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Lent 2007: Dangerous Stories
Lent 2007: Dangerous Stories
Our Lenten theme is Dangerous Stories. We are not going to try to scare you, much, but just
remind ourselves that choices are important and life can hang on the merest happenstance, planned or unplanned. Of course, the other question I, “Are they happenstance?” We can never quite be sure that God isn’t behind all of this, all of the time. Ecclesiastes says, ”God has made everything beautiful in its time; also, he has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot
find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”
The Lenten story is first and foremost the story of Jesus, and it is full of danger. He keeps making these dangerous decisions leading to his death. Basically he makes the most just, compassionate, honest decision possible. Each decision puts him at odds with the power structure and makes them choose their reaction. Unfortunately, the power structure is not noted for making the most just, compassionate, and honest decision. From their point of view they had no choice but to kill him. “It is better one should die for the nation than all suffer.” In this case, in ways beyond Caiaphas’ wildest imagination he was correct.
As we go through the Lenten cycle of readings, our Sunday speakers will try to match their stories with the Gospel story and the decisions they did or did not make.
Some musings on our Lenten theme of “Dangerous Stories” which may help our Lenten speakers.
Of course the theme is ambiguous. That’s one of its beauties: it can hold several different meanings simultaneously.
Certainly the stories are dangerous for the storyteller; they’re going to get him killed. Second, they’re dangerous for the listeners because they upset our accustomed view of reality. Third, they are dangerous for the society itself (and the guardians of that society instinctively recognize their danger), for hey upset the public good, the status quo.
We’ve become so accustomed to these stories that we cannot see their danger, their subversiveness. It is exciting and informative to see Christ in different lights, rather than the handful that we’re used to: the Savior, the Victim, the Unblemished Sacrifice. What about Christ the Storyteller, Christ the Poet, Christ the Subversive, Christ Upsetter of Applecarts, Christ the Troublemaker, Christ Disturber of the Peace? At one point he says of himself that he has come not to bring peace but the sword. That seems to fly in the face of Christ the Peacemaker and our tradition of non-violence. But in this instance, perhaps, peace means complacency. Perhaps he means that he intends to disturb the status quo, to disturb the social order, to disturb our long-held assumptions about God, to disturb what seems to us the natural order.
How many of those in power quake before the lowly story. One way of retaining power, of course, is to muzzle your victims. Not only individual dictators, but whole countries and regimes find the seemingly innocent story, the powerless narrative, a threat to their power and to the society they’ve created: the Soviet Union exiling Boris Pasternak and suppressing his novel, Doctor Zhivago; the same treatment given to Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his stories like The Gulag Archipelago or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Hitler ordering the burning of all copies of Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front; Iran declaring a fatwa on Salmon Rushdie because of his Satanic Verses; Nigeria hanging its most famous playwright; and, just recently the new Nobel Prize winner in Literature from Turkey being put on trial for insulting “Turkishness.” Storytelling can be a dangerous business!
Christ’s stories, of course, say many things and are seemingly inexhaustible, but one of their consistent patterns is that they completely upset our image of God, our notion of justice, our view of right and wrong. We want to sputter, like the eldest son or the laborers working all day, “BUT . . . BUT . . . BUT . . . THAT’S NOT FAIR!!!” “What kind of a God are you who shines on the good and bad alike?!” “We demand that good be rewarded and evil punished!” “What kind of madman is running this joint?”
The stories seem to tell us that God is quite beyond our ken, rising above our petty concerns, our cleverly crafted and carefully measured distinctions. What with our obsession with weights and measures, teacups and quarts and inches and half-teaspoons and millimeters, how can we comprehend lavish love? A God who truly overflows with an embarrassing, unseemly abundance we cannot fathom. A God who seems to say, if the stories about him can be believed, “Justice? I’m light years beyond justice, spilling all of my treasure all of the time, anywhere and everywhere at all on anyone and everyone at all. Why, even if he did squander his last dime on prostitutes, I love him. Why, even if she was caught in the very act, I love her. Why, even if some of you did work an hour, or three hours, or four hours, three minutes, and 29 seconds, I pour my wealth on all of you alike.”
Perhaps the subversiveness, the real “danger,” of these stories is intimated in our motto at St. Joan’s. Everyone is invited. Everyone is equal. No exceptions. Scary stuff, that.
Listening and watching our theme unfold this Lent seems to me more exciting than usual. The stories of danger are riveting. Of the personal testimonies on Ash Wednesday, perhaps the most moving was the one about confronting the Giant - Fear. One could feel the fear of the speaker and was aware of how even standing there was dangerous for him.
It strikes me, however, that if we limit ourselves to stories “about” danger, we will deliberately hamstring ourselves, robbing the theme of much of its power.
It’s not so much that the stories need to be “about” danger. It’s that the stories themselves are dangerous. Powder kegs. Nitroglycerin. Maybe handled with white gloves by a bomb squad. Even more, the very “telling” of them may be dangerous. There’s a great difference between narrating a story of a past danger and the telling of a story now, at this very moment, which could get you into trouble. One is history, the other is drama. The gospel may be good news, but it is also very bad news for some, and it may be even worse for the teller of the tale.
I can imagine a story with no danger in it at all, and yet the telling of it could be very dangerous:
“Once upon a time in a land that never was, the inhabitants regarded their children as ambassadors newly come from the realm of the Great King himself, that country East of the Sun and West of the Moon. As such, they treated their young like precious jewels, like visiting royalty. They hung upon their every word. The women curtseyed in their presence, and the men went down on one knee whenever they encountered a child. Old people would clap in delight when these messengers from the Great King appeared on the street …”
STORY WATER - reading used during Lent
-- Rumi
A story is like water
that you heat for your bath.
It takes messages between the fire
and your skin. It lets them meet,
and it cleans you!
Very few can sit down
in the middle of the fire itself
like a salamander or Abraham.
We need intermediaries.
A feeling of fullness comes,
but usually it takes some bread
to bring it.
Beauty surrounds us,
but usually we need to be walking
in a garden to know it.
The body itself is a screen
to shield and partially reveal
the light that’s blazing
inside your presence.
Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what’s hidden.
Study them,
and enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.