Between the Lines

Ever wonder what happened to Mark’s story telling?  He leaves out so many details! He’s like that teenager we try to have a conversation with at the supper table.  “How was your day, dear?”  “Fine” “How was school?” “The usual”.  “How are your friends doing?” “Okay. Can I go now?” And we hear them clomp upstairs to their room then call their friends and have a two-hour conversation about how their day really went, who said what to whom, who talked to the wrong person, or did the funny thing that got the teacher mad or wore the oddest outfit to school.  The conversation that doesn’t really happen with us but happens with others.

Mark takes 6 verses to tell a simple story of the first days of the ministry of Jesus.  Contrast that to Matthew’s 18 verses and Luke’s 15 verses.  John stretched Mark’s five verses on the baptism of Jesus into 8 verses and skipped the temptation altogether.  John had a very lofty idea of Jesus, what professors and theologians call a ‘high Christology’, so high that Jesus would never have struggled with things like power or fame.

So, Mark did the Coles notes version of the start of the mission of Jesus, fast and short so he could get to the good stuff.  His was also the earliest gospel written, 12 to 14 years after Paul started his letters. Matthew and Luke didn’t write their gospels for another ten or twenty years later.  It could very well be that Mark was writing things down so briefly more to jog people’s memories.  “Remember that time when Jesus went and got baptised, then wandered into the wilderness?  Peter, remind us of what he told us happened?  James, what can you add?”  It may have been his way of encouraging people to share the memories that they had.

These stories, some of which were collected into the later Gospels, were stories of great transformation.  They were stories of great courage.  They were also stories of small transformations, the fever healed, the kindness shown women and children.  Sometimes the transformation was fast, like Jesus getting baptised and whoosh God shows up and does a happy dance worthy of a Super Bowl touchdown.  Sometimes the transformation was slow, like 40 days of wilderness wandering where there were no human witnesses to the temptations Jesus faced.

We tend to glorify the fast, the big, the showy transformations, the big turning points in a human being’s life, or in a political movement.  One fellow I talked to said that he didn’t like Black History Month because all we hear about are Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandala, and Rosa Parks and that is it.  We don’t hear about the nameless people who take a stand for change, who want to make a difference in the world, and who have to let go of their fears of failure, or even more insidiously, their fears of success, to make a stand for a principle they believe in. 

A good example of this is a little-known gem of a movie starring Sissy Spacek and Whoopie Goldberg.  It was made in the 1990’s and unlike the Color Purple, Ghost, Jumping Jack Flash, or the many guest appearances Whoopie did as Guinan on Star Trek the Next Generation, this movie was not a comedy hit for her.  It did not win Oscar nominations or huge profits.  It is a movie that falls between the lines.

It's also a movie about ordinary women living ordinary lives according to the norms of the1950’s Alabama society they lived in.  An ordinary housewife married to a successful city leader and her ordinary housekeeper who took care of the children, cooked the food and cleaned the house.  Until the housekeeper started showing up late for work, soaked from the rain, and one day, so footsore that the blood soaked through her shoes.  Many of us know about Rosa Parks, who became famous for refusing to move to the back of the bus.  We don’t know about the quiet folks like Whoopie’s character who boycotted the busses after Rosa’s resistance.  Many people chose to walk to work from the poorer areas of town to the richer parts where their jobs were.  They organized carpools and rode horses or bicycles to work.  Other communities rallied to support the boycotters by sending financial aid or pairs of shoes to replace the  worn out shoes of the boycotters.  This frustrated many townsfolks, from bus drivers driving empty buses, to politicians and business people.  Vigilante acts of violence tried to intimidate folks into once again riding the buses, but people had enough of the disrespect, the racism, the discrimination and the hardship imposed by segregation.  They boycotted the busses for a whole year until the segregation stopped.  A whole year!

They risked everything because they had a clear vision.  They risked losing their jobs because they wanted a better world for their children and grandchildren.  They risked being attacked because they had nothing to lose.  They risked because they realized that they had strength in numbers and deserved to be treated with dignity.  They risked because they knew that if they didn’t, nothing would change for the better.

Sometimes the risk can be small.  A school teacher named Harriet Glickman wrote a letter to a comic strip artist shortly after Martin Luther King was assassinated.  And because of that letter, Charlie Brown gained a new friend named Franklin, changing the world of budding young artists and children everywhere.  Because of one letter she risked writing!

Jesus risked everything for the sake of his vision and because he loved people.  He knew that the discrimination, poverty and oppression they were experiencing was not what God wanted for the world.  Our province is also struggling with poverty and discrimination.  Trans people are targeted, people are living in tents, friends are dying because they can’t get medical care quickly enough.  Can we risk speaking out, writing letters, making calls, signing petitions?  Just like the housewives and housekeepers, it’s those little risks we take together that can change the world.  When we work together with deep spirituality, bold discipleship and daring justice, we can help God change the world once again.  May we have the courage to take risks to stand with all who need to know God loves them.  Amen.

Hamster Wheels

When my kids were little, they had pet mice.  And what those mice loved doing more than anything was run in their hamster wheels.  Because they were nocturnal, we would wake up to the noise of the mice running as fast as their little paws could carry them, sometimes with so much energy and verve that the wheel would fall over and they had to stop running.  They would be so frustrated that they would chew on their wheel.  As soon as we set it up again, they would ignore it until the next night when the whole cycle would start over.  We should have hooked a generator to that hamster wheel, it went so fast the momentum of the wheel was stronger than the mouse that was moving it. It sent them for a spin upside down and dumped them out onto their soft papered cage floor.  The mice were quite bewildered about what had happened, but they kept on running!

Sometimes it seems like I’m running in a giant hamster wheel.  Work, eat, sleep and repeat.  There’s so much to do, especially at this time of the year.  That’s typical of many people.  Except for Christmas parties thrown by British Government staff people, most of us had a much quieter Christmas than usual last year, and we’ll probably do the same this year.  Presents are mailed, visits are curtailed, and zoom calls connect us without the long drives we’re used to.  It’s like our hamster wheels have stopped turning and thrown
us out back on the ground and we’re still a little dazed by everything. Some of us have enjoyed the break, some of us are still on the wheel but just can’t seem to get up to speed, and for those who are working in the health system, they have had to run faster than ever before.  They find themselves doing the loop de loop.  The constant stress has meant that collectively our blood pressure levels are higher.  Probably because of the sticker shock we have when we go grocery shopping and realize how much the price of food has risen.  Or the grief we feel when we hear of the rise in opioid overdoses impacting mostly young people.

We are living in tough times.  Zephaniah, if you read all of the book, which is only 3 chapters long, knew similar times of harsh fear and being in survivor mode.  He called out systemic injustice and would have had no tolerance of food systems that waste billions of dollars of food every year in Canada.  He would have called out oil companies that leave orphaned wells on farmland and impact the quality of the soil we need to grow crops.  He would have called out government curriculums that teach only a colonialist version of history, and pointed out the addictions we have to shopping or Netflix or on-line bullying or drugs.  He would have called out the oppressive employment practices of big corporations.  Just like John the Baptist, coming charging out of the wilderness, filled with a passion to name the hamster wheels we are running in.

Zephaniah heard God’s promise that our shame will be turned to praise, but the shame has to be named and faced first.  It’s specific and individual.  John heard several groups of people who recognized their shame in being stuck in their hamster wheels of oppression.  But John didn’t want to just get them out of their hamster wheels, but out of their cages completely!  His advice, tailored to several different career paths, was designed to get them fired!  If a tax collector only collected what they were supposed to as part of the system of oppression that Rome imposed on all its colonies, the other tax collectors would resent it and complain to the higher authorities about being undermined.  If a soldier stopped taking bribes, the rest of the soldiers would complain that they had gone soft on the locals and was no longer enforcing Roman Rule.  Enough soldiers and tax collectors changing their attitudes to the people they were supposed to be controlling and the system would collapse.  Which eventually it did. 

We can’t escape our hamster wheels or our cages until we recognize that we are in them.  People like Zephaniah and John help us to recognize that.  It’s not until we have heard their call and ask ‘what should we do’, that the cage opens up and we can feel the joy at being able to run like a hamster as God intended.

My favorite example of this is the Sister Act movies with Whoopi Goldberg.  In Sister Act 2, she goes to an inner school where the kids are trapped in a system of oppression.  They don’t want to run like hamsters, but no one is willing to support their dreams.  Sister Mary Clarence comes in, challenges the kids to get off the hamster wheels, challenges the administrators who are intent on closing down the school, and takes the new school choir to state championships where they win the contest and save their school.

This movie was inspired by a real teacher, Iris Stevenson-McCullough, who teaches music in Los Angeles in a school predominantly attended by visible minorities.  Her choirs have risen to national prominence, performing in France and Jamaica, winning many competitions.  At one point she and many other teachers were going to be fired by the Los Angeles School Board.  She publicly spoke against the cuts, inspiring media attention and reversing the cuts.  In doing so, she also inspired the people behind Sister Act 2!  In 2014, she took her school choir to perform at the White House for the Obamas and was suspended for 4 months by the school board for doing so.  Students protested again, and she still teaches as well as leading music at her Church.  She encourages her children, like John the Baptist, to not let them get stuck in cages on hamster wheels.

What can we do?  What cages are we in?  What hamster wheels are we running around in?  Who could we be sharing a second coat with or some food with?  When we break out of our cages of shame and fear, we can feel real joy as God intended us to.  Joy comes to us all, when we answer God’s call!