| Rector’s
Sermon
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| Why would he do that? Why would anyone deliberately make him or herself available for torture? This story is about Abu Ghraib. It’s about waterboarding. It’s about lynching black people. It’s just awful. And we have this whole week to remember it. Actually, “remember” is one of my favorite words. It’s also a kind of reality check word now that I’m past age 60 and remembering becomes a critical test that only those of us who are past 60 can really appreciate. Some of us were talking about Blackberries and date books and texting, and it was shocking to remember that I never had a date book until after I was married and had graduated from seminary, probably because I had fewer things to remember but also probably because I was good at remembering. Today the thought of losing my date book (I don’t have a Blackberry yet) renders me catatonic—that’s how dependent I’ve become for a hard copy version of the six months prior and the six months ahead that define my life. But the word remember has a deeper significance for me than making sure I show up at a meeting. It has to do with recreating an event so that that event can become accessible, can be re-lived. And it has to do with persons and relationships, bringing them to mind so that they can live again in us, so that our connecting can continue to influence who we are and what we make of our lives. I remember, for example, Bishop Persell’s visit for our Centennial celebration in November 2005. He wore the white chasuble I had been ordained in and that had been a gift to me from my aunt Tealdie. And I thought how proud and pleased my aunt Tealdie would have been to know that Bishop Persell was wearing the chasuble she had given to me for my ordination, and so it was as if Aunt Tealdie was right there with us celebrating our 100th Anniversary, in a parish that was not hers but nonetheless in a parish she loved with its current rector whom she loved. Remembering those kinds of things does that. Today we are remembering the events and the persons in the last week of Christ’s life. We are remembering Christ so that those events and those persons and Christ himself may become available to us, become accessible to us, become present for us. And so our question of why he did it, of why he allowed himself to be so brutally mistreated puts me of mind of those instances today when innocent people or perhaps not-so-innocent people are brutally mistreated and of people who offer themselves for some greater purpose that has a cost attached to it. We say that it was because of love that Jesus was willing to die for us. Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote, [John Buchanan continues]
And so in remembering that kind of love Jesus had I am invited to somehow have his story become my story, to somehow embrace the mature responsibility that kind of love offers me as an opportunity, and wherever that kind of mature love might take me. Barbara Brown Taylor writes in The Preaching Life: The Bible tells us the stories we need and want to hear—stories that help us live, stories that help us die, and stories to help us believe we shall live again. Listening to them, we are called into relationship with the One who tells them to us. Believing them, we are changed. The living words of God heal our hurts and soften our hearts; they clear our vision and guide our feet. Like a lifeline strung from the beginning of time to the end, they show us a way through all the storms of culture, nature, and history. They show us the way to the Word beyond all our words, in whose presence we shall be made eloquent at last. That’s the nature of this story for this week which we remember. It is a painful privilege but a privilege nonetheless, and one that ends with an Alleluia.
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