SermonStudio

The Rhetorical Impact Of Character-Based Story Sermons

Every time I've watched Disney's animated movie Mulan, a song the character Mulan sings brings tears to my eyes. As the film begins, the creators of the movie are quick to introduce us to Mulan: a young woman who doesn't fit the role her society has set before her. A character, who appears to be the town matchmaker, conducts a test of the essential social skills for women in Mulan's society. Mulan fails the test. The matchmaker judges Mulan to be "a disgrace," to be completely unfit to be a wife. The matchmaker's words are cruel, but the test Mulan fails is rendered as light, satirical, musical comedy. I don't feel Mulan's pain when she returns home to mope around as her mother informs her father of Mulan's failure. Only when Mulan begins to sing does her predicament evoke an emotional response from me. As she sings, she's able to see a reflection of herself in a pond. She's still dressed in proper feminine costume and make-up, but as she sings, she sorrowfully wonders who she is if she's not who her culture wants her to be.

I think I was aware from the first time I saw the movie why these simple lyrics moved me so. Mulan's inability to be the person she feels she is reminds me of my interpretation of my own life's struggle. I'm not crying for a digitally animated, fictional character of eleventh-century China. I'm not shedding tears for Mulan, but for myself, for my own longing to be who I think I really am. During this song, I also feel for others dear to me in similar predicaments. I immediately think of gay and lesbian Christians I know who have been judged as a disgrace, who have sometimes broken their family's hearts by being who they are, who long to be pastors but cannot, because their denomination judges them to be unfit. The animated character, Mulan, and her predicament function as a catalyst through which my own painful story and the painful stories of others are awakened.

Let's Kick Some Hunny Buns!1

Shortly after singing this song, Mulan seizes a role for herself she imagines she is more suited for: taking her aged father's place as a warrior in a war to defend her country. But neither her solution to her predicament nor the struggles it entails evoke the same emotional response as that initial song. I don't feel or think Mulan's solution is in any way helpful for me. Humor and suspense about the resolution of the action, not interest in the viability of Mulan's solution, keep me watching the rest of the film. Near the end of Mulan, I don't feel her triumph has been a lesson or a victory for me. "Let's kick some Hunny buns!" -- the battle cry that signals the climax of the movie -- is hardly an inspiring call to arms for me. At the end of the film, when Mulan's father proudly welcomes her home with a few simple words and actions, I respond emotionally again, vicariously enjoying her father's acceptance. It appears, therefore, that a character can sometimes evoke an emotional response for only part of a story.

Finally, that the words that evoke my first emotional response are sung may account for a large measure of their effectiveness. Simply reading the lyrics is not as compelling as hearing them sung and orchestrated; then they get to me every time. These rudimentary observations of my own experience of a story's character have much to do with a viewer/listener's experience of characters in sermons written as stories. More than plot, characters in sermons written as stories are the key to making a meaningful emotional connection with listeners/viewers. In his book, Thinking In Story, Richard Jensen articulates a profound theological justification for my point of view: "The people in stories come to live in our imagination. Hear how one student in one of Dr. Coles' classes described the reality of a person called Stecher from the trilogy of William Carlos Williams: '... to me, Stecher is -- oh, now, part of me! What do I mean? I mean that he's someone; he's a guy I think of. I picture him and can hear him talking ... He's inside us ... Williams' words have become my images and sounds, part of me. You can't do that with theories. You can't do that with a system of ideas. You do it with a story, because in a story -- oh, like it says in the Bible, the word becomes flesh.' ... Traditionally we have thought of filling people's heads with ideas. But we can just as well think of filling our peoples' heads with people!"2

It's Not About Plot

I have discovered other reasons to make character the highest priority specific to the practice of preaching by retelling biblical stories. One obvious challenge for those who preach by retelling biblical stories is that they must retell a story that listeners/viewers have just heard read as one of the lessons. Simply recapitulating the chronological features of a story would be boring. In the rhetorical context of preaching a sermon, plot does not have much potential to draw listeners/viewers into the sermon. People have just heard the plot. They know how it all ends.

Apart from the problem of the predictability of plot, my most plot-oriented parish project sermon drew the worst reviews. I retold the biblical story that surrounded Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 (Third Sunday After Epiphany, Revised Common Lectionary, Cycle C) with a meticulously scriptural focus on chronology. It's best to let the members of the preaching group speak for themselves:

Zandy: This was the first one of your sermons where I couldn't really stay on task through the whole first part, and I started floating away ... I was waiting for you to get dramatic ... You made [the story] more complicated. Could everyone else follow it?

Val: It didn't seem to have as much of a story to it; it just seemed like background, a history lesson, which is fine and interesting, but just sort of more factual, laying things out logically ... I still was a little disappointed that there wasn't more of a character for Nehemiah. In all your other sermons, you always had a character. [In this sermon] you didn't speak from a character persona.


I was genuinely surprised by the response of the preaching group. Here at last I felt I had written a real story, I was thinking, because it has this truly grand plot right out of the scriptures! After the preaching group's disappointing review, I was able to connect the dots between Val's observation that the sermon "didn't seem to have as much of a story to it" and her observation that I didn't present Nehemiah as a character. At least in terms of sermons that attempt to retell biblical stories, Val equates the term story with character, not plot. The sermon about Nehemiah had a plethora of plot, but no character and, for Val and most of the others in the preaching group, the sermon was not, therefore, much of a story.

Plots Consume Time

Plots are great for a ten-hour fantasy film trilogy that explains how two short guys with furry feet manage to save the world from evil. Sermons, in my denomination at least (the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), are normally confined to a time slot of between eight and twenty minutes. Time, therefore, is a factor. A series of events takes a great deal of time to tell. Each event has characters, settings, and actions to describe. This consumes time. For the purposes of preaching by retelling a biblical story, if the term story is conceived of as a story of character and not as a series of events, events are recounted with the sole purpose of painting a vivid portrait of the character.

In one Reformation Day sermon, for example, I spent five minutes introducing the listener/viewer to a character by describing the first thirty or so years of her life. It was sort of a story, but not one made up of a series of distinct episodes. It was a summary of events: the character grew up poor, watched over her little brothers, and tried to get them to stay in school so they could get out of poverty. The story of how she escaped poverty herself took one sentence. Then I spent the final ten minutes on the one event of the sermon. By the standards of Star Wars, one event does not a story make; The Phantom Menace concluded with three events simultaneously playing out at one time! I'd like to see you try that in the pulpit! For the purposes of a sermon, character makes the story. The structure of time in retelling a biblical story need not, therefore, be evenly chronological or episodic. Half of the life of a character can zip by in five minutes, four to six years can zip by in one sentence twenty-seconds long, but one three-minute event can take ten minutes to tell, all because the point of a sermon told as a story is not an accurate sense of chronology but an intimate acquaintance with a character.

In the case of my Reformation Day sermon, after the listeners/viewers had a chance to get to know its main character and admire her, they could feel more deeply her struggle in the story's one event. This event forces her to choose between her hard-won convictions and the gospel. This gospel choice goes against her grain and against the grain of most listeners/viewers as well. When she finally does choose the gospel, this dubious choice is potentially validated by the listeners/viewers, because a character they have come to admire has made it. Once again, delving deeply into character can intensify the mystery of motivation, especially of motivations that go against the grain. How in the world did she make the compassionate, gospel choice she made? The listener/viewer is left thinking and feeling good about the possibility that it was God who made it happen. (This sermon follows ch. 6.)

Creating Characters Creates Problems

Creating characters, the heart of a sermon that retells or dramatizes biblical stories, creates some hermeneutical problems, particularly if one follows literary advice on the subject. Take the advice of my great friend, Winnie-the-Pooh, who says "It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come."3 Anne Lamott, in her book, Bird by Bird, quotes Frederick Buechner who agrees with Winnie-the-Pooh about the poetic process of creating characters: "You avoid forcing your characters to march too steadily to the drumbeat of your artistic purpose. You leave some measure of real freedom for your characters to be themselves."4 Lamott weighs in on the topic herself: "Fix ... on who your people are and how they feel toward one another, what they say, how they smell, whom they fear. Let your human beings follow the music they hear, and let it take them where it will"5 and "... in lieu of plot, you may find ... you have ... a temporary destination ... you envision as a climax. So you write toward this scene, but when you get there ... you see that because of all you've learned about your characters along the way, it no longer works ... so it does not make the final cut."6 When that happens, as it had in her second novel, Lamott gets "very quiet" and waits "for the characters to come to [her] with their lines and intentions."7 Other writers make similar comments: "[Characters] take on a life of their own I kind of have to follow them."8

This is all well and good for novelists, poets, and Winnie-the-Pooh, but preachers have a purpose the drumbeat to which their work must march steadily. That purpose is sticking to a truth in a text. In Bird by Bird and other reflections about creative writing, one often reads that characters must be allowed the freedom to become themselves.9 How can this work when a preacher's characters are given to him or her in a text that people are often fearful of changing in any way because of its sacred, revelatory character? What room is there left for real characters to be born and to exercise their free will to become who they are called to be? For me, it is once again, the intent of the text that must act both as guide and final judge of the characters who "happen." An important practice for those who preach by retelling stories is to compare their new story to the biblical story. Do the new elements in the story explicitly contradict what the listener/viewer will have just heard as the lesson or the gospel? Such explicit contradictions will be noticed and will distract listeners/viewers from connecting with the new story. They need to be removed.

Scripture Or History?

The sermon that follows is based on a pericope that Judas is explicitly characterized as a thief (John 12:1-8). As I prepared to create the character of Judas for this sermon, I asked myself the following question: as social scientists understand first-century Galilean society, what kind of person would have joined the Jesus movement and would have been or would have been inclined to become a thief? I did not ask this question with the intent of discovering who the historical Judas was but with the intent of discovering what kind of person the author of John's Gospel thought Judas was. This is an important distinction to make for two reasons. One: it gets people in the habit of thinking that there are as many valid interpretations of Judas as there are distinctive biblical stories about him. Instead of responding to the scriptures with a quarrelsome anxiety for the "exactitude of certainty" that is not found in the scriptures, we can help people learn to celebrate what Kevin Bradt calls the "inexhaustibility of truthfulness" of a "narrative epistemology."10

Two: making the distinction keeps us focused on the particular story we're trying to retell. You're retelling John's story of Judas or Luke's story of Peter. Then, when listeners/viewers have questions about your retelling of a biblical story, you have a clear understanding about where each of the details of your story came from. You will be able to show them, detail by detail, that you are not being arbitrary, but faithful, and faithful not to "history" but to the scriptures! These kinds of conversations have been great teachable moments for me. Not being clear about this distinction can lead to misunderstandings and false expectations. For example, some of the publicity preceding the film, The Passion of the Christ, raised viewers' expectations about the historicity of the film. Maybe those who made negative comments about Mel Gibson's sympathetic characterization of Pilate did so because they were expecting a historical Pilate. The historical Pilate was a cruel man who would have never made deals with the religious authorities to try to save someone like Jesus. Gibson wasn't trying to present us with a historical Pilate; he was merely retelling Pilate's story following the relatively sympathetic renderings of Pilate in the four gospels. Those who critiqued Gibson's sympathetic portrayal of Pilate were judging a retelling of a biblical story using a standard of historicity inappropriate to the film. In their confusion, they missed an opportunity to critique the film on its most serious shortcoming: portraying Pilate as a "round" character but not the religious authorities.11

No Regrets For Judas?

I took my scripture-based question about the character of Judas in the Gospel of John and ferreted out of all the elements of his characterization. One of the most interesting results of this search was the fact that John does not report Judas' suicide.12 Were Judas to have in some way expressed his regret for his betrayal, that would have been another dimension of his character to have taken into consideration. Such a complex character doesn't really fit into John's understanding of the world -- an understanding which in pretty black and white ways pit "those loyal to Jesus" to "those in opposition."13 I looked at the factors in the characterization of Judas in light of how a first-century author understood human psychology and began to wonder what sort of life would make a man both a disciple of Jesus, a thief, and an unrepentant betrayer. People heard the story of Judas as they've never heard it before, partly because they're used to hearing about the Judas in Matthew whose suicide adds a dimension of regret or despair to Judas' character -- a dimension not present in John's story of Judas.

This Rat's Not Going To Last!

Should a preacher use Judas as the primary character in a sermon told as a story? Sensibly enough, Henry Mitchell objects: "Occasionally, Bible stories involved protagonists with whom we simply must not identify. Jesus did not intend for us to identify positively with the unjust steward ... rich man dives, or the elder brother of the prodigal son."14 At best, for Mitchell, the purpose of "bad characters" is to "see ourselves in [them] ... only long enough to convict us and ... motivate us to become more like Jesus."15 Mitchell also objects to an exclusive use of "bad characters," because for him, sermons must end with "celebration." "[In bad characters] where is the positive embodiment of the goal with which to launch celebration? ... Negative lessons then need to be paired with positive passages, so that there can be celebration relevant to the negative text's issue."16

For one of my project sermons, I did tell a story of "Rich Man Dives" so that listeners/viewers could see themselves in him. A member of my preaching group confessed that he did see himself in the "Rich Man Dives":

Dick: The whole thing is walking a line. My own perspective. I know how I am: how little can I do? How can I just fulfill the requirements and get by without having to jump in with both feet. The illustration of using the poor and the hungry so that he could on Sunday fulfill the requirements of the law by giving his own servants the day off. He's walking the line! I could identify with the rich man. I saw his dilemma. As you're going through the thing, part of me's going, this rat's not going to last and part of me's going, well, but you know, he is doing what the law says. Where's the wrong?


But I did not drop "Rich Man Dives" for a more positive role model as Mitchell urges us to do. I let the rich man play out his self-righteous trajectory even to the point of insulting Jesus when Jesus comes down to the place of the dead to offer him forgiveness:

"The rich man is quite sure that this is a gang of thugs about to come to beat him, when he recognizes the man as the guest teacher in the synagogue, who had indeed, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, was buried, and had descended into hell. The guest teacher, beaten and bedraggled and wretched as he is, reaches out to touch the rich man, who draws back. The guest teacher speaks: 'You are forgiven.'

" 'Forgiven!?' shouts the rich man. 'I am forgiven? Forgiven for what? And who are you to forgive sins? You're nothing but a common criminal! Who forgives sins but God alone? And in my book right now, God is the one who needs forgiveness, not me, because I have followed God's law to a tee to earn my everlasting reward and then I get this?' "

Because many listeners/viewers may have identified with the rich man in the beginning of the sermon as Dick did, the shock of the bitter and hateful way that he treats Jesus at the end of the sermon could have driven listeners/viewers to reflect even more seriously on their own self-righteousness and how it eliminates the need for Jesus and his forgiveness. If we can feel for a moment how little we need Jesus, we can feel how much we really want to get rid of Jesus, and how much we are in cahoots with those who wanted him dead. Similarly, Thomas Boomershine, in his book, Story Journey, is not afraid to suggest we can convict ourselves of the crucifixion, because the gospel writers did not hesitate to do so, either:

"The storyteller [of the crucifixion story] asks the listeners to recognize our corporate involvement in Jesus' death ... The primal connections of our experience with this story are experiences of consciousness and confession of personal and corporate sinfulness ... an awareness of human captivity to the powers of sin and death ... the awareness of our personal responsibility for Jesus' suffering and death ... the sinfulness of human communities, such as the nation and the religion....The story invites us to meditate on our involvement in the forces that cause war, racial oppression, starvation, sexual abuse, and poverty."17 Do we, in the context of the sermon, need to absolve people of wanting to kill Jesus, obviously the most heinous crime imaginable for a Christian? Because there are other gospel moments in the rest of a worship service, I think the sermon need not always be the place that such angst is resolved. Why not trust the Holy Spirit to meet the person later in the service so that the assurance of God's love and grace is something sought and discovered on one's own and not simply proclaimed by the pastor? Barbara Brown Taylor appears to concur in this memorable succession of passages from her book, When God is Silent: "If we really love [our listeners], we won't bring them back much to eat. If we did that, they might mistake us for the Food Giver...."18 Taylor instead, urges us to use "courteous language" in the pulpit. Courteous language: "respects the autonomy of the hearer. It also respects his or her ability to make meaning without too much supervision."19 Taylor is not worried about leaving listeners/viewers thinking, wrestling with the implications of a biblical story: "Fortunately, the Bible is full of such raw and powerful stories. Maybe we should preach more of them, and where they are obscure, troubling, or incomplete, perhaps we should leave them that way...."20 Taylor summarizes the implications for preaching: "Whatever preachers serve on Sunday, it must not blunt the appetite for this food. If people go away from us full, then we have done them a disservice. What we serve is not supposed to satisfy. It is food for the journey...."21 For Taylor, it's all about homiletical, epistemological humility: "our words are too fragile. God's silence is too deep...."22 Taylor concludes: "Only an idol always answers."23

Although I agree with Mitchell's description of the importance of giving listeners/viewers characters that are "positive role models" to emulate,24 I don't think it's always necessary.25 Boomershine is eager for listeners/viewers to experience complicity in the cross. Taylor is eager for listeners/viewers to experience the troubling silence of God. Richard Jensen recommends sermons that are "open-ended."26 There's a clear diversity of opinion on the matter. Maybe it's a matter of pastoral discernment when to lift up "the good guys" and when to confront listeners/viewers with the ways that they're in league with "the bad guys." Certainly what the old cartoon character Pogo says is always true: "We have met the enemy ... and he is us."27

Making Bad Guys Look Good?

There are, I think, some good reasons to make "the bad guys" in biblical stories as attractive as possible. First of all, we shouldn't be in the business of demonizing biblical sinners. We don't want listeners/viewers to dismiss their own sinfulness by saying to themselves, I could never be as bad as those people in the Bible! If there are ways that people are still like the worst of biblical characters, it's important for us to exploit it. It's also important for us to transport people back into the biblical story so they can experience the gracious ways God usually deals with even the worst of sinners.

Secondly, what if a biblical character's sinfulness is painfully similar to the sinfulness of one of your listeners/viewers? If you ridicule or hate your "bad guys" in your sermon, your listeners hear that ridicule or hatred directed at them. You will have stopped telling a story and begun a holier-than-thou harangue. Your story will have become transparent to your angry agenda; the sermon will become more about you than about the gospel. (Yes, we'll get to transparent intent in ch. 5.)

Enough said about creating and connecting with characters. Please meet Judas again for the first time.

* * *

In The Garden
A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday In Lent
(Revised Common Lectionary, Cycle C)
based on John 12:1-8 and Philippians 3:4b-14
preached at Our Savior's Lutheran Church
Pulaski, Wisconsin


The disciples are allowed to enter Mary's garden through a stone arch barred with an iron gate. They pass into a fragrant, humid shade beneath palms, beneath trees bearing figs, pomegranates, and lemons, beneath trees blooming with orange, yellow, or purple tropical flowers. The sound of the dribbling water of a fountain, the cool scent of water evaporating on the fountain stone, the intoxicating fragrance of the flowers are all concentrated, hoarded inside high stone walls. It's another world; it's the world of wealth casting a spell on the disciples, causing them to forget the stench of the street: the animal excrement, the garbage dumped into it, the racket of creaking carts and braying donkeys and hawking salesmen and dogs barking and starving beggars clanking sticks on empty tin cups.

Judas had played in a quiet garden like this under the watchful eye of a private tutor. In a garden like this, Judas learned Hebrew poetry; he tried to play the lyre; he listened to his tutor play the lyre as it was meant to be played: notes flowing like ripples forming where drops of water fall. Birds sang. Breezes stirred the leaves, caressed the orange and yellow and purple blossoms that released their fragrance until little Judas' little world was all lovely lyre and the beauty of blossoms.

When his father lost his business and his home and that garden, he had a little capital left to invest in a few donkeys and carts and a clay and wood house with no courtyard garden, no slaves, no tutor, no lyre, just dirt on the floor and donkeys braying and donkeys defecating to provide fuel for the fire for their daily bread.

In Mary's garden, tears stinging his eyes, Judas remembers that childhood garden. The rest of the disciples are laughing, playing, splashing water from the fountain on their hot faces, on each other. Then they seat themselves on cool stone benches under the shady trees as slaves come out to wash their feet.

Judas' grief flows as hot, bitter tears. This world had once been his. In taking over his father's business at age fourteen, Judas had worked ferociously, whipping donkeys mercilessly to get them to move as quickly as he could to cram as many deliveries into a day as he could. His father had died. His mother lived on the main floor of the clay house and cooked for Judas whenever he'd stop by for a meal and few hours of sleep in the guest room upstairs.

Gradually, Judas transformed the upper room into a tiny treasure trove. He covered the clay floor with red, gold, and purple Persian carpets he'd pilfered. Judas hung red and purple flowing silks he stole to hide the dull, sloping, clay ceiling. He burned frankincense and myrrh in golden receptacles. Judas even got his hands on a lyre, but it was only once in a great while he'd find the time to steal away to his upper room to keep trying to play it.

Judas was only one fourteen-year-old boy. The trade took its toll. One too many cart wheels ran over his foot. One too many donkeys kicked him in the face. One broke his leg. The cost of letting it heal drained all his assets. Judas lost his father's wood and clay house, his upper room of rich treasures, and his mother. He became a beggar lying in the street, his leg healing twisted and shorter. He banged on an empty tin cup with a stick.

One day some men came by and threw Judas on a cart and took him to Jesus who fed him by the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Judas clumped along after them, impressed with Jesus' fearless exposure of rich religious authorities who ruthlessly bought and sold foreclosed property of failed entrepreneurs like his father, and who'd turn around on the Sabbath and buy a brick or two for the new temple to soothe their consciences. Judas loved to watch Jesus get their goat.

Being fierce and knowledgeable about the tricks of mercantile trading, Judas was soon much beloved for his help in procuring daily bread for the disciples on their limited funds. Next to Jesus himself, Judas was soon much beloved for indulging the disciples with special deals he'd work out here and there along the way. Sure he took a little from the purse upon occasion, but it was easy to rationalize that and all the little treats -- what they were doing for humankind far outweighed a few perks he was able to appropriate for the disciples and himself.

Jesus didn't indulge in any of the special provisions Judas provided: fresh breads, fresh meats, fresh fruits, a good wine now and then. As the disciples laughed and played when Judas produced plenty, Jesus sat by the fire, looking at it, poking it with a stick, and looking at Judas once in a while out of the corner of his eye.

In Mary's garden, Judas wipes away the secret tears he'd been crying for the home he'd lost long ago. Judas begins to hope that this garden is a sign that they were finally getting somewhere. Wealthy people, wealthy women had provided timely support for them all along the way. But to Judas, this garden begins to feel like it has corporate headquarters potential. Judas begins to wonder about sly Jesus who'd just raised Mary's brother from the dead. Yeah, Judas begins thinking, now that we're out of the country, now that we're getting close to the capital city, Jesus dishes out a miracle here, a healing there, raises the brother of a couple of rich ladies -- all to build himself a loyal coalition to finance the gradual seizure of a portion of political power, to build an alliance between himself and the ultimate power, the power of Rome. That's just what Herod the Great did. Why not us?

Judas suddenly thinks he knows why Jesus seemed to have been especially kind to Roman centurions, tax collectors, and the like. In Mary's garden, Judas is figuring it all out for the first time. Judas is smiling at these thoughts as Jesus passes by him. The real Jesus smells stale compared to the fragrant garden. To Judas, Jesus is suddenly a smoky, sweaty stench passing by. Judas looks up at Jesus, who is staring at Judas sternly, as if he knows exactly what's going on in Judas' mind.

Mary, the wealthy hostess, comes out with a flourish of silks to greet Jesus, to welcome all the disciples to her home. She ushers them all into her house. Then Mary falls to her knees before Jesus. She produces a pound of perfume from a golden box that had been hidden beneath the flowing red and purple silk that envelops her. Judas eyes pop right out of his head. The fragrance of the perfume overwhelms everyone; it fills the entire room; it gradually causes each of the disciples in turn to fall silent, to turn to look at grateful Mary, kneeling before Jesus, massaging one of his feet with the perfume. Suddenly, with a shocking lack of womanly modesty, she releases the knot of the cord that has bound her hair. Her hair flows down around her, flows down around Jesus' legs as she massages his feet. She wipes Jesus' feet clean of days of dust and dung and Judas' eyes narrow. Judas now wonders if Jesus is up to something completely different, something he'd never seen motivate Jesus before. It accounts for his indifference toward them, his constant criticism of them. Judas is now thinking that maybe this has all been about Jesus snagging some rich lady, and pretty soon they'd all be expendable and Jesus and Mary would be living happily ever after in Mary's garden. So Judas says it; the words just spew out of sudden, jealous, hateful anger; Judas just barely has time to shape and control his words into something that sounds quite reasonable, almost polite. "I thought, my Lord," Judas says, "we were a common purse group. I mean, that fancy perfume there; I know I could have got a year's wages for it, twenty grand or more, to give to the poor."

Mary stops anointing Jesus' foot. She turns her head, holds back her hair, and looks over at Judas. She doesn't give Judas a haughty rich woman's look. Her look is apprehensive, fearful. She's wondering whether or not she's overdoing her devotion to Jesus a bit. Maybe she shouldn't express her love for Jesus, her gratitude for Jesus, so ... so extravagantly. Maybe her worship should be a little more reserved, a little more Lutheran. Maybe, she's thinking, maybe I should have given the cost of this nard away to the poor.

Mary looks up at Jesus, ready to do whatever he commands.

The disciples stand as absolutely still and silent as stones at this quiet challenge from a brother they love and respect for his shrewd business sense, for tending to their creature comforts on the long, dirty road. They like their roast lamb and just-baked bread and a fine wine now and then. They like their just rewards for all their righteous deeds. They like to remember all their great deeds, just as Judas liked remembering his father's garden, just as Judas liked remembering his upper room of rich treasures. None of them had yet learned to regard such memories as rubbish so that they might truly desire Jesus, so that they might truly love and worship Jesus as Mary did, so that they might truly know Jesus and the power of his resurrection and a share in his sufferings. None of them had yet learned what Jesus is all about: "forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to make the power of the resurrection their own and being grateful, grateful to Jesus that Jesus had made them his own" (Philippians 3:10-13 paraphrased).

Jesus says to Judas, "Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day," and here Jesus pauses, "for the day of my burial."

"Burial?" says Peter. "You must mean the day of your anointing! The day of your coronation!"

"Burial," Jesus says.

Burial, Judas thinks to himself. Why burial? This is where we're going? Nowhere? To the grave? After all I've done for him?
Judas looks down at his own filthy feet, shaking his head.

Mary looks into Jesus' eyes for one awkward moment; then finishes anointing his feet, places the remainder of the nard in the golden box, rises, and addresses Jesus and the disciples: "We're glad you've come. How could we forget what you've done for us? Come in, all of you. Perhaps our bread and wine will help chase away all your dreary thoughts."

"Or perhaps," Jesus says, "The bread and wine will be for the remembrance of me."

Amen.


Chapter Notes

1. Mulan, produced by Pam Coates, directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft, 88 min., Walt Disney Pictures, 1998, videocassette.

2. Richard Jensen, Thinking In Story (Lima, Ohio: CSS Publishing Company, 1993), p. 63.

3. A. A. Milne, The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh (New York: Dutton's Children's Books, 1994), p. 197.

4. Frederick Buechner in Spiritual Quest: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing, ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988) quoted in Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird (New York: Doubleday, 1995), p. 53.

5. Lamott, pp. 61-62.

6. Lamott, pp. 85-86.

7. Lamott, p. 86.

8. Bobbie Ann Mason, "Crafting Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary People" in 1997 Novel and Short Story Writers' Market, ed. Barbara Kuroff (Cincinnati: Writers' Digest Books, 1997), p. 70.

9. Eugene Lowry in The Sermon, Dancing at the Edge of Mystery, describes a similar creative process at work in the development of "narrative" sermons, sermons that are not stories, but which are "sequenced" like one. Lowry uses H. Grady Davis' image of a sermon being like a tree to ground his idea that the sermon plot must have at its genesis a "generative idea": "During our preparation for Sunday, it sometimes happens that we get pushed out of the driver's seat of our own work and get taken for a ride ... surely it has something to do with H. Grady Davis' insistence that a sermonic idea has an expanding force ... and we get swept along." Eugene L. Lowry, The Sermon, Dancing at the Edge of Mystery, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), p. 54.

10. Kevin M. Bradt, S.J., Story as a Way of Knowing (Kansas City, Missouri: Sheed and Ward, 1997), pp. 179, 200.

11. It is disturbing that the character of the religious authorities was rendered so simplistically and unsympathetically. Gibson shows us no struggle to make the decision to seek the death penalty for Jesus -- not even one based on self-interest which appeared to me to be what most of Pilate's struggle was about. Gibson needed only to use a few flashbacks to generate a sense of the profound conflict Jesus instigated among the faithful people of Israel: one of Jesus' meals with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners or one of Jesus' trashing the temple would have sufficed to help viewers see things from the religious authorities' point of view.

12. Matthew is the only gospel writer who recounts Judas' suicide. Luke in Acts reports an entirely different story of Judas' demise. For a helpful summary of these stories, see M. Eugene Boring, "The Gospel of Matthew: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections," The New Interpreter's Bible, Vol. VIII (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), pp. 482-484.

13. Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), p. 31.

14. Henry Mitchell, Celebration and Experience in Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), p. 47.

15. Mitchell, p. 47.

16. Mitchell, p. 47.

17. Thomas Boomershine, Story Journey: An Invitation to the Gospel as Storytelling (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988), pp. 170-171.

18. Barbara Brown Taylor, When God is Silent (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 1998), p. 110.

19. Taylor, p. 111. See also Childers, pp. 37-39; Jensen, Telling the Story (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1980), pp. 138-144; Jensen, Thinking, p. 115.

20. Taylor, pp. 115-116.

21. Taylor, p. 120.

22. Taylor, p. 121.

23. Taylor, p. 118.

24. Mitchell, pp. 101-103.

25. Mitchell, p. 47.

26. Jensen, p. 115. See also Boomershine, p. 52. Bradt, in Story as a Way of Knowing, reports Brueggemann's understanding of the epistemological orientation of the Old Testament: pp. 160-161, 200.

27. Walt Kelly, untitled cartoon for Earth Day 1971.