First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Numbers 14 and John 15

“Are We Good to Go?”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

June 1^st, 2008

The first step to be becoming a pastor is to be examined by the session of your home church. For us this was First Presbyterian San Diego. This is a somewhat large downtown church. Not being raised Presbyterian I had no idea what I was in for. There were about twenty folks around tables and they all had questions. Many questions. Theological questions. Virgin birth: myth or real event? Scripture: would I describe it as authoritative and if yes, how so? These sorts of questions kept coming and coming until finally someone asked, “What about the cross? What is your theology of the cross?” When I asked if the question was meant to explore the relationship between the Reformed and Lutheran traditions or the difference between the Roman Catholic and Protestants in broad theological terms, the senior pastor waved his hand.

I have mentioned Paul Pulliam to you before. He was a missionary to Pakistan and led First Pres San Diego for more than twenty years when I brought my college exposure of theology and church history to bear upon his session. At this point the examination had gone on for nearly an hour and I could tell that the idea of me offering my novice take on such topics was not exciting. Besides the person who asked the question had clarified himself by saying, “I meant the theology of the cross of the Apostle Paul,” which meant I would like you to comment upon the New Testament and the early church as a whole.

I took a deep breath and was ready to start speaking when Rev. Pulliam waved his hand to stop. I could tell by the change in posture many people took that this was a signal. Some pastors clear their throat, others say, okay let’s move on or one more comment. Paul Pulliam, it would appear, waved his hand.

“I’ll tell you what,” he began, “Fred here doesn’t have a foot on the ground. But he’s married to Kathy so it will all be fine. It will all work out.” And with that insight I was excused. In short order the vote was taken, approved, and I was thus summarily sent packing to New Jersey.

This wasn’t the first time in my life that it was suggested that I was less than grounded. That my high school classmates nicknamed me Cosmic Fred even though I was drug free should have been a clue that my feet were less than soiled. Some might call it a propensity to be lost in thought, but for me, my thoughts are the one place I am not lost.

Driving. Driving is a place where I am frequently lost. I get lost all the time as driving still proves a challenge to me. The main problem with driving is this: it is lovely time to think. I can be half way through the week’s sermon and realize I have gone the wrong way, missed the turn, or simply failed to stop when I was supposed to stop. Kathy has learned to ask politely as I take us 75 miles an hour in the wrong direction, “so where are we going?”

This happens at home as well. I shared with you the moment I went to pick up our daughter Laura only realizing I was in the wrong home talking to the wrong family after twenty minutes of chitchat. But I have withheld all the times I have stood outside with a basket of laundry only to realize the laundry belongs in the house. When I am writing this becomes very, very common. Two weeks ago I was trying to write a lecture for a class at JCC. During the composing of my thoughts I lost my keys, not uncommon, and then my cell phone.

With the lecture complete and delivered these items were now lost for more than a week. The house was turned upside down; I engaged in the sort of grunting and grousing that is to coax them from their hiding place to no avail. Sitting in our parlor I wondered: they wouldn’t be in my office? Walking to my office I turned a few papers over on my desk only to realize my cell phone and the keys to my office, the office our sexton and housekeeper had opened for me for the last week, those keys were in my office. Walking away from the office I smiled remembering Rev. Pulliam and his assessment. It was true then and it’s true now.

Almost twenty years ago there was a movie about being in your head so to speak. The movie was simply titled “Dad.” Jack Lemmon was the dad; Ted Danson was the son. It was basically a story of a father and son finding a connection as the elder dies. Nothing un-trod here. Nothing uncommon except the life the father lived in his head. The unique part was that Jack Lemmon’s character, when faced with difficulties, would drift into a world he created in his mind. There was a whole other family, a whole other career, a whole other life. The conflict of the story was intriguing. How will he cope with the reality of imminent death: in this world or the one he made in mind? As the movie unfolds you realize the Dad had cultivated this fantasy world for decades. Could the fantasies he’d develop to keep the stresses and disappointments of life at bay, could they keep even death at bay?

Now most of us don’t have such an elaborate fantasy life, but in many ways we all have views and hopes; we can call it our own take on events that bring us relief. How often have two people described the same event very differently? Each one taking something away that is unique: we take away what we need and roll it into our ideals, our way of seeing things. This works. It works until something happens that we cannot fit into the definitions we created; something happens that contradicts our views so deeply we just can’t roll with it, smooth it over.

For the dad it was his own death. It was an awakening to the painful truth that his world within had robbed him of much of what was good in life. He was dying and yet he had truly stopped living long ago.

Now, I want to say that this is the essential plot line of every Walker Percy novel more or less. Yet rather than some sort of fantasy world, his characters just retreated into themselves. They go to movies, they play golf, they take a bath, they look through telescopes and so on. No matter what though they are disconnected, dislocated, set adrift. They wonder if they are depressed; they wonder if they are alive; they wonder if everything they had lived is false. His novels like the movie is all about the moment where you look down and realize the ground you thought you were standing on is not really there.

Walker Percy’s novels explore people that are lost even though they have all the perceptible markers of being found. The novel Second Coming explores the undoing of Will Barrett, a successful lawyer who wakes up one morning and just feels completely disassociated from life. He starts to question the definitions, the markers, the paths he’s chosen, the life he’s made. With each question he feels more and more set adrift.

What make Percy’s novels intriguing are the moments where someone like Will Barrett wakes up. For Barrett he had to be shot at, fall through a ventilation shaft and spend a few weeks with a young woman who had escaped from a mental institution. When the novel is reduced to this it doesn’t seem plausible; boiled down it sounds far fetched. Couldn’t a friend just say, “hey, Will, we’re over here?” It does until I read the story of the Israelites and I am more than ready to accept what it took to wake Will Barrett up is not quite bizarre enough.

The Israelites wander through the desert, eat quail, manna, have a pillar of fire, cross the Rea Sea as it stood divided, leave Egypt after a catalog of plagues and signs are heaped one upon another. They face battles where the sun stands still, see water come from a rock, behold the glory of God upon Mt. Horeb and surrounding the tent of meeting. They see all these things and then they balk at the sight of the oasis city of Jericho and beg to retreat.

They hear there are giants afoot, the land will be hard to take so they want to return to a fantasy, to what Egypt had become in their minds. Now in their defense forty years in the desert had made them nomads. And even after this moment when they balk before the promise land they will balk again wondering if they wouldn’t be better off simply joining with the nomads who roam the land we call Jordan. But the key to this is that they balk and retreat unto a world they had made in their minds.

That the Israelites balked because of giants or challenges or simply because they were faithless never really works for me. What does work is that the promised land was real. It was a real end, a real place, a moment where they would be grounded, a place to stand. And that is one of the most frightening moments in life. How often do we go through life disconnected from all the people around us? How often do we stop listening when what is being said just isn’t what we want to hear? How often do we cling to a fantasy believing it is our attempt to be hopeful?

And then a child is born, a diagnosis is given, a marriage is made a divorce is finalized, a graduation occurs, a career begins. All of these moments bear with them a moment of fear when the definitions and markers we’d used are changed; at the very least they are confronted. The promise land was most likely a great ideal until it was seen from across the Jordan. Then it just looked like a place, a place that would be good and bad. Mostly though it was to be a place to be and not just another place to pass through.

When I set out to take a sabbatical there were two reasons. The first was a lot of what Walker Percy wrote about: there was a moment where I fell through the ventilation shaft and landed in green house with a mentally ill woman who helped me get my strength back. Except it wasn’t a woman it was a elderly physician with a peculiar need to laugh out loud who took me to Africa and enjoyed watching my world get turned upside down. Having slept with Fred Stone for three weeks, beginning each day by seeing him and wondering if he was still breathing I think I might have preferred a green house with a . . . well, let’s leave that one alone. But the effect was the same.

My world was shaken, the fantasies I nurtured where contradicted; the life I had crafted was being stripped by one village full of suffering people after another. Having returned to this again and again my ability to use the old definitions were slipping away, what Eliot called the old dispensations were no longer satisfying. Mostly though I was being grounded. When I shared that with Kathy it became transparent that if such change were to happen, we would need to see it together. The life I had crafted had a few aspects were she was shall we say a part. So the sabbatical is intended to be a moment where we try to make sense of the world where there are giants afoot.

Yet, the bigger theme, and bigger question is one of abiding. As I shared with you before I had come to believe that abiding meant staying put, digging in, remaining in a place for the long haul. The quiet intent was to use the sabbatical to explore a theme that would let me stay in a church more than five years- or to simply stay anywhere more than five years. My intent was to reflect upon the charge of Jesus to abide as a means of finding the secrets of staying put. Much to my chagrin all the exegesis I have done suggests that abiding has nothing to do with digging in or staying put, but everything to do with being faithful in the midst of change, being true, finding peace in a fluid world.

Don Klug spoke the truth to me the other day and I didn’t want to hear it. A good elder does this for pastors. They do other things as well, but what he said was: “This is a different church from when you came.” What I didn’t want to hear is that I had changed it. I am still a bit nervous about that. I want to say that the church changes and grows, is pruned or made other by the power of God, not me. But that is a lot of the fear of the promise land. What if the fears of the Israelites was not that it was going to be hard, but that they would be the ones to mess it up, make the promise land less than promising?

This is the great thing about living a life in your head, letting your ideals percolate and rumble about for decades. They are free and safe from reality, from, well, real life. Abiding it seems has a lot to say to this when we realize that Jesus is calling his disciples to abide in him the day before he is crucified, the day before he dies, he tells his disciples to live in him. Abiding is not so much a safe zone. Jesus says abide in me and then twenty-four hours later he is being crucified; that’s a hard thing to abide.

Deep within the notion of abiding there seems to be a kind of grounding that is more than simply sticking around or staying put. I am growing to believe that what Kierkegaard called being transparently grounded in God is what it means to abide. But what do we do with a God who is so terribly earthy, so broken, so fragile? How can we abide in him who is crucified? It’s great to abide in Jesus if he is some kind of transcendent ideal that doesn’t change and holds the key to all the promises of life. He makes all the promises as he is being crucified.

My hope is that 10 weeks in Africa with my family will shed some light on this. People in Malawi are quite often abiding in as much joy as they are suffering. I am still not sure how that can be.

Today marks the culmination of more than a year of preparation to see and ask these questions. I know I go with your blessings and your prayers. And for this I thank you.

Two weeks ago we took all our children and their special friends out to lunch. After the food had come and gone and the check arrived and was satisfied, our youngest, Dave, turned to me and slapped his legs and said, “So, are we good to go here?” I smiled and looked at him and said, “Yes, we are good to go.” Ready or not, we are good to go. Amen.