First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Luke 24 and 1Peter 1

“Your Time of Exile”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

April 6, 2008

Spring has come like a friend who just shows up. It surprised me. I was unprepared, but glad. I never want to trust it will get warmer, that tomorrow is the day we open the windows, or now is the time that my heavy coat returns to the back of the hall closet for its six month hiatus.

Seasons have been a learning experience for me. San Diego has two seasons spring and summer, cool and wet followed by dry and hot. The change there is glacial and hidden. Except for the grass that covers the foothills, spring is really found in the microscopic flowers that bloom implausibly amidst the hard soil.

I can remember the first time we came east and I encountered a bed of tulips on the side of the road. I nearly crashed the car. The volcanic red that covered the ground seemed alien, like the stuff of urban legends you hear about, but don’t believe.

I’ve become a believer. Each season here has its time and place and opportunities. Sitting in our front room watching the snowmelt and listening to the sump-pump keep our basement dry, I had this great urge feel the soil and plant lettuce seeds. It hit me like a fever.

Reading the Watertown Daily Times last week I finally figured out maple syrup. I know it makes pancakes taste wonderful and I have worked through the transition from thick stuff that comes from a factory (the stuff of my childhood) to the thin stuff that comes from the tree, but I hadn’t really figured out the joy of maple syrup. It comes in the spring; it is a sign of spring. All of sudden the big jug in our pantry became an image not so much of indulgent breakfast foods, but an omen that my snow blower can be put in the back of the garage for a time.

I felt the same thing as we drove to Sackets Harbor. There was a flock of snow buntings darting in unison across a stubbled cornfield. Soon the fields and trees will be full of birds of every kind and shape I thought. They would all be back and transform the sounds of the morning.

In short order the patio furniture will be hoisted from the basement, the lilac will bloom, and boiled hot dogs will seem a sacrilege. It could just be the time of life, but I feel connected, grounded in the movements of the sun. I mark winter with the solstice and delight that the mint for my tea is beginning to break through the cold mud. The outlines of what will be an impressive oak tree in fifty years is starting to take shape in our front yard. I remember the young tree planted five years ago and find its growth to be my own. I try to imagine what it will be when I am ninety.

Life is good. Moving from season to season, each one a kind of pregnant pause- something will be born, something will die. I am part of this, a kind of Whitmanesque reveling. The earth is not something out there, but a home; I feel at home.

It must be seven or eight years ago when I got a call that a parishioner and dear friend was in the hospital. His name is Fred and his wife Sue whose years as the wife of a Navy captain doesn’t afford tears, gave me great alarm as I could hear the sound of anguish and weeping in her voice. Fred had a kind of acute Leukemia, a rare one, highly aggressive. Sitting with them at the hospital I listened to the grave options. Standard treatment essentially would mean the brief remainder of his life would be filled with hospital visits and moving through the weight of futility. The other option was a radical treatment, a kind of super chemotherapy that if it doesn’t kill you, sends the rampant cancer of the blood into remission.

After some thought and prayer Fred chose door number two. A few days later I was with him when they brought in the large orange bag of chemo drugs marked with a skull and cross bones. It was not very comforting. The nurse who administered drug/poison wore special gloves, a mask, and eye protection lest any of orange goop spill out. The nurse paused and said, this stuff is so powerful I have to wear protective gear to handle it; now we have to put all of this inside of you.

I’ve been in a lot of hospital rooms, nursing homes, funeral homes, bedsides when the end of life draws near. You can’t help but see life differently, to recognize the seasons of life for what they are. Yet, sitting with Fred and the large orange bag of chemo drugs I couldn’t help but see my body differently. It was like his body, my body, the nurse’s body was a thing; it was there, close, very close, but it wasn’t us. The body was tissues and organs and bones and blood and all that was good and right, but it was other. It seemed to be a kind of common thought, a group awakening, as we looked at one another and felt the reality that Fred’s “other” body was about to be whomped by this terrible stuff.

In the weeks and months that followed this feeling persisted. It was at times surreal and confusing, but also enlightening and empowering. You couldn’t help feel disconnected from the body in his hospital room. The question that lingered in the air was would his body make it through? Would the cure heal or destroy it? And it, his body, was like something other, some experiment we observe.

I don’t want in any way to suggest that the suffering caused by the drugs wasn’t felt. It was excruciating and it nearly killed him. Yet, there was ever a kind of peace and courage that emerges when you know your soul doesn’t have cancer, your body does; your spirit isn’t being ransacked by an aggressive disease, your blood is. There were many dark moments, many hard, hard days of too much chemo and too many levels and tests and the ambiguity of when medicine is much more art than science. And during all of those difficult times, I want to say, it was a deep abiding joy for the life given, the moments already lived far outweighing what might be that yielded the strength of spirit and power helping the body to make its way back. And it did.

Fred, who should have died, is alive today. It’s hard when we see each other not to make our way back to that hard moment and laugh and cry for just a second, to laugh so the our breath isn’t taken away. You know that moment where silence is not a gift but a kind of jealousy better left unsaid and expelled by a thankful, but wry smile.

The United Church of Christ took out a full-page ad in the New York Times this week. They wanted to say that the mud being slung at one of their pastors and by inference upon one of their churches and her members was uncool. The ad said, the UCC is a hotbed of democracy and everything America; they are the fountain of representational government as eleven of the signers of the Declaration of Independence can be claimed as kin. So the inference that Rev. Jeremiah Wright being a kind of un-American, and with him the members of his church, those who hate America is beyond comprehension.

Unfortunately in our world of sound bites and snippets of 30-minute sermons where statements can take on a context of their own anything is very believable. When stakes are as high as the presidency, tactics need not be, shall we say, a hallmark of honesty and integrity. The indulgence of the pulpit, with no real critical options opposing it, is like a wellspring of juicy mistakes to embarrass those who say, Amen.

I read the controversial sermon Wright preached following the 9/11 tragedies. It was artful, powerful, and filled with the deep brooding irony, which is the African American experience of this land and all its bounties. What he said was we will want to hate these people who flew the planes into the twin towers and pentagon, but don’t. Hatred is not what will make things right. The controversy was over how he got to this great message.

To get to the end he flailed away, swung like a drunk-jilted lover at a land whose gains are always on the backs of the losses of others. He was preaching to people who are still trying to understand America through the lens of slavery and its radical injustice; the confusing painful moment where you behold our ideals and appeals to liberty and freedom in one hand and the truth that the very same lips that may say me liberty or give me death, could say, I will take the negress for fifty dollars and rape her for a time. He was reaching out to people who carry the outrage of generations and saying, don’t be lulled into a kind of shock where you forget that those who feel beaten down will want to strike back.

And this is what conjures the true sadness of the controversial sermons of Reverend Wright. His words are a kind of transparent glimpse into the struggle of how deeply disconnected African Americans can feel in what is their land, their freedom, their opportunity; his words were like a hand reaching into the heart of Black America and saying, do you ever feel at home, connected to a part of life, or do ever not feel set adrift, an exile in the land of your birth?

This really hit home for me last year when the choir would see someone who is black. At first they would be excited and then they would say, “oh, that one is not African.” Wright’s sermons seem to struggle with the pain that when black folks look within they may not say, “ah, but I’m American.” I wish, I wish as a people we had the political and cultural maturity to hear what he was trying say. But we don’t. In the end we need Senator Obama had to distance himself, to break off his friendship.

The First Letter of Peter is an appeal to not lose heart given how set apart the young church had become. The people who believed in Jesus were being thrown out of the synagogues; they were being betrayed to Roman officials, and at the time when Peter was writing, put to death for the dire offense of believing that love conquers all.

Peter tells them to live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. For those who would hear his voice it was a hard message: our lives as we knew it have been lost. We are exiles. This was a terrible verdict. Exile: the lives you lived, the connectedness, the friendships and generations of experiences and traditions are cast aside. You have no home, no place. And then in a moment of deep irony he says, but love one another terribly. As you are cast aside, love.

Peter’s words have shaped us ever sense. The church believing in the resurrection of Jesus would ever struggle to feel at home in its own skin. Like a restlessness that is buried beyond reach but must be obeyed, so are we ever a kind of wayfaring, wandering sort.

Our Gospel lesson today is an allegory of sorts that says, we are the church, the people who have no real home; we find the truth along the way, on the road. We should never trust that the flowers we plant would bloom; our lives will know the peace of season upon season. The disciples beg Jesus to stay, but he doesn’t even last the night. He must be moving on.

The violence faced by the early church created an anxious distrust of their bodies: it is only flesh. Like Fred with chemo, the soul, the spirit doesn’t have cancer. And for more than three hundred years, the church would feel as ill at ease. The church wouldn’t feel a part, which is the deep voice Jeremiah Wright’s sermon resurrected. The early church would worship in catacombs and graveyards not cathedrals and bully pulpits of downtown churches.

What Peter tried to say to them, to help them stave off the weight of loss, was beautiful: we are reconciled with God; our bodies may be lost, our business destroyed, even the simple joy of spring may prove illusive, but what is most precious is that we have a peace beyond understanding right here, right now; this is in us; we have been born again. It is a spiritual spring.

From Peter’s time until today the church has felt ill at ease in its own skin. “Don’t get too comfortable; don’t plan too far ahead.” This is like a Freudian echo of our life. So the love of this world, the joy of crocus, the simple pleasure of a cardinal couple following each other through the back yards of a small town ever proves illusive in terms of pure joy.

The trust of the body is nebulous at best. Those who know “if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have another one not made of hands” always have a kind of awkward love of what is earthy and physical.

When Peter wrote to the churches of Galatia and Cappadocia the idea that a day of homecoming would be seen was impossible. It was a time of exile. And it was a real loss. The markers we love to anticipate and revel in had been swept away. The grandeur of his response was to say whether you are at home or set adrift, love. As you have been uprooted, love deeply from the heart.

Winter didn’t sit well with me this year. Generally I love winter, enjoy its quiet, but not this year. Each snowfall was a weight. I just wanted it to be spring. I wanted to plant lettuce. Last summer we would send our youngest David outside with a bowl and a pair of scissors and enjoy the rather unique salad with which he returned.

I wanted spring because it was for me a sense that things would continue, begin again. I didn’t want to listen to Peter and his call for exile this week no matter how beautiful his mandate to love from the heart. I want love, but I want to feel a part, to revel in crocus and iris; I really want the Dutch iris to bloom before we head to Africa. Is that wrong?

Being a Christian is being a pilgrim, a wayfarer. It is never really feeling connected to heaven or earth. It’s Fred’s moment where we know the body is just a body; it’s Jeremiah Wright fighting, flailing for a sense of justice to come at last. Yet, can’t it also be the moment where we revel that the crocus has come? Can’t it also be the simple joy of knowing it’s time to plant lettuce? Amen.