Lasiter Senior Sermon
Feb 04, 2009
Douglas Lasiter
The Senior Sermon of Doug Lasiter, Class of 2009 from the Diocese of Texas, given on February 4, 2009, in Christ Chapel
Mark 8
One of my many passions in life is the study of World War II -- so in 1985, when I heard of a historian giving a lecture on the Holocaust at Lamar University in Beaumont, I just couldn't resist. I took a day off from work and made the two hour drive to hear the lecture. I already knew a bit about the Holocaust from my studies and previous lectures that I had heard on the subject and I found myself curious ... what type of lecture would this be?
Perhaps just a historical overview or maybe it would be the history of a particular camp, such as Treblinka or Auschwitz. Or maybe still it would be individual stories of the horrors of the camps. Any of these would have been considered the normative type lecture on the subject.
As I entered the auditorium, something just didn't seem normal. The atmosphere wasn't like the other lectures I had heard before, but I just couldn't put my finger on what was wrong. The lecture began as any other with historical background, and then it happened. I found out what was different-why the atmosphere wasn't the same as the previous lectures.
The lecturer, whose name escapes me now, began to tell a story, woven with facts but that deviated from the history I had known. He began to tell a story about the Holocaust and how it had all been a myth -- made up by the allies to make the Jewish people appear to be victims when in fact the real victims of the war were the German soldiers and officers who were put on trial for war crimes.
This man was a revisionist historian. Now, usually this is a historian that seeks to find a new truth hidden somewhere in the facts of the past -- they revise what people and history once thought of as the truth. Sometimes this is well motivated -- honestly trying to uncover something new, but sometimes it's just used to rewrite past events and make them fit into a new viewpoint.
The holocaust didn't fit into this man's idea of the past so he changed it, using historical facts and not dismissing them but twisting them. It's a good way to control the past, and we know how much we love control.
In today's reading from Mark we hear a brief exchange between the Pharisees and Jesus. They just want a sign -- just to test him. That's not asking too much, is it? I'm sure they've heard or seen Jesus teaching with authority in the synagogue -- casting out demons -- and they had to have heard or maybe been an eyewitness to the feeding of all those people who were hungry, with so little food available, yet all were filled -- but come on, let's be real! Just one more sign.
And to simplify Jesus' response -- the answer is "No, I'm not giving you a sign!" And Jesus leaves them. Can we blame the Pharisees? All this healing and teaching and feeding and compassion -- it doesn't fit. It doesn't make any sense. You can't just go around healing people and feeding them and teaching them that God is abundant -- that there's enough for all. That doesn't work here. So they doubt.
Jesus then has a conversation with the disciples and tells them to beware of the yeast of Herod and the yeast of the Pharisees, and the disciples really think Jesus is talking about bread. I can't blame them, they didn't have enough bread, and maybe Jesus is going to get some more bread! You can just feel the frustration building in Jesus as he begins to lecture the disciples and ask them -- what have you seen and heard in the past? What do you really think I'm talking about? You must understand by now!
We then read of Jesus healing a blind man with saliva and a touch, and the man saw everything clearly-everything. That's where Mark 8:26 leaves us. The Pharisees don't understand and the disciples don't understand because none of this fits into the way they see the world and in the same way that the revisionist historian tries to control the past and its events, the Pharisees and in some sense the disciples try to make some sense of Jesus -- to make him fit -- to control the events.
So where does this leave us today? In some strange way, it leaves us in the same place -- trying to make sense of a story that doesn't seem to fit into our world view. We read scripture sometimes as if it were an onion. As we read we can peel back the layers of the onion, and in the end it will reveal God to us and we will understand it all and it will make sense. But in reality, when we read scripture it should peel the layers from us , as if we were the onion, and in the end God's true creation will be revealed.
In Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age one of the many things that Taylor talks about in the decline of Christianity is the loss of the enchanted, the loss of the ability to believe without question or fully understanding, to believe in the mysterious -- without control.
That loss of the enchanted in my estimation is what allows us to read the scriptures and turn Jesus' teaching in the synagogue and casting out demons into just good pastoral care that allowed a man to heal himself. We turn the feeding of the five thousand into a mere picnic that Jesus just said a very good blessing over. We turn this healing story into a man that probably just had mud caked under his eyes. Jesus helped him wash it out, and then he could see. Now all of these stories make perfect sense - no mystery, nothing out of the ordinary. Now we can believe completely in that.
This reading in Mark stops at 8:26, but in 8:27, as my grandfather used to say, is where the rubber meets the road. Jesus asks the disciples "Who do the people and you say that I am?" And there it is -- the whole point. Who do we say that Jesus is? Is he just a very good example of a human being, a fine teacher and a compassionate man who cared for many people? A man to be emulated as best we can, like Gandhi or any other fine examples of human beings we can follow?
Or is he just a myth, made up at a time when the Jewish people needed something other than the established faith to believe in? Or are these stories of healing and miracles just very well written literature, like Shakespeare and his great works. Or are we willing to say, as we should, that this man Jesus is God incarnate in the world -- a God who acted on our behalf and was obedient even unto death for us and our salvation.
And that Holy Scripture is just that, somehow divinely inspired for us to read and interpret for the good of all and that even though we love to control things, some things our not in our control and that mystery exists. And I do know that however you answer the question of who Jesus is, it must inform your life and you must let it revise you in a most remarkable way, and inform everything in your life.
Everything.
That revisionist historian at Lamar University talked for 3 hours, and it was amazing. He may have even changed some people's minds on the Holocaust -- except for the three people at the back of the room with the long numbered tattoos on their forearms. He couldn't seem to revise their history or their beliefs. Some events are just embedded in history forever, like the tragedy of the Holocaust or the answer to a simple question like "Who do you say that I am?" When we answer that question, the world gets revised in a most remarkable way.
