The Supreme One

I brought four quarters to the Bring-a-buck Men’s Breakfast at Creston Church. Once the coffee was poured, Pastor Sean led us in a discussion about the account of Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem according to Luke’s Gospel. The Pharisees demanded that Jesus rebuke his followers for their overt praises but he replied that the rocks would cry out in their place if the people were silent.

Our discussion swooped like a hawk from divine evidence in creation to reflecting Christ’s message in our lives each moment and then to the ‘practice’ in spiritual-practices. Together, we wondered why men fail to be involved with churches. The older gentlemen spoke warmly about why they found church so advantageous but my friend, Greg, suggested that personal advantage could not be our basis. The ‘uses and gratifications’ approach treats Church like entertainment, not community. Discipline is required or young men find reasons to be somewhere else, victims of false efficiency.

I offered the message that God has put on my heart. “Going back to the theme of spiritual ‘practice’, I find that I need a vision that goes beyond myself. I played my best, in community bands, because I focused on how much greater we could be if I were there every week.”
Scenes from my last year in high school band streamed on a loop, ghosted over houses as I walked home. I heard our first-flute chuckle at the notion that our band could get a Division I* rating at band festival. I slammed my locker door and erupted:
“Shut the fuck up!”



The evening after festival, I unsheathed my bubble-gum victory-cigar but not for the reason I had planned. Cloistered in my seat on the darkened bus, I sustained a solitary, masticatory stewing session. The judges gave us a division IV rating. I shuffled into the bathroom, once I knew, to clear my bladder and my head; a suspicious trickle of underclassmen followed.
“I sent them in there to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself or anything...”
“I don’t have anything to hurt myself about—MY performance was fine. I piss better by myself, too...”


Forgive my ragged Ojibwa but the original inhabitants of Michigan had three words for “us”. I get ‘ninwe’ and ‘ginwe’, confused; one means ‘a crowd of people, of which I am one’, and the other means ‘our group, as opposed to another’. The third word is ‘kinwe’ [keen-way], which means “all of us together”. I knew that my part was not always featured but the merits of coming together as a band were foreign ideas. To me, being a band was an outgrowth of the fact that I could not play all the parts myself. A jewel needs a crown to be a crown-jewel; I expected my high-school band to line-up behind me, supreme trumpet. The judges noted that attitude in their comments: the first trumpet part was always in the foreground, set-apart. I mean that not in the Holy sense but a disconnected one. I only had a vision for my self.

...I’ve come a long way to be here...


Moses flees Egypt as a fugitive, alone, but returns to lead Israel from bondage. Years later, God is disgusted with the Israelites and offers to make Moses a nation [Numbers 14:12&13]. According to the Old Testament, Moses insisted that God spare them. Whatever actually happened, sometimes I believe it takes a person who went solo in the wilderness to recognize the value of kinwe.

When Jesus fasted in the wilderness, he was tempted with visions of mastery and supremacy. This serpent voice calls every person out of the garden with misconceptions of grandeur. It convinces us to act like third graders in line, vying for a meaningless position at the front while we pace further away from unity and understanding the only One who can lead us away from oblivion. Christians often reverence Christ as the Son of God but Jesus called himself the Son of Man. Even if they denote the same person they connote differently. The Son of God vision was going to set Jesus apart, not in the Holy sense but disconnected. The Pharisees wanted a superlative Messiah, a god to put behind the inner-curtain, who would take his position at the top and smile upon their stratification. Whether an independent force of wickedness or bad brain-waves from a long fast, Satan offered Jesus all the world’s kingdoms if he would forfeit the kingdom of his destiny.

Jesus left that vision in the desert. He traveled with lower-class mugs, talked with skanks and touched lepers. If he was ‘set-apart’, it was self-imposed quarantine. Just before his grand entrance, James and John asked to be his superlative disciples—his left and right-hand men. Instead, Jesus called the crew together and said:


“You know that the rulers of this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them but among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be the leader among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave to everyone else. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.”


Then the armed-guards stormed the garden at Gethsemane and this band, these disciples who wanted to be the greatest, broke like a rack of billiards and rolled away. Judas sold him for chump-change; Peter was willing to slice somebody’s ear off in the dark but by the light of the fire he just wanted to save his own skin; James and John go MIA. Jesus knew all of this beforehand but he still washed their crusty feet the night before. After the Resurrection, he made them a fish breakfast; Jesus reunited with the disciples and, rather than holding them accountable as deserters, loved them and equipped them to carry-on ministry.

Jesus had a vision greater than himself. He rode into town on an ass and forcibly reset the temple [Luke 19:28 — 20:8]. The Pharisees knew what He was and that he came to tear their curtains down. By Friday, they had him under control: nailed to a cross and dying.

“He saved others, let him save himself!”
“If he is really the king of the Jews, let him come down from the cross and we will believe.”


They would have believed, too, in that sub-standard Messiah who cared more about proving his prowess than keeping the kinwe. He stayed because he knew what was required to shred the temple curtain and bring us under God together.
I wept for ten minutes, at least, when the force of this truth touched my core. The feeling was beautiful but the after-taste was scary. The connection between my thoughts about Jesus on the cross and these potent emotions felt foreign. I wondered what it was that brought my estranged parts together again and what it was that tore them apart—and how I could allow myself to be fragmented. The answer may be that when I try to be self-contained I make decay inevitable but when I allow my borders to blur, when I give-up supremacy and even individuality, my internal connections come alive again.
I still do not fully understand. At some point, I have to share these thoughts or they will never be complete.