You're Not Going to Believe This

Ezekiel 37:1-14
John 11:1-45

If you haven’t seen The Book of Mormon, the award winning Broadway musical by the creators of South Park, you’re in for a surprise.

For me, the biggest surprise is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has purchased ads in the musical’s program. “You’ve seen the play,” the ads say, “Now Read the Book.”

It’s a surprise because the show doesn’t exactly portray Mormonism is the best light. If the show had done a similar number on American Baptists, we would have sued.

The musical, by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone, exposes all the difficulties facing a Mormon missionary:

The original prophet, Joseph Smith, who claimed the angel Moroni showed him where to dig up golden plates etched with a non-existent language that told about Jesus’ visit to America in the hours between his crucifixion and resurrection;

The plates themselves, which Smith said were snatched back by Moroni and could not be shown to anyone;

The fact that Smith said he transcribed the Book of Mormon after Moroni showed how to translate it, and which yielded a product that sounded like a poor imitation of King James Era English;

And alleged revelations that white men are entitled to all the concubines they could tolerate, but black men are evil.

No sane missionary wants to explain all this away while struggling to persuade an audience that God’s revelation in the Book of Mormon will make people happier, wealthier, and wiser.

A scene in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America raises the inevitable question. Hannah Pitt, a devout Mormon wife and mother, is witnessing to her depressed daughter-in-law, Harper.

“There’s something that’s always bothered me,” Harper says, bating her mother-in-law. “Everyone thinks the angel’s name was Mormon.”

“No,” Mother Pitt replies, exasperated. “The name of the angel …”

“I know, I went to Sunday school. Moroni.”

“Right. The angel Moroni.”

“So why don’t we call ourselves Morons?”

It’s hard to watch The Book of Mormon and not think of this line.

In the musical, the missionaries – Elder Price and Elder Cunningham – are burdened not only by the book’s improbable claims, but by their own ambitions and limitations.

Elder Price imagines himself as a heroic missionary who will save the world, preferably in a comfortable assignment in Orlando, Fla.

But the plot clots when the two missionaries are coupled for service in Uganda – not the real Uganda but a grotesquery that seems right out of the hemorrhoidal delirium of Idi Amin.

The two arrive in a Ugandan village beset with famine, poverty, and AIDS, and controlled by a deranged warlord who orders all the women to be circumcised.

It’s not a mission field white unto harvest, and the two missionaries are out of their element.

Ironically – as is often the case in the best missionary stories – it is the least clued missionary who makes the most progress.

Elder Cunningham, a short, overweight and overwrought young man, is handicapped by the fact he has never read the Book of Mormon “because it’s boring.”

What Elder Cunningham doesn’t know about the Book of Mormon, he makes up from his extensive knowledge of Star-Trek, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings.

Applying song, dance, and a riotous monologue to his outlandish teachings, Elder Cunningham inserts storm troopers, Jedi Knights, Ewoks, Vaders, faeries, and raped frogs into the heretofore boring story of Joseph Smith.

The villagers buy it, enthusiastically. Where his straight-laced missionary partners have failed, Elder Cunningham wins converts to his eclectic but bizarrely improbable latter day gospel.

He wins so many converts, in fact, that the mission station becomes the most successful Mormon outpost in Africa.

But the bubble bursts when the district superintendent visits the village and the new converts put on a play to dramatize their skewed understanding of the Mormon story.

The superintendent is appalled and closes the mission immediately. The villagers are saddened that the one thing that has given them hope has been cancelled. 

One of the villagers, the beautiful Nabulungi, is devastated by the revelation that the stories she has been told are not true.

Happily, none of the other villagers are disturbed by the lack of veracity in the missionary stories. A woman scolds Nabulungi for her naivete. “Did you think these stories were true?” she asks. “They were MET-A-PHORS.”

At the end of the show – spoiler alert – the villagers, including the sadistic warlord, have embraced their new faith, Ewoks and all, because it has brought them into communion with God’s love.

It was the loving, albeit wildly inaccurate testimonies of the missionaries that did it.

As the curtain closes, the once woebegone villagers bask in love for God, Jesus, Joseph Smith, and each other.

I can see why the Mormons buy approving ads in the show’s programs. If I were a Mormon, I’d be proud of both my church and these wacky missionaries. They strayed so far from the truth that truth emerged pure and whole. They demonstrated the crushing power of MET-A-PHORS.

We Baptists and other creedal Christians have long scorned the Mormon’s implausible and unconvincing tales of angels, golden plates, and Jesus’ pre-resurrection visit to America. (Creedally, Jesus descended into hell after his crucifixion, not Salt Lake City.)

But we creedal Christians have our own burden of implausible and unconvincing tales to tell.

Today’s scripture lessons place a couple of those tales before us now: the valley of the dry bones and the raising of a man dead four days.

Our grandparents and earlier ancestors had little problem with these incredible miracles. They avoided a careful forensic analysis. It takes too much fun out of bible stories if you don’t regard them as inerrant, literal truths. We slam the door on theological conversations when we declare, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

But as we contemplate the biological impossibility of restoring flesh to long dead bones, or revivifying a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition, we begin to understand why many people are skeptical about our well-meaning testimonies. “Can’t happen, don’t buy it, go away,” is the counter argument.

So what is the truth about the dry bones and the regenerated corpse?

People will argue about it until the end of time. As persons of faith, we can insist that God has the power to restore flesh to dried bones, and God has the power raise the dead. And skeptical agnostics can smile condescendingly and tell us that what we are saying is impossible.

But perhaps both sides are missing the point.

Whether these remarkable things happened or not, whether they are true of not, they are also MET-A-PHORS that point to a larger truth:

God loves us, and God will continue to love us today, tomorrow, and after this earthly life is over. Jesus put it plainly enough: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.” (John 11:25)

What does that mean, biologically, spiritually, forensically?

Who knows? We can argue about it until we die, scorning those who don’t believe it and telling ourselves that if we stop thinking about it, that settles it.

But that would be missing the point.

It’s a MET-A-PHOR.

The truth it conveys is that the loving God has invited each of us, persons of faith and persons of doubt, into God’s eternal dominion.

And – in ways we cannot possibly understand or define now – we shall bask in God’s endless care and love forever.

There is no better tale than that.