February 27, 2011 | 
Author 
The “King James Bible” was completed 400 years ago. St. Andrew’s will mark
the anniversary with a sermon and discussion series that examines the
question, “how are our spiritual texts chosen and shared today?” Over the
next 9 weeks (the season of Epiphany) we will ask who is shaping our
cultural canon today, and we will encourage you to participate by letting us
know which texts and kinds of texts (movies, songs, books, etc.) inform you
and move you when you look for deep meaning in your life.
Posted in 
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Wiki-Bible Week Seven
Eat, Pray Love
Luke 14:12-23
Russell Daye
February, 20, 2011
St. Andrew’s United Church, Halifax
This sermon will try its best to steal some mojo from two stories. One takes up 334 pages; the other takes 240 words. One’s teller is self-referential, self-indulgent, and sometimes self-obsessed. The other makes no reference to its author. Both are told by people who can drive you crazy if you let them. One employs an easy, comfortable irony. The other’s irony is sharp and indicting. One is a current mega-bestseller. The other is a tiny piece of the biggest seller of all time. The two stories are Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love and Jesus’ parable of the Great Banquet. Although the two stories could not be more different, they both compellingly carry us to the same place….
Let’s start with the shorter story. A man, obviously wealthy, decides to throw a great banquet. He invites many guests, also people of some means. The feast is prepared, but they don’t come. Some say, ‘Oh I’ve got business to attend to.’ One’s just been married. Reasons are given. The man, determined to have his big party sends his servants out to the streets to bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame – a collection of people not unlike the 250 who sup in our hall every Sunday. The servants do so, but still there is room, so the man sends them out into the countryside to ‘compel’ people to come in, demanding: ‘my house will be full!’
To capture meaning from this parable, it is important to understand the backdrop for all of Jesus’ teaching and preaching. Jesus’ peasant listeners in Palestine were living lives made miserable by the dictates of the Roman Empire. Already impoverished, they were taxed at backbreaking rates, causing many to lose everything. And comfort could not be found in religion. The priests were collaborators and tax collectors for the imperial authorities. Politically, economically, even spiritually, the empire of Caesar was the dominant reality in their lives, one that imposed hunger, heartbreak, dislocation, and constant fear.
Jesus’ parables were told to assert a contrary reality, an opposite reality, which lay hidden behind the veil of tears of the normal human condition. A reality that he believed gestated within and among his listeners. This is what he called the Kingdom of Heaven – or, more inclusively translated, the Reign of Heaven. And what was this reality like? The Reign of Heaven is like the biggest party of the year. The Reign of Heaven is like the one time when everyone has a full belly, when everyone eats the same food. The Reign of Heaven is like the one day when the community sets aside its troubles, its feuds, its constant grinding fear and comes together in joy, generosity, and hope. The Reign of Heaven is like the one day that is not dominated by the monolithic reality of empire. To quote one parable scholar, ‘Jesus was a party animal.’ The Reign of Heaven is a constant celebration. What was his first miracle? He turned 164 gallons of water into wine at the wedding in Cana. Over and over again, his stories make reference to parties like banquets and wedding feasts.
But this parable tells us there is a problem. The Reign of Heaven lies behind the veil of ordinary life, calling us into communion with a deeper life, one marked by sheer joy, the absence of fear, and equal, intimate celebration – but we don’t go. Some of us have business to attend to. Some of us have just been married. Some of us have just had kids. Some of us have hearts filled with bitterness or guilt because our businesses, our marriages, or our kids have not turned out the way we wanted them to. Some of us have done very well in this life and we fret and worry over our gains so the day won’t come when we have to sup at St. Andrew’s on a Sunday night. So how do we break through these barriers and find Jesus’ party? Eat, Pray, Love has something to say to us about this.
Elizabeth Gilbert has an extraordinary power to inspire ambivalence. She is, by turns, self- absorbed and generous, shallow and deep, naively new age and surprisingly insightful. Reading her memoir, one alternates between thinking ‘boy, that’s a real nugget of wisdom there’ and wanting to shout at her ‘grow up, get real, and get over yourself!’ Hers is the story of a woman in her thirties who has suffered a brutal divorce, an extended and traumatic break-up with another lover, and depression that needs treating with therapy and drugs. She loses everything: all her money, all her peace of mind, all her understanding of herself. She leaves home for a year, which she spends in three places and three pursuits: eating in Italy; praying in India; and loving in Bali. Italy is all about pasta and pastries, breezy friendships, and trying (successfully) to refrain from taking a lover in sex-saturated Rome. Her time in India is spent within the confines of a single ashram, practicing long hours of meditation, chanting and service. In Bali, she finds various kinds of love: the love of an ancient healer who embodies all the joy of the universe; the love of new friendship; and a return to erotic love after 18 months of panicked flight from it. The year ends with a wiser and happier Liz, one restored to health, to balance, to hope, and to the ability to love.
Throughout, Eat, Pray, Love has fun little anecdotes about the pleasures and follies of travel in new places. The reader is reminded of his own episodes of joy and embarrassment. It made me remember my first truly cross-cultural experience. At twenty-one years of age, I had packed up my ten words of French and moved to Quebec City to take an immersion in Canada’s other official language. After our instructor had given us a little more vocabulary, she sent us on some field work: ‘go to a bar and offer to buy a Francophone a drink if she or he will chat with you.’ A small group of us went to a tavern. There was one other patron in the house – a man sitting on a stool near the bartender. Drawing the short straw, I was dispatched to chat with him. I walked up meaning to say: ‘Voulez vous avoir une bierre avec moi?’ (‘Would you like to have a beer with me?). But, for some reason the words came out: ‘Voulez vous avoir un bain avec moi?’ Which translates as ‘how would you like to have a bath with me?’
But I’m wandering off topic here. Eat, Pray, Love is not ultimately about travel and cultures but about communion – at many levels. One level is communion with one’s own angels and demons. This is how she describes a moment on an Asian beach that marks the beginning of her year-long odyssey:
I went into meditation one evening … I said to my mind, ‘This is your chance. Show me everything that is causing you sorrow. … One by one the thoughts and memories of sadness raised their hands, stood up to identify themselves. I looked … at each unit of sorrow … in its horrible pain. And then I would tell that sorrow, ‘It’s OK. I love you. I accept you. Come into my heart now. … Then I said to my mind, ‘Show me your anger now.’ One by one, my life’s every incident of anger rose and made itself known…. I felt every piece of anger completely … and then I would say, ‘Come into my heart now. You can rest there. It’s safe now.’ … Then came the most difficult part. ‘Show me your shame,’ I asked my mind. Dear God, the horrors that I saw then. A pitiful parade of all my failings, my lies, my selfishness, jealousy, arrogance…. and I would say, ‘I do want you. … You are welcome here.’
This is an amazing moment, made even more so by the fact that it comes before her year-long pilgrimage. It is as though all the wisdom she would glean in her travels, at the ashram and with the old healer in Bali, is already with her – an older and wiser Liz who reaches to her from the future and pulls her into the journey she needs. She stops warring with those little demons inside her that carry her pain. She stops trying to meditate or medicate them away. She befriends them, welcomes them to the table and says, as one would to a crying child, ‘Shhh, shhh, you are safe here. I will hold you.’
I will confess that India was the most compelling part of the book for me – perhaps because I’d spent several weeks myself in a monastery on the banks of the Ganges, twisting my body into pretzel shapes and meditating so long that I thought I’d never have feeling in my bottom again. Liz has a dramatic experience of union with the divine in her ashram. Here is how she struggles to find words to describe what happened in the meditation hall one night:
Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely. I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and I entered the void… a limitless place of peace and wisdom. The void was conscious and it was intelligent. The void was God.
Besides being a very powerful experience, this sounds like a very private experience between Liz and God. But it only happens when she has been in deep communion with other people for weeks on end – praying and chanting beside them, scrubbing floors with them, breaking bread with them, discussing her troubles with them. Time in an ashram or monastery looks profoundly solitary from the outside, but the group experience can be uncommonly and beautifully intimate. The Buddhists call it Sangha – the community of seekers. Sanga is a vehicle to the transcendent. In fact, Liz’s deepest communion with God happens when the whole community together descends into almost total silence for an extended period. The sanctity of that group silence opens a door for her. Even this silence, this not talking to each other, is a communal experience. I’ve been there. Going into days-long silence is a fearsome prospect. Members of the community need each other and find ways to develop solidarity that go beyond words. The group silence, the holding of each other’s fear, makes Liz’s experience of God possible because people are both getting out of the way and carrying her there. Even alone in the meditation hall, revelling in God, Liz knows herself to be deeply connected: ‘I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe.’
Liz is having a direct immersion in the Reign of Heaven. She is communing with God and with the whole cosmos. It sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Let’s circle back to Jesus’ parable at this point and look at it through the lens of Liz’s journey. Liz comes to the Reign of Heaven, to joyous communion with all that is not in spite of her loss, her depression, or her inner demons but because of them and because of her new way of relating to them. The very things that we spend our lives trying to flee from turn out to be doors to God’s great and eternal party.
And what is true for the person is true for the community. I have often noticed that the assembly that gathers for Sunday Suppers enjoys each other’s company with a raucous abandon that we rarely experience in here, during this time. Jesus parable speaks to us about this. In God’s eternal party Sunday morning in the sanctuary and Sunday evening in the hall will conflate into one ongoing reast. They will come in, the poor and the rich, the lame and the dancing. They will come from the housing projects and the gated communities, from the city centre and the boonies. And the broken, the grieving, the vulnerable will lead the way. Their very need, our very need, our hungry hearts, to steal a phrase from Bruce Springsteen, will be the doors to the banquet. There together we will eat and we will pray, perhaps at the same time, uttering praise to God with our mouths full. There together we will love fully and unconditionally everyone and every part of ourselves.
1Corinthians 2:1-12
Russell Daye
February 6, 2011
St. Andrew’s United Church, Halifax
When we’ve been here ten thousand years…
bright shining as the sun.
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise…
than when we’ve first begun.
Twenty-five years ago, at the end of a week-long Canadian Theological Students’ Conference, closing worship was held in a light-filled chapel. There we sat, one hundred or so: women and men; straight and gay; liberals, radicals and conservatives; Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, evangelicals. As the service progressed, something strange and beautiful happened. We began to melt. The first sign of it was that some began to weep. And then our singing changed. It became, at the same, time much more intense and much more relaxed, natural. When the hymns ended, our breathing continued the rhythms of the sacred music, even in the silence. When women and men rose to preach or pray, the distance between them and their listeners seemed to disappear. I remember looking at the preacher, a Catholic with a Kentucky drawl he’d kept since childhood, from a distance of about thirty feet, but it seemed as though his blue eyes were right before me, as though his voice was being projected from only inches away.
The hundred gathered there had done a lot of fighting that week: about the authority of scripture; about missions to convert non-Christians; about the ordination of gays and lesbians and women, even. We had fallen into like-minded cliques, made enemies of a sort. Now the walls between us were being gently dismantled, stone by stone, by hidden hands of light – and with it our body armour: the set jaws; the raised shoulders; the taught diaphragms. We began to love each other. To love even our enemies, especially our enemies. We came to understand that we shared something that was deeper than any of our differences. We all believed that a great and silent participant was with us, ministering to us, touching us with grace. As we loved others, we came to love ourselves – without hesitation or qualification. We each saw ourselves as we were seen: as a creature of light, with no dark spots… bright shining as the sun …
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise…
That’s the last verse of Amazing Grace. Here’s the first:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me….
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. Around the same time as that students’ conference, some versions of Amazing Grace came out with the word ‘wretch’ replaced by a less offensive one, like ‘soul.’ There were debates about the wisdom, even the propriety of such a change. Folks like John Spong weighed in. Some argued that it wasn’t appropriate to have people refer to themselves as wretches. Well, I’ve been your pastor for almost six years and the verdict is in on you lot: You are wretches. You’ve got your dark spots. Ok, let’s get the pronouns straight here. We are wretches. You’ve known me long enough to know that I’ve got my dark spots too. You and I, we are companions in wretchedness!
Let’s explore our wretchedness a little bit. I’d like to take fifteen or twenty minutes or so and expound broadly on your wretchedness, but part of mine is that I have a serious attachment to material gain, in particular my salary. So, let’s take a different tack. Let’s investigate wretchedness by looking at the wretch who wrote Amazing Grace – and he really was one. John Newton was born in 1725, the son of a London shipmaster, and went to sea at a young age. A rebel who frequently got into trouble, he was dragooned into the Royal Navy. After attempting to desert, he was whipped and humiliated in front of his crewmates. It was such a psychic blow that he contemplated suicide. Soon he found himself working on a slave ship, where he continued to be such a troublemaker that his captain dumped him in West Africa to become a slave himself – in the service of an ‘African duchess.’ After he was rescued by a man dispatched by his father, he sailed home on the Greyhound, which was caught in a horrific storm. Calling out to God, he underwent a conversion experience and became a man of faith. He gave up profanity, gambling, and drink – but not working in the slave trade. In fact, Newton’s new stability made him more effective in the brutal commerce of human cargo. He went on to captain slave ships.
This is a key biographical point. The story of Amazing Grace’s author as a slave trader who was converted is well known. But most who have heard this tale assume that it happened in a flash; that Newton went from being a predatory wretch to a champion of the downtrodden in the flash of one brilliant moment. The truth is much more complex. Newton himself, looking back in the latter years of his life, saw that this first conversion was incomplete and that his transformation had played itself out over a number of decades. But it did come to fruition. Newton had more moments of trial and conversion, one during an awful fever, another one after a stroke. He abandoned the slave trade. He had a run of seven frustrating years trying to become a clergyman while earning his keep as tax collector. When he finally did get a pulpit, his preaching was so compelling that his church had to build a new gallery to accommodate all those who wanted to hear him. Newton became a truly rare phenomenon in the church: a minister whose fire warmed bishops and Dissenters, establishment figures and evangelicals, rich and poor … and, yes, abolitionists. His conversion became complete. Along with his friend William Wilberforce, he became a champion of the stop slavery movement. His abolitionist tract was a bestseller. He lived to see the passage of the Slave Trade Act.
It was to illustrate his 1773 New Year’s Day sermon that Newton wrote Amazing Grace …
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see…
T’was Grace that taught
my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
Grace, grace, grace… Looking at Newton’s life, you can see it working on him, pursuing him incessantly over the long years, breaking him open, filling him with fear, pouring light through the cracks, cooking him, moulding him like wax. Or perhaps all that grace was doing was burning the scales from his eyes… I once was blind but now I see. I once was blind to the light in those children, women, and men stuffed down in the hold to die in stench or be sold as chattel. I once was blind to the light in me. I once was blind to the hidden hands that minister to all of us, keeping us alive, touching us gently or tearing us open to grace. But now I see, I see all of these people – captives and masters, predators and prey – the way God sees them: as creatures of light.
And what about us? What about this assembly of wretches? Sometimes, when I stand before you, the space between us closes and I see your eyes bright and close. Sometimes, sometimes I get glimpses of you as God must see you: full of light, each shining, not self-contained, but merging with the light of those around you; becoming the hidden hands that minister. I saw you like this on the day we read the story of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany and then the children anointed us for our own deaths, and on the All Saints Days when you silently walked up to light a candle. I saw you like this the day we voted on same sex marriage – all of you, those for, those against. I saw you like this at funerals for people with names like Leni and Wilf and Abby and Bob. I saw you like this two weeks ago when we heard Cohen’s Hallelujah. In those moments I want very much for each of you to see yourself as God sees you: a child of light, without an ounce of wretchedness, without a single dark spot. I would like for this to happen in the flash of one brilliant moment, but, like John Newton, our conversions are mostly slow. We take a lot of heating up, a lot of breaking open, a lot of pouring of light through our cracks before we rush to close them. But don’t worry. There is time.
When we’ve been here ten thousand years…
bright shining as the sun.
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise…
than when we’ve first begun.
Wiki-Bible Week Four
Heart of Darkness
Micah 6:1-8
Russell Daye
January 30, 2011
St. Andrew’s United Church, Halifax
Last night I attended the annual Northwood dinner and was proud when one of our own received a major award. George Buckrell was named the Hedley G. Ivany Senior of the Year. His acceptance speech was classic George: warm, direct, and brief. But the list of his contributions to the community read out before hand was long and impressive. I didn’t know half of what George had been up to. Think about that sentence. When a minister says that about one of his parishioners, it’s not usually a good sign! The line from George’s speech that I remember best goes something like this: ‘originally I was going to say that I am humbled by this award, but Mary tells me that nobody who knows me well will buy that.’ Perhaps the line caught my attention because I was already thinking about humility. This week’s reading from Micah includes one of the best known verses in the Bible: He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
At the same gathering I ran into John Young, who was the one to suggest this week’s Wiki-Bible text: Heart of Darkness. Last week’s sermon took its inspiration from the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah. Before we move on, I’m not quite ready to let go of Cohen. Here are some lines from Cohen’s song The Future that serve as a good bridge to the disturbing brilliance of Conrad’s novella:
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
Conrad’s tale is told by a narrator named Marlow who travelled from his native England down the Congo River to the heart of Africa. The terrain he passed through was stinking hot, closed in by thick jungle, and ever more dangerous. What he was to encounter is presaged in these lines from an early page:
I’ve seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men – men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.
To use Cohen’s language, Marlow had entered a world that was sliding in all directions. The storm had reached the threshold and overturned the order of the soul. The storm into which Marlow was drawn was produced by the great and horrible encounter between African and European civilizations. Its manifestations were imperial armies wreaking havoc, millions bleeding away into the slave trade, and colonial enterprises lustfully extracting and sending north rivers of ivory and rubber and ore. The red-eyed devils of greed and desire were certainly at play, but the flabby devil of folly was having his day more than any other. Today we use one word to describe this great storm in which the devils danced: colonization. But somehow that label is not strong enough. It’s too clinical. It does not convey the horrific disorientation produced by the storm.
But Conrad’s prose succeeds where the label fails. He describes perfectly the dance of the flabby devil – the myriad ways in which men’s souls are overturned and they become cowards or brutes or sloths or traitors to their own ideals. Marlow, watching this nightmare, hears of one man who is different. A man named Kurtz, who lives by higher ideals. A white man who has come, not to exploit or destroy the ‘savages’, but rather to save them. Everyone who has encountered this man has been moved by him: by the power of his speech; by his capacity to bring out the best in all who meet him. For Marlow the journey to the heart of Africa becomes above all a journey to meet this great, white man, this saviour.
Those of you who have seen the movie Apocalypse Now, which is based on Conrad’s novella, will know what kind of a saviour Kurtz turns out to be. The man of grand thought and high morals has gone mad. He has become the supreme servant of the all the devils. He has made a little kingdom at the heart of Africa and there reigns horror.
For three years, in another hot country of dark-skinned peoples, I watched the same storm, the same dance of the devils. Nine years ago, almost to the day, my family and I took the slow, hot drive along the coast of Fiji’s largest island, Viti Levu. We had landed in Nadi, the airport town, a few days earlier and had to wait for our luggage, which American Airlines had sent to Belgium, to catch up with us. I had enjoyed our days on the west coast, which is sunny, open and dry by Fiji’s standards. As our journey in the van curved to the southeast and into the dampness of the trade winds, however, the flora became ever darker, ever more dense. The sky took on murky shades, and the air seemed to become liquid, forcing the lungs to labour to pull it in and push it out. By the time we reached our new home outside the capital, driving the last metres through narrow lanes that squeezed the sides of the van with impossibly lush foliage, I felt as though I was being compressed into a strange world – one in which people do not live on the hard surface of a planet but rather in the furry skin of a sweaty creature.
In many ways my trip was a parallel, if less dramatic, journey to that of Marlow. Like him: I was a white man, used to cool climes and open spaces, inserting myself among brown peoples with alien practices carried out in a strange environment. Like Marlow, I was entering a country turned upside down by the storm of colonialism. Like Marlow, I was trying to find my footing in a world that seemed to be sliding in all directions. And, like countless white people sent to countless tropical countries, I was presented with the powerful temptation to blame the brown-skinned people for all of the mess, to assume that the flabby devil found its natural home in their dark breasts and their heavy air. Almost daily, I met ex-pats – would-be-saviours in churches, NGOs, and air conditioned business offices – who succumbed to this temptation. On my worst days, caught in the flabby folds of the devil, I became one of them.
And then, like Marlow, I met a great man, a man who stood out in the storm, who was unlike anyone else in I met in terms of the clarity of his vision. But this man was not a Kurtz, not a white saviour of the brown-skinned peoples. He was the anti-Kurtz. His name was Ratu Joni Madraiwiwi. Ratu is the Fijian word for chief. Ratu Joni, as everyone called him, was one of the highest chiefs in Fiji. More than anyone else I can recall from that time, Ratu Joni lived up to Micah’s teaching: ‘… what does the LORD require of you, … to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’
If anyone had cause to go mad and betray his own ideals, it was Ratu Joni. From a long line of men who had protected and governed Fiji, Joni threw his heart into serving his nation during difficult times – only to see things slide in all directions. Coup d’état followed coup d’état. Unrest destroyed the economy, making it vulnerable to the red-eyed devils that came for their fish, their wood, their ore, and their beaches. Ratu Joni became a high court judge but eventually resigned when a coup brought in what he considered an illegitimate government. Things stabilized for a time and he was appointed Vice President, but after yet another coup he had to leave that post. Political and communal violence spread and Joni had to listen to the incessant scolding and prevarications of officials from the British Commonwealth and its member countries – almost all of whom seemed to forget that the precursor to the commonwealth, the British Empire, had brought the storm to Fiji in the first place.
But Ratu Joni did not go mad and betray his ideals. He did the opposite. He went sane and became a much needed embodiment of wisdom and humility. With ex-pats like me, whom he had every reason to resent, he was gracious and encouraging. With paternalistic pundits from America and Britain and Australia, he was patient. With hot-headed politicians he was calm. He did not succumb to the temptation to manoeuvre for power even when he was being told daily – and rightly! – ‘if you we’re running the show around here things would be a lot better.’ He kept the devils of resentment and despair at bay.
I wish I could tell you that things are going well in Fiji, but that is neither true nor the good news that sermon has to offer. The good news is that there is a way to keep the devils at bay, the red-eyed ones and flabby rapacious ones. When we are in a situation of chaos or conflict there is a way to keep the devils at bay. When we are in a situation where we encounter ‘the other’ whose customs and ideals (sometimes even their morals) are profoundly different from ours and the little devils are whispering in our ears ‘they are dangerous; they are inferior’, there is a way to keep those devils at bay. It’s is not Kurtz’s way but the anti-Kurtz’s way, the way of Ratu Joni. It is not the way of genius. It is not growing oneself to a place of greatness in which you understand the context better than everyone else and pour wisdom up on them. The way lies in holding to a few and simple imperatives: do justice; love kindness; and walk humbly with your God – and with ‘the other.’
We don’t have to go to Fiji or the Congo to find ‘the other’. Last night, after leaving the Northwood dinner at the Westin Hotel, I stopped by Palookas’ Boxing Gym to see the end of an evening of fights. It was a drive of five minutes but that little journey took me across dramatic divides of race and class and culture. In this city that is ever more heterogeneous, all of us encounter ‘the other’ all the time. We are constantly given opportunities to hold to Micah’s great and simple teaching. I hope you have your own Ratu Joni to hold as an example. If you don’t, I’d suggest that you find one. They are here. They are of every race and every class and every religion. They walk humbly with their God; and they are infectious. That’s the good news.
Wiki-Bible Week Three
Hallelujah
Isaiah 9:1-4
Russell Daye
January 23, 2011
St. Andrew’s United Church, Halifax
(Following the singing of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah)
Any of us who have lost ourselves in fierce and tender touch know that human lovemaking can become a dance with the divine. The rhythms of giving and receiving, emptying oneself and absorbing the other, sometimes … sometimes become sacred, taking us to that place where we are nothing … everything … nothing … everything … and then, impossibly, both at once.
Human religion has long known about the connection between sex and spirit. From temple prostitution to the Kama Sutra to tantric sex to the Song of Solomon, religion has seen lovemaking between humans as a door to lovemaking with the divine.
Another Canadian songwriter, Joni Mitchell, put it simply: love is touching souls. When two people touch souls they open themselves to Big Soul, to the Holy Spirit. Your body knows this, doesn’t it? Your breath remembers the time when its rhythms became those of another, two as one, and then one melting into something much greater than itself – a sea of love. Your skin remembers a time when it warmed to the point of becoming liquid, when it drank so deeply of another’s touch that you bathed in light.
Your body remembers, but the Church forgot. Perhaps the Church’s flight from sex was a reason for our culture’s flight from Spirit. Leonard Cohen reminds us with these lines:
And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah
One amazing thing about these lines is that they are tucked in the middle of a song filled with pathos. Hallelujah is the song of a man who has loved deeply and has been broken completely by that love:
Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah is the song of a man who opened his heart completely to another, and then through that open passage flowed not the bliss he expected, but pain and loss and defeat:
I know this room, I’ve walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
Two great biblical figures are evoked by the song. The first is the King David who, after defeating his rivals and enemies and building Israel’s kingdom to the greatest power would ever experience, after being blessed by the Lord in a way that no other leader has been, betrays it all through an illicit romance with Bathsheba, the woman he saw bathing on the roof. The affair begins with adultery, moves on to murder, and ends with a curse upon his whole household. For the rest of his life he is haunted by violence and betrayal. The other is Sampson, the great warrior who is undone by Delilah. She seduces him into revealing his hair as the source of his strength and cuts it off. Betrayed, he has his eyes gorged out by his enemies and gives his life in a final act of suicidal revenge.
Over the years many people have told me how Hallelujah is a very important piece of music and poetry for them, perhaps more than any other non-biblical (Wiki-Bible) text. I have had a person in her eighties ask for it to be sung in worship. University students, who have never heard of Leonard Cohen, have spoken to me off how moved they were by the Jeff Buckley version. Why is this song so broadly evocative? For some it may be because it reconnects sex and the sacred. But I think it is more than that. For some it may offer the same comfort as other songs of love lost. But I think it’s more than that too.
This is the song of a man who has loved and experienced God in that love. This is the song of a man who has lost love and been deeply wounded. But, above all, it is a song of faith.
I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
The singer has been torn open by love and loss. Out of the wound pours some bitterness and some remorse but those notes are overcome by notes of thanksgiving and praise… Hallelujah … Hallelujah… Hallelujah… Hallelujah.
The singer has found God, not despite his pain, but in the midst of his pain. He has been moved to worship, not by overcoming his torment, but through the power of his suffering. And now this is no longer a song of romantic love but a song of the human condition. Just as lovemaking can be a door to the divine, Cohen’s love song becomes a door to that place where the human soul touches the divine soul, and we see that that touch is not always one of pleasure. It is not always one of bliss. It is not always one of victory. The place where the human soul touches God’s soul is just as likely a place of grief or failure or agony or even rage.
You may never have experienced lovemaking that transported you to a place of Spirit, but I bet you’ve cried out in the night. They may have been cries of childbirth; they may have been cries of grief. They may have been cries of raucous celebration, howling at the moon. They may have been the cries that come with agony of heart. When the breath of those cries moved in you the holy dove was moving too. Hallelujah.
You may have cried with victory, like King David standing over Goliath or looking upon fallen Philistines. You may have uttered baffled groans, like David the adulterer or Sampson blinded, not knowing how you could have been such a damn fool. When those sounds burst from your heart, the Holy Spirit was bursting too. Hallelujah.
As long as we breathe we breathe with God. And the more deeply we breathe, the more deeply we breathe of God. It is better to breathe deeply of love, even love turned to agony than it is to hide in the shallow breath of safety. Cohen’s song is a song of faith that cries out: Live! Live large. Live with passion. For in your passion, in your lovemaking and your love breaking you will dance with the divine.
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
There is a blaze of light in every cell, a blaze of light in every touch, a blaze of light in every act. God, like the power of the atom, is buried in the very texture of life. But we have to touch it and be touched before we can cry Hallelujah. Sometimes that touch will feel like the kiss of a child who loves you unconditionally, in whose eyes you are perfect. Hallelujah. Sometimes that touch will burn you and give off sparks. Hallelujah.
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Wiki-Bible Week One
The King’s Speech
Isaiah 42:1-9
Russell Daye
January 9, 2011
St. Andrew’s United Church, Halifax
Volume after volume has been written trying to come to terms with the wild and violent time that was the twentieth century. Philosophical novels, political histories, interdisciplinary examinations, economic analyses, cultural studies and many other works have wrestled with that era that killed so many hallowed traditions and birthed a pantheon of unruly gods. But none that I have read come close to the compact insight in William Butler Yeats’ poem The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This poem, written in 1919 and looking back on the shocking destruction of the First World War, presaged the momentous change to come. At the heart of that change was the loss of ‘centre’: ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. For Yeats, key to this loss of centre was the abandoning of Christianity as the cohesive belief system of western civilization. He believed that something strange and ferocious would succeed Christianity, and depicted that thing as a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem.
Certainly, in the 90 years since the writing of this poem the world has seen many rough beasts trying to claim the centre – fascism, Stalinism, fundamentalisms – but none, no matter how fervent, has succeeded. Those failures are fortunate, but we still find ourselves in a strange and threatening place. Exactly four hundred years ago a strong, clear, beautifully articulated voice appeared. This was the King James Bible. In many ways it became the voice of the falconer for the English Speaking World. Four centuries later there is no such voice. In this pluralist, post-modern, post-Christian, apparently post-everything time we very often seem to be hovering, our ears bent to the ground listening for that decisive voice but instead hearing a confusing cacophony.
The preachers here at St. Andrew’s have decided that, for the season of Epiphany, seeking enlightenment, we are going to descend and listen to some voices in this cacophony. In a time in which something like the King James Bible could never be produced, we are going to search for ‘Wiki-Bible’. What do we mean by ‘Wiki-Bible’? We mean the texts that people turn to when they seek spiritual meaning, or moral clarity, or deep healing. Wiki-Bible is not so much a collection of texts as a cultural crossroads at which people find and share the stories that shape their lives. By texts we don’t just mean offerings on the written page, but also movies, plays, music, and so on. Martha and I are going to start you off with two sermons that examine movies: for the rest of this sermon we will take a look at The King’s Speech; next week Martha will preach on The Social Network.
Yeats’ depiction of the rough beast emerging in chaos must have resonated with many citizens of Britain and her commonwealth in 1939. Hitler’s tentacles were extending across Europe and Britain was being pulled back toward the nightmare that was supposed to have ended with ‘the war to end all wars’ in 1918. If ever the country needed the strong voice of national falconer it was now. Into that need stepped a most unlikely of pair of characters. The first was Alfred Frederick Arthur George, the Duke of York, second son of King George V, who suffered from a terrible speech impediment. While this handicap was painful and frustrating, until now it had been only a personal problem. After all ‘Bertie’, as he was known to his family, was not to be king; that would fall to his brother, the future King Edward VIII. Bertie could linger in the background, out of the public eye – or, more to the point, out of the public ear. But then Edward turned out to be weak of character, unwise in love, and, worst of all, a Hitler sympathiser. Bertie is thrust onto the throne and into the role of falconer. But how can a man who can barely talk become the voice for a nation? Again, into the need stepped an unlikely hero …. (movie trailer shown)
What is it about this film that is causing such a stir? I can’t remember the last time so many people spoke to me about a movie. What is it about the portrayed relationship between a broken prince and Lionel Logue, an odd and unorthodox commoner, that is so compelling at this time? It is impossible to know how enduring will be the appeal of this film, but for the time being it holds a prominent enough place at our cultural crossroads that I think it should be considered part of this season’s Wiki-Bible.
The film’s power clearly has something to do with leadership. There is an integrity about both men, about their relationship, and about their gift of voice to the nation that comes not out of self-service or the pursuit of power but out of sacrifice, confusion, and suffering. In many ways, the genius of The King’s Speech is a perfect fit for the genius of the Isaiah passage George Buckrell read for us a few minutes ago. Listen to a few verses from the King James Version:
1Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him. 2He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. 3A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. 4He shall not fail nor be discouraged. 6I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; 7To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house. 9Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them.
Isaiah offered this prophecy to Israel during one of her darkest and most confusing hours: her kingdom conquered; her temple destroyed; the people driven into exile. In the prophesy God says to the people, ‘Yes, the former things have passed but new things I will create, and before they spring forth I will send a servant to tell you of them, to teach you how to prepare for them and to teach you how to live through the darkness of the meantime. This is one of Isaiah’s famous ‘servant passages’ in which he tells of a great and humble servant leader that will come. This leader is not a rough beast that guides with booming voice and callous hand, but one who guides with fierce gentleness and brave example.
Dare we, in this post-Christian time, say that the leadership quality of both Bertie and Isaiah’s servant is so appealing because it is Christ-like? The suffering servant who offers hope because he has been wounded by the dark angels of his time and has risen from his pain to offer a way forward. A falconer whose voice is marked not by angry charisma but by love born through loss. A guide whose strength comes not from denying the confusion of the time but from having looked deep into the heart of that confusion and understood it.
Perhaps The King’s Speech is so compelling for Christians because we recognize the touch of Christ in both the growing strength and confidence in Bertie and in the moxie and genius of Logue. We recognize the touch of Christ in this impossible coming together of a King and a commoner. We recognize the touch of Christ in the gift of a clear and faithful voice amid the confusion raging across Europe in that time of rough beasts. And this gives us hope. It gives us hope that clear voices will arise in this time of confusion, that the touch of Christ is present even now. It gives us hope that God is lifting up falconers among us, and that, bending our ears to the ground, we will hear them.