November 25, 2001
Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
Philippians 2:1-11
As the Italian film, La Dolce Vita, opens, a helicopter is flying slowly through the sky not very high above the ground. Hanging down from the helicopter in a kind of halter is the life-size statue of a man dressed in robes, with his arms outstretched so that he looks almost as if he is flying by himself. It flies over a field where some men are working and causes a good deal of excitement. They wave their hats and hop around and yell. Then one of them recognizes who it is a statue of and shouts in Italian, “Hey, it’s Jesus!”, whereupon some of them start running along under the statue, waving and calling to it. But the helicopter keeps on going, and after a while it reaches the outskirts of Rome, where it passes over a building on the roof of which there is a swimming pool surrounded by a number of girls in bikinis basking in the sun. They look up too and start waving. But this time the helicopter doubles back as the young men flying it decide to get a better look at the girls. They and the statue hover over the pool where, above the roar of the engine, the pilots try to get the girls’ telephone numbers, explaining that they are taking the statue to the Vatican and will be only too happy to return as soon as their mission is accomplished.
Reflecting on this opening scene, author and preacher, Frederick Buechner writes, “During all of this, the reaction of the audience in the little college town where I saw the film was of course to laugh at the incongruity of the whole thing. There was the sacred statue dangling from the sky, on the one hand, and the profane young Italians and the bosomy young bathing beauties on the other hand - the one made of stone, so remote, so out of place there in the sky on the end of its rope; the others made of flesh, so bursting with life. Nobody in the audience was in any doubt as to which of the two came out ahead or at whose expense the laughter was.”
But then the helicopter continues on its way, and the great dome of St. Peter’s looms up from below, and for the first time, the camera starts to zoom in on the statue itself, until for a moment the screen is almost filled with just the face of Christ. Says Buechner, “And at that moment there was no laughter at all in that theater full of students and their dates and paper cups full of buttery popcorn and La Dolce Vita college-style. Nobody laughed during that moment because there was something about that face, for a few seconds there on the screen, that made them be silent - the face hovering there in the sky and the outspread arms. For a moment, not very long to be sure, there was no sound, as if the face were their face somehow, their secret face that they had never seen before but that they knew belonged to them, or the face that they had never seen before but that they knew, if only for a moment, they belonged to.”
What is it about that face, that life, that attracts us so, which brings us back again and again?
In our Thursday morning men’s Bible study we have been studying the Gospel of Mark. Recently we came upon the story of the rich young man. You know the story where the man comes to Jesus and wants to know what he can do to earn eternal life. Jesus says, “Well it’s pretty easy. Just sell everything you have, give the money to the poor, and follow me.” Well, the young man can’t do that and he goes away sad. A challenging text and we wrestled with it for a while. We realized we are very much like that rich young man - people of many possessions. What do Jesus’ words mean for us? What do they say about our priorities, our values, the choices we make each and every day? In the Fireside Room on a Thursday morning, there were many different thoughts and opinions, lots of different things were said. But I’ll tell you what wasn’t said. Nobody said this was a waste of time. Nobody wondered why we were grappling so hard with words spoken by a Palestinian Jew over 2000 years ago. No one said that Jesus and his teachings are irrelevant to us today, sophisticated 21st century men that we are. No, we took his words with utter seriousness. In fact, the theme of our discussion was how we can bring our lives more into alignment with his words. There was an unspoken understanding that this is important stuff that we need to listen to and struggle with - that this Jesus just might make a difference in our lives. What is it about that face?
Charles Lamb, that noble man of letters, once said, “If Shakespeare should come amongst us we should all rise; but if Jesus should appear, we should all kneel.” I think he was right.
“Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” Could that be what attracts us - the Lordship of Christ? Jesus is Lord. It is the oldest confession of the Christian faith. What does it mean to say that?
The truth of the matter is that in the 21st century, many of us do not want to say that. And I can certainly understand the reluctance to use the word, Lord. For many women - and men - the word can carry a powerful and unpleasant patriarchal, hierarchical meaning. The male Lord way up there and the rest of us lowly peons way down here. And when one speaks of someone, “lording” it over another, it seldom carries a positive connotation. In our own history, much of the American experiment in democracy was an effort to break free of the class and privilege distinctions carried by the word, Lord. And there is probably not a person here today who at some time, perhaps in a college apartment, did not have an unpleasant experience with a landlord. “Every knee should bend and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” What are we to make of such language? How can it - or even should it - still be meaningful for us?
It’s a Hindu fable told of a motherless tiger cub who was adopted by goats and brought up by them to speak their language, emulate their ways, eat their food, and in general to believe that he was a goat himself. Then one day a king tiger came along. When all the goats scattered in fear, the young tiger was left alone to confront him, afraid and yet somehow not afraid. The king tiger asked him what he meant by such an unseemly masquerade, but all the young tiger could do in response was to bleat nervously and nibble at the grass. So the older tiger carried him to a pool where he forced him to look at their two reflections side by side and draw his own conclusions. When this failed, he offered the young tiger his first piece of raw meat. At first the young one recoiled from the unfamiliar taste of it, but then as he ate more and began to feel it warming his blood, the truth gradually became clear to him. Lashing his tail and digging his claws into the ground the young beast raised his head high and the entire jungle trembled at the sound of his exultant roar.
“In the juvenescence of the year,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “comes Christ the Tiger.” Christ the tiger - this explosion of a man, this explosion of Life itself into life.
In that Hindu fable, I begin to find a way of expressing what the Lordship of Christ might mean for me. To return to the language of the fable, if the tiger who thinks he is a goat could really be a goat, then he would probably be just fine - eat grass and live out his life as a goat. Trouble is, there is still enough of the tiger in us to make us discontented with our goathood. We eat grass but it never really fills us. We bleat well enough, but deep down there is the suspicion that we were really made for roaring. And then we see the tiger.
Buechner says it like this: “We look at him. We glance up from our grazing for a moment and there he stands, and suddenly we see what a tiger looks like, what a human being really looks like, and if we thought that our goathood was a problem before, our own half-baked, cockeyed humanity, we reach the point here, if we look hard, where the contrast becomes so painful that one or the other of us simply has to go. Either we crucify the tiger just to escape his terrible gaze, or we risk the crucifixion of our own goathood, which must go if it is to be replaced by tigerhood. In either case, our first cry when we see him is a cry of woe: if this is what it really is to be human, then what am I? If this is true life, then what is this that I am living? I am a goat, and I live in a world of goats. I adjust myself to my world. I make its standards my standards, its wisdom my wisdom, its goals my goals. Woe is me. This is a man - a person - I am not. His is a life I cannot live.”
Yes, the contrast between him and us - his life and our life - is great indeed, painfully great. And it is tempting to get rid of him - crucify him and his terrible gaze. Life would be easier without him. Just let me be a goat. However, just when I think I’ve pushed him safely away, there is something about that face, that life, as challenging and troubling as it is, which draws me back to him. And so, yes, I do call him Lord. I call him Lord because, while I do not literally believe that “at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord,” still I do believe that the spirit, attitude and way of Jesus is finally our only hope. That spirit may come under some other name; it may work itself into the world in another form than just Christianity, but still, his way, the Christ spirit, must finally be our way. I’ve tried a lot of others and right now nothing else seems to work for me.
So yes, I do call Jesus Lord, because as great as the chasm between his life and my life might seem, and as tempted as I am at times to turn away from him, still I return because in my heart of hearts I believe that when he says, “Follow me,” what he asks he also has the power to give - the power to turn goats into tigers, to give life to the half-alive, even to the dead, which is to say, finally what he gives us is ourselves. What he tells us is our names and who we really are - God’s beloved sons and daughters, brothers and sisters to each other. In his name we are freed to love one another and share that love with a hurting world, no matter what the cost. There is so much to which I can entrust my life. There is so much that would like a piece of my life. But more and more I an finding that I choose Jesus.
A colleague said it like this: “So we get up and move away somewhere, anywhere, or we embrace the bright wind that seeks to fill our sails, open our arms, our lives, to the deepest miracle of reality itself and call it by its proper name, which is King of kings and Lord of lords, or call it by any name we want, or call it nothing, but live our lives open, receptive, to the fierce and transforming joy of it.” Ahh, there’s something about that face. Jesus is Lord!