Charlotte's Staircase

“Charlotte’s Staircase” The Dover Church
March 7, 2010 – Third Sunday in Lent
Scripture: Psalm 27, Philippians 3:14-4:1, Luke 13:31-35

Ah yes! Charlotte’s staircase. Charlotte is one of the wonderful people I have had the pleasure of getting to know well as a minister. Charlotte and I hit it off right from the start. Charlotte was more than old enough to be my mother, but we were birds of a feather: large people who spoke in loud voices, Swedish Americans who enjoyed off colored jokes and good belly laughs. Charlotte loved parties and thought church parties in particular were dull without cocktails. She was always on the move, buzzing here and there, chatting, helping out someone or getting something organized.
When Marie-Laure and I moved to Higganum as new parents, Charlotte took us under her wing. She was in a good place when we knew her, but she had known her share of hardship. Having grown up during the Depression and the Second World War, Charlotte had never moved farther than next door to the house she was born in. Like most folks of her generation in Higganum, she had married local, to a guy named Bob who was a carpenter. It was Bob who built their house next door to Charlotte’s parents. Whenever Charlotte spoke about “the good old days,” she would laugh and remember the fun they had had together, evenly mixed it seemed with their fair share of struggles. And then, at one of Charlotte’s famous Christmas Eve parties, Bob died of a massive heart attack with a glass of whiskey in his hand, leaving her with four young children, no savings, and no insurance. Charlotte had lived a lot of life, the very good and the very bad, both of which seemed to make Charlotte all the more appreciative of the goodness of the life she now lived with Bill, her second husband of 25 years, with whom she was travelling the world.
Anyway, one Sunday morning, two year old Leo picked up my screw gun which I had left lying around, and was walking down the hall, turning it on and off, when the weight of the heavy tool literally pulled him over onto a pile of pointy scrap wood, which I also had left lying around. He cut his eyebrow open, just missing his eye, and blood was everywhere. I quickly drove Leo and Marie-Laure to the hospital, where Leo waited for stitches, while I rushed back to Higganum to preach. When I told the church what had happened, someone volunteered to go pick them up and Charlotte told me this story at coffee hour.
Bob had just about finished building their house, putting the final touches to a beautiful front staircase, which he was particularly proud of. Their oldest son, Rick, now in his late 50s, but 3 or 4 at the time, had been watching his father work and helping out as young boys will. When Bob had put away his tools and gone to take a shower, young Rick went and got a saw and proceeded to saw every stair, not cut clean through, but just enough to be irreparable.
“What did you do?” I sputtered incredulously. “What could I do?” answered Charlotte with one of her big laughs. Of course, there was nothing to do but fix the stairs, which Bob did, and love the boy, which, in this case, meant trying to teach Rick not to do things like that in the future and keeping the him away from tools, just in case. Charlotte laughed again, admitting that she had not had too much success with either.
I had been laughing right along with Charlotte, but inside I was feeling embarrassed by my question in light of her response. Of course, she was completely right. What had I been hoping to hear? That she had cursed and beaten her child? That she had sent Rick to bed without his supper? That she didn’t talk to him for a week? That she had broadcast her wrath and blamed her husband, refusing to speak to him? The truth, which Charlotte so wisely recognized, was that none of those “solutions” would solve her problems. Charlotte’s relationship with her son was not about a set a stairs, but about growing in love with one another.
All of us forget this fact from time to time, whenever something like this happens in our lives. And things like this happen all the time. That's life, but that's not what life is all about. Life is about being in relationship with one another and with God and about growing in love for one another.
The reason I felt embarrassed was because I was ashamed of myself. I felt guilty, guilty because I suddenly realized how much I buy into the standard rules of life. The standard rules of life? You know what I mean. Rule number one, for instance: life is about “power over” others, about dominating others into getting with our program.
If that doesn’t work, go to rule number 2: use your power to punish. Go ahead. Sacrifice the future on the burning flames of retribution for a past which cannot be changed.
If you cannot punish physically, then go to rule number 3: blame someone for your problems. Go ahead, get your finger out and point it. It’s THEM! THEY are responsible for the problems with my world. If only someone would punish them, make them change, then things would better.
If you are too timid to use your finger, then go to rule number 4: play the victim. I am not talking about the folks who really are victims, but about those of us who wear the mantle whenever we do not get our own way. No one listens to us. We never get things the way we want and no one cares. We’re just bullied and brow beaten by the bullies of life and that’s why everything is a mess. We are not responsible.
And finally, there’s the end game rule: DISENGAGE! Turn your back and walk away. Things are not going my way. Talk is pointless because the other person is either an idiot, a bully, or a control freak...probably all three. So I’ll just take my toys and go home. This does feel good, because now I am without an opponent, so I am sure to get my own way. The only problem is obvious, isn’t it? You cannot love without someone else.
You may be wondering how I happen to know these rules so well. It’s because I fall into them all the time, except for the domination one. I am actually the mellow one in my family or origin, believe it or not. I was the second child and my older sister played the “power over” card enough to condition me not to go there. But the rest of them, sure. At one time or another, I try them all. Of course, they all end up being covert domination techniques, so I’m really right back at Rule #1.
You see. I forget. I forget who I am. I forget that before anything else I am a disciple of Jesus and that, as a disciple, I am not playing by those rules anymore. Jesus threw out the rule book, changed the game completely. Jesus came to preach and live love, to confront the power and domination systems of the world. He walked right into Jerusalem, the city that kills God's prophets of love, knowing that the powers would destroy him. He knew that his suffering was going to open a way into the future for all Creation.
Most people are repelled by the thought of suffering. We don’t want to factor the Cross into our spiritual journeys. Why? Because we know what happened to Jesus and we know that if we stop playing by the rules the people in our lives are going to be angry and make us suffer. These great rules of life have worked so well for us and gotten us this far, so why change? Except for the fact that they haven’t worked, have they? Not if we really are looking for love, to love and be loved. These rules bring us the suffering we now live with into our lives, our power struggles, our blaming others, our broken relationships, our sense of being the victim, our isolation.
I think about Charlotte’s Staircase whenever I forget and I invite you to too. But think bigger than just personal improvement, about being good and doing better. Jesus’ new game is so much bigger than that. The mess we see all around us in the world is just a magnification of the power and domination that each of us harbor in our hearts and live out in our lives multiplied 6 billion times. The energy of each of our lives of power struggles builds and compounds itself until we have the swirling whirlwind of madness we see in the world today. The futility of it all is inescapable for those with eyes to see.
The Cross of Christ is our way to help make the world whole by love. We commit ourselves to taking up the Cross, each of us and all of us, one at a time, so that we might be transformed by love and then, begin transforming the world around us in love, one by one, one relationship at a time, one church at a time. In Jesus and his Cross, God has given us both the power and the means to re-create the world according to God’s intention. This is big stuff we are part of here. Thanks be to God.