First Parish Bedford UU

“A Shovel-Ready Easter” or
“The World Is Whole Beyond Human Knowing”

An Easter Sunday Sermon by Rev. John Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, April 12, 2009

at First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts





READING




from Some Further Words

by Wendell Berry





Let me be plain with you, dear reader.
I am an old-fashioned man. I like
the world of nature despite its mortal
dangers. I like the domestic world
of humans, so long as it pays its debts
to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.
I like the promise of Heaven. My purpose
is a language that can repay just thanks
and honor for those gifts, a tongue
set free from fashionable lies.





Neither this world nor any of its places
is an “environment.” And a house
for sale is not a “home.” Economics
is not “science,” nor “information” knowledge.
A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool
in a public office is not a “leader.”
A rich thief is a thief. And the ghost
of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer,
returns in the night to say again:
“Let me tell you something, boy.
An intellectual whore is a whore.”





The world is babbled to pieces after
the divorce of things from their names.
Ceaseless preparation for war
is not peace. Health is not procured
by sale of medication, or purity
by the addition of poison. Science
at the bidding of the corporations
is knowledge reduced to merchandise;
it is a whoredom of the mind,
and so is the art that calls this “progress.”
So is the cowardice that calls it “inevitable.”





I would like to die in love as I was born,
and as myself of life impoverished go
into the love all flesh begins
and ends in. I don’t like machines,
which are neither mortal nor immortal,
though I am constrained to use them.
(Thus the age perfects its clench.)
Some day they will be gone, and that
will be a glad and a holy day.
I mean the dire machines that run
by burning the world’s body and
its breath. When I see an airplane
fuming through the once-pure sky
or a vehicle of the outer space
with its little inner space
imitating a star at night, I say,
“Get out of there!” as I would speak
to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.
When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, “Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!” I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.





My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing.







THE SERMON



I’ve told this story plenty of times and I’ll tell it again: There was the mother, who one Sunday morning went in to wake her son and tell him it was time to get ready for church.  From beneath the covers, he moaned, “I don’t like to go to church.” “Why not?” she asked. “I’ll give you two good reasons,” he said. “(1) those people don’t like me, and (2) I don’t like them.” His mother replied, “I’ll give you TWO good reasons why YOU SHOULD go to church. (1) You’re 57 years old, and (2) you’re the minister!  The people expect a sermon!”



Well, I really do like you and you find me likable enough (as candidate Obama said of candidate Clinton) but there are times when I am ambivalent and this Easter is one of them.  There is just so much sis-boom-ba, the stone is rolled away, the tomb is empty, hallelujah – alleluia – hosanna…He is risen, He is risen indeed, we are saved, brothers and sisters, presto chango!, happy days are here again!  And this year, I’m just not feeling it.



I’ve been advised that preaching a curmudgeonly Easter sermon is contraindicated to a minister’s employment and I will get around to some subdued cheerleading.  But it seems to me that the greatest cheer-worthy miracle is not that once-and-for-all, salvifically, He has risen from the dead…but that you and I manage somehow (on most days) to get out from under the covers and rise, however limpingly, from our own comfortable beds. 



Rising from the bed matters more, I think, than rising from the dead.



Folks, I’m tired.  It’s been a long hard winter – not just for me but for a lot of us – and it’s been harder on some of you than on me but church life and work life and family life and life life is exhausting.  And no matter how much we sing and shout alleluia, no matter how many tulips and crocuses pop up, as far as I can tell this tiring dailyness of life doesn’t show any signs of letting up…until we’re dead.  And, yes, we can sleep when we’re dead and maybe that’s something to look forward to, but meanwhile life is hard.   Not as hard for us as it is in Darfur or for that guy bobbing around with the Somali pirates; but it’s hard enough.



Now eventually, I assure you, I’ll turn a corner and whisper an alleluia; but I’m not yet done with my curmudgeonly rant.



So the Obama’s were in Europe last week and that was cool:  Michelle and the Queen.  And then they went to Prague where, outdoors in Wenceslas Square, Barack paid homage to Tomas Masaryk, the revered father of the first Czechoslovak nation (who was, by the way, a Unitarian) and there he met with dissident playwright/former president Vaclav Havel who – according to the NY Times - “warned Mr. Obama of the perils of limitless hope being projected onto a leader, noting that disappointment could boil over into anger.”



That’s what bothers me about Easter this year.  It is a phantasmagorical Easter of “limitless hope” against which I rant. 



Better, I believe, that we celebrate an Easter of real but limited hope. We are mortal, ignorant, and small.  The world is whole beyond human knowing.



I tried out the basic themes of this rant last week at my discussion group at Carleton-Willard and one person cautioned me that it is the Easter of limitless hope and hosanna that has inspired some of the world’s greatest and most awesome music and that if composers took their cues from me we’d be stuck with dirges and droning and plainsong and a few Shaker tunes but be bereft of magnificence.  But even glorious music is not born at once for, as we know, “how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.”  Nonetheless I’ll give you musical people a pass on my modest proposals, but as for the rest of you, I’m still not done. 



Also last week, Paul Krugman in the Times made a plea for “making banking boring.”  We’ve seen where irrational exuberance gets us! In cycles of boom and bust, we’ve gone through three eras in the last hundred years, he said.  Before 1930, banking was an exciting business of high-flying financiers, full of limitless hope – and people ran up big debts. The banking industry that emerged after the Depression was more regulated, less colorful, less lucrative and household debt went way down.



And then again in the 80’s banking again became a spectacular career, another Gilded Age, and a lot of folks shouted Alleluia, my portfolio has risen, it has risen indeed.  We did not save dollars but too many people thought they were saved by credit default swaps and by fast talking double dealing theologies of finance that, like some irrationally exuberant theologies of the resurrection no one really understands, still the party was in full fantasy capitalism swing…until it all melted down.



Paul Krugman thinks that a lot of the policy makers are rearranging the deck chairs and are “not at all ready to do what needs to be done – which is to make banking boring again…. Despite everything that has happened, most people in positions of power still associate fancy finance with economic progress.” 



So too most people associate fancy theology with spiritual progress and are not ready to do what needs to be done – which I propose - is to make Easter boring again.



For a long time I’ve been an abundance-shouting sort of guy.  Abondanza! I say; there’s more than enough to go around. I really do not believe in scarcity, you know: even when it comes to the church budget there is plenty of money: it’s in your pocket and my pocket and not in the church’s pocket, but there’s plenty of money.  Still, instead of abondanza, instead of abundance, maybe the lesson of these times is one of sufficiency.  Let’s live lives that are sufficient.  Let’s have, not a great big bang Easter but a sufficient Easter.



But maybe it is time for me to turn that corner and whisper alleluia.  There is hope – limited but sufficient hope – and I suggest it comes, not from all-transforming substitutionary atonement of someone doing something miraculous for you but rather hope is to be found in the small victories and up-risings from tired beds.



Others’ words speak more to me than my own:  William James:

“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of (human) pride.”



At the top of our order of service there are words from my late colleague Max Coots:

It’s the little deaths before the final time we fear.

The blasé shrug

That quietly replaces excited curiosity,

The cynic-sneer

That takes the place of innocence,

The soft-sweet odor of success

That overcomes the sense of sympathy,

The self-betrayals

That rob us of our will to trust,

The ridicule of vision, the barren blindness

To what was once our sense of beauty –

These are the deaths that come so quietly

We do not know when it was we died.



What I propose is that this Easter we invert those words:

It is the little resurrections before the final whoosh and rapture we yearn for:  the excited curiosity that replaces the blasé shrug; the innocence that replaces the cynic-seer; the sympathy that replaces the odor of success; the vision, the sense of beauty – these are the little resurrections that come so quietly we do not know or care if or when we were born again.



Here’s an example of what I mean:  A month ago in Cambridge, Sue and I heard a woman from Darfur describe the work being done by the UU Service Committee.  Yes, we want the genocide to end but UUSC’s focus is on gender justice.  Men beat their wives in Darfur; it’s what men do.  And both men and women beat their children.  And so the human rights work is to empower women to assert themselves but UUSC is also training a cadre of men to behave differently.  And, for example, it is suggested that men might, upon awakening, say to their wives, “Good morning.”  That is a little resurrection.  Men…and women…can change their relationship to one another and to their children and it may begin by recognizing one another’s humanity and saying “Good morning.”



Little things bear enormous weight.



That parishioner of ours Sharon McDonald is a rather remarkable poet, and here are a couple of hers:



“Small Things”:

A sliver, the eye of a needle, a deer tick, a computer chip, a sperm, a sneeze, a hangnail, one potato chip, the planet Pluto, the straw that broke the camel’s back, an eyelash, one peso, a breath, a spark, a razor, one pregnant mouse, the zzz of a mosquito when you’re trying to sleep, a lost contact lens, a diamond, a nail hole in a tire, a keyhole, a kidney stone, a paper cut, the village of Abasfalva, your first kiss, the blink of a camera shutter, one vote, an aspirin, a popcorn hull tuck in your tooth, the cable connecting an astronaut to the space shuttle, the first gold nugget discovered at Sutter’s Mill, a hair on your chinny chin chin, a mustard seed, one snowflake, the horseshoe nail – for want of which the battle was lost, the difference in distance between a mile and a kilometer (don’t plan any trips to Mars), a visa.



That last one – the visa – is a bit of an inside joke that stems from several years ago, when I was much younger and less smart and I was going to India and I neglected to get a visa and, upon arrival in Calcutta and despite my protest, I was put on the next plane and, uh, deported.  A visa is a small thing.



One more of Sharon’s, “A Prayer for the Dazed”:

For those whose “check engine light just flashed;

For those recently deposited, trembly-legged, from a roller-coaster;

For those who forgot their lines as they entered, stage right;

For those poised tensely like a deer in the headlights;

For those badly jet-lagged who fumble for their passport;

For those just awakening not sure of their name;

For those who sat near as a loved one died a “good” death;

Oh God, we pray, repeat yourself:

Vouchsafe again and again the law of gravity;

Reiterate that days follow night and crocuses follow icicles;

Push the tides endlessly like a rocking cradle

Until we can recognize the rhythm of our own breath;

Until we can blink and regain our balance;

Until our hearts beat steadily again.



We are all, I believe, tired and in our own ways dazed.  Would this Easter we be assured that “the world is whole beyond human knowing, blink, regain our balance, until our hearts beat steadily again.



Ours is a broken world and, we too, are often tired and broken.  No shouted alleluias will change that, no fancy footwork of irrational Easter exuberance.



A few times in the past week I’ve been visited in my office by people in search of healing.  Elixirs I haven’t got.  And, of course, by the time somebody comes to me you have to figure they’re pretty desperate, ’cause who knows what I will have to offer.  But on at least three occasions this week, I’ve sat on my couch next to some tired, dazed, at-wits-end adult, and all I’ve had to offer was to read aloud a children’s book and look at the pictures.  You gotta say something; I am a minister; this was the best I could do.  How to Heal a Broken Wing, by Bob Graham.  I sat by myself once and read it aloud, too. 



I might as well read it to you too.



High above the city, no one heard the soft thud of feathers against glass.

No one saw the bird fall.

No one looked down …

except Will.

Will saw a bird with a broken wing …

and he took it home.

A loose feather can’t be put back …

but a broken wing can sometimes heal.

With rest …

and time …

and a little hope …

a bird may fly again.

Will opened his hands …

and with a beat of its wings, the bird was gone.

 

One more thing for us to hear.  This from the great Howard Thurman:



“Look well to the growing edge. All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms, green fruit. Such is the growing edge. It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung, the one more thing to try when all else has failed, the upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor. This is the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on when times are out of joint and men and women have lost their reason, the source of confidence when worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash. Such is the growing edge incarnate. Look well to the growing edge.”



That only leaves this business about a shovel-ready Easter.  What was I thinking when I chose that title?  Well, if you’re going to grow something you’ll probably need to start by digging.  And, once again, I wouldn’t pin our hopes on salvation from on high.  Look lower.  The growing edge is under your feet.



It was, however, Langston Hughes who said,

“I play it cool
And dig all jive.
That’s the reason
I stay alive. 


My motto,
As I live and learn,
is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.” 



I think you can write the rest of that Shovel-Ready Easter sermon on your own.



Rising from the bed matters more than rising from the dead.  We are mortal, ignorant and small and yet….the world is whole beyond human knowing.



And my prescription:

Rest, and time, and a little hope.  Good morning.  Alleluia.