It's not Life OR Death

It's Not Life OR Death                     The Dover Church
March 24, 2013: Palm Sunday Scripture: Luke 19:28-40

A week ago Friday I was walking down the mud brown, dirt streets of Fond des Blanc, Haiti. Fond des Blancs is a place of palm trees and vines, small plot gardens, tin roofed shacks with outside cooking fires, goats, pigs, chickens, dogs and garbage in the streets and yards, donkeys and mopeds for transportation, barefoot women carrying huge bundles on their heads, men sitting and talking in groups, and shy but curious children, some in school uniforms and some in cast off rags, some playing, some carrying water from the well, and all watching to see what the conspicuously big and conspicuously white foreigner is up to.
In my wandering I happened to pass by the village church. After the hospital, the church is the second most imposing building in a town of mostly one room shacks. As the door was open and I always like to visit churches in my travels, I decided to pop in for a look.
  Once my eyes adjusted from the bright light outside to the shade within, I was confused. It was Friday, shortly after noon, and there was a large congregation in the midst of what looked very much like the Stations of the Cross. But it wasn't Good Friday. Or was it? Had I missed a week? Or two? Panic started tickling my belly...had I mistakenly gone to Haiti over Holy Week and Easter? Was I about to get the meathead minister of the year award? Why hadn't someone pointed out my mistake before I left? "Oh my God," I thought. "I gotta get back to Dover."
A quick look at my cellphone calendar brought my fear under control, but now I was professionally and spiritually curious. What had I walked in on? When I came back to the hospital, I commented to our host, "I think I was just at The Stations of the Cross at the church, but how could that be? It isn't Good Friday for another two weeks." "Oh no, Max!" Conor said. "You're not mistaken. That was the Stations of the Cross. They do that every Friday in Lent here in Haiti. They love Lent here and Good Friday is the big day. The whole village does stations and processes around town for six hours. Easter is an anticlimax after the intensity of Good Friday in Haiti."
  "When you think about it," Conor continued, "a spirituality of a suffering God, a God who suffers with them and like them helps them make meaning of their hardship, gives them hope in their hopelessness, reveals to them a purpose in what seems senseless. Where there is such poverty and death is so close, the North American prosperity gospel, that everything's great and only going to get better if we believe it will, is not going to resonate strongly with their lived reality."
I've been thinking about this the last week. I've been thinking that while the vast majority of the specifics of our lived reality couldn't be any more different from the Haitians in Fond des Blancs, there is a baseline human reality which we share not only with the Haitians but with all people everywhere, a universal human truth which Jesus on Palm Sunday points to and which culminates on the Cross. Moreover, I think we all already know this universal truth, even if we find it distasteful and inconvenient as it clashes with our self image.
Let's start right at the beginning of the human experience with birth, from the mother's point of view, not the child's. Pregnancy seems to me to be a process in which a mother's physical identity gradually changes. Her slim, agile pre-pregnancy self gradually dies as her child bearing self is being born. Even if she wasn't slim and agile before she pregnancy, there had only been one person in her body and now there are two. That's a big change which ultrasound picks up when you hear two heart beats. When labor and delivery come, the suffering is often intense. Some mothers tell me they felt like they were going to die. And when the baby is delivered, the non-mother person dies completely and is reborn forever as mother. Which brings us to the universal human truth: life comes through change, suffering and death.
Then there's growing up, which is all about change as we pass each developmental threshold, the continual death of immature selves as more mature selves are born, and the suffering all of this entails. These thresholds can be quite painful, and our transition or our inability to transition can entail enormous suffering. If we don't grow up, if we refuse to change, our human potential dies. Life comes through change, suffering and death.
How about intellectual development? For most of us, learning involves suffering as we struggled to master new concepts. Most of us suffer as our old conceptual world collapses and dies and is supplanted by new horizons. We have to be willing to allow our understanding and point of view to change if we are to learn new things. Life comes through change, suffering and death.
Physical development and athletic achievement? Pure suffering as we transform our bodies as instruments of new levels of endurance, strength and speed. We sacrifice time and energy we could spend sleeping, playing, partying, anything, to athletic achievement. When we approach the elite level, we push ourselves literally to the brink of death to finish that marathon, climb that marathon, increase the speed on that ski run. Life comes through change, suffering and death.
How about professional and business success? Hard work, suffering, sacrifice and willingness to change...like Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: those who succeeded put in their 10,000 hours. Marriage, parenting, anything and everything done fully involves change, suffering, death, all of which we accept willingly, even welcome as a clear pathway to our goal. And paradoxically, refusing to change, avoiding suffering, running from death, does not actually lead to life. It leads to death, sometimes by other names, but death all the same.
Now, even though I think we all know from our lived experience that life comes from change, suffering and death, something quite interesting happens in the North American religious contexts like ours, which is to say, wealthy, healthy, post-Enlightenment rational congregations in which God is one option among several available to us, most people are pretty turned off by the suffering and death at the center of Christianity. We want a suffering and death free Christianity. Most people do not observe Holy Week, seeing the events as unfortunate, disturbing and confusing incidents rather than the central event in the Christ event. Most people prefer Christmas to Holy Week, and the Baby Jesus is more what we want Jesus to be really about: about good people living good lives which should only get better with the lessons about living a good life we pick up here in church. For us, life is about happiness, success, prosperity, achievement, individual fulfillment and self-actualization, and religion is about helping us cope with the stress and pressure of life.  Church is a time out for perspective and meditation, not the place to crank up the intensity. We do our best to put unpleasantness, not to mention death, out of our minds. We're all for change as long as it is of the progressively or exponentially better sort and can be contained to only changing the things we think need changing. We think that Jesus boldly riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was a judgment error or insanity. Many of us experience Maundy Thursday as odd, disconcerting, even superstitious. And Good Friday? In our prejudices left over from the bad old days of Catholic-Protestant polarization here in Massachusetts, we put Lent, Holy Week, and particularly Good Friday in the Catholic box as not ours.
The people of Haiti can neither ignore nor escape their circumstances, which is why Lent and Good Friday make such sense to them. God in Jesus on the Cross is with them on their crosses of life. We, on the other hand, have the luxury of thinking that we can ignore and escape whatever suffering might be biting at our heals let alone slapping us in the face every now and then. But what if suffering is actually not something to be avoided? What if suffering is the doorway to new life and transformation, wisdom and the experience of God? A threshold to be crossed to a fuller existence? What if the measure of a human life is not of a good or even great person living a good life getting better, but rather how we lean into, embrace, or walk through the suffering which is coming our way whether we like it or not, the suffering that is unavoidable for mortals like us who all will die, how we live this suffering, where we find God in it, and how we allow it to transform us, remake us into a new creation?
The point of Jesus boldly riding a donkey into Jerusalem at the head of a probably pathetic bunch of peasants, riding in to suffer and die, is that life is only available through change, suffering and death. The Resurrection can only happen after the Crucifixion. Old life must die if new life is to born. Christian faith ultimately is about saying yes to that. Christian faith is about trusting that the Resurrection both happened, is still happening, and is going to happen. It just take us trusting enough to walk boldly forward into the deaths, changes, and sufferings of our lives. The paradox is that the more willing we are to step off into life, a move that is sure to bring change, cause us to suffer, and lead to the death of our old selves, the more new and abundant life we will find. It's not life OR death. It's life out of death.