First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Joshua 3 and the Parable of the Ten Virgins

“Yes and No”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

November 2^nd- the Kirkin’- 2008

Kathy downloaded “She Talks to Angels” before we left for Africa. It’s a cool song; it’s a plaintive cry, a kind of defense for a woman whose life is precarious. When you talk to angels and, as the song claims, “they call her out by her name,” when you talk to angels and they know your name not everything in life has worked out, things have not been easy.

The song describes a woman who paints her eyes black as night, keeps the locket of little boy’s hair in her pocket, and wears a cross around her neck. “She knows no lover” is the claim. And as a kind of strategy “she never mentions the word addiction in certain company” and then to keep you around “she’ll tell you she’s an orphan after you meet her family.”

I’ve known people like this. Love people like this. Be it mental illness, violence, poverty, or circumstance (usually it’s a combination of the above), whatever, though, that created the chaos, their life is in fragments. When you talk to someone who lives out of a shopping cart, there is always the image of a having to gather up the broken pieces in a hurry and keep moving.

At first such people are always daunting. I can remember reading chart after chart in the psych hospital after I had gotten to know the people; I can remember seeing a predictable pattern emerge: abuse, a crisis, a time of wandering, self-medication, a transition to more constructive meds than heroin, a safe place for a time, and then, repeat. It always left me wondering what phase they were in at the moment because it wasn’t always clear. Were they coming or going?

Knowing someone, loving someone, whose life is in tatters moves through stages. At first the level of pain and suffering, the despair, hits you like a wave so big that it drags you under and tosses you along the bottom leaving you dazed and confused. Where do you start? What do you do? What can you say? But then you get used to it. You grow accustomed to the truth: life is precarious and sometimes it is destroyed, but somehow no matter the destruction the soul persists. A life can be ruined in a heartbeat. But then you start to see that no matter how precarious, no matter whether they are coming or going, everyone has a name, everyone has a soul.

She talks to angels and they call her out by her name. Sitting in a high-end resort on Lake Malawi in August this Black Crowes song started to play. Maybe it was the contrast, the lovely resort in a land of poverty, maybe we just were finally really broken, but we just sat and listened to these words again and again. As the lake turned purple with sundown and the porter came to fetch our dinner order we just kept listening and listening. Each pass was just as true as the one before; each time there was a moment of clarity, but what it was was not exactly clear; it was much more a feeling than a summary.

Looking back with enough distance to feel safe, I want to say the clarity and connection is that extreme poverty is painfully close to schizophrenia. They both seem to create their own world, a world it hurts to enter. Neither one is subtle, neither covets ambiguity, and they both insist upon the truth even when there is nothing true on the surface, or what is spoken has a truth of its own. Both render people transparent and demanding and relentless. Mostly though each of them demand a question of me: are you going to love, are you here to help, to be in the midst, or are you not? There isn’t a lot of room for “maybe.” You can’t really get back to someone who is dying of hunger. Are you going to help and care or are you going to pass by?

There is a power when you chose to love, and your love is not pity. You can even grow to love the transparency, how life isn’t reduced, but it is terribly simple and basic. This summer we were in the midst of a group of widows whose life was terribly simple and basic and they begged the question: are you going love or not? With one widow though the question keeps lingering and hanging on for me.

Phinas didn’t know how old she was. And that’s alright. Her life isn’t truly measured in years but days. The details of her existence quickly grow irrelevant when you see what it means for her to be raising five grandchildren in the dambo- the free, swampy land where the is no running water, no sanitation, no roads, just hut after hut after hut of grinding poverty. Their house, or hovel, was a kind of makeshift hut without a door, with gaps for windows and straw for a roof. Looking in her eyes, watching her amidst the rabble of children and the curious neighbors who came to see why mzungu were at her door, I caught glimpses of her soul. Beneath the chaos I couldn’t help but think there is the image of God, somehow, beneath the unimaginable suffering was a soul.

Mark Purcell and Sam Chirwa secured a better house for her. The Widows’ Fund put a roof on the new and improved hovel. Kathy went out and bartered for bed frames with Grace and then bought mattresses, blankets and the other pieces that were going to change her miserable existence into something less painful.

On numerous occasions I sat outside her house while others met her or official steps were being taken. Each time what really ate at me was the image of Phinas, a grandmother, sleeping on the ground. None of the widows had beds. The dirt floor of her hovel is damp if not wet in the cold nights of Mzuzu. A grandmother sleeping surrounded by her five grandchildren, huddled together no blankets, no bed, no windows, a roof that is more for shade than for staying dry. I think that was the moment the chaos of extreme poverty somehow got a bit personal for me. It was when the image of God, the grandeur of the soul, Phinas, was washing one of the children in the dirt . . . so broken, but yet she still was. One night maybe I could do this, one terrible night and day; but one life?

Each of the widows we worked with this summer received a big make over. Which was a good day. I was gone driving the ladies from Watertown and Canton when all the big deliveries happened. I wasn’t there but I heard one widow told Sam, “tonight I will go to bed early to sleep in my bed.” But it was Phinas who defined the moment. The next day she told Sam, “I can die now; I have slept in a bed.” It was the first time in her life. It felt great to see that day, to be a part of that day, but it also exacted a toll.

Sitting in the lovely grounds of the Chinteche Inn the tab, the bill arrived; the balance was brought to me, to us. There is a price when joy and despair, transformation and madness all commingle. With each pass of the song I became convinced the angels know Phinas by name. In spite of all that was taken, kept from her, she was a soul- the image of God; somehow with the whole of life in shards and fragments she was still one- she was, is, Phinas.

There were many moments this summer where we were in the balance of transformation. And this balance feels like a flood where you are fighting a quick rising tide and every bag of sand is a moment of hope. It was a good thing I brought some sand this summer. There were big moments with others much in the same place as Phinas. Moments of salvation. Salvation is when your life goes from death to life. We often define this as a moment of faith where we go from indifference to God to being open to the Holy Spirit. But there is also the moment of faith where life goes from despair to hope.

When the Israelites crossed the Jordan it was a moment of salvation. They wandered for 40 years, saw misery and dread, but in a heartbeat their life went from despair to hope. As a sign (saying, what was before is not the same) God made the water stand in a heap- like the Red Sea. When the water stands in a heap, things are pretty crazy, but also pretty clear: life is changing for the better, this is a new day. We are crossing from death to life. (There was one widow who danced and danced as her neighbors rejoiced because we told her we would build her a pit latrine. She didn’t have to walk into the bushes anymore. At that moment the waters were standing in a heap and she was dancing.)

Having rambled around Israel a few times I am mindful that there are other ways of entering the land, ways that don’t need a miracle, just better planning. I am mindful that the waters standing up in a heap was to say to the generation entering the promise land that the years of wandering are behind you like Egypt was behind your parents. It was the same, but all was new. All was right. I know there are always people who never want to believe things like water standing up, being held at bay, happened but I must say there is little I’ve found to quite match the moment of chaos and joy where you cross from death to life like this one like crossing a river with the water in a heap, dry ground just for you.

Sitting in the dusk of the early evening “She talks to angels” became a moment when I watched the waters stand in a heap just for us. We were walking to the other side, walking in step to the tune. We were walking to the other side even if the other side was not really clear. It wasn’t just Phinas who was crossing the Jordan. For some reason being in the dambo gave me hope. It was not a very hopeful place. In the middle of August we walked around the Luxemburg Garden in Paris, a place of remarkable beauty known throughout the world. But it didn’t inspire. It seemed predictable compared to the ruts and foot paths leading from one widow’s hut to the next. It paled next to the dambo. Go figure?

I love these moments of transformation, of saving grace. Bob Dylan said, this is what salvation must be like after awhile. Yes, yes it is. There is a swirl, but also a kind of division, a parting that is also a gathering, and life begins again as if it was born anew, born this time of water and spirit. It’s good sometimes when the angels know your name.

I am not sure what it means that I need to sit in a hovel with a grandmother who sleeps on the ground with children she is raising after her own; I don’t know why it takes a song about a woman living in the fragments of life to get me to pay attention. I don’t know why, but it does, or at the very least, it did.

There is a sad truth, and its sadness is how common it is: we can get to places where we lose sight of the souls around us; we no longer pay attention; at some point we no longer see the people around us as the image of God. We start to see them as problems or obstacles or something less, something other than us. The parable of Jesus we heard is all about how we look at each other and don’t see the good; how we stop seeing each other as a soul; how some people are in and some people are out. The parable conjures our impulse to teach people a lesson, to let them fall hard, remind them they need not be included for life to be good.

Reading the parable of the ten virgins in the light of Phinas brings to the fore all the pettiness and the intolerance we feel so right or at least ready to offer. Phinas in the parable lets me see the distance we keep from people or the carelessness we enjoy believing there is no need for us to be a part. Somebody didn’t bring enough, somebody didn’t want to share, someone was inflexible and callous. It all works until you meet someone who doesn’t have room for this much pretense.

This parable becomes painfully true in the dambo. There the indifference that justifies exclusion and disregard meet real suffering and it all looks silly. The rules, the foolishness, we demand and demand again.

In the dambo it is so easy to say yes. You have a woman in front of you whose 14-year-old granddaughter just died a few days before because she got sick. What does that mean I asked? She got sick was the only answer. In the midst of this the parable where the wise virgins would not share, they are cast aside as I ask: What if she had a blanket? What if she had a toilet or running water? What if there had just been a bit more corn meal- let alone cheap antibiotics? In those moments there is such a clear choice, such an obvious need. It is lovely and terrible to help at such a moment.

Far from the dambo other moments arise. Here things are not life threatening; life is not rendered so transparent. In a moment, a wisp, I can fail to see the other as a soul. I see them as a pain, a problem, a nuisance. In that moment I am so far from the kingdom of God; it is far from us.

The Kirkin and All Souls always makes me mindful that we are surrounded by people who have come before us. With the bagpipes I am mindful that our tradition is to carry not only the Word of God to all nations, but a freedom, a power, and a hope that life will be right for all. In this though it is ever true that such freedom, such hope and truth only comes one soul at a time. Love is good when we have it for all, but it is much more powerful when it becomes in particular.

In a moment we will read the names of members who passed away this year. At one point or another during their days under the sun they were both wise and foolish, they said yes and no, and most likely struggled to be gracious without being taken advantage. Indubitably there were moments of salvation for each, moments where despair became hope, where offence became faith, where they knew they were loved. I am pretty sure none of them talked to angels who knew them by name, just as I am pretty sure they spent their life sleeping in a bed. Yet, each was just as much in need of mercy.

Each name is the image of God for so we were created. Salvation, salvation . . . what if it really begins again not only when we see the image within but without? I know Jean Stanley is the image of God, I watched it, saw it. I know Nick Ebersol was a good soul whose care inspired so many. I know that, but what if salvation is when we look for such an image in all? What would happen if we lived as if every soul was our concern?

I know, I know too much. We will have to turn away some. Some just won’t make it. We will have to tell some we don’t know you. We will? That’s not what salvation is like is it? Amen.