Scripture: 2Corinthians 6:1-10
Several things conspired to bring about the sermon for this morning.
For one thing there was the memorial service yesterday for Tom Meyer. As we said yesterday, it was not meant to be a gloomy time. Tom would not have wanted that. Neither did Marion or the rest of the family for that matter. They all intended that the memorial service be a time of thanksgiving for Tom’s life, a celebration of his life, a time of fond remembering, and so on. Nevertheless…nevertheless, we do not lose a family member without some sadness. The Meyer family doesn’t. The Sojourners family doesn’t. And so just with regard to that time, there is this need to hold together the thanksgiving and the sense of loss, the celebration and the sadness. In addition to that, I have been aware that this memorial service, one of the few we have had as a Sojourners community, would take place in the context of several weddings taking place in and around the Sojourners community and a couple of baptisms coming up in the not too distant future, one of them next week, when Madeline Hutter will be baptized. Further dramatizing for me, the need to hold together these times of endings and beginnings. Those things have all been in my spirit over the last week or so.
Then there’s the fact that this is a holiday weekend, a patriotic holiday weekend. Patriotic holidays always arouse conflicting feelings in me. There is certainly a part of me that loves the United States, loves the land, the people, the ideals. There is also a part of me that knows we betrayed our ideals even before we had much of a chance to realize them or even knew what they were, a part of me that is very much aware that this vast, varied, gorgeous land was taken by force, taken immorally. There is a part of me that is embarrassed and ashamed at the disproportionate percentage of the world’s resources the United States uses—without apparent embarrassment or apology. Just to name a few things that trouble me. Part of me is in love with the United States, sincerely and deeply in love with this country that is my home— and part of me is appalled. Not has been briefly appalled at some time or another but is appalled. I have never gotten used to or gotten over some of the things we have done and are doing, betraying ourselves in the process.
Those conflicting feelings, that are always there, rise to the surface for me on occasions such as the Fourth of July holiday. I suppose I could ignore them or suppress them, but then when it comes to preaching I at least have to ask myself whether I am going to ignore the holiday and the feelings that go along with it. And if I don’t ignore it, what am I to say? Given the fact that my feelings are so divided. Given the further fact that my feelings are also divided about whether it is even appropriate to raise the idea of love of country in a Christian worship service. When you get right down to it, I don’t believe faith has much, if anything to do with love of or loyalty to one’s country. I don’t believe God blesses America or any other country. Still, we are God’s people, all six billion of us I mean, all of earth’s people, and almost all of us seem to care about our country in some way or another, and maybe God does too. Maybe God blesses all countries. What to do with such conflicting feelings.
Then, as I was looking for readings for last week’s service, I came across a reading that I didn’t think was particularly on target for that service, but that did speak to the kinds of feelings I have been describing and that I had already begun to think about for today. Let me read the first part of it to you; it’s not long. It’s called, “In a World of In-Between” by someone named Norm Esdon. (He is not familiar to me.) He writes:
Like shorebirds living between sand and surf
We live in a world of in-between.
Between punching the clock and smelling the roses
Serving others and renewing ourselves
Between hanging on and letting go
Sticking with the old and risking the new
Between speaking the truth and sparing feeling
Seeking justice and avoiding division
Between the economy and the environment
Between computer byte and human touch
Avoiding harassment and needing a hug
Between who we are and what others think we should be
Who we are and who we may become…
I’ll stop there for now. Reading those words, I was reminded both of the contradictory feelings we sometimes have within us, which as I say I was already feeling, and of the contradictory truths we sometimes hold at the same time. The author didn’t name them all, but he named some of them, and he reminded me of the many times over the years when I have been in the midst of writing a sermon and I was suddenly struck that what I was saying was, on the surface anyway, the exact opposite of something I had said in some other sermon, quite often a sermon I had just given a week or two before. Maybe they won’t notice, I say to myself. Or maybe I could try to explain how these two ideas that seem to be contradictory really aren’t, though often when I’ve taken that approach it ends up that I think they really are. I can’t even convince myself that the two ideas fit neatly together. And so, I’ve often had occasion to console myself with the words (I think from Ralph Waldo Emerson) that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. I’m not really sure what a hobgoblin is, so I’m not exactly sure what that saying means, but I’m pretty sure it means that consistency isn’t always all that important, and that inconsistency isn’t always something to ashamed of. Still inconsistency can be a little bit unsettling. When you’re in middle of trying to figure out how to say something, the realization that what you’re trying to say seems to contradict something else you spent a fair amount of energy trying to say is just a bit disconcerting.
But maybe it doesn’t need to be. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe we say different things at different times that appear to contradict each other not because of faulty logic or because we have different moods and sometimes we’re feeling more mellow and other times more severe, sometimes more hopeful, other times more cynical, and so forth. Maybe we say different things that seem to be contradictory because that is the nature of the truth we reach out for, the nature of the reality we try to make sense of, the nature of the God in whom we live and move and have our being.
And so, to take an example a little different from the ones I mentioned at the beginning of the sermon and different from those mentioned in the poem I quoted, sometimes I may feel very much at home in the world, as though this is a place that I was meant to be, a place lovingly created by God for me to live in, for all of us to live in, to enjoy, to delight in, to embrace, to love, to care for, to try to preserve. The earth is my home. It is even, scripture suggests, God’s home, a dwelling place of God. It is a sacred place, set aside for humans to live in safety and to be at peace. And sometimes I feel like to be at one with the earth is to be in communion with God. Sometimes I feel that way, and sometimes I have tried to communicate something like that in sermons.
Then again other times I don’t feel that way so much at all. There are times when rather than feeling at home in the world, I have felt much like a stranger here, where as the apostle Paul once put it, to be at home in the flesh is to be away from God, times when I have felt like I am, like we are all just here for a fleeting moment, that we are just passing through, sojourners on the earth, strangers in a strange land, felt like we don’t really belong here, that I don’t really belong here, that “all flesh is like grass, the grass withers, the flower fades, but it is the word of God that stands forever”. There are times when I feel and believe quite deeply that my true home is not here, that death is a going home, and that in the meantime we are just as one of our hymns puts it “traveling through this wilderness”, our earthly life. Sometimes I have felt that way too and have tried to communicate that sensitivity in sermons too, knowing, as I say, that as I do I am contradicting myself.
The single thought I want to try to communicate today is that when we encounter such contradictions in ourselves, it is not a matter of which side of the bed we got up on on any given day, not a matter of whether life is going pretty well for us at the moment, not a matter of whether the sun is shining and the temperature’s in the 70’s and the world seems like a pretty hospitable place, not a matter of whether the headlines are particularly discouraging today or whether you have just heard about something that restores your faith in humanity. It’s not a matter of having different moods or temperaments or dispositions that cause some of us to feel at home in the world and others of us to have a hard time doing so, or that cause each of us at one time to have one attitude and at another time to have another. And it is definitely not that the right and healthy way to feel is to feel at home in the world and if you don’t feel that way that you need to see a doctor about getting some medication that will help you feel better, get over that unhealthy sensation that we are not at home in the world.
What I’m suggesting this morning is that both things may be true—in this example and in many others. In this example, I’m suggesting, it is true both that we belong and do not belong to this earth, that this earth is and is not our home. It may not sound logical or rational. We may not have an easy way to explain how both things can be true at the same time, but I believe they are. I believe, to put it in traditional language, that we are both citizens of earth and citizens of heaven. We are heart and soul of the earth. We are also, in our essence, of something that is not earthbound or time-bound.
It occurs to me that for some people, and I include myself in this, the dual nature of Christ has been a stumbling block, something that does not make sense, something we find it hard to believe. But that is the kind of truth I am speaking about today, how things don’t have to be one way or the other, but can be both. And I wonder if the idea of Christ being both human and divine, which has been treated too often as irrational dogma, might not be a suggestion about deeper forms of truth that we need to hear. I wonder if that notion about the dual nature of Christ does not point in the end to the dual nature of all of us, both human and divine, of the earth and of God at the same time.
I wonder if Paul had this kind of thing in mind when he wrote to the Corinthians that “we are as imposters and yet true; as unknown and yet well known; as dying, and see we are alive; …as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything. I do think he was thinking in this double-sided way about the most important truths we may embrace as human beings. I have lots more I could mention. I may come back to them over the course of the summer, haven’t decided that yet. For now let me just close with the end of the poem that I did not finish earlier. He wrote:
We are like shorebirds living
between cross and rolled-away stone,
between the alpha and the omega,
the beginning and the end.
And the spirit of the one
who walked the shore before us
walks with us
hallows this in-between world.
We are not alone. Thanks be to God.
To which I say…..Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 6, 2008