November 23, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
It’s an odd thing really: I look at a building like Trinity or a structure like the Hoover dam and what I see is its frailty, while someone else will perceive the magnificence of human capacity. On the other hand, I look up into the stars under a remote Canadian sky, and feel exuberant joy at my infinitesimal stature in the cosmos. Yet that same person who took pleasure in the capacity of human ingenuity, might feel anxious about our obvious and total insignificance beneath the sparkling dome of the sky.
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Sermons @ Trinity
November 15, 2009
“Walking through the rubble”
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
Good morning.
There is a name for the phobia or syndrome
when someone looks at a bridge,
like the Peace Bridge or the Golden Gate bridge,
and obsesses about its weakness
or points of vulnerability –
all the things that could go wrong
to bring it tumbling down.
I have it.
I don’t remember the name for it,
but whatever they call it,
I have it in a very manageable form.
I don’t get obsessed or freaked out about such things,
but there was a time when it would make me
cold and clammy.
I used to have season tickets to
The Ohio State football games –
ten years visiting a stadium
crammed like a sardine can
with a hundred-thousand people.
It was built in 1922
and I would look up at those huge old steel beams with rivets the size of my fist,
and think about the Titanic.
“Hmmm,” I would muse,
“the Titanic was built in 1911
with defective steel caused by human error
in the manufacturing process…”
Then I would wonder about how to escape
should it all fall down…
when 100,000 people started singing
“We will, we will rock you!”
and stomped their feet.
As a kid,
when a passenger in my parent’s car
while everyone else was enjoying the 5-mile drive
across one of the world’s longest expansion bridge,
over the straights of Mackinac in Michigan,
my face would be pushed up against the window inspecting the cables for fraying.
Still to this day,
I can’t drive or ride through the Lincoln tunnel
under the Hudson River in New York City…
without running through a scenario about what do
if there is an explosion and water starts pouring in.
I laugh at myself even as the thoughts occur to me
but it doesn’t stop me from having the thoughts.
Once, flying home from Africa,
I revealed to Katy that the thought of a plane crash
didn’t bother me half so much
as getting eaten by sharks in the ocean.
She chuckled as she assured me
that we wouldn’t be alive when the shark met us.
I call it the Jesus Syndrome…of course I would.
Not because I have it
and I want to be like Jesus.
But because calling it the Jesus Syndrome reminds me
that there is a good reason to have limits on
how much trust should be placed in anything human,
and to keep the long view
even while trying to accomplish the short term task.
So I have always taken great comfort
in the image of Jesus looking up at the amazing
Temple in Jerusalem,
and Jesus thinking out loud to his friends:
“Yep, those babies are going to come tumbling down
one of these days.”
(The watermark in the Worship Guide is taken from the image of an archeological reconstruction of the Temple).
We can imagine that there just weren’t
too many superstructures for a 1st century
Palestinian peasant to ogle over,
or get paranoid about.
How close did a marginalized guy like Jesus
ever get to a palace, pretorium or coliseum?
So the Temple in Jerusalem would have been
a unique experience.
I like the idea that Jesus had crazy thoughts too.
But as it turns out,
his fantasy about the Temple falling down
was only off by forty years.
The Roman army reduced the Temple to ruins
38 years after Jesus was executed by them.
It’s an odd thing really:
I look at a building like Trinity
or a structure like the Hoover dam
and what I see is its frailty,
while someone else
will perceive the magnificence of human capacity.
On the other hand,
I look up into the stars under a remote Canadian sky,
and feel exuberant joy
at my infinitesimal stature in the cosmos.
Yet that same person who took pleasure in the capacity of human ingenuity,
might feel anxious about our obvious and total insignificance beneath the sparkling dome of the sky.
Okay, so let me back away from the neurosis
I like to imagine I share with Jesus,
and step over to that James Wright poem.
“Suddenly I realize
that if I stepped out of my body I would break
into blossom.”
We all know that experience.
We have all had it, many times,
however we might describe it.
It is that moment
when something so slim and small and ordinary,
like the nuzzle of a horse at Twilight,
breaks into song within us.
Seriously,
it is when some speck of a detail,
some little crack in the matrix,
some little nothing of a moment
that holds no one thing within it to commend itself,
it is when something like that breaks us open…
to see or feel or re-live joy,
that suddenly we know what God is about.
Back to Jesus.
The wall before them,
the Temple wall, was known and ordinary.
It had been there
for their entire lives.
Yes, it was massive and spectacular and a veritable
feat of architecture, power and wealth,
but 40,000 people passed by it every single day.
It was a wall. It was a big wall,
with big stones
made by a freak’n big army of people –
3000 priests as a matter of fact,
because it had to be priests who built it…
according to the rules.
But really, it was a wall.
It was ordinary, every day, walking along it, ordinary.
But pop!
Someone mentioned it,
and Jesus suddenly saw it differently than usual.
In that moment,
in that ordinary moment,
suddenly the ordinary was held
in the arms of a bigger perspective.
“Yeah, it’s big
and a tribute to human power, money and imagination,
but it’s coming down. That wall is toast.”
Now let’s think about that perspective for a moment.
For the people inside that wall,
especially for those on top of it looking down,
Jesus’ words would be bad news.
But for peons,
people like Jesus and his friends,
they knew that their pitifully poor wages paid for it
with taxes they couldn’t afford,
so the thought of it falling down
might have given them a chuckle.
For peasants,
who had to practice their religion in it,
because there was a monopoly on sacred space,
and who had to pay to buy their entrance into it;
and for those same people who also had to pay
for the purchase of an animal they couldn’t afford…
in order to make a sacrifice for sins they couldn’t help;
for those people to think of it as vulnerable,
and awkwardly human,
instead of powerful and threatening,
might have been a piece of God
poking its head up in the midst of the ordinary.
And that is what I really mean to be talking about today, something that is a favorite theme of mine:
We spend too much of our time and energy
looking toward the big, amazing, wowy-zowy events,
and miss the blow-your-mind-amazing
that lives in the small and ordinary.
We seek God in the spectacular and universal,
in the intensely emotional and amazingly mystical…
all the while God’s custom
is to arrive on the wings of the ordinary,
the quiet,
the foolish,
and the particular.
It is a ferocious paradox: the schism between
our expectation of cosmic-sized holiness
and the dust of ordinary God-particles.
I think that we should take it as a big fat hint
that we lust after God in the Temple,
and marvelous sanctuaries,
and spectacular miracles,
and in vistas of stupendous Natural wonders…
all the while God,
like the Whos of Who-ville
that only Horton could hear,
is hanging out and talking to us
in the ordinary small things of every day life.
We should take this schism between what we
expect and what actually IS,
as a hint.
The hint is,
as I am fond of saying,
that the Economy of God
operates on the principle of small loves.
It is the accumulation of small loves over a life-time
that is the measure of true wealth
in the economy of God.
Don’t get me wrong,
the big flashy single acts of love are great
when they come along,
but even though they often give the impression
that they are the course-of-history-changers,
it is more likely
that the big flashy events happened in the first place
because of a series of small,
even insignificant and unnoticeable
acts of love that preceded it.
Bringing canned goods in here each week
is an act of small love.
Stopping to talk with a panhandler,
looking him or her in the eyes,
responding to him or her like you would any person
you know who has asked you for something,
whether or not you decide to contribute a coin…
that is a small act of love.
Pausing,
I mean really pausing your body and mind,
to look at the salesclerk or bus driver or cashier
and breaking out of seeing them in their utilitarian role that is there to help you get your task done…
pausing, to make a real human connection,
even if only for thirty seconds –
that is an act of small love.
Affirming a teenager that is not your kid,
affirming them in their humanity
and in their personhood
and offering them an intentional show
of dignity and respect,
that is an act of small love.
Sharing your time with someone,
or a whole organization of someone’s
who need someone like you –
even if it is to stuff envelopes
or sweep the floor
or pick up people or transport food…
to share our incredibly precious time
is an act of small love.
To give away your money to someone,
or to an organization of someone’s
who help or advocate for someone,
especially when you certainly do not have to,
and no one will really know if you ever do or not…
is an act of small love.
To lower the thermostat, take a bus,
use less of anything,
buy less of almost everything,
or in any other way reduce our carbon footprint
by even so much as a toenail,
is an act of small love.
To stand up for someone or something,
even against your friends and neighbors,
because you do not want to give the impression
you tolerate bigotry or prejudice,
is an act of small love.
To write a letter on behalf of a prisoner of conscience,
to email a representative on behalf of those who are marginalized, to join our voices together,
and insist that coercion or injustice be stopped
in the name of God if no one else,
is an act of small love.
Stopping to listen to someone who talks a lot,
or making an earnest inquiry of someone who rarely talks, or asking to do something with someone who you suspect feels lonely, any of these
are acts of small love.
You see what I mean.
The love does not have to be very big,
it can be quite small.
Being so small that it goes unnoticed
does not make it too small.
That is the kind of small change
upon which the Economy of God generates wealth.
It is in these acts of small love
that God likes to hang out…and is most accessible.
We think it is in the big stuff
but really,
God is in the small stuff –
just as your life and mine
are defined
and shaped
and fed
and held
and changed
and strengthened
by the accumulation of all small things we do…
or, conversely,
that we have chosen not to do.
In the Economy of God
true wealth is accumulated over time,
by change so small
almost no one thinks it is of value any more.
The really big, spectacular
events and experiences and stuff in life,
whether in yours and mine individually,
or in the world around us,
they will all come to an end.
When they do,
looking through the rubble,
we will discover they were all built
upon very small acts of love.
I find that a very comforting thought. Amen.
