Comments for International Survivors of Suicide Day

I am not Clint Eastwood.  I just want to make sure we are clear on that.  My task this morning is to consider briefly the Chronicle of Higher Education article “The Suddenly Empty Chair,” not to talk to an actually empty chair.  

Having clarified that, allow me to begin by sharing a poem.

‘Heavy’ from Thirst by Mary Oliver

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

At Marsh Chapel we commissioned a global, cross-cultural study of mortality rates, and we discovered something very startling.  Around the world and across all cultures, mortality rates are stunningly consistent.  In fact, it turns out that mortality rates are universally 100%.  Believe it or not, everybody dies.

The thing of it is, and as I argued in a sermon a few years ago, spiritual life is neither about nouns, the stuff of life, nor about verbs, the activity of life, but rather about adverbs.  Spiritual life is life lived adverbially: it is not who we are or what we do but rather how we are who we are and how we do what we do.  If there is to be a capstone experience in life, it must certainly be death, but the question for spiritual life is not whether or not we die, or even the method by which our death comes about, but rather how we die.

My mother is a hospice nurse.  In fact, in October she celebrated thirty years with Montgomery Hospice in Montgomery County, Maryland.  With a mother in such a profession, you can imagine that dinner table conversation growing up was somewhat unusual.  “What did you do today?”  “Well, I had to make a death call, but by the time I got to the home the body was already in rigor and it was all we could do to get his arm back down so that the funeral home could get him in the hearse!”  It is only now, having endured many years of theological training and spiritual formation, that I can look back on my mother’s career and understand how her work of accompanying people so that they may die with dignity, may die well, in their homes and amidst family and friends, is truly a vocation.

My senior year of college, my friend from high school, Linda, was finishing her undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins University in biomedical engineering.  Like me, she was looking forward to graduate school and a career in service to the least, the last, and the lost as she worked toward medical technology solutions to some of the most vexing health problems of her native Vietnam.  And then one day, just before noon, my friend Cory called to tell me that Linda had been brutally sexually assaulted and murdered in her Baltimore apartment.  I was so shocked that I did not realize how shocked I was.  I went into my noon meeting, and partway through abruptly stood up, hurled the Gatorade bottle I was holding against the wall, and fled the room.

Now, we here in Massachusetts narrowly voted down last week a ballot initiative to allow a form of physician assisted suicide.  Certainly the ethics of such a measure are highly fraught, but it is at least arguable that physician assisted suicide can enable someone who suffers from a terminal sickness or condition to die with dignity, to die well.  That, at least, is the intent of the authors of such initiatives.  For those of us gathered here this morning, however, this type of dignified suicide at the end of life as a means of ending suffering is not the experience that drew us together.

Neither are we here, I would venture to guess, in the wake of a suicide like that of Socrates, who dutifully accepted his sentence in the face of a judicial decision plagued by misunderstanding.  The same might be said of Jesus as well, whose divinity surely would have enabled him to escape the cross, and so whose death, merely by permitting the sentence to be carried out, must have been a form of suicide. These so-called dignified deaths are not what call us out to be here today.

Our experiences of suicide are nevertheless diverse, but I would suspect are closer to the end of the spectrum of deaths at which Linda’s death might be categorized.  Violent.  Sudden.  Shocking.  Perhaps unexpected.  Certainly incomprehensible.  You see, suicide is actually more like murder than anything else, except that suicide is worse because the victim and the perpetrator are one and the same.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant pointed out that there is something about the human mind that seeks to categorize things according to time, space, and causality.  In the wake of any death, one of the most common first questions people ask is “why?”  In many cases, the “why?” question is a petition for an explanation of causality.  Of course, most people are not looking for a cause in the medical sense, but rather in the existential sense.  Answering, “well, the Tylenol poisoned her liver,” is not going to be satisfactory.  Instead, people seem to want to know how this event fits into a larger, wider, cosmic picture.

In the case of suicide, however, the issue of causality is particularly daunting.  In the case of a murder, at least there is the perpetrator on whom to focus all of our fury at the cosmic injustice of it all.  But in the case of a suicide, the victim is the perpetrator, and we all know that blaming the victim is morally anathema.  All too often, survivors of suicide end up focusing their fury on themselves or on other loved ones.  “Did I do something to cause her to do this?”  “Should I have done something so that he would not have done this?”  “Why didn’t you do something so that she would not have done this?”  It is little wonder that so many families fall apart in the wake of experiencing a suicide.

The world’s religious traditions have struggled mightily to come to grips with suicide, sometimes more successfully than others.  In some traditions, suicide is taken to be sinful, and grounds for denying burial in holy ground.  I, for one, do not believe this is the case.  There is nothing sinful about a person suffering so greatly that they resort to taking their own life.  There is nothing sinful about that person.  It may be the case, however, that there is something desperately sinful about the community, society, and culture that fails to alleviate their suffering and allows their agony to consume them.

I come bearing good news this morning.  There is redemption for survivors of suicide, if we choose it.  When a chair in our classroom, in our congregation, in our living room, suddenly becomes empty, and after we have survived the process of grieving, we have a choice to make.  What will this tragedy inspire in us?  Will it cause us to change?  Will it motivate us to alleviate suffering wherever we find it?  Will it ignite a spark of compassion in us?  Or will we simply go on as before, only now perhaps with an extra twinge of sadness?  Will we allow ourselves to be caught up again in the frenetic business of our lives as if nothing happened?  How will we carry our grief, our pain, our loss?  What will we do with the suddenly empty chair?  Remember, spiritual life is life lived adverbially.  It’s not even so much how they died, but how we will live hereafter.

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

Endings and Beginnings

Have you heard!?  The world is ending!!  It’s very exciting.  Fires.  Floods.  Hail.  Earthquakes.  Wars.  All manner of natural and human-made destruction. 

At least, this is what most readily comes to mind when the language of apocalypse is invoked in our late modern context.  It is a bit distant from the Greek definition of something hidden being made manifest or revealed, which is far tamer.  Interestingly, in the biblical witness it is not the fires and floods and hail and earthquakes and wars that in themselves constitute the apocalypse, but rather they are signs pointing to what will immanently be revealed.  Biblical apocalyptic vision arose in continuity with the prophetic tradition of Israel.  Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea, and all the rest spent half their careers warning of all of the bad things that would happen to the Israelites if they did not repent and return to right relationship with Yahweh and then they spent the rest of their careers warning that the nations of the world would come to naught if they failed to recognize Yahweh and the chosen people Israel.  There are at times glimmers of more positive prospects in the prophetic witness, of what good things will come upon turning back to Yahweh.  Apocalyptic follows in this pattern of warning of dire times ahead after which a new, just, righteous age will follow.

Occasionally, as I am returning to the chapel from hither and yon on campus, I encounter an apocalyptic preacher on the sidewalk along Commonwealth Avenue in front of Marsh Plaza.  These preachers usually have a great deal to say about how tragic, unfortunate, and painful events in our world are signs of God’s judgment upon society for all manner of evils.  They have a constitutionally protected right to freely speak their views on a public sidewalk, just as I have a constitutionally protected right to think them wrong.  I have two problems with contemporary apocalyptic preachers.  The first is that the social and cultural evils that these preachers are decrying are the very same sociocultural changes that I take to be achievements over prejudice, violence, and inhumanity.  Gay marriage and a woman’s right to control her own body often top their, and my, lists.  Apart from our contrasting ethical visions, however, my second problem with the contemporary apocalyptic preachers I encounter is that they almost never provide the second half of the apocalyptic vision.  There is much talk of judgment, damnation, and destruction, but no talk of the new order to be ushered in in place of the judged, damned, and destroyed one.  While biblical apocalyptic can be considered good news as it offers the promise of a better tomorrow in spite of the toil and tribulation of today, contemporary apocalyptic seems to offer nothing but toil and tribulation, which is nothing more than bad news.

One of the things that differentiates the apocalyptic worldview in the bible from the prophetic view is that in the prophetic view it is still possible for humans to self-correct, while in the apocalyptic view humanity has passed the tipping point.  The prophets were constantly adjuring Israel to repent and return to Yahweh.  “If we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  Thanks be to God!”  It is actually not the case that apocalyptic figures and writers actually thought things were worse in their societies than prophetic figures did.  Rather, the prophetic figures felt that the leaders of their society still had enough control over the society to bring about changes that would return Israel to Yahweh.  Apocalyptic figures, by contrast, felt entirely out of control.  This largely had to do with the fact that they were living under the occupation of the Roman Empire.  Even if Israel wanted to go in a different direction and become more godly, they could not because they did not have any control over their own destinies.   Thus it is that since humans are unable to rectify the situation, only God can step in and fix things.  Only God can overturn the present order and usher in a new order of peace, prosperity, and right relationship with God. 

This feeling of being out of control marks the apocalyptic view in our contemporary context as well.  Karen Armstrong, an independent scholar of religion, spoke at Ithaca College during my freshman year there in October of 2001.  She was extraordinarily helpful in interpreting the events of September 11^th of that year in terms of the fundamentalist mindset that inspired and motivated that day of death and destruction.  Her book The Battle for God explores how fundamentalisms across religious traditions are responses by religious people to a loss of control brought about by the apparently secularizing forces and assumptions of modernity.  These religious people then follow their fight or flight instinct, and those who follow the fight path often understand themselves to be instruments of God in righting the world.  Certainly, there is a great deal more to religious fundamentalism that an apocalyptic worldview, and not all people with apocalyptic views are religious fundamentalists.  However, the feeling of having lost control that drives the modern rejection of modernity that is fundamentalism is the same feeling of having lost control that inspired the apocalyptic texts of the bible. 

One of the challenges in responding to apocalyptic texts, apocalyptic preachers, and fundamentalists is that the view that the world has gone to hell in a hand basket and there is nothing to be done about it but wait for God to set it right can feel very foreign.  I wonder, however, if we might not be a bit too quick to abide in the feeling of otherness, perhaps as a strategy for not having to face how familiar the apocalyptic view might be.  Perhaps I am the odd ball out, and perhaps none of you have ever felt like things had gotten totally out of control.  Life in ministry, I have discovered, provides frequent exposure to the feeling and experience of things being totally out of control.  Ministry also provides ample opportunity to see how, if people would simply make this, that, or the other decision and act on it, as opposed to the one they did decide on and act upon, things would have gone so much better.  I confess, I have at times found myself daydreaming about how things might have gone had someone wiser been in charge. 

Is this really so much different than the apocalyptic vision?  Not really.  After all, the apocalyptic vision is very much an imagination that things do go better when someone of infinite wisdom, namely God, is in charge.  On the other hand, my imagination of how things might have been better inspires me to decide and act more wisely.  This is to say that I learn something from watching how the decisions and actions I and others take work out, as well as from the imaginings of how things might have gone.  At the end of the day, however, my imaginings remain in the subjunctive mood of what might have been or what might yet become.  This is in stark contrast to the way in which the apocalyptic imagination of what might be inspires fundamentalist decision-making and action.  The fundamentalist is so inspired by the apocalyptic imagination that she or he attempts to impress the subjunctive mood of what might become into the indicative mood of what actually is. 

The work we do together here in this space, week by week, in gathering together in worship, is very much a subjunctive imagining of what life might be like if God were in charge.  The readings, prayers, sermon, music, and sacrament of the liturgy reveal to us the ways in which we ought to live in the ideal world of God’s realm.  Live justly, walk humbly, confess your shortcomings, forgive one another, rejoice in joy, weep in lamentation, and break bread with one another.  Of course, life in the world is not nearly so ideal.  Justice is ambiguous.  Humility is mistaken for weakness.  Confession leads to judgment without forgiveness.  The joy of one is the sorrow of another.  Those we break bread with may stab us in the back.  We learn from these experiences as well as the imagination we return to, week by week, of what would be better.  Furthermore, our worship practice provides a safeguard from thinking that we should attempt to impose the subjunctive mood of worship on the indicative mood of life.  That safeguard is the strangeness of the liturgy.  The clergy wear funny robes.  The windows are made of stained glass.  The pews have no cushions.  These things, and many others, provide a sense of strangeness to remind us that, while much of what we experience here may point to a better way of being, in the end, a worship service is not life.  That better way of being exists apart from the day-to-day walk of life.  The better vision informs life, and so transforms our lives, by reminding us that life is not always and necessarily out of control.  The ongoing work of transformation by information indicates that at every moment of our lives the world is ending, and is beginning anew out of what was and what might yet be.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Prayers of the People - This I Believe

We join head and heart with body and voice as we offer our prayers to God.  I will conclude each petition, “God, in your mercy.”  Please respond, “Hear our prayer.”

That we as a chapel and University community may come more and more each day to believe in one another.  God, in your mercy.

That we as a chapel and University community may come more and more each day to awaken to the spirit of unconditional love.  God, in your mercy.

That those who pass through the halls and seminar rooms of Boston University may be awakened to an examined faith.  God, in your mercy.

That our graduates may behold what they are, become what they have received here, and offer self and service to a sore and straining world.  God, in your mercy.

That all in our community who seek may find a spiritual shelter from the storms of life.  God, in your mercy.

That all who seek may find a spiritual home and a spiritual family.  God, in your mercy.

That our graduating students may hear the call to serve and go with strength, carrying the assurance of abiding grace and presence they have received here.  God, in your mercy.

That our graduating students may be able to become still enough to hear the sound of the genuine welling up within.  God, in your mercy.

We pray today for the three Boston University students who died in a car accident this weekend in New Zealand: Austin, Daniela, and Roch.  Grant to them eternal rest, O God, and may light perpetual shine upon them.  God, in your mercy.

We pray for the students injured in the same accident, and particularly for Margaret who remains in a severe condition.  God, in your mercy.

We pray for those in our community who mourn, and particularly on this Mother’s Day for the mothers of the victims.  God, in your mercy.

We pray for the responders in our community and in communities who have gone the extra mile to lend support, that they may be strengthened to love and serve those devastated in the wake of tragedy.  God, in your mercy.

We pray for the spiritual wisdom to abide in a place between tragedy and celebration, to celebrate with those who celebrate, and to mourn with those who mourn.  God, in your mercy.

And now, with the confidence of children of God, we are bold to pray:  Our Father…

Thurman and Resurrection

The sermon this morning is not really a sermon.  “That is odd,” you may be saying to yourself.  “It says right here in my bulletin: ‘Sermon’!”  And so it does.  Alas, when tasked with considering the careful crafting of the religious and life experience into communicative text undertaken by the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, particularly on the topic of resurrection, it quickly becomes clear that it would be no small feat to attempt a presentation of his thoughts on the subject approaching anything like adequacy.  There are those in our midst who could do so; I am not one of them.  It would, of course, be best, if Dr. Thurman were here in his own pulpit to present his thoughts himself, but even in so hallowed a nave as Marsh Chapel, we do not pretend to be able to fulfill this ideal, even under such an auspicious sermon title as “Thurman and Resurrection.”  Thus, we are left with a less than ideal option, namely that of proffering some meager correlations between the themes of the resurrection Gospel according to John and the thoughts and writings of Dr. Thurman presented in the voice of one untimely born two years after Thurman’s death.

Peace

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ (John 20: 19-21).

“Peace in Our Lives,” a meditation of Howard Thurman from his book, The Growing Edge.

I make of my life an offering to God.

Fierce indeed is the grip by which we hold on to our lives as our private possession.  The struggle to achieve some sense of individuality in the midst of other people and other things is grim.  Always we are surrounded by persons, forces, and objects which lay siege to us and seek to make us means to their ends or at least to their fulfillment.  The demand is ever present to distinguish between the self and the not-self.

There are moments of enthusiasm when with mounting excitement we absorb ourselves in something beyond ourselves.  When this happens we fight at length to get back home, to come again into the familiar place, to be secure in our own boundaries.  Again and again the process repeats itself, wearing down the walls that shut us in.

Of course, a man may by early resolution, by frustration, by bitter experience withdraw more and more from all involvements.  By this process he seeks to immunize himself against hurts and from what seems to be certain disaster.  Behold such a man.  His spirit shrinks, his mind becomes ingrown, his imagination inward turning.  The wall surrounding him becomes so thick that deep within he is threatened with isolation.  This is the threat of death.  Sometimes his spirit breaks out in reverse by giving voices to inward impulses, thus establishing by the sheer will to survival a therapy for the corrosion of his spirit.

For all of this religion has a searching word.  “Deep within are the issues of life.”  “The rule of God is within.”  “If thou hadst known the things which belong unto thy peace.”  There is a surrender of the life that redeems, purifies, and makes whole.  Every surrender to a particular person, event, circumstance, or activity is but a token surrender, the temporary settling of the passing and transitory.  They end in tightening the wall of isolation around the spirit.  They are too narrow, too limited, finally unworthy.

The surrender must be to something big enough to absolve one from the little way, the meager demand.  There can be no tranquility for the spirit unless it has found something about which to be tranquil.  The need for a sense of peace beyond all conflict can only be met by something that gathers up into itself all meaning and all value.  It is the claim of religion that this is only found in God.  The pathways may vary but the goal is one.

Spirit

When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. (John 20: 22).

“God is With Me” and “God is Present,” two meditations of Howard Thurman from his book, Meditations of the Heart.

God is with me, in the sense that He is the Creator and the Sustainer of life.  This is a part of my general thought and experience.  There is something so big and vast about God as Creator and Sustainer of all of life that it is hard for me to feel that I am included.

God is with me.  All around me are certain expressions of orderliness, of beauty, of wonder and delight.  The regularity of sunrise and sunset, the fragile loveliness of a wisp of cloud fringed with silver, the wonder of day dawning and the delight of companionship – all these are His handiwork.

God is with me.  Again and again I am stirred by some experience of tenderness, some simple act of gratuitous kindness moving from one man to another, some quiet deed of courage, wisdom or sacrifice or some striking movement of unstudied joy that bursts forth in the contagion of merry laughter.  I know God is with me.

God is with me.  Always there is the persistent need for some deep inner assurance, some whisper in my heart, some stirring of the spirit within me – that renews, re-creates and steadies.  Then whatever betides of light or shadow, I can look out on life with quiet eyes.

God is with me.

God is present with me this day.

God is present with me in the midst of my anxieties.  I affirm in my own heart and mind the reality of His presence.  He makes immediately available to me the strength of His goodness, the reassurance of His wisdom and the heartiness of His courage.  My axieties are real; they are the result of a wide variety of experiences, some of which I understand, some of which I do not understand.  One thing I know concerning my anxieties: they are real to me.  Sometimes they seem more real than the presence of God.  When this happens, they dominate my mood and possess my thoughts.  The presence of God does not always deliver me from anxiety but it always delivers me from anxieties.  Little by little, I am beginning to understand that deliverance from anxiety means fundamental growth in spiritual character and awareness.  It becomes a quality of being, emerging from deep within, giving to all the dimensions of experience a vast immunity against being anxious.  A ground of calm underlies experiences whatever may be the tempestuous character of events.  This calm is the manifestation in life of the active, dynamic Presence of God.

God is present with me this day.

Forgiveness

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’ (John 20: 23).

A selection from the chapter “Reconciliation,” from Howard Thurman’s book, Disciplines of the Spirit.

The concern for reconciliation finds expression in the simple human desire to understand others and to be understood by others.  These are the building blocks of the society of man, the precious ingredients without which man’s life is a nightmare and the future of his life on the planet is doomed.  Every man wants to be cared for, to be sustained by the assurance that he shares in the watchful and thoughtful attention of others – not merely or necessarily others in general but others in particular.  He wants to know that – however vast and impersonal all life about him may seem, however hard may be the stretch of road on which he is journeying – his is not alone, in an awareness sufficient to hold him against ultimate fear and panic.  It is precisely at this point of awareness that life becomes personal and the individual a person.  Through it he gets some intimation of what, after all, he finally amounts to, and the way is cleared for him to experience his own spirit.

The need to be cared for is essential to the furtherance and maintenance of life in health.  This is how life is nourished.  The simpler the form of life, the simpler the terms of caring…

It is in human life that the need to be cared for can be most clearly observed, however, because here it can be most clearly felt.  There was a lady in my church in San Francisco who felt very poignantly the need to be needed beyond the limits of her family.  One day she went with a small group to visit the children’s ward in a hospital.  She noticed a baby in a crib against the wall.  Despite the things that were going on in the ward and the excitement created by a group of English bell-ringers and their tunes, this little child remained lying on his side with his face to the wall.  But it was discovered that he was not asleep – his eyes were open in an unseeing stare.  The nurse explained that the entire ward was worried because the child responded to nothing.  Feeding had to be forced.  “Even if he cried all the time, that would be something to work with.  But there is nothing.  And he is not sick as far as anything clinical can be determined.  He will surely die unless something is done.”  Then the lady decided to try to do something.  Every day for several weeks she visited the ward, took the little boy in her arms, talked to him, hummed little melodies and lullabies, and did all the spontaneous things that many years ago she had one with her own son.  For a long time there was absolutely no response.  One day when she lifted the child into her arms there was a slight movement of the body, and the eyes appeared to be somewhat in focus.  This was the beginning.  Finally, on a later day, as her voice was heard greeting the nurse when she came into the ward, the child turned over, faced the ward, and tried to raise himself to a sitting position.  Things happened rapidly thereafter until he was restored to health.

Let us keep clearly in mind the issue here.  The need to be cared for is fundamental to human life and to psychic and spiritual health and well-being.  When this need is not met, the individual is thrown into conflict, an inner conflict that can only be resolved when the need is honored.  The conflict expresses itself in many ways, from profound mental disturbance to the complete projection upon others of the hate and violence the person himself is feeling.  The individual experiences the fulfillment of his need in a diffused way, by living in an atmosphere of acceptance and belonging.  It is here that simple techniques of co-operation and adjustment are developed, which in time become the channels through which the intent to honor this deep need in others is implemented.  Unwillingness to accept ill will, hatred, or violence directed toward oneself from another as the fundamental intent is the role of the reconciler, the function of reconciliation.  “Father, forgive them, for the know not what they do,” says Jesus as he is dying on the cross.

Doubt

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ (John 20: 24-29).

An excerpt from the Baccalaureate Address delivered by Dr. Thurman at Spelman College in May of 1980.

There is in every person something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in herself... There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. Nobody like you has ever been born and no one like you will ever be born again—you are the only one.     

If you can not hear the sound of the genuine within you, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born. You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existences, and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

So the burden of what I have to say to you is, "What is your name—who are you—and can you find a way to hear the sound of the genuine in yourself?" There are so many noises going on inside of you, so many echoes of all sorts, so many internalizing of the rumble and the traffic going on in your minds, the confusions, the disorders by which your environment is peopled that I wonder if you can get still enough—not quiet enough—still enough to hear rumbling up from your unique and essential idiom the sound of the genuine in you. I don't know if you can. But this is your assignment

The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don't be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams, your ambitions that you don't hear the sound of the genuine in you. Because that is the only true guide that you will ever have and if you don't have that you don't have a thing. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself.

Life

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. (John 20: 30-31).

Selections from Howard Thurman’s The Search for Common Ground.

When I was a small boy I went across the meadow to visit with one of my chums.  I was running around the house when I heard a voice, which came from a knock on the windowpane.  I looked up to see my friend’s father standing in the room.  As soon as he caught my attention, he motioned for me to turn around and come into the house through the front door.  When I entered the room he pointed through an open window.  There I saw his baby girl, less than a year old, sitting in the sand playing with a rattlesnake.  It was an amazing and deeply frightening experience to watch.  The child would turn the snake over on its side and do various things with him; the snake would crawl around her, then crawl back.  It was apparent that they were playing together.

I was sent back into the yard to stand guard to keep anyone from coming around the house to frighten them.  For if their harmony were broken by sudden disharmony created by noise or sudden movement, there would have been violence on earth.  After a while the baby grew tired of playing, turned away, and started crawling toward the back steps; the snake crawled towards the woods on the edge of the yard.  It was then that the father drew a bead on the snake’s head with his shotgun, killing him instantly.  It was as if two different expressions of life, normally antagonistic to each, had dropped back into some common ground and there reestablished a sense of harmony through which they were relating to each other at a conscious level…

The paradox of conscious life is the ultimate issue here.  On the one hand is the absolute necessity for the declaration that states unequivocally the uniqueness of the private life, the awful sense of being an isolate, independent and alone, the great urgency to savor one’s personal flavor – to stand over against all the rest of life in contained affirmation.  While on the other hand is the necessity to feel oneself as a primary part of all of life, sharing at every level of awareness a dependence upon the same elements in nature, caught up in the ceaseless rhythm of living and dying, with no final immunity against a common fate that finds and holds all living things.

Men, all men belong to each other, and he who shuts himself away diminishes himself, and he who shuts another away from him destroys himself.  And all the people said Amen.

I Thirst - Good Friday Meditation

Once again, those who followed Jesus missed the point.  Anyone who has awoken the morning after having shared a bottle of wine with friends knows that wine is hardly a thirst quencher.  On the contrary, wine is a thirst inducer, and yet this is what Jesus is given when from the cross he says, “I thirst.”  Oops.  Missed again.  Even attempts at compassion for the dying Christ are fumbled, only exacerbating the problem they are trying to solve.

We live in a thirsty age.  Not only are we thirsty ourselves, but our culture and society seek explicitly and intentionally to modify our thirsts.  Marketing experts are experts precisely in the delicate art of inspiring and intensifying our thirsts.  Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Marsh Chapel Experiment, which was designed precisely to see whether certain chemical substances were effective in intensifying spiritual thirst.  As it turns out, it is indeed possible to intentionally and explicably alter a person’s spiritual appetites with the chemical substances in question. 

Jesus’ thirst is different than our many modern thirsts.  Jesus’ thirst arises after he knows that “all was now finished.”  It is over.  There is nothing left.  Jesus is at the bottom of the trajectory outlined in the kenotic hymn of Philippians 2:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,

   did not regard equality with God

   as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

   taking the form of a slave,

   being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

   he humbled himself

   and became obedient to the point of death—

   even death on a cross.

Here, on the cross, just before he gives up his spirit, Jesus is entirely empty.  No wonder he is thirsty. There is purity to this thirst.  It is not something that can be instilled or inspired or intensified.  Jesus’ thirst at the bottom of the kenotic ellipse is a pure desire for the process of self-emptying to cease, one way or another.  It is a cry of desperation.  Giving voice to the pure desire for an end of emptiness, by whatever means necessary, in the language of thirst, here we see the turning point to the second half of the ellipse of the kenotic hymn:

Therefore God also highly exalted him

   and gave him the name

   that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

   every knee should bend,

   in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue should confess

   that Jesus Christ is Lord,

   to the glory of God the Father.

The exaltation of Jesus the Christ must await the resurrection at Easter.  For now, as we shall hear momentarily, it is finished.  The language of thirst points to the fact that the exaltation is not guaranteed.  At the point at which Jesus is hanging on the cross, the cry of thirst is not necessarily for fullness, but either for fullness or for annihilation. One way or another, please God, end it.  In these next days, we too must hang on the cross, wondering whence and whether our glory might come.

Amen.

Freely, Humbly, Honestly

Zechariah 9: 9-12

Romans 7: 15-25

Psalm 145: 8-14

Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30

It is good to begin in a spirit of gratitude, and so once again it is incumbent upon me to begin this sermon with a word of gratitude to Dean Hill for his gracious offering of a preaching series in the late spring and summer of 2011.  Yes, whether you like it or not, you have managed to arrive in the nave of Marsh Chapel for the final installment of Br. Larry’s 2011 Secular Holiday Preaching Series.  Some of you may remember when we began, back in May, on Mother’s Day, and then a few weeks later continued on Memorial Day.  And now, here we are, once again, this time on Independence Day weekend, at the conclusion of the series.  For those who, at the conclusion of this hour, will have withstood all three installments, you have my sincerest condolences.

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Let us pray.

Holy God, Holy and mighty, Holy and eternal, have mercy on us this day, that we may come to live freely, humbly and honestly in the communion of you most Holy Spirit, in whose unity you dwell with Jesus Christ, our Lord.  Amen.

As parts of speech go, adverbs tend to fall at the, “Well, okay, but only if we must,” end of the spectrum.  To be honest, the trendiest aspect of grammar these days is punctuation, as evidenced by the passionate debates on Twitter in the past few days about the use of the Oxford comma.  The bedrock of grammar, of course, is the noun.  Nouns have substance.  We can see, hear, taste, touch and smell their referents.  Verbs help us talk about what nouns do and adjectives help us distinguish the blue nouns from the red nouns.  All adverbs do is to qualify the manner in which nouns do the things their attendant verbs indicate.   We even go out of our way to find ways of avoiding adverbs.  After hearing a politician or a preacher we are likely to say, “Well that was a stupid thing for him to say,” as opposed to saying, “she spoke stupidly.” 

It is little wonder, then, that so many in our time struggle to find their spiritual voice, since religious and spiritual life dwells in the land of the adverb.  To be religious or to be spiritual is to be concerned with the manner in which life is lived.  Life is the noun, live is the verb, and the manner in which life is lived is expressed adverbially.  The reality of the adverbial nature of religiosity and spirituality is found in our Gospel reading this morning.  In the first half of the pericope, Jesus is frustrated by the lack of understanding of the ministries he and John the Baptist undertook.  This lack of understanding is situated in the focus placed upon particular actions, or inactions, undertaken by Jesus and John, namely eating and drinking.  Then, the members of the generation Jesus’ critiques ascribes particular connotations to the states of being of Jesus and John, respectively, based on those actions or inactions.  The members of the generation observe the verbs and then classify the nouns according to those observations.  In the second half of the pericope, Jesus indicates that the generation has missed the point, and that what is really important is hidden from them.  Later in the pericope Jesus says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”  We may ask, what makes people weary?  Too much activity.  Too many verbs!  And those carrying heavy burdens have too many nouns, or too much of a given noun.  When we learn from Jesus, we come to understand that it is not about how many activities we can undertake or how much we can carry.  It is not about nouns and verbs.  It is about the manner in which we do whatever we undertake.  To follow Jesus is to learn to live adverbially.  Not that adverbs are easier than nouns and verbs, just lighter and less frantic.  No, the challenge of living adverbially is garnering the focus of attention required.

There are many adverbs in religious and spiritual life.  On this Independence Day weekend, we will consider three: freely, humbly, and honestly.  First, and the adverb most closely keyed to the holiday, freely.

The notion of living freely as a spiritual manner of life flies directly in the face of how moderns, Westerns, and particularly we in the United States generally think about what it means to be free.  Most often we speak of freedom, a noun, a substance.  Freedom is something we have as a possession, and one of the reasons we celebrate Independence Day is to celebrate the substance of freedom that was won as a possession in the wake of the colonies declaring independence and fighting the Revolutionary War.  It is a bit odd to think of freedom as a substance.  After all, have you ever tried to put freedom in a bag and carry it down the street?  Can you walk up to a street vendor and say, “I’ll have a large cup of freedom with sprinkles on top?”  Admittedly, for a time you could order Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast from restaurants and snack bars run by the U.S. House of Representatives, but that is a whole other story and a whole other sermon.

No, the modern western concept of freedom is not a noun like “book” is a noun, namely something you could carry down the street with you.  Instead, most often what we mean by freedom in the modern west is both the capacity to act as we choose or desire and the lack of impediment or constraint resulting from the actions of others.  This double concept of freedom is epitomized in Isaiah Berlin’s lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty, in which he distinguishes freedom “to” and freedom “from.”  Of course, the two may conflict.  After all, every action I undertake may impede the actions of another or constrain them from acting at all.  If I hold a large rock concert on Marsh Plaza in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, this will likely impede the ability of scholars in the College of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Theology from being very productive, and will be a significant distraction to students studying there, to say nothing of the Chapel Choir rehearsing in the nave here in Marsh Chapel.  My freedom to hold the concert runs counter to the freedom of others from distraction.  The conflict between freedom from and freedom to, and various approaches to managing the conflict, is the source of much of political, social and legal controversies of our time.

Our religious and spiritual traditions, however, teach us that to be free is not to possess the substance freedom but rather to live freely.  To live freely is to cultivate the capacity to behave in ways that avoid the turn to the frenetic and overburdened.  As Saint Paul tells it in our reading from Romans, to live freely is to live in concert among head, heart and body.  Of course, the way Paul tells it belies a rather unfortunate dualism between body and spirit, but that should not inhibit us from retelling it in a way the expresses the truth of our common desire with Paul to live integrated lives.  Such integration is a prerequisite to living freely. 

The Buddhist doctrine of non-attachment is a correlate to this living freely.  It emphasizes that in moving beyond frantic activity and heavy burdens we are able to be more fully present in the present moment.  In doing so we are able to bring our full attention to the reality of the here and now without needing to control for every possible future outcome.  This is not to say that we should neglect future outcomes; that would be irresponsible.  It is to say that living freely means freely receiving what comes and offering back the best synthesis of what we receive in gracious generosity.  We should not become too attached to what we receive, or we will not be able to offer it back generously.  We should also not become too attached to the outcomes we intend in making our offering, as we are never fully in control of those outcomes.  We do our best with what we have, and when our best is not good enough, we offer what we have received and what we have offered up to God in penitence and thanksgiving.

When living freely, it is very possible that the conditions in which we live, some of which are brought about by other people, will resist our best intentions.  In religious and spiritual life, as we work toward living freely, we should not be too concerned when our best intentions cannot be realized.  The religious and spiritual traditions testify that freedom-from is an illusion at best, and a trap at worst.  At the same time, they teach that freedom-to is never absolute and is always constrained by the conditions at hand.  The generation that so frustrated Jesus frustrated him precisely because they thought that the Messiah would come to bring their freedom from the political, social and religious oppression of the Roman Empire.  The Messiah Jesus, however, came to teach them instead how to live freely under the conditions in which they found themselves, which living he believed would eventually restore them out of oppression, as the prophet Zechariah had promised.

What does living freely look like?  Perhaps we should take our cue from Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who said of the late Reverend Professor Peter Gomes of Harvard Memorial Church, “He was the freest man I ever knew.”  I have quoted Governor Patrick on this several times, and many people have looked at me quixotically.  I think that what Governor Patrick meant is that Reverend Professor Gomes lived freely.  He cultivated a way of being that allowed him to be fully present wherever he found himself.  When he found himself faced with a crisis at Harvard over the status in the community of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students, he calmly stood up, taking up the authority of his revered position, and announced that he was gay.  Furthermore, he said that the secret to his ministry of over forty years at Harvard was “ubiquity, ubiquity, ubiquity.”  Reverend Professor Gomes lived freely, and that empowered him to be fully present in situations where he was wanted, challenging those who said they wanted him along the way, and fully present in situations where he was not wanted, opening up avenues of dialogue toward finding common ground amidst difference. 

So too, those of us who seek to live religious and spiritual lives seek to live life humbly.  Just as freely the adverb is a far cry from the noun freedom, so too the adverb humbly is a far cry from the adjective humble.  In our gospel today Jesus says that he is “gentle and humble in heart,” but I would submit that the qualifier “in heart” would indicate that he means that he seeks to live his life adverbially humbly.  After all, it would be hard to say the Jesus was entirely humble, riding into Jerusalem as he did on the back of a donkey in kingly fashion, fulfilling the words of the prophet Zechariah.  This is not what we would associate with a humble person, which is to say one whose entire way of being, one whose life-substance is qualitatively humble through and through.  To be humble is to be of small stature, to be one who refrains from entering the fray, to suppress the desire for the better, to say nothing of the best. 

The problem with being humble is that it holds back the integration we already saw was a prerequisite for living freely, which is also a prerequisite for living humbly.  This is precisely the problem with the dualism that Paul sets up by seeking to humble his body that his spirit might be free of sin.  The humbled body can never be integrated with the spirit, which is to say cleansed or justified.  More than simply being integrated as a prerequisite however, living humbly also requires recognizing and respecting the integrity of others.  Integrity requires deference.  To live humbly is to live in such a way that our own pursuit of religiously and spiritually fulfilled lives comes about in concert with the pursuit of religiously and spiritually fulfilled lives by others.  At the same time, living humbly recognizes that religious and spiritual fulfillment for any one person cannot come about at the expense of such fulfillment by any others.  If my salvation can only come about by the damnation of others, it is not salvation, but also, if the salvation of others can only come about by my damnation, it is not salvation.  If the salvation of the mob can only come about by arresting, trying and crucifying Jesus, it cannot be true salvation, but neither can the salvation of the world come through the killing of the mob, as one disciple set out to do by cutting off the ear of the slave of the high priest.  Living life humbly recognizes the integrity of others and so empowers us to resist that which would oppress us, often as not by submitting to that very oppression.

The nonviolent activism of Mohandas Gandhi and Boston University’s own alumnus the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., exemplifies what it means to live life humbly.  It is in recognizing the integrity of others that Gandhi and King sought to organize those others to resist the attempts on the part of a wider society to oppress them, while at the same time teaching the others to recognize the integrity of the others who made up the wider society.  What it means to live humbly is embodied in the three points of Gandhi’s philosophy, summarized in E. Stanley Jones’ biography of Gandhi, that inspired King to take up the practices of nonviolence:

1.         that nonviolence is the method of the strong, not the method of the weak and the cowardly

2.         that it is better to fight than to take up nonviolence through fear or cowardice

3.         that by using the right means, the right result will follow

We should note that the last point is a summary of the principle that religious and spiritual life is concerned with the adverbial character of how life is lived, and that life lived adverbially is the good life, not life lived frantically and overburdened. 

Now, what is this integrated self that we have been speaking of as a precondition for life lived freely and humbly?   It is life lived honestly.  If we are to have any hope of the many parts of ourselves abiding together wholesomely, then they must first be acknowledged honestly.  Just as life lived freely is to be distinguished, even opposed, to freedom, and just as life lived humbly is to be distinguished, even opposed, to being humble, so too life lived honestly is to be distinguished, and even opposed, to truth.  Truth is something that is established and stable for all time.  Life lived honestly recognizes that we ourselves are not established and stable, that the way we are now is not the way we always were and is not the way we always will be.  Furthermore, the situation of our lives is not established and stable, is not the same now as it always has been, and will not be in ten days either what it is now or will be tomorrow.  If truth is once and for all, then living life honestly is a way of being in constant discernment of who we were, who we are, who we will be, in light of ever changing circumstances.

Of course, it is the very instability of living honestly, the very continuous and ongoing cycles of change, that gives rise to the adverbial character of religious and spiritual life.  All of those nouns and verbs that pervade our speech and our thought about what is most true and good risk making us participants in the very generation Jesus bemoans in our gospel reading today.  Take, for example, the extraordinarily vitriolic language all too prevalent on the tips of the tongues of politicians and pundits, to say nothing of friends and family, aimed at Muslims and the Islamic world.  Such vitriol can only arise from a clinging to a truth that claims an exceptional character for the United States and a demonic character for all Muslims based upon the actions of a few.  Today, in the midst of Independence Day weekend, we would do well to seek to live more honestly.  How quickly we forget that the modern western world of science and technology would not exist except for the rediscovery of Aristotle, transmitted through the Islamic world back into the west during the late Middle Ages.  How quickly we forget that the Roman Empire once thought itself exceptional, and now it is dust. 

Today, in the midst of Independence Day weekend, let us live according to the good news of life lived adverbially.  Let us live according to the good news that we can live integrated and wholesome lives when we seek to live honestly with ourselves and each other.  Let us live according to the good news that we can live humbly, recognizing the integrity of everyone and everything around us.  Let us live according to the good news that we can live freely even in the midst of the constraints brought about by chance and by the free lives undertaken by integral others.  And in living freely, humbly and honestly we experience salvation.  Clinging to a substantial freedom will leave us conflicted socially.  Clinging to a humble nature will leave us conflicted personally.  And clinging to absolute truth will leave us ineptly groping about in a constantly changing and complex world.  Nouns and verbs are the substance and motion of life, but they are not the fullness and fulfillment of life.  For fullness and fulfillment, long live the adverb!  Amen.