To Dare Delight
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
October 18, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Isaiah 58:9b-14a
I Peter 1:3-9
“In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of
your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is
revealed.”
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
The first lines of Jack Gilbert’s poem, A Brief for the Defense, apart from the lines that follow, bring to mind our human penchant for moving
suffering out of sight, so that the privileged or the elect or the fortunate few may enjoy their days unbothered by the suffering of the many. In the
culture this is known as kitsch which, by definition, treats that which is considered unwholesome offstage. “Think,” writes Giles Frazer, the Vicar of
Putney in The Guardian, “of those Nazi propaganda films of beautiful, healthy children skiing down the Bavarian Alps. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Of
course there is! For this is a world that has been purified, where everything nasty or troubling has been eliminated.” I think of the manicured gardens in
Flossenburg where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed, his bones mounded with others and now perfectly landscaped so as not to disturb the tourists. I think of
the homeless rounded up and off the streets of cities when a visitor of note is passing through. I think of the headlines hawking the news of the Dow
hitting the 10,000 mark while burying reports of newly soaring home foreclosures and the staggering statistics of unemployment that are not numbers but
countless human lives.
In the church, this is what Carol Bly has called the “dreadful cheer” of American Christianity, “that blinds itself to pain and makes a falsehood of its
praise.” Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls it the “unmitigated praise of buoyant cultural religion” that “forces upon us a pretense of
everything being all right….We sing praise because everything works…worshipping a god from whom we dare expect no serious transformation. Indeed, we prefer
a god who has become guarantor of the way things are.” Even God must roll over and go back to sleep when the banality of praise music wafts its way to the
highest heavens.
The poet himself does not pause here, nor does he tolerate dreadful cheer:
…we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
Did He who made the lamb make thee? William Blake once asked of another Tiger, tiger burning bright/in the forests of the night,/What mortal hand or
eye/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Like Blake, Gilbert has seen the intricate dance built into the fabric of our being between pain and praise,
between suffering and delight, between our beseeching God for deliverance and our thanking God for beauty. Such praise and pain is sung by a people whose
wilderness is remembered in the Promised Land and whose exile is an ever present possibility, a people who have been brought out of darkness into God’s
marvelous light and who have had to suffer various trials, being tested by fire are people who sing the psalms. “The value of the great songbook of the
Bible,” writes poet Kathleen Norris, “lies not in the fact that singing praise can alleviate pain but that the painful images we find there are essential
for praise, that without them praise is meaningless.”
I think of the 22nd psalm which begins with the darkest cry in all of Scripture: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from
helping me, from the words of my groaning?” and then explodes twenty-two verses later with praise: “I will tell of thy name to my brothers and sisters; in
the midst of the congregation I will praise thee.” For Israel, each time the psalm was recited, the community remembered the movement from hurt to hope;
every Sabbath, when the lament was uttered, the people reenacted the transformation and healing which marked their life together. In sustained notes they
voiced drastic verbs: “rescue, deliver, heal, release, redeem, snatch, feed, guide, give.’ [even as they broke into joy and thanksgiving and de;light at the
sight of God’s glory].…In such singing,” says Brueggemann, “Israel no longer lingers over the slow idols who celebrate the status quo….The recitations of
Israel banish such false gods and make possible grateful trust in the living God.”
What then of the praises we sing Sunday in and Sunday out in the great congregation that is on the Hill? In the first place, if our praise of God is to be
praise and not kitsch, we must do business with the poor women at the fountain, the crowds on the terrible streets of Calcutta, the caged women of Bombay.
That is to say, the praise that finds its way into the great music of the church is wrought on the anvil of human suffering wherein we are left to cry out
for the help we cannot give ourselves. Mark told me on Friday of the relentless “one…two” beat that runs throughout the Huguenot Psalter, psalms set and
sung by French Protestants as--right, left, right, left--they were marched to their deaths. Consider our praise, then, in light of the troubles we choose to
pull onstage for Christ’s sake as together we spend an evening at St. Paul’s with a homeless family or feed hundreds of men with no place to lay their heads
but Our Brother’s Place; when those among us take flight to Haiti and Pearlington to work alongside people whose dogged persistence and hope humbles us all
and hounds us down the labyrinthine ways of our own minds long after pilgrims are returned to routine.
You could say that our praise partakes of the “nevertheless” that is the laughter we have learned from lives marked by hardship and disappointment and grief
at the well, in the terrible streets, behind the cage. Though I think this does not go far enough for us. Our Communities for the Common Good may indeed
muster up volunteers and raise funds and educate us about the great issues of our day, thereby transforming the prayers and the praise of this congregation
on Sunday morning.
But if on Monday morning we do not speak out, if we do not rage against the death-dealing policies of nations, the violence visited on the “other” that is
sanctioned by our silence, the lethal politics of exponential hatred, the short-sighted, profit-driven rape of God’s good creation, then at the end of the
day our laughter will redound upon our own impoverished souls. The question before this congregation today is the same posed by Bonhoeffer to the Confessing
Church: “Will the church merely gather up those whom the wheel has crushed or will it [act to] prevent the wheel from crushing them?”
In the first place, then, lest our praise of God on the Hill be confused with the kitsch of the culture, we must make music that unmasks the shallowness,
the emptiness, the sedimented power and pretentions of a society or culture or church bowed down to lesser gods. “Only he who cries out for the Jews,” said
Bonhoeffer to his seminarians in the soon to be silenced seminary of the Confessing Church, “may sing Gregorian chants!”
But praise not only protests the present arrangements in the world: praise invites our buttoned-down minds and hearts to risk delight in the face of death
and destruction. Praise, says Brueggemann, “embodies our capacity to yield, to submit, to abandon ourselves in trust and gratitude to the One whose we are.”
It is no coincidence that when we sing, something in us wells up and we often find tears running down our faces. “…it was singing,” recalls Tim Clark, “that
led me back into the church—in much the same way that people who stutter can sing what they need to say. Music can bypass whatever terror it is that revs
the heart and befuddles the tongue. I felt, however, a vague sort of disquiet,” Clark reports, “on this particular Sunday. Something else had been bypassed
here; some degree of control of my life had been surrendered, in some way I couldn’t quite define.”
It occurs to me that without the gift of human vulnerability, without our yielding, submitting, abandoning ourselves in the trust embodied by our singing of
praise, the praise that is protest would be no more to the world than another ideology and we no more than ideologues. But just so, without the praise that
is protest wrought on the anvil of human suffering, our worship would be sentiment, cultural kitsch, and our singing banal. Praise, then, is polyphonic: the
melody of hope sung against the melody of pain, the major key of delight answering the minor key of suffering, the bass clef beseeching God for deliverance
while the treble clef thanks God for beauty. Praise is music despite everything and music in the face of everything sounding simultaneously in the creatures
of the God who is, says Robert Jenson, melody fugued. Suddenly I grasp why the poet tells us amid sorrow everywhere and slaughter everywhere that
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit that there will be music despite everything.
As we risk delight, we refuse to praise the devil--who is control un-surrendered—at the moment when the first chord of the organ resounds in our flesh and
we join the chorus that has, from the beginning of creation, made a joyful noise to the Lord. Even John Calvin said in his Institutes of Religion
that “God respects me when I work, but loves me when I sing.” And Augustine who did not say that to sing is to pray twice but did allow that “The one who
sings praise not only praises, but also praises with gladness; the one that sings praise not only sings, but also loves Him of whom he sings. In praise,”
says Augustine, “there is the speaking faith of one who confesses; in singing, the affection of one loving.”
At the end I think the poet imagines those who have dared such affection, have risked delight, have stubbornly accepted gladness in the ruthless furnace of
the world together on a ship still anchored in time while beholding on the other shore three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning. He imagines us
standing
…at the prow of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of the oars in the silence as a rowboat
Comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
All the years of sorrow that are to come.
“In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith…may be found to result in
praise….” Thanks be to God!
Return to Sermons
Return to Home Page
|