Spirit of the Heartland

A Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent
The Rev. Patricia Gillespie

Genesis 22:1-14
Psalm 16
Romans 8:31-39
Mark 8:31-38

You see them everywhere: those bumper stickers that say, "Honk if you love Jesus." My husband Paul has a slightly different one on his rusty, old, work pickup: it says, "Honk if you think I"m Jesus."

Actually, he does sometimes look rather like many of our pictures of Jesus. Long light brown hair, beard, stunning blue eyes. And he's got the hands and the build of a carpenter. An internationally known sculptor once asked him if he'd model as Jesus. But still not too many people honk as they drive by. No one expects to see Jesus in a rusty pickup in downtown Minneapolis. Yet we know what he looks like, don't we?

Think about your favorite picture of Jesus. Or, if you pray with a mental picture of Jesus, how does he look? Probably most of our pictures look something like my husband, even though in our heads we know that Jesus lived in Palestine, where nobody except tourists looks like that.

This week's Newsweek came out with Jesus on the cover, and an assortment of pictures of Jesus inside. Jesus as the Muslims or Hindu's or his own Jewish people picture him. No blonde, blue-eyed white boy here.

National Catholic Reporter had a contest searching for an artist's representation of Jesus for the new millennium. The winning "Jesus of the People" is a dark-skinned, multiracial peasant.

Whatever your picture of Jesus might be, white or black, brown eyes or blue, now put a whip in his hand. Does your Jesus know what to do with it? Can the Jesus in your picture overturn tables? This is a scandalous picture. The headlines read, "Beloved, compassionate Jewish teacher turns violent!"

I met this Jesus in Memphis, at the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum is in the Lorraine Motel, shrine of the American saint who was killed there, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Leaving the museum, I intended to walk across the street to visit some booths selling African-American clothing. Just before crossing, I noticed, next to the booths, a woman, bundled up against the cold, sitting on a beat-up bench seat apparently taken from an old car. Above her was a banner, a spray-painted sheet that read "Boycott the Civil Rights Museum." The word "Rights" was crossed out and replaced by "Wrong."

I tried to think of what her objection to the museum might be. Was she a racist, maybe a Klan member, objecting to the focus on black freedom? But no. Even with the stocking cap, sunglasses, and muffler, I could see her skin matched not mine but that of the African selling hats in the booth next to her.

I walked across the street, not to the booths, but to ask her about her protest. Her message was clear. She objected --because she felt "Dr. King" would object-- to the commercialization. She feared the Museum was becoming a Disneyworld or a Graceland, with people out to make money instead of making housing available in the impoverished neighborhood of the Lorraine Motel.

Her message was clear. "Stop making my Father's house a marketplace." But she had no whip. She was not turning over sales tables. True to the spirit of St. Martin, she was an advocate of nonviolence.

I wanted my picture of Jesus to look like her. I tried to imagine Jesus as a nonviolent protester with a banner. Try to see him sitting across from the Temple under a sign reading "Ban the temple tax!" or perhaps something scriptural, from the prophetic tradition, like "I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice." I just couldn't see it.

Turning around to face the motel, I could so easily see Jesus there on the balcony. Martin, eyes wide with surprise, throat spurting blood. Jesus, beside him, eyes on his people, blood trickling from hands and feet.

I could so easily see Jesus at the white lunch counter in the museum film. A young black college women, her textbook set aside, watches the black men sitting next to her being seized from behind one at a time, each time one seat closer to her own. The black students are thrown to the floor and brutally beaten. As each one, without resistance, finally loses consciousness, her eyes widen in fear and she half stands to run, then resolutely and calmly sits down. Jesus is sitting on the next stool and he is weeping.

But I could not see Jesus on the sidewalk with a banner. The gospel just doesn't show us a nonviolent protester at the temple.

He's there in the temple with a whip. This is not the sweet Jesus we usually picture. He is not just filled with zeal for his Father's house. He is angry. He is violent. He doesn't meekly hold up the whip and all the animals rush out. He is lashing out and shouting with rage. He doesn't gently push the tables over, adding meekly, "Please, take these things out of here!" This is no polite gentleman. This is a man whose body is strengthened by traveling long distances on foot and toughened by stretches of time in the wilderness. Under that clean white dress we like to put on him are the hardened muscles and broad shoulders of a carpenter. His voice is like thunder. He raises the tables above his head and smashes them to the floor. This man frightens me.

The images of whips and destruction recall too easily the images I have just seen in the museum. Images painted clearly in black and white: white violence and black strength; white oppressive power and black nonviolent resistance; white increasing fear and black growing freedom.

In the museum, I look at the faces of the black freedom riders, and I touch the remains of the shattered greyhound on which they rode.

I see a multitude of black faces, marching calmly into tear gas and powerful firehose spray. I hear the force of the water, and the floor of the museum is wet.

There is a garbage truck in the museum. Beside it are the black sanitation workers-- No, they were called "garbage niggers," or "boys." They are carrying signs that read "I am a man." Facing them are white policemen, guns raised, ready to fire.

I realize that my face is covered with tears. I recognize that I am going to be sick. Falling tears and rising nausea. It is precisely how I felt standing in the gas chamber at Dachau.

The lynched black. The hanged Jew. The cross on the hood of the Klan member. The crosses of the Christian supervisors at the concentration camp.

These are my people. I want to stand with the black, with the Jew, with the oppressed. But these others are my people. The men with the crosses. The ones with white skin and blue eyes, the Christians. They look like me. These are my people. This is my sin, too.

I stand guilty, condemned. Falling tears and rising nausea turns to pain and then to anger, rage even. Anger with oneself can be the most fierce, the most intense.

I am afraid I am going to shout my rage. The young black woman who is the tour guide enters with a group of girl scouts. I turn my face away, wipe the tears, and pretend to be reading a document on the wall.

I hear the guide's voice in the distance beyond the roaring in my head. And I hear another voice . . . my own, childlike, singing: "Jesus loves me, this I know."

I am at vacation bible school. In the midsummer heat the windows of the old wooden church are cranked open. The room is filled with the sound of children's singing and the smell of hot bodies. My friend Susie and I are fanning each other with a fan from the funeral home. We are grinning and passing a smooth white pebble back and forth with our bare toes while singing with all our heart and at the top of our lungs.