{"id":1688,"date":"2012-04-06T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-06T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/fellowshipofsaintsandsinners\/?p=1688"},"modified":"2018-07-20T20:33:45","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T20:33:45","slug":"desperate-housewife-or-gods-dreamer-station-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fellowshipofsaintsandsinners\/2012\/04\/desperate-housewife-or-gods-dreamer-station-5.html","title":{"rendered":"Desperate Housewife or God’s Dreamer? Station 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finally, the sermon that many of you helped me write in encouraging the use of “appropriate” humor even on the darkest day of the church calendar. \u00a0Today’s Good Friday service at Mount Zion A.M.E. will be a series of \u00a0meditations on the perspectives of the women who appear throughout the Passion narrative- Pilate’s wife, Claudia, being one of them. \u00a0Enjoy! \u00a0May you walk away having laughed and having asked yourself a question that is not just for Pilate’s wife but for all of us in our God-forsaken places.<\/strong><\/p>\n

While [Pilate] was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, “Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.”<\/em> -Matthew 27:19<\/p>\n

Pilate\u2019s wife- or, Claudia, as subsequent church tradition has named her- knows about dreams that don\u2019t come true.<\/p>\n

Her whole life up until now, I suspect, has been one, big miscarriage of best-laid hopes.<\/p>\n

Because if I had to guess, I would imagine that Claudia once dreamt of a whole lot more than what her life has amounted to.\u00a0 She was, after all, an aristocrat, the cream of the crop in imperial Rome.\u00a0 The most eligible, maybe, of bachelorettes.\u00a0 Wealthy, beautiful and educated (or at least as educated as the women of her time could be).\u00a0 She probably had the world at her finger tips.<\/p>\n

Claudia\u2019s marriage to Pilate? I suspect at one time she had hoped that tying the knot would bring her access to an exciting life in the limelight and at the epicenter of luxury and power in the world\u2019s greatest city of Rome.<\/p>\n

Instead, she finds herself stuck in the dry, dusty, remote colony of Judea, on the outskirts of the empire, with only a spineless middle manager for a husband, whose job is merely to keep the peace.\u00a0 Life here is one long, drawn-out reminder of unfulfilled dreams, like credits in a movie that keep running forever.<\/p>\n

And, if Claudia once dreamt of access to the emperor\u2019s inner circle, if she once spun visions of a future life in the corridors of the imperial government, now she has resigned herself to smaller, more trivial ambitions.\u00a0 Now she fills her days by doing her nails while watching morning talk shows. \u00a0By speculating on when the next caravan of luxury goods will roll into town so she can switch out the drapes. \u00a0By wondering how many ways she can wear her hair to impress the young man with the nice calves and the six pack who drives her chariot.<\/p>\n

Boredom, triviality, and resignation have become the furniture of Claudia\u2019s life now- so much so that she barely even notices their presence.<\/p>\n

And the day when Jesus comes to town in handcuffs is like any other day, really, in Claudia\u2019s small world of aspirating dreams.\u00a0 It\u2019s like any other day except that today she\u2019s been dozing on the couch, listening to the local news, when a picture of Jesus flashes across the screen with the headlines of his arrest.\u00a0 Something about some cockamamie trial and angry crowds that want him crucified for nothing in particular.\u00a0 Just because.\u00a0 For blood sport- and because the sky is blue and it\u2019s a Friday.<\/p>\n

And suddenly there and then the smallness of this woman\u2019s inner chamber opens up onto a vast stage on which the course of human history is playing out in this backwater city of Jerusalem.\u00a0 There and then she perceives- if only fleetingly- that maybe her part isn\u2019t so small after all, because she in some way is related to this mysterious stranger named Jesus, and their fates are unavoidably linked in some great, cosmic scheme.\u00a0 In that moment, she apprehends that her mid-level-bureaucrat-of-a-husband with Jello for a spine is not presiding over just another petty dispute.\u00a0 He is in some way changing the course of human history.<\/p>\n

And this reality, as it sets in, scares and even torments her.<\/p>\n

But Claudia for so long now has been used to dreaming dreams that don\u2019t come true.\u00a0 So when she scribbles out this message to her husband, she is giving voice to her own desperate sense of powerlessness, a kind of complacency with the status quo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t have anything to do with that innocent man,\u201d she writes. And in that moment it\u2019s the best she can hope for, for her and her husband- that Pontius Pilate would just wash his hands of the matter.\u00a0 No high hopes for justice here.\u00a0 No declarations of Jesus\u2019 divinity or wrestling with what that might mean just yet.\u00a0 No suggestions that Claudia or her husband have any power whatsoever to change a quickly deteriorating situation. Only the desperate plea that her husband have nothing to do with Jesus.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a small-minded request, really.\u00a0 It apprehends something true about Jesus even as it avoids the implications.\u00a0 And maybe this is because Claudia has learned with the years not to ask too much of life or expect too much of herself or others.\u00a0 She has become so good at accepting the triviality and pettiness of her little, self-absorbed world that she can\u2019t even imagine what it would be like for things to change, for God to come along and make a way out of all those dead ends.<\/p>\n

You and I have been there, too.\u00a0 Maybe we\u2019re there right now.\u00a0 Because all sorts of things in this world can collude to make our dreams shrink and our lives devolve into little more than just going through the motions, forgetting who we really are and who we were made to be.<\/p>\n

We, too, live in a world in which dreams often don\u2019t come true. Sure, we may not be whittling away our days in a luxury villa somewhere near the Mediterranean- for many of us, that is <\/em>a dream!- but we have seen our hopes slowly suffocate in other ways.\u00a0 Our marriages unravel and our dreams of \u201chappily ever after\u201d end with divorce.\u00a0 Our once-healthy bodies get sick, deteriorate and die, often at the most inconvenient of times.\u00a0 Our hopes of financial security fall apart with the loss of a job, or one quick, downward swing of the stock market.<\/p>\n

Collectively, our dreams fall apart, too.\u00a0 These days I don\u2019t really hear much talk about the so-called \u201cAmerican dream\u201d \u2013 you know, that promise that with hard work and equal opportunity, every American could earn their way to economic prosperity. These days, we talk a lot more about unemployment, about home foreclosures, about a growing divide between the very rich and the rest of us.\u00a0 Somewhere along the way, the American dream went missing, or at least became a whole lot less spacious and inviting.\u00a0 Today the \u201cAmerican dream\u201d for many people is just to keep their head above water- to have enough money to pay the bills and keep food on the table, maybe to win the lottery some day.<\/p>\n

And in these spaces, when our dreams come undone at the seams, the best we can hope for can sometimes be clinging to what we have left, clinging to what we know- even if it is small, dreary, or trivial- because it\u2019s what we\u2019ve become accustomed to.\u00a0 In these spaces, it becomes easy to pretend that God really has nothing to do with us, and we nothing to do with God.\u00a0 We grow timid, complacent and afraid to dream big, God-breathed dreams, because our lives and our world have told us that dreams don\u2019t come true\u2026<\/p>\n

This week I met a woman who on a day much like this one almost exactly four years ago saw her whole world fall apart.\u00a0 That day she got the news that her husband and twin boys had died suddenly in a freak accident.\u00a0 They had been returning from a fishing trip when their private plane crashed.\u00a0 All the passengers on board had died instantly.\u00a0 She and her remaining son in the wake of unspeakable grief were left to pick up the pieces of their lives and somehow- slowly, painstakingly- put one foot in front of the other.<\/p>\n

I asked this woman what it was that had helped her cope in that God-forsaken place of unfathomable loss and grief.\u00a0 She said that prior to the accident she hadn\u2019t really believed God could be concretely involved with her life, but that that all had changed when her world fell apart. When her world fell apart, she was obliged to begin asking God to have everything to do with her life.\u00a0 And she saw how God began to answer her prayers in very real, tangible ways.\u00a0 And with time, God began to help her re-imagine her life put back together again, and along the way to give her new dreams and then enflesh those dreams.<\/p>\n

Somehow in the midst of deep, cataclysmic tragedy, God gave this woman the ability to dream again, and to believe that her dreams had everything <\/em>to do with God.\u00a0 Because God in Jesus is a God of possibilities- a God who makes a way out of no way, a God who takes our dreams and shapes and transforms them and breathes new life into them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Pilate’s wife in Antonio Ciseri’s painting, “Ecce Homo,” or “Behold the Man” (19th century)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t have anything to do with that innocent man,\u201d Claudia writes.\u00a0 \u201cDon\u2019t have anything to do with Jesus,\u201d is her appeal.<\/p>\n

I wonder if in some subterranean place in her unconscious, Claudia knows that acknowledging the reality that she and Jesus really do have something to do with one another will rock her world.\u00a0 Will overturn her comfortable status quo<\/em>.\u00a0 Will oblige her both to dream again and dream differently about things that have everything to do with God.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t have anything to do with Jesus\u201d might just as well form a question then, a question from the writer of Matthew\u2019s Gospel for us-<\/em> the question being, \u201cIs it possible not <\/em>to have anything to do with Jesus?\u201d<\/p>\n

Matthew\u2019s Gospel would answer \u201cno,\u201d that by virtue of being alive we have something to do with Jesus.\u00a0 Because in what can only be irony, Pilate washes his hands of Jesus\u2019 blood; he follows his wife\u2019s advice, but we, the reader, know the blood is on Pilate\u2019s hands, too, just as it is on the hands of the chief priests and the crowd.\u00a0 Just as it is on the hands of a woman madly scribbling a note from a place inside her where dreams once bloomed.<\/p>\n

On this day we\u2019ve come to call \u201cGood Friday,\u201d Jesus goes to the cross to show us that our dreams don\u2019t have to shrivel up and die.\u00a0 He goes to the cross to help us remember who we once were, and who we can be again, because our lives in the end have everything<\/em> to do with Him.\u00a0 Because apart from Him, we\u2019re all just desperate house wives- aspiring royalty with aspirating dreams and too much time on our hands.<\/p>\n

Today Jesus goes to the cross to tell us we\u2019re far more than that, and to ask us to believe in things we thought were impossible.\u00a0 Things we had come to assume were just the stuff of broken dreams, nothing more. Things like forgiveness and community.\u00a0 Things like healing and restoration.\u00a0 Things like concrete answers to prayer.\u00a0 Things like love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness and self-control. Things like new life sprouting miraculously from the ashes of tragedy- new and abundant life that never runs out.<\/p>\n

Jesus goes to the cross to help us dream again in all of our God-forsaken places.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finally, the sermon that many of you helped me write in encouraging the use of “appropriate” humor even on the darkest day of the church calendar. \u00a0Today’s Good Friday service at Mount Zion A.M.E. will be a series of \u00a0meditations on the perspectives of the women who appear throughout the Passion narrative- Pilate’s wife, Claudia,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":461,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,69,43,25,65,5],"tags":[577,571,552,561,506],"class_list":["post-1688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cross","category-good-news","category-humor","category-jesus","category-the-bible","category-women","tag-desperate-housewives","tag-final-week-of-lent","tag-good-friday","tag-holy-week","tag-womens-history-month"],"yoast_head":"\nDesperate Housewife or God's Dreamer? 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