The Lonely Questions

Many people view Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a modern martyr of the Christian faith and, more expansively, of the cause of human freedom. Recognized as a gifted theologian while still a young man, Bonhoeffer could have chosen to pursue his career in the safety of one of the countless American seminaries and universities that would have delighted to include him among their faculty. Instead, he returned to Hitler’s Germany to join in the effort to resist fascism, knowing that he might never again see his family, friends, or fiancé.

Bonhoeffer was arrested in April of 1943 and executed two years later, shortly before the liberation of the prison camp where he was confined. While in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote a number of letters and papers that have been preserved, collected, and published. Together they make up one of the masterpieces of spiritual literature. In these documents, Bonhoeffer models a courage, faith, and uncompromising intellectual curiosity that must amaze and inspire us.

In a letter written to his friend Eberhard Bethge on July 16, 1944, Bonhoeffer says: “If you have to preach in the near future, I should suggest taking [one of the following] texts.” He then lists a number of passages for Bethge's consideration. The list is remarkable for at least three reasons.

First, he lists seven passages. The number eerily—and perhaps not coincidentally—corresponds to the number of passages traditionally known as "the last words of Christ."

Second, he lists six passages from the Hebrew Bible and only one from the New Testament. This is consistent with Bonhoeffer's deep interest in the Old Testament, particularly during his time of imprisonment.

And, finally, he offers Bethge almost no guidance whatsoever as to why these passages matter or what he should say about them when preaching. Because Bonhoeffer was not only a brilliant theologian but an inspired speaker and teacher, it seems fair to assume that he provides no instruction here for a simple reason: he thought it obvious.

These are the passages Bonhoeffer commends to his friend, in the order in which he lists them:

Psalm 62:1: “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation.”

Psalm 119:94: “I am yours; save me, for I have sought your precepts.”

Psalm 42:5: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.”

Jeremiah 31:3: “[T]he Lord appeared to [Israel] from far away [and said] ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.’”

Isaiah 41:10: “[D]o not fear, for I am with you; do not be afraid, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.”

Isaiah 43:1: “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.”

Matthew 28:20: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

We might gain some insight into Bonhoeffer's view of these passages if we put them in the context of a poem he had written shortly before he drafted this letter. The poem is called Who Am I? and it is stunning in its stark candor. In the poem, Bonhoeffer explored the doubts and conflicts that raged within him and asked:

“Who am I? This or the other?

Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,

And I before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?

Or is something within me still like a beaten army,

Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?”

But then he concludes:

         “Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

         Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.”

Probably as much as anyone who has ever lived, Bonhoeffer understood what it means to be plagued by the “lonely questions,” the uncertainties that hunt us down and seek to devour us, the unceasing and radical instabilities of the human condition. He found his answers in his confidence that God had called him by name, that he belonged to God, and that God would accompany him through his tribulations--the central themes of the seven passages he conveyed to his friend.

It seems to me that our answers to our own "lonely questions" lie where Bonhoeffer found his: in the recognition that God calls each of us, that each of us belongs to Him, and that He will never, ever leave us. On the days when anxieties bedevil us, we can find a saving grace in the knowledge that the most powerful and loving force in the universe summons us, embraces us, and stands with us--now and forever.

         To the end of the age.

         And to the end of the age. Amen.

Candy, Anger, and Sleep

A sermon shared at the Suttons Bay Congregational Church, September 25, 2016

Scripture: 1 Timothy 6:6-19

Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra said lots of things that make no logical sense and yet somehow hint at a deep philosophical truth. For example, these days many of us might see some wisdom in his observation that “The future ain’t what it used to be.” And I suppose that every sermon ever delivered—including this one—could be summarized by Yogi’s observation that “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”

Even in resisting the notion that he had made many of these quotable statements, Yogi could not help sounding like Yogi. He once remarked with a wisp of merry defiance: “I never said most of the things I said.” And maybe he didn’t.

 

When it comes to never saying most of the things attributed to you, however, the Hall of Fame champion must be the Holy Bible. Surely, no text in the history of the world has so often been misquoted, selectively quoted, quoted out of context, or quoted to advance decidedly unbiblical agendas. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Anotonio declares that “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” and we know that Shakespeare is right (as usual) because we see this happen with unsettling regularity.

This passage from Paul’s first letter to Timothy is one that is often misquoted and commonly misunderstood, particularly the verse within it that is frequently rendered as: “Money is the root of all evil.” This morning, I want to fix the misquotation and put the phrase back into context. I do not want to do this as a nitpicky and lawyerly exercise in getting language right. Rather, I want to do this because I believe that a correct understanding of this passage forces us to confront one of the most daunting and persistent challenges of human existence.

Let’s start with two relatively minor fixes. First, this scripture does not condemn money in and of itself. If it did, then the passage taken as a whole would not make any sense. After all, it urges us to be “generous and ready to share,” which presumably includes the giving of our financial resources. At the risk of sounding like Yogi Berra, if you have nothing to give then it’s harder to give it.

No, the scripture is worried about our relationship with money. It is not money but the love of money that causes the trouble. The scripture warns that loving money and the stuff it can buy leads us into all kinds of traps and temptations that have nothing to do with the life to which Jesus calls us. And the love of money can work against the generosity of spirit and sharing of resources that the passage tells us we need to foster and pursue.

Second, properly translated this passage does not claim that the love of money is the sole root of all evil but rather that it is a cause of many kinds of evil. I doubt that Paul intended to claim that money holds a monopoly on malfeasance. No, we can get there many other ways, including through hatred, wrath, anger, bias, prejudice, jealousy, fear—fear does a lot of work here, doesn’t it?—and a thousand other weaknesses we are heir to.

Beyond these minor fixes, however, I want to suggest to you that neither money nor the love of it is actually the central concern of this text. I think the passage is actually worried about two much bigger things. The first is that—our spiritual aspirations notwithstanding—we experience life as physical beings. Indeed, that’s precisely why money is problematic: it helps us scratch our physical itches and we can fall in love with its capacity to do so.

The second is that our attachment to this physicality accounts for much of our unhappiness. Our selfishness, our grief, our despair, and our (sometimes paralyzing) anxiety often have a lot to do with our clutching at our physical life and at physical things. This is understandable: our physical being is what we know with the greatest immediacy.

I think it was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who wisely declared: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” At some level of abstraction we understand that this is so. But let’s be honest: our day-to-day existence inundates us with evidence to the contrary.

Say we are spiritual beings if you like, but the reality is that tomorrow we will experience life physically. We will feel the power in our muscles or the aches in our joints; we will know the pangs of hunger or the taste of good food; we will grapple with the discomforts of illness or enjoy the pleasures of good health; we will look around and find no one beside us or we will delight in the touch of a loved one.

The poet Delmore Schwartz described these bodies of ours as “the heavy bear who goes with [us] … in love with candy, anger, and sleep.” The good news is that we will not go through tomorrow alone: God will be with us. The less good news is: so will the bear.

Now, this scriptural passage does not tell us to ignore our physicality. To the contrary, it recognizes the reality that we need “food and clothing.” And nothing in this passage denies that we may find comfort in physical things. Nothing here denies that some physical experiences can even help usher us toward a more spiritual place: witnessing one of our gorgeous Leelanau peninsula sunsets; watching the shimmering water of the bay on a warm afternoon; listening to the spring birdsong in the woods; laughing with beloved friends over food and a little wine, “for our stomach’s sake,” as that first letter to Timothy says elsewhere. Done in the right spirit there is holiness in the breaking of bread, no less than in the praying over it.

In a poem written toward the end of his life, Jim Harrison—who knew a fair amount about this dear peninsula said: “My work piles up, / I falter with disease / Time rushes toward me-- / it has no brakes. Still, / the radishes are good this year. / Run them through butter, / add a little salt.” I can find no evidence anywhere in the Bible that God begrudges us the pleasure of a salted radish. To the contrary, the radish is one of God’s lovely little flirtations in the grandeur of the divine creation.

The problem, of course, is that the bear has much bigger appetites—that can prove hard to control. And the scripture worries that when we chase the gratification of those impulses we will spend our time in pursuit of the wrong things. It is not just that this will have grave consequences for our fellow human beings, because we will have less to share with them. It is that it will have grave consequences for each of us, because we cannot possibly find peace, contentment, and meaning in the temporary possession of things that we know we are going to lose. “It ain’t over til it’s over,” Yogi Berra said; and when it’s over “we can take nothing out of [the world],” the scripture reminds us.

In this respect, the first letter to Timothy stands in a line of thought that we find across cultures, philosophies, and religions. One of the central tenets of Buddhism is that our anxiety and suffering come from our grasping at and clinging to things that are finally impermanent. And the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote: “For no one is worthy of a god unless he has paid no heed to riches. I am not, mind you, against your possessing them, but I want to ensure that you posses them without tremors; and you will only achieve this in one way, by convincing yourself that you can live a happy life even without them, and by always regarding them as being on the point of vanishing.” Because they are.

This scripture therefore presents us with one of the fundamental puzzles of human existence, a riddle with which our species has struggled for, oh, only about a few thousand years. Yes, we know that our physical existence is fragile, temporal, and short. But it is also our most present reality. Given that, how can we reach for that ultimate and greater reality that a deeply spiritual existence offers?

This scripture provides an answer to this question, although in our preoccupation with its uncomfortable admonitions about money we may miss it. It tells us that the way out of the dilemma—the way out of our very human fixation on our own physicality—lies in our service to others. “Be rich in good works,” the scripture tells us. “That you may take hold of the life that really is life.”

In his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl recounts his experiences as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. He describes, in painful detail, how he and his fellow prisoners lost everything that had defined their lives and descended into a place of unspeakable grief and suffering. It was a trauma from which many of the prisoners could not recover, and they withered and perished in their despair.

And, yet, Frankl observed that some of the prisoners endured these horrific experiences in a way that gave their existence continued meaning. Those prisoners found something to do, some work to keep them occupied. And that work was often not for their own benefit, but for that of other prisoners.

Frankl writes: “For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. That truth is that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Love, this scripture tells us, is the greatest thing, the only thing that finally matters. It has been so since before the hidden foundations of the world. It is infinite and endless. And yet, paradoxically, it is possible for us to waste it on the wrong things.

God wastes none of it, even while dispensing it with wild abandon. God showers it upon us in an extravagant and unmerited—almost seemingly reckless—show of delight and forgiveness and peace and grace. God spends love as though it were an inexhaustible resource—because it is.

“Go and do likewise,” a voice says to us, sometimes coming as a still soft voice, sometimes as a thunderous declaration and shaking of us by the lapels. “Go and do likewise. And, if you do, you will dwell within the light of the world. You will spread the light of the world. You will be the light of the world. And you will be so now, and forever and ever and ever.” 

Amen. And amen.

Redemption Song: Reflections After Orlando

On Sunday morning at 2:02 a.m. I was restlessly reading in bed. I knew why I was having trouble sleeping. Lisa was away, which I always find disorienting. And J.J. and I had stayed up late to watch television and eat bowlfuls of ice cream with fresh strawberries—not exactly a prescription for sound and settled rest. I read my book and listened through the window to the sounds of the frogs and birds calling to each other on our little lake. As I did so, one of the worst massacres in American history was occurring at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

*

The days that followed have brought many words but little understanding. Events like this confuse and confound us, and our language multiplies correspondingly. In the face of the irrational, we are inundated with reasons; in the face of the inexplicable, we are inundated with explanations; in the face of loss and despair, we are inundated with the voices of the aspiring and opportunistic. The cacophonous clamor of our words overwhelms real communication and true communion. A cynic might say: on the eighth day man invented language, and no one—no one save God—has heard anything since.

We cannot even agree on the subject matter of the conversation. Should we be talking about gun control, or law enforcement, or terrorism, or mental health resources, or radicalized religious movements, or our long and ugly history of violence against the LGBT community, or our long and ugly history of violence—period?  Should we be focused on the shooter, trying to understand his motives and methods in our efforts to keep this from happening again? Or should we direct our attention toward the victims, trying to ensure that the magnitude of this tragedy does not reduce them to statistics? Should we talk about the numbers? Or should we talk about the victims as individuals, learn their stories, and say their names?

  As a community of faith, we do what we are doing tonight and have done for two thousand years. We gather; we mourn; we reflect; we comfort each other; we pray. But this response, too, has become a subject of debate. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, a number of political leaders and celebrities publicly expressed their prayers for the victims and their families and friends. This elicited a bitter response from some people: “stop talking about your prayers and do something,” they said. And how do we answer that challenge? How do we think about what we are doing tonight, right here, right now? Do we view our prayers as an end—an exercise in healing, a confession of our own violent natures, and a plea for guidance from the only One who finally has any to offer? Or do we view our prayers as a beginning—an exercise in recommitment, a promise to work tirelessly in opposition to violence and hatred, and a declaration that we will strive courageously to bring God’s kingdom of peace into this world and to all of our brothers and sisters—every last one, everyone in, nobody out?

And—if we cannot figure out how to talk and think about these things—then how can we help our children and grandchildren do so? Years ago, the brilliant essayist and physician Lewis Thomas wrote an article called “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.” The thrust of the essay was that Thomas had lost his ability to listen with the same pleasure to a piece of music that had previously brought him hope and consolation. The threat of nuclear annihilation—estimates of eighty million dead—had made the music feel irrelevant, disconnected from the current state of things. He wrote:

If I were sixteen or seventeen years old and had to listen to [those descriptions of nuclear war,] or read things like that, I would begin thinking up new kinds of sounds, different from any music heard before, and I would be twisting and turning to rid myself of human language.

The challenges posed to our youth now seem even greater. Talk of nuclear annihilation can feel comfortingly abstract—I remember drills in elementary school where we would be ordered to squat under our desks in preparation for a hydrogen bomb, an exercise that struck us as hilariously detached from anything like reality. But today our children hear stories of people murdered in cold blood as they sit in a classroom, or at a movie theater, or in a Bible study meeting at church. The victims at the club in Orlando did not initially realize what was going on because they were so caught up in the joy, the dancing, and the music. 

So we struggle with the limitations of our words and our language. But struggle we must, because the end of all goodness in the world lies in a quiet acquiescence to violence. If the crucifixion of Jesus Christ teaches us nothing else, surely it teaches us that much. As I have previously observed in this very sanctuary: I do not know many things; but I know that evil has a muscular co-conspirator in silence.

So we go to language—including the language of music—because we must. We can do nothing until we can navigate the language of grief, the language of despair, the language of outrage, the language of justice, the language of inclusion, the language of compassion. “In the beginning,” we are told, “was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was God.”

*

The book I was reading on Sunday morning at 2:02 a.m. is called Letters to Yesenin, by the late author Jim Harrison. In the nineteen-seventies, Harrison found himself in a profoundly depressed state: living in poverty, working on a hardscrabble farm, filled with despair, and contemplating suicide. In an oddly therapeutic exercise, he wrote a series of short letters ostensibly addressed to a Russian poet named Sergei Yesenin, who had hanged himself in 1925. The book is a compilation of those letters.

The book is hard reading: brutally candid; explicit; tortured; and confused. You can perhaps understand why it was not helping much in my effort to get to sleep. But, at the same time, the book is a kind of redemption song. Harrison finds his way out through a combination of language, image, and memory. I suspect that if we are to find our way out, then our path must look much the same.

Let me describe to you two passages in the book that I think may be particularly helpful tonight. In one, Harrison describes a “cold autumn evening” when the impulse toward self-destruction became particularly strong. But then he saw something that brought the compulsion to a full and immediate halt. He writes: “My year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.”

In a second passage, he acknowledges the abundant challenges of the world but also finds a reason to live through a small and isolated act of kindness and caregiving. “To be frank,” he writes at the end of the book, “I’d rather live to feed my dogs, knowing the world says no in ten thousand ways and yes in only a few.” You do not need to agree with Harrison’s math to agree with the point: if we have any chance at all, it is in the yes of love; it is the only hope we have now; it is the only hope we have ever had.

When two or more are gathered in His name then He is there. So we gather tonight in the name and in the presence of the most powerful force in the universe, the One who knows your name, the One who knows the names of each and every victim in Orlando, the one who became a victim of human violence that we might know that He suffers with us, beside us, for us.

We gather to cry: “yes.”

We gather to shout: “stop.”

And the people said: Amen.