A Time to Gather Stones Together

It's Holy Week, we might be on the verge of war, we certainly are in the grip of darkness. But, there is good news, Doctor Who is coming back!  Oh yeah, and so is Jesus. I informed my budding Whovian daughter that BBC America is playing Doctor Who reruns all day long, as they ramp up for the season premiere on Saturday night.  The episode that was on this morning when we made this triumphant discovery is called The Beast Below. In the distant future, the human race has fled to the stars in a celestial city, which as it turns out, is carried on the back of the last of the Star Whales.  The humans think that they must inflict torment on the whale to get it to continue to carry them.  They construct a sort of religious system that is meant to protect that secret, because they know that if the secret gets out they would be faced with the impossible choice of their own doom or continuing to torture a magnificent and unique creature.  They eventually discover the awful truth and find out that, in fact, they have discovered this before, and have set up a sort of liturgical ritual for forgetting the horrible truth, so that the journey can continue. They come to a place where a recorded message from the high Priestess of the human race tells them that they have a choice to simply push a button so that they can forget that their survival depends on the torture and enslavement of the Star Whale. They are about to repeat the process, because they think they have no choice.
The Doctor, of course, knows better, he suspects that there may, in fact, be a third way, and on faith he acts to force the humans out of their deadly dilemma.  As it turns out the Star Whale has been tolerating the torture of the humans out of sheer beneficence, and once they stop tormenting it, it is more than happy to carry them through space, much, much more efficiently than when they thought they were forcing it to move.  The moral of the story is that love and kindness is more powerful than force and violence.
The Christ metaphor present in Doctor Who (here and elsewhere) is not exactly subtle.
I've been thinking all morning about the dilemmas that we supposedly face.  Must we really inflict such violence on one another?  Is it inevitable? Is it unavoidable? I mean especially during this week, shouldn't we be remembering that Jesus chose to go the way that no one thought of in order to bring us out of darkness?
Isn't the essential narrative of the Gospel all about the way that Christ challenged our assumptions about God?  Sin is living in a place where scarcity dominates.  Grace is living in a world of expansive, even eternal possibilities.  Sin is striving for control and dominance.  Grace is surrender to the breath of God. Sin is living in fear of what you might lose.  Grace is living to give all that you are. Sin is death. Grace is life.
Christ ended the power of sin with grace. The minds of those he taught about the Kingdom of Heaven were kept from seeing what he was really about, because they could only imagine a Kingdom of Heaven in terms of what they knew about the world.  The Kingdom of Heaven must actually demolish and replace the kingdoms of the world.  But Jesus said it was like salt, leaven, treasure hidden and a bunch of other stuff, none of which was at all like what people thought.
In our suffering we have failed to see what is possible with the Kingdom of Heaven, and we have proceeded to try our best to simply create a more "christian" world.  Every once in a while, someone remembers, but then we are collectively convinced to press the "forget" button and go back to trying to do it the way the world tells us we must.
It's really crazy when you consider that we have the truth of things written down in a book we call Holy Scripture.  You don't have to search or proof text or anything, just sort of open up one of Paul's letters, written to some of the earliest churches and you will find that folk have known the gig was up for a long time.  Paul wrote to the church at Rome, using the example of God's saving work with the people of Israel: "It depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy." (Romans 9: 16)
Our attempts to keep the love of God under control are tortuous and fatal.  The Gospel, especially this week, reminds us that there is another way, the way of the Cross, the way of Christ, the stony path of obedience and surrender, of love and grace. We are called to be one in Christ, to have the same mind as Christ, to cloth ourselves in Christ, to be the body of Christ.  How long will we ignore that calling?