Mark 8:31-38
During Lent, we are asked to repent of our sins, to grow into who we are truly meant to be. Whether you align yourself with spirituality and religion, as most of us do, or are a hardcore empiricist, viewing humans as nothing more than the evolutionary effect of an unknown cause, we humans are meaning making creatures. Most of us accept that beyond our lizard brain and biochemical impulses lies a little bit of inexplicable magic, the part of us that writes poetry, that stands in awe before a painting by Marc Chagall, and that runs into a burning building.
The dual themes of meaning making and repentance bring me to the problem of Joss Whedon. Whedon is a multi-talented creator… developing, directing, and producing television shows and films, writing comic books, composing music. Among his most successful and culturally significant works was the comic book and television character “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Whedon’s personal values align pretty well with many of the values we hold here at the Park Church. He is, for example, an outspoken feminist. He is anti-corporate and anti-authoritarian. He is also a humanist and an existentialist, but there is a little bit of that around here too.
Sadly, he is also a jerk, a workaholic whose bullying behavior does not match his professed values. Though Whedon has not been accused of sexual harassment, the #MeToo movement exposed other forms of workplace toxicity, and Whedon’s sets were toxic. He has been effectively cancelled by the film industry, and while I stand by my belief that some people deserve to be permanently cancelled, I do wonder about redemption for the repentant, one of our core Lenten themes, whether or not we really believe someone can learn and grow.
I mean, Jesus is pretty clear that he came for the sick, not the healthy, and we are a church more of sinners than of saints.
In a 2012 interview, long before his misconduct was exposed, staff from “The Guardian,” the historic progressive newspaper from Manchester, England, asked Whedon to “Tell us a joke.”
He responded, “Your life has meaning.”
Hold that thought. We’re going to circle back.
No matter what actually happened after Jesus was executed, the early followers of Jesus, from the apostolic witness in Galilee to the converts in Rome, believed that his life had meaning. What that meaning was they were still trying to figure out.
If you have a high “Christology,” which is to say that you understand Jesus as sharing the mind of God and understand his life as a fully-scripted divine drama, then Jesus knew at every moment the meaning of his life. Far more tenable to me is a man who came to understand himself in relation to the holy and the prophetic tradition of his people, who became increasingly convinced and committed, convicted in traditional Christian language, of his role in saving his people.
We are still trying to figure out the meaning of what some call “the Christ Event” two thousand years later, and anyone who tells you they know exactly what it means is lying, to themselves and to others. A lot of people have died in disputes over the exact nature of Jesus, of God, of salvation, and I’d like to suggest that our faith, all faiths, could use a lot more humility and a lot less murder.
If Jesus was actually in some special way “God-with-us,” as we claim, then he will always be by default beyond our understanding and control. And even if he was just a slightly unhinged prophet in a long tradition of slightly unhinged Israelite and Jewish prophets, he’s one we are still talking about, still debating, one who changed the world and we are still trying to figure that out.
What is the meaning of any life? Of yours and of mine?
Rick Warren and his “Purpose Driven Life” mega-church and mega-bank accounts want you to believe that God has a very specific purpose for you, but honestly, I don’t think I believe in the same God they do. Their version of god is a micro-manager, a puppet master, and given that belief, a god that involved in our daily affairs also has to own every brain tumor and school shooting. I’m just not signing up for that sort of god, for that god is not good..
However, letting go of the puppet master God does not mean abandoning the idea of meaning in our lives.
Our lives have meaning, but it is coded into creation, into the undefined X in the equation that allows elephants to grieve and Kendrick Lamar to rap like a latter-day Micah calling us out of our sin.
Every single day is a miracle and every single creative act, every single act of compassion, is holy and a living into a purpose that we do not always understand ourselves. Our purpose it to be outerly, which is to say to see and to celebrate, to create and to care. We are meant to embrace the not-self, for we are holy mystery that is the result of holy mystery, and we exist because the power and force, the song at the center of the universe, flows out and forward, through time and through space, and we live forward and outward. It is okay to use the past to inform the future, something I wish more humans were doing these days, but those who worship the past grow smaller all the time, because that is not how creation works.
If our worship was directed toward the dead dude from Galilee, it would be meaningless. It is a living God, the Christ who is risen and still with us, and the Spirit that inspires that we worship.
Matthew 25 reminds us of this in the parable of the sheep and the goats, for what you have done to the least of these you have done also unto Christ, so that the Palestinian child is our neighbor and is part of God and the woman sleeping off last night’s drunk in a holding cell is our neighbor and is part of God.
Our lives have meaning. We just sometimes need bigger imaginations and the ability to zoom out beyond just ourselves to see the beautiful dance that is going on, in the pews of a historic church in a Rust Belt town and in the school swimming in bright blue Pacific waters. We are a flash in time, but oh what a beautiful flash, and that is our job, the beauty of being called into existence by the greatest of all creators through the slow un-spooling of evolution.
To love is to share in the nature of the holy. To create is to share in the nature of the holy.
Sometimes that that takes the form of writing symphonies. Sometimes it takes the form of cleaning up chemo puke.
The only strings are the threads of love and holy mystery that stretch back to the first word, the logos that was with God and was God and is God and is here, right now, right here.
A reporter said to a man of imagination, a creator in his own way, “Tell us a joke.” And he responded, “Your life has meaning.”
The reporter had a follow-up. “Tell us a secret.” And he responded, “Your life has meaning.”
Amen.