In The Laughter Room
When they came for Him in the
garden, did they know?
When they came for Him in the
garden, did they know?
Did they know He was the Son of
God, did they know that He was Lord?
Did they hear when He told Peter,
“Peter, put up your sword”?
When they came for Him in the
garden, did they know?
When they came for Him in the
garden, did they know?
Sometimes it feels as if it is all too too much. Good
Friday. Why is it good? What is truth? Were we there? Are we there? Did he
really have to die? Can we see what is going on in these narrative stories we
call The Passion? Can God’s Passion ever become our Passion? And as Nobel
Laureate in Literature Bob Dylan asks in this song from what is often called “his
Gospel years,” When they came for him in the Garden did they know?
Which is the question, of course, that is meant for us. We
are “they.” When they come for him in the Garden do we know? Do we know He was
the Son of God, do we know that he is Lord? Do we hear him when he tells Peter,
“Peter, put up your sword?” Bob Dylan. Robert Zimmerman. A poet from Hibbing,
Minnesota invites us to put ourselves in this story and answer the questions as
if it is we who are in the Garden. Or, we who are in front of Pilate. Or, we
who are in the crowd of Judeans. Or, it is we who are so busy that day of
Preparation for the Passover, that day that when the sun goes down will begin
the Sabbath, quite possibly the busiest day of the whole year as all Jerusalem
must get all the arrangements in order for the Passover celebration before the
sun goes down on that Friday – are we just too busy to even notice what is
going on with Pilate’s little show-trial, let alone are we even aware of the
all too common liturgy taking place just outside the city as the Empire
tortures and kills three more young Jewish men, one of whom is there only
because he stood up to it all, to all the shows of power and so-called might
and strength and named it all for what it always is: the falseness of this world?
For those who take the time away from so much frenetic busy-ness
to stand in solidarity with the Man from Galilee, the goodness of Good Friday
is revealed. God does the revealing. God pulls back the curtain just long
enough for us to see what real truth and life and light and goodness really
look like. The simplicity of it all is easy to miss even for those of us who are
there and do take the time to watch the horror of it all, the terror of it all,
and accept the gift that is revealed and given in the midst of so much terror,
in the midst of such really dark darkness.
Pilate asks the question we all want answered. What is
truth? Although coming from a local political hack and stooge who was so
inherently ruthless that even Rome had to recall him and strip him of his authority,
these words sound more like rhetorical mockery than a serious question. But for
those of us who choose to enter into this story year after year after year, we
want to know the truth. And we may as well admit it right here and right now
that the Church, that institution that claims to be the Body of Christ in the
world, has gotten it wrong over and over again as it took on the mantle of the
very Empire against which it was once upon a time the most vocal critic in word
and deed.
You can see it in the silken royalty of its vestments, the
pomp and circumstance of its rituals, at times so ostentatious as to have
caused that other poet of truth and prophecy, Maya Angelou, to surmise that
somewhere in our great churches and cathedrals there must be a Laughter Room. While
at Trinity Church, Wall Street, just steps away from the very heartbeat of what
we euphemistically call “the economy,” she watched the procession into the
church and surmised: “I just looked at the service, and you Episcopalians do it
so well. Those gorgeous vestments you wear, and those candles and the singing.
And there is that man who came in carrying that great silver cross with this
look of great serenity on his face. And I thought to myself, what you should
have right off the vestry is a laughter room. You parade around with all these
wonderful things and every once in a while you go in there and ha, ha, ha, and
then you come out of the laughter room and you pick up the cross and keep
going.” Frederick Buechner shrewdly observes that in all religious traditions
and ritual we act as if we know what we are doing. When in fact, we don’t. And how wonderful of Maya and Buechner
and others like them to give us permission to see the folly of it all and allow
ourselves to see ourselves in all our pieties attempting to glorify God and
take a moment to just admit, ha ha, we really don’t know what we are doing. And
can we imagine God sharing in the laughter as well? [The Remarkable Ordinary,
Frederick Buechner, p 50-51]
Because, after all, it is God who glorifiees God. And it is
God who glorifies us as well. We call it grace, but it is glory. We who are
created in God’s own image strain to look into the mirror and see that. Too
often too many of us look into the mirror and see that terror, the horror, the
utter aloneness of that man hanging on a Roman cross as a warning to one and
all that the power and authority of Empire is not to be challenged. Yet, like Paul
Harvey, we are those people who do know the rest of the story. We know that the
real laughter room is in that empty tomb, a cave carved into the hard rock of
the Kidron Valley, the Valley of Gehenna, a smoldering garbage pit just outside
the walls of Jerusalem. If we really truly put ourselves into this story and
accompany the women who look into the tomb and find it empty, the Man from
Galilee is nowhere to be seen, then we ought to be able to catch at least a glimpse
of why Good Friday is so good! And we can also imagine God’s own self offering
a “ha ha” as the brutality and ultimate impotency of the Empire is finally
revealed! And was revealed when they came for Him in the Garden and he tells
Peter to put up his sword once and for all. Because in the end all the swagger
and bullying and torture and killing of Empire is exposed for what it truly is –
the ungodly behavior of those who would not know the truth if it bit them on
the nose! But alas, I get ahead of the story.
The Pilates of this world and in the Church itself fail to
see that Truth is not an idea, not a doctrine, but a man of flesh and blood. God’s
new revelation and Good News is not a doctrine or an idea, but a person – a
person like any one of us. “A person,” writes Evelyn Underhill, “whose story
and statements, in every point and detail, give us some deep truth about the
life and will of God who creates and sustains us, and about the power and
vocation of a soul which is transformed in Him, and pays ungrudgingly the price
of generous love.” [Underhill, The School of Charity, p. 26.]
The ultimate act of God’s love and Charity occurs in that
final moment when the Truth looks down from the cross, utters the final words, “It
is finished,” bows his head and hands over his Spirit. God’s Spirit, which in
Hebrew and Greek means spirit, wind and breath all in one single word. He just
hands it over to us. It is Richard Rohr who suggests, in his book, The Naked Now,
that the unspeakable name of the God of the Passover and Exodus, the God of the
Crucifixion and Resurrection, represented by four Hebrew characters, yodh-hey-vav-hey,
or the sacred tetragrammaton, YHWH, was meant, is meant, to imitate the sound
of breath, of breathing: Yah-Wheh. If so, the first word we speak when we are
born, and the last word we speak when we die is God’s name. It is the name we
speak with every breath we take. It is this breath, this spirit, that gives us and
all living creatures life! Rohr goes on to observe that there is no Christian,
Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu or Daoist way to breathe. There is no European,
Asian, African, Middle Eastern way of breathing. There is no rich, poor or
middle-class way of breathing. The playing field is leveled. And science
confirms that we breathe the very same molecules first emanated from the first
moment of creation that have sustained the earliest life forms, the earliest
cave men and women all the way through to the astronauts and cosmonauts on the International
Space Station! It is no longer a claim of religion, philosophy or mysticism. We
truly are One.
Jesus hands this Oneness over to us as we dare to take a few
moments out of our otherwise overly busy and distracted lives to step into this
story, stand in the laugher room before the cross and receive his final gift to
us and to all that lives – the gift of his breath, his spirit. If we allow
ourselves just a moment to re-member this, it will be enough as we return to
the busyness and challenges of the world about us. Just that moment of
awareness is enough to carry us through another day. Acceptance of his breath,
his spirit is what makes this day a good day. The Good Day. And perhaps if we
can string enough good days together we might collectively hear his voice, put up
our swords, recognize those around us as breathing the same breath, uttering the
same divine name with each breath, and accept one another as Good as well.
Altogether we can step into the Laughter Room, say a final ha-ha to all we
thought was so important and true, and emerge from that room as One People. Some
may say it is a dream. Those who accept the gift of God’s divine charity handed
over on the cross know it as Truth. And it is good. So very very good! Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment