upside-down
February 20, 2011
I don’t know how to tell you what I want to tell you. What I have to tell you today is very difficult to communicate if not impossible to tell for it asks us to set aside everything we have come to believe is normal and expected, to be open to hearing a truth completely different than we have known in our own experience even though we have heard the words all our lives. No matter how often we have said the words and put them away in all those rational places that make sense of them so they won’t bother us too much. Yet, still, we need to break through what we have always known and been told, to hear again for the first time, the gospel message which still stubbornly counters everything the world has taught us to be. I daresay we are not even aware that our being Christian is any different than being an American or than being a human being in the world. What is different about being a Christian? We don’t want to be different. We have lost touch with the sacred and with the distinction between the ways of God and the ways of the world. It is all the same to us. The more found we think we are, the more lost we become.
The radical life-giving brilliance of the teachings of Jesus are completely ignored in part because what he says barely makes sense to us and Lord knows we have no time for nonsense. Yet it may well be that it is the nonsense of God that will save us from what we have come to think makes sense for us. Even as I speak these words I feel frustrated because I cannot really communicate the gap between where we are and where Christ is. We worry about the wrong things. If only we could really know the joy and freedom of the gospel, the possibilities and the presence of God even now we would not worry about whether our church will continue to exist but would celebrate our existence continually. We are here to celebrate and to share with the world the gospel, to share a joy that is no simple mindless cheerfulness but a joy that has come through the truth and the suffering to emerge firmly in the arms of grace.
Ours is the gospel of grace and it does not make sense to the ways of the world that demands that we get what we deserve for no one deserves grace and it is for everyone freely given. In a sermon written by a young pastor who had just learned that he had a particularly nasty form of cancer and had been treated and was able to return to his pulpit if only for a short while and his sermon on that first Sunday back began with this text from Romans: Yet while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly .He went on to say, I’m physically weak, but that’s not my main weakness, my most debilitating weakness. What the last half year has proved to me is that my weakness is more of the soul than of the body. This is what I’ve come to understand as I have dwelled on one question: How will I explain myself to my God? How can I ever claim to have been what he called me to be? And, of course, the scary truth is that I can’t. That’s the kind of weakness Paul is talking about. And that’s where (this) word comes in, while we were still enemies of God, we were reconciled with him through the death of his son. I find it unfathomable that God’s love propelled him to reach into our world with such scandalous grace, such a way out, such hope. No doubt God has done it, because there’s no hope anywhere else. I know, I’ve been looking. And I have come to see that the hope of the world lies only inside the cradle of God’s grace.
Part of the difficulty with us is that what we want to believe on the outside contradicts what we really believe on the inside. We say the words. We go through the motions but deep inside where we live we believe something else and sometimes we don’t even know of the contradiction within even our own selves. We do what makes sense at the time, what seems to be what everybody else is doing at the time, don’t rock the boat or upset the apple cart, don’t let anybody see I am different, don’t let anybody see my broken heart or my crazy impossible hope. What do we really know of this scandalous grace? How do we dare to speak the unspeakable, the gospel we can hardly believe ourselves? There is something wild and crazy about this gospel. Are these holy riddles (you must lose yourself to find yourself) or actual expectations of God for us?
In the upside down reality of the radical countering of the world’s values by the values of Christ, nonsense becomes a key word for understanding what is going on here. Nonsense makes sense and what makes sense is nonsense. What makes sense to us shapes who we are. How do we make sense of nonsense? The dead rise to life. To win you must lose. To be first you must be last. When you are struck on one cheek you are to turn your other cheek to be struck again. Love those who hate you. Pray for those who hurt you.
‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes─and ships─and sealing wax─
Of cabbages─and kings─
And why the sea is boiling hot─
And whether pigs have wings.’
In my office hanging from the ceiling I have my own flying pig. The idea of a pig with wings comes from the expression ‘when pigs fly’ which basically means never. I have it there to remind me to never say never. Strange things happen. Life really is what happens when we have made other plans. Faith is just as crazy.
(On the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the Congregational church in Rupert, Vermont Frederick was called upon to speak. This is part of what he said.) In the year 1831, it seems, this church was repaired and several new additions were made. One of them was a new steeple with a bell in it, and once it was set in place and painted, apparently, an extraordinary event took place. “When the steeple was added,” Howard Mudgett writes in his history, “one agile Lyman Woodard stood on his head in the belfry with his feet toward heaven.” That’s the one and only thing I’ve been able to find out abut Lyman Woodard, whoever he was, but it is enough. I love him for doing what he did. It was a crazy thing to do. It was a risky thing to do. It ran counter to all standards of Ne England practicality and prudence. It stood the whole idea that you’re supposed to be nothing but solemn in church on its head just like Lyman himself standing upside down on his. And it was also a magical and magnificent and Mozartian thing to do. (In Christ) everything goes topsy-turvy. Losing becomes finding and crying becomes laughing. The last become first and the weak become strong. Instead of life being done in by death in the end as we always supposed, death is done in finally by life in the end.
How do we dare to believe any of it? We dare, if we go there at all, because that is where life is. It is found in the unknown, the unexpected, in the contradictions and often in what does not make sense until we go there.
Alice laughed, “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Side note: In a letter from Lewis Carrol to Mary MacDonald on May 23, 1864: If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you’ll be so weak that you won’t be able to believe the simplest true things. Only last week a friend of mine set to work to believe Jack-the-giant-killer. He managed to do it, but he was so exhausted by it that when I told him it was raining (which was true) he couldn’t believe it, but rushed out in to the street without his hat or umbrella, the consequence of which was his hair got seriously damp.
What do you know about this business?” the King aid to Alice.
“Nothing,” said Alice.
“Nothing whatever?” persisted the king.
“Nothing whatever,” said Alice.
“That’s very important,” the King said, turning to the jury. They were just beginning to write down on their slates, when the White Rabbit interrupted: “Unimportant, you majesty means of course,” he said in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.
“Unimportant, of course, I meant,” the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, “important-unimportant-unimportant-important---“ as if he were trying which word sounded best.
So what’s it gonna be for us? Important, unimportant? How seriously crazy are we willing to step outside all the usual expectations for our lives, for our church? Jesus is a loser. He lost everything so we could find God and be found. How much are we willing to lose in order to win heaven? Are we willing to give up everything to receive everything? Are we ready to forgive, to be forgiven, to fall weak and flawed, loved and loving, into the cradle of grace.
Back at the church in Rupert Vermont Buechner concludes with these words: There is plenty of work to be done here, God knows. To struggle each day to walk the paths of righteousness is no pushover, and struggle we must because just as we are fed like sheep in green pastures, we must also feed his sheep, which are each other. Jesus, our Shepherd, tells us that. We must help bear each other’s burdens. We must pray for each other. We must nourish each other, weep with each other, rejoice with each other. Sometimes we must just learn to leave each other alone. In short, we must love each other. We must never forget that. But let us never forget Lyman Woodard either silhouetted up there against the blue Rupert sky. Let us join him in the belfry with our feet toward Heaven like his because Heaven is where we are heading. That is our faith and what better image of faith could there be? It is a little crazy.
Upside-down in the world we are one step closer to heaven. This, by any worldly standard, crazy Jesus says, to hold on, we must let go. The only love we get to keep is the love we give away. Let’s not kid ourselves. This is different. And when this starts making sense to us is when the lost will be found. Up will be down and down will be up and we will finally know what is really going on here.
‘The trouble with the world,’ said the wise old teacher with a sigh,
’is that human beings refuse to grow up.’
‘When can a person be said to have grown up?’ asked the seeker.
‘On the day that she or he does not need to be lied to about anything.’
‘How shall I be free?’ the seeker wanted to know.
‘Find out who has bound you,’ said the teacher.
The learner returned after a week and said, ‘No one has bound me.’
‘Then why ask to be set free?’
In that moment the seeker knew that she was as free as she dared to be.
