Tuesday in holy week 2012...

Usually I prepare my notes for Sunday on this day - and I've gotten a good start - but there are three other liturgies to deal with, too.  So, Easter's notes will show up later here.  Today I made a first attempt at framing our Good Friday contemporary music presentation re: the Cross and our Context.  These are the introductory remarks I will share after we do Nina Simone's take on "Isn't It a Pity."

Introduction
Greetings and blessings to you all tonight:  I am so very grateful that you are here for our prayerful reflections on the Cross of Jesus Christ in our 21^st century context.  We are engaged in an experiment you might call “doing theology through the arts.”  Tonight we are using music and poetry – prose and prayer, movement and rest, as well as silence, sound and a sculpture that brings together light and darkness – to illuminate our connection to God in the Cross.

·      Theology, you see, is the careful exploration of what we can know about God.   We are given some insights, of course, through Scripture and worship.  And in this community, we take those words very seriously.

·      So seriously, in fact, that tonight we are trying to go deeper – to discover and listen and experience what can be known about God’s words in the Cross – because the wisdom of the Lord in not simply a linear, rational truth.  It touches our hearts – and souls – and relationships.  It changes the way we see and listen and move in the world.

As artists – who are also people of faith – we are going to use our gifts and imaginations to wrestle with the horror and hope of the Cross.  What does it mean, for example, to follow a Messiah who is a total loser in the eyes of the world?  What does it feel like to have all your expectations destroyed by the Lord?  Or to feel abandoned, alone and forsaken as Jesus did?

Insights
What we have done for tonight has three layers – and let me try to clearly illuminate them so that you might enter this encounter more fully.

·       First, we have taken one of the oldest prayer forms in the Christian tradition – the Veneration of the Cross and Reproaches – and rewritten them.  Not only did we seek to strip the old form of its ancient anti-Semitism – for we stand in solidarity with, not judgment of, our spiritual forbearers in Judaism – but we also wanted to understand how the mystery of the Cross touches us today.  We believe that what we do in worship is a matter of life and death.

Another artist – the painter Mako Fujimura – has written:  What we do is about the Life we can live generatively verses commerce driven, celebrity crazed frenzy.  When we encounter bodies of casualties like Whitney Houston, or Amy Winehouse, we wonder what struck us.  And yet, we do not realize that we have been worshipping the wrong idols all along, and all of us are capable of such misplaced devotions, misaligned liturgies. It's not so much about excluding ourselves from the secular liturgies, but to repent that we have not understood what a beautiful liturgy is, or to discover, for the first time, that gifts and stillness was there all along behind the voices of the casualties of culture wars and flash bulbs going off.  This is a time to rediscover why and from whom the Greatest Gift of All has come from.  But it's more complex than to diagnose and speculate on what went wrong, when really, Houston and Winehouse are just the tip of the iceberg.

·       Consequently, we have tried to remove any false or misleading distinctions that so often separate the secular from the sacred:  that is the second layer of tonight’s presentation – an awareness that the Cross speaks to our politics – our use of money – how we see and treat one another as much if not more than what kinds of prayers we say when we’re all alone.  That’s why we have chosen mostly secular songs that have spoken to us part of the wisdom of the Cross.  “Isn’t It a Pity” is pure lament. 

When the “Long and Winding Road” is set alongside the story of the Cross we see how often we find ourselves at a crossroads aching for help in choosing the most compassionate road home in the midst of often terrifying options..  When we deconstructed Paul Simon’s song, “The Boxer” it pointed to Christ’s own discouragement and shame on the Cross.

And then we discovered a taste of the fear the disciples themselves must have felt in a song called “On the Way Home.”  That will be a hard song for some to hear – it is dissonant and harsh – and all about losing faith, being shamed by trusting Jesus and living for a time without any clear foundation.  But like St. Paul taught, “the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’

I hope you will let yourself go into the deeper truths of the song even as the music challenges you…

·       And third, each artist tonight has brought to this presentation a new sense of artistic creativity and humility:  Brian has written a powerful new song about what the Cross looks like in our contemporary world.  Eva and Dianne are singing songs waaaaaaaay outside their comfort zone as they listen for the truth of God in new ways.  And Dave and Andy, Jon and Carlton and Sue bring their abiding and healing commitment to beauty and grace to the mix, too.

Conclusion
So that’s what we’re going to share tonight: 

·         a way of doing theology with the arts about the Cross

·         a commitment to breaking down sacred/secular distinctions

·         all within the context of creativity and faith and trust

Throughout the evening – during the music or the readings or even the silence – if you feel moved to express yourself in a visual prayer, let me encourage you to come forward and light a candle on the cross, ok?  Ted has constructed it to be a place where you can offer prayers of hope or despair – sorrow or celebration – fear or trust.  And you can come up whenever the Spirit moves you – from this point until the close – so let your heart be your guide.

Listen now for the wisdom of the Lord as we come to the Cross in our own Context…