Russian Literature and the Cross

K31

Jer. 23:1-6
Canticle 16
Col. 1:11-20
Lk. 23:33-43

Russian Literature and the Cross
“He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son… for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created… and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1).

At the foot of the cross we face the greatest mystery of our existence. On the one hand we see a man convicted of political crimes, helplessly executed among criminals by the state. After the horrors of the twentieth century we all can believe this.

At the same time, I also believe that this man Jesus is the image of the invisible God. I believe that he is the firstborn of creation, the head of the church, the author of our salvation. I believe that all things were created for him and through him, that in him all things hold together. I know that he will rescue us from the power of darkness.

The cross is the point where suffering and omnipotence meet. It is hard to believe these two things, this man and this God, at the same time. Please do not think that I believe because I am less informed about the reasons why this should be impossible. My belief is not a sign that I am weaker or less intelligent than you. In fact, I cannot be separated from you. I come from the same place. I struggle with the same doubts. I have heard the same stories that you did as I grew up. Like the thief executed with Jesus and like you I have cried out to God, “Save us,” and I have felt denied.

I have been thinking about how my faith in Christ lies at the heart of my interest in Russian literature. I asked many of you about this. Some of you appreciate the way that Russian literature can encourage deep thinking even about disturbing things, that it leads to more human reflection than the journalism we usually read. Others love the commitment to social change that that they read in it. One of you went so far as to describe Russian literature as a non-narcotic, as the opposite of the hazy unreality on TV.

The Russian literature that I read faces the most difficult questions of what it means to be a modern person. What does the world tell you? What are you? Who are you created to be? At its most basic level the Christianity that I believe in addresses these three questions also. This morning I want to talk about these questions using examples from Russia.

1. What the world tells us. Leo Tolstoy’s story Ivan Ilych (1886) begins with an external, objective account of Ilych’s death. When his colleagues in the state court system hear the news, each of them privately speculates on how this event might advance their own career.

The next chapters seem like a resume. They describe the important details of Ilych’s life from his earliest childhood. He enjoys being a bachelor. He goes to law school, marries a beautiful woman. He works his way up with political savvy through the court system. He overextends himself (just as we do today in America). His house looks like the homes of other middle class people who are pretending to be richer than they really are. He worries about his financial situation. He fights constantly and bitterly with his wife. One senses an overwhelming isolation in his life. There seems to be nothing more to him than nagging worries and irritation with other people.

Ilych comes to realize this as he dies slowly from something that has gone wrong with his appendix or kidneys. In his heart Ilych keeps hearing a voice asking, “What do you want?” At first he answers, “To be well and not to suffer.” The voice replies, “As you lived before, well and pleasantly?” This presents him with a dilemma. On the one hand he knows he was not happy struggling to maintain his middle class lifestyle, but on the other hand he has no regrets about his life either. For a while he keeps repeating, “I did everything right.” I jumped through all the right hoops. I am a success.

Only hours before his death, Ilych stops dying and for the first time ever he starts living. He asks his family to forgive him and suddenly he feels free from fear. Tolstoy writes, “In place of death there was light.” Ilych says to himself, “What joy… Death is finished, it is no more.” This is what we say on Easter Sunday, the Feast of the Resurrection.

The world tells us that we can be happy with what we buy and our career promotions, with the power that these things give us over other people. Father Zossima in Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov (1879-1880) says that modern people interpret freedom as the “multiplication and rapid satisfaction of our desires.” He warns that these desires distort us and warp us so that we come to live only for our own envy. We lust after luxury instead of seeking joy in God’s love.

2. What we are. As twenty-first century Americans, this may be the most difficult part to understand. We do not know ourselves and this is dangerous. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn distinguished himself in combat against the Nazis in WW II. He made the worst mistake of his life when he criticized the Soviet leader Iosif Stalin (1879-1959) in letters to a close friend.

For this he was arrested, humiliated, beaten and tortured. In 1945 a secret committee sentenced him to serve for eight years in brutal Soviet labor camps. Solzhenitsyn witnessed Stalin’s efforts to kill and arrest all of those who had been exposed to conditions outside of the Soviet Union. This included the arrest of thousands of Russian POW’s and the arbitrary repression of ordinary citizens.

His almost two thousand-page book The Gulag Archipelago tells the stories of people in pain. Prisoners are stuffed into pipes, jammed into prison cells that are so crowded that their feet can’t touch the ground. They are transported in boxcars, starved and worked to death. He must refer to “latrine bucket” several hundred times and to at least a hundred different forms of torture. Hundreds of thousands of people are shot.

Solzhenitsyn has seen the worst evil imaginable. He has every reason to dismiss the guards and state security agents as inhuman. Instead he does something remarkable.

He recognizes that he himself could be guilty of the same crimes. “If only there were evil people,” he writes, “and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

This is a remarkable insight for us in a nation that most often describes evil as something that is foreign. It is important for us to remember as we prosecute war thousands of miles away from home. Solzhenitsyn has a message for a nation that holds more than six hundred foreign citizens (including a thirteen year old) in prolonged, indefinite detention without either charge or trial. People who represent you and me use torture as a means to suppress dissent.

Perhaps a sense that evil is external to us may help to understand why of the 8,750,000 people incarcerated around the globe, the US accounts for 22% of them. The number of people incarcerated per 100,000 is 105 in Canada, 150 in Mexico. Here 700 per 100,000 are in prison or jail (the incarceration rate for African American males is 4,848 per 100,000). The US leads the world in executing childhood offenders (and the mentally ill).

Who are we? We are part of evil or it is part of us. Solzhenitsyn writes, “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good [or natural].” “Ideology… gives evil its… justification.” “Cruelty is invariably accompanied by sentimentality.”

3. The world tells us that we will be happy with possessions and power. When we know ourselves best we recognize that evil is not outside of us. My last question is, “what are we created to be?” I won’t keep you in suspense, I believe that we are made to be with God, that we are loved by God and closest to ourselves when we share that love. From my earlier comments you might think that The Gulag Archipelago is chiefly a pessimistic book. It is not.

Solzhenitsyn writes that in these extreme situations owning things makes prisoners worry about their possessions being taken away. He describes men falling asleep with both arms around tattered suitcases. This leads to another terrible tragedy. The prisoner can choose to waste the very life that he is desperately trying to preserve. He can be blind to the blessing that comes from God. Solzhenitsyn writes, “Look around you – there are people around you. Maybe one day you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn’t make use of the opportunity to ask him questions.” Solzhenitsyn came to love these people. He discovered that Christ was in them.

And this is the remarkable thing. Maybe it is something that you already know. Love is stronger than pain. Christ is present where there is suffering.

Most of you know that I once was a chaplain at a children’s hospital. I saw so much suffering there, but it did not keep the parents away. Parents would sleep in uncomfortable chairs. They would miss weeks of work. If you asked the children, “why do your parents spend so much time here?” They would say, “My Mommy and Daddy don’t want me to be alone.”

God feels this way about you. God will not abandon us when we are frightened or in pain. Jesus promises that this is true and in my experience it is.

Here we are, facing the mystery of the cross. The power and glory of Jesus reach beyond our imagination, from the beginning of time to its end. His strength is not to grant us immunity to suffering because that is not what we really need. Instead Jesus rescues us from darkness by giving us himself.

Jesus is not another possession that you can buy but which will ultimately leave you unsatisfied. We understand him best when we recognize the evil that divides our own heart, and turn to the love that makes us whole. Amen.

Difficult Truth

C11
Jer. 20:7-13
Ps. 69:7-10, 16-18
Romans 5:15b-19
Matt. 10 [16-23] 24-33

The beat-up Mercedes-Benz stolen from Western Europe swerved to avoid potholes as it clattered over the immense desert wastes of Kazakstan. It stopped by the shores of a large lake. Before my brother could even get out of his seat, the energy ministers of this formerly Soviet nation in Asia were streaking from the car stark naked into the water and splashing each other. For my brother Andrew, a mechanical engineer at the World Bank, this is just another day on the job.

As we enjoy our leisurely summer schedules, he is touring around the eighth largest country in the world through the base of the Himalayas at altitudes 25% higher than the Alps. These unpopulated wastes are farther away from the ocean than any land on earth. The passes so familiar to Genghis Khan have not changed at all since his hordes rode through this wild terrain. Yurts, the tents in which the nomadic sheep-herders live today have also changed very little through the centuries. Traveling with high-ranking government ministers Andrew will soon be writing a report on the energy potential of these newly formed countries.

Unfortunately for my brother, the ministry officials have friends everywhere. The ritual is the same in every town and every district. Still dusty from the road, the travelers are invited by the headman into a long room with a large table groaning from the weight of food. If you are hungry this may sound to you like a good thing. But that could be because you do not yet know that every meal in Kazakstan or Kirgistan is exactly the same: Plates and plates of greasy meat cut from rangy, strong-tasting sheep, with acrid camel's milk (which my brother says tastes gamy, a little like how one might imagine paint-thinner might taste) and ten large bottles of vodka.

Before arriving to the village the members of the World Bank team have already been pleading with each other. Each hopes that someone else will be the "most honored guest." During the meal, the most honored guest will be presented with a sheep's head. He makes toasts and distributes the ears to the youngest person at the table, the eyes to other special guests and the brains to everyone. Remember, this is a land in which there is no such thing as a menu. Breakfast, lunch and dinner is always the same.

The technical experts at the World Bank are expected to show their respect by eating and drinking as much as the local shepherds who settle disputes through sheep-eating contests. Being that sick and drunk is bad enough for an ordinary American. But my brother, true to his California roots, is a strict vegetarian.

At home during Thanksgiving and Christmas Andrew suffers hours of teasing. In Asia he worried that his culinary standards may cause an international incident. Before beginning the first of these great feasts Andrew wondered whether he should tell the truth about his vegetarianism or if should he go along with the crowd. How could he show his respect for his hosts without eating the food they had prepared for him?

We have all had to tell difficult truths. Perhaps you have had to tell a friend that she shouldn't marry her fiancée. Maybe you were the one who had to break the news of death or illness to family members. You could be the one who knows about corruption on the job. Perhaps in exposing this dishonesty you will be risking your career. Maybe you have to explain to an older person that they can no longer live alone without special care. Perhaps you have to tell a younger person that he doesn't have enough experience for the job.

Today's lessons are about suffering for the sake of truth. They tell us about the fear which grips us in our recognition that after we speak everything may be forever changed. All that Christ says to us quietly in the dark we must proclaim from the housetops. If that great Greek philosopher Aristotle is correct and man is indeed a political animal, then this truth telling goes against our deepest nature. Articulating the painful truths simply is not politic.

Indeed today's gospel is doubly difficult. First, one could easily misunderstand the individual sentences spoken by Jesus. Initially they sound discontinuous, fragmentary and we can scarcely help taking them out of context. For instance, Jesus says, "a disciple is not above the teacher..., it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher..." This does not mean that we should be seeking to figure out the minimum requirements for discipleship or that we do not have to be completely like Christ. Jesus says these words to warn us that as we speak up for him, we should not be surprised if we are abused as he was. "If they have called the master... [Satan] how much more will they malign those of his household."

We are all here because in some sense each of us has been touched by God. We, like the prophet Jeremiah feel something of "the burning fire shut up in... [our] bones." The second problem for us, is that even when we recognize the necessity of suffering for Christ, we do not know how to tell our stories to others. We can scarcely find the words to articulate our faith in our own interior deliberations. Many of us do not feel confident enough to speak about salvation to even our closest friends. The sexual taboos of the Victorians have been shattered. But in their place we have constructed religious taboos which leave us with the persistent sense that talk about religion is not appropriate in polite or even impolite society. This taboo separates us from our creator, from the source of all life and love. It makes us strangers to our very selves.

Perhaps somewhere deep within us we recognize the need for help. In that quiet interior place we might remember that Christ saves but many of us have lost a sense for how that salvation is lived out from day to day.

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We inhabit a world of dreams, of indistinct visions and distorted illusions. We see our lives as if through a lacy curtain. We know the unclear shapes beyond ourselves only as uncertain shadows of light and darkness. At times a cool wind will blow the curtain aside and we will have a brief glimpse of naked truth. At other times the darkness of a moonless and misty night will make understanding any true pattern in our life hopeless.

But most of the time we do not even look toward the window of reality. Instead, our imagination plays reel after reel of a film that has been going almost since the day we were born. These movies run by our imagination are the story of our lives. Each one of us plays the star in this fantasy. Our cameras remain carefully focused on ourselves, other characters hover indistinctly at the periphery. We each play the lead, the victim and hero of our own tragedies and comedies.

This movie running nearly continuously makes today's gospel difficult to hear. At any given moment it is tempting to hear God's word and to write it into the screenplay of our selfish fantasy. We want to take the holy land and turn it into another setting for our self-justification, to make God's prophets into minor characters in our drama about ourselves. The longer we play these films about ourselves, the more difficult it is to hear or see anything beyond them. Seeing the world only through the tiny lens of our ego, our small-minded self-interest, turns all of our experience into distortion. It isolates us more profoundly than the two foot thick wall of a prison cell.

Friday I was listening to a radio program extolling the miraculous benefits of skepticism as the basis for all knowledge. One commentator went into a lengthy diatribe describing all religious life as merely a marketing scam to enrich religious professionals. He adamantly argued that people all over the world have been brainwashed to believe in God. If only we could be so fortunate. If only we could be reminded of the greater reality that is not ourselves. In truth our ego has been trained from an early age to have no interest beyond the bounds of our self.

The simple truth is that we need to be saved from our very selves. Christ asserts that we are, "not [to] fear those who can kill the body; [but] rather [to] fear him who can destroy soul and body in hell." Deep within you, lying close at hand is the power of egotistical damnation. In our loveless selfishness we are the jailers of our selves. John Milton frequently repeats this theme in "Paradise Lost." When Satan alights in Eden he despairs at the contrast between the beauty of that place and his own degradation. He says, "... which way shall I fly Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep still threat'ning to devour me opens wide..." (Bk IV, 74). Those who love only themselves carry hell wherever they go. Those whose love reaches beyond their self carry heaven with them. As Jesus says, "those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life." (John 12:25).

The free gift of grace which Christ gives to each of us is love, the very key sufficient to open up the iron gate of our selfishness. There are a million ways to express this truth and you will all find your own way. But when each of you goes out to tell the world this truth you will suffer. By telling the truth you will suffer the consequences paid by anyone who reminds us that our world is too small. Christ's message to us today is that we really only have two alternatives before us (and both of them are bad): First, you can tell the truth and suffer for it or second, you can conceal the truth from others and yourself thereby losing everything.

I would like to close with a story that I hope will make this conversation less abstract. In my preparation for this sermon, I asked someone from St. Clement's to read the text and she told me this story. Last fall I was visiting her family's house and on my way out the door. After I left, a UC Berkeley science professor who was the most recent arrival turned to her and said, "what's that guy's story anyway." The hostess responded, "he's a priest." At this the good professor blew up saying, "What is he doing walking around like that [I wasn't wearing clerical clothes]. They're always sneaking up on people, dressing up like normal guys." And then he began to realize... "he's not your priest, is he?"

Our dear hostess was caught off guard and hedged saying that I was a friend and that otherwise I would not have been invited into the family home. Unfortunately for her though, the professor had already gotten started he had caught the scent and was determined to finish. He then proceeded to say, "I always thought that you were strong and sure of yourself, now it turns out that you're a wimp." After resorting to name-calling he talked about not having a mind of one's own, and brought out all of the worn-out arguments which suggest that God only exists as some sort of cosmic crutch for people who are short on the strong character that one needs to face reality.

These are the fields in which Christ sends us out to labor. This is the sort of all-encompassing egotism that cannot see anything beyond one's own self and which threatens anyone subject to our human condition. This is the reason why we come together in a religious community that constantly reminds us that we are not the center of the universe. And together we take one enormous step over the abyss. Leaving behind the illusions of our selfish desire we take our place with Christ, with each other and all creation.