Mardi Gras Homily (2.23.20)

Homily
26th Annual Jazz Worship
Revelation 21.1-7
Sunday, February 23, 2020
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.

Revelation 21.1-7

I love the wild rhythm of Mardi Gras. Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, I experienced a similar, if scaled-down, version of this season of parades and parties. It’s the high school marching bands that get me every time, that catch in my throat when I can feel the drums from down the street, the race of my heart as the horns begin to blast their way into the night. Those are the moments when the best of my childhood swirls into my middle-aged, parenting life as I enjoy watching my own growing children embrace the seasons.

However, this is a carnival unlike any of the seven I have now spent as a New Orleanian. The wigs have still come out and the gold lamé leggings are presently laying across a chair in my bedroom. I most definitely have sequins on beneath this robe. Our house is littered in beads and koozies and blinking light foam stick things that make no sense at all outside of a night parade. The wagon and chairs and cooler of snacks have been hauled for blocks and blocks to a barrage of parades and are ready and waiting in the back of my car. In some ways, it’s Carnival as usual.

But there is also a somber tone to everything as not one but two neighbors have lost their lives in the midst of the celebrations. Yesterday, in between catching sunglasses and waiting for purple, green, and gold colored toilet paper to fill the oak trees, folks were talking about tandem floats and the element of obvious danger in what we do each year. I watched my children inch closer and closer to floats and wondered if it was a foolish freedom to grant them. In addition to the tragic and gruesome loss of life amidst city-wide celebration, perhaps what is jarring to us is the shattering of our illusions. Mardi Gras is a fantasy season. Adults throw off their suits and high heels, leave their laptops at home, and rush the streets to play alongside children and strangers and friends. It is, at its best, a world-as-it-could-be season.

My very favorite spot in the world for a just-as-it-could-be moment is the beach. That fleeting time when the sun is out, the clouds are few, the breeze is just right, the kids are content, and my love is beside me. The close second for just-as-it-could be moments would most definitely be day parades with the same conditions. For just a little while, strangers become friends, we share and laugh more easily, we pass the Popeye’s and whatever else we’ve lugged along with us. We are generous and patient with children who desperately want to catch everything being thrown their way.

We crave these just-as-it-could-be moments because we know that so much of life is heavy and hard and more complicated than we thought it would be. And when life-as-it-is comes crashing, literally, into the fantasy of life-as-it-could-be, well, it is loss on many levels. And most of us have had enough loss already, and some of us have faced more loss than we thought a human could bear. For scripture to promise us a time when such anxiety and weeping will be no more seems a bit too pie in the sky for us to believe right now.

So let’s consider first: the scripture I read a few moments ago takes place in the context of a dream. And if your dreams are anything like mine, the settings are wild, the faces are not quite right, the plot lines don’t always follow a logical sequence of any kind. But the feeling of the dream is what sticks with us beyond the details of the thing. Late in the first century CE, A man named John has a dream on an island in the Aegean sea, and what he recalled of the dream is now the book of Revelation. Revelation is an apocalyptic text. This is where some folks get their ideas of what the end of the world will be like, but that’s not at all what it is meant to be. I can hear your thoughts now: why in the world would we talk about apocalypse today? Well, as in most cases of sacred story, it’s all in how you treat the text. 

The word apocalypse literally translates to uncovering or revealing. In apocalyptic literature, we are talking about holding two stories side-by-side. One is the story we live out every day. The other is a fantastical, dream-like story that reveals what is ultimately true and ultimately false about the first story. The apocalypse of John’s dream was written against a very specific, oppressive empire, and dared to imagine life could be different than what anyone in that region, at that time, new to be real.

Friends, we are not the first humans to feel utterly overwhelmed by the enormity of the world’s pain. The first-century audience for this apocalyptic dream was living within a very real story of oppression and fear at every turn, and what was happening around them every day—corrupt government, untrustworthy clergy, unlivable taxation, severe religious purity codes that favored the rich and excluded the poor—made giving up an easy fantasy. All of these forces are bigger, they’re stronger, they have the power, they win. So when John starts imaging the whole of heaven and earth completely made over, he is telling them they cannot define reality based on this one story they know. He’s telling them the power of dreams and imagination are just as real. He’s telling them there’s a better story, a truer story, a story guided by love, and they might have to listen for it in unexpected places and watch for it to radically surprise them in the middle of their ordinary lives.

What’s the real story of our lives? That’s the question ancient, apocalyptic texts challenge us to ask. There’s the story we are living out every day. On an ordinary day in my life it’s wake, coffee, kids, school, work, kids, dinner-homework-bedtime, sleep, repeat. And on top of that story is the one we experience around us, and my goodness can we hear that story even better than Jesus’ audience would have heard it. We with computers attached to phones and in our hands almost all the time. We with the 24 hour news cycle. We with the ability to watch wildfires in California and Australia, tracking the movement and activity of coronavirus, witness the impact of far away war, follow the details of minute-by-minute tragedy on Magazine Street and Canal Street all by staring at our screens like it’s all just another tv show. Friends, we already know a story or 2 or 12 that could send us into a bunker to hide and fully disengage from life. 

Which story will be the one that guides us? Which story enables us to navigate the very best of days as we want them to be and the very worst days that we hope will never be again? For John, it was the dream of a world in which the Divine Source of life and love will wipe every tear from our eyes. A world in which death will be no more; a reality in which mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things in that old story have passed away. And if that dream sounds like something much too saccharine for our reality, that’s because we are standing between the stories. And we can choose today to partner together to create a world shaped by love. That story of ultimate, revolutionary love is the story that is guiding me, in fits and starts, faltering and imperfect, but guiding me nonetheless. That is the story that is guiding us here at the St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church. Friends, consider today: What is the real story for you? Which one will guide you as you leave this place today? Oh, may it be the one of a love so deep and high and wide and true that it can change the world. Amen.