Just the One of Us

Psalm 97:1-2; 11-12
John 17:20-24


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

May 20, 2007

You all know that the Folger Library in Washington is doing a big Shakespeare deal for it’s 75th Anniversary. So in my own renewed quest for God in culture, as well as nature, I found myself at a choral concert last week that featured new music based on Shakespeare’s plays. I loved it! Whenever, I encounter Shakespeare’s words, wit, and wisdom. I feel as if a refreshing, exhilarating, draft of summer air has awakened my senses, my mind, and my heart. Even after a tragedy I feel cleansed, refreshed, more alive to life. I feel more like a real person. I don’t know what, if anything, he “does” for you, or all those others for these last 4 centuries, but to me Shakespeare brings to life real life. Even through strange and foreign places, I feel that I am seeing and hearing the world as I find it, not the stories so much as the human beings within them. In Shakespeare, I recognize humanity and feel my humanity recognized.

I think this is because his world does not come through the lens of some world view, some ideology, or even some theology! Shakespeare feels refreshingly free of God-talk, or at least God-footnotes. Shakespeare gives the word “secular” a good name! His characters are full of vibrant faults and virtues, feelings tender and mild, passions crazed and dark, foolishness and wisdom: all burst through without ideology or theology. Comic or tragic, its life. I still have a knowing regret at how I missed the day in class when my favorite high school English teacher, Mrs. Comstock, read and enacted the drunk door man scene. I think from Macbeth. My youthful religious world was deprived of such depravity.

Now Shakespeare is not anti-God. Abraham Lincoln’s first and favorite theological line in Shakespeare’s “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends rough hew them tho we will.” But in Shakespeare God is not spin. So not being saturated in Christian theology, like me, Shakespeare gives me a chance to love life without religious prejudice, without an ideologically stacked deck. And God has a chance. A chance to emerge in non-coded words, in images without subliminal advertising.

“Shakespeare mirrors life,” so wrote a world renown Shakespeare scholar in a recent Harpers Magazine. The writer, Jonathan Bates, says that Shakespeare conquered the world by mirroring the world. Truly a non-violent way to conquer.
I believe it is very pleasing to God that Shakespeare did this. How could the creator of the world not love having creation mirrored?!

And I believe we have, in the church, a Shakespearean standard. Can we, too, see the real world. Without such clear eyes how can we follow Jesus into loving the real world. God did not create two worlds, one world holy and worthy of our love, and another world unholy and deserving of our hate. Our scripture theme today from the prayer words spoken by Jesus is: All things made one. God made one holy world; one world, holy. That is our scripture theme.

Now I want to tell you about how in our home Nancy and I have had a large, colorful, over-the-fireplace picture that looks very Shakespearean. It’s a print of a painting by the Scot, John Duncan. I can’t wait to see it again! Talk about seeing
“rare beasts” and having “unique adventures”! This picture is a pageant of people and animals from sometime a long, long time ago. Rustic and elegant they look Shakespearean, like random selection of characters and actors from a variety of plays. A gaunt brown dog trying to keep up, a diaphanously garbed princess, a fully armored knight on a white steed, and a monk in a brown, cowl garment. I imagine that they are all in an actor’s guild, a troupe, who have done a series of plays in one town and are off to a variety of plays somewhere else. They evoke the line from Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy in “As you like it.” “All the world’s a stage.”

Perhaps they are off to enact a night on a misty stormy moor in Scotland where three witches will stir a cauldron of bubbling trouble, or on their way to a divided castle in Denmark where Hamlet is about to fail to chose to be, and more.

One figure in the John Duncan’s Shakespearean looking parade is a woman in a greenish gown. She has very long wavy blond hair. Her arms are right at her side and she is ten feet or more off the ground and going up! She’s shooting towards the sky. She’s levitating. Now her ascension is not the point of the painting, our eyes are free to fix on any or all of a mix of intriguing characters.

But as she does her ascension thing one could ask in this setting: is something Christian going on in the painting? Last Thursday was Ascension Day on the Christian calendar. It celebrates a day most Protestant Christians don’t even know or think about. After Easter but before Pentecost it’s when Jesus leaves for eternity, going to His Father, until he comes again. Our gospel reading today from John was part of Jesus’ prayer to prepare his disciples for his ascension, since he was to be departing now, for good, he prays that they become as one, with each other and with him so that they can be as much one with God as he is.

But ascension is a neglected theological theme and if John Duncan was trying to insert some Christian theme into his painting he chose a rare bird indeed with ascension. Ascension doesn’t guide our Christian ethic nor our spiritual practice. Although as practice goes I read once that the 300 plus pound medieval theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas used to levitate, a little! Rapture people are into ascension and the sooner they go up the better!

But as to this mystical spiritual ascending woman in our mantel painting I’m here to assert there is nothing Christian going on I this painting. There is no Christian message encoded in its images. The monk is no more the central piece of the progression than that cook with the running sores is the hero of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.”

No, what is being staged here is not John Bunyan’s “Pilgrims Progress.” Our actors are not to do a skit of the good Samaritan at any moment. The ascending lady is not Jesus nor is the light around her the white light of Christ that blinded Paul on the Damascus road. I can find no Christian message in this painting any more than I can find a Christian message in Shakespeare.

Now, the trouble with this sermon you might say is that I’m not doing that, not de-coding some true and hidden secret Christian message in these works of art. I don’t like the idea of trying to find secret messages in places where they are not.

Some people were very excited when Dan Brown tried to find a secret message in Da Vinci’s Code, Mary Magdaline, and a sensual, conspiratorial spin on Leonardo da Vinci and his Jesus painting. I suppose if there were some truth to it all that might be exciting. “The Da Vinci Code” book was trying to show a secular theme in a Christian painting. Not there! Nor is there a Christian theme in the world of Shakespeare. Not there.

So my excitement in Shakespeare and in my Duncan painting is not to decode a Christian message where there is none. Rather, I want to celebrate what is real life in this non-Christian art. And to me a sermon is not a tortured exercise in trying to get you to believe that there is a hidden Christ in culture. So, I don’t want to force a bible message into Shakespeare. But it would also be a kind of perversity; if not blasphemy were I to try to say that the Bible is just like another Shakespearean play. While for me there is something about actors and theatre that I love, but it would be blasphemy to say that Jesus was just an actor. The ascension of Jesus is not when he walks off the gospel stage, takes off his Jesus mask and his Christ costume and wipes his brow with the back of his unscarred hand. You can see how threatening theater can seem.

And perhaps you can see why Christianity has always been uneasy with theater and actors. They seem to suggest that reality can not be pinned down. The Puritans in England closed the theaters.

No, Jesus is not just an actor and God is not putting on plays with in plays. But we are. We are. To us all the world’s a stage. And that’s why a pageant is a picture of just actors could be beautiful and inspiring to see because we are actors in a pageant, we are just people taking up our part and playing it. Now, Jesus did not develop his identity. The divinity of Jesus is that he was and is the real deal: God. But we do, we do develop our identity. We are actors enacting a self we create in a drama we co-author, on a stage we choose and co-create.

Now lots of Christians do not want life to be so much in our human hands. It seems to lessen the divinity that shapes our ends. And non-progressive Christians are uncomfortable thinking that our lives are so much like actors in a theatre. Fundamentalists want their world to be the one real, good and true world not a play act. Jerry Falwell didn’t open his Liberty University because he believed in the human mind pursuing all truth. He polluted and corrupted the ancient idea of a University as a place to know God’s universe, the world. Falwell wanted what he called a bible-based University, in other words a University that already knows the truth, the real truth, his hand-me-down version of God.

Such Christians are afraid of the world, afraid of God’s one holy world, God’s secular world. The religious right is afraid of the secular world, and wants to make America “Christian” so that our culture will be safe for Christians and Christianity, so Ralph Reed said. Now since Jesus was not safe in his culture, neither the Roman Empire nor the religious rulers, why should we be? If all of the disciples were martyred by the world for their faith in Christ why should we, Ralph Reed make the south safe for Christians by calling it a Christian south?!

Louisville Baptist Seminary, is afraid of the secular world. As you may have heard me say, they just got rid of their pastoral counseling department because the Bible is all the help people need, they say. But you can not do pastoral care with out psychology. Pastoral care without psychology is just indoctrination.

Soon perhaps Southern Baptists will get rid of literature, because the Bible is all the truth that people need, no matter what people might also want. Or maybe they would just try to publish a “Christian Shakespeare,” a spin, spun, version of Shakespeare that would somehow be the Christian truth in the mind and writing of William Shakespeare. And that’s why I love Shakespeare and celebrate his massive world, because it could not be done. Christ is not encoded in Shakespeare just as Shakespeare is too secular to be translated into theology. We can thank God and William Shakespeare for that.

Now we know that Thomas Jefferson took his scissors to the New Testament to cut out all the magic, miracle, and power to just leave the reasonable ethics. Of course there was no Jesus left in Jefferson’s bible. Likewise to take the scissors to Shakespeare to cut out all but Christ, or even the Bible, would make confetti of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is a genie and he is out of the bottle not to be put back into one labeled “Christian”. Now if, I can not give you a Christian Shakespeare in this sermon why might I presume upon the ordained office of gospel preacher to preach a non-Christian Shakespeare. Because I believe that Jesus is out there in the chairs with you and not up behind the Christian preacher using some sacred sign language where gospel proclamation swallows up human crisis, where sermon solutions solve perennial problems, and Christian answers stop each human question. And I believe that Jesus would love to sit with us when we are watching a Shakespeare play. I don’t think he would stay long if we were watching a power-point presentation of Christian truth, which some people still call sermons.

You see, I believe Jesus sits with me when I look at my John Duncan painted pageant of actors, that he loves the mirrored world. “Who would you like to be and where would you like to go,” he might say. He might get up and walk off into the picture for a while, to go off with the actors to play a part in one of their plays. Jesus and me, as one, just the one of us, sitting and gazing at the play of real life, and he encouraging me to act my part in it.

If this sermon lifts up Shakespeare for you, it is because I believe that Jesus would love to sit with you to watch a Shakespeare play or to hear a sonnet with you. How could Jesus not love to share with you such a mirrored life?

In a sermon I read the other day, my imagination was sparked to see Jesus also sitting down with Hamlet and saying, “Let’s figure out a way for you to love and to act, not to go bitter, to kill, or to die.” The preacher suggested that Hamlet’s question “to be or not to be” is the next to most valuable question in life. Seeing our real selves in Hamlet we could, perhaps, hear Jesus whisper a stage cue, “to love or not to love that is the question”.

And wouldn’t it be wonderful to be with Jesus as he watched “Romeo and Juliet?” Those star crossed lovers? Wouldn’t he just love them, hope in agonizing hope to engage them, wouldn’t he know just how to be with them, to be at one with them, in life, or even in death? Amen.