October 8, 2023

Isaiah 5:1-7; Matthew 21:33-46

“Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’”

Jesus was confronting the leaders of the Temple. He was doing so through this very pointed story about the master and his tenants. Who are the tenants? In this specific case they are the priests and the scribes. Jesus is taking them to task because of how they have burdened people with too many tasks and religious expectations. It had become too difficult to be a faithful person if faithful means following the rules set down by the leaders. And Jesus has had enough of it.

Bear in mind that this is Matthew 21. The next five chapters involve numerous denunciations of the Temple priests. In chapter 26, the chief priests and the elders are gunning for Jesus, plotting his downfall and demise. Not much of a plot twist.

If we were to have given Jesus some advice, perhaps it would have been to go slow, to not rock the boat quite so much. Take it easy or you are going to get people too upset. And you never know what might happen. This advice of course would have been directly contrary to the life of Jesus that we have come to know. And, if he had taken our advice, if he had taken his time and not ruffled too many feathers, then perhaps we would not be talking about him 2,000 years later.

Today’s sermon is another installment in my series on art and beauty. And it is a bit of a departure from the others. Today I am considering the role of Broadway musicals on religious sensibilities. You may be thinking—what? How have Broadway musicals influenced religion. How strange?

Ok, hear me out on this one. Religion can have an influence on popular culture and music. That seems obvious. And when the influence flows in one direction, can we also assume that it sometimes flows back in the other? I think it does.

Today, we heard a few selections from Broadway shows. In one song, Day by Day, the lyrics are a simple prayer.

Day by day
Day by day
Oh Dear Lord
Three things I pray
To see thee more clearly
Love thee more dearly
Follow thee more nearly
Day by day

And then it repeats over and over. We shortened it, mind you.

The song is from the show Godspell, which has an interesting history. It was a project by art students at Carnegie Mellon University in 1971. The first production was the master’s thesis of John-Michael Tebelak. As an explanation for how he came up with the idea for the musical, Tebelak told a story about attending Easter services in 1970 at a Catholic church in Pittsburgh.

He was a college student at the time. He went to Easter Sunday services wearing a T-shirt and overalls. I know, the horror. Others shared that concern, it seems. A police officer stopped this underdressed student and frisked him to determine whether he was carrying drugs. Talk about a welcoming environment.

In addition to this brush with the law, Tebelak described his experience of that Easter service as if instead of rolling away the stone across Jesus’ tomb, they were piling on more stones. Covering up the joy of the Easter story, covering up the good news that Christ has risen. And don’t come back without a shirt and tie.

That modern day story is reminiscent of our reading this morning. The tenants do not want to listen to their master. They attack his servants and even kill his son. If you read through the surrounding parts of Matthew, you hear more about the religious burdens being placed upon the Jewish community. Very strict behavioral expectations. Very high financial requirements. All of these burdens and barriers made it harder for people to be faithful, as defined by the leaders of the Temple.

Jesus was not blaming the Jewish people. He goes out of his way to say that tax collectors and prostitutes will enter the kingdom of heaven before these hypocritical religious leaders. Over the centuries this has been reworked into anti-Semitic tropes, but Jesus was never delivering that message. Whether others do so in his name is a long and sad story.

Think about the story of the young college student walking into Easter services. He was searched by the police. Why? Because he looked different. Because he was not following the explicit or implicit dress code. Because he was not what might have been seen as acceptable in the eyes of that particular church or that particular police officer. Or both.

Tebelak also noted that the service was uninspiring. Recall that this had been Easter Sunday. But he remembers that everyone seemed bored. The priest was hurrying as if he wanted to get it over with. You would think that that Sunday of all Sundays would have been joyful, filled with a sense of the miraculous. But that was not the case. What had been lost on that Sunday in that church at that time?

In response to this less than positive religious experience, Tebelak goes on to write Godspell. The name has a double meaning. It is a play on the word gospel and the phrase God’s spell. Tebelak wanted to evoke a religious experience, as if a spell had been cast upon the audience.

He also wanted to focus on the sense of joy that he personally felt reading about Jesus’ life in the Gospels. The miracles. The acceptance of others. The feeding and healing and caring for others. This is a very traditional treatment of the Biblical message. The story presented in Godspell followed the account of Jesus’ life spelled out in the Gospel, particularly the parables. Even though the format of musical theatre is in some respects unusual, the underlying story was anything but.

Now there was more than just the Bible involved in writing the musical, particularly in the lyrics of the songs. Most of those were drawn from old Anglican hymns. For example, Day by Day is based on a hymn from the 1940s. And that hymn was based upon a prayer written by a medieval saint, Richard of Chichester. So, even though this is a Broadway musical from the 1970s, the stories upon which it was based are Biblical and medieval, as well as modern.

I looked at some of the scholarly literature about this musical—and yes there is indeed a great deal of scholarly literature about Broadway musicals. One of the influences on Tebelak when he was writing the musical was a then recent essay by Rev. Harvey Cox. He is a retired professor at the Harvard Divinity School, still residing in dear old Cambridge at last report.

Cox’s essay was called the Feast of Fools and in it, he argued that humanity needed to recover its capacity for “festivity and fantasy.” The idea being both to celebrate the joys of living and to imagine a better world coming into being. Of course, this was the late 1960s. The youth movement was one source of hope for Cox, one showing that people were rediscovering a sense of joy in everyday life. You all can assess whether that was a fateful or fanciful observation.

Cox was suggesting that we needed to assume a playful attitude toward religion. He wrote, “Only by learning to laugh at the hopelessness around us can we touch the hem of hope.” The hem of hope—this is a reference to a moment in the Bible when someone touched the hem of Jesus’ robe and was filled with miraculous healing power.

Cox goes so far as to use the phrase “Christ the clown.” That image was not meant to be disrespectful. He was trying to signify a playful appreciation of the past and a refusal to accept the “specter of inevitability” in our future. The inevitability of war. The inevitability of social unrest. The inevitability of inequality. Remember this was 1969. One year before, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. And one year later, a young man was searched by the police for drugs during Easter Sunday services because he was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. You can laugh about that or cry over it. Or maybe you write a musical.

Here’s a question for today: what is church for? Is it for someone in a black robe to get up and make you all feel sinful? I am probably guilty of making some people feel guilty on occasion. Sometimes when I am trying to convey a moral message, it can appear as finger wagging. And I am sorry if that is how someone feels. I do not mean to be a downer, but what I intend is far different than how I might be perceived.

Perhaps this might help you all understand what I am trying to do. First and foremost, I do not believe in hell. I do not believe in hell at all. I cannot imagine an all-knowing and all-loving God condemning anyone for eternal punishment for a finite life of sin. Even the most terrible person will not end up like that. We can debate the ins and outs of those ideas, but that is where I am coming from when I get up here Sunday to Sunday.

So, when I say we should love one another, there is never behind that statement an implicit “or else.” The only consequence of such a choice is right here and right now. It means potentially choosing to lead a life filled with less love, building a society and a world filled with less love.

Love is not about winning some eternal door prize. Love is about changing the way that we walk around, how we treat one another, how we might break out into laughter at life’s twists and turns rather than feeling a sense of despair or hopelessness.

When I wrote that sentence yesterday, I thought back to the Bible readings so far this fall. And some of them have been depressing. Even today, we can hear Jesus’ words as accusatory, which they were. Jesus was angry that the Jewish people were being saddled with unreasonable burdens. He pointed out that even prostitutes would be welcomed by God. Even the tax collectors—even in ancient times there was no love for the IRS.

Again, I do not think that means anyone would be eternally cut off from God. Instead, we become cut off from God in this life by not loving, not caring, not concerning ourselves with one another.

In this sense, however, that means we can find God every day.

But God does not live here in this building—I have looked. God does not even live inside of us. The best way to imagine where God lives is in between each of us. We enter the presence of God when we broach that distance between people. When we love our friends and family. When we love total strangers. God is love and so love is where we can truly find God.

The musical Godspell has been popular over the years, but that does not mean it has not been criticized. One criticism was that it features a bunch of hippies. The characters are in fact not from the Bible, but they are just regular folks in the present.

There are no character names in Godspell. The tradition has been that the actors use their own names for their characters in the Playbill. Jesus gets his own billing, of course, but otherwise the musical is about how a group of ordinary people grow into a community of followers. It is a conversion experience set to music. And the connections they create with one another are an essential part of that conversion.

The other criticism of Godspell is with the ending. There is no depiction of the resurrection story. Instead, Jesus dies and is carried offstage by the other actors. The End.

For some people that is a scandalous way to end things. Even in the Bible, mind you, the Gospel of Mark was rewritten centuries after it was set down for the same reason. Why? Because Mark the Evangelist chose to end his account of Jesus’ life without any specific mention of the resurrection. Later editors changed the original text of the Gospel because they disagreed with Mark. And you should of course never disagree with anyone named Mark.

The musical Godspell is not the Gospel of Mark. And even though it is highly Biblical in its way, it is not truly Biblical. The story of Godspell is not about Jesus’ resurrection at all. It is about the formation of a new community of people. People who have chosen to carry forward his teachings to the world. It is about what Jesus meant, how he influenced others.

And there are quite a few followers of Jesus who do not focus on Jesus’ death or his resurrection, but instead focus on his life and his teachings. You do not have to believe in heaven or hell to believe that the moral teachings of Jesus are a way to live a good and happy life.

One of the fundamental dynamics of a religion is that it inevitably changes over time. It can go from new and exciting and to something tightly wound and ever more burdensome. The priests and the scribes piled on expectations and responsibilities to the point that it was practically impossible to follow the rules without messing them up. And the priests and scribes were there to tell you that you had messed up and to require various complex and expensive ways to atone for your sins.

Jesus said that should stop, but it keeps happening. It happened in the Catholic Church leading to the Reformation. It happened in the Protestant churches, leading to their decline. It happens to this day.

This tendency has been likened to having a statue, representing the beauty and revelation of a religious tradition. Over time, though, someone builds a scaffold around the statue. That is so they can keep it tidy, and  tinker a bit here and there. But the problem is that the scaffolding never comes down. You can get a glimpse of the statue if you contort yourself. Maybe if you are lucky, one of the inner circle will invite you onto the scaffold for a quick look. Not too long, mind you. Perhaps after a time, a museum will be built around the statue, just to keep it safe, you understand. And then we’ll sell tickets. Some people get to cut the line. Of course. The right people with the right connections. But don’t worry—there will be a free admission night once a week. Unless we are renting out the museum for a wedding. Sorry.

A Broadway musical is one way to recapture the joyful feeling that one can get from growing to believe in something. It is not traditional, because traditions can over time turn into that scaffolding I mentioned. You become so focused on the traditions, the secret handshakes and the Sunday morning choreography, that you become ever more distant from the purpose of it all. The purpose of Jesus’ life and lessons. The purpose of getting together to remember that life and those lessons.

And of course, even a Broadway musical can become hidebound with traditions. Oh, no we would never stage things that way. My goodness, why did you change that dance number? Oh, my stars, why did you dress people that way? The musical which was supposed to be a purely joyful experience can be turned into just another boring display of tired traditions.

Godspell was very traditional, mind you, when it came to the message of Jesus’ life. It was very traditional when invoking medieval prayers and the words of saints. But it did so in a new fashion, with music that spoke to that moment in time. That does not mean “out with the old and in with the new.” It does mean “in with the new and let the new join together with the old.”

This brings me back to my personal theological maxim, patent pending, Caggiano’s Theory of Theological Necessity. Ask yourself, what is the one lesson, the one religious idea that you cannot do without and still feel that it is recognizably what you have faith in? Not a creed, not a list of dogmatic statements. Just the barest of essentials. For me, it comes from the Gospel of Matthew:

“Jesus said…‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets”

That last bit is important—everything hangs off these two commandments. And if they do not match up with these two lessons or, more importantly, if they contradict those lessons in any way, you let them drop off. You place them aside. Place them aside because they are not only distractions, but they are undermining what Jesus taught.

A few years ago, there was a writer named Marie Kondo who spoke about how to organize your home and your life. And her memorable question for organizing was asking if something sparked joy in you. If that lamp does  not spark joy, pitch it out the door. Carefully.

Strangely enough, Marie Kondo now has children. And one of the items she has seemingly pitched out the door is her own obsessive tidying. Because frankly, that outlook does not make sense with a houseful of children. Because she no longer gets her joy from cleaning but, I would surmise, from her children. And you can have the joy of children or an immaculate house. It is quite a challenge to have both.

Joy might never become the constant state of our lives, but when you find it, you should help it to stick around.

One of the challenges for a religious tradition is that over the years there will be a need to cast some things aside. To cast them aside, if and when, they become distractions from what truly matters. Old dreary hymns, get rid of them. White gloves and fedora hats, you were great while you lasted. And drug searching college students on Easter Sunday, yeah not worth discussing.

We need to keep our eyes on what matters. And we need to do so within a community of people dedicated to those important matters. And from time to time, it is worth thinking about what caused us to feel joy. If those are the same things, the important matters and the points of joy, we are doing a great job. And if they are not the same things, we might need to reconsider what is truly important. Amen.