(978) 939-8821 | Worship every Sunday @ 10 a.m.
(978) 939-8821 | Worship every Sunday @ 10 a.m.
Engage with out most recent sermons.
In Ottumwa, Iowa, about sixty-five years ago, on any warm summer night, somewhere in the vicinity of the 200 block of South Ward Street, you would have heard some kid yelling, “Ally, ally outs in free!” It meant that the person who was “it” had found somebody who was out hiding in the bushes and had beat them back to “home.” The game was over and everyone who was out hiding behind the garage or under the porch was supposed to come back in so a new game could be started with the loser of the foot race being “it.” The cry, at least in my neighborhood in the mid-fifties meant that all the “outs” (those who were still out hiding) could come “in” “free” (that is, without getting penalized) since the game was over. Hence, “Ally, ally outs in free.” Now, I know that a lot of you learned the phrase as “Olly, olly oxen free,” but let’s be honest; that doesn’t make any sense. Some people say it’s a corruption of the German phrase “Alle, alle auch sint frei,” or, roughly, “everyone, everyone is free.” But that’s just bad German. Anyway, we said it how we said it. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
There was something almost sacred about that phrase. We never messed with it. We were, I confess, fond of trying to trick each other into coming out of hiding so we could get them and win the game. We might yell, “Joey, your mom wants you to come out so you can go home for dinner!” or “Oh, I stubbed my toe, come help me.” We were shameless. But there was a sort of unspoken sanctity about “Ally, ally outs in free.” There was no joking with it. When you used that phrase, it was real; the game was over; there were no tricks.
I tell you about all of this as a way of asking your indulgence if I take a bit of liberty with the lofty language of scripture this morning. I’d like to offer a translation of today’s text. I’m translating into the language of the ’50’s, as heard in the neighborhood of 245 South Ward Street. In that jargon, these words from the second chapter of Ephesians would sound something like this: “Ally, ally outs in free.”
The Apostle Paul knew who the “outs” were in the early Christian movement. They were the Gentiles, those who were not pure. In those days the test of authenticity for “church membership,” if you will, was not how many committees and rummage sales you had worked on, it was whether or not you were a child of Abraham, a faithful Jew, adhering to the law of Moses. The early Christians, the first followers of Jesus, were Jews; and the non-Jews, the Gentiles in places like Ephesus were not quickly embraced by the faithful in Jerusalem.
So, Paul tells these newbies, these new Gentile followers of Christ, that they should no longer consider themselves “strangers and sojourners” – they are no longer “outs” – but “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.” They are now “in,” and, what’s more, they are “in, free.” They’re not “in” because they contributed enough dollars, or because they belong to the right social class, or because they’ve put in enough hours on programs and projects, but totally by grace, totally without price or accounting, “free.” “Ally, ally outs in free.” It’s a sacred thing. No playing around; no tricks. The words can be trusted.
Are you one of the “outs,” or are you “in?” If the truth be known, most of us feel at times like one, and at times like the other. In some settings, with our friends, or in places where we spend a lot of time, we are at home, it’s our turf, we feel comfortably “in.” In other arenas of life, any of us can feel like a stranger, a sojourner. Attending a friend’s wedding reception, in a room full of complete strangers, moving into a new town, or even attending a church, can seem like being on someone else’s turf.
But, there are folks who have been “outs” for so long, and ousted from so much, that the entire world feels like someone else’s turf. That’s a particularly painful way to go through life. It can lead to chronic shuffling of the feet and downcasting of the eyes. Sometimes I think a person can feel so thoroughly “out” of this world that everyone in it is seen as nothing more than an alien being responsible in some convoluted logic for one’s own misery.
And we are all well aware of the zones where we are “out” or “in,” the boundaries of which are defined by skin color, or socio-economic background, or language, or political views. Sadly, those who attempt to cross these boundaries are consistently met with looks, and gestures, and comments that remind them they are out of their territory. Certain sections of any major city, certain communities, clubs (country and otherwise), political organizations, even service organizations, can be such places of clearly identified turf. I’m led to wonder if a young man takes a rifle to a rooftop to try to assassinate a candidate for the presidency because the divisions between us have become so extreme that it seems in his twisted mind it’s the only solution.
I’ve often wondered what a visitor from another planet would make of all this. I imagine such a newcomer to earth standing with mouth agape, and head cocked trying to understand as we explain all the intricacies of social stratification. I wonder if the alien would say, “But, you all look alike, and you’re all on this same little planet together. The purpose of all these divisions among yourselves eludes me.” I don’t know what we’d say to that alien to explain it all. I’m not sure that I could make sense out of it. For whatever reason, we seem to be enamored of drawing circles around ourselves, whether we draw them to identify ourselves as “ins” or to identify ourselves as “outs,” we can be equally comforted by them.
Well, check your magic marker at the door when you enter this place, because we draw no circles here. As soon as you cross the threshold of the church, you enter a place where there are no “ins” and no “outs” – at least that’s the ideal we try to hold ourselves to here. It’s not easy, because it goes against the grain of everything else in our lives and seems almost contrary to our very natures. We might be more comfortable in some ways if there were different levels of membership, each with a different status. In fact, we sometimes subconsciously try to create them. We could have hierarchies like the rest of the world does, based on seniority or talent. That way you could work your way up the ladder over the course of a few years and become a “senior, chief muckity-muck,” but then we wouldn’t learn anything, would we?
And, once every month we come to the table, to eat the same bread and drink the same cup. Every Sunday we sit and stand and sing together, with no honored places, or positions of privilege, to declare a oneness in Christ that flies in the face of society’s proclivity for naming the “ins” and the “outs.”
Martha Sterne tells a wonderful story about a sermon that went way out of control. “A friend was delivering the sermon to his parish in downtown Macon, Georgia,” she writes, “on a Sunday in the late sixties. As you know, the whole country was in an uproar with Vietnam and civil rights marches and women were waking up and young people finding spectacular ways to be outrageous.
“All of this was swirling around his congregation, which included city fathers, who made it clear to their young rector that on Sundays they wanted to rest from the unrest. . . .
“Newcomers were showing up in church, some in jeans and long hair, even rock musicians. The newcomers got involved in outreach ministries serving the poor, which was sort of okay with the church leaders. But the newcomers also wanted the poor and anybody else to come to church which was not okay. They even put an advertisement in the paper with the Sunday service schedule and a picture of a black sheep and the words ‘Come As You Are.’
“Inviting even more strange people to flock to the church through the newspaper, with the connotation that some of the sheep might be black, was the last straw for the traditionalists. One woman mailed a letter to the entire parish in which she stated that the reach of the outreach people had exceeded the grasp of any sensible person by a long shot.
“Thus, lack of appreciation pervaded the atmosphere on that Sunday. . . . The priest . . . launched, subtly of course, into repenting the traditionalists’ sins. He spoke with assurance, deftly weaving the stories of Isaiah’s community and Jesus’ crowd and the world of Macon, Georgia. He described the parallels in a gently ironic tone, and he looked out over the congregation who seemed transfixed. If the truth were to be told he was pleased with himself. Then as he paused for breath, the unthinkable happened. A lady stood up. . . . she said, ‘do you mean to say we are wrong? Do you mean to say that for all these years we have been wrong?’
“Then the young rector opened his mouth to reply, but nothing came out. And he stood in the pulpit. For a moment, all was silence. And then another voice in the congregation spoke up and then another and then another. And people talked of trying to become part of church and being frozen out. And others mourned the loss of respect for traditions held dear. And some yelled in anger and some said they were afraid of what the church and the whole world were coming to. And many people cried. The congregation argued with itself for about twenty minutes. And the young rector stood in the pulpit. And listened. Then for a moment all was silence again. And he said, ‘I don’t know what to do. What do we do now?’ And someone said, ‘well, we might as well do [communion].’
“And they [celebrated the Lord’s Supper] . . .And of course you know the rest of the story. Like Paul and the Gentiles or Nixon and the Chinese, the enraged traditional woman became the instrument of reconciliation between the old-timers and the new people. She was the first woman ever on the vestry, and largely through her sponsorship, the first female priest in Georgia came to that congregation. And through the grace of God in her and some others, the doors of the church opened wider to invite strangers in and to send people out to love and serve.”1
And, like that church in Macon, Georgia, Sunday after Sunday here, together, we continue to lift up to those around us a model of community without barriers and divisions, and we continue to invite others to do the same.
My message today is not complicated; in fact, it’s rather brief. It boils down to this: In the course of my ministry, I’ve thought of three or four things that are so important I’ve wished they could be written on a big sign over the front door to the church. One of them is this:
“Ally, ally outs in free.”
1 Martha Sterne, All Saints’ Church, Atlanta, GA, “Can Pentecost Be Private?,” Journal For Preachers, Pentecost, 1997, pp. 40-41.
One of my first pastorates out of seminary was in a small rural community in upstate New York. I have changed quite a bit since those days, but one way in which I remain much the same person is that I have always loved to have fun. I tend to make light of a lot of things, and I’m particularly good at particularly bad jokes. Sometimes I even get a little carried away and get downright silly. Well, in this rural church there was a farmer by the name of Elihu Jones. Elihu was a stern, austere man who had admirably made his way through life by sheer hard work. He was an early riser, and a no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone sort of guy. He read the Bible regularly and could quote chapter a verse when called upon. Mostly, though, he didn’t say much. I’ll never forget one evening after a church meeting held in someone’s home, Elihu came up to me and confronted me about the jokes and light-hearted fooling around that was my wont. He said that he didn’t think it was quite appropriate for a minister to behave in such a way. When I protested he put me in my place by quoting Isaiah 53:3. He said, “Jesus was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief!” Well, dear old Elihu probably went to his grave thinking that I was a lost cause. And I guess he was right; I’ve never gotten over my inclination toward light-hearted fun and bad jokes. But then, I’m not convinced of Elihu’s scriptural exegesis. I recall also that Jesus seemed to enjoy a party – he turned the water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana. And I suspect that he must have known how to have a good time because he got the finger-wagging rebuke that comes to those who don’t take it all as seriously as some would prefer. Jesus tells us in Matthew 11:19 that he was accused by some of being a glutton and a drunkard, and hanging out with the wrong crowd. You don’t get that kind of reputation for nothing.
King David certainly knew how to party. He brought the sacred arc up from the house of Obed-edom to Jerusalem “with rejoicing”. And then he got so carried away that he stripped down to his skivvies, and started dancing in the street. Now, I can’t really imagine a national leader doing that today (the image is a bit unsettling), but for David it kind of feels right. He was, if you’ll pardon the expression, “letting it all hang out.” There was something authentic and compelling in his outrageous performance that was not simply calling attention to himself but reminding everyone that even though he is king, he also a human being. But Michal, the daughter of Saul, looked out her window and saw the king prancing around in front of everyone in his skivvies, and she was scandalized. She let him have it – called him vulgar and shameless. For David, I guess, that’s what you get for dancing.
It seems there’s always someone around to throw cold water on the party. And if the truth be known, a lot of the time that’s you and I. We adhere to our sense of propriety. We don’t want to be seen as fools. And consequently, we can find ourselves disinclined to really loosen up to find and express the joy in life.
Now, I have to admit, I haven’t always felt much like dancing – let alone doing it in the street in my BVD’s. But I think David’s dance is about something larger than having fun. He explains to Michal: “It was before the Lord, who chose me in place of your father and all his household, to appoint me as prince over Israel, the people of the Lord, that I have danced before the Lord. I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in my own eyes.” In other words, David was dancing with his feet because he felt blessed enough by the Lord’s presence and favor that he was dancing in his heart. And having a dancing heart is what it’s all about.
I think that David’s dance is informative. It is the sense of being connected to the divine, of being one with the Heart of Existence, of being touched by the Divine Light, that makes a heart dance. And you don’t have to be happy for that to happen. Your heart can dance even when your eyes are flooded with tears.
I’ve often tried to describe what this “dancing heart” feels like; I never seem to quite get it right. It’s so hard to explain because it’s not just about being happy, it is a certain lightness that comes when one can let go of hurt and fear in the awareness of a deeper Presence. One elucidation of this feeling is found in C. S. Lewis’s description of the emotional reaction to the name of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. He writes that, “each one of the children felt something jump in his inside. . . . Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.”1 It’s that kind of transportation to a place of freedom and wholeness that I’m talking about.
But your heart can’t dance if it’s tied up with resentment and weighed down with anger. That was the case for Herodias in our gospel reading from Mark today. Her heart was so twisted up with rage at John the Baptist that all she could think about was killing him. So her daughter performed a death-dance before the king and wound up with an ugly, bloody head on a platter. That’s what you get for dancing if that’s the kind of dance you’re into.
And your heart can’t dance if it’s in a straightjacket. And that’s what happens so often when we become emotionally absorbed in our own trials and traumas. I’ve discovered something about that also. When all there is to do is sit around, felling sorry for myself about something, the minutes and hours can seem interminable – unbearable. Often, all it takes is to have some focus other than myself to make it all seem so much more manageable. Dadgie, bless her heart, can lift me up with a smile or a kiss. Something like that can do wonders to take you out of yourself. I think that’s the case for any of us. When we get into those awful times of self-absorption and self-pity, it can turn into a downhill spiral that’s hard to get out of – and that’s the straightjacket that keeps one’s heart from dancing. I think that’s one of the great values of the kind of fellowship we have in this church. We rub elbows around here and get to know each other, and in time, we learn to truly care about one another. I’ve seen people here reaching out to others in times of need, and I’ve seen folks doing that in scorn of their own infirmities and troubles. The bonds that we form in this church family are mutually healing. They shift our perspective and free our hearts.
So, one way to get a dancing heart is to get outside of yourself. Another way is to simply stop taking yourself so seriously. I think it was G. K. Chesterton who said that angels are able to fly because they take themselves lightly. There is great power for healing to be found in poking fun at one’s self. Sometimes you and I can get so consumed by our agendas and priorities that one might think the world rises or falls on whether we get what we want. Maybe that’s the value in telling jokes and being a little silly. It keeps one from getting too serious about one’s own place in the world.
But perhaps the best way to get a dancing heart is to spend time realizing your connection to the quiet Power that pervades all being. Whether it’s through meditation or simply repeated moments of reflection, there is a tremendous release that comes with such broadened awareness. Reading the Bible stories can do that for some people. Encountering the life of Jesus and taking his words to heart can bring a whole new perspective on life and help to unbutton that straightjacket around one’s heart.
But there are bound to be those who resent you for having inappropriate affect, for reflecting inner peace and joy in the face of trauma. They’re the same ones who will scold you for telling jokes when they feel proper decorum is called for. And they’re the ones who will look down on you and call you vulgar if they catch you dancing in the street – I suppose that’s what you get for dancing. Just be careful not to be one of those scolding types yourself.
Instead, nurture a heart of joy, a heart that is in tune with the great Heart of Love that beats throughout this created order, a heart that can find peace in the midst of the storm, a heart that is free from the bondage of self-absorption and is free to be concerned for the welfare of others, a heart that can help you laugh at yourself and find the best in life. That, after all, is what you get for dancing.
1 C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Harper Collins, 2002, pp. 74-75.
A few years ago scientists made a big discovery at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. They smashed a couple of protons into each other at near light speeds, and up popped the evidence of a hitherto unconfirmed subatomic particle. It’s a boson, which is just a fancy name for photons, and some other elusive particles that flash into and out of existence when particles collide. This boson is very much the particle that was predicted to exist by Peter Higgs back in 1964. So this particle, now called the Higgs boson, confirmed the existence of the related “Higgs field” that acts a kind of cosmological sticky soup permeating all of space and slowing down other particles, causing them to acquire mass. This process is called the “Higgs mechanism.” The “Higgs mechanism” is simply the generation of masses for the W+, W− and Z weak gauge bosons through the breaking of electroweak symmetry. Now the big question. Do I really understand everything I just said? Not entirely.
But here’s where it gets interesting for us. Somewhere along the line (to the consternation of physicists), media types started referring to the Higgs boson as “the God particle,” perhaps assuming that since the Higgs field would be responsible for the generation of mass, and therefore everything we see in the universe, it would be somehow the key to creation itself, or more likely, media types thought calling it the “God particle” would sell more newspapers, magazines, and air-time. The truth is it’s not really God, it’s simply a theory about how the physics of the universe operates (which, I suppose, could mean about the same thing, depending on your conception of God). But it’s not even anything new; physicists have been doing math and physics based on calculations for the Higgs field ever since Higgs came up with the idea. They had already taken that theoretical line of research almost as far as they go with present knowledge. So, physicists didn’t really get so excited about the realization that this new boson is pretty much the same particle that Higgs envisioned. What really got their engines revving is the possibility that it would turn out to be somewhat different than the classical Higgs boson. Because that would mean they’d have to go back to the drawing board and take up a whole new line of research and investigation. That’s what really turns them on. Therein lies my message today: a complicated, confusing, unknown, and angst-producing world is the best kind of world to live in. Isn’t it lucky that’s the one we’ve got?
I was driven to this notion when I started to read the lectionary for today and saw that those who compile the lectionary readings had decided in their wisdom to leave out some verses from the passage in 2 Samuel you heard this morning. In your bulletin, it says the reading is 2 Samuel 5:1-10. I have to confess, I fudged a bit. The actual lectionary reading, and the one I had Barbara read for you this morning, leaves out verses six through eight. Well, you know me; I couldn’t resist looking to see what they decided to skip over. Here it is:
“The king and his men marched to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, ‘You will not come in here, even the blind and the lame will turn you back’ – thinking, ‘David cannot come in here.’ Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion, which is now the city of David. David had said on that day, ‘Whoever would strike down the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack the lame and the blind, those whom David hates.’ Therefore it is said, ‘The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.’”
David wants his men to attack the blind and the lame in Jerusalem because he hates them. Yeah, I can understand why the lectionary people would want to skip over those verses. As you can imagine, this really got me going. So I started to dig. What’s going on here? Well, it turns out these three verses are considered by most biblical scholars to be so corrupted as to be practically non-translatable. In other words, with the passing down of the story, first orally, from generation to generation, and then in written form, transcribed and recopied innumerable times, the words got jumbled and truncated to the point that transcribers were struggling to make sense of them and so revised them even further. So translators are left trying to make sense of what has been passed down to us in Hebrew which, according to the best I’m able to do, translates the words of David most literally as, “Whoever would strike down the Jebusite and struggle with [something – which may mean a water shaft] and the lame and the blind, hated by David’s soul.” All of this leads to the question, what might the original sentences have been? There’s no way to know. But there’s an intriguing possibility. If one reads some later accounts in the Bible, in Joshua and Judges we find these words: “the Jebusites live with the people of Judah in Jerusalem to this day.” So, David did not wipe out or drive out all the Jebusites when he conquered Jerusalem. So it would be reasonable to assume that some kind of amnesty was accorded to the Jebusites that would have been set down in a retelling of the story, such as an account like this in 2 Samuel. Add to this notion something else I discovered in doing my own translation. If you move one little dot from above the left side of a letter to above the right side of the letter, it changes that letter from a sin to a shin, and so changes what the word might be. The translation might go from, “the lame and the blind, hated by David’s soul . . .” to “the lame and the blind, sublime to David’s soul . . .” Now, I’m no Hebrew authority, so don’t put a lot of stock in my half-baked notions here. But if I’ve lost you in all this linguistic ruminating, that’s OK, because here’s the point of all this: It’s the corrupted text, the part that doesn’t make sense, that offers the most intriguing area of study, and yields a potential insight (at least an hypothesis) that could make the passage mean just about the opposite of what it seems – and could shed a gracious light on an otherwise ugly scenario. That’s the kind of thing that really turns me on – just like the physicists get turned on when the experimental results throw them for a loop.
I think this has everything to do with what the Apostle Paul was getting at in his second letter to the Corinthians. He talked about a “thorn” that was given to him in the flesh. We don’t know what that was, apparently some physiological problem that he struggled with through at least his adult life – maybe a chronic disease, or a physical impairment, or epilepsy, who knows? But Paul saw in this thorn in the flesh something of great value. He rejoiced in it, and said, “Whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”
You and I yearn for a simpler life. We’d like to be free from travail, exempt from frustration. We imagine that the best in life are those days when we zip effortlessly from one simple routine to another without any glitches. We dread the thought of having our plans interrupted, our dreams crumpled, our expectations frustrated. And we’ve got it all backwards. We could learn a lesson from the physicists and from the apostle Paul. It’s the hitches in our plans that offer the greatest possibility for finding new directions. It’s the places where we get tripped up that afford us the best chance of learning something. It’s the struggles and difficulties of life that point the way to a deeper and more meaningful existence. Angst is not our enemy; it’s a blessing!
Stop and consider for a moment what life would be if everything were simple and always went smooth as silk – no troubles, no worries, no surprises, no glitches. Sounds like paradise, right? Think again. Nothing new; nothing challenging. Nothing to adjust to and become more of a person because of. Without the possibility of discovering something dreadful there is no possibility of discovering something full of wonder. Without dead-ends there are no new roads to travel.
Here’s my thought. What if the angst that seems to be part of our lives is, in fact, like a Higgs field permeating the very fabric of our existence and making life possible? What if every event, every encounter, every experience of life moves through this field encountering angst and gets slowed down enough to acquire true essence – like a quark or an electron gains mass moving through the Higgs field? If the analogy is apt, then you and I couldn’t really exist – we wouldn’t be people of substance – without the traumas, frustrations, and pains that are our constant companions. In fact, these are our treasures, because they so invariably point the way to new possibilities and larger lives. They strengthen and teach us. When you stop to think about it, maybe this all does have to do with a sort of “God particle.” Maybe the fact that existence is chock-a-block full of challenging, eye-opening, soul-stirring frustrations and problems is proof enough for the existence of the Almighty.
So, I leave you with the words of Paul: “Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”
It’s that time again – the Fourth of July week. So, this seems like a particularly meaningful time to be reflecting on the blessings of liberty. I want to look at Some of our cherished words as Americans, examine them under the spotlight of Biblical concepts of freedom and of justice, and talk about what it has meant for us to be a nation of free people – a nation which we proudly proclaim as “one . . . under God, with liberty and justice for all.” And I want to reflect also on the implications of those biblical concepts of freedom and justice for a church like ours – a church that is going through a rather stressful time of weighing the treasures of our endowed past against the promises of an unknown future.
It is a remarkable system we’ve developed here in America. It’s based on an almost sacred list of freedoms. They are: freedom of religion, freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of the press, freedom to petition for grievances, freedom to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, freedom from arbitrary, capricious or secret prosecution or civil complaint, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. These freedoms are so dear to us that the words we use to describe them are burned into our hearts from an early age, and their recital can almost bring tears to our eyes. Those tears of gratitude for our freedoms come easily when hearing, as I did just the other evening on the PBS NewsHour, that a woman in Russia was imprisoned for treason for sending fifty one dollars to Ukraine.
But what has become of our cherished American freedom? Increasingly, it has become the freedom of multi-billionaires to shelter their assets from taxes while single mothers are unable to care for their children and put a roof over their heads. Increasingly, it has become the freedom for America to behave in any manner it chooses because we are the most powerful nation on the planet and therefore able to make up the rules as we go along. Increasingly, it has become the freedom of powerful corporations to dictate government policy and profit from legislative and administrative influence.
And here’s the larger question: what has become of the simple biblical notion of justice? It’s a principle that we are supposed to hold as dear as that of freedom – after all, the familiar phrase is “liberty and justice for all.” The Apostle Paul spoke to the Christians in Corinth about justice. He said, “it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. As it is written, ‘The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.’” Wouldn’t it be a wondrous world indeed if “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little?”
The problem is, you can’t entirely legislate that kind of justice. The Soviets tried it, and it was a resounding failure. One of the common assumptions in modern American politics is that the United States won the cold war and defeated Communism because we had a “superior ideology.” Well, that’s partly true. We won the cold war because we crushed the Soviet Union economically by pushing the arms and space race all the way to “Star Wars” so that they would have to choose whether to become a second class military power or spend until they broke the bank. Either way, we win. Now, the argument can be made that we were able to defeat the U.S.S.R. economically because our system worked better than theirs, which proves that our ideology is superior. Well, that’s also true. Communism can’t work because you can’t legislate absolute justice without crushing people’s hopes and trampling on their freedoms. Sooner or later they will rise up and wrest their liberty away from you. There is a passion for freedom that beats within the human breast, and it cannot be stifled. So, we must be ever vigilant to maintain our separation of powers and our precious democracy.
The problem lies in what the Apostle Paul spoke to the Corinthians about. When he urged them to offer assistance to those in need as a matter of justice, he said, “I do not say this as a command, but I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others.” It is the genuineness of our love that is the issue. It is the earnestness of our compassion – a compassion that we as a people demonstrate, not the compassion we talk about – that determines whether “liberty and justice for all” is a real possibility or simply a pipe dream. Because in a world of self-interest and greed, greater freedom only leads to greater injustice. In a world that easily turns its eyes away from the plight of the working single mother or the kid growing up on a hopeless ghetto street, the tax sheltering of billions in assets is heralded as wise money management.
So what does all this have to do with you and me? Just this: America is and will be what we make of it. And it will be built up, brick by brick, from the individual beliefs, acts, and decisions of every one of us. I must admit, I long for the days when we were regarded by great numbers of nations as the model for heroic generosity and good will. I truly do yearn for a time when, as Doctor King said, “all of God’s children will be able to say . . . we’re free at last” – free from the chains of ignorance, free from the prison of injustice, free from the clutches of poverty.
One of the tools that has been used to try to promote justice in our land is the highly debated practice of “affirmative action.” One year ago the Supreme Court of the United States decided a landmark case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, holding race-conscious college admissions processes to be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. A lot of folks are afraid that affirmative action will take away their own opportunities in order to advance the opportunities of others. But you know something? I’m the beneficiary of “affirmative action,” and I’ll bet that just about everyone in this room is in some way or another. I never called it that. I never even thought of it that way, but it’s true. When I was a young college student, I nearly flunked out of my freshman year at the Illinois Institute of Technology. I spent my time chasing girls and playing handball. Studying just didn’t fit into the equation. By the end of the year, I was sharing a small apartment with a roommate and the few worldly possessions that I called my own. I had hardly any money for food, and I had no prospects because I wasn’t going to be allowed back for another year of architectural studies. In other words, I was at the bottom of the barrel. At the time, my father was in an executive position with the American Baptist Churches in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. He made some phone calls, and arrangements, then came to Chicago to pick me up and get me to Ottawa, Kansas, where he had arranged for my admission into the American Baptist related university there. My grades did not qualify me for admission; my record offered no reason for the school to have confidence in me; my father’s influence got me into that school. And if I hadn’t gotten in there, who knows what would have become of me? I don’t like to think about it. That’s affirmative action if ever there was such a thing. What we need to foster is simply a broader appreciation of the concept of “family” and a deeper sense of who might be “worthy” of a little help. That’s what justice means. It’s nothing less than compassion. In the apostle Paul’s words, it’s “genuineness of love.”
Freedom carries with it the burden of responsibility. If we are to be a freedom-loving people, we must raise the torch of justice or else our freedom will devour us. If we are to stand for the noble vision of our forebears, we must embody the kind of generosity and vigilance that will keep that dream from turning into a nightmare. Every time you enter into a conversation or tell a joke, you are helping to shape the face of America. Every time you step into the voting booth, or pull out your check book, or sign a petition, you are casting the force of your being behind one possible future or another.
And as those who stand in what’s called the “free church” tradition, we are participants in one of the greatest counter-cultural movements for freedom and justice in the world. This church strives to be a model for the kind of community that’s envisioned in the New Testament. Our commitment is to live in the kind of freedom that Christ spoke of when he said that “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” and that “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” I take that freedom to mean that we are not bound to common beliefs, but to the very right and responsibility to hold divergent beliefs, and in our disagreement, to commit ourselves in love to one another and to Christ’s church. That’s the justice side of the equation. Disagreement or dispute without love is like freedom without justice; it just doesn’t work in the long run. We have an uncertain future here at Memorial Congregational. These are the times that test, as Paul said, “the genuineness of our love.” There is, perhaps a larger question before us than whether we will be able to hire a pastor. The larger question is whether we are truly and deeply committed to the counter-cultural model of love that binds us together in the freedom of our diversity or whether we’re just foolin’ around.
On this coming Fourth of July, I urge you to celebrate freedom as never before. I invite you to lift high the worthy ideal that is America. And I encourage you to rededicate yourself to the cause of justice, and to compassion, and genuine love, and to celebrate that if Christ “. . . makes you free, you will be free indeed.”
I love those marvelous words of FDR spoken at the time our nation was in the Great Depression. It was 1933. The Depression worsened in the months preceding Roosevelt’s inauguration on March 4. Many people have compared recent recessions with the Great Depression, but there really is no comparison. Factory closings, farm foreclosures, and bank failures increased, while unemployment soared far beyond what we’ve seen in more recent times. Roosevelt faced the greatest crisis in American history since the Civil War. In his inaugural address, he said, “First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself!” Those words are like the man who spoke them – strong, confident, reassuring.
They are not like the words Jesus uttered to his disciples in the boat, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” Let me explain:
In verse 36 we read, “leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat . . . [and] A great windstorm arose” Now, I’ve gotten into boats. I can remember being with friends on a sailboat in two to three foot seas. That’s not considered much by sailors, but it was plenty enough for me. I remember the pounding of the boat against the waves as it dove into each trough. When we changed course and the boat leaned, I thought I was going to lose my lunch.
I’ve never been in a boat in a serious storm. I’ve heard plenty of stories about it, though. I’ve heard friends tell of being out on the water with eight foot waves crashing over the bow in the darkness – the kind of seas that make veteran sailors fear for their lives. I can hardly imagine being in that kind of storm at sea.
So, when I read here in Mark, “A great windstorm arose . . .” I can imagine a great storm. This is no little heavy wind. It says here, “the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped!” Not only were the waves crashing over the bow, but the boat was about to sink! That’s some storm.
Now get this. Then it says, “But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion.” He was asleep? That’s one of the most amazing things I’ve encountered in scripture. He was either an astonishingly great and soul-centered man, a narcoleptic, or a complete idiot!
“. . .and they woke him up.” Now, think about that for a minute. I have no idea how they did that. If he could sleep through a raging storm that was tossing the boat around and about to sink it, what in the world could these guys do that would get his attention?
So Jesus wakes up, assesses the situation, quiets the raging seas, and utters this truly baffling phrase, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
“Why are you afraid?” You’ve got to be kidding. It seems rather obvious. I’ve been in a boat in heavy winds. I was scared to death when it was nothing like what’s described here. “Why are you afraid?”
I’ve been frightened. I was a police officer. And if you think cops are never afraid, you’re mistaken. I remember starting to wear a bullet-proof vest under my uniform because there was some nut-case going around shooting police officers. I can remember high speed chases, trying to arrest a guy who was twice my size and drunk and resisting. I remember ordering larceny suspects out of a car at gun-point. I remember going home after a long and stressful shift, so caught up in my fears that I had to go check on the children in their beds to make sure they were breathing.
I don’t blame the disciples for their fear. I’ve been frightened. I remember huddling in the living room with a transistor radio while hurricane Gloria came rumbling through. And when it felt like the house was about to be reduced to rubble we went into the bathroom because it seemed like the sturdiest part of the structure. We crouched there while a sixty foot maple tree in the back yard came crashing to the ground. I don’t blame the disciples for their fear.
I doubt that you can either. When the obstacles have seemed so large, and self doubt has crept up on you, so that you wonder what you are doing, or what you are going to do. When the storms of life, of loss, of tragedy, of failure have moved in to blacken the sky overhead, and the winds of uncertainty have blown and piled up the waves like great walls, and all there seems below is a great, cold, black void, fathoms deep. You’ve been frightened.
I remember when the sixth grade bully beat me up on the playground. I told my dad about it. His advice? “The next time he comes after you, you just clean his clock – punch his lights out.” The fact that this kid was nearly twice my size was to have no bearing on the situation. Somehow, just saying, “don’t be afraid” doesn’t seem like good advice.
And Jesus doesn’t say, “don’t be afraid.” He doesn’t offer some stirring words like, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” or even, “fear not, the Lord shall be they confidence.” He challenges me, and he challenges you with a mind-blowing question: “Why are you afraid?”
That’s the question. It calls us to truly look at ourselves and come to terms with the source of our fears. It’s not the sort of word you might hear from most of us preachers when you’re in the midst of a traumatic and painful experience. We’re trained in seminary to try to hear and empathize with people’s fear and hurt. It’s not considered the time to challenge them.
And Jesus was perfectly able to empathize with the disciples. His amazing ability to sleep through a raging storm at sea notwithstanding, Jesus was capable of knowing fear. He certainly demonstrated that on the night before he was crucified, in the garden of Gethsemane. He prayed, and sweated, and trembled, and asked to be let out of this terrible situation. He knew. He knew what it’s like to live in a terrifying world. But he still put it to the disciples, “Why are you afraid?”
“Why are you afraid?” It’s a question that directs us to the very heart of our faith. The things that we fear are real. There are more things to fear than just fear itself. But it can be terribly important to ask ourselves what it is that lives at the deepest heart of our fear. We might say we fear losing our job, or getting cancer, or having something awful happen to someone we love, or just about anything else. But if we search diligently enough, we may discover other, deeper fears that fuel the more routine and daily fears. Are we afraid of death, or are we afraid of what death might be? Are we afraid of losing income, or are we afraid of losing the routines and titles that give us something to cling to for security? Are we afraid of global catastrophe, or are we afraid of losing the future, thus rendering the past meaningless? In the final analysis, most of our deepest fears boil down to the fear of what the universe and our place in it would be if there were no hope, no grace, no divine providence.
I think that’s why Jesus startled the disciples with what sounded like a foolish question. He was turning the disciples’ experience upside down. In essence, he was saying, “You think you’re afraid of the storm? Why are you really afraid?” I think he challenged the root of their fear because that’s the only point there is to make, and the only way to make it! Faith is not a magic elixir to make our fears vanish into thin air, but at a deep, existential level, faith is the opposite of our greatest, most profound fear. Faith is that connection with the heart of the universe that grabs us by the shirt collar and tells us existence is not arbitrary and capricious; it is an expression of divine intention. And there’s something about that way of approaching life that turns things upside down!
Because of the reality of grace, the world doesn’t always work the way we think it does. Just when we are at the end of our resources, and we’ve no place left to turn, the answer comes from the least expected place with no warning. The very thing you think is least likely to happen may well be the Divine plan. The irresponsible slacker, sleeping in the boat while a storm rages may just be the one who can, astonishingly, quiet the waters.
The world is full of miracles; we are surrounded by miracle-workers, and we usually don’t know it simply because we’re not looking for them. When you run out of options, another option can be created for you out of thin air. When you are most alone, you discover the wondrous healing touch of a friend.
You see, either we’re just going through the motions here, or this entire universe, along with each one of us, is resting in ultimately powerful, perfectly loving, and eternally abiding hands. And that makes all the difference.
To live by faith may not be to walk blithely through our days unaffected by the storms that rage, but it is to wrest from life at least a modicum of the peace that comes from knowing that the world is upside down, that storms can be stilled when that’s the last thing we expect, that the Lord of Life is in charge, even though it seems like there’s no one minding the store.
Every once in a while it’s important to remind ourselves that we are not among those who live without hope, and that our hope is built on a sure foundation. Whatever disturbs you, whatever dismays you, whatever keeps you awake at night, whatever gnaws at your insides, whatever causes you to worry and fret, whatever your fear, here is my word to you this morning: There may be a surprise in store for you. So look for it, be patient, be ready. And maybe ask yourself: “Why are you afraid?”
Dadgie and I have always had interesting nesting habits. Just about every time we’ve moved to a new place we’ve gone through this little ritual. She planted gardens and I built fences. The gardens are . . . well . . . self explanatory. The fences were often to keep the dog out of the gardens. I am usually quite proud of my fences. I’ve built picket fences, wire fences, stockade fences, you name it. But there is one problem that I haven’t yet quite figured a way around: after a few years, her gardens still looked bright and beautiful, but my fences started to rot. It’s the doggonedest thing! The very minute she put those flowers and vegetables in the dirt, they started to grow, and the very minute I put those posts in the ground, they started to rot. Now I know some of you watch “This Old House” and are ready to say, “Mike, just use pressure treated lumber.” I do use it, but my point is that even p.t. doesn’t last forever. Apparently, there’s something built right into those flower seeds that’s a miracle – a miracle that has long since faded from possibility in those fence posts, but a miracle that makes the flowers keep becoming more than they were.
It’s automatic! At least that’s the word Jesus chose to describe it (or, the translators of Jesus’ words, if you will). In speaking of the kingdom, he said it was like a seed planted in the ground, growing into a stalk of wheat that is brought forth from the earth (in Greek) automaté. That’s the same root from which comes our English word automatic. Growth is built-in. Organic development seems to be one of the basic ingredients in the recipe of creation. It’s common, apparently, to single-celled animals, complex organisms, and the kingdom of heaven. Jesus apparently considered it intrinsic to the Gospel; he spoke about it all the time. Many of the parables are about growth: grain, yeast, mustard plants, trees, weeds. Jesus seemed to love these kind of stories. And in this fourth chapter of Mark, he makes it very clear that what he is doing and calling us to do is not so much like building a fence as it is like planting a garden.
Seeds of peace, planted long ago, have begun to germinate in many corners of the world. We saw it happen in Ireland and South Africa a number of years ago. There are even rumors lately of behind-the-scenes negotiations going on between the Israelis and Palestinians. If that came about it would indeed be a miracle. There are still nations at war; there are still religious rivalries that erupt into deadly conflict. There are still atrocities being committed. There are still ancient hatreds simmering in many lands. But, isn’t it remarkable how the conflicts on our planet seem to be scaling down, and our emerging global network of economic interdependencies seems to be making really large scale warfare like world wars less and less likely. We may be a long way from lasting global peace, but we just may finally be starting to grow in that direction.
It’s true for our world, and it’s true for our community of faith. When we look back at the history of our church, we are aware of times of struggle and times of triumph. We have seen the church supporting missions around the world and reaching out to people in our own community. As with any church, I’m sure our historical record includes conflicts and reconciliations, unity and diversity, set-backs and stunning achievements. Yes, we have dwindled in numbers, but we have grown together in love and faith and are striving every day to embody the Love of Christ.
And the same is true in your own life. Rarely do we take the time to notice, but it can be important to rest a moment along the way and look at the road you’ve traveled. It may at times seem that you take two steps back for every one forward, but over the long haul, you know it’s not true; you are more today than you once were. You are wiser, more able to listen and hear the hopes and fears of others. I believe it was Robert Raines reflecting somewhere on the remarkable growth of the human soul over time and his awareness that real growth often only comes when one has lived a number of years. He responded to the question of Nicodemus, “How can one be born again when he is old?” And Raines said, “Why that’s precisely when it happens!”
All of this is good to reflect on and sheds a hopeful light on our lives and our world. But there’s a significant caution for us in the story Jesus tells. It is the caution to not lose sight of the mystery of growth. In the parable, the seed grows secretly while the man sleeps. In the light of day he sees the growth of the plant, but he’s at a loss to explain how it happens. Because the miracle of growth is a mystery, it’s also a process that’s often hidden, almost imperceptible. Consequently, we need all the patience we can muster.
That’s the lesson we all learned from Nelson Mandella. He spent years in prison, with no certainty about his future, but he patiently nurtured the seeds of hope within, preparing himself for a day he could not be certain would ever come. Upon his release, he became the voice of justice and peace, and ultimately the leader of his nation. Those who are about the business of the realm of Love are most certainly people of infectious hope, but they must also be people of indomitable patience. So, even in the bleakest of times, we must have the wisdom to lie down on our beds at night and know the seeds, hidden in the darkness, are hard at work performing an automatic miracle.
Another aspect of the story Jesus told is equally critical for those of us who are trying to find our way in this age of uncertainty. Jesus goes to considerable lengths to illustrate that this mysterious growing of love and faith is a process, and a process involving human beings at critical moments. Yes, the grain grows mysteriously, but the seed has to be planted. The blade appears, then the head, then the full grain in the head, but the one who must harvest the crop stays vigilant throughout the growth cycle, sleeping each night, but rising each day to examine the progress. There’s no doubt about it, you and I are co-creators, partners in the divine work of creation and re-creation, collaborators in the unfolding of a new world and a new humanity. We are called to be earnest and diligent gardeners, tending to and watering the seedlings of all the beautiful things growing in our world, and pulling at the weeds of greed and self interest, intolerance and abuse.
I believe that the most terrible kind of death a person can suffer is the death of the spirit. That’s what happens when you give up on growth. Concerns for peace, social justice, human service, global ecology, civil rights, all have grown up out of the fertile soil of those in our nation, in our cities, in our churches, who have been vigilantly progressive. By that I mean they have refused to be content with things they way they are. They have been committed to a self-critical approach to life, that looks not only at the world around them, but first within, and asks, “How can things be better?” Not, “How can I keep things from getting worse?” I’m deeply concerned that we’re in danger of letting that spirit die in America. We are all too rapidly becoming a nation of finger-pointers. And I fear we are losing the capacity to look critically at ourselves. Goethe said it: “everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.” If the kingdom is going to come about (as we pray each week) “on earth, as it is in heaven,” if the seeds of peace and justice are going to grow within our own hearts and minds, if the flower of community is going to blossom in this place, then we must be vigilant, always seeking the opportunity to pitch in and be a part of the new thing that’s trying to bloom.
Finally, I’m struck by the fact that, even after all the focus on growth as a process, the kingdom becoming, growing like a stalk of wheat, the need for vigilance and care, Jesus points to the final harvest. If we are working, waiting, and keeping watch over the growth of the kingdom, we are working and waiting for a real outcome, not pie-in-the-sky. A new realm of love and justice and community is in the cards! Growth is not for its own sake. The process is not an end in itself. We may spend our entire lives becoming, but there is something to be. We may never see the end results of our labors, but there are results. Full fruition of the kingdom may continue to be unrealized, but it is nonetheless real. Don’t give up on tomorrow. It’s just a sunrise away.
So what’s all this got to do with fenceposts and flowers? Well, there are two kinds of people in the world, those who, like fence posts, get stuck in the muck and start to turn rotten, and those who, like flowers, spread their leaves and keep reaching for the sun.
I preached a few Sundays ago about Kit Smart and the importance of being crazy enough to, as he wrote, “Hear the Hallelujah from the heart of God.” I’d like to expand on that notion a bit this morning and talk about what it can really mean to go “out of your mind.”
An absolutely amazing picture is painted in our scripture reading from Mark this morning. Crowds were gathering to hear Jesus speak, and it’s clear that for many, it was a kind of circus sideshow. They wanted to come hear the crazy man. In the same sentence that Mark says the crowds were swarming around him, he points out that a lot of people who heard Jesus speak thought he was a few Fruit Loops shy of a whole bowl. The situation was so distressing to Jesus’ family that they were trying to get him to back off – maybe disappear for a while. Listen to this: “and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’” And apparently Jesus didn’t do much to convince the crowds that he had all his marbles. Because when they told him his mother and brothers were there to see him, he said, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And then he looked at the crowds gathered around to listen to him, and he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” Don’t you think if he were concerned about the rumors and trying to demonstrate that his elevator went to the top floor, he would have said something a bit more conventional, like “Oh, I’m glad they came to see me. Tell them I’ll be right there.” If I may be so bold, I think Jesus may have seen some merit in being “out of his mind.” Let me try to explain that.
You and I are so often like those crowds who gathered for the sideshow, who came to spend a fun afternoon chuckling under their breath while they listened to the lunatic from Galilee. The media moguls have figured that out; they know what turns us on. From the so-called “reality shows” to the kind of stories that often pass for news these days, what we so often are drawn to are caricatures of humanity that are so broadly and outrageously drawn that they can serve to reinforce everyone’s sense of their own normalcy – the validity of their own view of the world. It’s a lot like going to hear a so-called prophet we think is off his rocker. Chuckling at him makes us feel superior and fortifies our own convictions. We all find that very satisfying. The problem is that, whether we’re talking about relational ethics, politics, or theology, simply having one’s own predilections and prejudices strengthened doesn’t necessarily lead to greater wisdom or truth. Witness the cancer of retrenched partisan ideology that has become our political system. Both sides in this current run for the presidency paint their opponent in the most extreme terms they can think of. It helps their own supporters feel superior and confident in their leader. Don’t we all do it? Depending on which end of the political spectrum you are on, the other guy is either a senile, doddering, old fool, or a megalomaniac out to destroy our democracy.
Truth is, we spend most of our time in our own minds. We are marinated, basted, and sautéed in the ideas that have formed us; we swim in the ocean of our own thinking; we wrap ourselves in the comfortable blanket of the world view carefully crafted in the factory of our minds. There is a certain arrogance in this business of living constantly in our minds. Our unshakeable and utter dependence on the validity of what we think we know carries the implied assumption that any of us is capable of comprehending truth all by ourselves, that we can actually grasp reality and know with omnipotent certainty divine and eternal intentions and determinations. It is the idolatry of setting one’s own mind on a pedestal as if it were the epitome of Divine Intention. Clergy are particularly susceptible to this kind of idolatry. The great German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew this danger well. While preparing today’s sermon I stumbled upon a remarkable phrase from Bonhoeffer dredged up by William Willimon. He wrote about “the curse of theology.” Bonhoeffer (writing in the day when all clergy were presumed to be males – so excuse the exclusive language) wrote, “The greatest difficulty for the pastor stems from his theology. He knows all there is to be known about sin and forgiveness . . . The peak of theological craftiness is to conceal necessary and wholesome unrest under such self-justification . . . The conscience has been put to sleep. Theology becomes a science by which one learns to excuse everything and justify everything . . . The theologian knows that he cannot be shot out of the saddle by other theologians. Everything his theology admits is justified. This is the curse of theology.”1 That’s quite a comment from one of the world’s greatest theologians. What Bonhoeffer refers to as “necessary and wholesome unrest” is that unsettling word from Jesus, that business of going “out of your mind,” that many pastors try to avoid by tying their theologies up in neat little ribbons and bows. Whenever you hear a preacher (including this one) issue an unequivocal declaration of what “the Bible says,” or what “God wants,” be afraid, be very afraid.
I think Jesus would have us go “out of our minds” from time to time. I think he wanted us to see a larger world than the one that neatly fits into the box of our preconceptions and expectations. I think that’s why he always said things that surprised, disturbed, and even shocked his listeners – things like “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple,” and “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! . . . father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother,” and “Who are my mother and my brothers? . . . Here are my mother and my brothers!” He loved to confound people’s expectations; he always found a way to throw them off balance, to get them “out of their minds.” You and I could stand to get out of our minds from time to time.
What is it to be “out of your mind?” First of all, I think it’s a wonderful expression of humility. If I’m willing to step outside of my own world view long enough to entertain another perspective, I just may be able to stop worshiping at the shrine of my own truth. Humility seems to be a rare commodity these days. Folks are convinced that those who disagree with them are delusional, wrong-headed, or, in the extreme, communists, socialists, fascists, or instruments of the devil. I love the old bumper sticker we used to see every now and then. It simply said, “Have you ever stopped to consider that you might be wrong?” Getting out of your own mind, if even for a brief excursion, is a great way to let a little air out of an inflated ego.
Secondly, to go “out of your mind” is to expand your world view in a way that shifts perspective and opens you to greater insight and greater possibilities. A world that fits inside one’s own small brain is a very little world indeed. There’s a whole wide universe of ideas, realities, and truths out there. And none of us can ever master them all. If you can practice stepping outside of the reality that you’ve constructed in your head, it can be truly astounding what you can learn. It’s a scary thing to do. Once we admit that there’s more truth than we know, it can shake our confidence and make us afraid that our whole world might collapse on us. But if we muster the courage to look further, and experience more broadly and deeply those alien ideas that don’t always fit our assumptions, we gain not only more awareness, but a greater understanding of how little we truly grasp. That’s what folks back in the time of Samuel couldn’t figure out. Every nation around them had a king. It was the thing to do. So they wanted a king so they could be like all the other nations. They couldn’t think any further than that. It was all that their minds could grasp, and it turned out to be disastrous. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that a nation got stuck in a rut due to a lack of vision.
Finally, to be out of your mind is to establish a greater bond with those around you. Maybe that’s the deeper truth behind Jesus’ words about his mother and brothers. He said, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” Knowing what is “the will of God” is pretty tricky stuff, I admit. But the task of searching for that will, and striving always to get closer to comprehending it takes us away from being embroiled in our own agendas, and needs, and persuasions. It puts us on common ground with one another because when we acknowledge that it’s the Lord’s will and not our own that’s determinative, we can no longer separate ourselves from one another through judgment.
I’m very pleased to be in church full of people who are always going “out of their minds.” There is a culture here of searching, growing, listening, and learning. It is very healthy. We have many opportunities to speak with one another and to listen. I’m confident that you will all continue to demonstrate the humility that comes with knowing none of us has a monopoly on truth, and that you will make the love that you have for one another manifest in knowing each other to be your own brothers and sisters. Because of that, I always love our times of eating, and sharing, and listening. After all, it’s a great opportunity to get “out of your mind.”
1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Spiritual Care, cited by William Willimon in Pulpit Resource, June 10, 2012.
I remember when, years ago, Dadgie and I took a picnic to Tanglewood. We sat on the lawn beneath a giant tree and listened to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Chorus perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I recall that it was a beautiful day, and I remember looking up at the sky through the leaves of that great tree and feeling that this was the an eternal moment. I feel that a lot, though, when I listen to the Ninth Symphony. It was exactly two hundred years ago last month, with the ink practically still wet on the paper from Beethoven’s pen, that the symphony was first performed. It is a spectacular and inspired work that always brings me to a remarkable combination of laughter and tears – tears of joy. And that’s the idea, isn’t it – joy? The symphony was, according to Jan Swafford, Beethoven’s answer to the unanswered prayer “Dona nobis pacem” (or, “Give Us Peace”) at the conclusion of his sister work, the Missa Solemnis.1 The Ninth Symphony is an exuberant celebration of the divine gift of joy, inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s ode: An die Fruede (or Ode to Joy) which Beethoven set to music and incorporated into the final movement of the symphony. The poem begins with a shout, and an exclamation: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” (Joy! Beautiful Godspark!). It refers to this joy as the “daughter of Elysium,” Elysium being the idyllic land of flowers and lovely meadows that is the domain of those souls destined for paradise. It is astounding that Beethoven, in his final years, would choose to shout for joy with this symphony. He was blind, racked with pain and humiliation from illness, and arguably on the verge of insanity. What was there in life to celebrate as divine joy? Therein lies the quest of this sermon.
I have not struggled with the kind of disabilities and torments that Beethoven did. But I have had my moments. Many years ago, before I married the love of my life, I found myself in a terrible state of depression. I was divorced and alone; I had lost my job, lost my home, lost my family. In a session of counseling with an excellent therapist I was led into the depths of that depression. And in the midst of my deep and desperate aloneness, I made a profound discovery. I realized that I still had myself! And in that discovery lay a hidden truth, something that I only gradually began to internalize in the months and years ahead. That truth is this: that I am profoundly connected to Life itself, to the universe, to every person, to God, to (and I’m partial to the way Tillich put it:) the “Ground of All Being.” And my connection to all of that is unbreakable, and it is Joy itself. It’s what the Psalmist was exclaiming those thousands of years ago. He wrote, “O LORD, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. . . . Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.” That divine communion is what Jesus spoke of in today’s reading from the Gospel of John. He employed, of course, a metaphor. He said that we are connected with a vine that has branches and bears fruit.
I happen to believe that every human being shares in that vine. Beethoven and Schiller seem to agree. The words of the Ode to Joy embedded in the Ninth Symphony celebrate the universality of this connection:
All creatures drink of Joy
At Nature’s breasts.
All good, all evil souls
Follow in her rose-strewn wake.
She gave us kisses and vines . . .
No matter who you are, no matter what your background, how many your weaknesses and failings, or how pervasive your disbelief, you are connected to this Core of existence; you are a recipient of those treasured gifts of kisses and vines. And in an ecstatic moment, Schiller seems to want to do more than make the point; he gives it a wild and passionate exclamation mark!
Be embraced, you Millions!
This kiss is for the whole world!
That kiss, that embrace, is joy. Joy is that connection, a connection with the Heart of Reality, a connection ultimately with one another (even with all the millions), as all of us are branches on the vine.
Jesus sums it up for us. He says, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” And then he says, “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” He couldn’t be more clear. The connection we share on this vine is joy itself – complete joy. And it has everything to do with loving one another – with, as Schiller put it, “all men being made brothers where the soft wings of joy sway.”
What does this mean? It means that joy is a very different thing than that transient emotion: happiness. It is not an emotion. Joy is a profound and unbreakable connection that remains firm – abides, if you will – even when blindness comes and the lights go out, when pain and illness take over a life, when loss and aloneness seem to be all that’s left. Such joy is the bedrock on which a life can be constructed. It does not yield to the tremors and quakes that upend plans and bring dreams down to the dust.
But, of course, there is always a caveat. Jesus says that every branch that bears no fruit is “removed” and even the branch that bears fruit is “pruned” to make it bear more fruit. I think he’s laying out the truth that people frequently cut themselves off from the nourishment of that vine by simply disregarding it. When we fail to acknowledge, nurture, and celebrate the abiding connection we have with the Heart of Being we find ourselves desperately alone. As Schiller writes in our ode, if a person has never called “even one soul on earth his own . . . let him steal away weeping from this fellowship.”
And, the very traumas and heartaches of life, although they cannot shake the foundation of our joy – our connection with Grace – once it is established, can serve to “prune” away the extraneous, hone our perspective, and remind us of what truly matters in life. I have known this in my own experience. It was a heart attack that finally cleared away the fog of trivial pursuits for me, and allowed me to distinguish that which is true and lasting from that which is momentary and unreliable. I’m sure that in your life there have been moments that have served you in that way. For Schiller the extraneous parts of life that need to be pruned are the habits and customs that we can find ourselves entangled in, and which can separate us from one another, or even from ourselves. He addresses Joy with awe, saying:
Your magical power binds together
What custom (or habit) tears apart.
It is simply turning away from that defining, holy connection that results in a profound alienation, and it is turning toward and affirming that connection that centers and grounds our lives and frees us for love. The point is, as someone once noted, “You can’t get to love except through joy, and you can’t get to joy except through love.”
In the course of these two hundred years, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has taken its place as one of the most impactful pieces of music in human history. It has been claimed by people of all ideologies and nations on the earth; it was transposed into one of the great hymns of the church: Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee; it was played as the resounding note of celebration at the fall of the Berlin Wall; and it has been adopted by the European Union as their anthem. Jan Swafford writes, “What can be said with some certainty is that its position in the world is probably what Beethoven wanted it to be. In an unprecedented way for a composer, he stepped into history with a great ceremonial work that doesn’t simply preach a sermon about freedom and brotherhood, but aspires to help bring them to pass.”2
Well, I guess I’ve just preached that sermon. I think the Psalmist wraps it up best. He struggles, as we all do, with trying to comprehend the power and presence of Divinty. His struggle can be seen, in one light, as a reflection of all the larger struggles of our lives – the trials and the hurts that might threaten to distract us, turn us in on ourselves, and turn us away from the vine, the Joy – the complete joy – that is our connection with the Heart of Being. He puts it this way:
“How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!
I try to count them – they are more than the sand; I come to the end – I am still with you.”
Let’s sing together: “An Die Freude.”
1 Jan Swafford, in the program notes to BSO Performance at Tanglewood, August 25, 2013.
2 op cit.
I’d like to begin on this Memorial Day weekend by sharing with you a treasure from my computer files. It’s excerpts from an email I received from my father many years ago before his death: “Nearly three quarters of a century ago,” he wrote, “my country needed me in its war and I spent a significant amount of time away from my wife and two babies. As it happened I was sent to the U.S. Navy for duty in the Pacific theater. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor remained in the forefront of our minds, enabling us to shoot at incoming planes with no thought of the human beings flying them. If such a thought happened to cross our minds, which rarely happened, we quickly dismissed it because we weren’t shooting at people, we were shooting at ‘Japs’ who were our mortal enemies. . . .
“When I was discharged and back home I discovered that I had become a man with a different world view. I saw war – all war – as insanity! The essential element in the making of a warrior is dehumanizing the ‘enemy,’ thus removing the guilt (or at least providing a self-justification) for taking the life of another human being . . .
“All this fits together and makes perfect sense to me – but there remains hidden somewhere in the back of my mind the lingering memory of my very small part of WWII, and the emotions I both carried into it and those that persisted. The realization of this ‘moral contamination’ hit me years later. My son, a baby I left behind, grew to be a man who chose a career as a U.S. Naval Officer. In the course of his duties he was stationed in Japan and he served as secretary to the Commanding Officer of the Pacific Fleet. He did such an outstanding job that he was awarded a medal by an admiral of the Japanese Navy. He sent me a photograph of the admiral pinning the medal on him. To say I had mixed emotions would be an understatement. I felt all the fatherly pride one would expect but the ambiguity came as I realized that the man decorating my son was a man I would have been happy to shoot down less than three decades ago – and that he would have been delighted to blow my ship out from under me. That’s the ‘moral contamination’ I spoke of.
“Even today, in the twilight years of my life, I carry the scar which at times only lightly covers the emotional knee-jerk . . . of [is it] racism?” he asks.
“I hope not,” he continues, “though I have come to understand that such concepts are not as clear cut as most people would like to make them. . . . I grew up in a culture which I later recognized as racist but which at the time I accepted as normal. . . . [but] the major part of my adult life has been involved with interracial activities. I only wish and pray that before I die I might know the freedom from the intrusive remnants of my childhood.”
Well, that was quite an email. My father has been many things to me: an authority figure, a source of dependable encouragement and guidance, even a friend. But, in what he referred to as “the twilight years” of his life, he inspired me with his continuing quest to learn and grow.
My granddaddy used to say that if frogs had wings they wouldn’t bump their rear ends so much. There are great numbers of us who feel like frogs from time to time, and we’re getting pretty tired of scraping our rear-ends. We are painfully aware of the vast distance between who we are and who we wish we were – between who we have become, and who we were, perhaps, intended to be. At times it can almost bring us to tears.
I’d like to address a question that has been on many of our hearts from time to time: Is it really possible to change when you’ve spent a lifetime being who you are? Can something within ourselves actually call us beyond ourselves? Can there be something in the nature of things that transcends the nature of things?
I want to stand next to Nicodemus and nod my head in impatient agreement as he asks Jesus, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” I’m not all that confused by what Jesus means when he says, “You must be born again,” but I still share Nicodemus’ question. Even if Jesus is speaking metaphorically (as he was inclined to do), doesn’t Nicodemus still have a legitimate complaint? If a change in one’s life so volcanic, so immense, as to be compared to rebirth is to come about, how can that possibly happen to someone who is old, battle-scarred, and set in their ways? We know how it works: you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
Jesus rather artfully pushes aside our folk-wisdom, and offers a door to understanding the unimaginable through a couple of plays on words. The first one has to do with the words “born again.” The Greek phrase gennethe’sai a’nothen can be taken in two different ways. It can mean born anew (as the Revised Standard Version translates it), or born from above (the translation opted for by the New Revised Standard Version). The second play on words employs the Greek word pneuma which is regularly used to mean both wind and spirit. Jesus says, “The wind (pneuma) blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit (pneuma).” In both cases (“born again” or “from above” and the “spirit/wind”), a concept that transcends human experience is tied to an image that is commonplace in human experience. Certainly, birth is a vivid and familiar image; being “born from above” is anything but! Wind is heard and felt daily, spirit is transcendent. These words have two meanings: one ordinary, one extraordinary. Now, the larger point Jesus is making is that somehow the ordinariness of life can be infused with extraordinary power. That which is above can live in us. The transcendent power of Divinity is not under our control, but manifests itself, like the wind, if it wills and where it wills, surprises us, and transforms us. This is elegance. This is high poetry. The very words chosen, and the hidden play on words they contain, carry the deepest meanings of the larger message. In fact, that same poetry is woven into the very fabric of creation. Life, even at its most mundane, is nonetheless infused with the miraculous ability to transcend itself.
Barbara and Bill Myers, in their book, Engaging In Transcendence, describe the first attempts of their ten-month-old daughter, Melissanne, to walk: “Grabbing a table leg [she] determinedly pulls herself upright. Both her legs are shaking, but she won’t allow herself to slip back onto the floor. Supporting herself as she moves, hand over hand, around the corner of the tabletop, Melissanne conveys a sense of great seriousness, even as she looks toward her mother, who is seated some distance from Melissanne’s last available handhold. Chewing her lip, but keeping one hand upon the tabletop, Melissanne stretches toward her mother until, for the briefest of moments, she hesitantly stands alone. Tumbling down, Melissanne chortles with glee, grabs the nearest table leg and once more pulls herself upright, ready to repeat the process.”1
Their daughter’s story is compelling because even in as simple a thing as baby steps there is a universe of wonder. What keeps us reaching for the table leg, reaching for the smiling visage waiting across the room? What is it that tells a child to keep reaching when she keeps falling? We have a thirst to be more than we are perhaps because we are compelled by that which is beyond us. And perhaps in that invitation lies a power for change, for transformation, that is beyond our comprehension.
Joseph Campbell relates a marvelous story from the life of Carl Jung. Jung was counseling a young woman who was resistant to his psychotherapeutic interventions because she was so rationalistic and “impeccably geometrical” in her idea of reality. Jung writes: “I was sitting opposite her one day with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab – a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned around and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window pane from the outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a Scarabaeid Beetle, or common Rose-Chafer, whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, ‘Here is your scarab.’ The experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”2
Was the beetle’s appearance at the window a “bit of good luck,” as they say, or something more? Whether one regards it as some sort of divine intervention or simply regards Dr. Jung as one who used his powers of perception and creativity to the fullest, the truth is that a woman was there seeking to be more than she was, Jung was there reaching for whatever he could to make a difference, and something burst into this therapy session from outside and changed everything. The truth is: something is always bursting into our lives and relationships from outside. It might be a phone call, or a beetle at the window, or a sentence in a book, or an email from a father. What matters is that when it comes, we are found reaching – still reaching, no matter what our age.
So, on this Memorial Day weekend I’m thinking about my father. I’m still proud of him. He reminded me that what is glorious in a human being, at any age, is the dependably surprising “spirit-wind” that comes from – who knows where – maybe from “above,” maybe from something being “reborn” within us, but moving us forward deliberately, persistently . . . like baby steps; tumbling and falling, as we will, but always reaching – confident that that which is more than we are is reaching back.
1 Barbara K. Myers & William R. Myers, Engaging in Transcendence: The Church’s Ministry and Covenant with Young Children, Pilgrim Press, 1992.
2 Joseph Campbell, The Portable Jung, Viking Press 1971.
Our scripture reading this morning relates a remarkable tale. The disciples were visited by a great windy noise, tongues of flame resting on their heads, and strange languages spoken that allowed all those who gathered around from every nation known on earth to hear and understand in their own language what was spoken. This event has been regarded through the ages as the birth of the Christian Church. But there is a little voice that crops up in the backs our heads when we read about it. Some of us allow the voice full reign, while others try to tamp it down. The little voice asks, “Is this really true?” That’s a larger question than we might imagine; it lives deeper in our hearts than we might think; and it is our question for this hour: Is it true?
The question that persists in the back corner of our minds is larger than simply: “Did these things really happen? Were there really tongues of fire and strange languages spoken?” At ground level, isn’t it the question with which each person walks through the doors here every Sunday morning? We talk about the life and teachings of Jesus, of his miraculous acts; we speak of the Almighty Lord of the Universe, preexistent and eternal; we offer prayers in the expectation or hope that they are effectual; we acknowledge a Divine Spirit dwelling among us and moving through our fellowship. And yet, every Sunday morning and perhaps through the week that little voice pesters and teases: Is it true?
But there are many different things that question can mean. We might each bring to it different notions of what truth really is. I’m reminded of the scene where Jesus appears before Pilate who interrogates him: “Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate [famously] asked him, ‘What is truth?’” Jesus leaves Pilate, and us, hanging; he famously did not answer.
On the campaign trail it seems that truth is whatever a candidate wants to tell us, an awful lot of which boils down to what Steven Colbert once termed “truthiness”. So, we have blogs, Internet sites, TV news segments, and talking heads all devoted to rating the veracity of campaign rhetoric. My personal favorite category has always been “pants on fire”. But truth-telling isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. In the movie Liar, Liar, Jim Carrey plays a guy who all of a sudden has to tell the stark, naked truth in every situation. I haven’t seen the movie but I understand that he spends the entire time being slapped, beaten, and humiliated by everyone he deals with. I came across an online article titled, “I think you’re fat: This story is about something called Radical Honesty. It may change your life. (But honestly, we don’t really care.)” So, truth can be cruel, which is why, I suppose, we often opt for avoidance, or subtlety, or even “little white lies”. And maybe that’s why preachers avoid questions like the one posed this morning; they’re afraid of disturbing people with the honest question that lurks in the back of all our minds.
But I tend to think we avoid the disturbing question for a deeper reason: because, as Jack Nicholson suggested in the movie A Few Good Men, we can’t handle the truth. What’s true about Jesus, and God, and prayer, and the Spirit is too large and too powerful to neatly fit into a given Sunday morning from ten to eleven. Jesus said that if we knew the truth it would set us free. Here’s the question: do we really want that freedom? Do we want to be free of our preconceptions and prejudices, free of our dependable failings and miseries, free of the security structures in which we house ourselves to ward off the familiar fears that we keep conveniently howling around us, free of the false gods of pride, and place, and possessions to which we regularly bow down? Knowing that which would free us from all this is a truth we can’t handle. So we speak around the edges of that truth. We use words like “grace” and “love” and “salvation” and “forgiveness” and “faith” as if we really understood what we were talking about. And, not so far removed as we like to imagine from our remote ancestors who sat watching shadows on the cave walls, we show up here on a Pentecost morning to hear a familiar tale of fire, and wind, and strange tongues. And what do we find? If we’re lucky we find something akin to what they found: awe. Awe, of course, is not an answer. It’s a state of mind. Or rather, a state of spirit.
But that frightening, freeing truth of which Jesus spoke – what of it? If we’re lucky enough to find awe here, perhaps we’re at least trying to touch the white-hot truth of Jesus. And maybe trying is what it’s about. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, writing in The Christian Century commented about “. . . the journalistic who-what-when-where-how that we grandchildren of the Enlightenment think comprises truth.” She contrasts this desire to pin down the facts with the willingness to have one’s life changed before understanding fully what is changing it. Then she writes, “Actually, this is the only way life ever really changes. You won’t understand marriage until you’ve been hitched for a while – maybe not even then. You’re not going to know what it’s like to have a baby until you have one. You don’t even know your profession until you’ve been in it a while. Nothing in life is obvious immediately. It all grows on us.” You have to admit, she’s got a point. And it just may be the beginning of an answer to our question. Maybe the answer is . . . well, growing on us.
We come here together on Sunday mornings singing and praying, and rub elbows downstairs with cups of coffee and bits of conversation. We sit in meetings, and occasionally sit at table and share meals together, or wash dishes, or take food to a food bank. Sometimes we plow the same old ground in conversations; sometimes we, as a colorful old acquaintance of mine once put it, “pee on each other’s shoes” but somehow, nonetheless, don’t give up on each other. And someone looking in from the outside might see all this and imagine it all to be such a waste of time. But they don’t see inside. Inside, something is stirring. It’s hard to put a name to really; we might call it Spirit; we might call it “abundant life”; I choose to call it an answer – growing.
You see, the disciples came together on Pentecost and in their coming together something happened that astounded them and allowed them to see one another as if lighted up by some divine, flaming halo. And in the Spirit of their fellowship the barriers of communication fell like scales dropping from blind eyes and suddenly they could all understand one another’s language. That was magic! Did it happen literally as described in the book of Acts? It really doesn’t matter, because I’ve been in such situations. I’ve seen the holiness dance on another person’s head, real communication suddenly break through the usual jabberwocky, and I know it’s true. I know about the abundance in living that Jesus spoke of that transcends agendas and resolutions, wells up from hearts engaged in prayer and song, fills moments of coffee and conversation with grace and joy. Boris Pasternak is quoted as saying, “What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: Life always spills over the rim of every cup.”
Each week, we stumble into this sanctuary with a question rumbling around in the recesses of our hearts. Each of us eager to find out if this is the day – the day when our secret yearning will finally find its answer: Is it true?
I was in the ministry for a little over forty years, and I’ve been going to church most every Sunday for over a quarter century longer than that. I’ve studied theology, and studied the Bible. I’ve sat with people through some of their most trying days, and ushered more lives in and out of this world than I can tally. And what have I learned from it all? Frankly, not a lot. But I have learned this much: Is it true? You bet your life it is.
Sign up to receive our weekly "What's Happening" email. Send email request to [email protected]