Steve Jungkeit
Meditation for Sunday July 3, 2011
Newport United Church
Texts: Psalm 63: 1-8, John 21: 1-13
“A Small Good Thing”
In 1983, the writer Raymond Carver published a story called “A Small Good Thing,” a story that contains as rich a Eucharistic theology as anything I know. It’s a sad story, but bear with me – it goes somewhere. Carver’s story tells of two grieving parents, Howard and Ann, whose son has been hit by a car during his walk to school, a day that happens to be his eighth birthday. In a moment of absentmindedness, the boy steps into oncoming traffic and is knocked to the ground by the car, hitting his head on the pavement. Initially, he seems fine, but after an hour or so he loses consciousness and is rushed to the hospital. Doctors are optimistic, cheerful even, and they assure Howard and Ann that their son simply has a mild concussion and that he should wake up any time. But hours and then days drag out, and Howard and Ann become despondent.
Meanwhile, they take turns going home to rest and to bathe. When they do, the phone rings, and on the other end a strange, creepy voice asks them about their son. “Have you forgot about him,” the voice wonders? “Where is the birthday boy,” the voice asks? At other moments, there is only silence on the line. The anxious parents slam the phone down and wonder who could be so cruel in a moment like this. They feel rage inside. Then they go back to the hospital to maintain their vigil.
After several days of this, the unthinkable does occur, and their son dies from what is called an occluded hemorrhage. When there is nothing more to be done at the hospital, they return to a terrible and barren house, and, eventually, to the disturbing phone calls. The phone rings, there is silence on the end, and the mother, Ann, loses it. “Who are you,” she says, wishing she could kill whoever is on the other end of the line. And then she knows. She realizes beyond a shadow of a doubt that the caller is a local baker, a man she had hired several days earlier to bake a cake for their son’s birthday. She gets in the car with her husband, drives to the bakery, and pounds on the back door, for it is very early. The baker answers the door, an older, overweight man with a thick neck and squinty eyes that make him look rather mean. He knows immediately that the game is up. “I don’t want no trouble,” he tells the parents. But the parents are past niceties, and they push inside. Ann gives vent to her fury. “What kind of evil person are you,” she shouts. “Don’t you know that we just lost our son, our boy?” Ann slumps to the floor in her grief, spent.
To everyone’s surprise, Howard’s, Ann’s, and our own as readers, the baker takes off his apron and offers the two parents some chairs. Then he sits down with them, and after a while he tells them how sorry he is. He tells them a little about what made him behave as he did. Here’s what he says: “I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I’ve forgotten, I don’t know for sure. Now I’m just a baker. That don’t excuse my doing what I did, I know, but I’m deeply sorry. I’m sorry for your son and my part in this. I’m not an evil man, I don’t think. Can you forgive me?”
And then he says and does the most marvelous thing. “You probably need to eat something,” the baker said. “I hope you’ll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small good thing in a time like this.” He pulls hot cinnamon rolls from the oven and the three of them, the grieving parents and the lonely baker, sit there until the sun comes up, and it is warm there, and the parents “do not even think of leaving.”
“Eating is a small good thing in a time like this,” is what the baker says to the heartbroken parents. “Come and have breakfast,” is what Jesus says to his disciples in one of his resurrection appearances in the Gospel of John. It’s not an accident that nearly every one of Jesus’ resurrection appearances takes place against the backdrop of food. Indeed, it’s not an accident that from beginning to end, the Bible is strewn about with mentions of food – tables set before me, feasts prepared in the presence of enemies, a small meal shared between a lonely prophet, a widow and her daughter, bread broken and a mysterious traveler recognized as the risen Jesus. To a group of perplexed and traumatized disciples, Jesus appears one last time. “Come and have breakfast,” he says. To eat together is a small good thing when the world falls apart, as the world tends to do from time to time. Cinnamon rolls, grilled fish, meat and gravy, bread and wine – sometimes these are the elements that allow us to collect ourselves and to notice the fragile and glorious humanity of those before us.
To eat together is a bodily act, one that reminds us of our needs, our limits, of our frail mortal flesh that requires constant sustenance and care. To eat together is a reminder of the joy we share in one another’s company, a reminder of what it is to feel alive to the world. To eat together is to mark a passing – of one more year, of a job accomplished well, of somebody we love who has departed from us. To eat together is to be initiated into moments of wondrous beauty, as complex tastes stimulate our tongues, as strong drinks rush to our heads, as the smell of charcoal smoke from a grill carries us into summers long past, and into gatherings long since dissolved. Many of us will rehearse those culinary scenes today and tomorrow in our backyards for the ritual of summer we call the 4th of July. There’s a patriotic celebration attached to the day, to be sure, but there’s something more to it as well, something deeper and truer than mere nationalism. I believe the backyard rituals of hotdogs, hamburgers and beers that many of us will perform this weekend are Eucharistic acts, where we celebrate the goodness of being together, the joys of shared life, the pleasures of our senses, and maybe too the depth of our losses.
During the year I just spent working as a hospital chaplain, I witnessed unbearable sufferings, and I often found myself wondering what kept people going through it all. The loss of somebody they’ve loved for years, the loss of their mobility and freedom, the loss of an imagined future, the loss of beauty and youth – where do people find the strength to go on? I don’t really know, except to say that as often as not in the midst of the storm there would be an impromptu meal – coffee and rolls brought by the hospital staff or fast food hastily gathered by a well-meaning relative. If those things weren’t present, as often as not, food would factor in the bedside talk – memories of home cooked meals, anticipations of the meals that would need to be prepared in the coming days, yearnings for the plenty symbolized by a Chinese buffet. In all those bedside gatherings, rituals of eating, and rehearsals of culinary memories and dreams performed something that the Bible, and Christian liturgies, know well. In the midst of the storm, eating together is a small good thing.
This world we inhabit can be a cruel and lovely place, filled with toil and despair, beauty and grace. On occasion, even I, somebody ordained to preach and teach, wonder what it all adds up to. But then I share an evening meal with friends or with my family, a winter soup with a crusty loaf of warm bread, say. I share a breakfast with some new friends from church, and talk about this new place I find myself in. And I come to the table prepared month after month, Sunday after Sunday, in which bread is broken and the cup is passed, and I remember that in this small act of eating and drinking together, somehow and in some way, Christ becomes present all over again. “You have to eat and keep going,” the baker says. “Come and have breakfast,” Jesus says. Wherever you are along the way today, full of anticipation for a holiday celebration, full of sadness over a loss, full of dread about a hard decision, full of nothing much at all: know that you are welcome here at this table. In a time such as this, whatever time that might be for you, eating and drinking together around Christ’s table is a small good thing. May the grace and peace of Christ be present to you anew as we eat and drink together. “Come and have breakfast.” May the grace and peace of Christ become present to us all in this small good thing. “Come and have breakfast.” Amen. Steve Jungkeit United Sermon for Sunday July 10, 2011 Texts: Psalm 119: 105-112, I Corinthians 12: 12-26 “Honoring the Body” I’ve entitled my sermon for the morning “Honoring the Body,” a biblical theme if ever there was one. But it’s Franz Kafka that will get things rolling today, an unlikely place to begin, I acknowledge. He’s famous for stories like “The Metamorphosis,” the one where poor Gregor Samsa wakes up and finds that he’s become an insect, and The Trial, where a hapless man finds himself accused of something he knows not what, and then subjected to an endless and arcane legal process. But it’s a short story called “In the Penal Colony” that I find most pertinent these days, a story that Kafka wrote in 1914 as the first World War was breaking out. It tells the story of a nameless traveler who finds himself in a tropical colony where prisoners have been transported from the countries of I had read the story a number of times, but it wasn’t until I began frequenting an emergency room and an oncology ward and all the rest as a hospital chaplain that I understood the story. “The apparatus” is an elaborate metaphor for modern culture, and the ways our culture writes a particular sentence upon each of our bodies. Indeed, the implication seems to be that we are all of us strapped to the apparatus and our culture is little by little writing itself onto and into our bodies, in the foods that we eat and the toxins we breathe, in the medical procedures we undergo and the wars we fight, in the exercise regimens we subject ourselves to in order to sculpt our torsos and in the movements of our hands and legs as we perform our work. Many, though not all of us are fortunate, far more fortunate than those I met in the emergency room, for our sentences are not always very severe. But in the emergency room and other parts of the hospital, I witnessed the effects of shootings and stabbings, occasioned by a form of urban nihilism where an entire population of young people know that their lives are infinitely disposable. I witnessed the apparatus at work among the elderly, whose pensions had been stripped in the economic crisis, and who could no longer afford decent health care. I witnessed it in children with respiratory issues, whose lungs were reacting to the bad air of a congested environment, and whose parents did not receive medical insurance for their families from their dead end jobs. I witnessed it in the poor nutrition of young and old alike, those whose daily food intake was limited to junk from the neighborhood bodega, and whose bodies were beginning to rebel in the form of aggressive diabetes. I witnessed many of those bodies cut and maimed, as fingers and toes, and then feet and legs and hands and arms, became too diseased to remain viable. There in the hospital, I witnessed Kafka’s apparatus at work right before my eyes, inscribing its sentence onto the bodies of everyone present. Much of what I saw was the result of a battery of economic reforms unleashed several decades earlier, reforms that travel under a number of names, neoliberalism and globalization being the most well known. These are reforms that seem to know no political or national boundaries, transcending distinctions like Republican or Democrat, North American or European, Asian or African. I’m not an economist, and so I don’t always understand the nuances of all those reforms. But I think I’ve seen the effects. I’ve seen the way that market deregulation created a speculative bonanza on Wall Street that stripped many of us of our savings for retirement and have made it difficult for others of us to find work. I’ve seen how government powers have been limited and taxes cut, often simply to pave the way for public services like education, health care, utilities and all the rest to be auctioned off to private, for-profit entities. I’ve seen how manufacturing jobs have disappeared, a fact made possible by free trade and the elimination of tariffs, which has simply gutted many American cities – places like So what’s a poor preacher to do? What are we, who gather to sing and pray, read and visit, to make of all this? I’m short on solutions, but I have some hints that I borrow from the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. Read that letter closely, and you’ll notice that from beginning to end, bodies dominate Paul’s thinking. The ancient world wrote itself into the bodies of ordinary people no less than our own culture, especially those living during the Paul’s words run in two directions, toward social bodies and individual ones. Both directions are important. He is, on one hand, using the body as a metaphor for the kind of community he is trying to form, the kind of community he believes the good news of Jesus initiates. On this metaphorical level, he urges his readers toward the understanding that every body, every person, is valued as a member of the community, such that it becomes impossible to consider some people disposable or unnecessary to the greater whole. It is tempting to think his words apply only to church communities, so that our task is merely to love and accept one another. Instead, I believe Paul is talking about the world itself as a whole. Whereas governments and cultures, economies and corporations behave as if some people are extraneous to the body, Paul is writing a counter-proposal. We are all of us eyes and ears, mouth and nose, head and heart to one another. We all of us belong to one another, are members of one another – here in the church, yes, but outside the doors of the church even more so. For the community that gathers in Jesus’ name week after week, that means we understand ourselves as deeply implicated in the social order that writes its sentence so brutally on some members of our culture. It means that the damage done in the name of a malignant economic order harms even those of us who dwell in relatively privileged circumstances, as if our very own hands and feet, eyes and ears, were undergoing damage. For those of us who gather in Jesus’s name, there is no such thing as a private existence in a gated community on some hill. If preachers are short on solutions, and we are, at the very least Paul’s words create a sense of dissonance in our lives, as we understand how far short of becoming the blessed community we actually are. At the very least, we must bear Paul’s words in mind every time we vote, every time we write a letter to our elected officials, every time we show up to do some form of community outreach, every time we offer ourselves up to some kind of protest. To bear in mind that we are all members of one another is already to inhabit a different kind of cultural machinery, one in line with the imagination that Paul is seeking to instill in his readers, then as now. That’s one level of Paul’s discourse. The other has to do with how we view our own individual bodies in this time of disposable bodies, for Paul’s words indicate not only that all parts of the social body are to be honored, but all the parts of our individual bodies as well – our eyes and ears, our bellies and our arms, our feet and, yes, our sexuality too, all of it. If some preachers have understood these words as license to condemn the things we do to our bodies, I want to take the opposite tack. I want to ask instead how we celebrate our sight, if we’re privileged to see, by letting our eyes register something that we find gorgeous. I want to ask how we celebrate our sense of hearing, if we’re privileged enough to hear, by listening to music or words that delight us and send shivers up our spines. I want to ask how we celebrate our feet and legs, if we’re privileged enough to have the use of our legs, by allowing ourselves to walk along the streets and lanes, the trails and beaches, that offer us a sense of well-being and goodness. I want to ask how we celebrate our sense of taste and hunger, if we’re privileged enough to have food readily available, by filling our plates with the things we love, whether a grilled steak or a summer salad, a fine Chianti or a glass of iced tea. And lest you think I’m shy, I want to ask how we celebrate our sense of sexuality, if we’re privileged enough to celebrate such things, by offering ourselves to someone we love, and enjoying that offering, relishing it as a part of our God-given humanity. I want to ask all of these things in the name of the apostle Paul, for I think they all indicate ways of honoring and celebrating the bodies that are ours. Yes, we can overdo it. Yes, we can eat too much, drink too much, have too much sex, become outlandish hedonists, or whatever. But I’m far less concerned about that possibility in churches than the opposite, namely that we deny the existence of our bodies in the name of some inherited, ill conceived and totally unbiblical Puritanism. In an age of disposable bodies, to honor all of the parts of our bodies as good is to perform a piece of counter-cultural inscription. If Kafka’s apparatus subtly writes itself onto our bodies, disciplining them in a particular way, Paul’s letter to the Corinthians urges us toward a different kind of bodily understanding, a different kind of bodily inscription. We’ll still be caught in a cultural apparatus of one sort or another, but in the midst of that I believe it’s important to find ways to celebrate and honor our bodies as precious, as a gift of God’s good creation. A final story. This past winter I was summoned to the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital to be with the family of a woman in her late 50’s who had had a massive stroke. She would soon die. I stayed with the family for a few hours, sometimes talking, sometimes sitting or standing with them in silence as they struggled to cope with their grief. During one of those silences, when no one knew what else to say or do, the woman’s daughter in law suddenly rose and got out a make-up case. And then she began applying some base to the dying woman’s cheeks, and after that a little rouge. She took out some eye-liner and applied it to her mother-in-law’s eyelids and eyebrows, and when she was done with that she put some lipstick on her, even though the tubes in the woman’s mouth made it next to impossible. “She never left the house without putting her face on,” the daughter in law told me. “We never got along that well, but even now, maybe especially now, she’d want to look pretty.” The tubes and machines were a kind of cultural apparatus written onto the dying woman’s body. But her daughter in law wrote something different, something gorgeous, and I stood there in tears as she wrote her final love onto the woman’s face. It was a moment fit for the apostle Paul, a moment in keeping with his words to the Corinthians. We are all members of one another and belong to one another, no matter how much or how little we like each other. All are members of the body. So too, each part of our own bodies is to be celebrated and honored as sacred, as God-given, even in the midst of ongoing desecration from wars and ghettos, economic malfeasance, bad food, and diminished health care options. And so take up the eye-liner pencil and write. Take up the lipstick and write. Take up your plate and cup, your sight and hearing, your sexuality and your movements, and write. Write something that is your own, your own beautiful bodily creations in the midst of so much devastation. Take up your life and write. Amen. Steve Jungkeit Sermon for the United July 17, 2011 Texts: Gen. 18: 1-15, Mark 1: 1-8 “Jesus is a Joke” The thing to notice about him is that he's primed to explode. He’s spilled gasoline waiting for a match, a Molotov cocktail about to be hurled. The Baptizer is a split-second inferno to the face, singeing the eyebrows of all those who come near him, searing their souls with his brimstone brand of repentance. He leads the people to the river and into it, where he gets a little too close to them, and they can smell the foulness from his mouth, see the rotted and broken teeth, his bloodshot eyes. He grabs their shoulders and then their heads. The Baptizer pushes them down, and once they're down, he holds them there, just a little too long and sometimes longer than that, so they come up looking panicked, flailing and gasping for air, angry. But they keep coming down to the river where the Baptizer pulses, pulses, and then blows apart. They think he's the one, the one to send the Romans packing, the one to restore To understand what I have in mind when I say that Jesus is a joke, we'll need to peel ourselves away from the baptismal scene in first century To begin, say you're surfing Youtube late at night and in your clicking you see a link for that old bit about "Who's on first, what's on second," with Abbott and Costello. Everyone knows it as a cliche now, and you've seen it ten times before, but you watch it again anyway. And at some point as Costello mistakes the names "Who" and "What" for interrogative pronouns again and again and Abbott starts to boil over at Costello's density, you can't help it. You laugh. Question: why did you laugh? Here’s another situation, this one based on our morning lectionary: say you're a barren and tired old woman and that you've spent your whole life on the road, a kind of hippie drifter, shuttling from one strange town to another. Your deepest sorrow and regret is that you haven't been able to have any children, a fact that has led to some desperate and hurtful behavior between you and some of the other drifters you've met in years past. Now somebody you've befriended in some small desert cafe tells you and your husband after a few drinks that you'll soon be pregnant. And here's you at, like, ninety. It's so wild and bizarre that you can't restrain yourself. You laugh. Again the question: why did you laugh? Here's why. When something strikes us as funny, it's a sign that a norm has been transgressed, that a spell has been broken, that something absolutely different and other has interrupted whatever moment we were in. Whatever the interruption is, it has a way of puncturing the inflated importance of the prior moment, of making it look sort of silly, so that the only thing to do is to laugh. Costello's misunderstanding is but one example, repeatedly frustrating and interrupting Abbott's attempt to tell him something important. Think about comedians such as Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, or my favorite comedian these days, Louis C.K. What makes their comedy work is that they take a situation that has come to seem normal to us - that it is embarrassing and uncomfortable to talk explicitly about sex, for instance, or that raising children allegedly makes us happier and better, or that our politicians say vacuous and sometimes insane things that we fail to really notice - they take these things that seem so commonplace, and then they say something that points out the absurdity and strangeness and humor of our behavior. Sex is serious business after all, and so are our children and our politicians, judging from the amount of time and money and importance we lend to them. So comedians work because we're actually longing for ways to overcome these norms and codes of behavior that have been invested with so much weight, so much seriousness. Comedians allow us a brief reprieve from such weight. It's no accident after all, that the best way to defuse a tense situation in a meeting or personal conversation is to make a joke. The joke works because the contrast it introduces is so distinct, so different and maybe outlandish, that whatever had been contributing to the tension is instantly made less important. That's essentially what's happening when we dissolve in laughter in a difficult situation. Our laughter is a way for our psyches to relieve whatever tension we're feeling in that moment. So a joke is a joke because it opens up a new kind of space, a new way of being. A joke is a joke because it opens up a kind of freedom. Laughter, I would suggest, is merely the way we respond to the offer of freedom. Let's transpose this idea into the language of religion. In this community, we come from a variety of backgrounds, UCC and Methodist, Presbyterian and Lutheran, Catholic and Baptist. But whatever our background, I’m willing to bet some things stay the same. I suspect that for all of us, at some level of our psyches, our religion is an intensely serious matter indeed. From the time of our earliest childhood, we're taught to keep a straight face when Jesus or God jokes are told, because it's just not right to disrespect something that big and grandiose and sacred. We're taught to be on our best behavior when we show up at the church door. We look our best and present versions of ourselves that make us seem clean and polite, easy to get along with, because God evidently appreciates people without rough spots in their character. When we do something that the pastor or the church authorities might not approve of, something gave us the idea that we ought to feel bad about that, because God likes it when people feel a little bad about things they've done. When it comes to our beliefs about God, we feel that we had better study the Bible and the old theologians hard so that we can get the answers right, because God apparently likes those who are right. If you get it wrong, after all, it'll be weeping and gnashing of teeth for you. And there are the endless meetings and events and paperwork that go on in the name of God and the church, all of it hinting that perhaps God likes bureaucracy and business as much as we do. Now, I doubt any of us think those things consciously, but my hunch is that somewhere in our heads, there lives a God who has a pinched and drawn face, a God who hasn't smiled in quite some time. This God is a matter for sober reflection and sober calculation, producing sober behavior and sober actions. This God is no joke, and if you start to think he is, he'll pay you back good. Regardless of our background, I submit that all of us hear the voice of that God from time to time, and I submit that at some level of our being we're actually longing to be free from the God of sober calculations, from the God who is not a joke. Let's go back to Jesus and John in the river Then and now, Jesus upsets our notions of God, of what God wants people to be. He upsets our ideas of power and might and worthiness. We long for a God of firm morality, one we can appeal to when we instruct our children on what's right and wrong, and here Jesus flouts the moral code of his day and ours. We want a God who will put our enemy's head under his foot to establish a rule of justice, and here's Jesus with his own head planted under somebody else's foot. We look for a God who will be attractive and popular, one who will win a big following, and here Jesus dies lonely and abandoned. We look for a God who will bless our nation, and here's Jesus, put to death by the most powerful nation of his day. We expect a God of omnipotence, unchanging and unmoved, and who shows up but Jesus, eating, drinking, weeping, dying. We search for a God who will reveal his will to us, who will answer our questions and remove all the ambiguities from our minds, and what we get is Jesus, a person who speaks in riddles and mysterious stories, answering questions with more questions. Jesus is a joke. He is a norm that has been transgressed, an interruption that makes itself heard and felt in the midst of a solemn assembly. Like Lou Costello mistaking the meaning of "who" every time Abbott tells him "Who's on first," Jesus constantly shifts the meaning of things for us, producing a kind of dissonance, so that we have to ask what power and might finally mean - does power mean a legion of Caesar's soldiers or does it mean the man on the cross? Does might mean the wild-eyed fireball by the river, or the one who weeps when his friend dies? Does worthiness mean obeying a strict purity code, or does it mean eating and drinking, fasting and abstaining as the moment seems fit? The two meanings clash, and somewhere in that dissonant clash the gospel can be heard. Like any good comedian, Jesus takes the prior moment in our thinking about God and our own lives and punctures its self-importance, making it seem less powerful. Like a good joke, Jesus opens up a new kind of space to us, a new way of being. When Jesus becomes a joke, he becomes an opening to freedom, a freedom whose response can only be one of great laughter. Lest you think this is merely a nice idea to mull over in church, I want to suggest a few ways that this can have bearing on our everyday lives. For example, if we understand that Jesus is God's joke on the world, it might mean that we'll begin taking ourselves a little less seriously, being open to the possibility that we might be wrong about many of our most firmly held opinions, in theology, in politics, in morality, whatever. It might make us easier to talk to, easier to be around, easier to listen to. If we understand Jesus as God's joke, it might mean that instead of grasping for power and influence in our jobs or our communities or even here at the church, we'll understand that God's power has to do with vulnerability and openness to others, not control. If we understand that Jesus is a holy joke, it might lead us to question all the stories about upward mobility and affluence that we're fed on TV, so that we can finally see that God's punch-line for our world has to do with downward mobility and maybe even failure. If Jesus is a joke, we might take all of the churchly rituals and behaviors and moralisms a little less seriously and begin to ask simply, "How are you doing, really? What are you going through these days?" My suspicion is that if Jesus is a joke, then nearly everything about the way we think and live and behave is radically upended in one great comic gesture. One of the best liturgical phrases I know has to do with proclaiming the death and resurrection of Jesus until he comes again. Those are words and sentiments that are inscribed in the very center of our faith tradition. We are a people who self-consciously wait upon God, who wait for God to come again. It's tempting to think that we're perpetually waiting on the very same thing. I don't believe we are. I believe the joke that is Jesus hints that God will always come to us anew, in a new guise, in a new form, confounding our expectations. Nobody expected a scrawny half-naked man in the river waiting to be dunked, nobody expected a God who weeps and bleeds, and most people didn't get the joke. But you and I claim to get it. I hope we'll be among those who get it when it happens again. Because maybe it's happening all around us. Maybe it happens all the time.
Steve Jungkeit
United Church of Newport
July 24, 2011
Texts: Psalm 107: 1-9, Revelation 21: 1-5
“Spaces of Life, Places of Hope”
Much of what I have to say this morning emerged from two sources: our summer book group, where we’ve been asking questions about what it means to have a place of our own, or conversely, not to have such a place, and this past week’s Vacation Bible School. Much of what the kids and the adults learned together was what it means to belong: to our families, to ourselves, to a church. And we thought about what it means to have a home.
Those two events stirred my mind, which in turn leads me to pose to you the following question: have you ever been lost, really lost? Not lost as in “I took a wrong turn and can’t find my way back to the highway.” The kind of lost I mean is the “I have no idea where in the world I actually am” variety, lost in the sense that our morning Psalm talks about: wandering in desert wastes with no sense of direction whatsoever.
It’s hard to get truly lost in our world, even in the most unfamiliar places. We have atlases and GPS devices, we have our cell phones, and landmarks. And so to become lost can be as surprising as it is disturbing – we’re used to knowing, more or less exactly, where we are.
I got a fleeting glimpse of what it is to be lost about ten years ago during a forty mile day hike through the state of Maryland, now an annual ritual that I’ve mentioned here before. Three of us – Brian, David, and me, started walking the Appalachian Trail at the West Virginia/Maryland state line at around 6 AM, and planned to reach the Maryland/Pennsylvania line some forty miles later at….well, we weren’t sure exactly when, only that we hoped to be done before dark. The August heat was intense and the miles and hours seemed to creep along, even as we enjoyed one another’s conversation and company. By 9:00 we had done ten miles and by 1 or 2 in the afternoon we had done 17 or 18. But by 8 in the evening, with just a little light left in the sky, we had ten miles to go.
Brian wisely decided that 30 miles in a day was accomplishment enough for him, and so he caught a ride home for a shower and a warm meal. David and I chose to go on, strapping on headlamps and starting to jog to make the most of the daylight. But of course the light soon disappeared, as did the reserve of energy summoned by our bravado. We stumbled through the darkness, with no awareness of what surrounded us, save for the three feet of visibility provided by our headlamps. Time provided no clues as to how far we had walked, for our pace had slowed to a crawl as we moved from tree to tree. Soon the trail climbed a steep precipice, and then descended that precipice into a boulder field, where David and I picked our way from rock to rock, searching for directional clues. There were numerous times that we lost those clues, and found ourselves having to retrace our steps as best we could. It wasn’t quite panic that we felt, for we knew, in a wider sense, where we were. But a profound sense of uneasiness began to creep over us, as we became uncertain about the precise time and space coordinates that we occupied. Questions and anxieties flooded us: What surrounded us in all that darkness? How long would it take to finish this walk? Isn’t this where the Blair Witch Project took place? Where exactly were we in relation to where we hoped to be? Where was the nearest shelter? And, oh, why had we thought this would make for a fun summer’s day? Pushing our way through the dark forest, we teetered at the brink of the panic described in Psalm 107 as we wandered, hoping to come across a sign that our journey was over.
***
That minor experience of dislocation reveals something profound about the human need to know where we are. An article printed recently in Backpacker magazine describes the psychic effects of being lost for a long period of time. It describes in detail the efforts of search and rescue specialists, who note that even if a lost individual has a few weeks worth of food and water, the majority of those individuals die within five days if they are not found. That’s because the inability to figure out where they are is more and more panic inducing, causing people to lose their ability to make sound judgments. It happens gradually. The person’s mental map doesn’t match their surroundings, leading to little rationalizations: that river that should be here must have dried up, what I thought was one mountain must actually be another mountain, that building must have been destroyed, and so forth. It’s what search and rescue folk call “bending the map.” And then at some point, the map simply breaks. When the ability to construct a mental map erodes, it is literally crazy-making. That’s when people charge ahead into the unknown screaming, arms flailing, charging off cliffs or into rivers. It would seem that we humans have a deep-seated and abiding need to know where exactly we are.
And yet I wonder, for all the technologies and signposts, if indeed most of us really do know where we are. A few weeks ago, I spoke about globalization and what it’s doing to human bodies. One further result of globalization is that most all of us feel a gnawing sense of dislocation from time to time. That dislocation is most pronounced on the extreme ends of the emerging global class hierarchy: on the top of that hierarchy are the global business travelers, forever hurtling through space in hollow airborne tubes, which deposit them in unpredictable places: Zurich, Beijing, Johannesburg, San Francisco. A friend who travels these circuits reports that he regularly has to sit in bed at night and then again in the morning reminding himself where he is at that moment. Conversely, at the bottom end of the global hierarchy is a class of laborers who must remain forever on the move in order to find work and wages. They’re categorized by some as “illegal immigrants,” and are forever crossing borders in search of some measure of reliable work. Of course, this new labor force is subject to forced deportations, after which the cycle of movement and migration will begin all over again. And so at either extreme of the global class system, we find vast portions of people who can never be placed, who can never discover or build a place of their own.
Those of us who live between those two extremes lead more circumscribed lives: a circuit of movement that takes us from our houses to work and daycare, grocery stores and restaurants, churches and the homes of friends. But even here in Newport, we’re not immune to the dislocation that I’m describing. Our vocational choices frequently require us to relocate to unfamiliar places, sometimes every few years. Air travel and cars allow us to pass over or through vast swaths of territory without ever touching it. Neighborhoods, roads, and even whole towns spring up as if from thin air, and we wonder who has planned those projects, and how they got there. And though northern Vermont has a history of resisting the encroachment of malls, multiplexes and amusement parks and all the rest, you only need to linger in one for about ten minutes to experience the kind of dislocation I’m describing. Now, I love an air conditioned multiplex and a roller coaster as much as anyone, but I suspect the attraction of such places is that they soothe and make pleasant the abiding sense of rootlessness that many of us feel from time to time. They’re big enough to stand in for the world at large, and small enough that we can figure out our place within them. And so they work to assuage the disorientation that comes from our global predicament, as we realize in fleeting but palpable moments that it’s sometimes hard to know where we are in the world, even in a place we know well.
The various writers who composed the books of the Bible knew a lot about dislocation. So much of the Bible is about the restless search for a place to call one’s own. The Psalms in particular offer a rich poetic display of the struggle to find a place. In the portion of Psalm 107 that we read this morning, we find a sobering description of what it means to be truly and utterly lost, and what it means to dream of being found. The Psalm described people drifting through desert expanses, unable to find a village or town to provide them with food and water. That description calls to mind the Israelites just after the Exodus, circling through the trackless sand and dust of the Sinai for forty years looking for a habitable place to plant themselves. But it calls to mind more contemporary scenes as well, like the refugee camps scattered throughout places like Gaza and the Sudan, as well as the cities of cardboard and tin built upon the garbage dumps of Lagos, Johannesburg, and Rio. And though the scale and conditions are immensely different, the Psalm also calls to mind our own vague displacements as we pass through our lives, occasionally unsure of where we are, let alone how to dwell there. The Psalm describes well the despair induced by these displacements, as well as the experience of being found, of discovering a life-giving place in which to be.
***
Let’s return to the Appalachian Trail. David and I are still picking our way through a dark maze of rocks. The boulders seem to stretch on infinitely, and we pause in our exhaustion to sip some lukewarm water and to take a few bites from a pasty Clif Bar. Conversation has dried up, and anyway, we’re too tired to concentrate on anything more than the task at hand. Neither of us has a desire to move, until we begin to wonder what kind of food awaits us at the house, and begin to envision the tiny splendors of tables and chairs, utensils, salads, cool water, and fresh bread. The vision works as a semi-waking dream, a goad in the night to get us moving again. We pick ourselves up after a long delay and we shuffle ahead into the darkness, hoping to find our way to our own promised land before the night is through, or before our bodies collapse. Step by step in the darkness, we stubbornly chase our vision of plenty.
***
To write a poem like Psalm 107 doesn’t quite offer a map of the world. To recite it or sing it isn’t the same as having a well-marked atlas or a GPS device. Instead, they are waking dreams, poetic reveries, goads in the night that incite listeners and hearers to begin creating new mental maps in the midst of their disorientation. The poetic vision provided by Psalm 107 is an incitement to imagine what it’s like to be adrift in the world and to imagine what kind of environment would allow people to truly thrive. Psalm 107 is an invitation to imagine a compassionate and hospitable place to dwell for all the drifters who can’t get a fix on their location, which in one way or another is most of us these days. To read Psalm 107 and to take it seriously is to become an architect of sorts, imagining how our homes and cities, our religious and educational institutions, our transportation and leisure choices, can be configured in more life affirming ways. To pray through Psalm 107 is to begin to create a new geography, for to imagine places of refuge and hospitality and well-being is the first step toward establishing such places.
I believe the geographical imagination of the Psalms is an invitation to a different kind of mapmaking, one born of slowness and care. The imagination of the Psalms is most akin to the maps created by medieval mapmakers. If you ever see such a map, you’ll notice that they don’t attempt to represent a territory or land through a rigid geometry of longitudes and latitudes. Instead, those maps conveyed what a place felt like to the body – here you find a steep hill that will tire you out, here you find a stunning vista that will overwhelm you with delight, here the landscape undulates beneath your feet, and so on. It’s a different way of being placed, one that attempts to articulate the way a place presses back upon the body, offering itself to the senses. The geographical detail of the Psalms causes me to wonder if learning to know and inhabit our places in the world will involve a mapmaking exercise of that sort. What if we made a map of the places we inhabit having performed the following sorts of tasks, tasks I gather many of you already perform (you can be my guides): Seeing the world on foot day after day, memorizing the bends of a trail or the contours of a neighborhood block. Moving slowly enough that we smell the air, noticing its sweetness and also when it has become foul from pollution. Noticing and befriending the various people that walk those same circuits. Finding ourselves willing to sit and listen carefully in conversation as people’s stories unfold. Becoming aware of the changes among the inhabitants of our towns, and being willing to ask the hard questions about what economic realities are driving those changes. Cooking our food slowly, and becoming inquisitive enough to ask: Where did this come from and who grew it? Admiring the richly variegated texture of our places, admiring the strange, pleasant, and sometimes alienating inhabitants of those places, and breathing deep the breath of God. Many of you already do those things, simply by way of living in northern Vermont, simply by way of carrying out your lives. And yet there is always reason to remain conscious of the pleasures of slowness, and therefore to become more fully aware of the places that structure our lives.
***
The rocks still feel like daggers thrusting through our shoes. Every gap in the trees promises relief from the dark forest trail, but there is no relief, not yet. David and I still dream our dreams of plenty on our night march through the Maryland woods. The boulder field has faded into the darkness behind us, but the trail continues on and on in what feels like an eternally painful present. Until suddenly it doesn’t. The trail spills out into a grassy expanse with a large picnic gazebo, and a little beyond that a parking lot. We have no idea where we are really, except that in the parking lot a car has started to flash its lights, and as we get closer we know for certain that the lights are for us, beckoning us toward the midnight splendor we had been dreaming about. We’re greeted loudly and enthusiastically, and Brian describes in great detail the orange glazed pork medallions that await us at home. David and I swear up and down never to do something as stupid as a forty mile day hike again, except we don’t quite believe it. After all, we’ve been doing it every year since. As soon as we begin rehearsing the events of the day around the table, telling ourselves what had happened as we walked, a sense of gladness overwhelms us. From the glow of a midnight meal, from the sense of having been lost and now feeling profoundly found, we began to experience something like joy, something like what the Psalmist describes: “He satisfies the thirsty, and the hungry he fills with good things,” is what it says. Good things indeed.
Feeling bewildered by an exhausting midnight hike barely approximates the spatial dislocation of many people on this planet. And yet, like Psalm 107, it provides a fleeting glimpse into what it means to feel lost, and what it feels like to be found, what it feels like to be hungry and be fed, what it feels like to be thirsty and be given a drink.
***
I’m under no illusions about the enormity of the issues surrounding our sense of dislocation. This dislocation is at the heart of our most recalcitrant public issues, foremost among them our snowballing ecological crises. And so I have no wish to be pollyanish in offering a solution. What I’m offering isn’t quite that.
Every week we gather in this place to sing together, to share the joys and concerns of the community, to read the old poetry and stories of the Bible, to offer up the names of the hurt and broken in our prayers. Children are welcomed and are told that God loves them, and that they are told that they are important and accepted and loved by all those who gather here. And then once a month we celebrate the sacrament of communion, a meal not unlike the joyful meal at the end of my midnight hike. Bread is broken, wine is poured and we share in a moment of profound nourishment. All of those acts are a way of orienting ourselves in a bewildering world, giving ourselves a sense of location, place, belonging. Our worship, our communion, and our welcome to children are ways of creating a map of the world. At our best, when we sing and pray together, we remind ourselves that we are bread and wine for one another, and that no matter how broken or wounded or flawed or strange or lost, we are the breath of God. Breathe deep the breath of God. Savor the notes of music in the hymns, and the words of hope and assurance offered in the prayers. Savor where you are, and who you’re with. Find yourself here. Even if you’ve never been here before, even if you’ve been away for a long time, the songs and prayers and the welcome that we share with one another are ways of saying: Welcome home. There will always be a place here for you whenever you care to come. Welcome home.
Steve Jungkeit
United Church of Newport
July 31, 2011
Texts: Isaiah 11: 1-2, 6-9, John 12: 20-26
“Meet Me At The Wrecking Ball”
The title of this sermon, “Meet Me At The Wrecking Ball,” comes from a song by the country musician Emmylou Harris. It contains as fine a theology as any I know. Emmylou performs it in whispers and sighs, a tired woman trying to connect with an old lover for a last drink (or maybe the first in a renewed relationship) at a café called The Wrecking Ball. The image of the wrecking ball suggests the scene of a disaster, something gone wrong, an open wound of the heart that refuses to close. I like to imagine that the narrator of the song has seen better days. Maybe her looks aren’t what they used to be, the job isn’t fulfilling, the gin bottles are empty, the ashtrays are full, and the friends aren’t calling as often as they once did. She sounds lonely, longing for the company of other people, the comfort of human touch. “I’ll wear something pretty and white,” she tells her lover, as if to suggest that maybe they can begin again with something new, broken but wiser. “And we’ll go dancing tonight,” she sings, there at the scene of the train wreck, the disaster, the heartache - there at The Wrecking Ball. I’m filling in some gaps. But the singer’s invitation reaches me. I sense in Emmylou’s voice the mark of a person too tired to judge, too weary to keep casting blame. I sense a person who has touched bottom, someone with a willingness to embrace the raw humanity of her life and to risk forgiveness. And I sense a certain whimsy as well, as she performs a shuffling slow dance upon the scene of the wreckage.
I sense all that and a little more, for I think it’s the sound of something remarkably akin to the gospel that I hear in that song. It’s the sound of one who knows herself to be among the fragile ones, which seems to free her in a strange way to risk reaching out again. It’s the sound of one for whom past resentment and enmity and competition have been melted down into a present where it’s no longer worth it to patrol the border lines of who’s done what to whom, of who owes what, who’s received what, who deserves what. There’s nothing much left of her except maybe the ashtrays, an open heart, and a standing invitation to meet at The Wrecking Ball.
I like that image because it seems so contrary to the religious world that I grew up in as a kid, a world that’s still very much present throughout American culture, though maybe a bit less so here in Vermont. When I was a child, I learned very early in church that Jesus had died for my sins, though I wasn’t really sure what I had done. But since he had to die, I assumed I must have done something pretty bad. I learned that I needed to accept Jesus into my heart if I was to receive eternal life, and so one evening at Bible camp, after a scary hell talk, I prayed the required prayer, a pattern that I was to repeat numerous times throughout childhood and early adolescence. And I learned that the world outside the church doors was a threatening and hostile place, something to be wary of, and so I began to visit that world less often, content to surround myself with people and music and books that seemed religiously safe, as a way of honoring what Jesus had done. In short, I ensconced myself in a maze of sacred truths that were loosely based on the Bible, truths that worked to isolate ambiguous outside elements from the wider world. I appointed a kind of border control over my interior life, and like an Arizona Minuteman watching for illegal immigrants, I prevented anything foreign or untoward from crossing.
I don’t know how familiar that version of Christianity is in a place like northern Vermont, or in a mainline denomination. But some noisy version of that theology is forever being trumpeted somewhere throughout the land. The part of it that I find most troubling these days is the part that insists on creating a version of the sacred where some are in and some are out, some are saved and some must for that reason be damned, where some have the truth and others are trapped in error, where some live their lives aright, in a moral and pure fashion, while others are apparently trapped in sin. I see versions of that spirituality all over the nightly news, as politicians and lobbyists use a scarecrow form of Christianity to police anyone with a different value system. But I see the will to divide the world into the saved and damned, the ins and outs, the sacred and secular in other ways as well: in debates over immigration, and the attempt to police the boundaries of national purity; in the emails I occasionally receive informing me of the supposed threats to America and the West itself posed by Islam, in similar emails warning me of some dark Islamic or secularist forces poised to infiltrate the public school system, or in the birther rhetoric surrounding President Obama, suggesting that he might not be one of “us” at all, whoever “we” finally are. We all saw a demonic and horrifying instance of that will toward purity last week in the Norway attacks, as a demented individual thought he could separate the wheat and the chaff with a handgun. In ways large and small, those voices that would divide up the world into the sacred and the secular seem to be proliferating, and much of it seems to be predicated on a vision of Christianity that, when pushed to its logical conclusion, can be extremely hurtful.
I’d like to offer an alternative account this morning. I’d like to suggest to you that, understood in a certain way, the Christian gospel itself is already a kind of secularization. Understood in a certain way, the good news of Christianity has to do with impurity and miscegenation, cultural mixing and crossed boundaries. After all, “secular,” in its root form, simply means “outside religious orders,” which is to say, outside the quarantine, outside the ghetto, outside the fences erected in the name of religion, nation and creed. If to be secular originally meant existing outside the walls of the monastery, then we have all been secular for a long time indeed, even as we continue to come to church and continue to worship God. To be secular, in the broadest sense of that term, simply means to reside in the world itself in all of its marvelous and confusing messiness, rather than sequestering ourselves behind a wall of Christian objects and ideas, a wall where nothing outside can taint or harm us. To be secular is to open ourselves to all that the world has to offer, and to experience that world as a piece of God’s good creation.
So much of the New Testament seems to consist of precisely that idea – “Go out into all the world” is what Jesus tells his disciples at the end of his earthly ministry. “The world” in that passage has to do not only with far-flung lands, but with the business of life itself. That’s what it means when the curtain of the temple is ripped in two at the moment of Jesus’s death. The curtain was what separated the holy of holies, the sacred, the place in the temple that only the priests could visit, from the rest of the temple and the rest of the population. Such divisions as the sacred and the secular are torn asunder in the event of Jesus, who, we can recall, spent his entire ministry out in the world, outside of religious orders, among the people, within the secular. Passages within the Hebrew Bible push toward this idea as well, foremost among them the passage from Isaiah that we heard this morning, where wolves live with lambs, leopards with kids, calves with lions, and children with vipers. What are these images if not images of irreconcilables dwelling together, mixing, mingling, and cohabitating? What are these images if not images of borders and barriers crossed, Sharks mingling with Jets, Capulets with Montagues, Hatfields with McCoys, Christians with Muslims, blue state sisters with red state brothers, hedge fund managers with assembly line workers? Isaiah gives us the ultimate vision of miscegenation and mixing, though it often takes a tragedy to realize the potential of his vision. The word for this vision of mixtures and crossed boundaries, the word for all I have been describing, is an old one, but one that still rings true: reconciliation. It sounds simple, I know, but it’s something like reconciliation that I have in mind when I talk about the dissolution of the sacred and the opening of what I’m calling the secular in the Christian gospel, for to be reconciled is to put divisions and barriers aside in a moment of shared understanding and sorrow, empathy and embrace.
Back to the Wrecking Ball. To hear Emmylou Harris sing it, The Wrecking Ball is the scene of a disaster, the scene of incomprehension and sorrow. But The Wrecking Ball is also midnight in an emergency room or noon at a graveside service. The Wrecking Ball comprises the scenes of our own lives where we cope with our fragility, struggle with our losses and grieve over broken or fractured relationships. The Wrecking Ball is the scene of vulnerability and need, but it’s also the scene of a certain openness, a certain communion – a halting gesture of embrace, the touch of a hand, a head slumped onto the shoulder of a companion, eyes that meet and do not look away. It’s not a place that any of us want to go, not in our wildest dreams. And yet it is a place that we find ourselves every now and then. No matter how dark or confusing, I believe The Wrecking Ball is a place where we can expect to encounter the generous embrace of a God who has preceded us there, even there, in the most unlikely and unsavory of places.
The Wrecking Ball is the scene of the cross, the one that Jesus forecasts in our gospel lesson this morning. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” he says. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit,” Jesus tells his disciples. When Jesus tells his parable about the grain of wheat, I think he’s referring to something very much like this reconciling, secularizing process that I’m describing. It seems to me that Jesus is revealing a good deal more in that parable than a mere prediction of his impending death and resurrection. In my mind, everything turns on that metaphor of the ground. Might it be that Jesus is urging his disciples to cast their eyes not on the starry heavens above, but on the earth below, literally on the ground beneath their feet? Could it be that his entire ministry was a way of orienting his followers to that earth, to the ground, drawing them deeper and deeper into the flesh of the world, into the complex messiness of human life? Did Jesus not spend those years of ministry among those whose lives had brought them especially low, the lepers, the blind men, the bleeding woman, the marginalized, those whose flesh betrayed them in some way that prevented them from flourishing, those who spent their days and nights at The Wrecking Ball? What if Jesus was drawing his followers into the life of the world in exactly that way, urging them to fall to the earth, to let the ground swallow them up, with the understanding that it is precisely there, in the hummus and dirt of this sweet and terrible old world that they would encounter the fragile and vulnerable God that Jesus so consistently revealed?
And so I ask, what if, instead of predicting some kind of cosmic reckoning between God and humans that somehow required a bloody death, Jesus was inviting his disciples to become more fully human, more fully alive to the joys and elation, but also the sorrows, heartaches and disappointments of life? And what if that becoming human created an opening in the disciples to be freer with themselves and others, not unlike the way Jesus himself seemed able to discern the shadows that haunted people’s lives, and to immediately touch them or speak a word in such a way that put them at ease? In short, what if Jesus was drawing his disciples, and all of us with them, deeper into the creation of God, into its most vulnerable and maybe lovely places, asking all of us to trust the goodness of that creation, such that, as one writer has it, we were able to embrace the “ordinary and good secularity of everything that is” without fear, without needing to protect our own sense of righteousness and purity in the world?[1] Is that not, after all, exactly the movement that Jesus himself makes nearly every moment of his ministry, moving into the depths of human experience? Is that not a way of signaling that no matter how fearful and isolated we believe we are, even if we descend into the bowels of hell, the embrace of God will have preceded us there? What if Jesus’ parable about the grain of wheat, and his entire ministry, were a way of asking us to perform our own shuffling slow dance there at The Wrecking Ball, in the sites within our lives and within the world that most needed to feel the touch of our reconciling embrace?
It’s no accident that the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky chose that very parable as the epigraph for his novel The Brothers Karamazov, a book everywhere suffused with a sense of the ordinary and good secularity of all that is, a book as big as the world itself, as wide in its embrace as the love of God itself. At the spiritual center of that book is a story about a young soldier named Zosima, full of charm, full of wit, full of swagger, full of himself and full of what he thinks is love for a beautiful woman who lives in the town in which he’s stationed. But unbeknownst to Zosima, she marries another, a man, Zosima later claims, who was in every way his superior – kinder, more generous, more compassionate. Zosima is filled with both shame and rage, and in his humiliation he turns toward violence and revenge by challenging his rival to a duel.
But immediately before that fateful encounter, Zosima is brought low by his own animosity toward the world, and suddenly lashes out at his servant in an unprovoked moment of fury. Zosima strikes him across the face, and the servant turns away, shocked, weeping. And then something snaps. Something gives inside of Zosima, and all the wounded vanity and pain of rejection that he had been carrying in his heart drain away. All the ways in which Zosima thought he needed to defend himself and his little world come undone. The sight of his poor servant, eyes now swollen with tears, frees Zosima to recognize who and what he had become, namely, someone willing to kill in order to settle a score. He goes to the duel, and allows his rival to take the first shot. It grazes his cheek and ear, but leaves him otherwise unharmed.
At that point, Zosima does an original thing, creating a genuinely new situation: he hurls his pistol into a grove of trees nearby and transgresses a sacred honor code by begging forgiveness of his rival. His military comrades shout him down, taunting him with accusations of cowardice. But Zosima, having fallen into the ground and died, has arisen a new man. Like Emmylou Harris’ wounded lover, Zosima touched bottom, and glimpsed there in the mess of his life the capacity to exist otherwise, the ability to risk becoming foolish and a little whimsical, to begin his own version of a dance at The Wrecking Ball.
There in the darkness, there at the bottom, there in the complex tragedy of his wounded desire, I believe Zosima caught a glimpse of Jesus. And I believe that fragile and halting vision was so overwhelmingly good, so full of trustworthiness and pure, unadulterated joy that the honor code of his friends no longer mattered, the rivalry no longer mattered, his wounded vanity and spurned love no longer mattered. Dostoevsky tells us that amidst all the accusation and outrage of the witnesses, Zosima couldn’t stop laughing, for what he had discovered was too good to be true. Or so good that it must be true. Maybe it gets like that at The Wrecking Ball from time to time. Maybe laughter is what remains when the mournful ballads are over.
I am convinced that the good news of Christianity has little to do with policing the boundaries and barriers of right and wrong, in and out, sacred and secular. Most days I find it hard to tell the difference. Instead, I am convinced that a fragile and vulnerable God is drawing us toward the ground, asking us to notice the strange and frail humanity of ourselves and of those we encounter. I believe that we’re being invited to reach out toward that strange frailty, in order that we may cease being alone. It’s true, there remains a kind of judgment in that invitation, for in the searing and gorgeous light of the revelation of God’s love, all of the old resentments and rivalries and anger, and the isolation as well, drain away into a present that is defined by a gracious reconciliation, one that truly does introduce something original and new into the world. I have the sense that if we are to risk encountering the world and ourselves and God in this way, we’ll be drawn far beyond the borders of the sacred doors of this church, into the ordinary and good secularity of everything that is. In one way or another, from everything I have seen here, that’s a movement many of you already practice.
Even so, in the tense religious climate we live in these days, we need alternative visions to counter those strains of Christianity that would sever the world into the saved and damned, the sacred and the secular. We need visions of Christianity to counter the narrow, sectarian, divisive and exclusionary voices that too often get passed off as orthodoxy. We need visions of wolves and sheep lying down with one another, leopards with kids, calves with lions, irreconcilables finding ways to mingle and coexist. We need visions of the ordinary and good secularity of all that is, of the goodness of the world in and out of religious orders, in and out of the groups we identify with. We need visions that call us to reach across borders and barriers not only in our public lives, but in our personal relationships as well, and maybe with ourselves too, as we discover the parts of our lives that call out for a gesture of loving embrace. I believe we need visions like The Wrecking Ball, where everybody shows up to perform their own mournful dances from time to time, and where everybody can expect to receive a kind word or a soft embrace in a moment of need. We need visions of the cross, where all of us meet as equals in moments of sadness and moments of great laughter as well. When we meet there, I believe we’ll encounter the love of a trustworthy God, who has promised to dwell with us wherever we happen to find ourselves, wherever the twisting paths of our lives lead us, even unto The Wrecking Ball. I’ll meet you there. Amen.