“The Colors Through Which we Look
at Life”
Seventh & Last in a Series on the Sanctuary Stained Glass Windows
April 4, 2010 (Easter Sunday) Des Moines
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
“The Crown”
For those who
haven’t been here the past several weeks, today brings us to a climax of
sorts. “Duh!” you might be saying, “Of
course it is. It’s Easter!” And you would of course be right. But in addition to that high point so
obviously in the foreground is the fact that for the past 6 weeks – the weeks
of the contemplative season of Lent which began way back on February 17 – we
have been using as our mentoring guide the stained glass windows that greet us
here every time we gather in this room.
The windows, we
recalled, originally hung in the walls of Central Christian Church which was
located at 9th and Pleasant Streets downtown and affectionately
referred to as the building that was a “poem in stone.” After Central Christian and University
Christian reunited in 1970, the glass was harvested from that downtown structure
before it was demolished, and a few of those windows were installed here. I say “a few” because in addition to the
windows selected by the congregation for this room and the 10 that grace the
second floor chapel, more than twice that many were eventually sold.
It has been my
contention that none of us is capable of absolute objectivity – that all of us
see life through some kind of lens; none of us is ever free from one kind or
another of interpretive filters through which we process and make some kind of
sense out of what we see. It’s sort of
like if you see yourself as a hammer, everything around you looks like a
nail. If you see yourself as a fire
hydrant, then everyone looks like a dog.
And since we are not finally prisoners of those lenses – since we can,
in fact, choose to take certain ones off and replace them with others – it is
critical that we look ourselves in the mirror every now and then and “see”, so
to speak, what we are wearing.
I have suggested
that the images embedded in these windows symbolize the “faith-colored” lenses
through which Christians look at life, and that every time we step into this
room we are essentially readjusting their fit for our vision correction.
We began with the
“Creation” window, dominating all others above the baptistery, which reasserts
the goodness of God’s creative effort, God’s introduction of order to the
chaos, light and life, and God’s continuing transformative ability to turn the
waters of chaos into the wine of grace.
We continued with
the window bearing the Bible and Sword, recalling that the “word of God” is
“Living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword...” and knows us better
than we know ourselves. But we concluded
that that Word isn’t literally a book. True
living, we heard this window remind us, is found not in chaining ourselves to
ink on a page, but in offering ourselves – submitting ourselves – to the
sometimes painful, oftentimes dismembering, routinely enlarging, and always
recreating Word of the living and active and loving God.
The
Anchor window grounded us in the midst of life’s disorienting turbulence in an
unshakable certainty that we are beloved children of God, at the same time it
pulls us forward as the guiding power of hope.
The
Dove and Olive Branch window, evoking the story of the Great Flood in Genesis,
recalled God’s determination to spend the rest of time seeking no longer to
replace but to heal what is broken and to call such healing “peace” – peace
defined not simply as order and quiet, but as seeing ourselves and all of
creation as precious and in each other's keeping and care.
Perhaps
the most challenging window has been that image of wheat, reflecting as it does
the ancient symbol of abundance and prosperity.
Especially in times like these when scarcity is the popular view, we
confess that we are surrounded by holy abundance – even if it turns out that the
abundance we are given is not necessarily the abundance we were wishing for.
Last
week the Cross window confronted us with the historical reality that Jesus was
not executed as a spiritual teacher but as an enemy of the state. He represented a disruption to the order of
the empire – a frontal assault on the ways that the world is ordered and
run. The cross, we admitted, reminds us
that any insights about our soul gleaned from his crucifixion are artificial if
they ignore what it also has to teach us about the kind of community God
intends. It is, in other words, a cross
that we, too, are called to pick up and carry daily.
Which brings us to
the final image – there, the first window on the north side of the room, the
crown. Royalty, we might recall,
was an attribution that was to be a problem for Jesus from the beginning right
through the end of his short life. There
was, for example, that little jealous consternation early on in Jesus' life
when three foreign magi, following a portentous star they had noticed rising in
the sky, sought out an audience with King Herod to inquire as to where the new King of the Jews had been
born. They, of course, wanted to visit
and pay their respects. You can imagine
how this interested Herod. It was news
to him that his reign was being cut short, and he immediately thought of a few
respects that he would like to pay to this surprising interloper, as well.
Later in life, Jesus
contributed to the confusion while on trial before Pilate. “Are you the King of the Jews?” Pilate asked.
Jesus responded with
a rather sideways answer: “Well, my
kingdom is not of this world.”
But Pilate
intercepted the dodge. “So, you are a king.”
“Well,” Jesus
replied, “You say that I am a king. For
this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the
truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Ah! Thanks for clearing that up. Despite Jesus’ best efforts at obfuscation,
the Romans rather perceptively smelled a rat.
For all his protestations, they recognized quite accurately that Jesus
was calling their legitimacy into question – not so much as a governing,
organizing body; after all, somebody needs to be in charge of snow removal and
pothole repair and making sure the water treatment plant is operating
efficiently and according to standards.
But as anything approaching “ultimacy” or conveying meaning or defining
integrity? Get real. “You are civil servants – important enough,
to be sure – but that hardly qualifies you for divinity. Next thing you know you’ll start thinking you
are head of the state school board association,” or a talk show host. And so they executed him as too subversive to
let live. The Romans, in other words,
got it right. Jesus was a threat to
everything they stood for.
Years later, an
exiled disciple on the Island of Patmos, opted to cut through all the ambiguity
in his extravagant portrayal of the end times with which our scriptures end and
came right out with it. All the enemies
of God, he predicted, will make war on the Lamb, but the Lamb will conquer them
because he is “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” (Rev. 17:14; 19:16).
It’s a phrase that
makes for great poetry, but it’s never been anything but a difficult sell. A lamb?
King? Let’s be honest about it,
it just sounds kind of silly. Say
whatever you want to in church, everybody knows that Kings have to be big and
strong and intimidating enough to scare the bejeebers out of you. Lambs tend to make better stew than
royalty.
Don’t take my word
for it. Look around you. Who would you lift up as among the really
powerful in the world today, and what is the source of their power? You might name the Chinese Premier, and point
to his ability to move international markets and bring whole industries to a
standstill by the sheer volume his country represents. And don’t discount the President of Russia or
the United States. The economic strength
of these two perennial titans may be wounded and diminished, but only a fool
would ignore the residual firepower and latent mushroom clouds available to
them at the press of a button. The
Chairman of the Federal Reserve? You
could make an argument there. Rupert Murdoch? If owning practically everything constitutes
power then you would have to include him in the list. Osama bin Laden coyly elusive in the
mountains around Afghanistan? Who knows? I wouldn’t discount anybody who can stir an
apparently infinite number of otherwise intelligent human beings to line up for
suicide duty.
But Jesus? I don’t want to be cynical, but frankly the
most he seems able to do is get a few extra people out of bed and dressed up on
Easter morning. Nonetheless, there it is
on the window above us: the crown,
representing an unavoidable and undeniable challenge to everyone and everything
making a claim on truth and meaning and destiny. I don’t know, maybe it is the persistent and
compelling itch of that audacious claim – and the deep, intuitive conviction
that it’s true – that is finally responsible for our getting out of bed this
morning to sing and clap and literally shine; the utterly presumptuous, quietly
comical, and soulfully satisfying notion that the one we have come to think of
as “prince of peace”, “good shepherd”, “lamb of God,” the one who said he had
come because of God’s unshakable love for all the world – despite all
appearances to the contrary -- really is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords;
that…
The stone that the builders rejected really has become the chief cornerstone.
And
that this really is the Lord’s doing;
marvelous in our eyes.
We have gathered here
this day because something in us knows that the window says it all.
Christ is Risen!
Christ is risen, indeed!
O give thanks to the Lord, for he is
good; his steadfast love endures forever!
This is the day that the Lord has
made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.