First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Ecclesiastes 6 and Mark 9

“A Question of Boundary”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

October 15, 2006

            The ancients have this amazing understanding of water.  It’s clearest in the account of creation in Genesis, but our psalm text today offers the very same view.  And since most of us have flown above the clouds you need to use your imagination to follow their understanding of water.

            Water for them was chaos.  Water was death.  Water was the limit of life.  And life, a life with peace and hope and goodness, is only found where the water is held at bay.  So our psalm this morning paints a picture of God gathering the waters in the sky, holding them in one place.  Again, we don’t think of the sky as a kind of inverted tub, but the ancients did.  Water comes from the sky and this water is regulated, kept from flooding the earth by God’s care and power.

            In the same way the water has been gathered into the seas and lakes and rivers.  This water too has its place and it is God’s hand that keeps it there.  When the water is let loose, then chaos is the result.  When you venture out on the seas and winds come up, you find yourself in the midst of chaos.  And the seas, of course, go to the very limit of creation and from there dragons and a tremendous drop await the unlucky seaman. 

            Although our view of the physical universe is different from the ancients, the theology behind this view remains.  For the picture of the psalm is that God holds the chaos at bay and we live in the midst of the peace.  It’s as if goodness and mercy and rest and a good life are created by God keeping the demons of destruction at bay, keeping the sky aloft and the ground stable, fertile for crops and family life.

            Now I want you to think for a moment about this image, the idea that God is keeping the chaos at bay, keeping the forces of destruction in their place so life can emerge.  Think of this as a place, as your place, where your life happens.  Think of this for a moment.  What does it look like?  Is it a garden, a house, a field, a bed?  For all the times I have done this, contemplated the seas being held at bay and the dry ground of life emerging it always looks the same to me: the place of peace is a moment where I am sitting in a club chair with a pot of coffee and a book and there is an afternoon light, warm, but not hot.  This is a picture of solitude.

            It took me awhile to understand solitude and its public face, anonymity.  I truly began to understand solitude on my first mission trip.  There was about seventy of us who headed down to Juarez, Mexico.  It was a good trip and it was then and there that I began to understand the calling and need for short-term mission.  Yet it was also there that I discovered my absolute need for solitude.  For ten days I was immersed in people and camp music (one too many choruses of Shine Jesus Shine).  I slept with six other men, ate every meal in the midst of a crowd, and never had more than a moment or two without conversation.

            I hadn’t understood the impact this was having until we were waiting for some busses in a sanctuary.  Kids were milling about and it was relatively quiet.  A young girl walked up to the electric keyboard and turned it on.  My eyes went to slits as I waited for a plunking, chinking of some song I was sure everyone would be ready to sing.  Yet, instead, came Chopin.  It was one of his “studies” and she played it very well.  I had a hard time breathing as I bathed in the beauty.  In a moment I had gone from being cast adrift in the chaos of a mission trip to sitting in a quiet place, a sense of solitude.  There were plenty of people still there, but for a moment I was alone in the transport music can bring.

            That may have been the first time I fully recognized my desire for solitude and its companion anonymity.  The need to be alone or unknown is something I still desire.  It is still what I see when I think of God holding the chaos at bay.  In that moment I am sitting alone listening to Chopin. 

A number of years ago the television show Seinfeld had an episode about this.  The premise was Jerry going to a new gym where no one knew him.  There he could be a whole new person he argued, he could be Anonymous Jerry.  For me this is what Manhattan means.  To be part of nine million people would be a somewhat anonymous experience.  Yet, just like the episode, I almost always meet someone I know in Manhattan.  It’s strange, but true.  And each time its as if I have been picked out of a line up, called out of the safety of a crowd.  “I know you.”  And all the glory of solitude and anonymity retreats. 

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, poet, theologian, describes this as our desire for a public life which is unknown and unbothered, completely free.  The public he writes is about being an individual, being alone, as it were, even though your are surrounded by millions.  For Berry, this is a part of our life that has gone too far.  He would listen to me describe the place where chaos is at bay, he would see the images of solitude and anonymity and suggest I am part of the problem.

For Berry, the opposite of the public is what we need, we need the community.  In the community the chaos is held at bay with others, in community the solitude is not being apart but in the midst of a family.  If the individual is the model for the public he writes, then the family is the model for a community.  If being an individual with all freedom and an unfettered self is the public, a life where you are known, and you must give up yourself for others, be part of something greater than yourself is community.

It’s tempting to read Berry as a kind of nostalgic voice for a time when life was defined by the community of farmers whose lives were intertwined by marriage and commerce and dancing and gossip.  It’s tempting to read someone like a Kentucky farmer who speaks of agrarian ideals as a kind of grounding, it’s tempting to listen to him and see our urban life with its frantic quality, to see our need to exercise because we do no physical labor, it’s easy to see the images of the crop and the family meal and the movements of the sun as how life should be if only we could divest ourselves of technology and haste.

Yet, Berry’s point and belief is not a kind of nostalgia for life before computers and MTV.  It’s not a radical rejection.  It is a simple, persistent request to rethink what that place is where the waters are held at bay.  What if that place where we stand and see life as good and peaceful is not one defined by solitude and anonymity but family and friendship and a common life?  It’s not so much a question of elimination of the public individual, but finding a greater value in the community.

There is a good example of this in the passage we read from Mark.  Jesus leaves the disciples to go up the mountain.  When he returns there is a scene brewing.  The disciples couldn’t heal a boy and the father of the child asks Jesus if he can’t do what the others couldn’t.  There is an intriguing exchange and a great prayer, I believe, help my unbelief, yet, the bigger picture of this story is the disciples inability. 

When the disciples ask Jesus why they were unable he says, “this kind can only come out through prayer.”  In other words this is not something you can do on your own.  This is bigger than one person or a few.  Prayer here is an image of what the church would become.  Mark was posing a question for what the disciples would try to imagine when Jesus was not with them; prayer here is the image of the church.

The image of the church, just like it was for the disciples then, so it is now.  It is hard to see, hard to imagine.  Just as the disciples struggled to understand what they would become, what the common faith would become, so it is for us.  For the most part we define the church just as we do everything else, we define the church from the individual: it is what I believe, what I enjoy, what feeds me.  Even in service to others this definition comes to the fore: this is where I feel I can make a difference. 

And there is nothing wrong with this.  The disciples then just as the disciples now try to understand faith as an individual.  The public ideal of the church is not wrong.  This can be a place where people find solitude, even anonymity.  You can come to First Pres, worship, be at peace, and never speak to anyone, see the church as a place where you enjoy the peace of solitude, like the Etude of Chopin where I soaked it in.  And, again, this isn’t bad.  In fact one of things I love about worshiping here is that I forget what’s happening next; I get lost in the movements and sometimes forget I am sitting amidst hundreds.

Yet if this is our only understanding of faith and more importantly church and worship we’ve missed it.  This is what the writer of Ecclesiastes tries again and again to say.  Life is truly good when it is about something more than you.  He’s goading his reader by saying, all the things you’ve kept, someone else, a stranger even, is going to enjoy them more than you.  He’s trying to warn us by saying, unless we live as a community our name is like a stillborns, it is a kind of tragedy of being unknown.

How we define the church, like the place we imagine where the chaos is held at bay, is not bad if it’s about solitude and anonymity; it is though a shame and a loss if it is never more than that.  When we gather for worship we become more than a public at prayer, we become the body of Christ, a community of faith.  To hunger for this, to hope for this, and believe in the power, the possibility of all things is not the individual; it is the community.  Yet, what I wonder is this: do we hope for this community, do we believe in this gathering of prayer?  Are we becoming something in our prayers more than just an individual before God?

At the end of the summer one of the interns for the neighborhood revitalization was in my house.  Her name is Vela.  Now Vela is one of my favorites, but I told her that I was worried about her when she applied to the internship program.  This is what I told her.  I said, “kid, you are the sharpest tool in the shed, but you are demure.  You’re not gregarious.  And knocking on doors for a summer to talk to people about a survey sounded like it would be torture.”  She confessed that she too was apprehensive.

Then she said, “but I got over it.  I realized that if I was going to get the surveys done I need to speak up and want people to listen to me.”  I smiled and told her that with such insight there is not a lot left to learn in terms of adolescence. 

She got over her dependence of being just one person.  She was part of a larger effort and by the end of the summer part of a community.  I truly believe we, as a church, are a lot like Vela was at the beginning of the summer.  We are demure, happy to be silent, happy to be a successful individual.  As a church we need to grow up, become mature and gregarious and define success not in what we can do as individuals, but what it means to be a community.

I keep trying to imagine what that looks like.  And it’s hard.  I am part of generation who only defines success in terms of the individual; the only standard is the self.  It’s hard to even picture what it means for the church to be us as a whole, and not just you and you and me as individuals.  For in our common prayer we are becoming something more, something that defeats the ills of this world, that drives away the demons.  We are becoming something with boundless possibilities. 

Every time we give the church to others, inviting them, encouraging others to become a part we are becoming this church, this more.  Every time we get over our fears about solitude and anonymity, we start to glimpse that something more, that community which exists in the midst of chaos. 

Maybe someday my moment of peace, what I imagine as a moment of rest, will have more than one chair.  Perhaps it might even be the common prayer of the body of Christ in worship.  Amen.