In my sermon this week I talked about stained glass blinders, which seems to have struck a chord with many of you. It seems most of us have these blinders near at hand, even if we manage to take them off sometimes. It’s almost impossible not to have them. Stained glass blinders are those things which surround your vision at church, casting a rosy glow on our Bible stories, prayers, and hymns. They prevent us from seeing the harshness, contradiction, and scandal in the stories and history of our faith. For example, the book of Jonah (the one who gets swallowed by a whale) was written as a sarcastic tirade against prophets and prophecy. Our stained-glass blinders cover that up and make it into a children’s story. And of course there is the image of the lovable, huggable Jesus that children too easily confuse with Santa Claus. Godly Play stories do their best not to put this kind of smiling face on Jesus, but these images are all around us, and dominate our cultural visions of Jesus. We can’t imagine this nice person being sarcastic, or driving merchants out of the Temple with a whip. See examples, found on Matthew Paul Turner’s great blog feature, “Jesus needs new PR”:
These stained-glass images of our faith trivialize it and make it seem extremely irrelevant to people living hard lives. This trivialization of our faith is a problem that deserves attention from every possible angle. For my part, I’m writing a Christmas pageant for this year that will attempt to remove the stained glass from the Christmas story… because too many people think it is “cute” that Jesus was born in a stable. When you paint a face like that on a lamb, (see above) then yes, it’s hard to argue that being born in a stable is cute, but we have forgotten that it was probably also messy, smelly, and cold; the opposite of a comfortable place to give birth or to be born. This year’s pageant is titled “Away in a Garage” and will do its best to give a modern equivalent. Save the date and bring your friends: December 14th, in Celebration!
And if you catch yourself coming to church with stained glass blinders on, one good corrective that can shake them off is to imagine yourself in a less privileged position. If you were homeless, how would such a story sound to you? If you were seriously disabled, or ill? But the best corrective of all is to reach out and engage in conversation with someone who genuinely comes from a place like that, because you learn to see the world differently when you live it day in and day out. And as we know well, Christ comes to us in the “least of these,” those whom the world ignores, and we may be blessed with an opportunity to really encounter Christ, living in our world today.
Every Blessing,
Talitha