| Thinking
Meaning Into A New Situation Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 15, 2002, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill IIKings 23:1-3 "…forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus." "It will be some years before you read this, if ever," begins the letter of Reynolds Price to his godchild Harper. "But given the uncertainties of all our futures, I'll set it down here at the time of your baptism and will hope that-should you ever need it-it will be legible…. I certainly won't guess at what your own relation to faith may be, though your parents and godparents have vowed to guide you toward it…. Above all, none of us who know you in the bright wonder of your laughing, open-armed childhood can begin to imagine who you'll be and where you'll want-or need-to go in your youth or your maturity. So here, by way of a gift, are some thoughts that may interest you in time." Price goes on to write to his godchild as Christians have written since Paul first put pen to papyrus and sent Epaphroditus packing to Philippi. Speaking winsomely of his own holding to faith amid life's intractabilities, and then wisely of those practices which, when tried, have often proven true in the lives of generations that have believed, Price writes in hopes that Harper will grow up to have a God on whom to call. It is what many here once hoped as they baptized a child now lost from the church's worship. It is what others continue to hope as they scramble, of a Sunday morning, to reestablish children in the routine of religion after a summer away. But it is also what many of us still seek in adulthood and cannot will ourselves into possessing: the wide-eyed trust of a child in the God made known in Jesus Christ. So some of us return to these pews both wondering what we are doing here and unable to stay away, asking after the meaning of the gospel for the living of these days. What is painfully clear to me, especially given the year we have just endured, is that the faith we seek, for ourselves and our children, cannot be sustained in us or in the generation to come by a mere recital of texts or tradition. That conviction was unexpectedly underlined by Garry Wills a few weeks ago on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. Writing about the substance of Lincoln's Gettysburg address, an address whose mere recitation was deemed sufficient to lend meaning to a media-driven anniversary this Wednesday last, Wills notes that "Though Lincoln referred reverentially to the Declaration of Independence, he did not think it adequate simply to read the document over the dead bodies at Gettysburg. He had to think its meaning into the new situation." Lincoln did this by calling to the White House the architect who had designed the burial ground where the address would be given. He learned that the graves were placed in such a way as to embody this nation's foundational truth: that "all [human beings] are created equal." But equal or not, where in the loss of 50,000 lives was meaning to be found? Thinking the meaning of human dignity and equality into the nation's new situation, Lincoln used the magnitude of death to up the ante of our nation's purpose on those living. In essence, the dead had set a task for the living: "that we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion." I found myself reading those words in relation to the truth set before us in the gospel not by 50,000 dead but by One whose life, death and resurrection ups the ante of the church's purpose season in and season out. It has never been enough for the church merely to recite the texts we have been given in the biblical witness or in the creeds handed down by the church throughout the ages. It will not do simply to be gathered, as Josiah gathered the elders and the people of Israel, for a reading of the law long lost in the rubble of the temple. We must think the meaning of the gospel into each new situation, and that requires more of every single one of us than our occupying a pew a few times a month when we have no other pressing plans. In the first place, according to Paul, it requires of us that we imitate him and observe those who live according to the example we have in them. With these very witnesses in mind, Reynolds Price wrote to his godchild, "…if anyone with a persistent curiosity about faith, anyone who has lacked a sane early grounding in…faith…were to ask me where to go to begin to understand the inevitability of belief and its mixed rewards, I'd suggest two initial courses to be pursued with quiet steadiness. First, begin to read the sacred texts…the Christian Bible." And here we must add, not only read the Bible, but read the Bible together, as a people set apart to ask anew after its meaning. Brigid and I cannot impart the depth of that meaning to you in twenty minutes on sporadic Sunday mornings! You need to dig for it, work together at understanding what God has been up to with human beings since the beginning, use your mind as well as the sentiments of your heart to love God and serve God. I say this to you this morning with a new urgency because, for all the so-called theological reflections aired about God and evil in the last week, there was precious little evidence that those struggling most in the face of this tragedy had been equipped with much more than a church school notion of God or with some vague idea about God absorbed from the culture. The Bible gives up its meaning in any given age only as the community of faith faithfully and constantly beseeches God's Spirit to intercede between our new situation and this witness. That, more than anything else we do in the year ahead, holds the power to change your life and the life of the world in which we live. Though Price would not have us stop with the biblical story, nor would Paul whose admonition to "observe those who live according to the example set in us" sends us, in the second place, to what Price calls "the thoughts of the great believing minds…such as Francis of Assisi, Soren Kierkegaard, Albert Schweitzer, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor," he suggests. I would add authors some of us will be reading together, month by month, in the year ahead: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth, to name two. I know many of you grow irritated with me when I quote theologians on a Sunday morning and would love more pithy little stories to carry you through the week. But thinking the meaning of the gospel into a new situation requires so much more of us. Because we are not the first to encounter evil and darkness, we can do no less than consult the minds of those whom God has used before us to think the gospel's meaning into their own situation. Go the course on the church's confessions week after next, and listen to what German Christians confessed in the face of the Third Reich, under the theological leadership of Barth and Bonhoeffer. See if you think we can get by in these times on anything less, on toastmaster stories of a Sunday morning! Though Price wisely recognized, for Harper's sake, that the gospel's meaning is forged not only by way of theologians but, in the third place, through the witness of the arts. "Considering that your family will have reared you in a world deep in the knowledge and the resonance of the arts," he goes on, "I'd urge you to immerse yourself in the lives and works of the great believing musicians and painters-such witnesses as the preservers of Gregorian chant, Giotto and Michaelangelo, Palestina, Rembrandt, Bach and Handel, Mozart and Beethovern, Van Gogh and Rouault, Messiaen and Part." If you have never learned to listen for the gospel proclaimed in a Bach Cantata or an opening voluntary by Messiaen or in Mark's own improvisation, your spirit and your faith is the poorer. There is a world of belief waiting for us in the arts and that is one of the most engaging ways this congregation may learn to think and sing the gospel's meaning into a world so in need of the grace given us by God in music or painting or dance. Here, by the way, Paul is not much help. Rather we may hie to David's psalms for massive biblical warrant that the arts are a gift of God's heart. Then, says Paul to the Philippians in the fourth place, "help those who have struggled in the work of the gospel." Or in Price's words to Harper, "commit part of your time to working with the wretched of your neighborhood or town-the homeless, hungry, abused, the unloved whom most religions insist that we comfort." You know, we think that the danger we now face in this new situation is the danger of terrorists attacking our way of life. But if it is the gospel's meaning we mean to think into our new situation, if it is Christ we mean to follow into the world he came to save, then vulnerability to the reality of the world's wretched, a standing beside and a bearing with those whose equal humanity and dignity has been forgotten in our ease, this begins to offer itself to people of faith as a more lasting strategy against terror, I promise you, than taking up arms! Though finally, says Paul and echoes Price, in order to think the gospel's meaning into a new situation, we must learn anew to pray. "Try," Price sagely suggests to Harper, "if you never have-speaking short sentences in the air around you (be sure no one is watching; people have been carted off for less). Call the air God if you can, though it's not a god; and state as honestly as possible some immediate need, some hope for guidance. With luck and further effort, your sentences will grow less self-obsessed. They may even begin to express occasional thanks…. You may, in short-and finally, my valued young friend-have begun to speak with and to hear from the truth, some form of the truth that wears many masks for its likely sole face." We need not call to the air, my friends, for we are a community of people whom God has first called together and claimed in Jesus Christ. Therefore forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, may God guide us as we seek to think the gospel's meaning into the year before us: for the likes of Elizabeth on the day of her baptism, and for sake of the world in her ageless vulnerability, until we be turned by grace all together toward the home for which we were made. |