04.22.12; Rev. David Williams
One of my favorite cult classic films dates from the mid 1980s, that strange far-off era when the hair was big, the shoulderpads were even bigger, and some bible scholars were convinced that the wearing of pastel parachute pants might have marked the coming of the end times. This mostly came from a literal interpretation of Matthew 24:15, because pastel parachute pants come so very close to what Matthew meant when he used the term “desolating sacrilege.”
Many of us old enough to remember that time may have taken some care to insure that all of the hard copies of all of the pictures ever taken of us between the years 1983 and 1990 have mysteriously disappeared. “Gosh, honey, I just don’t know what happened to that album. And could you please empty the shredder?”
Anyhoo, one of my favorite films as a youngling in that era was a oddment called The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. The protagonist is a guy by the name of Buckaroo Banzai, who is a rock-star/physicist/neurosurgeon/secret agent...of course, I mean, aren’t we all? In his spare time, Buckaroo is also he leader of a motley band of adventurers called the Hong Kong Cavaliers, who find themselves in a race against time to save the earth from a group of Red Lectroids from Planet 10. So it’s not exactly Citizen Kane or Schindler’s List. But it’s endearingly goofy, and filled with delightfully pithy semi-random one-liners and catch-phrases.
One that sticks in my head was delivered by Banzai to comfort the long-lost identical twin of his deceased girlfriend, who he encounters in a club that he’s playing after a day of brain surgery and extra-dimensional travel in his rocket-powered pickup truck. Again, really, really really not Citizen Kane or Schindler’s List. As Buckaroo gets ready to sing her a really depressing song to cheer her up, he reminds her of one of his philosophical touchstones:
That felt both daftly obvious and oddly zen-profound back then, but I wonder if it’s still true. More and more, we’re not where we are. That we’re in a place does not mean that we’re present there. That we’re encountering another person does not mean that we’re really engaging with them. We are, perhaps more than in any other time in human history, able to abstract ourselves from the place we find ourselves.
Our ability to carry the stored memories and knowledge of our entire culture around with us in our pockets is an amazing thing. We can know seemingly anything, at any time. We can find our way from any one place to another. We can remember the name of that guy, you know, the one who starred in that thing with what’s her name. We can know how our friends are feeling, or what they’re eating.
But we can also find ourselves dwelling with one foot in meatspace reality and the other foot in virtual space. We are sort of where we are. But we are also not. We are also removed from the reality in which we find ourselves. Our attention, our mindfulness, our focus, and ourselves are elsewhere, diverted to the immediate gratification of whatever we happen to desire at that very moment. And that can distance us from those around us.
In today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke, we hear a story of the importance of presence. In this final chapter, Luke’s narrative of the Gospel is winding down, in preparation for the continuance of the story in the Book of Acts. In the opening verses of chapter 24, we’ve heard how women arrived at the tomb and found it empty. They tried to report that angels had told them that Jesus was risen, but the apostles wouldn’t listen. We’ve heard about how two disciples were walking the road to Emmaus, and on that journey encountered a stranger who turned out to be Jesus.
With these stories humming in their ears, Jesus is suddenly among them, which just scares the bejabbers out of them. He offers them a greeting, a simple “Peace be with you,” no more than the Hebrew greeting shalom aleichem that you’d say in encountering a friend. They remain fearful and doubtful.
At this point in Luke’s story, Jesus takes three specific actions. In verse 39, he offers them his hands and feet, to see and to hold, as evidence that he is really and truly with them. In verse 41, he also takes a bit of fish and eats it, again, a marker of his physical, actual, material presence among them.
These actions are mirrored in the post-resurrection story told in John’s Gospel. Even though John and Luke are drawing on very different oral and written traditions about Jesus, they both contain nearly identical reminders of Christ’s physical presence. In John 20:20-28 passage we heard last week, Jesus also offers up his tangible self, his hands and his side, as proof that he truly is risen. In John 21:14-15, Jesus shares a meal of bread and fish with the disciples.
Some scholarship has suggested that Luke and John recounted these similar tales because their communities were responding to an ancient Christian struggle about the identity of Jesus. Luke and John were among the latest Gospels to reach final written form, and that meant that the communities that received them would have encountered the teachings of a Christian movement called Gnosticism.
The Gnostics got their name from the Greek word gnosis, or knowledge. They understood the Gospel as secret knowledge, a set of mysterious teachings that Jesus brought to teach a chosen few. Gnostic Gospels, like the Gospel of Thomas or the recently discovered Gospel of Judas, were circulated widely in the early Christian world, and they were notably bizarre, filled with intentionally obscure symbolism and an occasionally intense, almost fever-dream spirituality. Only a select few were permitted to participate, as the secret knowledge was passed on to the best, brightest, and most spiritually elite.
The Gnostics were also dualists. That’s dualists with an “A,” not “duelists” with an “E.” They didn’t line up at forty paces with flintlocks and shoot at each other. Instead, they argued that our world and the spiritual realm were totally separate. Jesus was, they said, a creature of the heavenly realm, who did not really exist in the world. According to the gnostics, the world was completely and utterly evil. The whole purpose of Gnostic Jesus was to help us escape the world, in which he didn’t really and actually exist.
The Gnostic Jesus was utterly separate from the world, a creature of light who neither knew suffering nor could know suffering. That disengagement was the whole point of Gnosticism, in which the spiritually strong sought power to escape this world.
But spiritual disengagement and distance are diametrically opposed to the teachings, life, and purpose of Jesus of Nazareth. What Jesus taught and lived was radically a part of this world, deeply connected, and fundamentally engaged. Those early stories of Jesus told by Luke and John are a counterpoint to that hyper-spiritual, otherworldly, distant faith. They remind us of the importance of flesh and bone, of life and breath and the process of living. Being present, in the real and in the now, this matters if you’re following Jesus. Ours is an incarnate faith, written into the fabric of existence, guided by the same spirit that filled Christ, who could be touched and held, who walked and ate and wept with us.
And that’s an increasingly countercultural stance. Our culture drives us to be more and more deeply distracted and separated from meaningful encounters with others. Falling into that silo of self-absorption has never been easier. We can become siloed in our social network cocoon of tightly woven relationships, hearing only friends, seeing only what we wish to see. Those screens before our eyes can become something to be checked compulsively, demanding more of our attention than the person nearest to us. But it goes beyond that recent addiction.
The political and social viewpoints that are reinforced by our ability to choose our own echo chamber mean that we often exist at a remove from those around us. The theological issues we permit to divide us cast us even further from one another. We don’t connect with them. We are not present for them. We do not allow ourselves to be touched, or held. We do not sit down at table. And that’s not how we’re meant to live. We need to be present.
We do that by being there. Our physical presence for those in need matters. We most clearly show others that we are Christ followers by being with them, by listening when they need an ear, by binding up their brokenness with caring hands, by standing with them and rebuilding what has fallen apart, and by insuring that when they sit at table, they do not go hungry.
That is an incarnate faith. That is a faith made real in flesh and bone, that can touch and be touched. When we in faith go down that path, well, there we are.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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