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A Few Words from Pastor Bryan
...and Jesus Christ Superstar
So this coming Sunday, March 24th, is Palm Sunday once again. The beginning of Holy Week—the last week of Jesus’s life on earth.
I hope you’ve had a meaningful season of Lent. I definitely have. Preaching about Jesus, who he was and what his life was and is about, and why the religious and political leaders of his time were so threatened by him that they murdered him—well, that’s gotten me all churned up inside once again—in a good way, you know. And maybe that’s the best thing that can happen during Lent. To be kind of blown away again by Jesus. Or perhaps for the first time.
Have you ever really heard the story of Jesus? I think maybe one of the reasons why so many people “don’t get how Jesus fits in” is because we’ve never really heard the full story. Most people were told things as children such as, “Jesus died for our sins,” or even “Jesus loves me this I know,” but we never really have had a chance to hear the very human story and get a sense of the drama. I’m not going to try to tell it to you now, but if you don’t know it and would like to hear it, let’s get together and take a walk or sit outside together sometime this spring or summer on a beautiful day and I’ll do my best to share it with you. Sharing that story is really what my life is all about. There’s nothing more important to me, and maybe one of the reasons for this is that no one told it to me when I was growing up.
I didn’t grow up going to church, and I had never heard the full story of Jesus until the summer after 8th grade, three years before my own spiritual awakening at that same lake in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. But it was the summer after 8th grade when the seeds of the story were first sown in my heart and my imagination.
Each summer the staff that worked at the lake and a few others in that resort community would put on a musical. It was all just for fun, but the productions were extremely well done. They’d rehearse in the evenings all July and August and the play would be on Labor Day Weekend. I was only around for July so I couldn’t be in the play, but a bunch of my friends were, and during the summer of 1972, when I was 14, the play was “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
Almost every evening during that month, I watched the rehearsals as this play came together. I’d never seen or heard Superstar before, but the rock opera tells the story of Jesus, his disciples, Jesus’s relationship with Mary Magdalene, his conflict with the Pharisees, his interactions with the Romans and Pontius Pilate, and his being whipped and beaten and killed on the cross. And it was all told through the rock music and lyrics of the amazing Andrew Lloyd Weber. I was absolutely enthralled. I loved the music of course. But the STORY—of a very human Jesus (played by an 18 year old who could REALLY sing and who was a very cool guy) who radiated love, was magnetic, who stood up for the outcasts, who healed people, who called out the hypocrisy of the religious leaders—well I was drawn to it like a moth to a light. And I was drawn not because of anything overtly spiritual. I didn’t believe in God and neither did the majority of my friends who were in the play—but it was the drama of the story itself. If you haven’t seen Jesus Christ Superstar, you can find the movie online. And if you can’t then watch the new Netflix series, “The Chosen.” Other than its portrayal of Mary Magdalene’s “demons,” I think The Chosen is amazing and is bringing the story of Jesus to life for so many people now.
But back to Palm Sunday. I remember being stunned by the turn the musical takes immediately in the midst of the Palm Sunday scene. The crowd that cheered Jesus began to turn on him for not being who they wanted him to be. Jesus himself was not surprised. He knew all along what was going to happen. But that 18 year old young man who played Jesus really brought it home to me for the first time. For the first time I realized that Jesus knew that in order to complete his mission of love, he had to be willing to stare down his own death. He didn’t want to die, but he refused to protect himself or run away from it either. What he was doing all along was loving everyone, while knowing that fully living out that Divine Love was going to cost him his life, and that his mission was to see this through to the end. To love so fully that those opposed to love would think that killing him would silence him—and for him to face this and actually—in some strangely powerful way-- allow it to happen--and trust God with all of it.
I can still remember the first rehearsal when I realized that Jesus was this amazingly wonderful and beautiful human who did nothing but love people, and who knew all along that certain people would oppose his love, reject him, betray him, lie about him, hate him, conspire against him, and brutally kill him--and that his mission was to see all of this through and to keep loving even those who treated him the worst and betrayed him most deeply.
You know it still doesn’t fully make sense to me. How could this somehow be what “saves” or “heals” the world?
And then there’s this line that Jesus sings, “…to conquer death, you only have to die. You only have to die.”
And so he did. Not without being driven to his own knees crying out to God—“If it's possible--if there's any other way--please take this cup away from me.” And then that prayer that I find equal parts haunting and liberating; “Nevertheless not my will but yours be done.”
A final surrender to Love.
The Story still grabs me in the depths of my being. But this Palm Sunday what is blowing me away most is Jesus’s courage. How he entered Jerusalem that day knowing that within less than a week he would be ruthlessly killed. And why did he do this? Somehow, out of love for everyone and everything, including you and me.
It’s quite a Story. I’ve spent the last 51 years trying to come to terms with it, and I plan to spend whatever years I have left letting it speak to me and claim me more and more. Because if I know anything at all after all these years, it is that this story of God's Love in Jesus takes us to the very heart of what being most Truly and Beautifully Human is all about.
I hope to see you this Sunday and perhaps for some of our Holy Week services so that we can accompany Jesus (and the Marys and all the disciples) and be amazed together, give thanks together, and celebrate Easter more powerfully together than ever.
Pastor Bryan
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