One Brutal Baptism

One Brutal Baptism

Limping down the bank
Into the current
With one brutal baptism
Standing between here
And the other side
Drowning possible?
Drowning required!

Flesh awashed on shore
Tossed
Water-logged
Limp
Mouth-to-mouth
Breath of life

Awaken in wimsy
Animated in wonder
Imagination sprung free
All familiar
All new
"I've never been here"
"I've always belonged here"
"Finally! Finally! Finally!
I know what to do"

7 Years of Missing My Dad - Easter

How do seven years pass so rapidly?
Where does time go?
Is there a place it is stored after it is used up?
Could we stop it for a while?
Sort through used time for a while?
Must time always be new and ever moving?

I wish I could have him back,
Just for a day,
Just for an hour,
Wouldn't he be so proud of his grandkids?
Would he relish the stories of Africa?
Wouldn't  he have some advice that makes me say,
"How the Hell do you even know that?" or
"How long you been holding on to that nugget of wisdom?"

In that moment together,
We would go for a drive;
We would talk about life;
We would eat pizza;
We would laugh;
We would live out some more of our reconciled relationship;

We would look at each other with faces that say,
"All is forgiven"
"I love you"
"I am proud of you"
And we would not need words.

Seven years ago today I buried my father;
Seven years ago today was the last time I saw his face;
Seven years ago today
Marked me;
Changed me;
Emptied me.

My soul is stretched thin between heaven and earth,
As part of me went with him,

And yet there is a promise,
The Easter promise,
The promise that death,
With its bluster and fury,
With its hate and rage,
With its smugness and certainty,
Does not have the last word,
Like it thinks it does.

I cannot see my father;
I cannot hold my father;
I cannot hear his voice...

But I will
And when I see him I will run to him
And he will run to me
We will trample death on the way to each other


 

Hunger Games Easter

After watching the Hunger Games, I might actually go ahead and read the book. It easily ranks up there with The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, and The Chonicles of Narnia in ripeness with theological implications.

There is good and evil. There is the fake or gilded world and then there is the real world. There is a narrative of death that is powerful and seemingly irresitible and the strength needed to live the counternarrative is not only difficult, it is dangerous. The story of "live the narrative of death or die" wears relentlessly against those who are honest, free, and hopeful.

"May the odds be ever in your favor," is the twisted blessing that is spoken to encourage everyone. It is a diabolical sort of "God bless you" with God being replaced with a wicked game of chance. It gives some kind of sense that if your name is not drawn to go into the annual death match, you were in some way favored. However, the oppressiveness and deceit of the statement imposes on everyone because everyone is forced into the anxiety having the chance of kill or be killed.

Everyone is objectified. Everyone is equally worthy of death. And yet it is even more sickening than just death. For the masters of death, there is value in keeping people alive for sport, for the entertainment of the powerful. Just like in the Matrix, providing the masses with some minimal life satisfaction to believe they can live or are living serves the powerful. The oppressed must live just enough to provide a resource to be exploited by the powerful, but they must not be allowed too much hope or it gets out of control and the oppressed may believe they can have freedom, may pursue great freedom.

Jesus was situated in the political superpower of Rome and the religious superpower of the Jewish religious system. Each of these systems had powerful control mechanisms that served the powerful for the exploitation of the masses. Systems of death were used to control. Jesus may have been more aware of his freedom than Katniss, she was not far behind. Her innocence in loving freedom is refreshing and it isn't too hard to think of her Messianic archetype.

Jesus lived within these systems, but was not beholden to them. He neither bowed to Caesar nor did he run from Caesar. He neither obeyed the Sanhedrin nor did he fear them and flee. Jesus operated on a completely different power system. He called it the Kingdom of God.

Whatever metaphor might now better fit what Jesus was doing 2000 years ago, it was about freedom and taking the side of the oppressed.

When the systems of death were ramped up by Rome and the Sanhedrin, they killed Jesus. And yet even in death Jesus was defiant. There is a difference between being killed and being willing to die. Jesus took the power out of the hands of his killers by freely dying. Jesus' death actually created more life in the lives of the living.

Here in the Easter season, Christians think of how Jesus died and how Jesus defeated death. In the Hunger Games, life and death is the up and running theme throughout. Even though there are political, religious, economic, and media systems of dehumanization, of objectification, of oppression, of death, freedom and hope cannot be snuffed out.

We must be not give in to the systems of death that swirl and seduce us. We must live. Being yourself, the image of God that you were made (and helping others do the same), is the most powerfully subversive initiative you can take.

Re-Hope

After the darkest day of their lives, after the death of hope, after all was lost, a rumor began. Perhaps hope was not gone. Could it be that Jesus was alive?

It was not believable. He was as a dead a Roman cross could get someone. No one survived that sort of thing. People saw him take his last breath. He was dead. So any talk of him being alive was at best a mistake, but more than likely delusional. People don’t raise from the dead.

But there kept being more people claiming to see Jesus in the flesh, walking around. How? How could a delusion spread like this? Maybe it was a conspiracy. Desperate people do desperate things. Maybe a political uprising based on a story.

The number of people claiming to see him grew, but they had no agenda. They were not seeking power. They were full of joy or caught into disbelief, as though the impossible were swallowed by the undeniable. People were re-hoping.

If it were true, if Jesus had been dead for over 50 hours and now was walking among people again, then a lot of things were true.

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Black Saturday

To hope is to believe. To hope is to risk. To hope is to be vulnerable.

When the people who got to know Jesus and came to trust him as someone who would make hope something worth doing watched him die, their hopes died too.

Before Jesus, their simple lives were predictable and they knew where the power was. Between the Roman government officials and the Jewish religious establishment, power accumulated in these two areas. So long as everyone else went along in their everyday life and didn’t make any trouble, things were fine. So long as the behavior modification tactics of church and state were adhered to, there wouldn’t be any trouble. So long as everyone agreed that people with mental health issues should be marginalized, people with illnesses should be ostracized, women were the cause of all sexual misconduct, foreigners should be mistreated because of their nationality, wealth equaled power, and any ailment a person ever had was proof of their sinfulness…so long as everyone agreed to these rules, there was peace.

They had lives, but subdued lives. They had lives of limited meaning and limited consequence. Yes, there were urges and impulses and fantasies about things being different. There were ideas and conversations about change, but they knew their place. At the end of each day, they took their places dutifully or even begrudgingly, but there they stood – in place.

And then someone comes along and breaks all the rules. He touches and cures the mentally ill, he touches the sick, he defends women, he engages foreigners, he had no cash and challenged the wealthy with surprising credibility, he redefined why people were sick. Jesus didn’t agree with any of the rules people were supposed to agree to. He did not disagree with violence. He did not disagree with anger. He did not disagree with his own set of oppressions. He just disagreed with love.

And that gave people hope.

Those urges and impulses and fantasies people had about something, maybe it was freedom, got lured out past their allowable boundaries. They got out into the open. People started the believe that maybe things could be better. They thought that maybe there was some sort of legitimacy to their hope. People let their hope out from under the blankets of rules and laws and fear and doubt and disbelief. People saw a person who loved people and it was so very different than anything else they had ever seen before. They knew love when they saw it, even if they had seen it before.

Some got curious. Some got interested. Some quit their jobs to be near Jesus. It was that big a deal. He was that different. But he was familiar. He touched people. He told stories that made people think. He told stories that embarrassed people in power, but usually in a playful way. He said the words that made sense to people, the words they had always wanted to say, but didn’t believe it was true. When Jesus said it, there was confirmation that the inklings in their hearts were true. They weren’t crazy for thinking things could be better.

Jesus never promised fame.

Jesus never promised fortune.

Jesus never promised happiness. 

People were not interested in Jesus for any of those reasons. They instinctively knew that life was not about these things. What brought them to him was that he was living the sort of life that showed them they were not crazy for their urges, impulses and fantasies of freedom and love and that there was a way live life that way.

Love was worth the risk.

People started to believe that if Jesus said it worth it, then it was worth it. They hoped.

And then something went terribly wrong. The old forces had had enough. The church and state collaborated to put an end to the rule breaking. Jesus’ freedom had gone too far. Jesus’ love had insulted the church and state enough. It was time to assert the true force, the true power. It was time for the church and state to demonstrate who was in control.

The church and state killed Jesus.

It was on a Friday. They publicly killed him. There was not going to be any chance of a rumor that he was still living in the hills somewhere outside of town. No. He would be killed in an undeniable way.

But the church and state were not just killing Jesus. They were on to the fact that people were hoping. Hope threatens power. Always. Hope threatens oppression. Always. What was worse than one man loving people was a lot of people believing in this sort of rule breaking. The church and state knew that if they killed Jesus, they killed hope. Jesus is one man. Hope is contagious. Hope can spread. Hope is a threat. They execution of Jesus was the execution of hope.

And it worked. When Jesus died on the Roman executioner’s cross, hope was nailed up there with him. No one who was there walked away with any hope. No one who heard about the execution had any hope left in them. Friday was a dark day. A lot died on Friday. There were tears as the space where hope once lifted the hearts of women and men was now just huge empty spot.

It was hard to sleep Friday night. Many people didn’t. They just cried a lot. The ache of lost hope left them with little idea of what might be next. The shock of the loss left them aching or numb or confused or angry or feeling duped or depressed or everything all at once.

Saturday morning met them as a day of long emptiness. Most people who just a day earlier held so much hope didn’t know what to do. Daily chores were going to be neglected. For some, ritual was all they had to help them to know what to do. Tradition, routine, and ritual would push the hours by, but with 100 pounds of grief strapped to the backs weighing them down.

Abruptly, hope was gone. And it was not just a bad dream. Saturday provided 24 straight hours of unrelenting reinforcement that he was really dead. Even though the minds of many wrestled to solve it, to figure out some way they was not really gone, they could not do it. Every thought lead to one place – death. People talked among each other. It was so hard to believe he was really gone, but impossible to deny it.

Some wept more.

Some betrayed themselves and said they never really hoped in the first place.

Some thought about ending their own lives.

Some were just quiet.

No one was left unaffected on this very dark Saturday.

The church and state had demonstrated that even the most clever, most engaging, most contagious man was going to submit to the rules one way or another. They had done so in a way that not only killed the man who broke the rules, and not only in a way that killed hope in the hearts of many people, but also in a way that was an obvious warning to anyone else who might try this sort of rule breaking. Rule breakers die. That was the message. And it was received.

On Saturday, all of the powers of oppression were reset. Order was re-established. The rules be followed once again. Everything people risked was proven pointless. People risked and became vulnerable – and got burned. Back to safety. Back to obedience. Back to hopelessness.

The only thing darker than the oppression before Jesus touched people’s hope was how dark it was when people realized that even someone like Jesus couldn’t pull it off. If hope for love and freedom and equality were improbable before Jesus came, they were confirmed impossible now that he was dead. The words of Jesus saying, “It is finished” echoed in the ears of many. Jesus was right – we’re done here.

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