Blessed Restlessness

Scripture: 3 John 11, 13-14

Inscribed in stone on the south wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. is the text of one of the most famous speeches ever given—Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Over time, the words of this short speech have become ingrained in our national DNA. We know its first sentence: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” And we know its last ringing phrase: “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Indeed, the speech is so familiar that we often read past a curious statement that appears right in the middle of it. The statement seems out of place in light of what the speech has come to mean to us. And the statement seems marvelously ironic in light of the fact that it is etched into the Indiana limestone of one of the most impressive and recognizable monuments on the planet. The statement is this: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.”

This statement was no show of false modesty on Lincoln’s part. In his vast biography of the President, Carl Sandburg says that Lincoln feared the speech would not “come up to public expectation.” And Sandburg reports that, after delivering the address, Lincoln remarked to a friend: “It is a flat failure and the people are disappointed.”

Indeed, many were. A Chicago newspaper suggested that “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dish watery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.” And a Harrisburg newspaper expressed the hope that “the veil of oblivion [might] be dropped over [the President’s remarks so] that they [would] no longer be repeated or thought of.”

Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way.

Over time, it became clear that Lincoln’s brief, simple, elegant remarks captured something essential about the aspirations of democracy and the nature of self-sacrifice. The speech that everyone thought no one would remember became immortal. And, to compound the irony, the two-hour long oration of Edward Everett, the man actually charged with giving the principal address at Gettysburg that day, has been largely forgotten.

In the second and third letters of John we find a statement even richer in irony than the one that appears in the middle of Lincoln’s famous address. For, in both letters, the author laments the inadequacy of his correspondence and expresses the hope that he will soon have the opportunity to converse with the people to whom he is writing. “I would rather not write with pen and ink,” John declares; I would rather talk with you “face to face.”

It is quite wonderful, really. The author apologizes for the shortcomings of his letters—letters that will find their way into the Holy Bible; letters that will be translated into every known language; letters that will become a part of the best-selling book in the history of the world; letters that will show up in homeless shelters and hospitals, in the mansions of the rich and the tenements of the poor, in obscure rural bus terminals and major urban airports, in spacious hotel rooms and cramped prison cells, in the foxholes of our soldiers, and the foxholes of our allies, and often the foxholes of our declared enemies.

And, while we may smile at John’s statement, we understand it, just as we understand Lincoln’s. For we know what it means to wonder whether we’re making a difference, whether our efforts are changing anything, whether our words are moving people’s hearts, whether anyone hears what we’re trying to say or sees what we’re trying to do or will remember what we have said and done. We know what it means to harbor doubts about whether the good we have done has finally done any good at all.

But there is something inside of us that keeps us at it. There is something in that spirit of ours—which, like the rest of us, is made in the image of the spirit of God—that urges us to keep trying. There is something that moves us to throw our good words and our good works and our good will out into the world despite our doubts. Because it turns out that faith does not just bring us rest. It also brings us restlessness, blessed restlessness, what the great poet George Herbert calls our “repining restlessness.”

Some of you may know a song by the rock group U2 called “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The title pretty much describes its theme. A while back, I heard an interview with Bono, the lead vocalist of the group, who said that it was a “gospel song.” I knew exactly what he meant. For it is in the nature of faith to look, to seek, to try, to aspire, but also to remain unsatisfied and unsettled, living, as we do, in the unsatisfying and unsettling world as we find it. Our blessed restlessness is the God-given God-driven impulse to refuse to accept conditions as they are and to do the things we can to try to make them better.

Sometimes those will be big things. Sometimes they will be small things. But we persist in doing them because we understand that, at some level, they matter.

The great preacher and author Frederick Buechner seems to delight in stories about small things—often done spontaneously or without fanfare—that end up making a big difference to someone. One day, he says, he was walking along Central Park South in New York City, working his way through the crowds on the busy sidewalk, when a woman going past him said “Jesus loves you.” Buechner reports that she said it in a casual, ordinary voice and kept on walking, but this random gesture had a profound impact him. He writes:

"I [wanted to] catch up with her and say, ‘Yes. If I believe anything worth believing in this whole world, I believe that. He loves me. He loves you. He loves the whole doomed, damned pack of us.’ For the rest of the way I was going, the streets I walked on were paved with gold. Nothing was different. Everything was different … For a moment it was not the world as it is that I saw but the world as it might be, as something deep within the world want to be and is preparing to be, the way in darkness a seed prepares for growth, the way leaven works in bread." (Buechner, The Kingdom of God)

But my favorite of Buechner’s stories concerns one Lyman Woodward, a man about whom you probably know nothing, and about whom Buechner knows only one thing. In 1831, a steeple was added to the New England church where Buechner often preached. The written history of that church reports that, when the construction was finished, “one agile Lyman Woodward stood on his head in the belfry with his feet toward heaven.” Buechner writes:

"That’s the one and only thing I’ve been able to find out about Lyman Woodward, whoever he was, but it is enough. I love him for doing what he did. It was a crazy thing to do. It was a risky thing to do. It ran counter to all standards of New England practicality and prudence. It stood the whole idea that you’re supposed to be nothing but solemn in church on its head just like Lyman himself standing upside down on his. And it was also a magical and magnificent and Mozartian thing to do." (Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry)

So even this ridiculous off-hand stunt ended up making a difference. It found its way into the history of a church. More than a century-and-a-half later, it found its way into a sermon and then it found its way into a book. And, now, it has found its way to you.

I suspect we all have stories like this—stories about little things that people did out of restlessness or impulse but that made a real difference to us. I have an abundance of them. I’ll share a recent one.

There is a family in our community who, within the past few months, suffered a terrible tragedy. I don’t know the family, but about a week ago I happened to be driving past their house. As I did, I glanced over and noticed that someone—maybe a family member, maybe a friend or neighbor—had hung a basket of flowers on the front porch of their home.

Now, on any other day, this might not have had an impact on me. But on that particular day it seized my attention and left me absolutely amazed. Just think about it. Here is this little family, living in a home that must still be haunted by a dark and unrelenting and inexpressible grief. And yet, and yet on every single day someone goes out onto that porch, walks into the light, cares for the flowers, and throws a clear high note of grace and hope and joy out into the universe.

In a way, the basket embarrassed me. It shamed me to think of the weak and self-indulgent ways I wallow in my own struggles—struggles that seem so trivial compared to what that family has endured. Indeed, the basket even seemed to embarrass the world itself, to call it to task for its meanness of spirit, to shame the petty, profane, bickering, banal culture that surrounds us.

But, much more than this, that messy little scramble of flowers woke me up. It shook me up. It elevated me. It blessed me. And, stranger still, I am sure that, in this, I am not alone.

Oh, all the directions our blessed restlessness can take us. It can call us to give a speech, to write a letter, to remind someone that Jesus loves them, to stand on our heads in celebration, or to hang a bright bundle of flowers on a tired old porch. We do these things, not knowing if anyone will hear what we say, or will read what we write, or will believe what we declare, or will share in our displays of joy, or will be moved to smile by the small splashes of color that we toss out onto the world.

We do these things because God made us to do them, and because when we honor that principle life is good and full, and because when we dishonor that principle life is sad and empty, and because in the end it really isn’t any more complicated than that.

We do these things to sustain us until we can see the ones we love—and, finally, the One who loves us—“face to face.”

We do these things without keeping count or expecting repayment.

We do these things understanding, at some basic level, that there is holiness in our unsettledness, that there is blessedness in our restlessness, and that there is gospel in our struggle to find what we are looking for.

We do these things without waiting for the blessings that follow because, deep down, we know that in the doing of them we are already blessed.

So has it always been.

So will it always be.

And the people said: Amen.