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.

Safekeeping

After a solemn service of Holy Eucharist on Maundy Thursday, when we remember the last supper, Jesus's commissioning his disciples to love one another, and his agony in the Garden of Gesthemane, some ministers strip the altar bare while others take what remains of the consecrated bread and wine to an altar of repose elsewhere in the church. This remnant is used for Holy Communion on Good Friday. Andy Guilford of St. John's Church took this photo early Friday morning during an all-night prayer vigil.

Light And Sacrament

The altar of repose last night at St. John's

Face Of Agony

This olive tree in the Garden of Gesthemane is hundreds of years old; its roots may have fed the trees that sheltered Jesus as he awaited his betrayal. I took the photo in January 2011.

"Could You Not Keep Awake One Hour?"

The John Chrysostom chapel, prepared for the all-night prayer vigil, beginning after tonight's Maundy Thursday service and continuing until noon on Good Friday

We're Natural-Born Killers

As Christians prepare for Holy Week, which among other things is about our complicity in the killing of Jesus Christ, David Brooks suggests that most of us are theoretically capable of crimes such as the massacre Robert Bales allegedly committed in Afghanistan:

[E]ven people who contain reservoirs of compassion and neighborliness also possess a latent potential to commit murder.

David Buss of the University of Texas asked his students if they had ever thought seriously about killing someone, and if so, to write out their homicidal fantasies in an essay. He was astonished to find that 91 percent of the men and 84 percent of the women had detailed, vivid homicidal fantasies. He was even more astonished to learn how many steps some of his students had taken toward carrying them out.

One woman invited an abusive ex-boyfriend to dinner with thoughts of stabbing him in the chest. A young man in a fit of road rage pulled a baseball bat out of his trunk and would have pummeled his opponent if he hadn’t run away. Another young man planned the progression of his murder — crushing a former friend’s fingers, puncturing his lungs, then killing him.

These thoughts do not arise from playing violent video games, Buss argues. They occur because we are descended from creatures who killed to thrive and survive. We’re natural-born killers and the real question is not what makes people kill but what prevents them from doing so.

Photo by Andy Guilford

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.

Holy Leftovers

Reserved sacrament in the Chrysostom chapel at St. John's Church, Good Friday afternoon

Good Friday Sky

Yorba Linda, 10:45 a.m.

The Cupboard Is Bare

The aumbry and altar of St. John's Episcopal Church on Good Friday afternoon, following the stripping of the altar on Maundy Thursday.

St. John's Holy Wednesday Sky

Calling The Tune

A Holy Week play list. I think I understand the guy's momentary reluctance to listen to the song in his own heart.
Hat tip to Chip and Bev Raisin

Reciprocity

Happy ponytails to you, at a Yorba Linda Starbucks on Holy Wednesday

Holy Wednesday With Zack And Mark

On Tuesday afternoon, two young men, Mark Motley, 18, and Zach Rafferty, 17, died when the car Mark was driving hit a tree along a twisting road in south Orange County. Both had attended St. John's School. Zach graduated from the middle school in 2006, while Mark finished his pre-secondary education elsewhere. In his yearbook photo, Zach has spiky hair, a big Windsor knot in his tie (dad must've helped), and a winning smile. While a number of students remembered Zach (though none of the younger ones watching as flags were raised against a threatening sky), almost all the teachers and administrators did.

The news of his and his friend's death reached our campus on the morning of what Christians call Holy Wednesday. We usually use this time, in the middle of Holy Week, to teach the children about the meaning and power of Jesus's willing sacrifice for all creation. When tragedy intrudes at such moments in the church calendar, pastors and teachers must tread carefully. There's a collect, or prayer, for Holy Wednesday that includes a noble sentiment that may make perfect theological sense but would make none whatsoever, at least right now, to the family and friends of Zack and Mark. "Grant us grace," the prayer reads, "to take joyfully the sufferings of the present time, in full assurance of the glory that shall be revealed." Talking about today's present suffering, it will be a long time before the immensity of these children's loss will even be comprehensible. Take it joyfully? Only to the extent that people may take comfort from remembering the joy these two kids took from life.

Stories abounded today of Zach's irrepressible sense of humor. We heard them from his teachers and his high school friends, most of them St. John's alumni and alumnae on spring break who returned to our campus, the place they'd first known him, to seek some comfort in their grieving, to begin to try to understand the unknowable.

What a blessing that they came here today. One of the reasons young people are such miracles is that they're not afraid to admit when they're hurt, to gather together and cling to each other, to let tears stream down their faces without even trying to wipe them away. We sat with them, praying, counseling, but mainly letting them talk and cry.

Several Friends of Zack had never been on our campus but came along because it was important to his St. John's friends. Most of the teenagers had already visited the crash site. Some had gone to the victims' homes and expressed condolences. That was surely God's work. When the initial shock has passed, when the funerals are over, those who loved Zach and Mark the most may find that they want to keep talking about their heartbreak even though the world wants them to move on, to get over it.

These young pastors, the baptized priests of God who came home to our school today to mourn, promised us that they would keep checking in with the families in the weeks and months ahead, when the first excruciating wound has healed, leaving an ache that may become more manageable but will never go away. How could it, when two such lights have gone out of the world, and in Holy Week, of all times?

O God, whose beloved Son took children into his arms and blessed them: Give us grace to entrust Zack and Mark to your never-failing care and love, and bring us all to your heavenly kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.