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SERMONS

Second Sunday of Easter
April 19, 2009

By The Rev. Alston Johnson

Most everyone here this morning probably has some memory of the 1970's television show MASH. One of my favorite characters from the show was Father Mulcahy, the young Catholic priest who is dropped into the Korean war zone like a person visiting from another planet. Every now and then, it is Father Mulcahy who in the midst of all the doom and gloom and intrinsic zaniness of the MASH family who reaches down to bring up the nugget of wisdom, the kernel of truth or beauty, from what were certainly difficult wartime situations. And during such moments there was often a kind of nostalgic glow that would come over the other characters, as though they were remembering some other place and some other time.
However, more often than not, Father Mulcahy was portrayed as something of “fifth wheel” in the MASH unit. A kind of naive, impractical, religious addition, who was simply part of the American cultural package in a foreign land. Someone with a set of religious and moral answers with no where to go; someone all dressed up for the show, but with nothing useful or practical to add. There is Father Mulcahy bumbling around in the operating room; Father Mulcahy bumbling around the mess tent; Father Mulcahy bumbling around in the Army trying to be useful, and most often nothing more than the punch line of clever jokes for the cynical.

I don’t recall the episode, but one afternoon in high school, it struck me like lightning that the big business of media and entertainment do not necessarily have an interest in portraying religious persons as anything but fools or villains. Allowing the slightest bit of gravitas to a religious character in a movie or television show would throw off the chance for simple and sentimental story lines. It seemed that religion was all right in small, predictably naive doses; that faith might be present if it were contained in a silly, sentimental box, but it had to be a box of our own construction.

Since that realization, I have become a collector of moments when God decides to step out of the box that Hollywood has built for him. One moment that stunned me was following either the U.S. Open or Wimbledon. The young tennis champion standing there with the trophy, the ESPN reporter savvy and at the ready, asking some question about the champion’s strategy or match; and the young man looking directly into the camera and saying, “I would like to offer my thanks to God, and my friend and savior Jesus Christ, for this victory today.”

Dead silence on the air, and within about a twenty foot circle surrounding him.

Another moment I recall was in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots sparked by the case of Rodney King, a man beaten by police that was caught on video-tape. During the riots, television crews in helicopters captured the scene of a man being pulled from a construction truck, for no apparent reason. He was severely beaten; and this was being caught live.

A few blocks away, watching the events unfold from their living room, were some young people. They sat silently watching their neighborhood implode and felt helpless. Finally one of them said something, and they all left the apartment and went out into those violent streets to try and help this innocent man, as well as anyone else who might be in the mob’s path.

I caught the news segment after the riot as a reporter was interviewing these young people. And their demeanor and slang were all pretty predictable, even given the fact that they were being lauded as heroes.

“Yeah man, it was pretty bad out there. They shouldn’t have been doing all that to that man . . . aw man you should have seen those crazy people . . . etc., etc.”
Newsreporter - “Yes, you must have been scared.”

And then out of the blue . . . a young female says . . . “well, all I know is that we were sittin’ up in here on our couch safe and sound with nothing to say, and I said - we cannot call ourselves Christians and sit here doing nothing. And that’s when we left the house.”

God stepped out of the box - there was complete silence on the air, and that fumbling sort of recovery that news folks make when they have been brought up short.
All those young folks sitting there on national TV nodding their heads going “MMMph. That’s right.”

I stood in front of the television mesmerized, and humbled.
It struck me, that just like my brothers and sisters in Hollywood, I too had constructed a box for God to live in. And that through the faith, the words, and the actions of a teen-age girl living in the Los Angeles ghetto, God was stepping out of my box as well.

Following Jesus’ death, the disciples retreat to a kind of collective fetal position. They are huddled, they are frightened, they are hiding; there are few other places in the Gospels where the disciples are any more like us. Reduced to playing it safe; hiding from the world, as though we could hide from God.

But that is the terrifying Good News of our Lord, that we cannot hide. His love and his power come looking for us. It comes in His own presence. And in comes in the presence of those who have found the courage to step beyond the locked door, step beyond the doubts of Thomas, who find that His presence is most near when they themselves move in his direction.

Our Lord is not living in a Hollywood box, or any box, for that matter.

Nor would he have us live lives huddled in a box of our own fear.

We are invited to meet him in this world with the assurance that his message for us is always, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”