Room on the Hill

{Good Friday…and this series of casual, unplanned, personal yet “blogly” public writings about “room(s)” is coming to an end. One more, tomorrow. But there is today, and I am wondering how to write about my chosen 2024 topic on Crucifixion Day. Let’s see what happens, shall we?”}

The soldiers brought Jesus to Golgotha, meaning “Skull Hill.” …They nailed him up at nine o’clock in the morning…Along with him, they crucified two criminals, one to his right, the other to his left. People passing along the road jeered…

Gospel According to Mark 15:22 25, 27, 29; from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase, “The Message”

In 1982 I was the keynote speaker at the Montreat Youth Conference, a denomination-wide youth event held in the Presbyterian “Mecca,” Montreat, NC. The theme of the conference that year was “Cross Connections,” and I was to speak each day before about 1000 teens and their adult leaders. (The annual conference was so popular, we held an identical gatherings the following week.) I had worked with the conference planning committee to come up with a topic each day related to the broad theme. Then, I took a few days in a retreat of sorts to write at my friend Jim’s place in a D. C. suburb. As I recall, the conference went very well. I even had a minister in the crowd who said (and this was a very high compliment), “Your presentations remind me of Frederick Buechner.” But there was also criticism following one morning’s keynote.

I had taken Malcolm Boyd’s book The Alleluia Affair and turned it into a dramatic reading, with parts assigned to a team of youth and a couple of adults. (I may have asked the publisher for permission, but that detail is lost in foggy memory banks. Let’s say I did.) The book begins with Jesus pulling himself off a large crucifix cross in an Indianapolis church, then from a Manhattan church, and sixty churches in Paris. From San Francisco to Sydney, Prague to Peking, Jesus pulled free from church crosses and walked into the streets. The world’s religious leaders reacted with consternation, issuing all kinds of verbose counsel and warnings. Boyd says, “People ignored the religious leaders, preferring to confront Jesus in the streets and talk to him face-to-face.” He’d be in a diner, for example, breaking bread in the form of a hamburger roll and sharing coffee.

Then the Jesus figures portrayed in stained glass windows throughout Christendom came alive and shattered the glass and leaped out and dove into humanity, wearing prison stripes, joining migrant workers, selling tickets in bus stations, staying at YMCAs, and getting temporary work permits. The world reeled, and faith became alive for millions.

Under the empty crosses and the broken windows, scrolls were found, all with words from the teachings of Jesus. “When you give a feast, invite the poor…” “Judge not that you be not judged.” “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.”

Boyd’s writing then takes a turn when suddenly people find on those empty crosses people whose stories we’d rather not hear. The crucified of our culture. A starving child. An unmarried teen mother scorned by her family. A black man in prison stripes, a woman clad in jeweled high fashion, but drunk. An untouchable from Bombay. An abused youth.

Interestingly, the critical response I received from one adult in the youth conference masses wasn’t about the empty crosses or the newly crucified of our times, but Boyd’s targeting of larger, more affluent churches. The critic had come from one of those churches. He was probably right: the book aimed its complaint toward the more prominant churches and church leaders like bishops and denominational execs. But the book’s imaginative premise was nonetheless a powerful reminder that we as a society do condemn Jesus’ sisters and brothers to crosses we have fashioned from our bigotry, racism, and all manner of injustices.

When I had first moved to our retirement home, I had to find a new barber. I chose the one in the heart of the shopping district. One morning, his TV was reporting on Barack Obama’s initial run for the White House. With my haircut finished, I headed for the door and the barber said to me, “I know what we can do with that guy! Get some wood and matches, right?” I was so stunned, I couldn’t speak. (Damn it.) But I never went back.

You see, there is still room on Skull Hill for those with whom we disagree politically, those we’d rather not have living next door, and those whose complexion or gender identity or mental confusion breeds fear in our hearts. I could use this crucifixion day to name my enemies, the ones Jesus said it’d be best to love. I could name names. “Lock ’em up!” “String ’em up!” I confess I have a collection of nails. But instead of hearing my confession, why not listen to your own heart.

God so loved the world, the cosmos, every creature, so much that God gave the Son…who walks among us now, as the beloved, the unknown, the condemned, the ignored, the hungry, the job-less, the victim and the perp, and the room-less. Lord, when did we see thee…? Or, maybe we’d think, “Lord, if you’d just go back to your place in the stained glass…wouldn’t that be a more holy dwelling place for you? And less threatening for us?” We could then blend our voices in singing, “Beneath the cross of Jesus…”

But now. I must examine my own heart. How much more room is there on that hill?

 

A Darker Place

{I have to admit, with tomorrow’s writing this Lenten discipline comes to an end, and Joan will be glad to have me back. I’ll be happy to have a couple of extra hours free each day after tomorrow. I mean, I do enjoy writing, but spring is arriving here and there’s other stuff to do. Please…I’m not complaining, just explaining. Here’s #39.}

Round Top (as photographed by Peter Bernadini)

There’s this big topographical lump of a hill on the western edge of Endicott, NY. It’s called “Round Top,” and there’s a park up there where we used to “park.” We could see the submarine races on the Susquehanna down below. The shoe company owned the hill “back in the day,” and its sign at the entrance road famously read “Private Property– Visitors Welcome.” When the trees are bare, one can see the valley below, the villages, the river, the highways. It’s no scenic rocky peak, and not at all a dramatic climb to the top. But as hills go, it’s lovely.

But imagine a hill with a darker name: “The Skull.” No scenic overlook, unless one is being executed, crucified.

Yesterday I wrote of Albert Uries love of wood. There are people like that you know. Some people are into brews, classic cars, baseball cards. But people like Albert know their woods. Cherry. Maple. Oak. Hickory. They know the colors, the grains, the textures, the uses of wood. They use their knowledge to create cradles, tables, desks, coffins. Once the wood has been joined, assembled…they know the right polishes, the most beautiful ways to preserve their creations.

But imagine wood used for nothing more than holding up a criminal for all to see, an example of what happens to those guilty of sedition against the powers that be and think they will always be. The wood — the cross.

I have no perfectly organized storage for my tools or hardware. When I need to hang a picture, fix a bookshelf, build a birdhouse, or fasten down a shingle, I’ve got just the nail for that. Somewhere. The tiny 1/2 inch brads are mixed in with finishing nails, ten-penny nails, and some steel cut masonry nails. Why do I even have those? Masonry? That might go back to when we hung a hose hanger on the back of our first house. We don’t own this home, so I have to be careful about pounding too many nails into the walls here. But boxes and boxes of them lay on our garage shelves. Might make a nice Christmas gift for my handy son-in-law.

But imagine spikes, like the ones you might run across near the railroad tracks — imagine two of them pounded through flesh at the wrist, and another one (would only one do it?) fastening feet to that cross on the hill. My God.

Then there’s blood. Need I write of its functions, its purposes? First year biology class or Google can help you out if you want to get technical. We speak of the “life blood” of a community (i.e., volunteers) and of the bloodline of a family (we are blood relatives). Shylock’s speech from “The Merchant of Venice” (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”) echoes here from my tenth-grade English class. At my age, the blood tests are many, and the results signal my continuing good health. And there at the table that last night, Jesus says to his disciples the words that penetrate the heart of followers every time we break the communion bread and drink from the cup. “This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”

But imagine that life blood now coming from his wounds as he hangs there. A sword pierces his side. More blood. And the life slips away.

Those who watched, from the soldiers who were just doing their job to his beloved family and friends who were driven to despair– they were witnesses to a good man’s death. A God-man’s death. What they must have thought was the end of a movement.

A hill, wood, nails, and blood. And cosmic purpose. A mystery today, a heavy shadow tomorrow. And beyond that? Who knows?

 

Living and Breathing Faith: Day 39

{Good Friday, 2021. Churches have many rooms, from Sunday Schools to kitchens, clergy studies to offices, furnace rooms to fellowship halls. But the room where the most followers gather at one time, the place set apart for worship, nurture, being engaged by the Word and sent out to live and breathe the faith — that is the sanctuary. It may be a place of comfort; or it may be the most unsettling room of the building, when the word is preached prophetically. Generally, the sanctuary is the most aesthetically pleasing space, grand architecture and liturgical arts combining to inspire, perhaps intimidating, perhaps sheltering. Throughout the days of Lent, I have revisited those gathering places, sharing images and writing words. After today, one day to go. But there is today.}

This day we remember the crucifixion of Jesus. It is called, oddly, “Good Friday,” for all the good it did that day. Actually the word “good” also meant “holy,” one source says. But going back to Middle English, the day is most probably “God’s Friday.” It is the day the cross looms large, that excruciatingly cruel form of execution: wood, nails, pain and suffering, and death, a capital punishment. Theologically, Christians see on that particular cross God’s love nailed down.

My first thought for this 39th day of my Lenten sanctuary tour was to find a cathedral crucifix as the image I’d write about. There held high above the center aisle (or in the “cross” as the center of a cruciform church would be called) is Jesus, crucified in gold, maybe even encrusted with gems– yes, a highly decorated soldier of the cross. But in looking through my files, I found myself back in familar territory (for this blog series): the Southwell Minster Cathedral and Parish Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Nottinghamshire, England. I wrote of it for the second time just a couple of days ago. It was there that we encountered this:

The Kelham Madonna

Not what you expected to see on Good Friday? Madonna and Child? First the context, our Southwell visit. As we walked around the cathedral, listening to the fine pipe organ accompany our steps and hearing of the church’s history from a docent, I glanced at this carved statue and noticed the interpretative sign. The name “Kelham” naturally struck me. It is the older spelling of my surname. The statue had been carved in 1952 by Alan Coleman for the Kelham Great Chapel of the Society of the Sacred Mission, an Anglican Religious order.

But why focus on that image on Good Friday? For one thing, it reminds us that the man on the cross was once a child, a beloved son, and a big brother. Before he was condemned to death for sedition, before he was betrayed by his closest friends, before he had preached amazing grace, inclusive love, generous hospitality, and social justice, and enacted those gifts with every element of his being — before all that, and even before he had spent that forty day vision quest in the wilderness, before his baptism in the Jordan, and even before that 12 year-old had theologized with the temple rabbis, before he had run through the marketplace chasing a loose goat when he was seven (that’s not Biblical, just typical!), he was a beloved first-born child of Mary whose breasts gave him nourishment.

Look at her there, so tall, so proud, so strong. And determined.

Now, at thirty-three or so, he bleeds in agony between two thieves who share his destiny. Among the few of his followers there near the cross are some women. Among them, his mother. And one male disciple, whom he especially loved apparently, for that is how John’s Gospel refers to the man whose faith has overcome his fear. (That’s what love does.) The beloved disciple.

Jesus, according to John, sees his mother and that disciple. Even in his struggle to breathe, and with his eyes blurred by blood and tears, he sees them there amid the mocking crowd. Even then, his compassion reaches out for those loved ones. He sees their pain, their anguish, the deep loneliness they will face with his death, and John’s Gospel tells us:

When Jesus saw his mother standing there beside the disciple he loved, he said to her, “Dear woman, here is your son.”  And he said to this disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from then on this disciple took her into his home.

John 19:26-27 NLT

My dear teacher and friend Lamar Williamson says that this story is to show Jesus’ filial love for his human family. The family that nurtured him as infant, child, teen, and young man — and the family that he knew as brothers and sisters in discipleship — Jesus joins them in mutual caring for one another. Lamar Williamson calls the union a “house church,” making of them the core community that is to become the church. He writes that the Fourth Gospel conceives of the church not as an apostolic institution, but as an extended family. (Williamson’s book is Preaching the Gospel of John, Westminster John Knox Press.) More than the disciple providing room and board, this is the birth of the beloved community, the family of faith, the Church. And it began with those having the courage to follow Jesus to the Place of the Skull, and to remain with him until the end.

That’s why I chose that image. A mother’s love for her child. The son’s love for his mother. And then for his friends.

The Southwell Minster Cathedral has another work of art there in the sanctuary. I leave you to meditate on his Good Friday countenance.