First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Exodus 17

“Take a Fanta”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

September 28, 2008

Sainte-Chapelle is considered the most beautiful church in all of Paris. From the outside it looks just like any other Gothic church. There are the usual markers of flying buttresses and gargoyles. On the inside, though, it’s different. First of all you start with confusion. The entrance doesn’t lead you to the foot of the cross, which is what Norte Dame does, nor does it let you eye wander to slowly upward to a series of windows like St. Severin. When you enter St. Chapelle you are in the bookstore.

Then there are the signs that lead the visitor to a winding, narrow staircase giving the feel of being behind the scenes; it is as you are being asked to take a detour by using a servant’s passage. At the top of the winding staircase you enter a room, which at first, continues along the path of less than dramatic. You are now in a small chapel. You could fit at least two of them in this sanctuary. The next strange piece is that almost everyone is seated and no one is speaking. There is a hush over the room.

All of this made sense when I looked up. Soaring fifty feet above you are stained glass windows that surround the room. The effect of the windows was so intense I had to sit down. Finding a seat I now became one of the silent crowd staring in awe. Each window was maybe three feet wide, but as it rose the fifty feet to the blue ceiling painted to reflect a star filled heaven, each time I let my eyes follow one of the windows upward it was like a tapestry was being unrolled, unfurled. Every few feet was the repetition of a unique pattern with a new image, a new piece of its story.

That there was lots of amazing stained glass and the feeling of being wrapped in light was enough for me, but then I remembered what I had read about the church and it became truly inspiring. St. Chapelle was conceived not only as a church using the vertical sensibilities of the Gothic era; it was also conceived as a reliquary. A reliquary is a box that stores or holds a relic. Kind of like what an urn is for ashes or a jewelry box for jewels, a reliquary was small box that held a piece of the true cross, a lock of hair, a bone of a saint and so on. St. Chapelle was known to possess a number of relics from the passion of Christ, but what it was really known for was how the church was meant to be the box itself.

Now, again, I have to raise my Protestant hand and suggest I am not a big believer in the physical deposit of holiness in relics, nor am I ready to rub the box containing the bones of a saint to help cure my lower back issues. But what I found so intriguing in St. Chapelle was the idea of being commingled with the blessing. Instead of being outside the box, I, we, were on the inside. Now we are getting close to something a Reformed theology may endure. Being in the box as the body of Christ, the people there became a kind of blessing that would become again.

Back on the street outside the church the glory of the windows was replaced by the claustrophobia of how the most beautiful sanctuary in Paris is nestled inside the halls of justice and has lost any sense of being in its own space. And just like the inside, there are signs on the outside too; these signs say be careful, stuff is falling off the roof. So to add to St. Chapelle’s incognito theme chain-link fences and makeshift wooded walkways wrap its exterior and provide a distance that is unsettling and unwelcoming.

Despite all of this I would concur on its being the most beautiful. And it was that beauty that kept pushing a question at me as we walked across the Seine to the Left Bank. The question is: why does Paris have all these incredibly beautiful churches, these great acts of faith preserved for the world, but yet be so godless? I mean this is a city that has a church they converted into a temple of reason to celebrate the fact that they were done with churches and freed from religion. The Pantheon down the way a few miles has served for the last two hundred plus years as a constant reminder that Christianity was no longer needed. I dare say that the builders of St. Chapelle might find this development less than the goal that inspired them.

Each time I return from Africa I am struck not so much by the cathedrals I visit en route, but by our cathedrals. Although we have beautiful churches and plenty of public buildings that are echoes of a Greek and Roman temples, they are not our cathedrals. We have been building cathedrals for a hundred years and they are our public schools. They are the closest thing to the kind of common effort, common place that cathedrals were meant to be in the 13^th century.

I know this is not the common view of public schools, but rambling around the public schools of sub-Saharan Africa has given me time to pause and compare and contrast. This summer I took a number of people to see Chivumu, which is the full primary school we have helped to build in Malawi. Some of you remember the pictures of the classrooms constructed out of sticks and branches with a grass roof and dirt floors. Remembering those rooms makes me look at the new brick classrooms with concrete floors and desks and the tin roof with a sense of awe and joy. But they are not quite on the level of or add up to a cathedral.

Don’t get me wrong they add up to a new world for a village. This is what they tell me, this is what their eyes say when we talk about the next phase. For them this is a grand endeavor. And I am inspired by the progress and the difference they have made, we have made, together. But it is just not the same. I have seen St. Chapelle and it will be very difficult for another space to inspire me with light and color and theology imbedded in architecture as this one did. And there is something similar when you sit with the Malawians when they pass out the Fanta and the Cokes and they hear you describe a public school or a hospital in America. They just can’t imagine- but I can.

We have built cathedrals for our children in town after town that makes the rest of the world pause and wonder. Like the moment in St. Chapelle where it took a second to sink in, when our friends see our schools or just start to count the busses that line up to chauffeur our children around the town, there is a need to sit down and take it all in. There is a look of wonder if the kingdom of God has indeed come.

This was the intent of the Gothic cathedral to be the blending of heaven and earth, to inspire people to see the proximity of God, that justice and beauty and truth and hope were actually in their midst. Part of the reason this image may not be terribly apparent to us is how little we esteem our own public education, how we love to grouse about it and grumble. We have fantastic teachers, bright children, we’ve built cathedrals for them to learn and grow and we have built amazing places for them to play and have a sense of pride, but no one is proud.

I don’t share this with our African friends because that would just not be cool and I don’t think they would believe me anyway. How could anyone have such a place and not be in constant wonder? How could someone who is used to having one paid teacher for three hundred students believe for a moment that we have at least one per thirty children and then aids and librarians and grounds people and someone to prepare free food for them and bus drivers to take them around at no charge or coaches to teach them how to play, how could have all this and yet grumble? But we do.

We complain about so many things. I know that things have dragged a bit on Ten Eyck Street with the construction, but like the schools I can’t bring myself to really complain anymore because I am still in awe that so many people would be working and no one was bribed, we didn’t have to sell a portion of our country to the Chinese to get a dump truck that works. We’ve been back in country a month and I am still just walking around our house like I did at St. Chapelle. I just can’t believe I am in the midst of this place; it is like heaven and earth are commingling. Now I know our furniture and furnishing can be easily surpassed and exceeded. Televisions come much bigger than mine and it’s not hard to find a better car than a 1989 Izuzu Trooper. But that doesn’t matter to me right now. I am still in awe.

Sometimes I wonder why the author of Exodus painted such a bad picture of the people. He casts them in a terrible light. It is as if they are the most ungrateful, losing sight of the forest for the trees, ready to abandon hope group of folks that ever came down the pike. I have tried to soften this image in sermons by suggesting that taking them from the closed, known world of Egypt to the wilds of the Sinai peninsula with no provisions and seemingly no plan would have made even the most patient person doubt and ready to grouse.

But at Meribah it is as if the scale has tipped against them. At the Red Sea they turned on Moses and said, just let us die. A little later when the food ran out they turned on him again, saying, just let us die. And when people realized they were not heading toward anything that resembled an oasis or even just a stream, they turned on him again. The tipping though is in the fact that the Red Sea did part, manna and quail were offered, and there was a cloud by day and a pillar of fire in the sky by night leading them. Had none of these been in place, maybe Meribah wouldn’t have been so bad. Yet it was kind of like the third strike. Actually it will get even worse in the next few parts of the story. But Meribah was a tipping point- not to the good.

The good news of our story though is that despite the grousing and questioning that seems so impossible given the wonders God kept offering, despite all of this God persists in working to bring something about in the people and they are not shamed for their lack of appreciation or faith. And this image is what I believe Exodus is meant to convey to us, the church, to the people who are on the way to freedom. There is going to be plenty of times where you have heaven before you and yet you just don’t get it; you have a feast and you complain about the cut of meat you receive; you have a cathedral built by all and yet you see it as a dump, or less than what was hoped for- not as good as others.

We are on our way to freedom; we are not there. We are struggling with temptations and our own misdeeds. The sirens of greed have just drawn us to shore again. There are so many lessons we need to learn and understand. But we must understand that God is in our midst doing wonders, creating a vision of how close heaven and earth can be; God is in our midst doing all those things again and again.

At the end of a long day this summer the women from Watertown and Canton were invited for one more sit down by their Malawian hosts. They were all spent, all tired, and needed their rest. One of the ladies turned to me as the soda pop was being passed around and said, “I just can’t do another Fanta.” I didn’t flinch, but I did say with a half Buddha smile “take a Fanta.”

I did this not because there would have been a scene or that protocol would have been breached (well it would have but who am I to cast a stone about protocol?). I encouraged the Fanta because the people there were not really interested in the need to please or even to have a specific conversation. They just wanted to revel in the moment that fifteen white people were in their house. That so many people, who live in America, the land of such opulence, that none of them are ever really ready to let themselves believe such a place, such a blessing really exists- that it is a fact. That these people were here, though, in this place was like having evidence that indeed it’s possible. That these people could just be in the midst having a Fanta is big.

In Paris I got a sense that people no longer knew or could appreciate that the world looks at a place like St. Chapelle and is convinced that God has brought water from the rock. And as I start to get more and more immersed in the opulence we all share, I am afraid I too will forget that God is in the midst. I too will wonder like the Israelites in spite of all that is good and lovely and tremendous, in spite of all the blessings I live out each day, I too will begin to wonder.

Remember this when you read the papers in the next month or as you hear the candidates posture over trillions, trillions. Remember you are a kind living, incarnation of hope for the world. And its just not stuff. It’s that life can be such a blessing; life can be so good. Remember that is so hard to believe for most of the world. Remember what we grouse about and question is just too good to be true. Amen.