I do not think it means what you think it means…

Here in these disunited states, we continue to struggle with a pernicious racism, even though race itself is an artificial construct with no basis in biology. This fault line through our national conscience is nowhere more clear than in our relationship with our president. This week, Tea Party protesters stood in front of the White House calling for Obama to be lynched, and who can forget the “Put the white back in the White House” tee-shirts from the 2012 election. We’ve clearly got work to do, and while these problems may seem distant to us, Selma was a long way from the South Shore of Long Island. And yet, our pastor of blessed memory…

Dividing folks, us vs. them, by color of skin, ethnicity, how we celebrate communion, this is both incredibly human, and incredibly wrong. Ted Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, touched on this theme more than once. Butter-side up or butter-side down?

It is then, with some trepidation, that I suggest dividing people neatly into three categories, but here goes… There are three types of people in this world. The first group is the 99% who never saw Terrence Malick’s 2011 film Tree of Life. They didn’t have access or time or were turned off by the reviews. Maybe they just don’t watch movies. Who knows?
The remaining 1% can be divided further into those who, when the credits rolled, were thrilled, and those who sighed, either because it was way too long, or because the whole enterprise seemed pointless.

I fall into that tiny sliver of folks who loved the film. It captures a moment in a life, as a man travels to bury his younger brother, the sensitive middle son. But this moment is set against the backdrop of the entire family history, authoritarian father and loving mother, sibling rivalry. And here would be an entire film. In fact, there we have the basic structure of countless films.
But the trajectory of this one web of lives is set against the backdrop of all of creation, from Big Bang to eternal life on heaven’s shore. And this is where some people lost it, dysfunctional family drama and dinosaurs seeming an odd juxtaposition.

Yet, it is a profoundly religious film, for surely we find ourselves in heaven. And it is a profoundly theological film, as we see the unfolding of creation, both macro and micro. It is a story of becoming. The O’Brien family is seen through the lens of God’s greater plan, and all of creation seen through the lens of the O’Brien’s. It is an interpretive doubling.

In the same way, today’s scripture reading is a dinosaur, a doubling, for Christians would come to see Jesus through the lens of Hebrew scripture, especially passages in Isaiah, and we would come to interpret that Hebrew trajectory through the lens of Jesus.

Now, I can’t speak to Malick’s theology and interpretation, the double lens of family tragedy and the roar and thunder of creation. But I can speak to the way we use the prophets in relation to Jesus. And, sadly, we’d be better saying that we misread the Hebrew scriptures when we go looking in them for the Christ. Nowhere is this more clear than in these frequently cited passages from Isaiah we call the Servant Songs.
Christian interpretation has always read these passages, near the end of the great poetic work in both textual order and chronology, as references to Jesus, and particularly to the crucifixion as a saving act. In fact, the passage refers to Judah itself as the Suffering Servant. This personification of the nation is common in the Hebrew scriptures, though most often Judah and Israel are portrayed as unfaithful spouses. So suffering is at least a step up.

We’ve been so busy trying to read the entirety of the Hebrew religious trajectory through the lens of Jesus that we even rearranged the order of the prophetic texts, so that the texts we think reference Jesus come last, completely out of order in the chronological and theological trajectories. As if reading scripture wasn’t hard enough.

So, in the great words of Inigo Montaya, when it comes to the Book of the Prophet Isaiah and the Servant Songs, “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

But before you throw up your hands muttering “There goes the pastor deconstructing scripture again,” because, you know, we all think as deconstructionists, right? Before you throw those hands up muttering, here is what I have to say about the fact that we get Isaiah wrong when we read it through the lens of Jesus, well… to quote another classic film, Meatballs, “It just doesn’t matter.”

And if you are keeping careful score, that makes three movies so far…

It just doesn’t matter if Isaiah or Deutero-Isaiah or some anonymous redactor meant to refer to the coming of the messiah in the form of a wandering rabbi and healer. It does not change how Jesus saves. The event of Jesus is in the context of a theological tradition that is dynamic, that is becoming. The story of Jesus is at once the story of the Hebrew people and the story of his own ministry and followers and the story of the church and our story right here. It is a story of becoming, of unfolding, it is the story of that divine mystery we name as God that charges this planet with beauty and poignancy. God is not, as some would have it, named “I am what I am,” a name one-step away from a soft shoe. God is “I am becoming.”

That’s a God I can get behind. A dynamic living God that is subject to reinterpretation, to re-conceiving because God is not stable and fixed and distant but is right now. Not dead.

Doubling our lens to see Jesus through our experience of the world is legitimate, it is what we do, it is what we have always done. We’re human, it is what we CAN do.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have to be cautious, don’t have to guard against finding only the Jesus that justifies our own beliefs. You know that Jesus. For conservatives he’s a white man of European descent who is a gun-toting capitalist defender of democracy, and for liberals he’s a peacenik hippie, a pacifist who is always calm and who has no expectations or rules, just flowers and fluff all the time.

Jesus was difficult, and we can only see him in the kaleidoscope lens that is doubled. But we believe, because we choose to believe, that Jesus is not past tense. And if Jesus is living, then Jesus is becoming, against the backdrop of Isaiah’s Servant Songs and Hausske’s Emmanuel, the spirit and imagination going both ways, through time and space.

Inconceivable? I hope not. I hope we can conceive of being in more than one place and time, for each of us are exactly that. You are here now, and where you hope to be tomorrow and where you were a year ago last Tuesday. You are unfolding and becoming. Amen and hallelujah!

Your story is being written, by you and by God and sometimes by forces beyond your control set against the backdrop of a prophet writing from Exile and the dusty paths of Galilee. Woven into that story is a thread that runs back to Bethlehem, to a young girl who gave birth to a child that would forever change the world. How awesome is that?

Be present in the story of you and be present in Bethlehem. Know that like characters in Malick’s movie, like the Bodhisattva who chants the words of the Heart Sutra, that we will all one day be “Gone, Gone, All Together Gone To the Other Shore.” Where our story will still unspool, will still be written. What will your story be?

Amen.