Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: February 17, 2019

Jeremiah 17:5-10
Psalm 1
Luke 6:17-26

One of the cooler parts of my years in the tech industry was getting to know James Walsh and the folks at Threshold Music, a recording studio in Manhattan. Once upon a time, I created their web site, integrating some technology that was pretty cutting edge stuff at the time, and made friends, hanging out, breaking bread, even watching a few recording sessions. I know how incredibly time consuming the recording, engineering, and production process can be, how much attention to detail. Then there is Jamaican vocalist Carl Douglas’ greatest hit, which is the exact opposite of all that time-consuming attention to detail. It is the classic one-hit wonder and a perfect example of riding the zeitgeist, the spirit of the moment.

They were recording a disco single, and needed something for the B-side, back when there were 45’s pressed on vinyl. With ten minutes left in the session, they did only two takes. That B-side throwaway went on to be a number one hit in twelve countries including the United States and Britain. Forty-five years later, and it still shows up in memes and even on t-shirts. Despite the doubters, it is clear that “Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting.”

It was 1974, the pinnacle of what Hollywood’s newspaper of record, Variety, would call chopsocky. The Euro-American actor David Carradine played the half-Chinese Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine, the yellow-face acting I mentioned last week, on the television show Kung-Fu. His character wandered the American Old West, a land of outlaws and revolvers, armed with nothing more than his impressive kung-fu fighting skills. The show was a hit all three seasons it aired, only ending because Carradine had sustained too many injuries to go on. It gave new meaning to the word grasshopper, now used in an echo of the show to designate the naive student, Caine’s teacher, Master Po, right up there with Yoda and Mr. Miyagi as wise and stereotypically inscrutable masters.

“Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting” the song was a fluke, like winning the lottery, massive reward for about as little effort as you could possibly put into a recording session. Life generally doesn’t work that way, as Master Po no doubt taught Caine when he was still a little grasshopper. Sure, some folks are born at the silver-spoon end of the Pareto distribution, where gains accrue mostly to those already advantaged, but the rest of us live in a world where we have to work, climb up against the Pareto distribution, some more than others, a world where where discipline matters, and where there is what Eastern thinkers call karma, the idea that things tend to balance out given a long enough sweep of time.

Now, I know we can point to individual lives and question karma, good people who seem to have always been doomed and wretched people who seem to thrive. Some create an inscrutable and capricious god for themselves as an explanation, while others use those failures of karma and consequence to deny the existence of any god at all. But many of us choose to believe in something, because we are less than human, less than “in God’s own image” if we don’t have love, and love is aspirational, is good and transcendent, is the power of God in creation, is the counter-weight to our animalistic fear.

There is a little bit of Christian karma to be found in today’s readings. We almost all known Matthew’s rather than Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, for those with power have traditionally preferred the spiritualized version. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness is easier than blessed are those who are hungry, for it does not require the wealthy to give up anything to feed the poor. We pretty much universally ignore the woes or curses that follow, inconvenient in a culture where we use wealth and the things wealth can buy to paper over our fear and vulnerability, as if our McMansions shield us from anxiety.

Christian author and leader Brian McLaren, in “The Secret Message of Jesus,” put it this way:

From the seemingly absurd proposition that blessing is associated with poverty of spirit (or simple poverty in LukeÂ’s version) to this binary option between serving God and wealth, Jesus makes it clear that the kingdom of God presents us with a radically different value system than we see in the world around us.

The word of the prophet, of the religious innovator, of the messiah, is almost always the word of the outsider, but religion itself inevitably becomes domesticated, institutionalized, a tool to preserve earthly wealth and power, so that the voice crying out in the wilderness is less jarring, provides a less scandalous message, always delivered as authorized and conveniently scheduled.

But Jesus, like Jeremiah five centuries earlier, chooses to live in the real world, one where everything isn’t perfect, where good news isn’t good news for everyone, where it matters how you live and where you draw your strength. Jesus moves from blessings to curses and Jeremiah moves in the opposite direction, from those who are cursed to those who are blessed.

It is to Jeremiah’s blessed that I want to turn, for like last week, we find a comparison to a tree, but this is a favorable comparison. The blessed are like trees planted by water, rooted near a stream. Their source, that which sustains them, is the Lord. Luke may not give us the thirsty in his beatitudes, but water was a constant need and a constant trope in that arid environment. Isaiah promises those who fast from injustice, who proactively do justice, that “The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.”

Jesus would promise that those who drank from the living waters of the divine would never be thirsty again. That the blessed are like a tree by a stream would have been a powerful image, nor romantic or bucolic. The tree was shelter and fruit and wood to burn against the cold desert night. That God is the stream is a confession of dependence on something external.

The blessed are rooted, well-located, draw their strength from the Lord, stay alive even when things are hard, bear fruit even when others wither and fail.

Parched places of the wilderness, an uninhabited salt land, these are the places we might find a half-Chinese Shaolin monk wandering. What is it that allows Caine to whip out his kung-fu mojo on the bad guys? For there are always bad guys. What is the source of his strength?

It might help to remember that Caine’s identity is not actually Kung-Fu fighter. It is Shaolin monk. He is a student and practitioner of the dharma, the Way of the Buddha.

Legend has it that kung-fu was created by Bodhidharma, a seminal figure in the Mahayana form of Buddhism that would flourish in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, that would cross the Pacific and have such tremendous influence in the West. He brought one school of Mahayana Buddhism, Chan or Zen, to the Shaolin Monastery, to China, coming from Persia or India, we’re not quite sure.

Visual depictions of the ancient master are fierce. He is referred to as a blue-eyed barbarian. Fierce too are the stories associated with his arrival sometime in the 5th or 6th century. The most well known legend has him sitting facing a wall not uttering a sound for years in meditation. He believed the monks had become soft, undisciplined, so he created a fitness regimen that would become the basis for kung-fu. He was a difficult and challenging human, like Jeremiah.

He understood that following the Way of the Buddha, the Eightfold Noble Path we touched on last week, was not for the meek, the lazy, the undisciplined. Right view, the really seeing and really hearing of things as they were, was only the first step of eight for the Buddhist. True enlightenment, the end of our anxiety and hunger, required work, more steps, required practice. Bodhidharma is responsible for the embodied practice of zen meditation and, if Shaolin legends are to be believed, the embodied practice of kung-fu.

You might be excused if you miss the spiritual aspect in most chopsocky movies of the 70’s, but you can’t miss it when Master Po teaches young Caine. You might love the Wookie and combat with lightsabers, but you cannot miss the spiritual aspect when Yoda speaks of the force and the light side.

You might want to be a tree strong enough to stand, supple enough to bend, but if you want to bear fruit during the drought, you’re going to need that source of living water.

Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream.

Caine does not wander the Wild West looking for conflict. But trouble is going to come. It will come for the Buddha in the form of the demon Mara. It will come for Jesus in the Adversary, Satan in the desert. It will come for Jesus again in the form of his own people and in the form of state power.

Caine is prepared because he draws from his Zen Buddhist tradition, spiritual and physical, because he has practiced. It takes work. It is sometimes hard. He has learned from masters, learned to master himself.

Jesus is prepared for Satan and for the evil in the hearts of humans because he draws from the word of God, from Isaiah and Daniel and tradition. In addition to his study of scripture, he spends time in prayer. It takes work. It is sometimes hard.

Easy-peasy gets you nowhere. A faith that never wrestles with the hard stuff and never asks for anything has no traction in real lives. Real lives are going to include hunger and thirst and grief and conflict. That’s just the way it is. Creation is filled with blessing and beauty, and we are wired for creativity and transcendence, but the blessing and beauty and creativity and transcendence stand out precisely because there is also decay and evil, curses and fear. Jesus promises us, as the Rev. King would note, that the arc may be long, too long for us to see, but the universe bends toward justice, karma happens, those who suffer for no reason will find comfort, will be fed, and those who stand by in their wealth and privilege while others suffer, those who turn their eyes away from the suffering and evil in the world, will have already reaped their reward, for the shroud of false peace in which they find comfort will indeed be their shroud. That’s gospel.

Suffering is real. Evil is real. It is the destruction of Palestinian olive trees on the West Bank and it is gossip and manipulation and peevishness right here in our community. We need discipline, a little spiritual kung-fu to defend ourselves against temptation, against fear. We need our source, that which allows us to bear fruit, the God that called us into being, the Word that came as flesh and taught us how to live, the Spirit that nags and pushes and fills us with fire. We need prayer and three thousands years of stories and we need faith that Jeremiah is right, that we will have what we need even when there is drought, even when all seems lost.

Find your source, grasshopper. It is right there at your feet. It is right there in your heart. It is right there in the book. You may be a one-hit wonder, but o how wondrous you are!

Amen.