First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

2Peter 1

“Bob Seger in Santa Fe”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

February 3, 2008

Just take those old records off the shelf; I sit and listen to them by myself. Today’s music ain’t got the same soul. I like that old time rock ‘n’ roll. Call me a “relic” call me what you will; say I’m old fashion’d, say I’m over the hill; today’s music just ain’t got the same soul. I like that old time rock ‘n’ roll. Don’t try to take me to a disco; you won’t even get me out on the floor. In ten minutes I’ll be late for the door. I like that old time rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s true. I like that old time rock ‘n’ roll. I would rather listen to John Fogerty than Jay Z. I can recite the lyrics of dozens of Motown songs, croon with Smokey Robinson, and affirm Otis Redding that a “little tenderness” is worth trying in a successful relationship, but I wouldn’t know a Tupac Shakur song from a Run DMC offering to save my life. They just don’t connect for me.

Now, taste can be a factor here. But taste is really a matter of acquisition and context. If it were taste then, as a member of my generation, I should lean more to rappers than the Rascals. Maybe it is what Bob Seger said, “maybe I’m old fashioned.” Which again, would be fine, except I am not old enough to be old fashioned.

For some reason, and I am not sure why, but for some reason when Bob Seger sings “Night Moves” I am nodding my head as if I know exactly what he means. Woke last night to the sound of thunder, how far off I sat and wondered. Started humming a song from nineteen sixty-two, funny how the night moves. When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose, funny how the night moves.

Bob Seger wrote this song as a reflection of his “awkward teenage blues” of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Singing along with him as I cooked in our kitchen I got to the line “the summer of 1962 ain’t it funny how the night moves” and it hit me kind of strange. How is it that the memory of a boy growing up in Detroit, the same age as my parents, would resonate so clearly in me? But it did. There is something in the idea of the night and how it “comes falling in,” the silence of darkness where your pulse is a cacophony.

I know it’s just a rock ‘n’ roll song. It’s not Eliot or Keats or Herbert. True. But that is just it, truth. There is something true in the words, something that will speak to teenagers for decades to come most likely, and something that will linger in your heart long after this time.

That is the strange purpose of poetry or lyrics in this case. There are more songs written than will ever truly be known, but from time to time someone pens a few words, puts them to a basic back beat, and the doors of your soul are swung open like an incantation or a secret password spoken without intent. One moment you are driving down the road and looking out for pedestrians and people who don’t know how to use a suicide lane, and the next “you’re out in corn fields” or “working mysteries without any clues.”

I don’t think it is the right words or the right beat or the tone that has this effect. It is the truth. Something is true here. The truth is that at one moment in your life the direction and intent of what it was all about was like a curtain, a shroud you couldn’t see beyond. The future was so unknown. The lyrics conjure that feeling and then that feeling is wed with the other moments where the curtain covered your future yet again. Where are you going to go? What are you going to be? Is this all folly? It’s funny not only how the night moves, but how it moves again and again. The questions you ask when you’re sixteen, they come back. Only this time you have a little more to lose.

That a rock ‘n’ roll song written by a man of a different generation in a different part of the country could resonate in me is perhaps not that great of stretch. That a novel written by a woman almost seventy years ago about two French Catholic priests rambling around New Mexico is more so, more of a stretch.

Willa Cather wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop after she found an obscure first-hand account of the mission work of a French order who came to the New World just before our Civil War.

The book Cather found was a local history that was published for a few people to appreciate the efforts of men and women history books will not include. It chronicled the challenge of organizing parishes in a land as wild as it is beautiful. Cather took this account and crafted a beautiful novel. The names were changed and the events where rendered into more of a story than a history, but the substance was the same: two men came from France, lived in and around Santa Fe, and in the end built a cathedral and a vibrant church.

Into this story, though, Cather injected a poignant song of friendship. The two men who came from France, Father Latour, who would become the bishop, and Father Valliant, who would evangelize Colorado, shared a life in ministry and were friends. They were truly different people. Latour was in his head and reserved; he did the business and the reflection; Valliant was earthy; he learned to speak Spanish how it was spoken on the street not in the books.

Chapter after chapter Willa Cather let the events of their life emerge with a simple kindness that seems to define her prose. There were scary moments where they faced dangerous men and harsh elements. Each man gave himself away to his calling as an act of faith and devotion. Their only common ground was a sense of common purpose. And then, like a gentle breeze that cools you in the summer heat, their friendship began to define the story. Where the opening pages painted a kind of western bravado, a tall tale perhaps, slowly the story gave way to an image as profound yet as fleeting as a sunset: friendship will sustain your soul. This was the truth she offered.

As I neared the end of the novel I couldn’t help but smile that I was immersed so deeply in the thoughts of a woman who grew up in Nebraska as the twentieth century began. I wondered how Cather knew what she did about the life of Mexican peasants, the legacy of Spain, and the contrast of French missionaries who rode donkeys along the trails interlacing the canyons and mountains of the southwest. Mostly, though, I was shocked by how much the novel evoked in me in terms of friendship. It spoke the incantation and the doors of my heart where swung open. All of sudden I was looking over my life, my friendships, my days, taking stock. I believe I have a few years left to live, but as the archbishop died it was as if I too were dying, seeing the way life was good when you have friends.

The Apostle Peter, near the end of his life, wrote a letter to the world. The audience he addresses is really broad: to those who have received a faith as precious as ours. His words tend to be cryptic and there is a kind of frenetic quality to his writing. I like his character in the gospels more than I like him as a writer. Yet, in our reading today there is this lovely line. “You will do well to be attentive to this, as a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart.” Lamps and morning stars are not of his creation: Jesus spoke of lamps often and Malachi called the coming messiah a morning star. But it is his call to be attentive and the idea that it would rise in your heart that is just so lovely.

And in this instance the truth will be what rises in your heart, according to Peter, the voice of God, the Holy Spirit, the presence of the living Christ. His call was for us to be attentive to the words of Moses to the prophesies of Elijah. For in them, from them, while you are attentive to them, the truth will be present, the voice of God may just speak.

God spoke to Peter, James and John on a mountain. And thirty some years later Peter is telling people about this. What is most intriguing about his moment of inspiration, a moment where the curtain of his life was pulled away, is what he remembers. The gospel story describes Moses and Elijah, glowing gowns, and a thundering voice. What Peter clung to, what became of the truth in him was a simple claim, “this is my beloved, my son in whom I am well pleased.”

Writing his letter to all those who faith is precious the events on Mt. Tabor probably looked different, probably even meant different things as he wrote of them from. Things looked different thirty years after he experienced them. There were other moments in his life since that one where the curtain fell. Yet, what he seems to be saying in the most profound of ways is that the truth is not something you find, but something that finds you. The truth opens up your heart much more than it is something you unlock and plunder.

Whenever I use a piece of literature or art in a sermon I try to determine its place in the life of an artist. “Night Moves” was an early song of Bob Seger and it represented a moment of originality where before his music had been very imitative. Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop seems to be a moment of transition as well. After WWI her novels had taken a melancholy voice, a kind of deep disillusionment like Somerset Maugham’s Razor’s Edge. Yet, somewhere in Father Latour and Father Valliant she saw something of redemption, something of life’s long journey, and found hope in friendship.

Peter’s second letter is best understood as a kind of farewell. Peter would die shortly after writing this as Nero diverted blame for the burning of Rome by putting Christians to death. His words are forceful as he claims the authority of an eyewitness, not the sophistication of a mythmaker. He saw Jesus transfigured, but he also saw Jesus Crucified. This was the man who denied Jesus with the cock’s crow, and then, saw the risen Christ on the beach with those fateful questions, “Do you love me?”

Somewhere between Mt. Tabor where the words were spoken from the sky, to Rome where Peter penned this letter, the transfiguration moment changed a bit. Gone were Moses and Elijah; gone were the garments and glow; and gone was his own intent to build booths. All that remained of the event were the words “This is my beloved, my son in whom I am well pleased.” For Peter this was the truth of the event, what had reached his heart.

And this is the risk we need to take in reading his letter. We need to risk that somewhere the event also changed from being the words he heard of Christ to the words he heard in his heart: you are my beloved. If you are attentive, he promises, you will hear the truth will speak in your heart as well, “You are my beloved.” What he saw on Mt. Tabor was fantastic. It was the truth. Yet, somewhere along the way he heard the words that opened his heart and saved him. You are my beloved.

I was asked recently what I believe of infant baptism. I recounted the words Peter heard on Mt. Tabor and said, infant baptism is where we believe God so speaks to the child: this is my beloved. When we baptize an infant we begin their life in the promise of God’s love and tenderness. I believe this. I also believe it takes a lot of cornfields and French priests lost in the southwest and hard moments before these words unlock our hearts. Peter struggled to hear these words, believe them, and so do we.

I don’t know why our hearts come with such strong locks. What is good and lovely can be all around us but it is cast easily aside; it lacks the power to come inside of us. We can behold the truth like Peter on the mountain; yet, it is not what we behold, but what holds us. The truth on the mountain was powerful, yet with Peter, it didn’t reach his heart until later.

This is the greatest of mysteries: the truth of God does not enter our hearts uninvited. “You are my beloved” is the word of hope and salvation our God stands ready to speak, knocking at the door of our heart. Yet, he will only enter where invited. The truth of God’s love only abides in our heart if we open our heart. It never intrudes nor comes with force.

You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart. This star only rises, this light only shines in the hearts we open. And we would do well to be attentive to this, to pray, come Lord Jesus, come into our hearts like a lamp shining in a dark place, like a morning star rising. Is your heart so open, so ready for the light, for those words, “You are my beloved.” Let them come and unravel the vestige of shame, the remnant of our broken souls. Come to my heart, to our hearts, and let us hear your voice again and again. Amen.