you're into this kind of thing, make sure and read the various links. It's a work in progress, so we too are "discovering" the details and connections in the story as we unearth new documents and sources!
(Audio available at the conclusion of the sermon text below)
~
I always feel more religious in the sunshine,
especially if it’s not hot and the place is pretty
and most people can’t afford to get there or just
don’t bother. Morning has broken and all that.
And so the rattle of rain on the tarp doesn’t really
make me count my blessings, the stray drops
beading my borrowed rain pants don’t bring
me bliss, the fact of fewer mosquitoes
than yesterday does not make my heart leap up.
But I know that one day I must learn
to give up for good on getting dry,
to love the hiss of water meeting water,
the gray lake accepting the gray rain,
so little between them, our slender place
between the great sky and the stones.
Hold tight, I tell my heart, here we go.
-Jeff Gundy
~
-Dear
Matthias,
-So
I know the last thing you’re probably looking for from your preacher father is
a personal letter...in the form of a sermon.But look on the bright side: we both know if I were left to
my own devices, this could get pretty
lengthy.As is, I’ve got to
keep this thing under 10 minutes, or the people listening in are gonna revolt.So the community’s got your
back on this one.
-I
was really excited to preach this week, because it’s the one time each year that we get to read about the one story where your name is mentioned in the
Bible.I wanted to preach about
why we chose to name you after Matthias, the disciple chosen by rolling dice to
replace Judas…and also why we had to change your name three times before your slightly perfectionistic parents finally
chilled out and settled on it.
-But
then this week happened in Denver.This week, our lawmakers at the capitol voted to ban outdoor camping in
the city - effectively displacing the homeless folks who are an important part
of our family's community.This week, they
also voted down a proposal to allow civil unions - effectively denying them to GLBTQ folks.So this week, many of our friends and
family here in Denver are experiencing pain, rejection, anger, frustration, and
betrayal.It’s been a pretty bleak
week.It’s a week that makes me
want to say, with Jesus in today’s Gospel, that we “do not belong to this
world.”
-And
listening to Jesus, you can just hear the struggle in his voice as he says a
final prayer over his followers before he goes to the cross.He obviously loves these faltering
friends of his.He’s protected
them and guided them.Taught them
about peace and love.And now, he
prays to His Father: “as you have sent me into the world, so I am sending them
into the world.”And we all know
how that story ends for Jesus.The
cross is hardly the kind of thing any father wants for their son.
-Definitely
not what I want for you, Tai-Tai.Because
as I hold you in my arms, thinking about this text and you, the last thing I’d want to do is send you into
a world like this.A world where,
if it turned out you loved men instead of women, you would be denied the gift of a marriage covenant with the person God had sent to intimately teach you about love, and forgiveness,
and holiness, and grace.A world
where, if it turned out you ended up homeless, you would not be allowed a place to
sleep.A world where politicians
use and abuse us for the sake of votes and salary, where churches attack others
instead of facing the Spirit’s call of death and resurrection.A world that Sin, Death and the Devil
have made into a playground of self-interest, rather than a good gift to be
shared in love.
-No,
I’d want to take you out of this world.To the kind of world like we glimpsed this weekend, on the House for All retreat.Up into those mind-blowing mountains,
where I can keep you wrapped in my warm flannel shirt as we walk through the
mist at sunrise.Where the clouds
come so close to the earth that its hard to know where this world ends and
heaven begins.Where friends love
one another, and sing together, and pray together...and even roller skate to bad '90s music together.Where even your crying all night
is a grace, because it means more time getting to hold you close, safely next
to my heart.
-Maybe it's less about taking you out of any particular place in the world. Maybe it’s just keeping alive within your soul a place where you can remember the truth about this home
God has created for us. Because look, son.God delighted in making this world, and God made it good.God made this
world’s people so brilliantly glorious that if we could see them in their true
nature, I believe that, as CS Lewis once said, we’d fall down and worship each
other as gods.God made nature so amazing
that if we truly appreciated it, we’d gladly switch places with all those homeless folks, wanting
to sleep out of doors every night, just to gaze up at the stars in endless childlike
wonder.God made communities - even churches! - so powerfully intimate, that in spite of the ways
we use and abuse one another, God is committed to bringing us back to one another
again and again.
-So
I hate to say it, but it seems there’s a tension here.A paradox.(Hey, you’re
Lutheran -get used to it.)It’s
both-and.“This world” is a place
God delights in and loves, and sent Jesus to redeem, and the Spirit to
re-create and sanctify.But it’s
also a place covered in darkness, bent away from the light - what one of my
friends this week called a “Shadowed Cosmos.”
-But
see, that’s why I think Jesus’ prayer for us is so powerful.In preparation for living into this both-and tension, he asked God to: “Sanctify them in the
truth.”Now, on the one hand,
that’s a very mean thing to ask for us.Because it’s gonna mean having to see things as they really are.And before we can truly see the glory,
we’re gonna have to see the shadows. And not just the shadows cast by those capitol hill politicians. We'll also have to confront the shadowlands of our own hearts. And that's not gonna be fun.
-But
Jesus refuses to protect us from the shadows, because he doesn’t want us to
miss out on the light.Jesus
doesn’t want us – or anyone - to miss
out on the glory of this creation that God pronounced “good.”So Jesus calls us out - just as he
called out that first Matthias, and says, “be witnesses to the resurrection.”Tell them a better
story.Tell them about the truth – about the real world.
-Tell
the world God loves that the heart of the universe is not rot, but resurrection and new life. Tell the world that God loves that there is a
Creator, that there is a Savior, that there is a Redeemer, and that this God isfor you, for me, and for us all.This God will be for you, no matter
where you sleep at night, no matter who you marry, no matter which party or
church you join.This God gives us
permission to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, bless the
outcast, sanctify the sinner, marry the unmarried, and proclaim Good News. Even
if it means defying the devil, defying the state -and even defying the church.This God frees us from cynicism, since
this God frees us from concern about results, or success, or failure, and asks
solely that we delight in trusting God to make this story our story.
-This
God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, and lived, served, was crucified, died
and was buried, descended into Hell, rose again and ascended into heaven, so
that we could be free to love and serve one another, and share the blessings of
this insanely marvelous creation with all peoples and all nations in peace.
-And
that, my Little Man, is why I begrudgingly want to pray Jesus’ prayer for
you.That you be sanctified in the
truth, as you are sent into this world.It’s a world that will break your heart with its horror.But also a world that God gave you to
melt your heart with delight.It’s
a world God will never give up on, no matter how dark we make it.And God will never give up on you
either – you, or me, or anyone else.
-So,
Matthias, may you be in this world, and may you learn to delight in it as God
delights in it, as you learn to tell the story of the resurrected Jesus.When grief threatens to crush your
spirit, let there be mountains, let there be community, let there be singing
and wonder, and yes, let there even be roller skating.May you be sanctified in the truth.May you delight in being a guerilla for
grace, and in practicing resurrection.And may the joy of Jesus be made complete in you.
What if 19th-century radical Christians possessed Hauerwasian theology, disillusionment with nation-bound institutional religion, and a ready supply of airships and hot-air balloons? Wonder with me at Steampunk Theology!
Supreme geekdom continues to reign at Steampunk Theology, to which I contribute under the character of "the Alpinist," along with my colleagues and fellow adventurers, the Magus of the North and the Ecclesiast. Recently, we've uncovered a communique from a radical youth group meeting in Oslo, Norway from just before the turn-of-the-century, recording a visit to the group by legendary arctic explorer and national hero, Fridtjof Nansen. See what his life has to say about the mission of the church...
Preached at House for All Sinners and Saints Denver, Colorado Second Sunday of Easter 15 April 2012
Texts: Acts 4.32-35 Psalm 133 1 John 1.1-2.2 John 20.19-31
(Rough audio recording of sermon can be found at the end of the text below)
-It’s Eastertide, and I’m kind of depressed that I’m here. I’ve never really been an Easter kind of Christian. Maybe it’s the fact that I just can’t stand lillies - or, for that matter, any other pollen-producing agent of the worldwide conspiracy to incite an allergy uprising in my sinuses. Maybe it’s because I’m still just not quite sure what to do with all of this resurrection business. Sin, death, and darkness, I can deal with. Resurrection, new life, and sunshine? I prefer the Lenten minor-key hymns of the crucified Christ to the major-key celebration of the empty cross. I believe in the resurrection – I’m just not sure how to believe it.
-Maybe that’s why I love today’s Gospel story about Thomas so much. Because Thomas plays hooky on the first Easter Sunday. He’s just simply not there with the other eleven when Jesus shows up - walking through walls, breathing out strange Spirits, and, you know, being alive. And Thomas misses it – simply didn’t go to church on Easter.
-Which makes me wonder: why wasn’t Thomas around? We are told the others were gathered behind locked doors out of fear of the Jews. Maybe Thomas was the only one who wasn’t scared. After all, six chapters back, when Jesus started talking about having to die, it was Thomas who exclaimed, “let us go too, that we might die with him!” Maybe Thomas was the only one with the stones to go buy groceries, or make a beer run, for his terrified friends. Or maybe he simply refused to follow the way of Peter’s denial - refused to be ashamed of his love for his crucified master.
-Or maybe Thomas’ love took a different form. I’ve always wondered if, perhaps, Thomas loved Jesus so much that he was off doing what any good Jew would have done for a loved one: grieving - what they called “sitting Shiva,” Hebrew for the seven days you sat in mourning. I wonder if, while the others were cowering, he was grieving the death of the one he was willing to die for. While the others locked up their love behind fear, he chose loyalty, sitting Shiva at the foot of the cross. Even on Easter Sunday.
-Which helps me make sense of why Thomas seems so angry with his eleven friends when they come in hoot-and-hollerin’ about resurrection. If I’m in the midst of suffering pain, loss, and grief, I’m thinking I would have said the same thing as Thomas. “You cowards. I’m grieving - like you should be - and you come in here, trample on my grief, acting like nothing happened. telling me about your amazing worship experience, and expect me to believe your crazy story - respect my grief. Or else, get lost.”
-See, I don’t think Thomas deserves his infamous title, “Doubting Thomas.” I don’t think anyone doubts just for doubting sake. And certainly, no one doubts in a vacuum. I think every doubt has a story behind it. I wonder if there were some dashed hopes, shattered dreams, unfulfilled promises behind Thomas‘ bitter refusal to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead., Maybe there was some anger and betrayal and unheard cries for companionship and community behind Thomas’ reaction.
-So “Doubting Thomas” just doesn’t seem fair. Maybe “Hurting Thomas” is a better appellation. Or “Grieving Thomas.” Or just plain “Human Thomas.” Or, do away with labels completely. Just Thomas. Regardless, I suspect he’s been each of us at some point in our journey of doubt and faith.
-But see, the story doesn’t end with Thomas’ anger. Somehow, the following Sunday, Thomas returns to the community - back at worship again. And once more, I wonder: why?
-I wonder if the other disciples, those faltering Jesus followers have something to do with it. Because I wonder if, perhaps, one or two of Thomas’ friends...listened to him. Heard his grief and his pain. Maybe they even sat down with their friend. Not in denial of their own amazing experience of the Risen Jesus. But rather, perhaps, because of it,. Maybe because of their experience of resurrection they were willing to be with Thomas in the midst of his so-called doubt. Offering not answers and arguments, but companionship and community.
-St. Vincent de Paul once wrote that, “it is only because of your love that the poor will forgive you the gift of your bread.” I wonder if Thomas forgave the disciples the gift of their disturbing, disruptive resurrection testimony because they shared with Thomas the gift of their loving, patient presence. I wonder if they were also able to forgive Thomas the hurt caused by his doubt, because of their willingness to enter into the doubt caused by his hurt.
-Perhaps the disciples’ testimony about the resurrected Jesus was made believable, not because they understood it any better than Thomas, but because the Spirit breathed from the Risen Christ had begun to transform them into people unafraid of doubt, of despair, of grief, or of suffering. Had begun to shape them into a people capable of fulfilling Jesus’ first resurrection commandment. His first commandment to us after he was raised from the dead was not to believe, or, “teach doctrines,” but to be at peace, to forgive, and to be reconciled to one another. Perhaps the Spirit had already begun resurrection in their lives. But a resurrection that always-already marked by the scars of the cross.
-And I have to hope that the disciples also learned something from Thomas. For when Thomas looked through the holes in Jesus’ hands and sides, he saw a glimpse of a new reality far beyond anything he had possibly dreamed. He confesses, more boldly, more confidently, than any person ever before him, “my Lord and my God!” Thomas glimpsed a God who reigns from heaven, not as a supernatural spiritual supermodel, but with scars on God’s glorious body. Thomas looked through those holes, like an adventurer peering through a spyglass, glimpsing a vast, undiscovered dimension of reality in which it is not only permitted to doubt your doubts, but also, to believe your beliefs. Where the last word is not despair, death, or suffering, but rather, reconciliation, restoration, and new creation.
-I wonder if that’s how it works for us as well. I’m still not exactly sure how to believe in resurrection. But I have the funny feeling that I’ve already been living in it. Not because of any belief or doubt on my end. But because the arms of the wounded Christ have been holding me all along, through this community of wounded healers called church. Where, whether we are a believer, a doubter, or somewhere in the vast in-between, we breathe with the same Spirit of the Resurrected Jesus. Where, being willing to share and look through the wounds we all bear, we catch glimpses of a mysterious reality: that, even when we cannot get ourselves to the resurrection, Christ is in the business of getting the resurrection to us. Whether we believe it or not.
The Easter Vigil at House for All Sinners and Saints epitomizes our motto of "anti-excellence, pro-participation" - with a lot of celebration added to the mix. This manifests itself especially during the Vigil readings, the time when the community tells stories from the Old Testament of the saving ways of God with God's people Israel. At HFASS, various folks volunteer to recast the story in unique, creative, and often hilarious ways.
This year, I took on the not-so-hilarious tale of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac (see Genesis 22). This story took on particular poignancy for me now that I have children of my own, and especially because of the gift of a son of my own, our six-month-old, Matthias. We're also preparing for the end of internship, which means leaving HFASS, Casa Karibu, our family and friends, and much we hold dear here in Denver. Letting go, it seems, has always been a rather unfortunate part of the whole faith-trust-grace deal.
Thankfully, songwriter Andrew Peterson has already penned what I consider one of the most powerful "Christian" songs of all time, and it happens to be about Abraham and Isaac. Rather than try to match it, I covered it with a few slight adaptations. I managed to record a take when I was practicing earlier in the day, which I include below, along with Peterson's lyrics. Hope it ministers to anyone else in the midst of death, change and trial, as it continues to minister to me.
"Holy is the Lord" by Andrew Peterson
Wake up little Isaac And rub your tired eyes Go and kiss your mama Well be gone a little while Come and walk beside me Come and hold your papas hand I go to make an altar And to offer up my lamb
I waited on the Lord And in a waking dream He came Riding on a wind across the sand He spoke my name Here I am, I whispered And I waited in the dark The answer was a sword That came down hard upon my heart
Matthias and me at the Great Southern Window Moab, 2012
Holy is the Lord Holy is the Lord And the Lord I will obey Lord, help me I don't know the way
So take me to the mountain I will follow where You lead There I'll lay the body Of the boy You gave to me And even though You take him Still I ever will obey But Maker of this mountain, please Make another way
Holy is the Lord Holy is the Lord
And the Lord I will obey Help me for I do not know the way
Anyone who’s shared a meal with me knows that I am a sucker for fountain soda. Like a horse let loose in the feed room, I’ll keep downing the stuff until I explode - though, luckily, unlike a horse, my bladder generally warns off my stomach before it’s too late.
Soda is basically legalized euthanasia. There will never be a prohibition against it, even though perhaps there should be. Because aside from gradually rotting out teeth and our bodies from within while bestowing the wonderful gift of type 2 diabetes in return for our dollar, the logos of the soda companies splashed across bar windows, billboards, and painted on the sides of shanties across the developing world, testifies to the sheer commercial and political power of a company capable of assassinating labor leaders in Columbia with impunity, while poisoning the rest of us.
But the veracity of such accusations is not a sidestepping of the sinister fact that, repeatedly, I both choose to indulge my addictive craving, and also, frequently, feel that this addictive craving, this thirst is choosing me. Even having vowed to shake my soda habit this side of age 30, the thirst has not left me - whether I am being faithful to this commitment or failing at it.
I thirst.
There is no AA for soda drinkers. And I’m honestly not sure if there is an AA for gluttons, or for the desire for instant gratification of our thirsts in general. Because for most of us, lacking the strength of the focused few, the craving, the sheer thirst of our deranged desires, is not a source of joy. It is, rather, the interface, the demonically topsy-turvy table at which we receive the eucharistic elements of a consumeristic world - freely, frequently, yet never, without cost. This craving thirst is not an addiction, after all. It’s simply faithfully supporting the economy. While being told we are partaking of "the real thing."
Earlier in St. John’s Gospel, a thirsty Jesus reveals to a thirsty woman by a well that he is living water come down from heaven. By the end of the Gospel, this living water is thirsty once more. I’ve always read this ostensibly, as a moment of dire weakness, a pathetic plea scratched from the parched leather of the Savior’s tortured throat. This is most certainly true, and it fits the bill of Johannine irony.
But I wonder if another way to view these last words of Jesus from the cross - completely within the trajectory of John’s irony - is to hear Jesus speaking our craving. Jesus, on the cross, bearing the weight of humanity’s disdain for God, drinking to the dregs the cup he so desperately desires for the Father to take from him, a drink he is unable to refuse, powerless to stop imbibing. Perhaps Jesus’ cry of thirst can and should be heard by us not only erupting from the void of a lack. Perhaps it can also be heard as the greedy, gluttonous, unbridled announcement of the overflowing craving borne of our overflowing abundance.
And I don’t mean this as if Jesus simply died because I can’t stop drinking soda. The depth and power of the grace of Atonement in its multifarious glory is far too mysterious to be contained in any theory, or bounded by any pathetic sin of my own. And yet, on the cross, the Crucified One is not merely a reflection of, but the very embodiment of the Truth and Reality of humanity’s sinfulness. When we look upon the cross, we see what happens when we serve golden calves rather than divine splendor, what results when we willingly sit at the tables of poisoners - tables we help to set - and feast on the bread and wine that we take for ourselves, rather than receiving the bread from heaven that we are freely given. The mere fact that the early writers so often refer to the cross as an “atonement” is less to limit God’s activity, and more, to unveil the unlimited capacity of twisted human activity, both to require the mercy and grace of God, and also, to destroy it when it comes.
The cross is like Dorian Gray’s portrait. Oscar Wilde’s famous anti-hero makes a Faustian deal with the devil. He remains eternally young and beautiful, while his portrait ages. So too, as we imagine ourselves drinking draughts of immortality and experience the thrill of exercising the power of our prosperity and our privilege - even as these powers exercise us - the portrait of the reality of human nature ages, withers, bleeds, screams, and dies upon the cross. And this portrait, the Incarnate glory of all that divinized humanity could hope and is promised to become, scratches out the words of our cravings.
“I thirst.”
If Dorian Gray ever looked at his portrait, the horror would overwhelm him, and he would die. At the novel’s end, having murdered the portrait’s painter, Dorian experiences a brief moment of clarity, and plunges a knife into his image’s heart. He is discovered later, stabbed through his own.
The Crucified One crying out his thirst is the portrait of humanity’s perfection in the divine image gone wrong because of our diabolical dealings. Even as we realize we are the drivers of the nails, all we can do in such moments of clarity is to keep driving. We drive the Living Water to the point of dryness by drowning Him in our thirsts. And when our portrait dies, so do we.
The hope for me is that it is in fact we who are the perverse portrait, and that, in declaring his thirst, it is Christ who plunges the dagger of grace into the very heart of broken humanity. It is God who, passively and non-violently, destroys the world we have wrapped around ourselves. It is God who, in thirst, drowns our cravings, and promises a different beverage, a better feast.
“I thirst.”
These words are plea, reflection, judgment, and consequence. Jesus is subjected to the full force of our addictions and our cravings. He becomes them. He joins us in drowning in their deluge. And they are also confession, and so, grace, mercy, reality and truth. And one way or another, Jesus promises, we shall know the truth, and the truth shall set us free.
The first “last words” Christ is recorded as saying are not even in English...or Greek, as the case would have been for St. Mark the Evangelist. To a non-Jewish reader unversed in Hebrew or Aramaic, they’d be incomprehensible without the accompanying translation Mark provides. And I wonder if that’s the point. Because even in translation, coming from the God-Man, the Savior of the world, they are incomprehensible - horrific if we let them be: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
A few years back, when I was serving as the Worship Coordinator for the Duke Youth Academy, I wanted to put together a live stations of the cross to bring our day of focus on crucifixion and Good Friday to a close. That day, the high school students had also gone on a pilgrimage of pain and hope through Durham, North Carolina, where they visited, among other things, slave quarters from an old plantation, an old civil rights activist, and several neighborhoods bearing and still receiving the scars of segregation and racially-motivated violence. I didn’t want to let them off the hook, didn’t want to allow the sheer reality of the situation to become two-dimensional souvenirs on 4x6 inch celluloid.
I did not want to mitigate the horror.
I wanted our stations to gather into itself the context in which the students were immersed. We invited the students to each select a station, and to write a prayer to accompany the readings. The prayer would tie the specific station to an experience of the cross from the day’s pilgrimage, or related to racism somewhere in the world. A handful of students volunteered to dramatically portray the stations. When he heard about what we were up to, the only Black male staff member came to me and solemnly requested to play Jesus. I was both thrilled and mortified. Because the students playing the soldiers, who would accompany Jesus around the sanctuary from station to station, whips and nails in hand, were both white.
I also enlisted the aide of my good friend, Duke classmate and Delta-bluesman, Toby Bonar. I asked Toby to create a solemn litany, a kind of Blues-Taize chant, for the worshipping community to sing during the time it took the crucifixion party to move from place to place. I wanted its words to be Christ‘s earliest last words: my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I’d never heard them sung in a focused manner in worship before, only as incidental verses in the traditional reading of Psalm 22 on Good Friday. And inevitably, we were taken too quickly from the actual verse Christ chose to scream from the cross, rushing to the promise of hopefulness and the words of trust at the psalm’s end. Another recoil from the horror I told Toby we couldn’t allow, as we invited the students to take up the pain of their pilgrimage in the sacred space of worship of the Crucified God.
That evening’s worship still scars by memory, like the shadow of a fire burned into a cave wall. I shudder when I think of Rodney, carrying a life-sized cross, around the sanitized stone and sculpture of Goodson Chapel in the fading light of a Carolina sunset, whipped with cords of choir robe cinctures born by white student soldiers whose determined grimaces could not mask the pain they felt at inhabiting the role of their race’s implication in the continuation of the cross.
I shiver when I sing again the simple, haunting, almost whispered crone that Toby created, floating like the ghost of so many souls lingering at a crossroads in the Southern countryside, waiting for the train of justice and redemption to collect them from their purgatory on the rails of a finger-picked slide guitar and a wavering bluesman’s voice conjuring Robert Johnson as he sang, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
I cringe and I weep when, at the climax of the service, the sanctuary gone utterly dark, Jesus, bound (standing) to a cross of tree branches, wearing a crown of thorns he insisted must be real, broke the silence of our meditation with those same words, but this time, at a scream, eyes displaced by their whites in his sockets, as if possessed by the spirit of a moment two centuries past, channeled and conjured into reality before us.
“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me???”
And then, utter darkness.
And a chapel full of teenagers sat riveted together, in the darkness, and wept, and prayed. Speechless at words not our own. And the horror, I pray, was not mitigated.
My New Testament professor Joel Marcus believed that, in Mark’s Gospel, the cry of dereliction is purposefully described in the same language as the cries of the demons as they are cast out by Jesus. He invited us to ponder whether or not, in the end, even Jesus had been consumed by the ever-widening shadow, whether or not, like Aslan, shorn and bound upon the stone table, God had actually lost to the forces of sin and evil, and been utterly consumed. That this was not just an existential cry of despair and doubt, but the very real, very final, death rattle of the conquered God, the shriek of triumph of the dark as it took possession of the body of Jesus, and so, of the universe.
Utter darkness. Horror. Unimaginable. Incomprehensible. This is what, I think, Mark is after in trying to tell the story of the death of Jesus. I think that is why these are the only words Jesus speaks from the cross in his Gospel. Anything else footnotes that moment of utter heartbreak, softens it, makes God less dead than God is on that cross, at the hands of Sin, Death, the Devil, and of humanity.
And the accompanying horror, that still haunts, outrages, and decimates us today. That in the face of the cross, God does absolutely nothing. God abandons. God forsakes. God is utterly passive. The final judgement and confrontation with the culmination of the collaboration of the powers of human and supernatural evil is, simply, to do nothing. To die. And in Mark, at least, in the original, there is no resurrection. Only an empty tomb. And a group of very scared people. No wonder the other Gospel writers scramble to fill in more details.
It would be tempting hear to offer a mitigation. To remind us that, just as with those students’ encounter with God’s seeming abandonment of black people upon the cross of American racism, so too, our Lenten pilgrimage is one of both pain and hope. To read the whole of Psalm 22, and point to the promised dawn that follows the darkness. Even, as has become so popular in today’s alt-Christian literature, to sanctify despair and proclaim, “to doubt is divine.”
But all of these too, are mitigations of the horror. Even well-intentioned participational worship services ultimately contribute to the reduction of the horror to a spectacle. Of the entire history of humanity, few have dared to look into the Void of that moment, to stand in the force of the black hole created on Golgotha that sucks the light of the world and crushes hope beneath its force. I sense no one would, if not forced into it, and sadly, we have participated in too many systems and societies that are built on the foundations of cries of dereliction we have helped elicit - or else, avoided by domestication and sentimentality.
But Jesus’ cry is not in our language. It is not comprehensible to us. It’s not something we can merely understand, capture, consume, and then move on from. It defies us. That’s the point, I think. It just happened. Happened like slavery, both in our country and in our hearts. Happened like the collapse of a star. Happened like the end of the world. And we cannot remain spectators, though we try with all our might. We are a drawn into it’s happening. If there’s any hope in it at all (and thank God, there is), it begins here - with horror.
And maybe, with singing horrified words that our not our own. And sitting in the darkness together.
The sun shone brighter. The buds on the pollen-laden trees perched like the shadows of so many angels around me. My children’s laughter peeled sweeter than I have heard it in awhile, and I was able to stand by and smile and laugh with them with a peace of heart I have not felt in forever.
Can a book really do such things?
Because this meager transfiguration of my world is precisely what occurred as I turned the final page of The Brothers Karamazov yesterday. And I’m not sure it’s merely because of that joyous final scene around Ilyuesha’s rock, in which Alyosha bids his young friends never to forget one another - a scene that, written by anyone else, would have been cloying, too easy. This last wave of beauty was not what made me follow St. Peter in desiring to build tents for the mysteries, grasping at them to remain, for, it was indeed good to be in their presence.
No, not merely beauty, wave after wave of purest, baptizing beauty. But even more so, truth. Crash after crash of heart-breaking truth. And, if such things may be said anymore, also, the sheer goodness that emerges, unbelievably, from the utter darkness of this bundle of dead souls. Beauty, truth, and goodness. From Karamazovs?
I still recall my freshman year college course on the “Problem of Evil.” I limped to the end of the semester, my faith lacerated, my spirit crushed, by the knowledge of so much suffering in the world. And then Dr. Larrimore proclaimed the Gospel that still makes this whole faith thing possible for me today. He turned the tables, offering that the true problem was not of evil, but of good. Because if we have eyes to see, evil should not be a shock or surprise. It is the very medium in which we eek out our tragic existence. We know where evil comes from, even if we cannot speak it. But good? Self-sacrifice? Love? Whenever and wherever these occur, can we ever truly account for them? For the French Huguenot village that gave its life for a handful of Jews during the Second World War? For Ivan Karamazov’s sudden willingness to sacrifice himself for his despised brother Dmitri?
That, I think, is what makes Dostoevsky’s miracle so miraculous. When transcendence appears, it is not a deus ex machina, not a sudden salvage operation. Beauty, truth, and goodness just happen. Ivan, collector of horror stories about the suffering of children, encounters the devil within himself, and suddenly discovers truth. Dmitri wrestles with lasciviousness and violence, and only when he is wrongfully accused, arrested, and convicted, does he discover real goodness, in himself and the world. Katya and Grushenka never quite make it to reconciliation, and yet, we know they will, but only precisely because they do not actually make it the full way yet. This is a book of planted seeds that are dead and buried. And yet, unless a grain of wheat falleth and die...
And then there is Alyosha. I find him the most perplexing character of all. Because Alyosha, for me, does not seem to change much. He begins as a budding saint, and ends as one. He has a momentary crisis of faith when his beloved Elder Zossima dies. But it is not clear to me that this is not really just grief. As is said several times, St. Thomas the Doubter did not believe because he saw the Risen Christ, but because he had already made up his mind to believe. Perhaps what is compelling about Alyosha is that his mind has, in a sense, been made up for him. Love has no logic. It is simply there, and can only ripen in the midst of such a storm of sin, seduction and suffering.
When I was in college, I wrongly believed that, of course, I was Alyosha, the lover of mankind and the hero of the tale. A hair over a decade later, I still long to be Alyosha. But I cannot help but think that, in truth, I am Dmitri Karamazov. I am Kolya Krotsokin. I am Smerdyakov. I am Grushenka, and I am Katya. I am a thread of darkness woven into the tapestry of human self-deception, self-assertion, and self-hatred that shrouds the world in the shadow of suffering. Like Dmitri, I am a loquacious buffoon and a spend-thrift. Like Kolya and Ivan, prematurely and insufferably imperious and arrogant. Like Smerdyakov, bitter and conniving. Like Grusha, unwilling to forgive, like Katya, insanely jealous. Like all, desperate for love to come and touch us tenderly, visit me in prison, believe in my goodness, untangle my confusion, speak the truth.
I am not Alyosha. But now, I think, I can truly long for Alyosha, and when he comes, in the presence of love that is not cloying but perfect in its naivete, then like Grushenka, I will no longer desire to “eat him up” with malice, but receive him with awe and wonder, begging him to sit upon my lap, able, finally, to see that the world is not darkness at all, but blinding, marvelous light. The light is coming into the world, and while the world does not receive it, it receives us, and seeks us out, and reveals its presence, deeper than the darkness, at the very heart of our created beings.
There is no doubt in my mind that Terrence Mallick, the writer and director of another great work on suffering and grace, The Tree of Life, found his inspiration from the Brothers Karamazov. The words of the father’s final, broken confession echo the crucial revelation in the life of Father Zossima: "Yes, there was so much of God's glory around me: birds, trees, meadows, sky, and I alone lived in shame, I alone dishonored everything, and did not notice the beauty and the glory of it all."
I wonder if, in the end, it is possible to see the glory without first arriving at the dishonor; if grace and truth can be known without Law unveiling our lies. If the world can be truly transfigured without first being crucified. If we can truly delight in the laughter of children, the angelic presence hiding in the bursting forth of new life, if resurrection and innocence can truly be miraculous, and not merely cliche and cloying, if we do not face the fact - the Good News! - that indeed, we are not Alyosha, but the world desperately in need of his imperfect perfection. I think then can we hear his prayer as prayed, not merely for others out there, but receive it, hear it, for us, and for all:
"Lord, have mercy on them all today, unhappy and stormy as they are, preserve and guide them. All ways are yours: save them according to your ways. You are love; you will send joy to all!"
It is the ability to discover such prayers, such people, and our deep need for them, that is the transfiguring majesty of Dostoevsky’s tale of the Karamazov brothers.
Howdy folks. I've shared links to our Steampunk Theology project in the past, and wanted to give the link to my latest contribution. For those who wonder what a steampunk is, in short, it's a kind of literary subgenre, based in the Victorian area (though encompassing much of the world at that time) that dabbles in re-imagining and re-visioning history as if steam technology, and not fossil fuels, maintained primacy. Much of it is concerned with exploration, adventure, discovery and invention. A few fellow nerds and I have decided to bring theology into the mix. 
