bloody savage

Hrm.... well it's Easter week. One of the 'high holy' weeks of the 'Christian calendar'. Most years it's a non-event for me. Because it shifts each year (i.e. isn't always on Dec 25 or some such date), I always seem to be caught by surprise for when Easter is, so half the time I forget that it is Easter until it's too late & then usually I'm heading home to hang with family or up to Edmonton to see Preston & catch a groggy sunrise service at his church.

This year, mom & dad are down to get dad's pacemaker 'fixed'. The docs figured one of the leads was starting to come loose & they had to re-attach. Well, after opening him up they found that the pacemaker is dented & both leads were fractured off. They figure it's from using the shotgun & the recoil from the gun busted up the pacemaker. They weren't real happy about that, but it's replaced now & Dad's in some pain, but reasonably good - superb shape compared to the last time we went through this.

Anyhow, so this puts me in town for Easter. Which gives me a chance to explore (hopefully) some churches & explore some of the more liturgical expressions of Easter - which have fascinated me ever since Marilyn Elliot led a class on them way back at Foothills Alliance (years ago).

Anyhow, went to a Maundy Thursday service tonight. It's 'holy thursday' & they use the service to remember Jesus's washing of the disciples feet & the last supper (& a few other things - look it up on wikipedia & it'll tell you lots more).

Well, yeah, it wasn't too bad. Not as profound as expected. It was at a church with a different denomination than what I'm used to & so that sort of left me noticing some odd bits (or odd to me). The song we sang sort of mentioned God once & was mostly about us sort of finding rest & stuff.... good words for the most part. It was half decent poetry with likely a dash of bhuddism thrown in. The thoughts expressed in it were reasonably good/fit my thoughts of being reasonable things to say for the most part. A few flags, but yeah, no biggee....

... a lot of the service felt like there was a pause, like you were waiting for something big to happen & it never did. One of the leaders poured some water into a basin while talking about Christ's servanthood & then, well, we just sat there for a while & I'm going, "Isn't someone going to wash someone's feet? Something?" but nothing. A musical interlude & they progressed.

When it came time for communion, it struck me as interesting that the bread and cup were referred to as "the bread of justice broken open for you" & "the cup of service, poured out for you".... now here is maybe where I show my bigotry, if I haven't already, but, yeah, this, too, left me wanting something more.

In my background, we call the bread & wine the 'body of Christ broken for you' & the 'blood of Christ, shed for you'... I was raised where the idea of the Eucharist - that the bread & cup become the literal body & blood of Jesus - is foreign to me. The bread & cup were just symbols. Powerful & important as they may be, but still just symbols.... & so I'd maybe feel odd if someone was all worried about me dropping crumbs of jesus on the floor or letting drops of Jesus spill down my chin... but this was equally odd.

For me the metaphor of 'the bread of justice' or 'the cup of service' sort of mean nothing. I was waiting for definition on these. More than that, it's that these symbols/meanings lacked the power that I was hoping for.

It made me realize how messy my views of Christianity are. At the core of my faith is the person of Jesus & sort of the central event of his life - that cataclysmic event, that 'cross'roads of where He purchases redemption for all - is a very visceral, very bloody, very messy event as Jesus is beaten into hamburger, torn & shredded beyond recognition as a man & then nailed to a cross where he is tortured & dies a slow, agonizingly painful death...

The service tonight makes me feel like a bit of a savage - a happy savage, but savage nevertheless. I kept thinking through it all "Where's the blood?" Where's the agony? the drama? the heart of Jesus bursting from love for us & the pain of Gethsemane, the scourgings, the way of suffering & the cross?

I think about what I grew up reading. My parents just gave us the Bible to read & so we chugged through it over time. When you really look at it, it's not a 'kids' book - or not by today's standards. Really it's a great kid's book. It's just so real & messy & larger than life and yet so much like life. There's good & evil. There's brave heroes & dastardly villians. There's people who do right, people who do wrong. It's like reading fairy tales in some ways except maybe more real....

...but there is lots of blood. The book is violent. Tons of battles & murders & all manner of bloodshed. There are sacrifices a plenty & stories after story of how worship of God demanded blood some how... How many rivers of blood flowed throughout the course of history? It's all messy. You feel in someways a slight kinship with the angry aztec deities & their thirst for blood. It feels very primal.....

...but all of that blood shed in the old testament was just a picture, a foreshadowing of the greater tragedy, the greater injustice, that Love would come to woo His bride, humanity, & she/we/me would tear him apart - body broken, blood shed - so that we could continue our rebellion as we ran from love & chose stubborn, selfish, independance - as we refused to have a God to reign over us & as we enthroned ourselves as masters of our own lives.....

....and then the great miracle, that our evil was turned for good. That our slaughter of the lamb of God instead brought our redemption, our salvation from our own insanity & self-destruction. & all of this is purchased though this mystery of the shedding of blood - Jesus's blood....

.... and yeah, in Leviticus, there are a bunch of sacrifices & if you really study hard, each one shows a different aspect of what Christ's sacrifice on the cross/life on planet actually acheived. & maybe each denomination of Christianity shows a different aspect of God's heart & this idea of 'bread of justice' & 'cup of serving' go hand in hand with a chuch that wants to be about social justice issues....

...but it just felt like it was missing something. I kept wanting to stand their like a savage crying out fo blood.... from what I know, there is power in Christ's blood & I was waiting/hoping for that to get unleashed....