Sunday, April 2

Sermon 5: Celebrity Poker

John 19.23-25

Jesus Christ and Ebenezer Scrooge: two characters, one historical and one fictional but both known to us by literature. Compare and contrast these two for just a moment.

As Jesus dies on a government-issue gibbet, four executioners strip Jesus and gamble for his grave goods. After Scrooge expires alone in his rented rooms, three people pick him clean and foregather with a fourth to fence their plunder. The Lord’s naked body hangs on a cross; Scrooge’s stripped corpse lies in a bare bed. Scrooge’s carcass lies alone and awaits the arrival of rats as they gnaw through the woodwork; some liberal theologians insist that Jesus’ remains wound up devoured by dogs who dug up a common grave. (They didn’t, but that would have been the normal course of events.)

Such comparisons only form a pivot point for the more dramatic contrasts.

Jesus distributed wealth because he had chosen to live in poverty; Scrooge lived in poverty because he hoarded wealth. Scrooge, in a vision, observes his own obscene obsequies with horror; Jesus sees the final division of his property as the logical extension of his own teaching about giving away one’s garments. Scrooge dodges death and receives a chance to change his life; Jesus, by actually dying, transforms death itself.

"This was the end of it, you see," says one of Scrooge’s underhanded undertakers. "He frightened everyone away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he was dead." Jesus drew all humanity to him during his life, and profits us all by his death.

Dickens’ Christmas Carol tells us some important things about how to live this life. The gospel tells us the important thing about the life to come. But both stories intersect at the point of these final acts of unintentional charity, reminding us that salvation starts now, that selfishness is simply the anteroom to Hell, and that we do not have to wait to enter the Kingdom.

Bah, Hum(ble)bug!

Doug

Got a thing about germs when you travel? Stockpile your own portable micro-environment. It’s true: for a surprisingly small investment, you can get a cover for your airline seat, a filter gizmo to splice onto the overhead air nozzle, paper slippers to create a barrier between your feet and the floor, and a surgical face-mask for fending off free-floating infection. Hand sanitizers, a personal sleep sack encased in plastic, an ultra-violet light to purify your toothbrush – you can have your own walking Great Wall of China constantly keeping bird flu at bay.

In fact, it occurs to me that, if you’re careful, you could travel all over the world and never touch anything but your own intimate, immediate, inviolate environment. You can roam the entire planet and come back completely untouched by the experience.

C. S. Lewis once built a metaphor around tourists whose idea of going abroad means doing one’s best to stay home. "There are travellers who carry their Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English tourists, enjoy all they see for its ‘quaintness,’ and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives." Comparing this to two ways of reading books, Lewis affirms the validity of both, then concludes, "But I was writing for the other sort."

Jesus, in the incarnation, did not come fully equipped with a heavenly host of holy hoses, or a gaggle of gadgets guaranteed to keep him unsullied by his new home’s earthy occupants. Philippians two tells us that he dove headlong into humanity and rolled around until he reeked of it. In the last moments of his earthly life, he kept company with the kind of people you’d hope not to sit by on the bus. And we know he wore no mask to foil the miasma of carnality, because he could be clearly heard when he spoke his final words of forgiveness. Of course, in the end he caught the infection, and it cost him his life to produce the antibodies that continue to cleanse sinful hearts. He seemed to think it well worth the price; he couldn’t touch us if he hid behind a veil of holiness.

There were people in Jesus’ day – folks called them Pharisees – who read the Bible the way Lewis’ tourists traveled Europe: hung out only with their own kind and saw sin only while slumming among the backward natives. Their moral commitment was admirable, and for all I know sincere. I wish them well. But I am glad that God was writing for the other sort.

Touchy Feely,

Doug