First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Philemon and Isaiah 45

“Something Forced”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

September 9, 2007

O the joy of increase, growth, recuperation,

The joy of soothing and pacifying, the joy of concord and harmony.

O to go back to the place where I was born,

To hear the birds once more,

To ramble about the house and barn and over the fields once more, and through the orchard and along the old lanes once more.

O to have been brought up on bays, lagoons, creeks, or along the coast, to continue and be employ’d there all my life. . . .

O boating on the rivers, the voyage down the St. Lawrence, the superb scenery, the steamers, the ships sailing, the Thousand Islands, the occasional timber-raft and the raftsman with long-reaching sweep-oars, the little huts on the rafts, and the stream of smoke when they cook supper at evening . . . (a song of joy).

Walt Whitman published these words as the "Song of Joys". They were made public the year Abraham Lincoln was elected president the first time. It was part of the second edition of the Leaves of Grass; the edition where he truly found the voice of America.
Reading Whitman from the West never made a great deal of sense. The imagery was all wrong for me; it was back lit as it were. He spoke of colors and contours so foreign they were all dark shapes. Mighty rivers to me are only for a moment; oyster bays and clam rakes are things I have come to find now, but not then, not when I first tried to hear Whitman. A dusty trail marked by the stunted chaparral, the way a field of dry grass ignites- these I could have heard, seen; these were the markers of my sauntering.

Whitman spoke of river rafts and mackerel, rocks and bogs; he called forth the lumber jack, the fisherman, the loafer. To be idle in the West is to be drunk. To loaf on the California coast is the stuff of childhood, but soon put aside by those who come of age. Looking East I couldn’t see him, hear him. In the East- standing here- I find his voice resounding, the very sound of the land; the young America becoming a nation.

As is the vice and virtue of poetry interpretations are many, so I offer this with the caveat of it being just one view. Yet, my view is that Walt Whitman sought to sing a whole new world into being. His poetry, at times erotic, at times, rambling, is ever a pursuit of freedom and the freedom wasn’t just for him; it was for all- it was for you and me.

If you read our call to worship over again and look at the way the poet is trying, longing, searching, reaching for joy, for his life to be full again, rich, satisfying; if you read this as what he hoped God would do for him as a gift of redemption, then we are close to what Whitman thought God was doing with this young nation. It was to become a place of redemption, a land of joy. Page after page of the Leaves of Grass is a kind of rallying call, a trumpet blast for people to wake up, for the mourning of joy had arrived and the joy was this land and that we are the people.

What makes this so intriguing, something I have come to see as of late is that the land, for Whitman, the people, and presence of the people were not just a nation, not just a country, not even a democracy; they, we, were so much more in his mind and heart. For him we are a kind of salvation, a joy for the world, a light. America, its land and people, its government and industry, could have all been seen as something transcendent, something redemptive.

He believed we were a new day for creation; God was doing something new. America, and Americans, was a new kind of hope for all, a new work. Thus (because it was so it was so new) he felt free to jettison the old: and the old was the church, the traditions, the mores, Western theology, the Bible. What are these old, dusty rags compared to the splendor of the garment bedecking the nation? What is the pastor in the pulpit spewing old doctrine compared to the forging of iron, the taste of blood, the open road, the rivers, the plow, the ax? What is the church compared to the Thousand Islands, the Niagara?

Where the church spoke of mystic sweet communion and passed around small hard bread and grape juice in cups too tiny to grasp; Whitman spoke of the bustling streets of Manhattan, the ferry to Brooklyn, the Long Island coast and hills- here he felt the oneness of creation and redemption. Where the elders railed against the prostitute and the vagabond, denigrated the yeoman with their genteel education, where rules of the church and its decorum left no room for the common man, here Whitman said, but this is where America can be found: the street, the brothel, the foundry, the forest and field; and when we find America, we find the Spirit of God.

I say he put them aside and yet that is not quite true. It was not that he said, “throw them out; throw out the church, the bible, the pew.” He did say, “We consider the bibles and religions divine . . . . I do not say they are not divine, I say they have grown out of you and may grow out of you still, it is not they who give life . . . . it is you who give the life.”

In essence he said: you are the bible; we are the word of God. And so he could say, “I have no chair, nor church nor philosophy; I lead no man to a dinner-table or library or exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, my right hand points to landscapes and continents, and a plain public roads.”

“I do not despise your priest;” he wrote, “My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths, enclosing all worship ancient and modern . . . believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years.”

It’s tempting to dismiss Whitman as a bit of a nut. His rambling poems seem to suggest there was little he didn’t see as worthy of finding a place in his verse. Yet, the intent of the Leaves of Grass was to sing America, to sing it whole; to give voice to the common hope, the tacit pulse of all Americans. You’re going to need a lot of gerunds to compose such a song.

It’s also tempting to put aside Whitman as a voice of a different time, a different nation. Yet, what is so surprising is how prophetic Whitman’s poetry has proved. His images of America, his images of the church, his images of sexuality and culture: it’s hard to find a voice in our contemporaries that is so clear, defines our life together today so well. He truly does speak for people today even if they have never read a line of his poetry.

Nowhere do I see this more than in his views of the church. We are living his vision: we live in the midst of a culture that believes the church is not necessarily our faith. How we look at the church is our decision, what we believe is our making and choice, traditions are options.

Recently I began asking people a question to see how close they were to Whitman. I asked, "Can you love God without loving the church?" I asked this because he did; he loved God without loving the church. And I wanted to know: is this true? And from so many the answer was a resounding “yes.” The crusades were mentioned, the oppression of women, bad doctrines, wooden interpretation, hypocrisy, and pedophilia: how can you say you love that was the underlying justification? Again and again people described their faith in ways Whitman would have thought he was being quoted: I find God in the solitude of nature more than I do the pew; I find my faith born of moments like child birth or friends, not the ritual of a service afraid of change, resistant to the spirit.

As I listened I couldn’t help but find the church as something of a duty, an obligation, a drudgery- a kind of whipping boy for all our ills and sins. Worship, worship was a private matter, not so much a corporate one. If you want to find faith, then look within yourself, not the stain glassed cathedral; church is just a building, a set of rules and a fair amount of foolishness, and a bureaucracy. And then I asked a friend who has seen many more generations than me. I said, "Can you love God without loving the church?" She squinted her eyes, searched as if to see what kind of fool would pose such a question. "O no", she said, "Impossible. You can’t. The church is people. How can you say you love God without loving the people? How can you say you have faith in God if you don’t love the people? "

In that moment it started to come clear: I saw the foolishness and sin of the few evaporate; it no longer overshadowed the great faith of the many who prayed, the many who worshipped. I heard God say: “oh . . . someone sees my church. What a day of salvation, a morning that has turned my grief into dancing."

This epiphany, this moment of joy is the hidden question of Philemon. The Apostle Paul, when he was Saul, loved the Torah, the traditions, the sacrifices, the codes and rituals. And after Damascus he came to love Christ. He came to see God not as letter only, but the spirit. This changed his life needless to say. This was his redemption. He now became the Apostle of the church to the Gentiles. Paul believed God was making salvation for the world with the church just as Whitman believed America was so. The church was God’s choice: God intended to bring salvation to all this way. Yet along the way his enthusiasm for God overshadowed people. And then at some moment in prison, at some moment of revelation (I believe it was a stop you in your tracks “ahah”) he found the question: how can I love God without loving people?

In Philemon we see his answer: this is my friend, whom I love, I entrust him to you, care for him. Here Paul speaks of love and friendship and joy as his own. We must always remember that this language doesn’t emerge in his letters until prison. The letter to the Galatians is caustic and harsh and right as it was written before prison; the letter to the Philippians is full of joy and kindness and friendship because it was written near the end, after he discovered how little his love of God matters unless his love of the church meant the love of people.

And, unfortunately, this is what doesn’t occur in Whitman’s poetry. Whitman sees the people as a kind of idea, a series of icons (the lumberjack, the plowman, the prostitute, the solider, the boy dying of cholera) all real, but not true objects of love, because none of these people have a name.

Finding the name of the one you love is the joy Paul found in prison; this is what set him free even though he was in chains. He knew the church was God’s choice for salvation, but he didn’t really know what the that entailed until the very end.

Isaiah said of God: "The nations are clay, they are at his disposal"; and so it is with the church and the nations today: we are ever yet creation. We are his choices. And this again is where we part company with Whitman. The church, the nation is ever God’s choice, not ours.

We are called to worship, to pray without ceasing, to give him thanks and praise. Yet, all of this becomes empty ritual without the love of the people; and not people as images or categories, but Les and John and Katy and Boo and Angela and David. Without the names, without the real people, the faith in God becomes a kind of fantasy.

I dare say we are living in the midst of the church become fantasy. It is whatever we dream. Like Whitman prophesied, the church has become what we want to be. And it is not surprising then that churches dwindle, worship is seen as where you are, and the people look like hypocrites and stodgy fools. [It is amazing how differently we treat people once we know their name.]

I, like Whitman, believe God is doing a work in the world with this land. To create a land of the free- that is the stuff of salvation. Yet, unlike him, I believe this is God’s work, God’s choice, just as this church is God’s choice. We can no sooner create a church than we can create truth: it is what it is by the hand of God.

Although we may do many things in many ways, we are called by God to worship, to serve, to learn, and to love each other and our neighbors as our selves. This isn’t what we create [this was Whitman’s big misunderstanding], it is what God has said, this is what I am doing, jump in. And in so doing you become the body and blood of my son to the world.

Yesterday’s paper said the Diocese of San Diego will give a few hundred people almost two hundred million dollars because their priests did terrible, terrible things. Here is your first charge: tell people this is not the church; this is not what it means to be the church.

Last month I gave up on our denomination as a means of fighting malaria. It’s nothing personal; it was just a mistake. Here is your second charge: don’t take my misdirection as the church. You and I together are the church (not me or bureaucracy). Be the church. Worship! Pray! Welcome the stranger by stranger by saying, “welcome home.”

We can love God without loving the church, just as we can love the people in the world we fashion without knowing their name; but we cannot do so in the name of God.

I started this sermon hoping to tell you to come back to worship without it sounding “forced”. I thought it would be cool to quote Whitman and his cruise down the St. Lawrence and in no short order it became so much more. Yet lest it miss the mark entirely let me say, come to worship each Sunday. Amen.