Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18
Ephesians 6:10-20
SERMON “Saturday Mornings”
Maybe I was already a little gay boy, who knows? I don’t remember anything wrong with the Saturday morning cartoon “The Herculoids,” which included a blond boy in a loin cloth, but apparently it was too violent, as were other programs like “Space Ghost.” Concerned parents organized a campaign, as they do, and Saturday Morning Television got a complete makeover in 1969.
Be careful what you ask for.
Among the new offerings was “H.R. Pufnstuf,” a live action show with oversized puppets that made you wonder exactly what stuff was being puffed.
One cartoon premiered that went on to become a media franchise and a part of popular culture. “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?” featured four teenage detectives and their Great Dane, Scooby Doo. The team would roll into town in their psychedelic van, the Mystery Machine, to solve cases involving swamp monsters and ghosts and zombies and the like. The mysterious monsters almost always turned out to be a human bad guy in disguise.
In the original series, the four teens were all white. In the most recent reboot, an adult animated series that launched a year and a half ago on HBO Max, Fred Jones remains the white high school jock stereotype, but the Shaggy character become Norville Rogers, who is African American, Daphne Blake is an East Asian-American, and Velma Dinkley, the star of the new series, is South Asian-American and bisexual. Scooby is nowhere to be seen, nor were the fans. Let’s just say it was not a hit.
Paul proclaims a mystery in today’s reading from the letter traditionally attributed to him and assigned to the church at Ephesus, buried under a lot of militaristic imagery. But there is no pulling off the mask moment here, and even if there was, I’m not sure Paul’s “mystery of the gospel” sometime around 55 C.E. would be our mystery of the gospel today. After all, Paul interpreted Jesus through the lens of the Temple and a transactional understanding of God in a pre-scientific age. There are some Christian communions that are still transactional, considering transactions like communion to contain mysterious transformations of bread into flesh, but that isn’t really our gig. Like the four kids and a canine in the original Scooby-Doo, we tend to pull off the mask to find just another human. And though there are some Christians that cling to the pre-scientific, We science around here.
What is the mystery of the gospel that Paul rightly identifies in other texts as foolishness to non-believers? If not popes and purgatory, what is it that we proclaim?
Let’s start with a sort of anthropology, “anthro” itself tipping our hand, as it means human. Orthodoxy insists that humans are a unique order, distinct and apart from all other living beings in this context we know, this blue-green planet circling a star. Science contradicts this, telling us that we are not apart from our context, and our only distinction is being the current state in the evolution of one trajectory of bipedal apes.
Still, Homo Sapiens makes meaning in a way we have not yet witnessed in other species, and transmits meaning to one another. This library of human knowledge continues to grow, though at times we must discard volumes and entire sections, and we still have the problem of people ending up in the wrong section, deep in horror fantasy when they think they are in non-fiction.
Our ancestors faced the great mysteries and created a placeholder they called God. In and of itself, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Many of us still use the word God to describe the something instead of nothing, the ways in which chaos becomes complexity and complexity creates beauty and even the fact that we can encounter something and assign it the term beauty.
But we are finite and our context is finite, so we fit God into human categories, assign personhood to that placeholder. This is useful as long as we don’t confuse the placeholder with the reality.
When the strongest and most brutal rose to the top of human tribes, God was the strongest and most brutal among many gods. When societies became complex enough that there was a new need for law and order, God became the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner. And if God was justice, then disaster must be just, punishment well-deserved, nations destroyed as divine will, lives destroyed as divine will, even unto the seventh generation, as the not-always-good book says.
Earlier prophets laid the ground work for the gospel’s radical re-envisioning of God. The Israelite and Judahite prophets still conceptualized God as human, but maybe a little transactional. Prophets like Hosea began to imagine God as a scorned but patient lover.
Jesus moved God even further from that first conception of divine co-dependence, even from that second conception of divine judgement, for while judgment remains, grace abounds. It is never too late to be forgiven. Resurrection isn’t an Easter morning magic trick. It is an every day occurrence, as people forgive themselves, get clean and sober, embrace a gift long suppressed, break free from the prison of social constructs of gender and sexuality, and sometimes just plain old get out of prison.
We are finite, fragile, fickle, and often fearful. This naturally leads to a sort of defensiveness, a bunker mentality, hoarding of more than we need. Being born-again has been co-opted by toxic forms of Christianity, but it is the heart of our faith, that your tomorrow need not be determined by your yesterday.
There may be constraints on your body. There are constraints on your body. Context matters. A kid in Gaza right now is probably not going to take up ski jumping. It is miracle enough if that kid manages to survive the genocidal maniacs on all sides of that war.
Disease and tragedy are realities. But your soul, your spirit, has a reset button. You can choose to live love any time. Your internal universe is yours.
The gospel is exactly the opposite of human smallness. Be not afraid. Go. Serve. Be bigger than you imagine you are, more expansive than you are now, forgiving and loving, and know that the reward for this outwardness will be greater than whatever we put into it, greater than the sacrifices we make, for what we will find is our true selves.
Lizards are lovely, but you are not called to be a lizard and that tiny little primal part of your brain should not be driving the bus…
So the mystery is not so much mystery as it is paradox, is cosmic reversal, is call to resist walling ourselves in, choosing instead to go out.
Love your neighbor. Who is my neighbor? Everyone.
Feed, heal, and clothe the sacred, for the sacred is the vulnerable and oppressed.
Glorify God always, pray always, by choosing to see the miracle, the quantum entanglement and weirdness and mysterious beauty.
Be still and know God.
Paul proclaims the mystery and paradox of our faith from his location, at the brutal intersection of the Pharisaic movement in Pre-rabbinic Judaism and the Hellenistic culture of the eastern Roman Empire two thousand years ago. The Christianity we have received contains Neo-Platonism and Romanticism and a hundred other flavors, many still detectable to the discerning palate.
We are called to proclaim the mystery/paradox of our faith from our location, as participants in a socio-economic system we seek to unwind, in brutal late stage neo-liberal capitalism at the tail end of settler-colonialism and genocide, in a world where toxic patriarchy is still a noxious weed, reduced but not yet eradicated.
But hey, we’re getting there. The arc of the universe could bend toward justice a little bit faster, hopefully before we destroy the planet.
Paul’s mystery of the gospel was his mystery of the gospel, and our mystery of the gospel is ours. That on the whole, the something instead of nothing is good, that the source of that something that includes us is good, that as small as our individual lives may be, they are amazing, and that in the story of Jesus, we learn a way of living in the world that makes the most good of what we have been given, learn a way to love and serve that is our best selves.
We’re not going to war. We are calling people from war. Put on the safety vest of love. Don the hardhat of humility. Pick up the shovel of service. Out, out into the streets, out into the mysterious universe. Scooby-Dooby-Do.
Amen.