Edna had arrived without any teeth. That’s the first thing that I noticed about our new patient at Bering Omega Hospice. For many years, Edna’s known address had been “under the bridge at St. John’s.” St. John’s Methodist Church feeds homeless people, so I suppose that had been a strategic location for Edna. We don’t know much about Edna’s life under the bridge, but we do know that at some point someone had noticed that she wasn’t moving around much anymore. She was taken to the hospital, and then she was referred directly to Bering Omega Hospice, which provides end of life care for AIDS patients.
In addition to having AIDS, Edna had a rare form of TB, Hepatitis C, and Herpes, just to name a few. Her body was riddled with untreated disease. Edna looked like she was about eighty years old. What was visibly left of her was a tiny shrunken body, a face wrinkled and leathered by the sun and the wind, and a lipless mouth curled around her gums. Edna was forty-three years old.
The official Bering Support Network Services Report that I fill out says that Edna is a white female who is HIV positive and that I had visited her three times. What it won’t say is the following:
Edna had no family. She had been living alone under a bridge for many, many years. Edna’s three weeks at our hospice were likely the first time that she had been bathed, fed consistently, or received medical care in many, many years. She died and received a pauper’s burial from Harris County. Edna had suffered in ways many of us cannot even imagine.
Suffering is an uncomfortable topic for many of us. For increasing numbers of Christians the Cross has become a source of tremendous embarrasment. On Good Friday last year, I attended a service at a non-denominational Christian church for a class assignment. There was no mention of crucifixion or even that Jesus had died. As a matter of fact, we were wished a cheery “Happy Easter!” at the end of our Good Friday service. I left the service utterly unclear on why we were there. It got worse. On Easter Sunday there was a giant Easter Bunny greeting us at the door of the church. The costume was professional. I think that the mall Easter Bunny had interrupted his children’s photo routine for a gig at a church. I tried to interview the Bunny for my paper, but there was some sort of Bunny Wrangler/Escort who told me that the Bunny was not allowed to talk to me, and she seemed pretty cranky about it. It was the closest I have ever come to a Mike Wallace moment.
Last week both of our services here at Bering had the following line: “Our certainties make us brittle.” I love that statement. I believe that the heavily westernized, legalistic version of our atonment theology, that of an angry Father demanding the death of a Son for the punishment of sin, has made us brittle, and that we aren’t breaking in a good way.
Tracing the development of a crime and punishment atonement theology is much too big for the scope of this writing. Suffice it to say that over the years we have become slaves to logic and reason, instead of stewards of the mystery of God. The current backlash both within and outside the Christian Church has been substantial, and has managed to take us on a brand new path to nowhere. In his book titled “Jesus for the Non-Religious” John Shelby Spong backpeadals off a cliff while explaining why the Cross just doesn’t work for us anymore:
“It’s the language of sacrifice, it’s abusive, punishing picture of God and its definition of human life as fallen, sinful, and broken, capable of only begging for mercy – has become bankrupt and now must be dismantled.”
Spong urges us to a life of pretense, a life that ignores our responsibility for the Edna’s under a bridge. Who else but a fallen and broken people living in a fallen and broken world could allow this to happen? In many ways, I am an agent of suffering. Good Friday calls me to coherence, calls me to lift up my eyes to the suffering of the Innocent on the Cross, as well as the suffering of innocents around the world.
The Christian word “salvation” implies two things: 1) That we are in some way in over our heads, in some way in need of assistance, and 2) That we need to be rescued or made well. We all need to be saved, and we tend to operate best when we admit it. I need the Cross. I need to be reminded, over and over, that only God can save me, and that my efforts to be self-sustaining are doomed to failure.
Spong says that the story of the Cross should be deleted from Christianity because “constant gratitude, which the story of the Cross seems to encourage, creates only weakness, childishness, and dependency.” How misguided. I AM weak and dependent. To pretend otherwise it to embrace our cultural illusions of self-sufficiency and deny our culpability in suffering. And for that, I stand in need of the mercy of God.
Read: Mark 14: 43-51
Mark 15: 21-47
Optional: Take a look at Irenaeus and recapitulation, John Calvin and the “blessed exchange,” Augustine and trapping the devil though bait and switch, Anselm and Christ paying our debt, Peter Abelard and Christ’s suffering as inspiration to a better life, and contemporary theologians Robert W. Jenson and Leanne Van Dyk.
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Tim Ramsey
As with the previous three lessons, this fourth study is very thought-provoking. In doing my family tree research last year, I was amazed to see how many of my male relatives were so VERY active in the church, whether it be the Quaker, Puritan, Baptist, or Methodist. In the infancy of our country, people were coming to the New World as much for religious freedom as anything else, and in order to spread the Gospel, men rode horses for miles upon miles in all sorts of weather, leaving families behind to maintain their fragile existence until the rider returned.
Growing up in south Texas, our community of 8,000 had many churches, and as children we attended church every Sunday with VBS every summer and all the revivals! We grew up with the old, traditional hymns which seemed to tell a story or give a lesson in living or reaching out to our Savior. Three of my cousins went into the ministry, two being very prominent, following in the footsteps of our ancestors. My parents sang in the choir, and I…as did most of my friends, attended Sunday School, church, and youth group every Sunday evening.
Today my three grown children all attend what’s commonly referred to as non-denominational, protestant churches with a more casual atmostphere in dress, the architecture of their buildings, coffee and donuts during the service, and similar but different “rules” or beliefs. The hymns are gone for the most part, as are the choir and organ, instead having been replaced by more the more contemporary instruments and praise music. The church has definitely begun to evolve in just my lifetime.
I see a decline in the level of one’s faith and commitment to the church in comparison to the earlier church. The more affluent in our society seem to have moved away from the earlier values of their ancestors and it appears that it’s more important to be SEEN in church than to be deeply involved in its ministry. As young people move away from the earlier standards of dress, sexual behavior, and values, so goes their interest in the church, in growing numbers.
“A little bit of the Easter Bunny at the door” doesn’t surprise me at all! With loud music booming from the sanctuary, similar to what we sometimes hear from cars cruising by us, some aspects of “church” seem foreign to many of us in today’s world. Will Jesus be the next to go? Will the cross and stained glass become “uneasy or unnecessary visuals”?
Is it any wonder that the lady under the bridge is just …”another homeless person who is, sadly, either mentally ill or just won’t get a job?” What’s happened, Lord? Where did we start getting off track?
Hi Joy,
I’m so glad that your kids are in a church. I think the issues that we are attempting to sort out in all of this is; what is foundational/non-negotiable about our faith? Are there some things that are off the table, as far as reinterpretation? For me, love is nonnegotiable, and the Cross is an essential part of the love story. I love a variety of worship styles (including cranked up contemporary music), and I enjoy a good theological debate as well.
The danger of any sort of absolutism is that we no longer engage with and enjoy the questions. On the other hand, the danger of having no absolutes is that we risk lacking form and substance.
What we strive to articulate (as did the early church of the 1st century) is the extraordinary commonality of experience surrounding Jesus. In my opinion, perhaps the creedalists went a bit overboard, but we have to somehow incorporate freedom of experience and revelation with a bit of structure. What concerns me the most is the willingness of some contemporary theologians to simply throw out the things that challenge us the most, instead of resting a bit in the mystery of it all.
Blessings!
Trish
The cross reminds us not just of the ultimate suffering and sacrifice, but ofthe ultimate faith and witness. We don’t know about Edna’s faith from her story, but certainly your witness of her life should remind us all to a radical hospitality to those who live under the bridge at St. John’s as our own journey of faith and witness. I don’t even know the real meaning of suffering or sacrifice in Edna’s terms, or for that matter in the terms of the majority of the world’s people. I guess that is why its just more fun to hide the candy eggs and wave at the Easter Bunny, where ever the critter hops, and why it is also easier to bring the secular into the sacred than take the sacred to the secular world.
In three days our church will have a “trial run” with our Project U kids as training for the adults as we begin our new ministry of inviting homeless teens to our church for dinner on Saturday nights I wonder how many Edna’s we will encounter, and how we will be Christ’s love in their world. It is my hope and prayer that we can at least open a window into the sacred for these teens who live in an all to hostile secular world.
Being Christ’s love to the Edna’s of the world… wonderful.
I should probably mention that Edna came in to the hospice too weak to talk, but she nodded when I asked her if she we like to pray. We prayed with confidence.