Working Out Some Thorny Theology: A Review of Charles Williams' "Chapel of the Thorn": Edited with an Introduction by Sørina Higgins

The Chapel of the Thorn by Charles Williams, ed. Sørina Higgins
Berkley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2014.
ISBN 9781940671536
$16.95

And they clothed him with purple, and platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head. - Mark 15.17


In his 1543 "Treatise on Relics," the reformer John Calvin complains that, "With regard to the crown of thorns, one must believe that the slips of which it was plaited had been planted, and had produced an abundaut growth, for otherwise it is impossible to understand how it could have increased so much." Of course, to Charles Williams, a writer whose church history omits the entire East/West split of the Catholic church, such historical details matter little. What counts is the test that a genuine hallow would set to those who encounter it.

In editing and publishing Williams' long-lost verse play, The Chapel of the Thorn, Sørina Higgins gives the world a very early work which bears witness to the consistency of Williams' more mature thought and themes, provides insights into his influence over his good friend C. S. Lewis, and, most importantly, delights and challenges the reader who may or may not care about the former matters.

The play contains the classic themes that readers will discover in Williams' later series of "spiritual thrillers," to use T. S. Eliot's term: a hyper-real object reveals the hearts of various characters by their reaction to it - characters who are more nearly roles than individuals. The plot unfolds simply: In an obscure chapel in pre-Arthurian England rests the original crown of thorns placed on the head of Christ at his crucifixion. Joachim, its hermit guardian, wishes to keep it there. Innocent, the powerful abbot of a local monastery, feels that the three rules of the relic business are location, location, and location, and wants to transport the artifact to his monastery for easier access and increased influence and revenue. Constantine, the nominally Christian king, wants to avoid trouble with Rome. Amael, the sole surviving priest of an ancient pagan cult, cares only about power and sees no point in a relic of defeat. Gregory, the headman of the village, only wants access to the chapel itself because the Christians built it over the legendary burial place of Druhild, a pagan porto-arthur figure whom the villagers believe will return to life one day.

So there it is: free-range mysticism, practical churchmanship, political opportunism, outright pagan opposition, and pragmatic syncretism. What the crown is matters less than what one wants, or does not want, to do with it. It is the untested touchstone that tests all other stones, as Christ is the uncut cornerstone that judges all other stones. Follow this patterning and be ready to read Williams anywhere with some comprehension.

One who comes to Williams, as so many do, by way of Lewis, will find much to savor. If Lewis' That Hideous Strength is "a Charles Williams novel written by C. S. Lewis," The Chapel of the Thorn is Lewis' theology of the "good dreams" of paganism written by Charles Williams long before the two men met. When Gregory objects to Innocent that, "none among our fathers knew (Christ's) name," the abbot asks him if his people had "no tales for drinking time?" Then he declares,

     And therein was a torch lit, though it threw
     But red light, dime with smoke and blown with wind,
     Where the wise pagans lit their vestal lamps,
     Wherewith the candles on our altars burn.

But at bottom, "the play's the thing." Williams could find no takers for his drama in his own lifetime, and the work is obscure and at times unpolished, but it contains much that delights and even more that haunts. Those who adhere to a more apophatic and mystical Christianity will identify with Joachim, yet find that Williams gives the bureaucratic Innocent some very good arguments about the need for structure. Those who like to quote Paul's dictum to the Corinthians about "decently and in order" will feel affirmed until the abbot, after a heated exchange with his opponent, admits to his prior, "Knowest thou there goes a greater man than we?" Pastors who tend to lament the lack of fervor among their flocks might profitably spend a little time pondering Gregory's blunt catechism:

     But wheresoever we bow down or no,
     Yea, thought we bow don or we bow not down,
     Still are we hungered when the harvest fails,
     Thirsty with labour, sun-burn, chill with rain.
     God's change, and we: yet little is to change.

When Joachim rebukes Gregory for valuing the small things of this present life over eternity, the canny peasant responds,

     Small! it is that we know we have - a hut,
     Talk with our kinsmen, wife or chamber-maid
     To keep the hut, a sleeping-place, and foot.
     Small! it is that we have.

Pastoral ministry that scorns these things as unworthy of Christ's attention should instead learn to pay attention to them in the name of Christ. Even Amael, the pagan Bob Dylan of the piece, gets some good lines; in fact, his speeches contain more allusions to Scripture than either of the two priests. When he seeks to seduce Michael, Joachim's acolyte, with offers of worldly power and adventure set against the promised conquests of interior spirituality, the honest reader feels more than a tug of response.

But all of this is too much and too little. Journal articles and, entire books, and - one hopes - sermons will explore the depths of this drama at length and still leave much unsaid. One final word: Higgins' Introduction is worth the price of the volume, not only as a learned exposition of the play's history and themes, but as an introduction to Williams' entire oeuvre. With this brief essay she establishes herself as a voice which anyone interested in Williams must hear. Take, as a widow's two mites plucked from heaps of golden coins, these lines.

"In many of (Williams') books, resolution is achieved by the subordination of the person to the symbol, the piece to the pattern, and the soul to God." The thoughtful Christian who strives to find standing ground in the current debates on, say, Caitlyn Jenner, will find sufficient divinity here to be getting on with.

"The Thorn reveals each person's spiritual condition by their responses to it and their subsequent treatment of each other." Those who, to refer to the issue just named, believe they have found not only standing ground but shouting ground, would do well to ask whether the test of truth is in argument or in how it leads us to treat others.

Three Things That Do Not Surprise Me About the Tragedy at Mother Emanuel

On Wednesday, June 17, Dylan Roof murdered nine people in a prayer meeting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Three things do not surprise me about this tragedy.

1. It does not surprise me that Dylan Roof committed these killings. The weed of racism thrives in the rotting soil of sin. An invasive species with no natural enemy, it overruns the ecosystem of every human heart like leafy spurge on the western plains. It grows in the North as well as the South. Some of us are better landscapers than Dylan Roof, that's all.

2. It does not surprise me that Dylan Roof had the chance to commit these killings. The people of Emanuel welcomed the young white man who showed up at their midweek prayer meeting. He admitted to the police that he nearly gave up his plan because he received such hospitable treatment. This does not surprise me because I have received the same generous welcome at African American churches. African American Christians across all denominations forged their church community by smelting the ore of faith over the fires of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and bigotry. If you show up at a black church, the congregation immediately gives you full access to all of that history, all of that pain, and all of that power. I have repeatedly been awed at such acts of Christian hospitality. It is like saying, "Here is the bunker we built from the stones you threw at us. Come in and take shelter." Visit an African-American church this Sunday - this Sunday - and you will experience the same thing.

3. It does not surprise me that the families of the victims forgave Dylan Roof. He shot them because they were black. They forgave him because they are Christians. I do not say what they did was easy. I do not say I would do the same. I do not say I would criticize those people if they withheld their forgiveness or needed more time to offer it. I say that this is what our Teacher tells us to do and it should not surprise us that Christians obey Christ.

Dylan Roof wanted to start a race war. What he may have accomplished is the removal of the Confederate battle flag from every state-owned venue in the South. What the people of Mother Emanuel accomplished is to set a shining city on a high hill and call us to the Kingdom where Our Lord promises to wipe every tear from our eyes.

When I Die, Please Hold My Funeral in a Church

When I die, please hold my funeral in a church:

Not some camera obscura where the spotlight stabs the stage,

And some upside-down celebrity reflects it from his teeth,

And the people sit in darkness as the mysteries unfold,

And sip sacramental lattes and the doughnut flesh of Christ,

And they rock in movie-plush seats to an "awesome" "worship band,"

And they scroll the iPhone NIV while texting to their friends.

But a church, please hold my funeral in a church:

In a cinder block Shekinah where the pulpit's made of pine,

And the chunky stained-glass windows turn the sun to seraphim,

And a preacher in a blue suit pounds the pulpit with a fist,

And the deacons serve out Welch's and the teeth of Pharisees,

And the pews creak as folks fidget as the choir sweats through their robes,

And they thumb through King James Bibles with those little index tabs.

Yes, a church - and please invite me to attend:

Do not eighty-six me somewhere else; I won't embarrass God,

And make people face a corpse and double-dare them to believe,

And proclaim that Jesus rose and that I'm no more dead than he,

And His mighty resurrection is the only hope I had,

And that I will be forgotten if the Lord waits long enough,

But that He'll remember me all right, however long He waits.

In a church: Please hold my funeral in a church.

 

An Embarrassment of Riches: Acts 2.1-21, A Sermon in Tryptich; First Christian Church of Portland, Texas, Pentecost Sunday, May 24, 2015

Collect

Heavenly Father, on the Sixth Day of Creation Your Spirit breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of humanity and Adam’s body became a living soul; and on the Day of Pentecost Your Spirit breathed the breath of life into the first disciples, and Your Body became a living Church. Today let your Spirit breathe into us the unpredictable breath of the wind that blows where it will, that we might proclaim a greater Gospel than we ourselves can ever  understand, and welcome a wider world than we ourselves have ever envisioned. This we pray in the Name of the One who promises to send us the Spirit, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.

Left Panel: The Church

Well, this is embarrassing, isn’t it? I mean, here we are, all modern, educated, twenty-first century Christians, and we have to face this text full of wind and fire and speaking in tongues! Well, if it helps at all, we aren’t the first to blush over Pentecost.

John Calvin, the great Reformer, actually theologized the whole thing away, arguing that the Age of Miracles ended with the close of the New Testament era. Healing the sick and raising the dead, let alone miraculous utterances - all that was just to get Christianity going, like start-up money from a venture capitalist. But we’re well established now, showing a profit, and no longer in need of that sort of thing.

Another dodge is to point out that the “tongues” here aren’t some kind of private prayer language. That may be what Paul’s talking about in 1 Corinthians, but this is clearly a matter of known earthly languages that the speaker has never learned. But I’m not sure how that helps, since it just shows more clearly than ever that we do not share this experience.

If you’re a Baptist, like me, there’s an even easier solution to a passage like this: Just ignore it. As my friend Dr. Dana Moore, pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Corpus Christi says, as Baptists we believe in the Holy Spirit - we just have issues with Him! Sure, we believe in the Trinity, but we like to think of the Third Member as a kind of silent partner.

But even that won’t work for you, because here it is, right in the Lectionary. Worse still, you use the liturgical calendar, which sets aside an entire Sunday to commemorate this event, on the actual anniversary of the day that Luke describes here.

Even my Pentecostal friends are - or should be - more embarrassed than proud of this passage. I mean, after all, as I said before, this isn’t just ecstatic utterance; this is unlearned earthly languages, as if I suddenly began preaching in perfect Mandarin. I’m not saying that those who claim to speak in tongues are faking it, but it is easier for a purely emotional experience to result in babbling than for a work of the Spirit to produce fluency in Portuguese. And anyway, the real miracle is three thousand souls saved and baptized and nobody’s seeing that on a regular basis.

It’s just embarrassing. The liturgical color for this day in the church calendar is red, presumably to commemorate the tongues of flame that flickered above the apostles’ heads. I wonder, however, if it might not also be to commemorate the color we turn as we blush at the reading of this primitive passage which we think we’ve outgrown but in fact have never really grown into.

Central Panel: The Text

But let’s set the language business aside for a minute. That is the literal part of the passage, the thing that actually happens. Let’s look instead for a moment at the images involved. There are three, by my count: wind, fire, and drunkenness. Notice the language of the text: Verse 2 says “there was a noise like a violent rushing wind.” Verse 3 tells us there were  “tongues as of fire.” In verse 13 the bystanders think the apostles have had a few too many, but Peter effectively refutes that charge in verse 15. Now, I’m not denying that there was a literal wind or literal fire but what seems to interest Luke is the image of these things. This is what a movement of the Holy Spirit over the church looks and feels like. So what’s the point?

I think the common element in all of these is the idea of being out of control. A violent, rushing wind? We had tornado warnings all over South Texas a week or so ago. A funnel cloud actually touched down in Gregory a week ago Friday and turned over a toolshed. Witnesses said that whirling vortex snatched up golf carts and even a forklift and tossed them around like a child’s toys! In other words, big, heavy objects whipped through the air and no one could control their movement.

What about tongues of fire? When a forest fire breaks out, it’s the lack of control that terrifies us.  Back in 2011 over thirty thousand fires ripped through four million acres in Central Texas and wiped out nearly three thousand homes - two thousand of them over a single Labor Day weekend! And what did they say on every newscast? “The fires are now X percent under control.” And of course we wanted to see that number increase. We fear fire that rampages out of control.

Then, of course, there is drunkenness, which may be the very definition of being out of control. A drunk person loses control of his body, of her speech, of his behavior - the whole of her person. I remember in high school when friends would ask why I didn’t drink, I’d often reply, “I’ve done some incredibly stupid things when I was in full possession of myself. I’d hate to think what kind of idiocy I could perpetrate if I was out of control!”

And not only do we have imagery of things being out of control, but it turns out that these images only serve as warning signs of what is actually about to happen. Just take verse 17, for example: “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” In case you missed that, Peter hammers at it again in verse 18: “Even on my bondslaves, both men and women, I will in those days pour forth my Spirit. And they shall prophesy.”

Now, that doesn’t bother good Disciples like yourselves, but it slings a meat-axe sideways through the delicate machinery of my Baptist culture. Peter says that Joel says that GOD SAYS women will preach! And he sandwiches this between all kinds of apocalyptic language: This will occur “in the last days” (v.17) when “the sun (is) turned into darkness and the moon into blood” (v.20). I know people who think that women in the pulpit would be the end of the world. . .and they’re right! Women in the pulpit is just one more sign that the old world, the world of oppression and privilege, has received its death sentence and the new world of the Kingdom of Heaven, inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Christ, has come about!

But don’t get cocky.

All of those doing the preaching were Jews, and all of those listening were Jews, but in the first century world there were Jews and Jews. Here’s what I mean: Some Jews grew up in what was then called Palestine, in the Promised Land. They spoke Hebrew, or at least Aramaic, and read the Scriptures in Hebrew, and lived near enough to Jerusalem to go to the temple for the great festivals on a regular basis. Their ancestors had returned to Judea from the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BC. Other Jews lived in the Dispersion, in the Gentile territories. They spoke Greek and read the Scriptures in a Greek translation and might make it to Jerusalem once in a lifetime to celebrate the Passover. Their ancestors had stayed behind after the captivity. Well, Palestinian Jews sort of looked down on Dispersion Jews; that’s the whole trouble with food distribution to widows in Acts 6. But here God makes these good Palestinian Jews preach the gospel, not in pure, godly Hebrew, but in the various native languages of those Dispersion Jews.

And of course it gets worse: In Acts 8.14 God sends people to preach to Samaritans (who were half-breed Jews). They receive this same exact gift of tongues, which Peter finds so hard t stomach that he has to come down himself from corporate to check it out. A little later, God sends Peter in person even to witness this gift given to pure Gentiles without a drop of Jewish blood. This grosses Peter out so bad that God has to send him a vision and repeat it three times just to convince him! (Acts 10)

My point is that once the Holy Spirit gets involved in the church, things quickly spin out of our control! The Spirit whips us up in the swirling vortex of God’s love and we just have to wait and see where we land! The Spirit ignites our familiar and fruitful soil and leaves it so scorched that we have to hot-foot it elsewhere without the time to figure out our destination in advance! The Spirit hits our bloodstream until we blow a .25 Jesus-level on the Bible breath-a-lyzer, legally drunk on the love of God and apt to stagger into places we’d never normally go and throw our arms around people we’d not usually speak to! Criminals, rabble-rousers, bikers, Republicans - there’s no telling and no stopping once the Spirit takes over. In fact, we probably are not living out Pentecost until we catch ourselves saying, “If I do that, it’ll be the end of the world!” In fact, until things are out of control, we have not come into Pentecost.

I like what the great Christian thinker G. K. Chesterton said about this: “While Christianity establishes a rule and order, the chief aim of that order (is) to give room for good things to run wild.” Pentecost celebrates the controlled rampaging of the good things of the Kingdom of God - things like mercy, forgiveness, grace, and radical community.

It’s an interesting thing about Pentecost: It undoes one of the great deeds of human history. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it re-does one of the great undoings of human history. In Genesis 11 we read about the Tower of Babel when, after the flood, the human race all spoke one language, and they said, "Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth." (Gn 11.4)

Do you hear the theme there? “A tower whose top will reach into heaven” - the idea is probably some form of astrology. This was to be a tower from which men could observe the movement of the stars and planets and thus control their destiny. Why? So they would not “be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” In other words, so they could control where they went. They made a grab for unity and permanence on their own terms. And what was the result? God confused their speech and scattered their community.

Do you see it? The effort at control resulted in chaos. The effort at purity resulted in dispersion. Now, at Pentecost, God sends the chaos of the Spirit to establish control. God brings in the dispersed so there can be true unity. The real miracle and message of Pentecost is that when we give up control we find peace, and when we embrace diversity we find unity, and when we turn loose we finally find a place to hold onto.

Right Panel: The World

The other day the the NPR program "All Things Considered" aired a piece about a robot. Some really brilliant scientists at the University of California at Berkeley invented it. They call it BRETT: "Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks." Well, one task: BRETT can fold towels. Well, BRETT can fold one towel. . .in twenty minutes. See, the problem is that robots are only good at repetitive patterns, while each pile of laundry contains lots of different items - socks, shorts, shirts, pants - and each pile of laundry jumbles these items in different piles and layers. All that variety - all that chaos - confuses BRETT terribly. He can’t find any corners, and until he knows where the corners are - where the boundaries are - he’s stumped.

We’re all worried these days about whether robots are going to take our jobs. And not just factory assembly line jobs, either: In his book The Rise of the Robots author Martin Ford theorizes that the automatons could even steal white collar jobs. It turns out, though, that in a robot-controlled world, chaos may be the key to continued human thriving. The NPR report said, “Machines need clear rules. One of the ways to figure out if a robot is going to take your job is to ask yourself: What are the rules here? Is my job a series decisions based on an orderly pattern? Or is my job really more like a giant pile of messy laundry?”

So it’s important to remember, when we want to push back against the great Godly higgledy-piggledy of our ongoing Pentecost, that the Third Member of the Trinity is not the Holy Algorithm but the Holy Spirit! He does not download God onto us; He breathes God into us. What we need is not a program but Pentecost. There may not be clear-cut corners with neat ninety-degree angles and clean edges. According to the story of today’s text, the Church is not about rules, but is more like a giant pile of messy laundry, all of which, though scarlet with sin, will be as white as snow, and though red like crimson shall be like wool (Isa 1.18).

Benediction

May the wind of the Holy Spirit

Rush unresisted through the rooms of your heart.

May the flame of the Holy Spirit

Blaze unbound above the thoughts of your head.

May the wine of the Holy Spirit

Leap unleashed from the language of your tongue.

In the Name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

One God now and forever,

Amen.

A Right Turn for a Wrong-Way Disciple: A Sermon in Triptych

John 21.15-17,

First Christian Church of Portland, Texas,

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Collect

            Heavenly Father, Your Son reveals to us that only You can forgive sin, but that not even You can ignore it. Grant us today, an assembly of sinners, the courage to return with Jesus to the place of our sin that we might arrive with Jesus at the place of our redemption made possible by the death and resurrection of Your Son, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Left Panel: The World

            Have you ever felt a desperate need for redemption?

            On January 21, 1915, the Cal State Golden Bears faced the Yellow Jackets of Georgia Tech in the fifteenth annual Rose Bowl game. Midway through the second quarter Tech's great running back Stumpy Thomason fumbled on the Cal State thirty-yard line. A Cal State lineman, a two-way starter named Roy Riegels, scooped up the loose ball. He caromed off of two potential tacklers, somehow lost his bearings, and began sprinting down field. . .the wrong way! His own quarterback, Benny Lom, finally managed to overtake Riegles at his own three-yard line where Riegels pivoted to face a wave of Tech tacklers who brought him down at the one. The Bears chose to punt the ball to safety rather than risk a play so deep in their own territory but Cal blocked it for a two-point safety, giving them the lead. Cal State went on to lose the game by a score of 8-7, the difference of that safety. The sportswriters jumped on the story and dubbed him "Wrong-Way Riegels." By some estimates, various newspapers through the years have run a total of 4,500 articles and devoted a quarter of a million column inches to Riegels' famous mistake.

Central Panel: Christ in the Text

            Have you ever felt a desperate need for redemption?

            I think that is what Simon Peter feels in the story we have read this morning. In fact, John has brought his Gospel to a full and satisfying conclusion at the close of chapter twenty and scholars debate whether chapter twenty-one might in fact have been written by an equally-inspired disciple after John's death. John tells us at the end of chapter twenty that while he could not tell us everything, he has told us all we need to know to come to a full, saving faith in Jesus, and what more could anyone ask? Why would anyone dare to add an appendix?

            Because the story is never complete until the fallen hero finds redemption.

            And Peter is indeed a fallen hero. The last two times we saw any personal interaction between Peter and Jesus was in chapters thirteen and eighteen. In chapter thirteen, Peter vows to follow Jesus to the death but Jesus instead predicts that Peter will deny his Lord three times before sunup (13.36-38). In chapter eighteen, Peter pulls that exact hat-trick, denying being a follower of Christ as he warms himself around the enemy's charcoal campfire (Jo 18.15-27). Notice those three elements: a charcoal fire, a triple-denial, and a refusal to be known as a follower of Jesus.

            Look how Jesus orchestrates the redemption of his wrong-way disciple.

            Verse four says that Jesus appeared "as the day was breaking," that is, just around the time a cock might crow. And when the waterlogged Peter sloshes ashore, he finds, according to verse nine, "a charcoal fire." The scene deliberately recreates for Peter the dynamics of his earlier denial, but it also invites him to be re-created as a disciple.

            Jesus asks Peter three times, "Do you love me?" That, of course, is the exact trifecta of times Peter told the crowd in the courtyard of the high priest that he had no idea who Jesus was. A triple-affirmation doubtless reminds Peter of his previous failure, but it also invites the disgraced disciple to unsay his triple-denials.

            At the end of the encounter Jesus predicts Peter's death as a martyr and then orders him, "Follow me" (v.18-19). Peter will naturally think of the time he vowed - and failed - to face death as a follower of his Lord. A call to martyrdom might seem to taunt Peter with his previous cowardice, but it also promises him future faithfulness.

            Does it seem cruel that Christ would lead Peter back through all the downward steps and stages he trod into such a shameful denial? Yet Jesus never promises to ignore sin. He promises the much better gift of forgiving sin, and it is in the remembrance of sin that we also experience the presence of redemption.

Right Panel: The Church

            Have you ever felt a desperate need for redemption?

            We're only a couple of weeks into the New Year, which means that statistically thirty percent of us have already trashed our New Year's resolutions, resolutions that only eight percent of us are actually likely to accomplish. But what about our Baptismal Resolutions?

            Like Peter, we have all made them. In many denominations, the minister asks the candidate for baptism, "Do you renounce Satan and all his works?" New Year's resolutions to start new habits are one thing; New Birth resolutions to start life afresh are something else.

            And, like Peter, we all break them. And, like Peter, we all need redemption. Where will we find it?

            First of all: Don't deny; confess. In a society like ours, I must stress that redemption is not the same thing as denial. The great Christian writer G. K. Chesterton scoffs at "those new religions that forgive your sins by saying you never had any." It might seem cruel that Jesus engineered such a detailed reconstruction of Peter's original fall, but he simply brought into the open what secretly gnawed at Peter's heart. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis it may be that the lost are those who dare not follow Jesus to such a public place of acknowledgement of sin.

            Secondly: Don't withdraw; engage. We note that each time Peter says, "I love Jesus," Jesus says, "Feed my sheep." I understand the natural, and even admirable urge that says, "I have messed up so badly that I am ashamed to be back among God's people." I can understand it, but it rests on the mistaken assumption that you, or I, or any of us, deserves to be there in the first place. Find a place of service in the sheepfold of the Chief Shepherd - a term, by the way, that Peter invents and only Peter uses (1 Peter 5.4) - and love the Lord you have let down.

            Finally: Serve the sheep, but watch the Shepherd. Peter sees John (the Beloved Disciple is almost certainly John himself) tagging along and wants to know what his assignment will be. Jesus answers, in essence, "Verily, verily I say unto thee  - none of thy doggone business." We sometimes seek to escape the burden of our own bungling by finding someone nearby who seems worse. The Germans even have a word for this: schadenfreude. It literally means "harm-joy," that sinful instinct we all have to be happy when someone else messes up. At times like that, it is a good idea to spend a little time reviewing our own redemption.

Conclusion: World, Church, Christ

            Have you ever felt a desperate need for redemption?

            What many people do not know about the story of Wrong Way Roy Riegels is that he came back out and played an outstanding football game in the second half, including blocking a Tech punt. Not only that, but the next season he captained the Golden Bears, earned All-America honors, and led his team to a 7-1-1 record. I can't help but wonder how that happened. Well, it is a story of redemption.

            As the team entered its locker room at halftime, Riegels slunk to the most isolated corner of the locker room, threw his helmet on the floor and sat with his head in his hands. When the team rose and shuffled their cleats across the concrete to head back onto the field, he did not move. When the room had emptied, head coach Nibs Price walked back to where Riegels sat and told him to get up.

            "Coach, I can't do it," the distraught young man responded. "I've ruined you, I've ruined myself, I've ruined the University of California. I couldn't face that crowd to save my life."

            Coach Price quietly commanded, "Roy, get up and go back out there — the game is only half over."

            Peter thought the cock crow was the sound of the final whistle. In fact, it only signaled the end of the first half. You, like Peter, may feel that it is too late, that your failure is final and your fiasco fatal. But the risen Christ stands before you this morning and declares, "By the bloody sweat of Gesthsemane's garden, by the crown of thorns and the mocking sign hung above my head, by the five wounds in my body an the water and blood that flowed from my pierced side, by the broken bread and spilled wine of my communion table, by the cross of Good Friday and the empty tomb of Easter Sunday: Get up and go back out there - the game is only half over!"

            For Peter, the game was only half over, and he would go on to play an outstanding second half. Your redemption is certain in your Savior. How will you play in your second half?

Benediction

Whatever your hands bring you,

Whatever your eyes show you,

Wherever your feet take you,

Whatever your ears tell you,

Whatever thoughts your heart forms,

Whatever words your lips shape

As you go forth from this place,

May you see the Father in this God-blind world,

And be the Son to this God-starved world,

And breathe the Spirit on this God-choked world.

In the name of the Father

And of the Son

And of the Holy Ghost

One God now and forever,

Amen.