Religious Temptations

Not being prepared for ministry was a great help. Not planning on being a pastor saved me from a lot of needless expectations, the kind of expectations that make you mad to lose, when they are not met; this gave me such unplanned freedom. Yet, there were somethings it would have been good to know as a new pastor. That churches have a budget and pastors have contracts; that would have been a good memo to get. Yet the greatest surprise, the part of ministry I was woefully unprepared for was not anything administrative or theological or anything practical.  The greatest surprise of ministry was joy. I had not really known what joy was, so I didn't know I was missing it, missing out.  Certainly, had no idea as to the irony of joy, how often it comes amidst grief.

              This surprise took a while to become clear.  It wasn't a book or a lecture or a mentor's advice.  Joy came slowly in surprising ways.  A first step I would say was my first funeral.

              I can remember the moment when I began to plan my first funeral, my first few weeks into ministry.  There was a pause when I realized that I had no idea what to do.  Not only was I not trained, but I also realized, I had only been to one in my life, and it was a tragic funeral.  Sounds strange, but I realized I had never experienced what you might call normal loss. Someone lives a full life, their body wears out, and they die surrounded by people who weep and will miss them when they're gone.  I remember thinking, what is that?

              Looking back 30 years later, looking back at a very young man, so much older than he should have been, as Dylan says, I am younger than that now, looking back I can clearly see what was emerging.  It was truth, sense, the difference between having joy taken from you and the ways, moments, events in life where you lose joy.  Tragedy takes joy from you; disappointment, change, grief, a lack of courage can cause you to lose joy. The latter is your choice, or choices, decisions; the former, tragedy, is without choice. I can see now how that first funeral and the surprise of loss without tragedy, how this was small step toward joy.

              Keeping to the theme of surprise and a lack of preparation, I started to see what joy was by making a mess of liturgy, or not knowing how a church lives liturgy.  Pastors in the Presbyterian Church get calendars and on the calendars are the names of the Sundays (Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday in Ordinary or Christ the King Sunday) and with these names come the lectionary readings, passages.  You may know this, I didn't then, but you might know that today is unique in the liturgy of the church.  Today is known as Palm Sunday and then it is also known as Passion Sunday.  It is what is says in the calendar.

              What I didn't know as a young pastor was how completely different are these two liturgies.

              Palm Sunday is fun, it's shouting hosanna, kids making palm crosses, a joyful event.  Passion Sunday is to remember the pain, the betrayal, the scourging and suffering of Jesus.  Read, "not fun."  The inexperienced, uninformed young clergy who didn't grow up with liturgy will take the two directions as two options.  You can go this way or that way.  Up to you.  They are both listed on the calendar. 

              You only need to make that mistake once and you don't need to wait until after the service to see the mistake.  People who come to church ready to sing Faure's the Palms are not impressed with He Never Said a Mumblin’ Word or Sacred Head Now Wounded.  Folks getting ready to wave their palms are pretty upset if you write a sermon about the crucifixion and blood and the last words of Jesus.

              Looking back, I can see how it wasn't just a lack of preparation.  There was that for sure.  Like I said to the kids, I thought Lent was something in the drier not a season of purple between Ash Wednesday and Easter.  No, it was more than just being clueless.  I had a very poor understanding or definition or confusion of faith.  To be faithful, I thought that meant you were a serious person, you took matter of theology and history and philosophy, you took these things as a quest for certainty or at the very least a diligence and duty and determination.  To be faithful was to be serious about faith.

              Changed my life when this dark veil was lifted, when I began to see that if you are not living unto joy faith has eluded you.  A strong conviction or a sincere commitment to a creed or a doctrine is not what faith is.  Being faithful is living a joyful life.  Granted, in tragedy, joy can be taken from you.  Absolutely no argument there.  But if the sky has not fallen, if your heart has not been shattered, if you are just living the ebb and flow of life without joy, that's your choice and it's a bad one, a matter of lacking faith. 

              Seeing Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday as two options was a lack of faith, a falling to a temptation, the terrible temptation of confusing religious rigor, being serious, with being faithful, faith as a trust of joy. 

              At the end of Luke's description of the temptations of Jesus it says, the devil left and waited for an opportune time to test Jesus again.

              The last temptation of Jesus has been a movie, a book, a controversy, a matter of speculation.  It could be that he was tempted to flee the garden when he prayed, "let this cup pass."  It could be that the power of a dozen legions of angels called from heaven was quite a temptation.  Maybe the temptation was Mary Magdalene or maybe it was the temptation to fix Judas.

              Yet, knowing the joy of Galilee and the seriousness of Judea, and what tempts us the most is what can be explained, rationalized, justified the most, the last temptation might just be believing you can leave joy behind.  Jesus came to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, to the center of the world, to the temple, where the stones will shout if the children are kept quiet.  Jesus left the lilies of the field, the chilly waters of the Jordan still a glacial stream, the friendships and villages, the meals with the tax collectors and sinners, the complexity of his family and feeding thousands in a day.  He came from joy, a faithful life and entered the swirl and severity of power and prestige and centuries of tradition and kings and prophets; he entered a serious world where joy is optional.

              Looking back on my first experience of the Holy Land, I remember the loss, the sense of sadness that came over me as we left Galilee and entered Judea.  In this moment I began to see the temptation of a faith where joy was something you sacrifice, something you lay aside.  That's the temptation, to make faith something less than what it is.  When Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and rushes to turn over the tables and make a stand, make a statement, I can sense, see the temptation. I can be faithful without being joyful.  If that is what it takes.

              Steven Spielberg made a movie about this temptation.  I don't believe he based it on the Palm Sunday text or the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. He could have, but it's a thematic connection not a material one.  Materially he could have based his movie about the sacrifice of joy, where you become a serious person, he could have based his movie on a beautiful Jewish saying.  There is an adage it goes something like this: It is the hardest, once you have stepped out of the dance of life, to enter once again.  Hard to step back into the dance after you have stepped out.

              The movie about lost joy was released in 1990 so it's not a new one.  The story he sought to tell is best considered as a question, a hypothetical.  What if Peter Pan left Never Neverland?  What if he went looking for Wendy and found her now a grandmother with a granddaughter.  What if Peter Pan grew up, became a man, went to college, became a lawyer, and married Wendy's granddaughter and had a couple of kids?

              This would be a kind of romantic sequel, a kind of wrapping up of all the questions about the lost boys and the need for a mother and sweetness that the lost are found and the abandoned are saved.  Steven Spielberg's movie got there in the end, to the sweetness, but not directly.  Peter grew up and turned into an absentee father, he was a lawyer, but not a nice one; he became a pirate.  And Captain Hook got bored without a worthy adversary.  No adventures, no battles, not fight to death, nothing but the tawdry and tacky.

              The movie, Hook, is about Captain Hook kidnapping Peter Pan's kids so he would return to Never Neverland and fight, fly and crow.  The movie is about how little Peter has become "junktified" so "junktified" he cannot play, be happy, be faithful.  And, in the end, the movie is about how Peter must see himself and what he has become, how little freedom he can taste, how unready he is to head off toward the second star on the right straight on till morning.  To get his kids back, he must find the child he lost in his heart, the joy he lost in becoming serious.

              I know that is a lot of moving parts, but just consider this: can you be a faithful adult and keep the joyful wonder of childhood?  And what is more, if you have sacrificed joy for the serious demands of life, can you find it again?  If you have stepped out of the dance of life, seeing delight as a thing of the past, not the present, not the future, can you take delight again, find your way to the dance again? After all the plot twists and sweetness, all the moving parts of the movie, it begs these questions.

              Looking back through the lens of Hook and Peter and Wendy Darling who always loved effortlessly, looking back at all my juvenile mistakes as a young pastor, how little I knew of joy, and how much I confused it with being serious, I am not so sure if my lack of expectations and preparations were really about ministry at all.  I can see now it wasn't about my lack of expectations of being a pastor.  It was about how little I expected of life, how little I expected to be human.

              Tragedy takes joy from us.  That is the power of tragedy.  But such devastation is not common or often.  What is common is when we fall to the temptation of defining faith and faithfulness without joy.  Being serious, being right, being strong are well warn paths where joy gets left aside.  Here we speak of our commitments and our obligations and what we have sacrificed. 

              One of the great claims about Jesus is that he endured the cross because of the joy set before him.  He didn't set aside joy amid suffering, challenge.  He overcame the temptation to forsake joy as if it were an extra.  If you follow him, if you learn to live as he did, you too can resist the temptation.  That is good news.  What is even better news is this: if you have laid joy aside, left the dance, you can find it again, step into the dance once more.  Amen.