Visions and Work
“As Saul was traveling along and approaching Damascus, a light from the sky suddenly flashed around him.” — Acts 9:3
As most, if not all of you know, I had a career before I became a pastor. I wrote for the stage, professional theater. And, if there was anything I specialized in, it was writing musicals.
Now, one show I wrote, one not produced but one which did get some readings and run throughs, was a musical version of Much Ado About Nothing, the play by William Shakespeare. With what we thought of as great good humor, the composer, David Schaefer, and I stole our title from another work by the Bard. We called our musical All’s Well that Ends Well.
Indeed, those titles are interchangeable and I think the lyric to closing song of our show proves it. (Quote): “In the end love / reigned victorious / and remained / forever glorious / while providing / us a story with song and dance. / It’s been a pleasure / performing for you. / all’s well that ends well / So here ends Much Ado!
Knowledge of Shakespeare’s works can be an acquired taste. I, myself, was not particularly familiar with them until I started doing research for that show.
When I was writing the show a friend said to me: “re-writing Shakespeare— it must be every writer’s dream and goal.” I don’t know if re-writing Shakespeare was my goal as a writer but since that time, I have read a lot about the much beloved Bard.
So, I bought a recent book by the popular writer Bill Bryson about this resident of Stratford-upon-Avon, and it proved a good refresher course in things Shakespearean. And, needless to say, one of the basic things we know about Shakespeare is we don’t really know a lot about him.
Today, the Bard might be described as lower middle class. Typical of someone in that era— he lived from 1564 to 1616— and in that segment of society, there are very few real records of his existence, other than those great plays and poems.
That Shakespeare wrote great plays and poems was not a majority opinion when he lived nor for quite some time after. To be clear: in his time he was successful.
But in that era, plays were owned by the theater companies for whom they were written, not the playwright. The slim records available do show Shakespeare was probably the prime writer for the Chamberlain’s Men and also a part owner of that group. But he owned no more than an eighth of a share of the company.
These players were among the favored groups to perform at court during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and then an overwhelming favorite of King James, of Bible fame. So, were we to make a comparison to today’s world, Shakespeare might be considered a good writer and producer of a popular television series but not at all an author of weight or authority.
Now, only about 230 plays survive from the time of Elizabeth and James. 15% are Shakespeare’s. It was happenstance so many were preserved.
The First Folio, a collection of Shakespeare’s plays, was published seven years after his death by friends, probably out of some sense of personal devotion to him. Over half, 18, had not been printed before, including Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew , and it’s likely these all would have been lost had the Folio not been produced.
While it is an overstatement to say the works Shakespeare ever totally disappeared, he was dead over one hundred years, into the seventeen hundreds, before these writings really start to be recognized as worthy of note. And only then does someone even attempt to write anything which resembled a biography.
Some plays did not receive performance again for nearly three hundred years. Troilus and Cressida had to wait until 1898 to be restaged. But, no matter what people thought in Shakespeare’s times, today there seems to be no question that, as Bach’s works moved Western Music toward codification, so too William Shakespeare did much the same for both the English language and for the world of theater.
All of which is to say, the recognition of what Shakespeare did and the coming to an understanding of these works as significant, was a process. It took the work and the devotion of a few over the course of years followed the passage of time to get to where we are today (at least in relation to Shakespeare). And, who knows, perhaps in another four hundred years, Shakespeare will not be held in the same esteem. (Slight pause.)
And these words are from the work know as Luke / Acts in the section commonly referred to as Acts: “As Saul was traveling along and approaching Damascus, a light from the sky suddenly flashed around him.” (Slight pause.)
Here is an interesting question: did the writers of the New Testament know they were writing Scripture? The answer is, of course, ‘no,’ they did not. For the writers of the Gospels, for Paul and for the other writers, their prime goal was to live faithful lives. The talented among them also wrote in hope of faithfully making a record of the journey.
One of the things we, who live in the Twenty-first Century, seem to fail to grasp is the effort and the time it took for the spread of Christianity to happen. Perhaps that is because the New Testament is too familiar to us. Perhaps it is because we are so surrounded by Christian tradition mixed with myth, we don’t pay much attention to what the writings really say.
Here’s an example of tradition and myth. My bet is most of us have heard it said Paul got knocked off his horse. I said it, myself, in Bible Study Wednesday night. But nowhere in Acts or in Paul’s writing is the word horse even used. Paul (quote): “fell to the ground” after a light (quote): “flashed around him.” There is no horse.
So, where does that idea come from? Perhaps from late medieval and Renaissance paintings of Paul on the road to Damascus, but not from Scripture.
We make other mistakes. It seems to me we read the New Testament narratives as if they happened over the course of only several months. Most scholars agree, Jesus is raised from death in the year 30 of the Common Era.
Most scholars agree, Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians is the earliest work in the New Testament, written about the year 54. Most Scholars agree, the works which make it into the canon are completed as late as 100 or 110, seventy or eighty years after the resurrection.
Most scholars agree, the number of Christians in the entire Mediterranean Basin in the year 100, is less than 10,000. Which is to say the growth of the Way is slow. (Slight pause.)
Still, this is clear: Paul has not just a vision of Jesus, but a vision of who Jesus is, a vision of how Jesus fits into the Jewish concept of One God. And yet, it takes years for that vision to be fully developed to the point where he writes about it and years beyond the work of his lifetime for the vision to really spread. After all, it is the year 325 of the Common Era before the church fully delineates the Trinity with the proclamation Nicene Creed. (Slight pause.)
We, in our culture, tend not just to want answers and results right now. We also seem to have trouble with the perspective of history and the time the work of the Dominion really takes, the time necessary for deep understanding. As the poet Maya Angelou has said, she is always surprised when someone claims to be a Christian since she is under the impression that becoming a Christian takes a lifetime to accomplish. (Slight pause.)
Yes, perhaps we all want visions. But to have vision— that’s to have vision, not visions, not apparitions— to have the vision necessary to see things through, to see what needs to happen, is more rare and more important than to simply having visions. And Paul unquestionably seems willing to do the work of the Dominion— to have vision— even when there appears to be little progress. (Slight pause.)
Perhaps a key question for us is this: are we willing to do the work of the dominion, even if sometimes we get little in terms of result? (Slight pause.) All Shakespeare really did was to live in his time and in his day, doing the daily work, the necessary work. It was years before his writing was recognized as great. And he was not there when greatness was finally recognized.
All Paul did was to live in his time and in his day, doing the daily work of the Dominion, the necessary work. And he was not there when the message spread far and wide.
I want to suggest a Christian calling is to do the work of the Dominion, even when that work is not recognized by those around us, even when it feels like the results are meager. And what is the work of the Dominion?
It is the work of justice, peace, freedom and love. It is the work of caring for others.
It is the work of sharing the Good News that Jesus is the Messiah— the Second Person of the Trinity and that God is the One Triune God. The Christian calling is doing the work of the Dominion in our time, in our era and not worrying about the results.
That may be a tall order in the modern world— not worrying about results. But it is our calling. Amen.
United Church of Christ, First Congregational, Norwich, New York
04/18/2010
ENDPIECE: It is the practice of the Pastor to speak after the Closing Hymn, but before the Benediction. This, then, is an précis of what the pastor said before the blessing: “The baseball player Cal Ripken holds the record for consecutive games played, 2,632. He played for only one team, the Baltimore Orioles, and while he was with them they won only One World series and that happened early in his career, I think the third year. For most of that career, they were a losing team. They were a terrible team for most of his career. Still, he was out there day after day after day after day, just doing the job, just working in the vineyard. I think, more so than the excitement of flashes of light, we Christians are called on to work in the vineyard. We are, hence, more called on to have vision than to have visions. Or as we in the United Church of Christ like to say it ‘God is still speaking.’ And it is through us.”
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