Sermon: The Long Way Home

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The Long Way Home

By Charles Rush

April 9, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 3.1Mb) ]

we turn towards Holy Week, remembering the last days and death of Jesus, there is a fundamental sense in which we should become introspective and reflective. In looking at the Christ, we can get a reflection of ourselves and where we are at that is important to do annually.

This story, the Last Supper of Jesus, is filled with a certain poignancy. Fred Buechner is right that it has a pathos for us, because there is a sense in which we feel ourselves at the table. We are, in a sense, ultimately preparing for our own last suppers.[i]

I have a friend that lost her husband a few years ago rather suddenly. A few weeks after he died, she was driving down the road in the late afternoon, trying to call one of her children on her cell phone. Unconsciously, she actually dialed her husband's old cell phone number. It was one that was programmed so deeply in her memory that she didn't even realize that she had dialed it. It turns out, his phone number hadn't been reassigned so she got his answering machine with his very familiar voice on it. Somewhat shocked, she pulled her car over to the side of the road, let the message finish and after a long silence, she left a message.

She told me that ever once in a while, mostly out of the blue, she would call the number over the next several months, sometimes just to hear it, sometimes she would leave a long reflection on the day, always half wondering if there was some tech guy from Verizon that would eventually leaf through this trove of very personal stuff.

I asked her what she would have said to her husband if there had been more time before he died. She said, "Oh I don't know but I probably do… I just wish that we could have gone to our favorite restaurant maybe in the spring when we could sit outside in the evening air."

We have lots of last suppers in our lives. Just before we graduated from college, all the seniors in the fraternity had a dinner together. We tore up a dollar bill, each taking a piece, on the pledge that one day it would be put back together. It hasn't yet, not completely. But once in a while someone will mail a picture with a bunch of pieces in it. For the most part, though, we've each gone our different ways.

And there is the last supper with close friends just after you've gotten the big break and the big job and you are going to be moving on to real adulthood and you are saying goodbye with nostalgia but also great expectation about the future.

And there is a last supper, usually a birthday party, like the 5th birthday party for your last child when you realize that the baby phase of your life is over, not a lot of time at that one for getting verklempt as there is so much to do, but you have a moment with your spouse, knowing that this is probably the only phase of parenting that you will feel unambiguously competent at.

The last supper when the oldest one goes off to college and you realize that your nuclear family unit phase is done and, although your kids drive you nuts much of the time and you would like to do some bodily harm occasionally, it was still your quirky family, and it won't be the same like that in the future.

Of course, with this generation, there is the last supper when the last young adult moves out of your house for the last time, and you look at your spouse and say, "We're going to Disneyland"…

There are last lunches, when you are walking around your office, thinking back over a careers worth of work, the things you accomplished, what you left undone, reflecting on how differently it all looks today from what you thought it would be when you were 25 and just getting going.

Jesus knew he was at his last Supper with the disciples. You didn't have to have supernatural discernment for that. The Romans were looking for him, the religious leaders were looking for him. He had come to Jerusalem to make a statement. This confrontation had a sense of destiny to it.

I presume that the meal was filled with a poignant reflection on what he was about and what the group was about. His career, so to speak, was brief, and it didn't have any material collection, so they didn't have lawyers and bankers to divide up the assets, nor a board meeting to hand on responsibilities. No this was a spiritual/social movement. Going through it, I presume that it felt much more like something Mohandas Gandhi led, something that Dr. King led. Those discussions are much more about what are we trying to achieve and are we doing it with nobility. The real Spiritual question that is forced in these moments has to do with "integrity".

Authentic social and political moments are like that. There is a sense that history is in the making and the consequences of what you are doing will have an impact far down the generations, and while there may not be much money in it, you have a sense of historical gravitas that how you comport yourself will have tremendous influence for good or ill. Especially when you anticipate that physical torture will be involved, it is all the more important that you have your spiritual disposition in it's strongest resolve. You have to stay focused on what is important.

I used to tell my students at Rutgers that this is the most important piece that is left out of their education on the Civil Rights movement in our country. You see those pictures of the marches in Selma, Alabama- dignified African-Americans walking past people yelling the most vile insults at them, police with attack dogs and fire hoses knocking them down. Don't think for a minute they just behaved with decorum because they just did.

No, what we skip over in public school, is that they had been to days of training in Churches about how to live non-violence. And just before every one of those marches, every one of those public protests where they were going to meet violence, they had been in Church for a couple of hours, all together, focusing, praying, listening to exhortation on how to interiorize non-violence in the midst of attack, verbal abuse, and degradation. No, no, no… this is not something easily done. This takes prayer, it takes community solidarity, this needs God.

And they had that sense that T.V. was watching, the world was watching, their ancestors and their children were watching and that how they comported themselves would make a difference for years to come.

At the very first march, Dr. King gave voice to something that would be repeated over and over again. He said to all the African-Americans that were gathered in Montgomery, "If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, 'There lived a great people- a black people- who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.' This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.'"[ii]

No that sense of historical destiny passing through the cordon of violence takes spiritual faith, spiritual hope, spiritual power. That is what Jesus and the disciples were reflecting on that last supper together. They were eating a Passover meal, a meal where they remembered God bringing the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt into freedom. They knew that they had to draw upon that same Spirit that can leave behind whatever they had in slavery and be ready to walk down the road of emancipation. On that road, there probably will be pain, there may well be abuse, for some there will be torture, isolation and loneliness, for some death. But come what may, they will have to stay focused on actualizing grace, faith, love. The world is watching and how you live makes a difference. And this is the spiritual point of your life- actualizing grace, faith, and love.

That is why the discussion at that Last Supper turned toward the question of integrity… Authenticity, actualization is about integrity. It is all about what you are walking in your life spiritually speaking.

Jesus makes the enigmatic observation, "one of you will betray me." That leads to a lot of protestation and posturing, so wonderfully captured by Leonardo DaVinci in his portrait. Some of the gospel stories have each of the disciples saying, "Is it I, surely not I" as though the concept of compromise had never entered his moral vocabulary. In the Gospel of Matthew, all the disciples say, 'We will never disown you.' On one level, I'm quite sure they meant it. And the irony of the story, of course, is that every single one of them will fall away, slink into the darkness, run for their lives… every single one… and Jesus will stand trial all by himself without one, single advocate…

This is who we actually are in our complexity. Earnest in our pledges of faithfulness, incredulous that anyone could think of us as other than upstanding, and individual acts of moral torpor- all rolled into one.

I'm quite sure that at the beginning of the season a couple weeks ago, all the boys on the Lacrosse team at Duke made a pledge to coach for a championship character, championship ethic, championship season. They absolutely meant it. And all of them, explicitly and implicitly, signed off on hiring a couple strippers.

I genuinely felt for the Headmaster at Delbarton called by every news organization in the country about 5 of his graduates, saying, 'they are all fine boys from good families' and they are. But the Headmaster was speaking with his public relations hat on, not his Christian theologian hat. Because with that hat he would have said, 'we are a genuine mystery to ourselves, a veritable miasma of virtue and vice. As St. Paul once said, "I am at war with myself". Or in Romans "I do that which I ought not to do and that which I ought to do, I cannot seem to do." We are living contradictions both actualizing and permanently in alienation from our highest selves.

And therein lies the value in reflecting on the great drama that comprises Holy week. If we can be shed of that propriety of manners which insists that we are all good guys from good families, the drama of Holy week provides for us a mirror by which we might actually see ourselves as we are morally and spiritually. Interested but not consistent, occasionally inspired but afraid, daring and just as quickly deflated of all courage.

I decided that in light of this, it would be a good time to finally watch "The Hotel Rawanda", the story of the hotel manager at the expensive Belgian hotel in Kigali who lived through the massacre. It is a difficult film to watch, though interestingly not because of the violence which is muted and largely takes place off camera.

Partly it is difficult to watch, knowing what is to come, and seeing so many characters in the early part of the film, going about their lives, not really tuned in to the growing upheaval around them, pretty much taken completely off guard when the violence begins. And even after the violence begins, the response of almost everybody is to underestimate how it will grow, and only to try to stay low and avoid being caught up in what is swirling around them.

Indeed, the protagonist of the movie, Paul Rusesabagina, is not a man of particular virtue. It just so happens that he is from a mixed marriage, he a Hutu and his wife a Tutsi, so he starts his campaign of salvation by taking care of his Mother-in-Law and her family. But that is an important piece of what makes his work profound because we do not have to go looking for a cause, we just need to be prepared and be brave enough to be humane in a situation of inhumanity. He does what he can, which is a fair amount, because he is the manager of an important hotel. He has connections and material.

But this movie is for Westerner's. There comes a pivotal turn in the plot when the violence is turning into a full blown anarchy. The United Nations force is pitiably small and unequipped to deal with any use of force at all. At this point, the entire world knows what is taking place and has a pretty good idea of what will take place. Frantic calls are being made by the Europeans and the Americans. The U.N. officers are waiting for serious reinforcements.

And nothing happens. A special plane is chartered and all of the white people are driven on a bus, protected by a convoy of police and U.N. soldiers. They are out of there, exactly what we would all do. I remember as a teenager being in a remote part of Turkey, having been robbed, couldn't communicate well. I would have been worried but I had two things in my possession, a United States passport and an American Express card. At nineteen, I already knew this was all you really needed to get Dad to send "lawyers, guns and money" to get me out of this.

As the buses are being loaded and pulling away, all the Rawandan's are left at that hotel. They don't really expect any thing else to happen. They don't blame the Europeans for their actions. But there is this deadening dread that comes over them realizing that no one is going to take up their cause, there won't be any last minute salvation. They just aren't connected in a way that matters to the rest of the world. I'm quite sure that all the Americans and Europeans were great guys from great families but this is the actual face of moral torpor on a collective scale.

And it is important to reflect on this once in a while. It just so happens that Paul Russesabagina wrote an Op-Ed piece for the Wall Street Journal this week which I'm sure many of you read. He was talking about the unfolding genocide in Sudan right now. He said that when it comes to genocide, the world always likes to intone the dictum 'Never Again' from the safe comfort of ex post facto. In this case, we are ourselves living through what we know to be a genocide and we are doing nothing about it. And this too is worthy of reflection.

I cannot put a band aid on this sermon and wrap it up neatly. It would not be honest. It is true that the great drama of Holy Week promises us that there are divine resources for our forgiveness… but that is because we need them. I invite you this week to reflect on yourself, just where, just how you also need forgiveness. And think broadly, at least as broadly as the scope of influence and privilege that you are blessed to enjoy. It is not pleasant or easy but it is necessary. Amen.

[i] See "Bidding Farewell" by Frederick Buechner in The Christian Century, April 4, 2006, pp. 26-31.

[ii] King, M.L., Strides Towards Freedom (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1958), p. 63.