The Commemoration of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Saturday, July 7, 2012
We Need Some Crazy Christians
by the Rt. Rev. Michael B. Curry
Diocese of North Carolina
In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom, that transfigured you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Glory, glory hallelujah,
Glory, glory hallelujah,
Glory, glory hallelujah,
God's truth is marching on.[2]
For
a text today, I offer these words from Mark 3:19-2: “Then [Jesus] went
home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even
eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people
were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’” The King James
Version of the Bible translates the concern of Jesus’ family for him in
these words: “He is beside himself.” The old J.B. Phillips New Testament
translates it, “People were saying, ‘He must be mad!’” But my favorite
is from the 1995 Contemporary English Version which says, “When Jesus'
family heard what he was doing, they thought he was crazy and went to
get him under control.”
So, forgive me for saying it this way, but
Jesus was, and is, crazy! And those who would follow him, those who
would be his disciples, those who would live as and be the people of the
Way, are called and summoned and challenged to be just as crazy as
Jesus. So I want to speak on the subject, “We Need Some Crazy
Christians.”
I don’t want to be too quick to judge Jesus’ mother
and the whole family. They had good reason to be concerned. We just
read from 1 Peter a teaching that reflects what Jesus taught in the
Sermon on the Mount: “Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse;
but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing” (1Peter 3:9). That's
crazy. In the Gospel reading from Matthew, read just a few moments ago,
Jesus says, “The greatest among you will be your servant” (Mt. 23:11).
That's crazy.
What the world calls wretched Jesus calls blessed.
Blessed are the poor and the poor in spirit. Blessed are the merciful,
the compassionate. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst that God’s
righteous justice might prevail. Blessed are those who work for peace.
Blessed are you when you are persecuted just for trying to love and do
what is good. Jesus was crazy. He said, love your enemies, bless those
who curse you, pray for those who despitefully use you. He was crazy. He
prayed while folk were killing him, “Father, forgive them; they know
not what they do.” Now that’s crazy.
We need some
Christians who are as crazy as the Lord. Crazy enough to love like
Jesus, to give like Jesus, to forgive like Jesus, to do justice, love
mercy, walk humbly with God -- like Jesus. Crazy enough to dare to
change the world from the nightmare it often is into something close to
the dream that God dreams for it. And for those who would follow him,
those who would be his disciples, those who would live as and be the
people of the Way? It might come as a shock, but they are called to
craziness.
Let me suggest one example of such a call from the New
Testament: Mary of Magdala, Mary Magdalene. For whatever reason, Mary
often gets a bum rap. Think back to the crucifixion of Jesus.
Crucifixion was execution by the Empire for crimes against the state. It
was public torture. It was an intentionally brutal means of capital
punishment, an execution designed to send a message that revolution and
revolutionaries would not be tolerated. If you were a supporter or
follower of the person being crucified, it was dangerous to stand too
close by during the execution. The rational and sensible thing to do was
to go into hiding or exile.
Having said that, let’s call the roll
of those Jesus called to follow him, let’s take the attendance of the
apostles at the crucifixion of their Lord. Simon Peter? Absent. James?
Absent. Andrew? Absent. Bartholomew? Absent. Thomas? Absent. Judas?
Definitely absent. Mary Magdalene? Present and accounted for! That’s a
disciple! When the old slaves sang, “Were you there when they crucified
my Lord?” there was a woman named Mary who could answer, “I was
there!” Now that’s crazy!
Now it may not be obvious at first, but
we actually have a day to remember crazy Christians. I think we call it
All Saints’ Day. It’s not called “All the Same Day,” it’s All Saints’
Day, because, though they were fallible and mortal, and sinners like the
rest of us, when push came to shove the people we honor as saints
marched to the beat of a different drummer. In their lifetimes, they
made a difference for the Kingdom of God. As you know, we are even
working on a book to help us commemorate them. We are calling it Holy Women, Holy Men. But we might as well call it The Chronicles of Crazy Christians.
One
of the people we celebrate in the book is Harriet Beecher Stowe, a
descendant of Mary Magdalene. She was born in 1811 into a devout
family committed to the Gospel of Jesus and to helping transform the
world from the nightmare it often is into the dream God intends. She is
best known for a fictional work titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In
this fiction, she told the truth. She told the story of how chattel
slavery afflicted a family, afflicted real people. She told the truth of
the brutality, the injustice, the inhumanity of the institution of
chattel slavery. Her book did what YouTube videos of injustices and
brutalities do today. It went 19th-century viral. It
rallied abolitionists and enraged vested interests. The influence of
that book was so powerful that Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said,
upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe for the first time, “So this is the
little lady who started this great war!”[3]
A
woman of her era was supposed to write nice stories, not stories that
would disturb the conscience of a nation. She was supposed to marry
well, raise well-bred children, participate in a few charitable
activities, and be fondly remembered by all who knew her. That was the
life she was supposed to have. But she had been raised in a family that
believed that following Jesus means changing the world from the
nightmare it often is into the dream that God intends. And sometimes
that means marching to the beat of a different drummer. Sometimes that
means caring when it is tempting to care less, or standing up when
others sit down. Sometimes it means speaking up when others shut up.
Sometimes it means being different – even being crazy.
When Steve
Jobs, one of the founders of Apple Inc., died last year, an old Apple
commercial from the 90's went viral on YouTube. It was a commercial that
aired in 1997 and that attempted to rebrand Apple products. The tag
line for the commercial and the company was, Think different, a phrase that is grammatically incorrect, which is part of the point.
In
the commercial they showed a collage of photographs and film footage of
people who have invented and inspired, created and sacrificed to
improve the world, to make a difference. They showed Bob Dylan, Amelia
Earhart, Frank Lloyd Wright, Maria Callas, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther
King, Jim Henson, Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein, Pablo Casals, Mahatma
Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, and on and on and on. As the images rolled
by, a voice read this poem:
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels.
The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore.
They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world,
are the ones who do.[4]
We
need some crazy Christians. Sane, sanitized Christianity is killing
us. That may have worked once upon a time, but it won’t carry the
Gospel anymore. We need some crazy Christians like Mary Magdalene and
Harriet Beecher Stowe. Christians crazy enough to believe that God is
real and that Jesus lives. Crazy enough to follow the radical way of the
Gospel. Crazy enough to believe that the love of God is greater than
all the powers of evil and death. Crazy enough to believe, as Dr. King
often said, that though “the moral arc of the universe is long, it bends
toward justice.” We need some Christians crazy enough to believe that
children don’t have to go to bed hungry; that the world doesn’t have to
be the way it often seems to be; that there is a way to lay down our
swords and shields, down by the riverside; that as the slaves used to
sing, “There's plenty good room in my Father's kingdom,” because every
human being has been created in the image of God, and we are all equally
children of God and meant to be treated as such.
In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom, that transfigured you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Glory, glory hallelujah,
God's truth is marching on.
[1] Susan Belasco, “Harriet Beecher Stowe in Our Time,” www.nationalera.wordpress.com
[2] Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910)
[3] Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints (New York: Church Publishing, 2010), p. 448
[4] Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997
No comments:
Post a Comment