Wild Card

The Reverend Seth Ethan Carey

December 30th, 2007

Hebrews 2:14-18

First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois

www.firstconge.org

630-469-3096

Introduction to the Scripture

This is an excerpt from one of Paul’s letters to a community that was simultaneously Jewish and Christian. You might call that an identity crisis, but in the early days of Christianity this wasn’t unusual. These were simply people who both accepted Christ’s divinity and continued to practice the Jewish Law. And in this passage, you’ll hear Paul saying that Jesus became like one of us, taking a form that we can identify with.

But there’s just one problem: what if everyone identifies with something different?

***

I want to tell you about a friend of mine.

His name is Senor Misterioso, and he’s a four-inch tall plastic figurine. He wears a suit that glows in the dark, and his mustache is immaculately sculpted. As his name implies, Senor Misterioso is a man of the utmost mystery. Nobody knows where he came from, or where he’s headed next. Nor can anyone tell you where he disappears to for days at a time. The box that he came in says that—and I quote—“In some circles, the elimination of Senor Misterioso and his atomic suit is of the utmost priority; to others, he is a sought after dinner speaker. Who is he? Why is he here? And who trims that impressive mustache?”

Of course Senor Misterioso is little more than a small and debonair piece of plastic. But that simple fact does nothing to diminish his legendary mystique. A number of urban legends have sprung up around him on the Internet, and some of them are pretty disturbing. One owner of this enigmatic figurine claims that she took it on vacation with her, placing it in the foreground of all of her photographs. I guess she thought it would be funny to show the photos to her friends back home. But she wasn’t laughing when she had the pictures developed, and Senor Misterioso was inexplicably absent from every one of them.

In another travel-related episode, Senor Misterioso vanished from his owner’s hotel room in Paris, only to reappear three weeks later on said owner’s desk at work. The figurine was standing atop a stamped U.S. passport indicating that it had arrived in town that very morning.

Is there any truth to these outlandish tales? Probably not, but that doesn’t make this little guy any less mysterious in my book. For you see, I had hoped to bring him with me this morning, but he vanished. Perhaps he had more pressing business elsewhere.

***

The subject of Paul’s letter to the Hebrews is another mysterious figure, one who goes by the name Jesus of Nazareth. At a glance, Jesus may seem far less enigmatic than our friend in the white suit, but that’s only because so many people think they’ve got him all figured out. And yet for all of our certainty, no one can seem to agree on who the historical Jesus was, where he came from, or what he set out to do. He is, if you will, a man of a thousand faces.

Paul’s letter to the Hebrews describes one of them—and in this case, it’s a distinctly Jewish portrait. Of course Jesus was Jewish, but in itself that wasn’t enough to appeal to a group of people who had very different expectations of what a messiah should look like. They had been waiting for a warrior, someone like King David or Samson, someone to deliver them from the hands of their Roman overlords. By their standards, a messiah who got himself killed was no messiah at all.

So Paul has to describe Jesus to them on their own terms. He has to meet them where they are. As such, this passage is rich with language that evokes Jewish tradition and theology. Paul talks about angels, which were important figures in Jewish mysticism and mythology. He says that Jesus didn’t come to help the angels, but rather to help human beings, who he calls “the descendants of Abraham,” Abraham being the first of the great Jewish patriarchs. Paul goes on to describe Jesus as a high priest, which was the highest position of Jewish authority in the Temple of Jerusalem.

Finally, and most importantly, Paul says that Christ came “to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people.” This atonement is a reference to a passage in Leviticus, one that proscribes a ritual for cleansing the community of sin and removing the evil from their midst. The ritual involves two goats—one is slain for the sins of the people, and the other is sent off into with wilderness after those sins have been whispered in its ear, charged with the task of carrying them far away.

Paul’s attempt to appeal to the Hebrew community is not unique, and his technique has been repeated by evangelists ever since, resulting in countless versions of the Christian mythos. My favorite is probably the Saxon gospel, in which Jesus is described as a kind of Nordic warrior-chieftain, born of a god, leader of a band of twelve swordsmen. In this gospel, Jesus looks more like Beowulf than a carpenter’s son.

Just when you think you know somebody.

***

It just goes to show how many beliefs about Jesus there are out there.

On one end of the spectrum, you’ve got the cartoon Jesus. The cartoon Jesus adorns the walls of Sunday school classrooms around the world, where he can usually be found with a cartoon lamb in his arms and a smiling cartoon child on his lap. The cartoon Jesus does not speak of an impending apocalypse, nor does He cast out demons. He just loves. He loves people, He loves animals, He loves the whole wide world. And that, I think, is a critical part of who Jesus is. But like other cartoon characters, the cartoon Jesus is portrayed as wearing the same clothes at all times, leading one to imagine a closet filled with ten identical sets of white robes and sandals—not unlike Inspector Gadget’s collection of identical grey trench coats, or Senor Misterioso’s white linen suits—and such comparisons make it difficult to take Jesus seriously as a real person.

On the other end of the scale, we find a radically different personality—the apocalyptic preacher. This Jesus stands on street corners, proclaiming that the end is near and threatening skeptics with eternal punishment. And when the end does come, you’ll see him riding on the clouds of heaven, raining lightning on sinners and cutting them down with a flaming sword. But this Jesus tends to be favored by fans of the Left Behind book series, and that doesn’t do his credibility any favors.

Between these radically different portrayals of the son of God are a dozen other identities and aliases. He was a carpenter, but also healer, and an exorcist whose very name is said to ward of demons. His most casual comments have sparked violent revolutions. Numerous biographers have tried to tell his story, but the story is never the same. Some say that he shared divine secrets with his closest disciples, a kind of Promethean fire that was too dangerous to reveal to the public. He’s been portrayed in musicals and films ranging from poignant to outrageous, such as Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. Christians believe that he was the son of God, while others say he was nothing more than a mad prophet.

And still others claim that he never existed at all.

***

Not surprisingly, people’s ideas about Jesus often reflect their own self-image. Liberals say Jesus was a liberal, conservatives think Jesus was conservative, and atheists think he liked to argue about the existence of God at cocktail parties. (Ok, that was a cheap shot.)

But some people take this to an extreme, claiming that they are Jesus. One such man has captured a bit of media attention. His name is Jose Luis Miranda de Jesus, although he usually just calls himself “the Jesus man.” An ex-heroin addict and former gang member, Miranda preaches a strange gospel indeed. He says that there is no such thing as sin and Hell does not exist, which has enraged some and appealed to others. He apparently isn’t as concerned about the evils of materialism as Jesus was, because he’s amassed a large fortune by swindling his followers into giving him expensive jewelry, sports cars, and multi-million dollar estates.

Many call him a false prophet, but he’s got hard evidence to prove them wrong. In a recent interview, Miranda states that, according to the Bible, false prophets will come in Jesus’ name, performing miracles and signs and wonders. But Miranda’s only trick is making your money disappear.

“I don’t perform miracles,” he said, “So how can I be a false prophet?”

While we’re on the subject of Jesus impersonators, one more comes to mind—far less dangerous, I think, but interesting in his own right. He doesn’t claim to be Jesus, but he has claimed Jesus’ name and likeness for his own in a maneuver of divine identity theft. Chris “Jesus” Ferguson is a professional poker player on the World Poker Tour. Like cartoon Jesus, Ferguson has long hair and a beard. But he rounds them out with dark sunglasses, a black fedora, and cowboy boots. He can’t perform miracles either, although it’s said that he can throw playing cards at with such speed and accuracy that they can cut through bananas.

It’s not walking on water—but it would be a handy skill when preparing a bowl of Frosted Flakes.

***

You may think Ferguson’s blend of Christianity and high-stakes gambling is blasphemous. If so, you might not be too keen on the Casino Night fundraiser our church is sponsoring, either. But rest assured the only real gambling taking place on Casino Night is the raffle. And while Ferguson’s use of ‘Jesus’ as a nickname is a pretty shameless marketing ploy, I think that the real Jesus does have something in common with a deck of cards—metaphorically speaking, of course.

In the game of poker, certain rules allow for the use of a wild card. While in play, that card can assume the function of any other card in the deck. And Jesus is a lot like that, because he’s so many different things to so many different people. I’m even tempted to say that he’s whatever we want him to be, but I don’t think that’s quite right. You see, Christ’s fundamental nature doesn’t ever change. A wild ace of spades may, for a moment, become a three of hearts. But at the end of the day, it’s still an ace of spades.

And Christ is still God’s word incarnate, year after year after year. He meets us where we are, but that doesn’t mean he is who we are. We aren’t Jesus, and Jesus isn’t us. But he loves us anyway, more than we can ever know. Sure, he’s mysterious. But unlike the strange Senor Misterioso, he won’t mysteriously vanish on you. He’s there when we need him most. And that need is what our scripture this morning is all about. It says that God chose to become a human being for a time and dwell among us, like an ace becoming a king—because whether anyone knew it or not, that’s the card we needed more than any other.

In the end, all of these questions about Christ cease to matter. When life deals us a cruel hand, all we need to know is that he loves us, and that we aren’t alone. I’m reminded of a sad song that a good friend of mine once wrote: “Sometimes you’re like a candle burning at both ends/ when an old guitar and a deck of cards are your only friends.”

But when the chips are down, that wild card is a good friend to have.

Amen.