Psalm 78:1-20
This is not going to be a patriotic sermon in honor of our nation and the Fourth of July holiday. However…I have to tell you that ever since we decided to buy this building and started making plans to move in, I have been aware that our location here puts us in a kind of close-up relationship to Monticello and the spirit of “Mr. Jefferson”, as he is known in these parts. Since the Fourth of July weekend commemorates the Declaration of Independence authored by Jefferson, it seems like a good time to speak out loud about some of the thoughts I have had in that connection with our dwelling here, in the shadow of Monticello.
I confess that I am still a little fuzzy on the geography. Of course I know that Monticello is just down the road, around the corner, and up the hill from here. From early on, when we first started looking at this as a possible church home, Ava and I commented that it would be easy for us to get together for lunch—I could just hop in the car and be at her office in a jiffy, and vice versa. That hasn’t happened yet, but it still might. And of course one of the many advantages to this location that has been noted is the fact that it’s on one of the direct routes to and from the interstate, PVCC, and Monticello. Having said that, I’m not sure I know exactly where to look to see Monticello from here. I’ve tried it the other way too. Once when we were showing family around, Ava had one of the guides show us where to stand so that we could see the Rotunda from the house at Monticello, but although Sojourners must be at least approximately in the sight line between Monticello and the Rotunda, I couldn’t quite make out the Sojourners sign from where I was standing, or even our church spire. So I’m still not sure even quite where to look when I try to find Monticello from here, or us from there. If anyone can help me, I’ll be grateful.
But of course I’m not really concerned about geography this morning. When I talk about dwelling in the shadow of Monticello, I’m not thinking much about physical closeness, though that keeps the symbolic relationship much in my mind. In a way, in a very real way Charlottesville and the whole region around here dwells within the energy field, if I can put it that way, of Monticello. This is true in some very positive ways. It’s a place of great historical interest that attracts visitors from all over the world and benefits the region’s economy. It’s a beautiful place. When I need to drop Ava off at work for some reason, I usually can’t help but remark out loud, looking around, something to the effect of “not a half-bad place to go to work every day”. I know there are some people who even believe that there are a few very special “holy places” on the face of the earth and that this is one of them, not because Thomas Jefferson lived there, but just in the nature of the place. From the practical to the mystical there is this positive aura emanating from Monticello that spreads itself out over the region.
There is also a negative side. When I talk about dwelling in the shadow of Monticello, I don’t necessarily mean it in a negative sense, but there is that too, and I think we all know that to be true. Slavery casts a vast and heavy shadow across life in the country whose birthday it is tomorrow. And Monticello not only represents the home of one of the chief spokesmen for our national ideals and a symbol of the freedoms we celebrate on days like the Fourth of July. It also stands as a symbol of slavery and the racial attitudes and realities that have haunted us throughout our history and that continue to haunt us today.
The contradictions and paradoxes of Jefferson himself and of Monticello are the contradictions and paradoxes we all live with. If it is true that for some people it is a place of exceptional interest or beauty or even spiritual energy, it is also true that for many others it stands precisely for the failures of our ideals of freedom, for the blind spots in our visions of a land of opportunity, for the privileges enjoyed by some and the hardships endured by others. For many, especially in this immediate area where Monticello has such a large presence, it represents an America where the racial system of the plantation is still in operation. To many it is a place where people ought to come not to pay homage but to mourn and to repent. In that way too, we here at Sojourners very much dwell in the shadow of Monticello. We bear the burden of its contradictions, and the unfinished business it leaves behind is very much ours as well.
This is where the table that David has presented to us this morning comes in. It too is a symbol, not of the past but of the future, God’s future. David has spoken to us of his decision, discussed and affirmed by others, but his notion of making it an egg-shaped table with the idea that this would signify new life. That’s a good phrase for Christians. We use it a lot, especially maybe around Easter time. We talk about, pray for, and celebrate the gift of new life that Christ symbolizes. The resurrection is all about new life. But it’s not just a nice sounding phrase, and it takes on a very specific meaning for me when I think about this table as a symbol of new life for us, dwelling as we do in the shadow of Monticello.
Somehow at the very center of our life together is the hope, the prayer, the promise of new life in the area of racial justice. Living in the shadow of Monticello, with the spirits of the African American people who once lived on Monticello mountain drifting down on us, how can we not feel that need for new life? How can we not feel the need to believe in a future different from the past? And not just a little different, some variation on the theme, but completely different, so different we wouldn’t recognize ourselves and there would be no choice but to believe in miracles.
Of course that wholly new future is not going to come about any time soon. That’s why the table needs to be there as a reminder, a reminder that we don’t aim for anything less than something truly new, that that hope, that promise must remain at the center, that it must nourish our spirits and remind us of what we are doing here and call us again and again back to action. This is not to say that our now and again efforts, sometimes minimal, sometimes very ordinary, sometimes praiseworthy, represent any kind of answer to the prayer for new life. That prayer is for way more than anything that has to do with us, except that it stands at the center of our life as hope and challenge.
Then again, there are so many different kinds of new life too, as different as all the people we are. I think of myself, all of us, our various needs for new life at different times in our lives, the prayers we have said on behalf of people we love, whose needs for new life take so many different forms. I think of someone who will walk in here someday, completely unexpectingly, and as a result have his or her life changed in some important way, find a joy or a caring or self-confidence or a belief in their being a child of God that had been absent before, perhaps will find as a result of walking in here a new dimension of their life, a new relationship to God, or a new relationship to the church, something less than a relationship to God I admit, but still an important thing for many people to have in their lives. I think of people who will have their life changed for the good by being here. I hope there will be many of them. I know there have been some already. Many, if we realize that new life does not always have to be dramatic, though sometimes it is.
For me, this table will be among us as a symbol of the new world we dream of, pray for, and labor toward together, a whole world born in the image of a God of love. It will also be a symbol for all the different kinds of new life we may discover as individuals. Our prayers are never just of the one or the other kind. They are always both—prayers for God’s world and prayers for God’s people, prayer for the spirit among us, prayers for the spirit within us.
Sometimes we don’t know whether what we pray for is coming true. Certainly we can’t speak for the new life that may be coming into being in someone else. Sometimes we don’t recognize it in ourselves. Some of them are of the kind that require patience and persistence. And if we are praying the kinds of prayers we are called to, if our visions are large enough and our hope is not too small, then some of our hopes and prayers will never come true for us to see. All of which is to say that we are on a long, mysterious, and uncertain journey—or rather we are on several journeys, some of them with intensely personal ends, and some with a common end, and one with the ultimate end of sharing in God’s reign. While we journey in these various ways, we may find ourselves often feeling like we are in a kind of wilderness, tiring, losing our sense of direction, losing our confidence, needing to be fed.
You know the Biblical story, if not in great detail, at least in its general outline, how the Hebrew people journeyed for forty years in the wilderness of the Sinai desert trying to find their way to the promised land. You know that story not just because it’s in the Bible and you have read it or learned it in Sunday school or heard people talk about it or picked it up in the culture somewhere, but also because it is part of our inner experience as human beings, all of us I do believe. Remembering the experience of the ancestors, the writer of Psalm 78 imagined them putting god to the test while they were in the wilderness, imagined them losing heart and starting to question, wondering whether God can spread a table in the wilderness, wondering whether, even though God had performed miracles in the past, brought them out of Egypt, split open a rock and made water to gush out in torrents—wondering whether God, even though God was reputed to have done great things in the past, could provide bread in the wilderness for the people of God. The Psalmist imagined them asking that question not because he had been there or because there were some reliable eye witness accounts but because she knew they were questions in her own heart too. She could hear their voices over the centuries because her heart was attuned to those of her ancestors, and maybe we can hear the voice of the Psalmist for the same reason. Those questions are in our hearts too.
But so too, if we listen carefully to the spirit within us, so too is the answer. God can and God does give bread in the wilderness for the people of God. There are lots of questions we ask that have no final or certain answers. Part of the job of people of faith is to learn, and sometimes it’s not so easy to learn, to live as people of faith, and not people of false certainties. There are lots of questions we ask as people of faith that have no final or certain answers. But that does not mean there are no answers. When the question is: Can God spread a table in the wilderness? The answer is “yes”. Yes! God can and God does give bread in the wilderness to those who know themselves to be on a journey toward new life and toward the reign of God. There is a table among us. God gives us, faithfully and lovingly, bread for the journey. Praise be to God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 3, 2005