Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
April 22, 2012 Easter 3
Luke 24:36b-40
36While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you." 37They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. 38He said to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? 39Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." 40And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.
The classical stage play and movie, "Fiddler on the Roof," tells the story of Tevya, a Russian Jew who has three daughters who challenge his devotion to the traditions that define what it meant to be a Jew living as a minority among a violent Christian majority. His first daughter does not want to marry the person selected for her by the match maker, as tradition dictated, but rather she wanted to marry for love. With humor and deep personal reflection, Tevya stretches to accept this change in their social fabric.
But then the second daughter falls in love with a political radical and Tevya refuses to give his blessing but discovers that neither his daughter nor her groom would accept his authority over them. In the end, Tevya has to stretch a even farther to accept that his daughter had the freedom to make this choice, even over his objections.
But the good humor drains out of the play when the third daughter, Chava, decides to marry a Russian Orthodox Christian. He seems to try but he cannot stretch that far and with great pain for both of them, Chava and Tevya's loving father-daughter relationship comes to an end.
The first time you see the play you keep thinking that there will be some reconciliation; surely it will not end that way.
In the closing scene, reluctantly, he gives her permission to write to them but it is anything but a satisfying restoration of their family.
When the writers of the screenplay first tried to market the story to movie makers they rejected it because they thought it would only be meaningful to Jewish families but they were wrong. Fiddler has been translated into dozens of languages and everyone from Jews, to Muslims, to Christians and families removed from any particular religious heritage, can see themselves in the play because almost all of us have either left someone behind or have been left behind.
It is especially relevant for us. Those of you who have found your way into this little congregation or who have become regular devotees of our YouTube and iTunes channels, almost all of us had to leave someone behind to get here. You struggled with your faith. You fought to let go of rigid constraints until your mind was freed.... What you did not know is that everyone you love does not necessary believe that your mind is your own.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said that once a mind has been stretched by a new idea never returns to its original dimensions. Those of us who have come to a progressive understanding of our faith could no more go back to pretending to believe in incarnation, atonement, substitutionary death, the trinity and the whole heaven and hell bargain with an angry Deity, Pascal's wager, than we could go back to believing in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy.
Letting go of the traditional religion of our youth was painful for many of us.
We learn only when we are uncomfortable; we change only when change is made necessary.
We became who we had to become, with or without our own Tevya's blessings.
Some of you have told me about relationships you have had to leave behind. Even within families that no longer really practice their faith.... There are Catholic families that are offended that if you are going to go to church at all that you are not going to the church you are "supposed" to go to. Some of you have grown children who have embraced a religious fundamentalism that makes it hard to visit and makes you shudder when you think about what your grandchildren are being taught.
I've been communicating with Carol, who is with us today from Kansas City, over the past several months. She was so excited about finding a Progressive church in her state but was disappointed to discover that we are three hours away from her home. And so she has been joining us through YouTube and reposting the sermons she has found meaningful on her own Face Book page and has discovered that by simply stating that she thinks this way, believes this way, feels embraced by this spirituality that she has been shedding friends.
I recently had a friend encourage me to let go of some of my past injuries with the attitude of a young puppy.... Saying, if you can't eat it or play with just pee on it and move on. And there is a part of me that wishes that I could be that cavalier. OK, you don't want to be my friend anymore because I refuse to join you in your superstitious beliefs, fine, I'll just make new friends.
But life doesn't really work that way. And you can't really make new parents, new siblings, new children....those losses are painful and I don't think we should even pretend otherwise.
We don't want to become so hard hearted that we can lose close connections and not be hurt by the loss.
When I first moved to the Ozarks twenty years ago, I made the obligatory journey down to Eureka Springs to visit the Christ of the Ozarks, that giant statue of the resurrected Jesus sprouting out of an Arkansas mountain top. Beyond the fact that it had been constructed by that old racist, E. B. Smith, the whole thing seemed offensive to me. It struck me in much the way Las Vegas struck me when I visited there..... it's big, it's tacky, and it seems both very fake and manipulatively intending to get money out of me.
It has structural issues... Jesus is buried up to his knees in the mountain because once construction had begun they learned that they were going to have to put a flashing red light on Jesus' head to warn off low flying aircraft. To avoid that Smith took the Jesus statue down to his knees so that if he were to lower his arms his knuckles would drag the ground.... Which makes him look a bit more like the KKK members who financed the original construction but I don't want to go down that path.
What strikes me about the statue that is the most theologically offensive is the fact that his image of the resurrected Jesus has no scars. In both John and Luke, it is important to them when they are writing their metaphorical accounts of resurrection appearances that the only way to be sure that it is really Jesus is because his hands and his feet are wounded.
The resurrection does not undo the cross. Coming back to life doesn't mean that he had not been tortured and killed.
In fact, the gospel writers seem to never tire of pointing out that his followers could not look at his face and recognize him.... His wounds were the most clear and recognizable thing about him because the wounds were real.
The past cannot be undone. I would even argue that we should not try to be cavalier about our losses. Our wounds are real and in a very real way, they make us who we are. Still, as Kierkegaard said, "Life can only be lived forward though it can only be understood backward."
I have lost friends over the past decade that I thought would always be a part of my life. There are people that I loved whose correspondence and phone calls finally slowed down to a complete stop. I don't know how much of that is because of differences in theology or differences in the way that I have understood our recent wars, the whole complex of economic and moral crises that relate to my social justice work. Sometimes it was a newspaper article and sometimes it was just easier to write me off than it was to put up with trying to be my friend. I know that most of you have been similarly wounded.
Pastorally, I want to say this. Never give into to revenge. Retaliating with rejection, as well as it works for puppies, is beneath who we are striving to be. There is a saying from the Desert Fathers that teaches that the fire you kindle against your enemies will burn you.
We cannot allow ourselves to just bleed arterially for the rest of our lives. We can't obsess or forever grieve those losses but there is nothing to be gained in trying to protect ourselves behind a wall of resentment.
You won't often catch me quoting Max Lucado but I like his definition of "forgiveness" where he says, "Forgiveness is unlocking the door to set someone free and realizing the prisoner was you."
The wounds are real and they will always be a part of you but you have the right, in fact, you have the obligation to be true to yourself. The Buddha taught that there are "Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."
You don't have to pretend to be what you are not to make other people more comfortable. You don't have to change them and you can always be the one who is ready to reconcile, the one who is willing to go the extra mile, the one who will suspect judgment, forgive past wrongs and to be the healer of broken relationships but you don't have to deny the truth.
As Tevya and his wife prepare to flee Russia to go live with family in Chicago he gives his estranged daughter permission to write to them and then the curtain falls. What happens after that is up to the audience member to decide.... I'm inclined towards optimism tempered with a heavy dose of reality orientation.
But given a choice between compliance with a falsehood that is popular or embracing a truth that is cherished only by a few, then I pray that I will always choose to stay in the path in search of the highest and best of truth and I'll willingly take my wounds.
