Seventeen Times

Recently I watched the sermon of a dear friend. We were in seminary together. I was curious how the decades treated him. Found him online. I wondered: was he still the happy-go-lucky-guy I knew? It was such a delight to see echoes of a young,, joyful heart alive and well. Ted was Ted. His strength was still his strength, but so was his weakness: his carefree spirit could overreach, leave the less than sunny behind.

              Ted's sermon was a series of PowerPoint images.  Terrible, tragic images.  One after another.  His basic message was: terrible things happen, but we're still okay. Tragedy, disaster, sky falling moments, but we're okay. 

              Each image was a disaster of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  I think it was the Hindenburg putting me over the top.  By the time Ted got to the heart of his message "we are okay" I was traumatized and I am sure everyone in the room was as well.  Things I worked hard to forget, to keep locked away in a memory box taped with a warning, "do not open"; one box after another he opened as if we were relocating to purgatory.

              What gave me great pause though was how happily he went through the boxes.  Every tragedy, for Ted, was a strange sort of victory.  "We're still okay."  After a bit I shut down the video.  Hindenburg. Just couldn't get past the Hindenburg as a PowerPoint slide in a sermon.  Sometimes a preacher's best intentions are a swing and a miss.

              The rule with trauma work is simply a matter of proportion and balance.  You can address terrible events with people, but only small pieces at a time, think teaspoon. If you do introduce a hardship, hard memory, you should balance this with something truly wonderful.  "We're okay" is not truly wonderful; it doesn't balance with the Hindenburg.  Something truly wonderful would be: memory of a grandchild's first laugh, smell of their hair after a bath; memory of a pup covered in mud as happy as anyone could be; watching a child have courage; craggy voice of a grandmother calling your name. The balancing power of beauty.

              On the cover of our bulletin is Charlie Day.  Nothing against Charlie but he is in the shot only as a matter of dimension.  I wanted him to stand next to the stones so to convey their enormity.  Charlie can be a powerful balance of beauty, but here he is just for scale.

              The scale I sought to capture was the ancient walls of Jerusalem, old city, the rubble not chosen when it was last rebuilt by Suleman because the Mamluks left it in ruin.  I love to say Mamluk, sounds like Marmaduke. Suleman and the Ottomans were the last to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem some five hundred years ago.  Their efforts were the seventeenth time the walls of the city were rebuilt after siege and plunder, disaster and destruction.  The walls of Jerusalem have come down seventeen times and seventeen times they have been rebuilt.

              A tour guide shared this with our group, and I could tell when he spoke of this it would stick with me, linger in my memory, haunt my thoughts.  When you look over the walls of the old city of Jerusalem you can see the hodgepodge, the mix and match of centuries of rebuilding.  Fascinating.  As you look you can see the hodgepodge of seventeen times as a mark of courage and tenacity, no matter what you rose again and rebuilt.  You could though also see seventeen times of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem as way too much heartache, just an endless sea of misery. Not again.   

              Bob Dylan wrote, there is no way to tell from the first kiss how much abuse you will be able to take.  Must have been a dark night on the tour bus when he wrote this line.  But there is a lot of truth in it.  How much can you take before you say not again?  How much heartache can you feel before your heart is broken?  How many hardships equal a hard life? How bitter must you be before you can taste a kiss meant to betray?

              I fear I have accomplished in prose what my dear friend Ted did with a PowerPoint.  Lot of hard questions.  One of these is more than enough to rob sleep, steal a good mood, lead you down a dark path. How bitter must you be before you can caste a kiss meant to betray?  Ouch.  Must be a dark moment in the pastor's study.

              A few years back I had a good idea for a dystopian novel, a novel about the future when the future is broken, bleak. I have written fiction and enjoy it, so I leapt into the project without much forethought.  After a few months of work I realized, you're trying to write a dystopian novel and you've never read one.  I know better so this insight was a quick verdict.  Get thee to Barnes and Noble! 

              After a year and a couple dozen novels I was humbled and even more intrigued.  A good dystopian novel needs to paint a dire picture, a world where all the wheels have come off, but it must also at the same time offer at the very least a sliver of hope.  Arguably the greatest example of this is Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road.

              Think four hundred pages of pain, awful, awful conditions and the darkest darkness of humanity.  I remember reaching the end of the novel and thinking, well, you are never going on the crisis hotline.  No crisis hotline for you.  And then, in a paragraph, one paragraph, he redeemed the whole novel.  Everything was still broken, still a dystopian novel, but I knew, knew deep within me, we're gonna be alright.  Maybe Ted read this book before his PowerPoint sermon with the Hindenburg. Maybe.

              Our reading from Luke is the second part of what is called the little apocalypse of Jesus.  An apocalypse is a vision of the future, usually the not very bright future.  It's a strange truth: a bad ending is more popular than a happy ending; a dark future is more to be trusted than a bright one.  I could be wrong but when asked if you want the good news first or the bad news, I would guess most people would say, the bad news first.  Turns out, if you Google this, it's bad news first by a great majority.

              In our lesson from Luke, this part of the apocalypse is not all that bright at first.  The powers of heaven will be shaken.  This is bad.  Powers of heaven shaken.  If anything should not be shaken its heaven.  We need heaven to be beyond the wiles of quake and shake, rattle, and, especially, roll. We need a place beyond hardship, beyond sadness, where there is no Hindenburg. 

              But then, much like Ted's sermon, Jesus paints a picture of everything being alright.  Son of man comes in the clouds with power and glory, and all is well.  True there were tough times, wars and hardship, earthquake and lightening reaching even heaven.  But then it worked out.  We are still okay.

              We're gonna be okay is not a bad message, not even a bad interpretation of the little apocalypse of Jesus.  But the walls of Jerusalem and their seventeen times of falling and rising, the walls of Jerusalem offer a better lesson, a better message.  The better message comes from an unexpected source, Friedrich Nietzsche.

              Nietzsche believed, as did Kiekegaard, Christianity's bold message of hope rising above fear was laid aside for a timid acceptance of a divine will of love and compassion.  Bad things can happen, but God is in charge and little by little, democracy after democracy, scientific progress after scientific progress we are becoming good, better, great even.  You need to acquiesce to this, accept this, like Billy Graham called us to do, accept Jesus as Lord and Savior.  He has fought the fight for us, won the battle for us, we need only accept the victory crown.

              To this way of thinking Nietzsche pushed back hard.  To die to self, to give your life away, to become the least, if it is just metaphor, an expression of what Jesus did, then this is a charade, a shadow play, not life.  To this end Nietzsche argued for what he called eternal recurrence.  History doesn't repeat itself, but it does recur.  We rise and fall.  We fail and succeed.  Not once.  Not someone for us.  We do it again and again.  Think seventeen times. 

              Before I give an example of how rise to challenge, a happy example, I want to take note of how our capital campaign is rebuilding, remodeling the sanctuary here for the fourth time.  In our three-hundred-plus years we are rebuilding the walls right on times.  This is consistent with how many times Jerusalem was rebuilt; we are on track in other words.  And we are doing it.  This is the collective effort of this generation for generations to come.  Like Nietzsche argued life is lived well when you step into the challenge, step up to the fight, and find your life made powerful.

              The good example comes from ordination services.  In the last ten years I have preached at several services for newly ordained pastors.  As I do there is a palpable feeling of passing the baton, and, more importantly, there is a feeling of seeing the future. I can see the church being born anew and it makes me very happy.

              Like every generation they have their flaws and idiosyncrasies. They, like every upcoming generation, suffer the weight of the older crowd's persistent critique, how much more difficult their lives were, how they had to walk uphill both ways to school barefoot in the snow, while this generation is chauffeured to class. 

              Despite grandiose comparison there is a wonderful event beginning to happen and their generation will see it come to fruition.  The great event is this: we are losing the corporate church, the church as board and policy, hierarchy and org chart. This generation will lead our churches beyond the corporate, business model, the organizational chart and chain of command.  They will lead the church unto a new way of being, the church where friendship is key, service the highest standard, and humility a place of confidence. And this is wonderful because it is so close to the gospel, the life of Jesus. 

              When our daughter Zoe was ordained, I told the story how as a little girl she always wanted to go to the nursing homes with me.  How on one occasion, when she should have drawn back, been afraid, given the pain and suffering in the room of a dying woman, I told how instead of stepping back, she dropped my hand, stepped forward, pushed through a crowd of adults, she pushed through and took the hand of the dying woman.  Zoe was maybe seven.  I distinctly remember wanting to say to my seven-year-old daughter, "you got this, Zoe.  I'll wait for you in the car." Finally, I got say this at her ordination.  I said, "you got this" meaning you are the future of the church, it looks good, you got this.

              Our capital campaign, what excites me most (other than not navigating a flight of stairs to the pulpit), what excites me is we are saying to the next three generations, "you got this."  The future is unknown.  True.  But here, in this place, in our gift to the generations to come, the future is bright. 

              I will enjoy a more down-to-earth pulpit.  But what excites me is to see the church reborn as a company of friends, a devotion to service for all, a door welcoming the stranger, outcast.  We get to say, "you got this" to the next generation.  Here is a place to step forth with boldness.  Amen.