November 25, 2007

by The Rev. Constance Jones

Col. 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43

This was an odd weekend for sermon-writing.
On the homeliest of holidays, I began the sermon in a hotel room in Chicago,
a city I’m a stranger to –
my first Thanksgiving away from my own home in literally decades.
Advent begins next week,
and we look for the light of Christ in the deep darkness of winter
Contrasts and polarities, the familiar and unfamiliar juxtaposed.
An epistle reading that proclaims the kingship of Christ,
and a Gospel that finds him hanging on the Cross between two thieves.
And with this crucifixion Gospel as a text, we are celebrating new birth in Baptism.

There’s a word for this that all you English majors will cringe at,
because of all the papers you wrote on it once upon a time. It’s “irony.”
It’s a word used mostly in a literary or theater context,
but I think irony describes both the nature of our experience of the world
and the nature of the Christian Gospel.

Take one little detail in today’s reading from Luke, for example.
As the Romans crucified Jesus,
somebody put a sign above his head that read INRI,
or in Latin, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.
It was ironic first because whoever put it there didn’t believe Jesus was King.
It was supposed to be wickedly funny,
to make passersby laugh and mock the helpless dying man.
Sure enough, they did.
But it was ironic in a cosmic sense as well, because Luke’s readers,
all the way down to you and me,
know that Jesus was the firstborn of all creation, eternal Son of the Father,
king from before time began.
Take it one step further and we stand in stunned wonder before the truth
that God who made the universe himself was crucified,
yet who by dying, conquered death once and for all.

This makes you feel a bit dizzy, doesn’t it?
Irony usually does.
But it’s not that the parts don’t fit together, or contradict one another.
It’s that in this world,
and through the sovereignty of God,
apparent randomness or even outright contradiction,
are harmonized, are given meaning, and are redeemed.

We lament, though – Why can’t things be straight and simple?
Why must the plot of life be such a mixture of sorrow and glory?
Why, to put it another way, did God tell Adam and Eve
that if they ate fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would die,
when we know that wisdom and discernment are good in this world,
and they did not die?
Why instead were they sent into this world
where God’s lordship over things seems so faint sometimes, so “not yet”?
Why if we are claimed as Christ’s own forever,
do we always fall short of the glory of God?

Those are enough questions to make your head hurt.
Let’s talk about a movie instead.

“Pleasantville” is a ten-year-old movie that
I’m going to have a movie-theology-and-popcorn session with you about some day.
It imagines a couple of teenagers transported through their TV set
back into an ideal version of the 1950s.
The lawns are perfect; the children respect their parents.
The basketball team wins every game,
Mom always has dinner on the table at six,
and because there are no fires that break out,
the fire department only rescues cats from trees.
The film at this point is in black and white.
Like fifties’ TV, of course,
but also because in perfect Pleasantville,
there is no nuance or shades of gray.
There is no striving for what doesn’t exist,
no mourning for what’s lost.
There is nothing to redeem, nothing to hope for.
No conflict, no mystery, and definitely, no irony.

Well, I won’t spoil this wonderful movie for you if you haven’t seen it,
but I’ll hint to you
that all the technicolor reality that Adam and Eve discovered outside the Garden,
and that you and I have discovered as well,
come to Pleasantville.
And the irony of it is, only outside the Garden is there redemption.
This truth, mind you, isn’t just a Book of Genesis or a fanciful movie thing.
It’s what you and I see and hear if our eyes and ears are open,
what we discover about how God works.
Only outside the Garden, is there redemption.

This past week, for instance, I sat on the free person’s side
of the thick glass in a jail visitation booth.
The man in the orange jumpsuit told me --
(and this was the prisoner testifying to the priest),
told me about how God intervened, personally and dramatically,
to rescue his life and soul.
About how God’s claim on his life
only happened because he was arrested and jailed.
Irony, reversal, redemption:
By being jailed, he is made free.

Also this week, I’ve prayed, holding my breath,
for a young husband and wife whose marriage I just blessed this month,
because he nearly died on Friday. But he is still alive.
Consider how that marriage will be differently blessed now.

I consider my own situation on Thanksgiving morning.
Things seemed cold and bleak to me, sitting in a slightly shabby hotel room.
So I went for a walk, only to find a beautiful snow shower.
I found Lake Michigan, which I’d never seen before.
And I found an Episcopal church
where a celebration of the Holy Eucharist had just begun.
So you could say I stumbled out of my gloom
into beauty, water, and the Bread of Life.
Later that day I shared Thanksgiving dinner
with my daughter Cary, her boyfriend, and her good friends,
who are within days of the birth of their first child.
More reversals and discoveries of grace,
here outside the Garden of Eden.

Seeing all of you this morning, I think (and not for the first time) --
You look beautiful! We all clean up pretty well, don’t we?!
A stranger might mistake us well-scrubbed, well-mannered Episcopalians
for a Sunday morning version of Pleasantville.
No shadows in our lives, right?

But it isn’t true, is it?
Each of us here today,
each of us who said “thank you” for our blessings this past Thursday,
has quite a number of other stories that lie behind the curtain.
Stories of reversal or loss.
Anxieties, fears, and things we’ve done that we’d pay anything to take back.

But I tell you this: if God is not sovereign over all these things
as well as abundant harvests and happy outcomes,
then he is not God at all.

But God is sovereign over things that break our hearts,
things we don’t understand,
outcomes we will never see.
We need not worry about whether they are held in God’s hand,
or whether he can make sense and good of them.
He can.

So, I figure it isn’t even close to pretense,
our being here this morning so well turned-out.
It is not hypocrisy I am naming, not at all.
It is courage, and it is hope.
It is faith that God is with us in everything,
faith that it makes sense to give thanks in all circumstances,
not “even” in the hard things, but especially then.

So, we move towards the Baptism of these two babies,
who are evidence of God’s love and the perfection of creation, if anything is.
We might say,
“couldn’t we have had a more cheerful Gospel lesson today than Jesus’ crucifixion?
More cheerful, perhaps yes.
But not more appropriate.
Because these children will not grow up in Pleasantville.
They’ll live in our rich and technicolor and fallen world.
So too, our God is not the God of Pleasantville,
but a real God who has known suffering himself, on the Cross.
A God who rules the universe and all its outcomes,
yet who is incarnate in every situation of our actual lives.
These children are baptized into Christ’s death AND Christ’s resurrection.
Ironic, isn’t it? Inexplicable and complicated,
but sturdy and reliable, and every bit of it true.
Thanks be to God.

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