Rest for Your Souls

Crazy Christians, Bishop Michael Curry’s reflections on faith, includes his zany sense of humor, and his profound gift for story telling.  Curry is African American and grew up during the Civil Rights era, so he tells a lot of stories of soaking this all in as a child, surrounded by adults who were practicing hope and resurrection in hard times.  He uses these experiences to understand many facets of American culture, from the despair and degradation of poverty and racism to the accomplishments of hope and the power of love.

Here’s a sample of his general theme:  “We need some Christians who are as crazy as the Lord. Crazy enough to love like Jesus, to give like Jesus, to forgive like Jesus, to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God— like Jesus. Crazy enough to dare to change the world from the nightmare it often is into something close to the dream that God dreams for it. And for those who would follow him, those who would be his disciples, those who would live as and be the people of the Way? It might come as a shock, but they are called to craziness.” 

Curry says Jesus shot out of the starting gate fired up and ready to defy conventional norms of behavior – starting with religious conventions and moving on in a quick one-two to social conventions.  Things got so hot so quickly, Curry points out, that by the third chapter of Mark, his mother and brothers were trying to rein him in and get him to stop, because they knew full well the next words and acts of defiance would be challenging political norms, and that could get him killed. But he wouldn’t be reined in, and we all know what happened in the end:  arrest, trial and execution in less than 24 hours during the holidays.

In this week’s reading from Matthew 11, Jesus comments on his own defiance, and on the strict lenses through which many folks see him with disapproval, see him as nothing but trouble.

“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another,‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’;  The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’

It is the sad truth that the Church, which gathers in his name, does much of this fussing and rejecting, passing judgment on other people, who they love and how they live.  And, oh my, oh my, does the church fuss about what folks play and sing!

You can make an argument that the differences between Christian groups are really about singing.  Well, you can also say it is  praying that separates us, whether we are loud or quiet, whether we move our bodies while we pray, and hold our arms up, or sit (kneel) still.  But the singing is the thing that people argue about in churches, refusing to change from the old tunes that are filled with nostalgia because their moms and their grandmoms sang them,  and the new, whatever the new is, which is different.

New hymnals meet a lot of resistance in most churches, and God help the minister who introduces hymns from other ethnic groups and nations, other music rhythms and languages, for these can turn ordinary Christians into fire-breathing dragons.

But the word of God, according to Jesus, challenges conventional norms, and overturns comfortable behaviors.  He didn’t come, Jesus  said, to join people in their traditions of dancing or of mourning.  He came to call people out of their comfort zones, and into the challenging word of God.

Bishop Curry recalls Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran theologian and pastor who came to America from Germany in the early 1930s, on the eve of WW2, to get away from the horrors there.  Bonhoeffer spent two years here, and then went back, to face the Devil and the darkness of Hitler’s Third Reich, as the leader of an Underground Seminary, to work for the overthrow of his government.

Before he returned, Bonhoeffer spent a number of months travelling in the deep South of the US, among poor black communities at the height of segregation, many years before the Civil Rights era.  Bonhoeffer worshipped in their churches, among people who dealt with desperate poverty, dilapidated housing, deep hunger.  Attending their ramshackle churches and singing with them their spirituals and gospel songs was transformational for Bonhoeffer, who wrote in his journals that he was converted by the depth of hope and faith in them, in the midst of such misery.  Back in Germany, in years of deep darkness, Bonhoeffer taught those spirituals to German people, whose hope rested in songs like Go Down Moses and Balm in Gilead.

Learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, said Jesus. 

___________________________________________________________

Illustrations:

1.  Crazy Christians, by Bishop Michael Curry, Episcopal, N.C. book

cover.  Google Images.

2.  Poster, photo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer with quote from his writings.  Google Images.

3.  Poster, photo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with quote from his writings.  Google Images.

4.  Slave Dancing with Music.  Unknown Artist, 1790.  Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Williamsburg, VA.

5.  Poster, photo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer with quote from his writings.  Google Images.

6.  Ring Shouting in Black Church, 1930s, Georgia.