IN MEMORIUM

After a very long journey of living with Alzheimer’s Disease, my mother, Mary Elizabeth Grabert Larzelere, died this past Thursday afternoon at her nursing home in Boca Raton, Florida.  My sister was at her side, the compassionate people of Hospice By the Sea present with their love and caring.  Our mother will be cremated and sometime at the end of June/the beginning of July our family will hold her Service at her home parish, St. Luke’s, in Dublin, Pennsylvania.

On behalf of my sister and her husband and Beverly and myself, I want to thank you all for your cards, your telephone calls, your emails, your prayers and your words of condolence.  They sustain us in our time of mourning, and embrace us with friendship and love … and we are very grateful.

Born Again

+ In nomine Domini.  Amen.

Last evening, two friends and I attended the Santa Fe Playhouse.  We were watching Bench Warmers VII: an evening of eight new one-act plays.  If you have never been to see Bench Warmers, I can only highly recommend this offering of “local writers and New Mexican voices”[1].  (The final performance is this afternoon at 2.00 pm – quite possibly sold out; however, next Saturday and Sunday there will be stage readings of 8 One-Act plays, the selection of honourable mentions from the 48 scripts submitted this year.)

The collective title Bench Warmers comes from the task of creating “a new one-act play, no more than 15 minutes in length, with a solitary bench as your stage setting”[2].

The three of us sat in the front row of this wonderful small local theatre and were drawn into the eight performances … were taken from our seats, in a theatrical out-of-body experience (you might say) to: the security line of an airport, a park in Santa Fe, the terrace of a rooftop apartment overlooking a city in Mexico, a passage of life from childhood to old age, a theatre stage where an audition was taking place, a wedding that was cancelled, an airport scene late at night, and a vignette of a mother and her son.

Each of the stories took us from peals of laughter to the dabbing of eyes wet with tears as the audience was taken on journeys where the absurdity of human existence and the characters thereunto turn us our sadness into laughter and where the pain of human existence and the loss of loved ones turn our laughter into the deepest sadness.

The one-act plays enabled us to see life, to see our lives and participate in them in such a way that once having been there (on stage) we have a  deeper understanding, a deeper awareness and sensitivity of life here.  That is, we could say, the whole purpose of drama.  It takes us from where we are to see ourselves as we are and the world as it is — and by that experience, which in theatre is a communal experience, moves us to compassionate involvement not only with our inner selves, but with the “selves” of others with whom we live and work and play.

As the last Bench Warmer concluded, my friends and I talked about them, in a kind of quick review, as we strove to make immediate sense of what we had seen and experienced. 

“Well,” I said, “I’m just here looking for material for Sunday morning.” 

Among the three of us we mused about how the liturgy is a one-act play, and it was suggested that I write a one-act for next year and submit it … we all looked at the bench on the now empty stage and thought “Pew” and I offered, “Who would play Pope?”  And one of my friends asked, “Which Sunday would you choose?”  And I answered, “Pick one.”

Indeed, what takes place in our liturgy is quite a drama indeed, where we are taken outside ourselves into a place and a time where we can see ourselves as we are, and the world as it is and by that experience of worship which is a communal experience moves us to compassionate involvement not only with our inner selves, but with the “selves” of others and the very world itself.

The drama unfolds around the phrase, “Love God, love neighbor as oneself, heal the world.”

As often happens on a Saturday night, I spend it and most of the wee hours of the morning pondering … pondering the text for the next day, wondering if there is anything that I can say which could have some meaning, some thoughtfulness … because you see, for me, the worship is wonderful, and I always want to be here … but, the preaching, that’s something else … that’s the insurmountable task!

Somewhere between the theatre last night and in advance of dawn’s early light, it came to me … “Of course!  The gospel portion is itself a one-act play, especially the one selected for today, “Nicodemus and Jesus”.

Look at it.  Look at it not as it has been used down through the centuries, as a story told by preachers in abundance against the Jewish people, where Jesus is the only way of salvation … look at this story not in that way, but in the way of a one-act play where we who hear the story and see the drama unfolding are taken to a different place where we can see ourselves as we are and the world as it is and be moved to compassionate love of God, love of neighbor, love of the world.

This story is not narrative history, it is drama, a play, a one-act Bench Warmer.

The scene is a quiet meeting in the darkness of night.  A Pharisee named Nicodemus seeks out Jesus for a private conversation.

It’s so sad that Christians have been taught from childhood that the Pharisees were the “bad guys” of the Gospels.  I wonder when and how the truth can be told … the Hebrew word prushim means “separated ones” with the sense of being separated for a life of purity.  The prushim (the Pharisees) were over time a variety of things depending on the time: a political party, a social movement, a school of thought among the Jewish people.  Although it is more than difficult to summarize quickly and succinctly the role of the Pharisees, we can understand them as a group of pious teachers who sought truth and a life of worshipping God consistent with the teachings of both Torah and the oral tradition of teaching that had grown alongside the written word.

So, Nicodemus comes to Jesus not as a combatant, but as a searcher for the truth, as one who wants to worship God and lead a holy life that means something.  And, you will notice, he comes not with a question, but with a “discussion” with a desire to talk, to understand by dialogue.

And the dialogue that ensues between Jesus and Nicodemus has to do with both of them themselves (!) going outside of themselves in a drama within the drama to talk about and understand not just individual holiness, but nothing less than the Kingdom of God!

There’s a little play on a Greek word in the drama, it’s the word anothen which can mean both “again” and “from above” (that is from heaven).  That’s the whole thing about being born again, it’s not about accepting “Jesus as your personal Lord and Saviour” … being born again means “coming to an awareness, the ‘aha’ moment, where the Spirit is in control, where all that we are and want to be, where everything that we strive to do in our control of our environment and other people, where all our human tendency toward nastiness and possession and oppression and greed and avarice and anger … which does nothing for ourselves, nor for our neighbor, nor for the healing of the world … where all these things fall away in the presence of the Spirit and we find ourselves newly formed, pointed in a new direction where love and peace and hope becomes the inner things of our very souls, and do not remain there, but flow out of us toward others, toward the sick and the sorrowful and the weeping and the dying with all the compassion that God must have if God would give up a son for the world.

That, says Jesus, is what it means to be born again.

Fade to darkness.  The one-act play is over and we, the audience, as Nicodemus and Jesus themselves, are brought back into the present moment, for us now in this liturgy, where we find ourselves in this one-act drama we call worship.  And where we find now our own calling, our vocation, our reason for being, where we are being changed and reshaped into lovers of God and our neighbors as ourselves and the world which must be healed.

Not a bad play at all.

Deo Gratia
The Rev. Benjamin Larzelere III