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Life We Have Been Given Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 23, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 1:20-31 I John 1:1-4
“For who, that really considers the works of God by which this whole world is governed and administered, will not be amazed and overwhelmed with miracles?” asked Augustine. “The force and virtue of a single grain of any seed is a great thing,” he goes on, “a thing that awes us while we consider it. But since [we], intent on other objects, have stopped thinking about the works of God, by which [we] should daily praise God as the creator, God has reserved to himself certain extraordinary and unfamiliar actions, that by marvels God might, so to speak, rouse us from our slumbers to worship him.” Will any of us really be roused from our slumbers this Thursday next to be amazed and overwhelmed with miracles? Or will our thanksgivings be too slight, our praise too circumscribed, our gratitude not nearly in keeping with the extravagance of the life we have been given by God to live? No doubt with turkey and stuffing, sweet potatoes and creamed onions to prompt us, we will give thanks for all things on the table; with friends and family, phone calls and centerpieces sent with love to remind us, we will express our gratitude for those seated around the table of our hearts. In prayer we will count our blessings…in stories we will remember--while passing the gravy—the goodness of our fortune, the greatness of our land. When all has been said and digested, we will stretch out in front of the fire or make our way up the stairs to bed, perhaps remembering one last time to thank God in the silence for the gift of it all. I confess that I have never been given to trust such casual and occasional thanksgivings. I think it was on a vacation from seminary, when asked to say the blessing—something my family asked of me on Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter—I declared we either would pray every meal or none at all. (It wasn’t that I was so pious, but rather that I dreaded the responsibility of praying aloud.) That was the last my family bowed our heads together around the dining room table! So on Thanksgiving I think of Sarah in Archibald MacLeish’s “J.B.” who asked her family as the turkey was being carved and before disaster hit, "Has any one of us thanked God? Really thanked God? Thanked God for everything?" We slumber, says Augustine, and to rouse us from our slumber that we might worship God as we ought, God has "reserved certain extraordinary and unfamiliar actions." In other words and in the first place, Augustine says, you and I are prompted to give the thanksgiving and praise due God by God's acting on the boundaries of our human experience--extraordinary and unfamiliar actions--rousing us from slumber to gratitude. By miracles and marvels, he says, God prompts our proper praise and gracefully goads our slumbering gratitude. But instead of allowing ourselves to be shoved into utter astonishment, we reasonably mistake miracles to be unjust interventions or ancient misunderstandings or theologically dense verses in Scripture. Perhaps we should give this another try! Set down in any chapter between the first of Genesis and the twenty-second of Revelation and I promise that you will come upon words meant to rouse you into astonishment: the lepers cleansed, the paralytic who walked, the fever quelled, the demons exorcised, the hemorrhage stopped, the dead child come to life, the blind given sight, the mute given voice. These are stories told as if to underline the astonishingly ordinary gifts--of touching, walking, reasoning, breathing, seeing, speaking--by noting their restoration. Given the miraculous return of our senses, we are roused from our slumbers for gratitude and worship. Similarly there is Augustine’s own example: “A dead man rose again; [the people] marveled. So many are born every day,” he says, “and no one marvels. If we consider these things more thoughtfully, it is a greater miracle for one to be who was not, than for one to come to life again who was…” or as John Calvin put it, “…if ingratitude did not put upon our eyes the veil of stupidity, we would be ravished with admiration at every childbirth in the world.” “For who that really considers the works of God…will not be amazed and overwhelmed by miracles.” In the second place, we rise every morning of the life we have been given expecting these astonishing gifts to be given: touch, breath, sight, sound, speech, reason, mobility. We take them so for granted that we do not notice until they are threatened by illness or accident or age. Then we have a choice: either we may rail against the Creator as if God had shortchanged our lives; or--by some amazing grace--we may let ourselves be prompted at the boundaries of the life we have been given to a deeper gratitude for our diminished days. Those who know the gift of seeing by its lack or the gift of mobility by its loss or the gift of memory by its absence have been schooled in God's unwarranted grace and often come closer on days like this Thursday next to a true thanksgiving. “One of the greatest sensuists of all time,” wrote Diane Akerman, in her book on the natural history of the senses, “was a… woman with several senses gone. Blind, deaf, mute, Helen Keller's remaining senses were so finely attuned that when she put her hands on the radio to enjoy music, she could tell the difference between the cornets and the strings….She wrote at length about the whelm of life’s aromas, tastes, touches, feelings, which she explored with the voluptuousness of a courtesan.” The “whelm of life’s aromas, tastes, touches, feelings” is regularly missed by those of us intent on other things. But for those who have been claimed by the ongoing miracle of life even and especially when life is diminished, only gratitude will do. The point is not sentiment, my friends, but the ordering of the lives we have been given by way of grateful reference and trembling reverence toward the God who made us astonishingly thus. But more! For in the third place, there is also the miracle and mystery of what the novelist Harry Crews called the “discoverable world.” I was made to believe, he wrote, “we live in a discoverable world, but that most of what we discover is an unfathomable mystery that we can name--even defend against--but never understand.” Augustine said the same in so many words: “As we marvel at those things which have been done by the man Jesus, let us marvel at those also which have been done by the God Jesus. By the God Jesus were made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all the adornments of the heavens, the plentifulness of the earth, the great fruitfulness of the sea--all these things which come within range of our eyes were made by Jesus God. And we behold these and if his spirit is in us, they please us so much that we praise the author of them.” The discoverable world through which we walk day by day is an unfathomable mystery that we can name but never fully understand. We name the world so casually, most of the time, that we might as well be looking the other way. Or to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, we simply have not mustered the imagination to apprehend it at every turn. “It could be,” writes Annie Dillard, “that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination…. If creation had been left up to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that….[Yet] intricacy is that which is given from the beginning, the birthright, and in intricacy is the hardiness of complexity that ensures against the failure of all life. This is our heritage….This…is the extravagant landscape of the world given, given with pizzazz, given in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over. “I have noticed,” she concludes, “that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild glitt’ring eye and say, ‘Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar…there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?’ The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.” This is not sentiment, my friends, but “that by marvels, God might rouse us from our slumbers to worship him.” I mean to change your life! When I think again of the words in Scripture that mean to rouse those of us who have stopped thinking about the works of God to astonishment, I think of the exaggerations that turn us with yeyes wide open to the discoverable world: the net so full of fish they could not haul it up; the loaves and fishes multiplied so masterfully that baskets full were left over; the field yielding thirty fold, sixty fold, a hundred fold; the rocks crying out; the waves silenced. Perhaps that is why, in part, Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea where language continues to be pushed to its limits. Middle Eastern hyperbole was his medium in order that we might be roused from the slumber of more reasonable words to give thanks to God for the life we have been given in him. For what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life that is Jesus Christ, in whom we live and move and have our remarkable being; through whom our eyes really see and our ears really hear and our hands really touch the word of life! What did you notice? asks poet Mary Oliver. (You have heard these questions before.) What did you hear? What did you admire? What astounded you? What would you like to see again? What was most tender? What was most wonderful? What did you think was happening? The poets also stretch language to its limits and call us to attention before the life we have been given, call us to praise before a creation that is good beyond our deserving. They invite us to look and listen and remember and cherish and delight and inhabit the depth of things. They address us as the only creatures left to wander the planet wholly and utterly aware that we wonder before a gift undeserved. Oliver asks them of herself, What did you notice?, and turns our mind’s eye to see “The dew-snail;/the low-flying sparrow;/the bat, on the wind, in the dark;/big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance/ …the uproar of mice in the empty house/the tin music of the cricket’s body;/the blouse of the goldenrod.” She rouses me from my slumber to worship! What did you hear? The thrush greeting the morning;/the little bluebirds in their hot box; the salty talk of the wren,/then the deep cup of the hour of silence. What astonished you? The swallows making their dip and turn over the water. What would you like to see again? My dog; her energy and exuberance, her willingness, her language beyond the nimbleness of tongue, her recklessness, her loyalty, her sweetness, her strong legs, her curled black lip, her snap.” I am amazed and overwhelmed with miracles! Around the table before we dig in, what if we paused and asked one another these questions…or asked them of ourselves before alone we sipped from the deep cup of the hour of silence? “Help us,” we have prayed before, marking the end of another’s life, help us who are still alive and breathing, “to walk, amid the things of this earth, with eyes wide open to the beauty and the glory of the eternal.” Help us to glorify you, O God, and enjoy you forever in this discoverable world of miracles at the boundaries, through Him whom we have heard and seen with our eyes, have looked at and touched with our hands, even Jesus Christ, the word of life. Amen! |