Two Homilies for 19 July: AM online worship, PM outdoors Vespers
Online Worship:
I understand it happens in other cities as well, though I never experienced it in New York City. That may be due to “alternate side of the street” parking rules and, well, the immensity of New York City. It might happen somewhere like Staten Island, or the furthest reaches of Queens. But it seemed new and odd to me those first winters in the metro Boston area, these lawn chairs in the street in January.
Now, some of you know exactly where I am going, but country folks and suburbanites may never have experienced it. You see, in Boston, and some other big cities with street parking, when someone digs their car out after a snow storm, they place a lawn chair or some similar object in the space to hold their parking space while they are gone. Moving someone’s lawn chair, or floor lamp, or stolen traffic cone, moving whatever is there as a placeholder to park your car in an available spot on a public street is considered a breach of the social contract. It can also lead to a breach of your personal space, a fat lip and a bloody nose.
Now, I’ve got to be honest with you. I think it is a stupid custom. Yes, it is a pain to dig your car out after the snow plow has come through and the snow, no longer fluffy, holds your car like Hans Solo in carbonite. Been there, done that. But you don’t have reserved spaces the rest of the year. City parking is a primal competition, mixed martial arts with a bumper, especially in Boston. Reserving snow spaces is unfair and actually inefficient. What happens to the person who was out of town when the snow happened to fall? What about folks who do shift work, especially the Boston area’s huge concentration of healthcare workers, essential today but slogging three blocks through the snow in a lawn chair jungle in a few months? What about the caregiver who literally needs that spot for one hour while you are at work to help keep a homebound elder in their home? Spots tied up for ten hours with lawn chairs not cars are wasted spots.
So yeah, not a fan. Fortunately, I only had to deal with it my last winter at Harvard, the only year I needed a car to reach my internship at a church in the suburbs.
It may seem an odd thing to think about in the middle of July, lawn chairs as placeholders amidst mountains of snow, but it is precisely how we often use God, to hold a spot that we will eventually fill with something completely different, something that is not God.
As Bonhoeffer states in our first reading, God has historically been a placeholder for missing information, the big questions for which we had no meaningful answers, which meant moving God along every time we found an answer. In fact, the human enterprise of religion operates in the face of mystery. Some of us choose a paradigm of complex ordering rather than the vulnerability of meaningless chaos. Acknowledging our human preference for meaning does not negate the God-ness of God, as some would have us believe. Still, it is worth considering how we think of God, how we use the idea of God, and sometimes how we misuse the idea of God.
Now, I happen to think that some humans have turned a corner, at least in terms of the constantly retreating God as a stop-gap like that referenced by Bonhoeffer. The Enlightenment project, so tightly tied to the scientific method and Newtonian physics, has given way to post-modernism, but not the evil, anything-goes post-modernism that frightens those with power. Instead, the advance of knowledge has led us back to profound mystery, and even the most diehard atheist, choosing chaos over order, cannot answer the question of first cause, the something instead of nothing.
But quite apart from this massive paradigm shift, quite independent of this conceptual question of ultimate mystery, are the simple practical ways we use God as a placeholder in our own lives, as a container for our fear, our longing, our grief, as an explanation for the inexplicable, and as a bulwark against reality.
There is nothing wrong with that. But like the lawn chair in the street, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when the snow has melted, the mystery has become less mysterious, when we don’t need God as a placeholder, as a screen to hide the uncomfortable.
Far better, I believe, to go out looking for God not to fill a need, not as a placeholder, but to come to know God on God’s own terms, as experienced in the fruit of that mysterious first cause, this creation, this human enterprise, in the face behind the mask with the smiling and longing eyes, and in yourself, for that part of you that longs to soar, to create, to love, that part of you that cannot be contained in you, that is transcendent, that is God too.
So go look for God, now, when the days are warm and bright, when we are frightened and yet hopeful. Winter is coming, and we may yet need those lawn chairs. But for now, for now…
God is with us, the God of Isaiah, the God of Jesus, our God, this day and always. Amen.
Vespers:
I did not go out and find the parable about weeds specifically for this evening, as we gather on these beautiful grounds maintained by our dedicated but far too small team of Wild Weeders. This was one of the texts scheduled for today in the cycle of readings we use, the Revised Common Lectionary, and I had already scheduled another of the texts for this morning. Though I’m sure our intrepid weeders will not mind if I take the opportunity to do a little recruiting. If you need some time out of the house, social and yet socially distanced, and a project where you can actually see results, they are here on Friday morning and would welcome your hands and hearts.
That said, we should at least go through the motion of considering the text. You may be mostly here for the company, to see one another, but we are still calling it worship after all.
This is an uncomfortable text for progressive Christians. We believe in a God who is redemptive and restorative, not vindictive and co-dependent, so we are inclined to gloss over texts that suggest consequence, though consequence, ideas of right and wrong, are inherent in every single religious system, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, you name it.
We waffle between constant agitation and unhappiness and something like Pollyanna and Pangloss, everything is swell, never mind the evil some humans inflict on one another. Of course, only those with incredible privilege, those who have not themselves been the victims, can afford to erase accounting and accountability from the narrative.
And then we get to a text that insists that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that there are consequences for the wrong, that it is the will of the holy that what is nourishing should thrive, and what destroys should eventually itself know destruction. There is the text’s warning about collateral damage, a warning perhaps about excessive zeal in rooting out and pulling up the evil, the destruction caused in destroying the destructive, but make no mistake, the message of Jesus is not that the weeds are as good as the harvest. We are happy to quote the line about “What you have done to the least of these…” but hate the story from which it is taken, the judgement of the sheep and the goats, which I only dislike because it seems horribly unfair to the goats.
I’ve been thinking about this as those with privilege increasingly talk about a national restoration that includes an intentional amnesia. “Better to avoid further conflict and just forget,” they say, which really means “let’s not seek justice for those brutalized, because, you know, I wasn’t brutalized.”
And I say to them, their intention may be good, but that is not how the world works. It is not how the holy works. It is not how actual human relations work.
One of the tectonic shifts that led Martin Luther to his daring revolt five centuries ago was knowledge found in the then recently released New Testament translation of Erasmus. There, Luther discovered that scripture does not call us to penance, and infamously, to buying our way out of guilt, but instead calls us to metanoia, Koine Greek for a change of heart. God’s forgiveness is infinite, but it requires a change of heart.
It is not for me to decide how we will engage in the process that is to come. I can only point to our tradition, to scripture, to the experiences of good and faithful people who have passed through the fire, to the practice of accountability in the letters of Paul and after the Second World War, to the truth-telling that was so necessary as part of the reconciliation process in South Africa, where the slow healing continues, decades after victory.
I can say that if there is not accountability, the cruelty, crime, and corruption that have flourished in our land will continue to spread their seeds, expand their roots, and eventually win, so that there is no harvest of love, no compassion. We are going to have to do this hard work, and I believe we can do it thoughtfully, compassionately. Our Covid catastrophe may have bought us some time, but we are going to eventually re-gather as family, over turkey and pumpkin pie, and cousin Charlie is going to be there, still filled with conspiracy theories and rage, and we are going to be challenged to love him back to spiritual health.
It is not about vengeance, for we are people on the Way of Jesus, and that way is the way of grace, the way of forgiveness, the way of redemption. Jesus does not save us from a wretched god, but instead saves us from ourselves. And being Hope, we’re happy for all the help we can get from other traditions, from our Sikh sisters, from our brothers dancing before the Great Spirit.
Jesus calls us to pay attention to the reality around us, the mystical things of the in-breaking Kingdom of God and the practical things like our neighbor, who needs us right now. Jesus also draws our attention to the corrupt and corrupting, to the greedy, the self-righteous, the callous, for you cannot know his story and not know that he struggled for the good. As St. John Lewis would say, he caused “good trouble.” When we ask “What would Jesus do?,” the answer is not closing his eyes.
Let those who have eyes see, those who have ears listen, and those who have hearts full of love prepare to do the hard work of calling those who have strayed home to love. There are no weeds in God’s good garden, just plants in need of transformation and redemption. Just don’t tell that to the Wild Weeders.
Amen.