As
I think on the scriptures we have read today, I am reminded of the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
by Tom Stoddard. The two lead characters
stumble upon a traveling band of actors that call themselves “Tragedians,” because
they only perform tragedies. When asked
if these were works of antiquity, their leader replies:
“We're
more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school.
Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do
you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent
or consecutive. But we can't give you
love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood
is compulsory. They're all blood, you
see.”
Blood
is compulsory in the story of human history.
Even as we continue to search for our evolutionary roots we can’t
help but ask questions about blood. We
spill it. We keep it. We honor it.
It doesn’t matter if the
blood indicates royalty, ethnicity, or just family – blood
matters. Not only is it essential for
life, but blood indicates our loyalties.
We’ve all heard the phrase, “blood
is thicker than water,” and it is true
that most people would rather be with family or tribe than that which is
foreign unless they are forced to leave.
One
place that we find ourselves crossing the divide between strangers and friends
is the church. I’ve
even heard it said that your church is your family of choice. As nice as that sounds, the idea of choosing
your religion is fairly new. As Nadia Boltz-Weber, a well
renowned Lutheran Pastor, recently put it in an interview, “people
are now choosing symbol systems to help them make sense of the world,” whereas
those used to be inherited. Sometimes
these symbol systems include the church.
Sometimes they do not.
The
good thing about this is that we are more sincere when we make these choices. The bad thing about it is that we are more
able to deny those relationships that make us uncomfortable. Yet, we who follow Christ are truly bound by
someone else’s choice. We are bound by someone else’s
blood.
Have
you ever thought about it that way – that
we are like blood brothers and sisters? Maybe
it’s a guy thing, but I have secretly
always wanted to cut my hand and bind it with a friend like they used to in old
stories before blood born illnesses made us crazy about hygiene. And yet, I believe that is exactly what
happens when we share our burdens and even more so when we experience life
together.
I
think that is why it is sometimes harder to share joys than it is to share
concerns. I’ve
seen this in prayer groups and worship service with people ranging from age 5
to 100. It’s
always the same. We are happy with and
for one another when good things happen, but nothing unites you with someone
else like sharing a burden – especially when
it is something that you have no idea how to respond to.
Of
course, when we get pushed too far out of our comfort zone we can do and say
some strange things. Just look at Job’s
wife! “Haven’t
you suffered enough? Just curse God and
get it over with!” says the woman
who also lost everything, including her children and their families.
And
Job corrects her, reminding her that God is the source of all of life in its fullness – the
good, the bad, and the ugly. The thing
that is hard for us as modern thinkers is that this was written at a time when
the question of the presence of evil with a just God wasn’t
an issue. The question that Job was
written to answer is, “Why do you
believe?”
Job’s
friends come later and challenge him over his faith and practice, but they come
up dry. Eventually the drama plays out
before God, and we find that the purpose of all the hardship was not only to
prove that God was God but to prove that faith is not dependent on blessing. If anything, faith is the essential tool for
understanding and getting through suffering!
For
us all the world is indeed a stage and we are all tragedians. The world for all of its complexity and
beauty is imperfect. Sometimes screws
fall out of the place they held together.
Sometimes people feel rejected and no one is there to tell them how
unique in all the world they are except for those who tell them that power and
dominance and violence are effective means of control.
And
yet God suffers with them as God does with us, because God knows that suffering
is not the last word. The last word is
the first word, which is the only word. And
that word is God. The letter to the Hebrews reminds us that God spoke the
universe into being. God corrected Kings
and nations through prophets. And God
spoke a final and complete word in the person, teaching, suffering, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. And that
final word which makes everything make sense is redemption.
Whether
we know it or not we need redemption. It
seems like that word gets thrown around a lot these days – mostly
in competitions. More and more I hear of
people saying that they need to redeem themselves, and maybe you can when it
comes to a cooking show or a football game.
But the author of Hebrews reminds us that redemption doesn’t
come from covering up a failure with a success.
Redemption comes from recognizing that, no matter what we have done or
had done to us, God is with us – constantly
choosing to love us into higher levels of response to God’s
love. In fact – so
says Hebrews 2:6 – somewhere,
somebody said that we have been given a lot of responsibility (it’s
actually a quote from Psalm 8). Yet we
can’t even see all that is under our care. But we can see that Jesus suffered.
We
can understand that we are united in the experience of suffering and limitation
–
not just with Jesus but with anyone. Through the suffering of Jesus we can know
that we are a part of his family of choice, and through his resurrection we can
see the possibility of peace and redemption for all of God’s
creation!
And
so we become a people that are able to say that all lives matter – that’s
what the table of Christ is all about. We
become a people that are able to say that blue lives matter without denying the
fact that black lives matter. We can
even say that black lives matter without denying that all lives matter equally.
And
today with the help of Innerfaith Prison Ministries,
we can even say that orange lives matter.
Innerfaith will be the local recipient of a portion of the Peace and Global Witness Offering,
and I’d like you to see how suffering and
redemption come together in the work that they do.
I’ve
edited this video down a bit, but you can find the full version on their
website. I also want to acknowledge that
our connection with them is through the C.U.P.S. Basket Ministry. You will not see any gift baskets in the
video, because the children get new toys.
The gift baskets C.U.P.S. provides are for the other family members that
would otherwise be neglected.
Blood
is compulsory. We’re
all flesh and blood, you see. As it has
been said, “What Christ has assumed, Christ has
healed.” And today we
celebrate with Christians throughout the world because God has chosen to be
known to us in suffering and redemption, and God has given us faith to proclaim
peace in a world bent on self destruction.
It’s just that simple. It’s
just that hard.
But
hey, you’re not alone. We have each other, and in the space between
us we might just find that there is more joy than we can contain, more hope
than we can imagine, and a message that truly flows through us as a life giving
force. Let us then be drawn to the table
of Christ that we might be sent into all the world, and to God be the glory,
now and always. Amen.
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