The Stone Moved

It's Easter morning, Feist-dog.  Of course, I can't sleep.  I'm listening for sounds of rain that might slow down my going to everything at church.  It's quiet so far.  

Two thousand years ago, before the sun came up, the followers of this man Jesus rolled away the stone and stole the body of their rabbi so they could tell people he was Immanuel, the Messiah, the Son of God, a lie, a scam, a fraud that lived down through the centuries--or something amazing happened.  

I can't tell you which is true.  No one can.  I can tell you what I believe, but I'm just a man, and you're just a dog.  What I can tell you is this idea, this promise that death cannot hold us, that new life from the ashes of the old is possible, even inevitable, became the foundation of our culture and has inspired millions of hopeless people around the world for two thousand years.

My people had gods of the trees and gods of stone, and gods of the sea, but the Romans came and gave us one God of the sky.  It wasn't even their God.  They had even more gods than my people did, but the idea, the seed planted by a people they conquered, a people they defeated so completely that they burned their city of Jerusalem and destroyed their palatial temple to the point where no stone lay atop another, they dispersed those people to the wind, they killed their practitioners and anyone who spoke the name of this Christ could die on a cross like his--that idea, that seed of an idea, that tiny bit of faith grew and grew and converted the entire empire that tried to destroy it, and that empire converted the world, and now, people on every continent, call this man Jesus, Adonai, Lord, and Master.

This idea, this Easter, this power of rebirth lives in me, Feist-dog.  I went into a cave and waited for death.  I stayed there for many years, but this man from Galilee, this humble rabbi who spoke a muddled form of Aramaic and barely knew a few words of Greek, wasn't done with me.  I was reborn.  I was as dead as a man can be while his heart still beats, but today I return to the bosom of my church to celebrate Easter.  

I can tell you everything that was said of this man Jesus.  I can tell you everything he said.  I can talk to you for days about the generations upon generations of men, wiser than me, who discussed him.  I can tell you how I feel, Feist-dog, but I cannot tell you what is true.  That's something you have to work out for yourself.  

I'm a terrible proselytizer.  I speak with no authority, no drama, and no force.  I mumble out stories and theories and books I read and men I knew, but I won't grasp you by the hand and look you in the ey and say, "This is the truth!" because I don't know the truth; I only know what I feel.  I cannot make this journey for you.  I'll go with you if you want me, but I cannot carry you.  I can't even clear the way before you.  I'm sorry, Feist-dog; I would do these things for you because I love you, but they're not within my grasp.  They are, however, within yours.  

It was forbidden to do this work on the Sabbath, so the women went to the tomb with oil and herbs to dress the body of the rabbi the next day, but when they got there, the stone was rolled away, and a man greeted them who said: "why do you seek the living among the dead?"

The historian Josephus said the testimony of the women was insufficient because women tend toward hysteria.  I can imagine how that sat with his wife.  The women went to attend the body of Jesus because the men who followed him were in hiding, fearing the same sort of prosecution Jesus suffered.  As he predicted, they denied him.  One betrayed him.  Only the women, Mary, his mother, and Mary, his companion, were left to attend his body with four other women who were followers and the mother of followers.  

The sun's coming up Feist-dog.  Someone rolled away the stone.  I can't tell you who.  I can't tell you what became of the body.  That's a walk you'll have to make, but I can tell you, do not seek the living among the dead.  Do not seek rebirth unless you believe it's possible.

Away from the Party

I snuck away from the party.  I mostly always sneak away from the party.  We've snuck away from some of the best parties in Mississippi's history together.  She showed me pictures of her first grandchild on her phone; she was tiny and pink and beautiful and had her turned-up mouth but twinkling brown eyes like a doe.

Do you remember that time when you called me from your prom to bring you a cigarette, and we smoked it in the parking lot and never went back in?  I always thought your date would be mad at me for stealing you away that night, but then he married that guy from New York, and I figured it was ok.  

You went away for college, but you came home for the summers.  Do you remember that night we got a belly full of good whiskey and climbed to the top of Sullivan Harrell and did unspeakable things in the moonlight?  I drove to Oxford to hold you when that boy cheated on you, then again when she dumped him, and we laughed. 

When my father died, you called, and we talked all night.  When I got divorced, you called, but I didn't answer.  I sent flowers when your child was born, and now that child has a child.

The moonlight reflects the silver in your hair.  You're as beautiful now as you were at sixteen.  We always hid from the spotlight together, but between us, a great garden of life grew and grew.  I've held you. I've loved you.  I've kissed you.  I held your hair when you drank too much.  I wiped away your tears, and you made it ok for me to shed my own.  You found a boy you liked and asked me if you should go away with him, and now you have a grandchild.  

May her heart be as full as yours.  May adventures blaze through her lifetime like a comet.  May she find a friend to sneak away from parties with.  May she continue the garden her grandmother and I planted.

Washing The Feet

 As a child, I saw the pope washing the feet of people lined up in the Vatican. It was such a strange thing to do.

In the middle east, feet held a special meaning. There were no cars or trains. No carriages and very few horses. Chariots were a weapon of war, not a means of transportation. If people moved, they did it with their feet, so having their feet touch the soil of the earth had significant meaning, and as a practical matter, their feet got very dirty.

At the last Passover seder before his death, Jesus took a towel and began washing the feet of his disciples. Peter, his second disciple, refused, saying he should wash the master's feet.

Jesus said, "You don't understand this now, but you will. If I do not wash your feet, you can have no part of me." To which Peter said, "Wash not just my feet, but my hands and my head as well." and Jesus said, "If you are clean, then your feet are enough. But, not every one of you is clean." He said this because he knew one would betray him.

According to the law, sacrifice absolves you of sin. If you sin, then you can offer a lamb or a dove on the altar, and its blood absolves you of your sin. It's an ancient ritual. Far more ancient than Jerusalem or Rome, or even Egypt.

Before Passover, thousands of Jews come to Jerusalem to offer a lamb or a dove for sacrifice so they may be cleansed. Rivers of blood flow in rilles cut into the stone surrounding the altar in Herod's temple. Some of it is gathered to put above the door during Passover to signify the covenant between the Jews and their God.

Jesus washes the feet of his disciples so they may be clean of sin, but they had yet to offer a sacrifice. When they went to the temple, their master overturned the money changer's tables and challenged the priests. They didn't know it, but he would be the sacrifice. His blood would run from the table, and at supper, they would drink of his blood so that the blood of the lamb is inside them, not painted over their door.

Washing the feet is an odd ritual, but it portends the crux of why Jesus came to earth. Your sins are washed away. His blood absolves you. His blood in you signifies the new covenant.

The Donkey Died

Along with music, food, art, and dance, we use religion to transmit the memes that create the culture that binds us and defines us.  Dawkins, who created the term, defines memes as the fractious anatomical parts of ideas, communication, and representation--the occupation of our higher mind.  It is part of how our genes seek to replicate themselves.  I've tried a thousand times to prove him wrong and always failed.

We provide our children with religious stories to arm them and populate them with the memes we use to bind them into our society and our families.  Despite being downtown and ancient and moderate and all the things to suggest that Galloway wouldn't have much of a youth program, Galloway is busting out with babies, toddlers, and young couples.  A welcome sign of continued growth.  That some of these tiny creatures in pastel color cotton easter dresses are third and fourth-generation Jacksonians with eyes that I recognize as the color and shape of their great-grandmother gives me considerable hope for the future and the survival of my own cultural memes.   

Today was Palm Sunday.  The day Christians celebrate Jesus entering Jerusalem during Passover. Zechariah prophesied that the Messiah, the seed of David, would arrive on the back of a colt moke so when Jesus arrived at the gates of Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, the people spread palm fronds before him and covered the rough road with their cloaks singing "Hosanna!" Their lord has arrived to deliver them from all the false kings of the world and establish the Kingdom of God.  That's a lot of pressure.

When I was a child at Galloway, there were different versions of a procession with palm fronds through the sanctuary to celebrate Palm Sunday.  I rarely participated in these because, for twenty years, we celebrated our cultural Messiah in the choir loft of the chapel at eight-thirty in the morning, where nobody but Clay Lee and God knew the Campbells attended church at all.  

In time, this procession evolved to a small army of children with palm fronds following a live donkey in a parade around the church, now an entire city block, from the great steps before our columned Greek edifice, down Yazoo street, across West street, up Mississippi street, then back down Congress street to the courtyard between the sanctuary and the chapel.  Since today was Jack's last day in Jackson until Christmas, I invited him to join the parade today with me since I missed most of his days in church when he was a child.  

The plan was to make some sort of reference to his father sharing some connection with the actual live donkey leading us, but when I got to church this morning, I found out that the celebrated equidae who led Galloway children on Palm Sunday for so many so years had expired and was now an ex-jackass.  I felt the sting of promising an entertainment to the fourth generation and not coming through.  We had a painted cut-out of a donkey, though, and with all our ministers, we joined a parade of a dozen young families and their pastel-colored progeny waving palm fronds in the downtown breezes.  Nobody sang Hosanna, but several commented on the prospect of rain.  I was the donkey.

Back in the sanctuary, Meg Hanes delivered the children's church part of the celebration.  Meg has a challenging job.  She's to infest our children with the stories that provide them with the memes that bind them into our culture.  This is huge; she's a gateway guardian into our society.  There are two primary schools of thought on this.  You can Disneyfy the entire concept so that children see our religious narrative as soft and inviting, like a toy or a cartoon, or you can make the entire process terrifying so that they are afraid to step beyond the boundaries of the stories.  Meg takes a less common third route.  She tries to relate the stories in terms of things already in the children's lives.  She makes the bible understandable in their own terms, making every effort to create something called a "thinking Christian," which some people say doesn't exist, but Galloway has been producing since before the Civil War. 

Meg's challenge on Palm Sunday is particularly complex.  It starts with the colorful pageant of palm fronds and singing and donkeys and little baby Jesus, now a triumphant man, but moves at a frightening pace where, the next Friday, the same people singing Hosanna shout, "CRUSIFY HIM!" Meg doesn't pull any punches, but she delivers the message at a sturdy, steady pace.  People are complicated.  Four-year-old eyes ponder the idea for a moment, then begin searching for Momma's face in the crowd again.  The meme is registered in their memory banks, but it's too soon to fully contemplate what all this means.  Maybe when they're twenty.

So many people I talk to immediately write off Galloway and Millsaps and Downtown and United Methodism and anything in the borders of Jackson and nearly everything in the borders of Mississippi as dead or dying or not worth it anyway, but at Galloway, there are green shoots pushing through the ancient scales on the streets of Jackson.  We are making new Christians out of ancient stock, and they are amazing.