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The Person You Ought To Be
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 2, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Psalm 90 II Peter 3:1-13
Poetry is all that I have wanted to read this week in the face of such unspeakable grief. “Before you know what kindness really is,” says the poet (Naomi Nye), “you must lose things,/feel the future dissolve in a moment/like salt in a weakened broth./What you held in your hand,/what you counted and carefully saved,/all this must go so you know/how desolate the landscape can be/between the regions of kindness./…Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,/you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho/lies dead by the side of the road./You must see how this could be you,/how he too was someone/who journeyed through the night with plans/and the simple breath that kept him alive.” Will 125,000 deaths by natural disaster be enough to teach us the gravity of kindness? Even six million dead by human evil did not teach us this, so what will the desolate landscape call forth in us and for how long? “…we use our compassion as a self-enveloping fog,” wrote David Brooks, “to obscure our view of the abyss.” I think he is right. I had chosen the words of Second Peter for a conventional turn of the calendar sermon, words that earlier had sent me to scan the lines of poet Carl Dennis whose questions now scan me: “Am I leading the life that my soul/Mortal or not, wants me to lead is a question/That seems at least as meaningful as the question/Am I leading the life I want to live,/Given the vagueness of the pronoun ‘I,’/The number of things it wants at any moment.” What sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness? asked Peter first. “Fictive or not,” Dennis continues, “the soul asks for a few things only,/If not just one. So life would be clearer/If it weren’t so silent, inaudible/Even here in the yard an hour past sundown,/When the pair of cardinals and crowd of starlings/Have settled down for the night in the poplars.” The poet’s conditions for kindness or question concerning the life our soul wants us to lead would normally be begged at the turn of the calendar by a more manageable resolve to lose weight, stop smoking, start jogging, begin saving. You assume you have a lifetime to work on the life your soul wants you to lead, on learning the tender gravity of kindness…and you do: a lifetime which may or may not be threescore years and ten…which may or may not, by way of the God who comes like a thief in the night, be any more than an hour, perhaps two. But first things first we say assuming time is on our side as we reorder the lives we apparently want. First we must take better control of these wants. It is a start, a positive step toward the life we really want, we think. But a month into the New Year, of course, we remember we cannot or, once again, we will not…be able…to control as much as we thought we could. We had forgotten but now are remembering what a large conclusion this is at the stroke of midnight, when the poet’s weightier question is anything but begged by a tragedy whose dimensions we cannot fathom with God and whose darkness we cannot bear without God. God only knows how many on those beaches, living the life they wanted to live, were contemplating the same resolve we are now considering for the New Year in the moment they were “carried away as with a flood” before the watchful eye of the God for whom “a thousand years are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.” And in the same human breath sucked in before going under, God only knows how many on those shores were anticipating a New Year in which their hunger and poverty likely would remain unresolved and beyond their control, placing their numbered days in the hand of the God who satisfies with mercy, but apparently not much more. Now the dead mount in common graves while the living, near at hand remain in shock, or choose to dwell as we do, at a distance, in disbelief. “Human beings have always told stories,” again writes David Brooks, “to explain deluges such as this. Most cultures have deep at their core a flood myth in which the great bulk of humanity is destroyed and a few are left to repopulate and repurify the human race. In most of these stories, God is meting out retribution, punishing those who have strayed from his path. The flood starts a new history which will be on a higher plane than the old.” We tell ourselves those stories still, but to what end? For those of us inhabiting liberal Protestant pews, the stories are of no literal help. The flood in Genesis comes immediately to mind, a second creation myth which tells of the God who destroyed his first draft to speak a new creation into being, this time promising never again to “curse the ground because of humankind…nor destroy every living creature….As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease,” says the Lord. We say, missing the truth a myth tells, that we cannot believe in such a God, let alone obey a God who actually sweeps people away as with a flood, as if they were of no account, as though they were no more to that God than the flotsam and jetsam, the debris of creation washed back upon a vast and mangled shore. Yet if all we have is nature’s indifference for evidence of God’s dealings with us, there is no other story to tell ourselves. “I don’t believe in a personal God,” some therefore have checked when asked, “but do believe in a higher power of some kind.” Of what monstrous kind could such a higher power be? The kind revealed in the aftermath of the earth’s shaking appears to be anything but…kind! “…life would be clearer,” the poet imagines, “If it weren’t so silent, inaudible /Even here in the yard an hour past sundown….” Given what nature reveals of this impersonal higher power, some say our resolve to lose weight, start jogging, stop smoking, begin saving, or learn the gravity of kindness is pointless. You might as well eat, drink and be merry, the Epicureans have always counseled: live the life of your wants because tomorrow, for all you know, you may be no more! Curiously the author of Second Peter wrote his letter to Christians who seemed to be more taken with Epicurean philosophy than with the Christian hope. “There is—so the Epicureans argued [in Peter’s time]—no evidence that the world is governed by divine providence or that the gods have any concern for administering justice [and so] treated the stories about the gods as so many pious fables.” As it was with the preacher of Ecclesiastes, all was vanity to them, human existence the experience of eternal sameness: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to love and a time to hate. None of it means a damn, the Epicureans said; an eternal sameness resides in all things such that no one thing matters or has meaning. Therefore live by your wants as atoms in a world of atoms, as refuse to an impersonal power of some kind that has left you free to lead the life you want to live until the dark waters rise and you are gone. Have we no other story we can tell ourselves? Close to death himself, the author of Second Peter writes in the voice of the apostle who had more than just another story to tell. He had witnessed with his own eyes, on a mountaintop, the glory of the knowledge of God in the face, in the person of Jesus Christ. He had heard an audible voice breaking the silence and saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved.” “We ourselves heard,” he writes at the beginning of the letter. Heard what we wonder? Heard God’s address, the same address we have heard in the story we told ourselves again only a few silent nights ago. “You would do well,” advises Peter, “to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” In the light of the God who has spoken in these latter days by a Son, Second Peter sees the events of human history, experiences the desolate landscape between the regions of kindness, endures the reality of human grief not as one who has no hope, but as one whose hope was in the Word made flesh. He lived, in the words of Richard Bauckham, “as a character in a different story, or at least a version of the same story with a radically different ending, an ending which transfigures the significance” of our own, which transfigures the significance of the countless lives still washing up on the shore. Without him we have only rocks and mountains, only fire and wind, only water and the waves to reveal a Mystery as menacing and it is majestic. But in his birth we may know the God who is with us through the deep waters, may trust the God who is for us in the desolate landscape between the regions of kindness, may lean upon the God who abides beside us in life and in death. You cannot resolve to have this life as Second Peter seems to suggest--of all people Peter whose resolve to love Him to the end thrice denied him instead. No, this life, these numbered days are a gift given you by the God to whom a thousand years are like one day and one day is like a thousand years, by the God who is not slow about his promise but patient with you, by the God who wants none to perish but all to live eternally in a new heaven and a new earth where righteousness is at home. Now I’m ready to posit a tug/Or nudge from the soul. Some insight/Too important to be put off till morning/Might have been mine if I’d opened myself/To the occasion as now I do./Here’s a chance for the soul to fit its truth/To a world of yards, moons, poplars, and starlings/[To a world of flood, fire, wind and dust]/‘Be brave, Soul,’ I want to say to encourage it./‘Your student, however slow, is willing,/The only student you’ll ever have.’” Thanks be to God. |