Notre Dame, Good Friday, and Easter…

When I was fourteen our High School Band, the Largo Band of Gold, went to Europe to compete in the World Music Festival (we won two gold medals with distinction). After the competition, we toured continental Europe.  Our first stop was Paris.

Nothing in my Southern boyhood prepared me for Paris.  The first thing that caught my eye were the billboards with nude female models.  I knew I was not supposed to lust, but no Sunday School lesson prepared me for that.  We went to the Louvre.  I saw the Mona Lisa but more amazing to me were whole rooms covered with one work of art.  The artist painted the walls and the ceilings.  I’d never seen anything like it.

We played a concert underneath the Eiffel Tower and then went up to see the city in all it’s splendor.  I did get lost on the Paris subway, where a kindly stranger speaking Portuguese responded to my ninth grade Spanish enough to get back to the hotel.

But it was Notre Dame I remembered most.  At fourteen, I already knew I was supposed to be a pastor, a “preacher” in our Southern Baptist lingo.  I had seen my share of churches, of course, but nothing in Wauchula, Okeechobee, Kissimmee, or Largo prepared me for Notre Dame. 

Rural Baptists had a distrust of Catholics, probably because there weren’t very many of them in our neck of the woods.  Then again, we didn’t even trust Methodists because they didn’t have church on Sunday night (heathens!).  Seeing the Cathedral of Notre Dame on the schedule made me apprehensive.  Would I have to become Catholic to enter?  Would they kidnap me and force me to be a priest instead of a preacher?  Would I have to kiss a statue of the Pope?  I had been warned about false prophets in many sermons, but I had no instructions about entering a strange house of worship.

The tour bus rounded the corner, and I saw Notre Dame up close.  My eyes drifted up, my breathing stopped.  I had never seen anything so massive.  We walked off the bus and made our way to the cathedral.  It loomed larger and larger; I felt smaller and smaller.  Only much later in life would I learn this was intentional.  A cathedral was supposed to make you realize the grandeur of God and make you aware of your own smallness in the world.

Since my offshoot of the Protestant Reformation has a distant kinship to the Puritans, our sanctuaries (this was before we called them “worship centers”) are plain.  At Notre Dame, there was not one inch of undecorated space.  The entrances, the outside walls, and the interior were covered with carvings.  The stain glass sparkled colors throughout the interior.  I couldn’t read Latin, but I recognized enough to know some of the stories being told.  I saw Jesus crucified and resurrected in the stone and in the glass.  It began to slowly dawn on me that the people who built this worshipped the same Jesus I did.

It was not until I was in the middle of the cathedral that someone said, “Look behind you.”  Then I saw the famous South Rose Window.  It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen, more amazing than the billboards.  I was held in a spell of awe.  In the vast cavern of the cathedral, I had a sense of something holy, someone bigger than myself.  In that moment, a fourteen-year-old Southern Baptist boy felt the beauty of God.

Like you, I saw the picture of the Notre Dame Cathedral burning this week. Memories poured out of the deep corners of my brain.  I could feel once more the majesty of the moment from forty decades earlier.  My first thought was “I pray the windows can be saved.”

I’m not someone who thinks God caused the fire in the Cathedral.  God is much bigger than any building, no matter how beautiful.  I do believe, however, that God invites me to look at the news and find where he is at work.  There are more signs of the gospel in the world than you or I can see.

I saw the picture the next day, the picture of a beam of light shining into Notre Dame, showing the altar, showing the bright bronze cross still in place.  That picture is the story of Good Friday and of Easter.  It is the story of an evil world doing its best to burn down the work of God.  It is the story of the fire of my sin, which burns within, causing me to do that which I know I should not do.  It is the story of grace, the grace that rains down upon the fires of sin, grace inexhaustible, extinguishing the penalty and power of my sin.  It is the story of resurrection, that nothing – not the power of the darkness, nor the fires of sin, nor the pitiful human efforts to make God small – nothing can take away God love for me.  Grace is a beautiful thing.

This is the story of Good Friday and of Easter – the light has come into the world and nothing can put it out. 

I hear they saved the South Window, the window that so long ago gifted me with a holy moment.  It is just another sign of the gospel, that God can save anything, anyone.  Even you.  Even me. 

Old Times There Are Not Forgotten…

When my mother and step-father married, we moved off the ranch and lived in Largo, Florida, where I went to high school.  Largo was home to the Band of Gold, perhaps the finest high school band ever to exist in this country.  We won five National Championships, a World Championship, and so many state championships we literally ran out of wall space to display the trophies.  For the twelve years Bob Cotter was the director, the Band of Gold was a musical force.

From the first time I heard the Band, I wanted to be in it.  I learned to play trumpet, then French Horn.  When I finally put on the shimmering gold shirt, I knew I belonged to something bigger than myself.  One man playing a French Horn could make a sound; one hundred and fifty people could make a tidal wave of sound.   

We didn’t just play at high school football games; we played at Miami Dolphin games and did half-time at the very first Tampa Bay Buccaneer’s game.  My senior year, we played a University of Florida Gator game at Tampa Stadium.  One of our songs was the theme from “Jaws.”  The Gator cheerleaders asked us to play it over and over.  That’s right: the Band of Gold originated the famous Gator “chomp.”

I don’t mean to throw other high school bands under the bus, but we were drilled in the fundamentals of marching and music.  It showed.  We marched in step.  Ever notice how the TV cameras will always focus on the one kid out of step in the band?  They never found “that guy” in the Band of Gold.  We played in tune.  For the non-musical among you, that meant we sounded like one instrument though we were one hundred and fifty different instruments. There were lots of different sounds making one song.

Playing in the band meant you didn’t really hear the music; you heard the echo off the stadium.  You never saw the show; you saw the impact.  I don’t remember ever performing and not receiving a standing ovation.  At the World Music Contest in Holland, I remember the standing ovation went on for fifteen minutes.  Nothing else in my life has ever been quite like it.

I realize now, the Band of Gold and Mr. Cotter, the director, taught me a lot about church.  When you are doing church – I mean really doing it – you don’t see what it looks like.  You can see people’s reaction to church, you can hear the cheers and boos, you can hear the echoes, but you don’t get the true picture when you are part of the movement of Jesus.

There is, however, something powerful, something beyond ourselves, when we join with others to have impact.  We can meet the needs of our community with a tidal wave of grace.  People will stand up and notice when we are in step and in tune.  When church sticks to the fundamentals – loving Jesus, loving each other, and loving God’s world – there is a power that overwhelms doubt and difference. 

I went back recently for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the founding of the Band of Gold and the Fortieth Anniversary of the World Championship.  We gathered to remember and celebrate old times that are not forgotten.  They showed old videos of field shows, and I saw the impact we made. 

Maybe that is part of Heaven: there, we will actually see the impact of our churches.  Which makes me wonder: Will we see the impact of the unified body of Christ, bringing grace to a hurting world?  Or will we see the feeble attempts of a group of people doing their own thing, playing their own tune, putting Jesus’ name on it, and calling it a church?

Is it time for you to get in step and in tune?