On Beyond Zebra, with Dr. Seuss and Jesus

The word “gospel” is a slight corruption of an old English phrase- godspell- meaning, good news, and while it can mean good news about anything, we know the four primary records of good news about Jesus as gospels- the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But there is other good news, too, and I’m going to begin tonight by reading from the gospel of Dr. Seuss, the book On Beyond Zebra, pages 1 through 5:

“Said Conrad Cornelius o”Donald o’Dell, My very young friend who is learning to spell: ‘The A is for Ape. And the B is for Bear. The C is for camel. The H is for Hare. The M is for Mouse. And the R is for Rat. I know all the twenty-six letters like that..

“..through to Z is for Zebra. I know the all well.” Said Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell. So now I know everything anyone knows, from beginning to end. From the start to the close.

“Because Z is as far as the alphabet goes.’

“Then he almost fell flat on his face on the floor when I picked up the chalk and drew one letter more! A letter he never had dreamed of before! And I said, ‘You can stop, if you want, with the Z, because most people stop with the Z. But not me!

“In the places I go there are things that I see that I never could spell if I stopped with the Z. I’m telling you this ‘cause you’re ne of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!”

This is a theme of all of Dr.Seuss’ books- unlocking the reader’s imagination with his own. He actually felt sorry for the Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dells of the world and wanted to do whatever he could to keep their young imaginations alive.

And not merely alive, but curious, creating, and- above all- free. “Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done!” Dr. Seuss wrote in his last book. But to get there, he told the kids, and the parents who read to them, to get there, you’ll have to never stop looking with your eyes and your minds wide open; never stop looking down Mulberry Street to see what others cannot see. Imagine the fun you could have if the Cat in the Hat would come to visit. And listen, all the time, like Horton the elephant, for the tiniest Who. “A person's a person, no matter how small,” Who says. For little kids, especially, sometimes it feels like they’re surrounded by big adult Hortons who don’t hear them very well. But keep talking, Dr. Seuss tells them- tell them you’d like Green Eggs and Ham for breakfast today, they’ll hear you! Tell them:

“My alphabet starts with this letter YUZZ. It’s the letter I use to spell Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzz. You’ll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond Z and start poking around!

“So on beyond Zebra! Explore! Like Columbus! Discover new letters! Like WUM is for Wumbus, my high-spouting whale who lives high on a hill and who never comes down ‘til it’s time to refill. So, on beyond Z! It’s high time you were shown that you really don’t know all there is to be known!”

Our imaginations take a beating as we grow older. We get criticized for coloring outside the lines, painting the sun green, or for asking, “Why?” too many times. We learn just enough history and science just long enough to pass the test- most of us. Or we learn to be acceptable and depend on others to do our imaging for us- we need TV or movies to make us laugh, cry, or even think sometimes. We even end up having faith in somebody else’s faith- but more about that in a minute.

Every generation needs a Dr.Seuss, a dozen of them. Because the ruts of routine into which we can all get bogged down, are always changing. Who would have thought, in 1954 and 1955, when most American households were getting their first television sets, and sitting in amazement, with their imaginations on fire while they watched Milton Berle or Bishop Sheen, that one day their grandchildren, by the age of 5, would have seen approximately 30,000 commercials telling them the same thing over and over: buy stuff and be happy.

Every generation needs someone who will chase us away from the TV and into a new book. We need those persons who can inspire us to bend down and see the miracles happening in our backyards. We need a friend, a companion, someone who cares enough about us to say. “Open your eyes again! Unstuff your ears!” Someone who will enable us to imagine again, to be able to see “three free fleas flying through three cheese trees,” or to think at night, just before we go to sleep, “to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street!”

Well, I’ve got Good News for you! I’ve got Godspell, and here it is: we have that kind of companion, to lift us out of the ruts and save us from the ditch. We have that kind of guide- who will hide the TV clicker from us while he points outside to the birds of the air and the flowers of the field for answers. We have that kind of Savior, who will and does, set captives free, from the chains of routine, from the fears that cause us to build fortresses against new ideas, and from the slavery of mere faith in someone else’s faith.

And here’s the evidence. Here’s where Jesus takes us On Beyond Zebra, past the spiritual and legal alphabet of his day and for all time. Listen now, as Jesus, a rabbi who very few people knew, but many had heard about, listen as Jesus sits down in the middle of a crowd of people who feel unworthy of the priesthood and excluded from the Temple, people who are looked down upon by the Scribes and Pharisees and who know they will never ever get to see inside that Holy of Holies where God dwells. Listen, as minds explode when Jesus says,

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is- is, is!- the Kingdom of Heaven!”

Listen, too, as he says to those families standing around them, every one of whom has lost one, two, three children in infancy. Listen as he speaks to the men, 20 to 30% of whom have lost wives in childbirth, and to the women who have lost husbands at sea. Listen as he says to them,

“Blessed..blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted!”

Blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers; blessed are those who hunger to know God, and blessed are those who have been put down by every priest and soldier they pass by. Blessed are those who have been insulted, and lied about. Rejoice! And be glad! For great is your reward in heaven!

Can we imagine how those words were blowing the lids off minds that day? Can you imagine that those words still are having the same effect right now on people right here in this room? Can you accept that Jesus is still grabbing for our imaginations and saying to us, “There is more to know! There are more places to go! There is more fun to be done!”

Now, in case anyone in the crowd that day hadn’t understood yet what was happening, and just in case there may be someone here wondering what the dickens is that guy from Jack County talking about..Just in case..listen to this, because Jesus is going to say something six times:

"You have heard it said..” and then follow that statement with a saying from Hebrew scripture. “You have heard it said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” He introduces an old scripture that way, then immediately adds,

“but I say..” before putting a whole new and up to date meaning on that old scripture: “You have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say, turn the other cheek, if a robber wants your coat, give him your shirt, too!”

Six times he does that- “You have heard it said, but I say..”. He is taking the dry, legal faith of someone else, wetting it down with his son of God imagination, and handing it to people who have just been set free.

“You have heard it said…but I say..” It is exactly as if he is saying, You know the alphabet, but there’s more to know, much more. You know all the letters A to Z, but there is Yuzz, and Um, and Wum, and Humph still to learn!

We make a mistake I think by not freeing the stories Jesus told from their history. It is very, very important to understand the meanings of the time these words were spoken in, but once they are understood, we can resurrect them into the year 2007, and let them help us unlock our imaginations again. Here’s an example, it’s from Luke 18, beginning at verse 9. I’m not changing the meaning one bit. But I am going to pour imagination all over it. And I’m choosing this scripture because of what comes right after it, in verse 15.

Luke 18: 9-14.

(Jesus told this parable to the yearly Convention of the One True Church of Jesus in America, meeting this year in the Dallas Convention Center. These were the men, all men, who knew they were the only ones on earth who had Jesus down right and so they also knew with great satisfaction, that the rest of the world was going to hell.)

Verse 9: Jesus said this to them. “Two men went up to the new $15 million Church of the Suburbs in Plano. One was a Bishop, appointed by his daddy, the former owner of the church. The other man was a Security Guard, hired by the church to watch over the Humvees and BMWs in the parking lot. The Bishop checked himself in the mirror, and had his assistant dust him with a little powder before looking into the television camera, and praying from the tele-prompter, ‘ Gawwwd, I thank you that I am not like other people: people on welfare, drug-users, sexual deviants, or even like that guy over there who works in the parking lot..what’s his name. I tithe from my salary down to the penny- don’t even miss it. I even miss breakfast, twice a week, so that I may lead the young women’s group here at the church in a Bible Study.’

But the security guard stood in the bushes near the entrance of the church- he’d never been inside before. He felt ashamed of all the bad choices he’d made in life which had ended him up here at age 44 in a part-time minimum wage job. He wrung his hands together, and he cried as he whispered, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’

Jesus said to the Conventioneers, ‘I tell you, that man out there crying made God smile, because he’s someone God can work with. He’s got nowhere to go but up. That other guy..what’s his name..that so-called Bishop.. he’s got to where left to go, but down.’

Now if I changed the meaning of that scripture even a little bit, you get onto me about it, because I don’t want to do that. That wasn’t my intention. I just wanted to try to do what Jesus did all the time, and take the story a little bit beyond Zebra.

Here’s another fascinating thing, though. The story which immediately follows that one about the two very different men, is the one about Jesus and the children. In other words, all the pompous Pharisees who just got slapped in their egos by the story Jesus just told, are about to get poked in their judgmental eyes when they saw what Jesus did next. I’m reading this one straight.

Verse 15: People were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they sternly ordered them not to do it. (They were just following ancient Temple Law, by the way, which didn’t allow children inside because, also according to that law at the time, children weren’t real people yet. In the same way that women weren’t whole, complete people,either.) ¹⁶But Jesus called for them and said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. ¹⁷Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’

How does a child receive the Kingdom of God? They can’t buy their way in, they have no monetary assets. At least they didn’t at the time of Jesus. They can’t go door-knocking and preaching on people’s front porches; there’s not a lot of big religious work they can undertake. All they have is themselves. All they have is their desire to be near the one who has invited them to come near. All they have- and they’re working at their best at the ages of 2, 3, 4, and 5- is their imaginations!

Just a few minutes before, in this Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had blessed their parents. For the first time ever, poor people, unclean people, people who couldn’t go and stand in the Temple like “good” Jews, these outcasts, these people poor in spirit, had been told by a rabbi, by an obvious holy man, that they were blessed! This was pretty exciting news for people who thought they were forever assigned to living at the edges of society, on earth and in heaven.

This man, this holy man, was telling them that there was more than the law, there was something beyond the law. There was more of a relationship possible and here was this rabbi telling them that they were in that relationship already! There was more, more, more to be known about God than what the Pharisees had told and taught them, or even that the Pharisees themselves knew!

Can you imagine the wonder these parents who heard that must have had, about the children who were with them? “If he says we’re blessed- we who have nothing- then maybe our children are blessed, too! Let’s find out..” And, nervously, they begin carrying their children up through the crowd to where Jesus himself is sitting..pushing themselves beyond the boundaries of what is normal…then they hear him say, “Bring them!”

Let the children come to me and do not stop them! Later on, in another story, Jesus would say, in effect, “Don’t you dare stop them!”

The Kingdom of God is also practical- another new revelation, and Jesus demonstrated that, too. It is not about going through religious motions. He was not talking about a pie in the sky, nose in the air way of doing his Father’s business. When people were hungry, he fed them. When others were thirsty, he gave them something to drink. The gospel cannot be heard by anyone who is starving. The first and best gospel message for many is a hamburger..and then, Jesus.

On beyond the words of deadening doctrine spoken by those who measure the Kingdom of God in rules obeyed and pledge cards received. On beyond the rituals, the endless committee meetings, and the eighty-first verse of O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing. On beyond churches who have made ignorance of a science a virtue to be embraced and on beyond churches who still still still regard women as half-formed men. On beyond the alphabets of worship which leave us comfortable and satisfied while children anywhere are hungry, thirsty, or dying.

On beyond the word made dead by legalism and into the word made flesh in Jesus.

Jesus said two words, which for me, summarize everything there is to know about being his disciple. I can study the theology of others all day and into the night, and I have. I can spend a lifetime lining up all the spiritual jots and tittles until I’m sure God approves of me. I can do those things, or I can respond as the first disciples did when he turned to them and said “Follow me.”

Jesus will put you with people you had consigned to the ash heap before you knew him. He’ll hand your heart to others and hand theirs right back to you. He’ll get your hands dirty, smelly, even bloody sometimes, and you’ll feel grateful to have served him. Jesus will make you touch the formerly untouchable, listen to stories that make you cringe, and go places you thought, once upon a time, you’d never step foot in. And in response, you’ll say “Thank you” and look forward to the next time.

Then he’ll lead beyond the mundane routines and into the realm of daily, hourly miracles. And “Follow me” are the only words you need to go there.

There is, simply put, work to be done, beyond reading the stories of Jesus. There is life happening outside the walls of church. We get to live those stories now, and make them our own gospels. There is the love of Jesus yet to be realized, practically and divinely, in the lives of countless peoples around the world.

Finally, these words of Dr. Seuss..and I’m sorry if sounds blasphemous to say that I can hear Jesus speaking these words, too, but I can..

“The places I took him! I tried hard to tell Young Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell a few brand-new wonderful words he might spell. I led him around and I tried hard to show there are things beyond Z that most people don’t know. I took him past Zebra. As far as I could. And I think, perhaps, maybe I did him some good…

“Because, finally, he said: ‘This is really great stuff! And I guess the ld alphabet isn’t enough!’

“Now the letters he uses are something to see! Most people still stop at the Z…But not HE!”

And I won’t stop there, and I don’t think you will, either.

Blessings.

Amen!