It was both heartbreaking and sweet, as love so often is. On March 3rd, 2017, the New York Times “Modern Love” essay was written by Amy Krause Rosenthal, a prolific and successful author. In it, she announced that she was dying of ovarian cancer, and offered a dating profile for her husband, soon to be a widower with three kids. Ten days later, she was gone.
Among her many works, across different genres and even media, was a 2009 children’s book titled “Yes Day!” This March, it made it to the silver screen. Well, to be more accurate, it made it to the little screen, for the film “Yes Day,” starring Jennifer Garner, was produced for Netflix.
The idea, of the book and of the screenplay, is that parents spend an awful lot of time saying “no,” and maybe, once in awhile, there should be a day when they say “yes.”
Within reason, of course. Yes Day does come with guardrails. The ten year old isn’t going to drive the car. And no one is going out to buy a pony. But, as blogger Dawn Booth reports, root beer floats for breakfast are a definite yes. Playing in the rain is also a yes. Playing hide-and-seek with your parents is a yes. Even doing a parent’s make-up and nails is a yes, which seems particularly brave.
It seems to me that, like parents, religion has a “no” problem, and while we can point to fundamentalists, we’d do well to look in the mirror, for “no” comes in many forms, wears many disguises, but in whatever form, it sucks the vitality right out of our faith, out of our leaders and our volunteers. It can come in the form of micromanaging and second-guessing, of stalling and delaying.
No is using process to stop progress.
No is the legalism that Jesus so despised when he spoke of the Scribes and Pharisees.
But here’s the thing: God is “yes.”
Earlier this week, a colleague and I were chatting over coffee about the texts and themes we were bringing to the pulpit this morning, for he also uses the Revised Common Lectionary, and he too is preaching on Joshua. I mentioned my sermon title, “God is yes,” and he reminded me that even in God’s no is a yes. For example, thou shalt not kill is really a yes to life.
Now, you already know me well enough to know that I don’t believe every rule in the Hebrew and Christian Scripture comes from God by way of divine revelation. Far from it.
Some rules are clearly needed for a well-ordered society, but I believe most rules are created by those with power and are primarily about preserving that power. Some put no in the mouth of a god made in their own image who wants what they want and hates who they hate. That’s just not God.
If God was no, then why is there anything? Seriously, the easiest thing to control is nothing. But God spoke something into being, and here we are. Creation is a glorious yes mess…
My late teacher Gordon Kaufman thought of God as serendipitous creativity. The late Templeton Prize winning scientist and mathematician Freemason Dyson put it this way:
I do not claim any ability to read God’s mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity.
I’m with Dyson. Seriously, look at the platypus! Should we add a flat tail, like a beaver? Yes! What about a bill like a duck? Absolutely! How about venom, like a snake? Why not?
The duck-billed platypus is yes on steroids!
It is only in recent decades that scientists like the great minds at the Santa fe Institute have come to identify the yes hard-wired into creation in the form of complexity, the way discreet units, from particles to tribes, self-organize in surprising ways that create unexpected results, so that everything is always more than the sum of the parts, and attempts to break things down to those constituent parts is always deadly, destructive…
I can talk all day about the exuberance of God, of serendipitous creativity, of natural selection, of the ways life breaks through the hard stuff, about Maya Angelou and Mozart. But I don’t have to.
Because if you are inclined to see the cup that runneth over, you will. If you are inclined to see only the mess made where the cup runneth over, you will, for believing is seeing.
Believing is seeing. So be careful about what you believe.
No comes from fear. The desire to control comes from fear. No is fear distilled.
Sometimes that fear is completely rational. Listen, kid, wear the helmet while you’re out on that skateboard. I’ve seen people who suffered traumatic brain injury, and it ain’t worth it. Wear your mask and get the vaccine. Covid-19 is a gruesome way to die.
But mostly, we are afraid of things we can’t control. As our bodies age and get smaller, so to do our spirits. No comes to our lips faster than yes. We sit on the dark, on piles of gold, alone, afraid to fly for fear that one small bauble might go missing, refusing to truly to live. There is a reason the dragon became an archetype of greed, the wasted power, the wasted potential.
No is the human dragons that think they can kill vulnerability under mountains of gold, when no amount of gold can ever make us invulnerable, for our vulnerability is part of our beauty.
Yes is writing a dating profile for your husband as you lay dying, rather than insisting that he never love again. No is thinking that the love, of the spouse you leave behind, of the kids you leave behind, is zero-sum, and that love for someone else means less love for you.
No nails people to a cross. Yes raises them from the grave.
May we, like Joshua, say yes to a God who says yes to us every day…
Amen.