It is a great joy to be with you all again this summer, my third time to this beautiful island to be with this faith community.
I recently read an article that perhaps some of you saw in The
Boston Globe that talked about the joys and challenges of life on this island and it's future. Someone (I think an islander) said that this was kind of "an island of misfit toys." I think it was meant with great affection as a term of endearment; at least I took it that way. Besides, in the world we are living in, I’m
so glad to be in such a place, a little out of step in all the right ways, all
of the ways that perhaps make it easier for us to listen for the voice of God
and return to our own true selves. For Hathy and me, this night is the
culmination of a lovely week among you and we will be heading back to Worcester
tomorrow. I know I speak for both of us in thanking you, again, for your
generous hospitality and for welcoming us to this holy ground.
I have chosen a difficult and very strange reading
from Jeremiah on purpose tonight. I hope it left you scratching your heads and
wondering if this guy should ever be invited back again after tonight. Please
bear with me…
I have never before preached a sermon on this text and
my guess is that you have never before heard a sermon preached on it. I went back and
forth between peaching on the story of the Good Samaritan (which came up today
for those denominations that use the Revised Common Lectionary) but in the end it
was this text that called to my heart, and it’s a rare treat for an
Episcopalian to get to choose our own readings outside of the lectionary. It's good to go rogue every now and again!
I also do believe that there is a word of the Lord here for us,
a word we very much need this summer and beyond. But it will require a little
patience and some digging. So I want to do three things tonight. First, I want
to remind you about what Jeremiah’s ministry was all about. And then, I’ll get
to this text and try to say why this real estate deal at Anathoth that we just
heard about was so important. And then, lastly, I want to reflect a bit on
where we are as a nation and a planet and why I think there really is a word of
hope here for us as well as a challenge.
First, Jeremiah was a prophet who lived roughly
six centuries before the birth of Jesus. There are basically two
prophetic tasks that in a sense are two sides to one coin. Sometimes the
prophets comfort the afflicted. And sometimes they afflict the comfortable.
Prophets are not fortune-tellers looking into a crystal ball to predict
the future. Rather, they are close cousins to social critics: they see the
present through God’s eyes and know where that is heading if things don’t
change. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote that the prophets take us by the
hand and lead us to the other side of the tracks, asking us to see what we’d
rather not see. The prophets are not fooled by spin.
And God says, “oh, stop saying you are just a boy
already!” I’ll be with you.
Pay attention to the verbs in the Bible; if there is
one hint I can give you in interpretation and personal devotion it is that one.
Where is the action? In the case of Jeremiah his work can be summed up by six
verbs which are a kind of mission statement for the work God gives him to do.
His job will be to pluck up and pull down and to destroy
and overthrow – all verbs of deconstruction that need to happen before
the last two can happen: to build and to plant.
Oh, and God adds this: no one is going to listen to
you. You’ll talk about all that plucking up and pulling down and destroying and
overthrowing but no one will want to hear it because they’d rather skip to the
building and planting without doing that first part and that’s not how it
works.
In a nutshell that is Jeremiah’s long ministry. His
work was to afflict comfortable people with warnings that the world was coming
unglued. But denial is not just a river in Egypt. When it finally did come
apart and only then did Jeremiah say, “all will be well but it’s going to be a
very long time from now…”
We all have been though some tough times ourselves in
the past few years – and you don’t need the preacher to tell you that you can lose
hope when it begins to sink in. You lose hope that the sun will come out
tomorrow, to quote Annie. Jeremiah is speaking initially to people in denial:
so there is a lot of plucking up, pulling down, destroying, and overthrowing.
But because he has a long ministry, after the exile happens, the work shifts
toward building and planting.
And that brings us to this strange real estate deal.
It’s a risky move. The temple has been destroyed and the leaders have laid up
their harps on the willows of Babylon. They don’t know what to sing anymore,
other than the blues. Their hope is gone. It’s dried up. This little real
estate deal is contemporaneous with that more famous prophet vision of Ezekiel,
of the dry bones. Can all these bones live? Do we have a future?
So let’s move from a little history lesson in a little
closer to see if we can hear a word of good news addressed to us tonight…
Let me first tell you a personal story. Hathy and I
did not become homeowners until the ripe old age of fifty. In my work as a
priest and in all of our married life up to that point, we lived in
parish-owned housing. We call them rectories in the Episcopal Church, but
parsonage works fine too. It was nice in so many ways. When the roof was
leaking, we just called the property chair. The vestry paid the bills.
When I was asked to join the Bishop’s staff in 2013,
however, we bought our first home. The home we found was ready to move into,
which was good since neither of us are handy and we needed to move in quickly. But
things come up as I’m sure most of you can appreciate. Roots had grown into a
sewer pipe and the roof needed to be replaced and there was some moisture in
the attic and basement that needed to be addressed. Over the past nine years
we’ve been on a steep learning curve on how to be homeowners. All of you who
have done this before and perhaps with multiple places know that it’s expensive
and never-ending. Some of the work is exciting and you get to enjoy it but
other stuff is just maintenance.
A couple of years ago we had to remove two big old
dead oak trees. It’s important but after the tree guys leave you get a rather
large bill and it seems like that’s a lot of money to pluck up and tear down. We
decided to plant one new tree and did a lot of research and settled on a
tri-colored beech. I love that little tree, but it’s still little. In fact I’ve
realized that I’ll never see it fully grown. We are investing in that tree, not
ultimately for us – but for whoever owns the home after us.
We had to take down trees that were both much older
than we, planted by someone else who has long since returned to the dust. And
now we are getting a new tree started that someone else will enjoy, and
eventually will have to remove. We are stewards and someday someone will have
to cut that tree down and pay good money to do that. But I trust that is a long
ways off. Are you with me? I think that
tree is a little bit like the real estate deal we read about tonight. We are
called, I think, to take the long view.
Since preaching isn’t about learning history but
proclaiming good news, I’ll just say this: it’s been a very challenging season
in the life of our country. Whatever your own politics may be it’s been
exhausting and scary for all of us, I think. We are divided and hurting, and you
don’t need me to recite the litany of all that has been happening in our nation
and in our world. A lot of tearing down and plucking up and destruction. I, for
one, am ready for some building and planting. Our institutions – including even
the church that we thought we could count on – are changing so rapidly as to be
unrecognizable.
So here’s my question and let me admit I can only
point in a direction tonight, as I have no easy formula to offer. What might
unleash courage in us, so that we do not lose heart just from reading the
morning newspaper? How do we en-courage one another in the name of the living
God?
I take great comfort these days in poetry and I have a
couple of go-tos that include Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry. It was one of Berry’s
poems that I selected as our second reading tonight.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have
come to our real work,
and that
when we no longer know which way to go
we have
come to our real journey.
The mind
that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded
stream is the one that sings.
That little poem makes me feel a little less crazy,
and gives me hope and courage to live life one day at a time. There is another
one of his we didn’t read but some of you may know:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake
in the night at the least sound
in fear of
what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and
lie down where the wood drake
rests in
his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into
the peace of wild things
who do not
tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I
come into the presence of still water.
And I feel
above me the day-blind stars
waiting
with their light. For a time
I rest in
the grace of the world, and am free.
The
Talmud states, "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do
justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete
the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
Well, that is what I have for you tonight, my friends.
Do not lose heart. Trust God. Find ways to plant seeds of reconciliation,
healing, and hope and then find ways to water those and nurture those. We won’t
get there fast, but we need to find ways to do what we can – and trust God with
the rest. We need to be the Church, here on this island of misfit toys and in
those places where you worship when you aren’t here. God is not done with us
yet.
So yes, there are signs of endings all around us. But
together and with God’s help we will find the courage – the heart – to buy some
real estate and plant some trees and invest in a future that we won’t fully
realize. We can refuse to let fear dictate our actions and dare to see in signs
of endings the possibility of new beginnings: those seeds of new resurrected
life.
I leave you with a question we will sing momentarily,
as a response to this sermon. Questions are good. (Do you know that Jesus asked
way more questions than he answered in the Bible? And he often answered
questions with questions. They leave us space to work on the hard stuff that
doesn’t have easy answers.)
So here is the question:
Can it
be that from our endings
new
beginnings You create?
Life from
death, and from our rendings
realms of
wholeness generate?
It's an Advent Hymn and I admit that
feels out of time. But right now everything is a little mixed up. So we’ll sing
it anyway, as an act of affirmation and as a song of hope: can it be? Can it be
that from our endings, God is already creating new beginnings? Life from death?
Yes. I don’t know when, or how, but yes, because God is trustworthy. So let’s sing it like we believe it because the one who sings, prays twice. (A link to the hymn can be found here.)
Let us pray it as a response to this sermon, as
a defiant act of hope.
Take
our fears, then, Lord, and turn them
Into hopes
for life anew
Fading
light and dying season
Sing their
Glorias to You.
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