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Why You Came
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 20, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 8:6-18 Romans 12:9-21
"Your days are short here; this is the last of your springs," said Adlai Stevenson in 1954 to a class of seniors who had come to break bread together at what would soon be their own alma mater as well as being his. "And now in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depth of truth, feel the hem of heaven. You will go away with old, good friends. And don't forget when you leave why you came." We live forgetting, of course. In the mid-life of marriages we forget why we ever walked down that long aisle. In the chaos of raising children we forget why we wanted so many in the first place. In the doldrums of a job wherein delight and duty no longer meet, we forget what it was we set out to do with our one precious life. At the bottom of a bottle or a pint of Ben and Jerry's, the end of a seven-day work week or the limit of a credit card, upon our return from another whirl-winded escape or at the prospect of a season of social engagements, at the mercy of each of these means we variously employ we often are successful at only one thing: at forgetting why we came. Or even more to the point as we break bread presently, collectively, contentiously in the thick of a nation at war with itself, in the moral paucity of a society that would damned the least of these yet again to hunger, in the shallows of a culture whose brightest and best are gratified instantly with more, we forget the substance of things hoped for, which once bound us together. Therefore around the table this Thursday next, gathered together to ask the Lord's blessing, the question is this: Will you remember when you leave why you came? In a sense, that was the question of the country Levite, the preacher who wrote to his people in the beginning of the eighth century when they had grown comfortable and conformed to the gods of their age in the land that had been promised. What he knew generations after the exodus, what he beheld in the excess of an existence that lacked for nothing, was God's children living forgetful of the One on whom their lives alone depended. So he wrote to remind them why they had come into a good land, a land with flowing streams, of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack for nothing, a land like our own. Why had they come? Why have we? The preacher answers his own question with a story. The story says Walter Brueggemann, "is that Yahweh 'brought us out of Egypt and brought us into the land"; but in between "the verb of exit and the verb of entrance" the real story awaits those who lean in close enough to hear. Nowhere, it seems, but in the wilderness may we recall and reflect on the truth of our collective human existence: our vulnerability…our lives "exposed to threats of death and at risk without sure resources, on the way in faith but without visible support…. Here," says Brueggemann, "the memory is not so public and not so fully on display; …no reference to pharaoh, and nothing so dramatic as Sinai occurs." This is the story we tell among kith and kin, the story of "risk and desperation…of peculiar sustenance and care…" of the God who tests and leads and humbles and feeds. We tell it at a distance from the wilderness and now around tables groaning under the weight of a fattened turkey both sacrificed and stuffed, sweet potatoes laced with bourbon on the side, cranberry sauce still running or jelled and upended from a can, brussel sprouts in bed with chestnuts or green beans swimming in mushroom soup, Beaujolais and Pinot Grigio flowing, pumpkin pies cooling. We tell it like the preacher tells the wilderness story when poverty humbled a generation and hunger threatened to do them in: the story of the earliest years of marriage, you remember, when we had nothing but each other for warmth and a gladness all but lost, it seems, in the upward climb; but will you ever forget that Thanksgiving as mother lay dying in the bedroom when we ate on our laps and laughed until we cried; or ["Oh please, not this story again!"] at the height of the depression when your great-grandfather sold papers on the street for pennies while your great-grandmother canned until the cupboard was full for the winter and your grandfather walked two miles [or was it ten?] in the snow without boots to school; that was the year when instead of turkey, hash was served on Thanksgiving and it was the most extravagant feast ever! You speak, in other words, of the forty years in the wilderness, the days that humbled and tested you to know what was in your heart, seasons that let you hunger in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, of an age when the clothes on your back did not wear out and your feet did not swell those forty years, of a time never known by this present generation whose desires their elders have both created and fulfilled lest they lack for anything: we tell the story of our lives between the verb of exit and the verb of entrance, a story we fail to tell our children at their peril and, I might add, we forget at our own! This story is the means you have been given in order to remember why you came, says the preacher. Then in case you missed the point, he tells you why: you came as one who once bowed down to the God who is God, the God in whose ways you walked and whom you feared when you had nothing, the God who brought you out of the wilderness into a good land, a land where you have built fine houses and live in them, where your herds and flocks have multiplied, your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, a land where you lack now for nothing except for that one crucial thing: the remembrance before you leave of the One who has brought you thus far and of the reason why you came. What if this Thursday next, when all are seated and before grace is said, what if you opened to the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy and began reading these words, addressing each one around the table as a child of God who is "living on the land in the sphere of blessing but at the same time still standing before the Jordan." What if, by your reading, these words carry those you love most back to the boundary in order to remember the One who had brought them thus far, the One who put them to the test, lest together we forget before we leave why we came. Though the boundary between wilderness and Promised Land brings to mind another word we would do well to speak around the tables of our thanksgivings. It is a word to the same players, but now a word addressed to our lives lived on the boundary of living, to human existence experienced only as anticipation and postponement. The word was first spoken, among many other admonitions, by Paul to the Romans, and reads in some translations: "Serve the opportune time." In other words, your days are short here; this may be the last of your springs. Therefore do not live forgetting the time in your life to which you have come, the life you have been given by God to live, the days so brief and swift and singularly yours. "We live the whole of our lives provisionally," says the dying priest and professor of Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine to his student turned fugitive revolutionary in Mussolini's Italy. "We think that for the time being things are bad, that for the time being we must make the best of them and adapt or humiliate ourselves, but that it's all only provisional and that one day real life will begin. We prepare for death complaining that we have never lived. Sometimes I am haunted," says old Nuncio who soon will hide Pietro, disguising him as the priest he was born to be, the priest Nuncio never dared be, "I am haunted by the thought that we have only one life and that we live it provisionally, waiting in vain for the day when real life will begin." "Serve the opportune time," says Paul and by that I think he means, as Paul says of himself elsewhere [as I say this morning in order to sound a contrapuntal note alongside the last], "Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, press on" to claim the high calling of God now, to live the life given you by God to live not tomorrow or the next day or when the stars align themselves perfectly in the night sky, but here: around the table, with the one by your side, for the sake of the neighbor across the hall, in the streets where revolutionaries disguised as priests demand justice, down dark alleys for love of young lives being lost in the cross fire, behind tortured prison bars or in spite of the terror that stalks by day, do something brave, tender, consoling, useful, glad, generous, graceful, wise. This may be your only chance on the boundary between the verb of exit and the verb of entrance: touch the depth, said Stevenson, feel the hem of heaven. "The real question" writes a young Karl Barth of Paul's command, "is whether our time is conditioned by the Spirit, whether our time is the 'present' time, whether our time is filled with meaning….This is always the question. If this be so, then-serve the time: plunge into the KRISIS of the present moment for the decision is there." The decision, of course, is the decision whether or not to follow him who has redeemed the time and the exit and the entrance and the wilderness; who is host at our every feast, setting our tables of thanksgiving with himself the manna, his love made flesh the heavenly food. When I read the phrases that run fleet across the page of Paul's letter and imagine them read also at our tables of thanksgiving, perhaps now before dessert, I hear the Christ of God pulling up a chair and by his presence among us redeeming everything we say and think and dare with one another: let love be genuine, hold fast to what is good, outdo one another in showing honor, be patient in suffering, rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep, live peaceably with all. Before these words admonish us, they bear witness to him who alone has lived well; to the one who, far from forgetting, reminds us in the breaking of bread before he leaves, reveals to us from the height of his cross why he came: that we might have life and life abundantly. To him let us pray our thanksgivings with the poet John Berryman:
& thro' great griefs surviving to this feast sober & still, with the children unborn and born, among brave friends, Lord, we stand again in debt and find ourselves in the glad position: Gratitude. We praise our ancestors who delivered us here within warm walls all safe, aware of music, likely toward ample & attractive meat with whatever accompaniment Kate in her kind ingenuity has seen fit to devise. and we hope-across the most strange year to come- continually to do them and You not sufficient honour but such as we become able to devise out of decent or joyful conscience & thanksgiving. Bless then, as Thou wilt, this wilderness board. |