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Silence Sermon by Brian Russo June 6, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Geneses 16:1-15 Galatians 5:1 If you say my name I’m no longer there, who am I? This simple little riddle has stayed with me ever since I saw the movie, La Vita È Bella (Life is Beautiful); a picture, astonishingly, that is as beautiful as its title suggests. One could certainly fashion an entire series of sermons based squarely on its events, its characters, and depictions of the Holocaust, but for today, our focus will strictly adhere to that lovely little riddle. Silencio. Silence. If you say my name and I’m no longer there, I am silence. And when I think about this time and again, I find myself reaffirming that there is perhaps no greater cryptogram that better crystallizes our present social volition than this. What I mean to say is plain: we perpetually personify the meaning of the riddle – day after day and second after excruciating second – as we seemingly do whatever it takes to erase what we think is a crushing existence of nothingness. Sure, some of us are quite fond of nothingness, of silence. Some of us can even find a solemn corner in the expanse of a large room, and sit quite happily there as we idly sew, read, or just ponder the great or small mysteries of life. But, wouldn’t you agree that this blissful experience is a subjective reality only discovered by a minority who can accomplish it; and more, by an aging generation detached from all the gadgetry of new age technology (and that’s no slight on some of you old-timers out there, for Pete Torrello is a wiz with a Mac; and that’s no slight on Pete Torrello, I certainly don’t mean to imply he’s an old-timer!)? But really though, doesn’t it just seem more accurate an assessment that our culture (our mid and younger culture especially), objectively observed, has become alarmingly fixated on breaking any moment of potential and real silence? Absolutely, and you need look no further then cell phones, to see this point. When I was a kid, oh so many years ago, we had no such thing, unless you wanted to carry around the brick that Zach Morris called a mobile. In fact my first cell phone, was a car phone… remember those things? They were actually a part of the car! Now, don’t confuse my words, I’m not professing to be Old Man River over here – for I love my cell phone – rather, I’m asking you to concede that there was once a time when none of us were immediately accessible, when we actually found ourselves alone to our own thoughts and devices. But now we also have… texting. Sweet fancy Moses, how has this innovation has gotten out of hand, right? Do any of us, besides Cindy, not text these days? I think my brother would have a conniption if he were ever deprived of it. But all kidding aside, texting has in many ways become the microcosm of our inability to focus our attention on what surrounds us. If something is incapable of sustaining our interest (even if it is in fact interesting in its own right), we go searching our contacts for someone else whom we can make plans with, to say “what up” to, to recount the painstaking minutiae our little minds seem so enthralled with. And really, it’s becoming such a sickness – or as film producer David Lynch likes to say, when commenting on iPhone users who use such a platform to watch movies, “get real.” Unfortunately for Lynch, the simple reality is most things today are built, and most people today are conditioned, on immediate gratification. And this stark reality extends to things far more important than just handheld technology. For how many of us are truly able to just sit still; to relax; to analyze and reflect; to meditate; to listen; to stare and smile into the space of silence? Not many, not many at all. And thus, it should come as no surprise then that so many teenagers can barely make it through listening to a song without hitting skip on their iPods, let alone, gasp, sitting silently through an entire album in uninterrupted attention. Things today have simply become like indecipherable music, noise on the air as we contemplate what else, or what next, we can be doing. Now in fairness, this “Foundation of Impatience,” our soundtrack of a thousand endless hits of thirty second tracks, has been a part of the human condition ever since the beginning – and I mean the beginning. I mean just look at this morning’s Old Testament text from Genesis. In Genesis 15, God makes a promise to Abraham that he will live to see an heir, a son. Now, can you just imagine the figurative frequency at which Abraham changed LP after LP, 78 after 78, as he continuously heard nothing but white noise emanating from the needle of the Divine turntable? For crying out loud, Abraham was nearly 86 years old and still childless! Surely, he must have thought, “yeah, whatever God, if I haven’t had a child by now, it surely ain’t going to happen at 86!” And thus, Abraham lost his patience, he lost his trust, and it was primarily because of that deafening silence from God’s end of the promise that he agreed to one of the most ridiculous decisions any man could ever consent to. You know which one. Oh yeah Abraham, it would be a great idea to sleep with a slave girl... nothing bad could come of that. Oh, but you had your wife’s permission; well then,, I’m sure you’ll be fine. In one of the most daring “musical” pieces of our time, John Cage tested the limits of what can be considered art, and did so by employing the greatest element he could think of – silence. The piece, 4’33” conducted in three movements, asks for a man to appear upon stage with a solitary piano. The first movement lasts for thirty seconds, during which the pianist sits at the piano and closes the lid. The second movement lasts for two minutes and twenty three seconds, during which the pianist opens the lid, sits down, and then closes the lid. The third and final movement lasts for a minute and forty seconds, and once more the pianist opens the lid only to close it again. When his stopwatch reaches 4’33” the pianist rises from the bench and bows to the crowd, thus completing the piece. And all of this, the entire thing, is done in silence, without one single note being played! Crazy. And yet, this is exactly what Cage envisioned – in fact, it is precisely what he thought music could be. Controversial for sure, Cage sought to persuade us that there is just as musical art in the undesirable, unpredictable, and unaccounted for as there is in the deliberate. Whatever noises were made by the audience, the environment, as well as one’s own conscience and subconscious, was what 4’33” was all about – to get people in touch with silence, recognizing within it an internal power to behold. Now, I just wonder… what would you have done if you were in the audience during the 4’33” premier? Would you have looked around yourself with the people’s eyebrow raised, wondering what on Earth was going on? Would you have started whispering the neighbor next to you? Would you have even fidgeted in your seat, finding a scratch that wasn’t there, and perhaps even texted your friend, “dude, I am having the weirdest experience of my life!”? Or would you have embraced it. Would you have sat back and exhaled, inhaled and listened to the noises you perhaps never heard before? Would you have heard a voice from within you, an inner voice long since buried? And would your mind have been flooded with imaginative landscapes, daydreaming away like a curious child on a sunny day in a dreadful class of Algebra 2? You see, there is music in silence but we often don’t hear it. There is peace in being still but we often don’t feel it. And there is even adventure in nothingness but almost always can’t grasp it. We have been conditioned to believe otherwise. We have become like Pavlov’s dogs, giving ourselves up to the machinery of our daily routines, our schedules and laundry lists of what we perceive as normative activity. And we are doing it to our children. We swamp their lives with so many obligations, so many commitments, that they can hardly see the line anymore between adulthood and childhood. It is child-hood. Freedom, for them, and for so many of us adults, has become a lost luxury, and we are lead to believe that it’s a sin to take a breather. What are you doing to gain success, what ladder are you climbing toward achievement? Wait, you don’t know what you want to be and you’re sixteen years old? How disappointing! And just wait one second, are you meaning to tell me that you’re giving up a paying career, to go back to school for a degree in nursing simply because you want to like what you do? How ridiculous! And yet, and yet, Galations reminds us that “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” My friends, we need to crawl out from the slavery of noise that we ourselves have manufactured in our studios of chaos. We need to chill out. We need to breathe, to encourage reflection and time spent simply to analyze. I mean really, why is it that so many of our children are being diagnosed with ADHD? Because we pump these kids full of stimuli at the most crucial ages of development, and we neglect to realize that processing it all is virtually impossible. We need to set limits, we need to cut back on a lot of the activities and scheduling, and we need to teach that silence… silence… is and can be a tool toward the enlightenment we want our children, and ourselves, to achieve. Now, Abraham and Sarah went against this teaching, this advocacy, and instead polluted in the sound of their panicked minds to paper over the gaps of a silence they didn’t know how to adapt to -- and boy, how they reaped what they sowed. But do you know what is so amazing about their story, what is so amazing about that Old Testament text, which we have yet to cover? Hagar, the slave-girl, who was thrown out into the barren wilderness all alone, who walked there aimlessly in complete silence, heard God. The angel of the LORD appears in this particular chapter, not to Abraham and Sarah, the patriarch and matriarch, but to Hagar, the slave-girl in the quiet desert. To Hagar; and it comforts her, and tells her that her son will be named Ishmael, and from him great nations will come. And do you know why Ishmael was the chosen name? Because Ishmael literally means, “God hears.” My friends, God hears us in our silence. God is with us there. But we can never hear God, nor decipher our own personal meaning or direction, when we clutter all possible space for such with the ceaseless, endless, and so often, pointless noise of our lives. Amen. |