Nothing fights stains like...

Revelation 22:14-15

22 JAN 2018, Photo by Pumpkinsky from Wikipedia

This past week, before the events of the Virginia Beach Municipal Building shooting unfolded, a good friend of mine called from there. We had a short, but good conversation. He asked me if I had seen the new miniseries on Hulu, Catch-22. I’ve never read the book it was based on, but it was highly recommended by my friend and he insisted that I finish watching it and tell him what I thought of it as a Navy chaplain, and based on my experiences in Iraq as a Marine. My friend is a civilian pastor in Virginia Beach, and so, when the events surrounding the shooting unfolded on a television screen in my California home, I immediately contacted him. After frantically checking on my friend, other clergy colleagues, neighbors, and friends from our old neighborhood, we could do nothing more than lament as we watched police and first responders rushing around a building that was all too familiar to my family and me. The shooting took place, literally, in our old neighborhood. They had heard the shots from our old house. In fact, it was the favorite part of my daily routine, driving to my church office and driving home past that quaint old courthouse. It was particularly beautiful on summer mornings, when the trees were full and green, before the humidity and heat of this season blanketed the area. As soon as the news anchors proclaimed that there had been a shooting in Virginia Beach, we immediately recognized the place, and we grieved. We grieved we couldn’t be with those in our community, breaking bread, praying, crying, consoling, lamenting. After spending too much time in front of the television, watching in anxiety for a face I knew, my wife put her hand on my shoulder and compassionately commanded me to turn it off.

Dinner was uneasy. We didn’t tell the kids. There would just be too many questions. Feeling at a loss because I couldn’t be there, I immediately went to the texts for this Sunday, knowing my friend and so many other colleagues would be expected to speak on this tragedy. I kept asking myself how these texts can speak to such a tragedy. I couldn’t think of any way. Again, my wife compassionately placed her hand on my laptop as I was parsing the Hebrew and Greek of this Sunday’s texts, gently closed it, and advised that we should just watch something besides the news on T.V. Still thinking of my friend and the conversation we had less than 24 hours earlier, I turned on Catch-22 and watched the final episode.

The series follows Lieutenant Yossarian (later on Captain), a bombardier on a WWII B-25, flying bombing missions in Europe during some of the most intense campaigns of that conflict. The series follows Lieutenant Yossarian, or “Yo Yo”, as he struggles with the apparent senselessness of the missions and death around him. I recollected similar feelings of my own as a young Marine, deployed in 2005. Watching friends die, without any idea of how our mission affected the bigger picture, sometimes even doubting it served any purpose at all.

B-25, U.S.A.F. Photo, PD

About halfway through the final episode, Yo Yo has resigned himself to the fatalistic reality of war, yet he has grown certain that anyone he cares for will eventually face a brutal and tragic death. Yo Yo begins to board his plane as he meets his new side gunner, Snowden (a “new guy”), and he attempts to calm this new crewmate and mentor him through the impending mission. During the mission, Snowden is wounded by shrapnel and Yo Yo goes to the back of the plane to provide him with care. As Yo Yo attempts to treat Snowden’s wounds, he slowly realizes the extent of the injuries before coming to terms with the fact that Snowden is dying. Due to Snowden's complaining about how cold he is, Yo Yo intimately lays on top of Snowden, embracing him until Snowden dies, in an effort to keep him warm. As the plane lands, Yo Yo rises to his knees, wipes his bloody hands across his face, and begins to strip himself of all of his saturated bloody clothes. When he finally disembarks the plane, he is bare and naked in a daze. As he passes the chaplain’s tent, the chaplain rushes out to ask if he can provide anything, to include clothing, which Yo Yo refuses and thanks the chaplain for his care.

A little later on, during an award ceremony, a four star General is handing out awards and Captain Yossarian stands before him barenaked to receive the distinguished flying cross. When the General asks why he is naked, he is advised that Yo Yo’s uniform had been saturated in blood and he refuses to wear it again. There were a number of comedic lines through that scene, but I struggled to laugh as I reflected on how this episode was unfolding. It took me back to the text for this Sunday, specifically Revelation 22:14. Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates.

The Revelation of the holy city in John's vision. 

The text is the conclusion of John’s apocalyptic vision of the new heaven and earth. These final few portions of John’s Revelation outline what the new kingdom of God will be like, but also what will be required of one to enter. John, like most of his day, sees the entrance into this new “holy of holies” with a specific need to enter pure. Much like the temple priests of Jerusalem, who were required to be clean and pure, both in what they wore and their bodies.

Now, I’m a bit old fashioned, so I still believe in wearing one’s “Sunday best” when we attend worship, but that’s not what I was hearing in the text after processing all these things. I recalled coming home from Iraq, feeling unclean, stained. It was as if I had been stained by what I had seen, what had been required of me during combat, what I had felt towards my enemies and perceived enemies. I recalled nights as a cop, tearing off my uniform and stuffing it into a trash bag, then dipping the soles of my boots in a pan of bleach that I kept in my locker, after leaving the scene of a homicide. I recalled how bloody and filthy I felt, a few hours earlier as I saw my neighborhood had been attacked by a lone gunmen. All these experiences, that scene in Catch-22, and the text from this Sunday brought me to ask myself a simple question; how can we even begin to make ourselves clean? It isn’t an obvious stain, but it is a stain on our souls as we mourn. At times it isn’t even our own blood, or our own deeds that cause us to feel so stained. At times, many times in my own life, I have just wanted to strip it all off and walk around bare and naked, resigning myself to the fact that I can never be clean again.

A lot of debate will ensue following this shooting, as it always does. As a nation, as a shared community, maybe we need to acknowledge those who feel stained by moments like these? People who feel that they are so saturated in blood and horror, that they can never be made clean again. I know how that feels. Years later, I still carry a lot of that on my soul and I ask myself at times if my children see me as stained. So, like Yo Yo, I usually strip myself bare. I over-share, over-analyze, people tell me I am too honest, even blunt at times. But I find that the older I get, the more blood I see and carry, the less inclined I am to hide it under a stained soul, a soul that I just can’t make clean. So, does that mean I am condemned?

John’s Revelation goes on to say in the following verse; Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. I know there was a time that I believed that was where I belonged. Watching Catch-22, reading the Sunday text, and watching those first responders on the news made me ask how many feel locked out now. Maybe that is when we know that we aren’t quite ready to get in just yet? Perhaps it is in the acknowledgement of our collective filth that we recognize the need to be clean in the first place? Not because it gets us inside, but just because we want to feel clean again!

I don’t see this passage as a locked door to me, Yo Yo, or anyone else. I see it as a need to admit that we are all stained in the first place. I believe the first step is to know that each of us has stains that need to be removed, which is why we confess that each and every Sunday. I confess that I am in bondage to sin, and cannot free myself…by what I have done and by what I have left undone.

It doesn’t really matter which stains are the most ingrained into the fibers of our souls, or how saturated we are in the blood of senseless violence. What is most important, and hopefully the most healing for us all, is to know that we are all stained, and the only thing that will get that stain out is more blood, and it isn’t our neighbors or our own…+

Sources

George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Ellen Curas, Written by Joseph Heller, Adapted to screen by Luke Davies and David Michôd Hulu Streaming. Catch-22 (Miniseries). Burbank, CA: Smoke House Pictures, 2018.