Room 101 and the Empty Tomb

Even people who never read George Orwell’s 1984, know about Big Brother. He isn’t a person –he’s a system of oppression that uses two-way TV’s to watch you while you watch them in the kitchen, in the living room, at work in and in the bedroom.

Toward the end of the novel the main character, Winston Smith, is held by Big Brother’s minions for treason. Winston is told that he must betray the person he loves most in this world. This love is the one true thing that Winston has experienced. It is his one claim to integrity. So he bravely refuses.

Big Brother’s enforcers tell him that, if he refuses, he will have to go to Room 101.

What is in Room 101? Winston asks.

The thing you hate and fear the most.

Winston is shoved into Room 101 and finds it filled with rats. He was bitten by a rat as a young child.  He has nightmares about rats. Soon he is screaming that he will do anything to escape the rats – including betraying the person he loves.

What is in your personal Room 101? What do you fear the most? My guess is that you can’t even answer that question because most of us are afraid to even think about what scares us the most. As Orwell knew, what we fear the most isn’t the loss of a loved one. What we fear the most are those things that keep us from loving our loved ones. What we fear the most are the kinds of things we would try to avoid even if it meant betraying  the people we love the most.

In the Passion story, Peter betrays Jesus, the person he loves the most,  because he is afraid of being crucified.

I am afraid of being poor - of being drained of my financial and emotional resources - so I keep my distance from people whom I might love, but for whom I don’t want to be responsible.

Jesus tells me that if I care for the sick, the imprisoned, the homeless, the hungry, I will be doing it for Him. (Matthew 25) The trouble is that  I’m not going to risk getting sick or imprisoned or becoming homeless or hungry.

In every relationship that I have that has become estranged I am convinced that the easiest way to fix it is for the other person to change. However, there are those who tell me that it might work if I changed. That would mean facing aspects of my personality that I spend a tremendous amount of time and energy covering up - stuff I'm so ashamed of that I can't even admit that I do those things.

So Room 101 for me contains poverty, suffering, sickness, failure, shame, and death. That’s exactly what the tomb contained. Jesus suffered pain and failure and poverty and shame and loneliness and above all, he was dead. His tomb is Room 101.

The good news of Easter is that the tomb is empty. Jesus has opened it up and nothing is in there. The Risen Christ and all angels say to us: Fear not!

Squirrels Bite Dog To Death

You may have missed this BBC News item about a pack of squirrels attacking a dog in a Russian park. I wonder if this may be linked to the protests and revolutions against dictators in the Middle East? It’s beginning to feel like the whole world is turning upside down.  Those in power are having the tables turned on them, whether their names are Hosni, Muammar or Fido.

Like most Americans, I haven’t felt too much sympathy for Hosni, Muammar and their brethren in other Middle Eastern capitals. But now, I’m not so sure.  

I just read an article about “The Church as Wikipedia”.  Every day, 13 percent of the world’s Internet users consult Wikipedia. We all know that its information can be a little shaky at times, but if we know something is wrong, all we have to do is register and edit the article ourselves.  That’s the way Wikipedia works. Nupedia preceded Wikipedia. Anyone could submit an article for Nupedia, but it had to be vetted by a team of experts. It usually took a very long time for a new article to appear.  Nupedia is no more.

Let’s compare that to a common problem we have in churches. Our youth sing a hymn at a youth conference that is deeply meaningful to them. They come back to their home church and ask their pastor if we can sing that hymn in church next Sunday right after the gospel reading. 

The pastor patiently explains that we can’t sing that hymn because it’s not in our hymnal and it can’t come after the gospel because the organist needs to get to the piano to accompany the choir. And besides, all our hymns for the next 3 months have been chosen already. So, sorry kids; but, hey, keep bringing in those ideas! We want our worship to appeal to all ages, you know!

What if we had an open-source church where anyone and everyone had a say in how things were done and there was no "authority" who had to approve everything? 

A question like that makes me feel more empathy for Hosni, Muammar and especially, Fido.

I’m all for change as long as it doesn’t threaten my authority (and privileges) as a white, male (very important credentials – try getting anything done without them) fully ordained, graduate school accredited senior pastor. And, I admit, I’m getting a little nervous about the way the world is going. 

The church has a great record of holding on to things like the earth-centered universe, the six-day creation of the world, slavery, racism, homophobia, and male privilege. But anyone who has been in a main-line Protestant church for the past few decades knows that we have completely caved in on the first three and there’s been a lot of nibbling around the edges of the rest.

Our only hope is that we can keep our church members from reading their Bibles and from understanding the real meaning of Palm Sunday.  Luckily, our churches are quite attached to the cute parade of kids waving Palm Branches as they march in during the first hymn. Seminary professors have decided that Palm Sunday should become Good Friday, because so many folks use Good Friday to pick up jellybeans for their Easter baskets.

Therefore, no one points out that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was a parody of power.  Pilate would have ridden his warhorse in the same gate (or perhaps was, at that very moment, riding in a different gate) surrounded by soldiers carrying spears. The warhorse, by the way, was the battle tank of the ancient world. They may have been playing martial music. And just as Muammar can still get supporters to cheer for him, I suppose Pilate could, too, especially among those who had an investment in things staying exactly the same.

So Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the back of a little donkey, maybe a jenny with a foal running along beside trying to get a drink of milk (Matt. 21:1-6).  Instead of armor and spears, his poor followers hold up palm fronds and blades of grass. Instead of the “Aves!” for military victors, they cry “Hosanna” and “Hallelujah” - roughly translated as "hurray for God". And what does Jesus do when he arrives in town? He goes to church and turns everything upside down.

 Thankfully, it looks like most people don’t have a clue about what that means, but I worry that squirrels attacking a dog may be a sign that anything can happen.