Jesus and the Martian

"A sad time for all people"

Imagine the world becoming obsessed with the survival of one person. Can you imagine anyone who would actually deserve it?

For Christians, the answer should be easy, especially in this season after Holy Week and Easter Sunday. During those precious few days, our ritual and liturgy focused like a laser on the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We rejoiced while remembering his entry into Jerusalem and deplored his followers’ neglectfulness in the garden and his delivery into his tormentors’ hands. Especially if we re-watched Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” we winced as the whip tore the flesh from his back and the nails pierced his hands and feet. Finally, inevitably, all Christians shouted, “Alleluia, Christ is risen!”

For us modern people, divided by language, creed, race, and station, by borders and ancient resentments and suspicions, it’s hard to imagine one person drawing the world together as Christ does his followers. Sometimes it does seem to happen, if only for a moment and almost always as the residue of tragedy. Those of a certain age remember the events of Nov. 22, 1963 as an outrage against all humanity. President Kennedy’s successor certainly did. During a recent visit to the LBJ Library in Austin, I saw the typescript of the brief remarks a staff member prepared for President Johnson to use when his plane arrived in Washington from Dallas with Kennedy’s body aboard. The aide wrote, “This is a sad time for every American.” Johnson crossed out the last two words so it would read, “[F]or all people.”

And so it was, although our species’ sadness didn’t ameliorate our Cold War rivalries. It makes me wonder what we could accomplish if the fragile bubble of unity never burst, if two billion Christians acted together in the spirit of our common alleluia, if people could just agree on how to achieve peace, justice, and freedom for all. After all, writes novelist Andy Weir, “[E]very human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true….This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception.”

Left behind

Actually, that’s not Andy talking but astronaut Mark Watney, a character in Weir’s book, The Martian. Mark is one of six NASA astronauts who land on Mars. When the mission is aborted because of a sandstorm, his colleagues leave without him because they mistakenly think he’s been killed. He has to survive using only the food, air, water, shelter, and transportation (two four wheel-drive rovers) left behind with him.

The novel, which features no extraterrestrials, is a space geek’s dream. At first, no one knows Mark’s alive. Then a NASA staffer studying satellite photos of the landing site notices that someone has moved one of the rovers. Within hours, everyone realizes that Mark is puttering around on Mars, and it turns out that almost all seven billion people on the novel’s fictional but highly realistic planet Earth want him to make it home. The U.S. invests hundreds of millions of dollars in desperate rescue missions. Even our geostrategic rivals the Chinese decide to help.

The Martian deftly invokes a unity of purpose that reminds me of Christians’ Easter acclamations, that laser-like fixation of ours on the miracle of Resurrection. We are prone to lose our unity all too soon, falling back on our enervating squabbles with one another at home, work, and church. By the same token, reading Andy Weir’s book, I had no trouble accepting that people would become fixated on an astronaut stranded 140 million miles away while overlooking the victims of injustice and circumstance on their own planet and even their own doorsteps. If God’s people ever gave full expression to the instinct to help each other out that Weir correctly identifies, then (pace Matt. 11:5) the blind would surely see, the deaf hear, and the lame walk, and good news would be continually proclaimed to the poor. Alleluia! 

This post first appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church.

Amid A Crowd Of Stars

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

With my mother at Easter

W.B. Yeats’ “When You Are Old” appears in A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, published in 1952 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. My copy has an inscription on the endpaper: “To Harvey on Christmas 1955 with deepest affection from Louis.” Harvey Taylor was my father, Louis Cook my godfather. Handsome Detroit newspapermen, for years they competed for the affections of my lovely newspaperwoman mother, Jean.

I was 14 months old that Christmas. Louis’s inscription expresses magnanimity in defeat. Still, he had probably guessed that alcoholism would destroy my parents’ marriage. Louis told me years later that he’d driven my father to more than one AA meeting. Six-foot-five in his stocking feet, gentle and strong, winner of the Bronze Star in World War II, Louis was biding his time.

In November, my mother moved to Yorba Linda, leaving behind the Pasadena house she bought half a lifetime ago when she got a job editing the old “View” section of the Los Angeles Times. A few years later, she became associate editor and one of the nation’s top female journalists. Kathy and I have been cleaning out her house, the work of many middle-aged children. There isn’t much left. Needing homes are the wrought-iron coffee table she loved and a long, Ponderosa-style dining room table and chairs she had made for the dinner parties she loved to throw.

All I really care about are the things she wrote. A commencement address she delivered at Mount St. Mary’s College. An article entitled “What Is An Episcopalian?”, which she wrote for the Detroit Free Press in 1961, when our General Convention was called in Motown. Her elegiac features about the 1965 murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo. Diary entries, including one on the date of my birth saying I weighed eight pounds, and it hadn’t gone easily. About a year ago, her advancing dementia robbed her of the pleasure of reading these aloud to visitors.

And then there are the letters. Especially Louis’s.

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true;

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

My mother wouldn’t marry Louis, which I always wanted her to do, since he was my father for all intents and purposes. She never really explained why, and now, she can’t. Her eyes sometimes glimmer when I mention him or my father. She doesn’t remember her devoted second husband, Richard Lescoe, at all.

The surpassing gift is that she saved about twenty of Louis’s love letters. They’re all written on old-fashioned newspaper copy paper. He never dated them. He wrote one, addressed “Dearest,” during his first visit to New York City, where it appears he was attending the famed Al Smith politicians’ dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria as a member of a Free Press delegation. It must’ve been about 1966, when he and Jean were in their forties.

“I have at last found the milieu for which I was born,” he wrote. “Nowhere in Manhattan can be found a gayer, more suave, more sophisticated man of the world than I. Especially since I stumbled out of a bar taking with me somebody’s Kuppenheimer overcoat. Unfortunately my victim’s gloves don’t fit me but they are Sak’s gray suede and I cut quite a figure dangling them carelessly in my left hand as I saunter down Park Ave.”

My mother loved John F. Kennedy, and at the black tie dinner at the Waldorf, lifelong labor organizer Louis encountered JFK’s nemesis and my future boss. He wrote, “I hesitate to mention this, darling, but Nixon is a fairly engaging character at close range.” Later, my mother managed to convince herself, but not me, that she had voted for Nixon, which made it easier to accept that her son was helping write his books. Her willfulness and my immature frustration made our relationship difficult. The dementia has taken all that away, too. I don’t think she’s ever been happier, nor have we ever been so close. And that is Easter.

And bending down beside the glowing bars

Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

This post appeared originally in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church.

His New Life And Ours

Theologian John Cobb explains why Christianity is all about Easter:

What is historically indubitable is that shortly after Jesus death some of Jesus followers were re-energized and ready to carry on Jesus’ work even if led to their deaths. These disciples said that Jesus had come to them and shown them that he was alive. They said that he was “resurrected.” They were joined by one we know as Paul, who had been their enemy, but who had a vision of Jesus alive in heavenly glory and calling him to his service. Paul taught that the resurrected Jesus had a “spiritual” body. Other believers insisted that the Jesus who came to them after his crucifixion was a fully physical being, although he appeared and disappeared in quite extraordinary ways.

If Jesus had not appeared to his followers and to Paul, his impact in human history would have been minor. We who live out of our memories of Jesus today, would know nothing about him. So, for us who follow him, Easter is the most important of our celebrations. Jesus lives on in our imaginations, our memories, and our hopes because his new life after his death gave new life to his followers. The image of “death and resurrection” is at the heart of Christian faith.

Moonstruck

Perhaps because we're deeply conscious of our worst tendencies, our fascination with perpetrators can muffle compassion for victims. God staged the perfect death so we'd learn to love life as much as God does. My Good Friday sermon, "All About Jesus," is here.

You might not realize it (St. John's School seventh graders do), but it's the movement of the heavens that brings us modern people to church each Easter Sunday. My sermon for the Sunday of the Resurrection, "Moonstruck," is here.

The St. John's Choir's magnificent "Hallelujah," from Messiah, which sent us out into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit and God's love, is here.

Easter Wednesday Sky

7:27 a.m., Yorba Linda

POTUS In D.C. At TEC

The Obamas were at St. John's on Easter Sunday and heard "Hallelujah" from Messiah (although it was the St. John's in Washington). The pool report (prepared by one reporter, in this case Mark Landler of the New York Times, for the White House press corps) is here.

First Drive No Nails

The text of my annual Easter letter to the people of God at St. John's:

New York Times columnist Alina Tugend wrote recently, “My sisters and I have often marveled that the stories we tell over and over about our childhood tend to focus on what went wrong.” Alina says she had a normal childhood with many good times and some bad ones. Can you relate to her experience? What do you remember most about growing up? What affects us more: Praise or criticism? When we get together with friends, do we rush to recount mishaps, illnesses, discouragements, or gossip, or do we dwell on the grace, joy, and abundance we’ve experienced?

Dr. Norman Vincent Peale was famous for promoting the power of positive thinking. Alina consulted authorities who remind us that there is vast power in negative thinking as well. In epochs when life was far more dangerous, counting our blessings might have felt good, but paying close attention to dangerous events or circumstances kept us alive.

We usually think of those who sent our LORD to the Cross as being evil. We will relate to them better – and even begin to see ourselves in the crowds shouting “Crucify him!” -- if we think of them as frightened people who took action to keep their status and power.

It doesn’t matter if we weren’t in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. The power of negative thinking is still ours to command whenever we want to drive a nail into a relationship at home, at work, or even at church. Instead, let’s be people who accentuate the positive, who remember the blessing and forgive the trespass, who bend toward hope and away from fear – people who live in the light of the empty tomb, where the ultimate power of negativity was destroyed forever. Let us be Resurrection people this Easter and all the days that follow.

Turin Jesus On His Face

Historian Thomas de Wesselow says that the Shroud of Turin (thought by many to be a medieval forgery) actually was Jesus's burial cloth and that its ghostly imprint tricked the disciples into thinking he'd been raised from the dead. At least in the Huffington Post article, de Wesselow doesn't say why the shroud's Jesus, who may well have had Semitic features and was probably in his early thirties when he died, looks like the English knight who guards the Holy Grail in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."

The article concludes with a predictable question:

What remains to be seen is how Christians around the world, who are about to celebrate Holy Week and Easter, will respond to de Wesselow's assertion that the bodily resurrection never happened.

Same way we do every year: Proclaim "He is Risen!" and go forth in the name of the risen Christ.

You Think?

The Wikipedia page for Easter carries this warning:

The neutrality of this article is questioned because of its systemic bias. In particular, there may be a strong bias in favor of Christianity.

He Is Risen

This seems as good an evening as any to call an Easter hiatus at The Episconixonian. The unread book pile is reaching alarming heights. Thanks to my readers! Back soon.

Easter Friday Flowers

Yorba Linda, 2:15 p.m.

Sermons: "Fade To Black" And "Hallelujah!"

People just like us were honoring institutions and traditions they loved. They were tired and scared. They were trying to do their jobs and keep the peace. As they gave in to what social scientists call ethical fading, they had no idea that they were killing God. Would we? If we attend to the song of the risen Christ in our hearts, we don't actually have to worry about it. My sermons for Good Friday and Easter.

Foxes Have Dens (But No Dems)

Barack Obama preached the gospel at a Holy Week White House breakfast for ministers:

I wanted to host this breakfast for a simple reason -- because as busy as we are, as many tasks as pile up, during this season, we are reminded that there's something about the resurrection -- something about the resurrection of our savior, Jesus Christ, that puts everything else in perspective.

We all live in the hustle and bustle of our work... But then comes Holy Week. The triumph of Palm Sunday. The humility of Jesus washing the disciples' feet. His slow march up that hill, and the pain and the scorn and the shame of the cross. And we're reminded that in that moment, he took on the sins of the world -- past, present and future -- and he extended to us that unfathomable gift of grace and salvation through his death and resurrection.

In the words of the book of Isaiah: "But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed."

This magnificent grace, this expansive grace, this "Amazing Grace" calls me to reflect. And it calls me to pray. It calls me to ask God for forgiveness for the times that I've not shown grace to others, those times that I've fallen short. It calls me to praise God for the gift of our son -- his Son and our Savior.

Meanwhile Fox News published this misleading, provocative headline, with an ugly picture of the president: "WH Fails to Release Easter Proclamation." The same was true under Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and both Presidents Bush.

Our Heaven, God's Heaven, And Hell

Ross Douthat is worried that while Americans' belief in God and heaven is strong, our fear of hell is waning:

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death ... salvation or damnation.”

If there’s a modern-day analogue to the “Inferno,” a work of art that illustrates the humanist case for hell, it’s David Chase’s “The Sopranos.” The HBO hit is a portrait of damnation freely chosen: Chase made audiences love Tony Soprano, and then made us watch as the mob boss traveled so deep into iniquity — refusing every opportunity to turn back — that it was hard to imagine him ever coming out. “The Sopranos” never suggested that Tony was beyond forgiveness. But, by the end, it suggested that he was beyond ever genuinely asking for it.

Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven?

Douthat blames our hellessiousness on two factors. The first is our big-hearted pluralism, or what I call the interfaith dilemma: How dare Christians (or Muslims) say that faithful adherents of other faiths will be consigned to perdition just because they were born and raised in the wrong cultural and religious milieu? What disturbs him far more is pastors' and theologians' falling back on the notion of an infinitely benevolent God as they try to explain why bad things continually happen to good people:

[I]f it’s hard for the modern mind to understand why a good God would allow such misery on a temporal scale, imagining one who allows eternal suffering seems not only offensive but absurd.

Douthat worries that insisting that God redeems and saves everyone devalues human life by reducing the significance of human choices. Put another way, why waste all that effort being good if you'll get into heaven anywho? St. Paul grappled with the same dilemma in Romans 6:1:

Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? [NRSV]

On the contrary. Being joined to Christ in baptism, Paul continues, enables grace to lead us from sin to righteousness. Putting it in interfaith terms, the closer the spiritual searcher hews to the mind and heart of God, the more likely she is to please God. She won't be able to help it. Christians understand that the Incarnation gives them a leg up on proximity to the divine. When we seek to imitate God, we have the advantage of a teacher and savior who uses our language, argues through everyday analogies (as in the parables), and even suffers and weeps as we do.

When closeness to God becomes a habit, a way of being, we understand that we're experiencing a foretaste of heaven. Hell would be the opposite, the ultimate isolation from God, a loneliness so terrible that the sufferer might prefer the distraction of demons with pitchforks. Someone to talk to, at least. So I don't share Douthat's concerns about the church's underemphasis of the underworld. Actually, I'm surprised that anyone who believes in God's omnipotence worries very much about the church. It's up to God to figure out how to draw his creatures closer to him, and God evidently believes that our hunger for relationship with him and one another is ultimately more compelling than fear of fiery perdition. Maybe it's because, at least in the west, we're living in societies where family and social relationships people once took for granted are fraying and even disappearing. If you want to see what hell looks like, visit a nursing home where someone's mother spends 20 hours a day lying in bed, rarely if ever visited by someone she loves.

Lurking behind the theological consensus that hell as humans usually portray it isn't logical is a third factor Douthat doesn't mention, namely the sovereignty of God. How could any soul, no matter how blighted, lie outside the saving power of a creator who repeatedly promises to lose or give up none that he has made? I've had conversations with evangelically inclined friends who say that, if it were up to them, gays could marry and Jews could be saved, but the Bible insists otherwise. But by their very nature, God's creatures can't be more compassionate than God.

This Easter Monday, I proclaim my faith in the saving power of the risen Christ and yet find that I am humble enough to accept that God's imagination mightily transcends mine and even that embodied by the church's doctrines. Douthat argues that evil people should have the right to make their choices in the world and receive the corresponding recompense in the hereafter. If I were running the universe, that's probably the rate card I'd come up with, too. There are people, the all-too-numerous real Tony Sopranos of the world included, that I would never let into my heaven. But you spotted what was wrong with that sentence right away.

The Great Post-Feast Of Easter

After Easter services, we go to brunch at El Adobe in San Juan Capistrano. Daughters Lindsay and Valerie are flanking Valerie's boyfriend, Mark. Below is Kathy's son, Dan, teaching a family friend, 20-month-old Eilee, how to play air mariachi guitar.

"The Rising," Springsteen & the E Street Band

An Easter hymn about Sept. 11. "May your precious blood bind me, Lord, as I stand before your fiery light." The St. John's folk circle will attempt the song at the May 7 women's brunch.
Hat tip to Paul Arndt (who will pay the guitar solo)

The Evening Of The Fourth Sunday In Easter

Yorba Linda, about 7:30 p.m.

"One-Way Ride": Sermon For Easter II

After I'd covered my first City Council meeting in 1979, Kile Morgan, mayor of the scrappy little town of National City in San Diego county, said he was going to take me on a one-way ride. Sounds like a Tony Soprano move, huh? It turned out to be his official tour of the town he'd rebuilt almost single handedly, ending with breakfast at Aunt Emma's, the restaurant he owned in Chula Vista, at 10:30 in the evening.

We're all on one-way rides, of course -- and they begin right now, in the light of the radical freedom of mind, heart, and spirit won for us by the Cross and the empty tomb. My sermon for the second Sunday of Easter is here.

Three Sermons En Route To Easter

Good Friday is an impossible paradox. Jesus's killing was inevitable. It was completely unjust. It was drenched in glory. By the same token, our deaths are inevitable. We'll each contend with unjust circumstances in our lives. And we each have the capacity to make our lives a glorious anticipation of the realm of God. Listen to my sermon here.

At the Easter Vigil at St. John's, the most important service of the church year, it was good to hear the voices of our youth retelling the creation story from Eden through the deliverance from Egypt. It was good to hear the voices of the corporate church raised in support of our 12 baptismal candidates. And it was good for God to hear our voices proclaiming, "Alleluia! He is risen!" That's Lisa Naulls rehearsing the youth choir beforehand. My Saturday night sermon here.

On Easter morning, it's hard to evade the peril of deciding that Jesus's resurrection was merely symbolic or spiritual, since if God's action in raising him is in doubt, so is the notion that there's any benevolence in the creation beyond the minds and intentions of its creatures. Our Easter faith is that Christ wants his people to have hope, peace, and a faith in God's transcendent and perfect love. My Easter Sunday sermon is here.

Our Citizenship In Heaven Has Begun

From the Easter sermon of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury:

Now we should not doubt for a moment that Paul means what he says and that he takes for granted that the resurrection of Jesus is not a piece of fantasy or wishful thinking but the actual emptying of a grave. However, the point of Paul's entire teaching on the resurrection is to take us much further than that. This event, the emptying of the grave, has done something and has brought the Christians of Colossae - like all Christians - into a new universe. They are living in a new climate, with new 'thoughts' - a climate in which the various ways in which we've put up barriers between ourselves and God have been shattered and our old selves are dead. We may still go on trying to put those barriers back up again, but something has happened that opens up a new kind of future. Our selfish and destructive acts and reactions can be dealt with, overwhelmed again and again by the love shown in the cross of Jesus. Because of Jesus' death and rising from the dead, our resurrection has started, and our citizenship in heaven has begun.