June 18, 2017 - Second Sunday after Pentecost - Silence

How does a congregation get to know their new potential pastor? This is a question that certainly relates to upcoming worship.

Photo by Ron Houser

About 70 people in the congregation showed up for the opportunity to meet the pastoral candidate our Call Committee has selected this last Friday and Saturday. There were "getting to know each other" questions for and from Pastor Ray during the Friday potluck, conversations over donuts and coffee Saturday morning and, finally, meeting for lunch at the food carts near Creator. The answers to some of questions pointed to a continuation of Creator's value and missions, some suggested a different approach which is probably as it should be for healthy ministry.

Pastor Ron presided again this Sunday while Pastor Michelle traveled back from Poland. Luka gave a touching extemporaneous Mission Moment talk and let the whole congregation know he was leaving for Spokane for the fall term and how he would miss being able to worship and be in community with all of us. His farewell worship will be next Sunday.

There were special musical moments for me in worship today. Matt and I both sang Of The Father's Love Begotten during Offertory. I felt a different reverence for this piece as we delivered it compared to the sending song Canticle of the Turning. Still I appreciated the different power and strengths inherent in each piece.

For me, the Gospel and sermon were profoundly affected by a somewhat personal experience. Last Tuesday my wife and I took in the Martin Scorsese film Silence, based on the 1966 novel of the same name by Shūsaku Endō. The story is about faith and doubt in two Portuguese missionaries in 17th century Japan and their Japanese followers who profess to be Christian. The Japanese rulers tortured and murdered those who professed to be Christian at that time. Silence raises questions about what being Christian means to different people.

The story does not dwell on why the Roman Catholics were treated like this by the rulers. In fact the Portuguese missionaries ordered Japanese Christians to destroy Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. They also closed their eyes to European slave traders (putting non-Christian Japanese into slavery and selling them to other countries). In addition the missionaries were used as a tool of colonizing Japan. Interestingly, Japan banned Catholic but not Protestant Christianity.  This, however, is not talked about in the film. Towards the end a Dutch trader picks up the narrative about the priests in Silence but ultimately this history is not of central concern for the story.

Given all the reasons the Japanese authorities view Christians as a threat they mercilessly kill all the converts. By the time the Silence story proper starts there is a trade-off repeatedly extended by the authorities to those suspected of Christian belief. By placing one’s foot on a fumi-e, a small plaque bearing a likeness of Christ or the Virgin, one can escape punishment and perhaps be freed. Refuse, and one faced torture or worse.

Some secret Christians accept this trade-off, others don't. One of the priests, Rodrigues, recommends trampling on the fumi-e, and the other priest disagrees, appalled by this. After seeing people who elect not to "trample' go through death or torture, further philosophical questions are introduced late in the film that suggest the Christian faith of the Japanese peasants isn’t really Christian at all. Due to a long-ago error of translation, they may worship not the “Son” as Jesus but the “Sun” in the sky.

The villagers often use the word Deus for Jesus. The word de-us for the West is the root of Deity, deism, pan-deism, and poly-deism. Ironically all these are theories in which any divine figure is absent from intervening in human affairs. This curious circumstance originates from the use of the word "deism" in the 17th and 18th centuries as a contrast to the prevailing "theism", belief in an actively intervening God.

Throughout Silence all the priests feel tormented by God’s silence and non-intervention. They question whether this is the same as absence. Is God’s refusal to intervene an unimaginable and intolerable cruelty? One priest asks “How can I explain his silence to these people?”

Silence is a film of that resolves itself into a single thought: if a Christian recants, yet maintains a hidden impregnable core of secret faith, a hidden finger-cross, is that a defeat or not? A public disavowal of faith can dissuade hundreds or thousands from believing so what is God's will. Is the public theater of faith more important than a secret bargain with a silent creator that saves lives? These are crucial questions and Silence does not provide simple answers.

The Christian villagers routinely share other more "worldly" reasons for their faith (depending on how the word "worldly" is defined). For the first time they may have met men in the priests who consistently treat them like human beings. To quote the book "It was the human kindness and charity of the fathers that touched their hearts." (p. 32.) And there is also the promise of a paradise in the next world, given by Jesus, that offers the villagers hope which is absent in their melancholy lives.

Today's Gospel - Matthew 10:16 -23 - read in this context - is illuminating:

"See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles. When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time;  for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.

Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes."

The June 4th Pentecost post included what Jesus said in John 15:13: No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. This film offers a different insight into that verse.

In Silence many professed Christians lose their mortal lives in Jesus' name. It also shows Rodrigues, the main missionary that the story follows, as gaining a new understanding of these secret Japanese Christians and himself.  Throughout the story the Jesuit priests teach the villagers about Jesus without becoming fluent in Japanese (one explanation of that "long-ago error of translation").

God's silence - or the deafness of man - is broken for Rodrigues, the priest we follow through this story: but it is, ambiguously, a voice in his own head. He is given advice similar to that which he had himself given to cowering Japanese peasants early in the story. Rodrigues does, in the end, trample on the fumi-e and participates in the "formality" of renouncing his faith in Jesus as an act of love.

Rodrigues renounces the God he clung to throughout the story. However, unlike the villagers, since his primary reason is not to escape personal harm and violence against himself but to prevent others from being tortured or put to death there is ambiguity which ultimately extends to every renunciation or refusal. He is convinced to follow the example of Jesus in acting to do what he can out of love for the villagers. He sacrifices what held him back from stepping on the fumi-e before.

Whether helping others was his primary motivation does somewhat remain a question but a spiritual arrogance within him is obviously subdued. I think about his action in light of the Gospel today. There is the verse - But the one who endures to the end will be saved. 

This story suggests there may be different ways to "endure" to possible different "ends"? Does God prefer one way, one end or one salvation over another? And should Christianity?