What We Do With Jesus — #3
This is the third in a series based on the story of Tucson’s Garden of Gethsemane, but meant to help us examine what we do with Jesus today.
We Find Him in Unexpected Places
When you can’t afford the basics of life, yet you aspire to create beautiful and meaningful things, you have a choice. You can wait until your situation turns around. You can grow embittered because life, truly, is unfair. Or, you can do what Felix Lucero did, and start looking around for something outside of yourself.
Let me be clear. We don’t know nearly enough about Lucero to assume that he never had some dark moments of doubt and anger with God as he sat in his makeshift tent under a bridge while other people constructed theaters and rode over the bridge in their new automobiles. War had wounded him and life wasn’t fair. By nature of the color of his skin he had less of a chance to tap into resources. He was aware undoubtedly that his story included the loss of his people’s land in the desert southwest at some point. He believed in God, but God hadn’t given him nearly as much as those on the topside of the bridge.
Faith is never the absence of dark or negative feelings. The Bible sure doesn’t cast it that way. Faith is life lived in relationship with God. Real relationships have their ups and downs. That’s how you know they’re real. I’m quite sure this man living in the tent by the river had his moments of despair and disappointment, but the legacy he left us speaks of another approach he also employed. As a sculptor you need material in bulk. His original sculpture in Yarnell was chiseled from a substantial concrete block. Massive stones are great too. But when you’re poor, it’s all easier said than done. Lucero had to be more creative. He had to keep his eyes open.
I live in Tucson as Lucero did, and I know a decent amount about the rivers he lived next to. We call them washes, because rivers run and washes get a “wash” every once in a while. The Santa Cruz actually did run when Lucero was there, unlike today. But it really runs during the summer storms. Monsoons. And when the rivers fill up to overflowing the waters tend to pick up a lot of material that people thought was safe above the flood line. As a poor kid, this is how I got my basketball hoop…backboard, pole and all. My dad and I went down to where the Rillito River was pulsing with temporary energy, flowing under the highway bridge. It was a day when Lucero would have had to have moved his camp. Down the river careened some other kid’s hoop that his parents probably placed too close to the riverbank. My dad fished it out with a stick and I pretended to be Damon Stoudamire (dirt court edition) on it for the rest of my childhood.
Felix Lucero did the same thing. In the waters of the Santa Cruz he found that God was providing him with the resources he needed to do the work he’d promised to do. Sticks, stones, metal objects. He began to collect them and assemble them together in raw scarecrow like figures. A man with his arms stretched out. Not a scarecrow, but a similar figure. Jesus on a cross. Men seated in varied positions that he planned to position around a large table. The Last Supper. Then he took concrete and filled out the figures into life size proportions. Perhaps he saved for cement in small batches. Perhaps he made it all. Perhaps he scrounged excess from constructions sites and put it to use every night before it dried. Then he would carefully shape, smooth, and sand it. Finally, he added a coat of smooth plaster finish.
One day he saw something like a life raft cruising atop the churning brown desert waters. It was an old mattress box spring swept away from a home too close to the river. I imagine him grabbing a long mesquite wood branch he’d been saving to hook and fish it out. As he stood victorious beside his catch perhaps he looked up toward the heavens and thanked God. The Last Supper would be complete. He’d found the table. All he had to do was sculpt something akin to the burial cloth in Yarnell over it as a tablecloth. Today we still marvel at the scope of this scene he made, perhaps the size of his entire personal dwelling place.
Of course, Lucero’s favorite image to sculpt was that of the Lord Jesus. At the table, with kind eyes engaging the traitorous Judas with his moneybag ready. Jesus on the cross bearing the sting of sin and shame. Like a scarecrow hung to repel people who would dare to hope in something greater than the powers that be. Then Jesus in the grave, bearing the sting of death itself but in holy serenity. And in Yarnell, the space left empty when Jesus rose from the dead victorious. I wonder what it was like for him as he formed these images with his hands, aware, that he had not made everything within them himself.
Lucero had promised to use his talent to honor Jesus if his life was saved, as it was. But he didn’t have enough capital to make it happen. And, as on those ancient hills of Palestine when multiplied the loaves and fish his disciples brought to him, Jesus provided Lucero with everything he needed to keep his promise. As Lucero went out to work for Jesus, he ended up finding Jesus floating down the river, in the coat hanger, the bare and twisted branch, and the rusted tin saucepan. This is one of the most beautiful facts about Lucero’s statues in retrospect. Lucero didn’t re-make Jesus. He found Jesus. He found him in the most unexpected places.
We want to do things that make us good and worthy. Even if we don’t have Jesus on our mind, this is the way we often live. Sometimes we despair of our inability to measure up to our own standards, let alone the standards of others and become paralyzed. We too, lack the capital to be the type of people we want to be, especially when we consider what it would take to pay God back for the life we’ve been given. That’s ok. It’s ok to feel those things and pass through those waters. But what if you looked around, in the unexpected places? It turns out; God is far more proficient at providing what we need to please him than we are. That’s the meaning of the cross after all. And as the cross stands in an unexpected place, on the refuse heap of society now as it was then, we may find that it is the very provision that we need the most. Felix Lucero found Jesus in the unexpected places, and so will we today. Keep an eye out.
