Rainer Zerbst, in his 2005 catalog of the great Catalan architect Antoni GaudÃ, recounts Albert Schweitzer’s visit to what would eventually become the BasÃlica de la Sagrada FamÃlia, that soaring masterpiece in Barcelona. Gaudà explained to the great doctor and Christian scholar that “When it became known that I was looking for a donkey as a model for the flight to Egypt, they brought me the most beautiful donkey in Barcelona. But I couldn’t use it.†The architect goes on to explain that he eventually found an appropriate donkey, “Its head hanging down, almost touching the ground,†hitched to the wagon of a woman selling scouring sand. That donkey, or at least a casting of that donkey, can be seen today on the basilica’s Portal of Hope, the story of Jesus, the refugee child, crossing a border with his mother and father. Today, he would have been seized and lost in the for-profit detention complex.
Like many other masterpieces, like Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David, Sagrada FamÃlia is both a blessing and a curse to the locals, the love and hate of every community that depends on tourists and visitors to drive the local economy. My last trip to Barcelona was in 2012, during Hurricane Sandy, though work on the basilica has progressed rapidly in recent years, so there is much to see when I next return. Construction was first started in 1882, but was delayed for many years by lack of funding, for this was to be a work of the common people, not of the wealthy elite. Today, thousands of international tourists and pilgrims pour through the door each day, paying fees, purchasing merchandise, and making donations. We can hope that, despite Catalan nationalism, the project will never again be delayed by politics, by civil war, for these too stood in the way.
In another life, I might have been an architect, for I love buildings, though Gaudà might seem an odd choice when compared to my other favorites, Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry. I am definitely more mid-century Modern than Neo-Gothic, more sweeping curves, cantilever, and clean line than the near rococo detail of GaudÃ. Yet I love Sagrada FamÃlia. It may help that Gaudà drew his forms from nature, and I love nature. Or maybe it is the fact that the entire basilica is a story told in architecture, the story of salvation and Christ, every element symbolic, right down to the number of towers, every color considered carefully, and I am love story, the story of a living faith expressed with exuberance into the world.
I don’t know whether it was genetics, family disinterest, or the random draw of classroom teachers, but I never excelled in the STEM disciplines, so I’m an architecture fanboy rather than an architect or even an architectural historian. I had hoped, however, with the design school only a block away, that Harvard might offer a cross-disciplinary course in the design of sacred space. Alas, that was not to be during my time in Cambridge. I still think about sacred space, places like Sagrada FamÃlia and Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, still marvel at arches and glass.
Most of us, in our appreciation of the arts, can make room for both complexity and simplicity, for Gaudà and Gehry, for J.S. Bach and John Adams. After all, creation is this amazing self-organizing system that balances complexity and simplicity, mysterious, inexplicable, from mitochondria to consciousness. Our response to creation can draw us out of ourselves, the transcendent pull that relativizes us, that reminds us that we are finite, and for some, that is enough, this natural religion, but it does not get us to the God of our story, the God that the Prophet Micah hears, the God that moves beyond natural forces to agape, the God that tells us we are more than the sum of our parts, strange loops and infinite miracles and spirit.
When it comes to religion, we, the greatest of the apes, create complexity, sometimes too much complexity, for complexity and institutionalization become the anchors that stunt our growth and prevent evolution, a parasitic vine choking what is living with process and procedure. The Temple in Jerusalem was full of complexity, of priests and scribes who just kept adding to the rules until there were 613 in total by the time the Hebrew canon was sealed, most completely impossible to observe then, even more so now. It was a world of policy and procedure and rules and what-ifs and a Sanhedrin with 71 members arguing all day, meeting every day except the sabbath and holy days, about minutia, arguing over everything. Jesus, while not openly rejecting the Torah itself, would reject this bureaucracy, would seek to simplify Torah, to make it subservient to a single principle, selfless love. Micah, too, was about simplicity.
Three weeks from today, the Rev. Gary Pinder will preach and celebrate the sacrament with you, while I travel to Boston to hear Pearl Jam in concert at Fenway Park. Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of the group, recently joked at a concert that the band would seek to have its fans, the Ten Club, recognized as a religion, with only one commandment, “Don’t be a __________.†You can fill in that blank yourself, for while it is suitable for a rock start on stage, not so much for a pastor in a pulpit.
Simplicity, really, coming from a man that has a kind of deep wisdom, an earthy charisma, and a few rough edges, like another man that is part of our own story.
Many celebrate and lift up what Vedder is getting at, known as the “Golden Rule,†viewed as the simplest code of conduct, with analogs in almost every world religion, in the words of Jesus himself. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you†does feel like a pretty good start. But it is not enough. It is traditionally limited in scope to the human experience, the others being other human creatures, ignoring our role as caretaker of non-human creatures, from coral to cattle, our role as caretakers of creation itself. The Golden Rule is is too narrow and too short-term, forgetting the wisdom that calls us to think of the future, something we seem unwilling to do as we continue to destroy the planet. Earth is already a mess of human-caused climate change, heatwaves and hurricanes, a planet on fire. Imagine what your great-grandchildren will face?
“Do unto others†feels a little selfish in the end, for it reflect ideas of reciprocity, what Eastern religions would call karma. Don’t do bad things to others because you don’t want bad things done to you.
Love is not about reciprocity. If it is given with an expectation of a return, if it is given as insurance, it is an investment, it is not love.
So how do we move beyond the self when we are selves, when selfness is all we have ever known?
We find our answer by moving beyond both the egotistical and co-dependent view of God and beyond the reciprocity of natural religion to Christ, to that plus in the formula of the divine, that inexplicable and transcendent. Despite the human tendency to smallness of mind and spirit, that plus would give us Micah, and eventually, Jesus, who would embody selflessness in action and model absolute faith in the power of the divine and the transcendent self.
It is necessary to understand our faith as a story of humans discovering this divine plus, for us to live in the scripture story, to understand how it evolved, how humans brushed up against holiness, and holiness brushed off on us, to understand the ancient story not only so we can take it in to our own lives, but so we can understand our tomorrows, actively constructing a faith together that can meet the demands of a changing world.
To understand that today it is not enough to feed the hungry. We must ask why they are hungry.
It is not enough to be neutral in the face of the destruction of the planet. We are going to have to make some sacrifices. I am going to have to make some sacrifices. You are going to have to make some sacrifices.
Selflessness. Everything worth doing requires sacrifice, just not the kind of sacrifices we are so often willing to make. “Shall I come before God with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?â€
And Micah, answers: nope! none of these. Do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.
Micah is one of what we call the “Minor†prophets, studied earlier this summer, not because of the size of his message, but because of the length of his text. If we are to believe the ancient editor, Micah was active during the reign of three different southern kings, spanning more than twenty years, maybe much longer. It was during his ministry that the Northern Kingdom of Israel entered a period of chaos and decline, eventually falling to the Assyrians. It was also during this period that Hezekiah, king of Judah, pursued religious reform and, more dangerously, attempted to throw off the Assyrian yoke, resulting in crushing punishment and a further weakening of what was left of this last vestige of the once great Kingdom of David and Solomon.
Micah is primarily known for two passages. In the 5th chapter, he promises a messiah from Bethlehem, a passage that would become central in the two Christian stories about the birth of Jesus, in the Christian understanding of Jesus as a fulfillment of that prophecy. The other is today’s reading, and in particularly 6:8, containing the passage about justice, kindness, and humility.
You’ve heard me refer to this passage again and again. It is, I believe, a simple rule for life for anyone who follows a Judeo-Christian religion. A full seven centuries before the life and teaching of Jesus, it points us in the right direction, moves from reciprocity and karma, prepares the ground for our great rabbi.
Do justice, at least justice as understood in the Hebrew scriptures, is all about reciprocity, but with that slight stretch for the vulnerable and oppressed, and of course, Jesus will make explicit what the prophets have already shown, that God’s justice is the justice of a loving, divine parent, of the father with a profligate son that welcome back that prodigal.
Love kindness is an odd construction in both the ancient Hebrew and in English translation, but the meaning is clear enough. Kindness, too, may have a certain sense of reciprocity, “do unto-ness,†though we who have privilege, economic, national, racial, are compelled by this second clause to offer care and kindness to those who do not share in our privilege: the orphan, the widow, the resident alien, in biblical times – today populations that are different yet the same, the addicted, the wrongfully convicted, those hated because of their skin, their culture, their sense of self.
Walk humbly. This may be the most important, not actionable in the way that justice and kindness are actionable, you can’t do humility, but it undergirds the other two. Not a one of us called ourselves into being. Not a one of us chose the families or culture that formed us. And each of us, no matter our wealth, privilege, or power, no matter how enlightened or noble we think we are, will come to an end, at least in this fleshy existence. You are not God and I am not God, and while God may be in us and with us, God is more than us, more than organized religion, more than humankind.
A Micah 6:8 life is a pretty good starting point for most of us, the humility, kindness, and justice doing stretching us beyond ourselves, making us permeable. It is simple, but points to the more, the plus, of Christ, which takes all of this and makes it extravagant. It is forgiving seventy times seven. It is letting God be God. It is knowing that rules are rules but love is love. It does not matter if you are right, for if you do not love, you are wrong.
We know that when the stone is rolled into place, the story is not over. 6:8 is awesome but not enough. In Jesus, we aim for 6:8+, which is mystery, soaring towers, a Hallelujah chorus, a chair beside a hospital bed. It is tender hearts and a faith as solid as stone, reconciliation, and a hope that never ever quits.
You are more than you think you are. You always were. May the Word of God open doors in your heart and in your life. May the Word invite you to the you God knows, 6:8+, miracle and mystery. Amen.