The Shape of Love's Presence

A sermon preached by Lee Cheek, Lay Preacher, 

@ Crissey Farm, Great Barrington 11-11-12

 

I don’t know about you, but John and I are thoroughly enjoying the new series on PBS Sunday evenings: “Call the Midwife.”  The series is based on the memoirs of Jennifer Lee Worth, a nurse trained for service in post-war London as a mid-wife deployed by the newly implemented National Health Service.  She and several other young women served the slums of the East End of London, where they were headquartered in an Anglican Convent whose sisters also served as midwives. 

Among the series’ delights is the voice-over in each episode spoken by Vanessa Redgrave who portrays Worth’s older, wiser self as she looks back on her life.  In the tone of her voice, you can hear her heart scouring her memories for the Presence of Love in the messiness of her life and in the lives the families she served.

I haven’t read Worth’s memoirs yet, but in the televised series, Worth is unflinchingly and graciously honest about how flawed we human beings are.  She is also honest about the  surprise of Love in  unpromising situations as well as the sad, tragic consequences  when Love is temporarily shut out.

The same could be said about the writings we Christians call our “Bible” comprised of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament writings. They are memoirs, too.   They, too, are unflinching memoirs of flawed human beings and their 2000 years of being surprised by The Presence of Love in their messy and unpromising circumstances and the tragedy of what happened when they tried to shut Love out.  

The Book of Ruth is one such story of the Mysterious Presence of Love in an unpromising situation.  This morning we heard excerpts from the second half of the story.  Since we missed the first half last week when we used the readings for All Saints, I’ll catch you up a bit. 

Naomi, her husband Elimelech, and their two sons flee famine in their native Judah to work and live in the fields of Moab, an alien land on the other side of the Dead Sea. 

After some years there, her husband dies. Then a few years later both her sons die, leaving their two Moabite wives, Orpah and Ruth, to live with Naomi.  When Naomi hears there is food again in Judah, the three childless widows hit the road for Bethlehem, Naomi’s hometown. 

There are many clues that this story may be an allegory of the exiled Israelites returning to Jerusalem from Babylon, but we are immediately drawn into a story of disaster for these vulnerable women, who have no men to protect them and provide for them.  The three childless widows are the sole remnants of a family.  

Widows are very much on the mind of the Markan memoirist in our Gospel reading this morning.  Upon hearing this comparison of indigent widows and well-positioned elitists who are able to legally rob them of their money, no contemporary of Mark’s community could have failed to recall the numerous condemnations in Jeremiah and Deuteronomy of those who take advantage of resident aliens, orphans, and widows. 

And if we read further in Mark, we cannot fail to see that this comparison immediately precedes what is known as the Markan Apocalypse, Jesus’ description of the end times which includes the destruction of the Second Temple.  I leave you to reflect on this as our nation’s leaders are re-working federal taxation policies and determining budget priorities.

But back to Ruth. Let me say how grateful I am to my circle of Jewish friends for all the many recommendations of commentary on this amazing Book of Ruth.*  I was greatly enriched by this study and eventually had the peculiar experience of the book “reading me” –telling me something about myself. 

Though God never “acts” in the book of Ruth, we sense that God—The Presence of Love—is very present.  For me Ruth is a master class in how to listen for the Presence of Love in my life and in the lives of others.

Naomi manages to dissuade Orpah from leaving her own people in Moab, but Ruth clings to her. Sticks by her side.  We can feel how The Presence of the God of Love, clings to Naomi and will not let this suffering, embittered woman go anywhere alone.  

Dear One!  Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you!  Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge.  Where you die, I will die.  

Imagine that this is the voice of Love speaking to you.  You, personally, in all your vulnerability, your weakness, your lack of funds, your lack of shelter, your lack of dignity, your lack of success.  I say to you that I can hardly bear that Love would speak to me thus. But I know it to be true.  Love has stuck by me even in my arrogance, my hubris, my vengefulness, my greediness, my bitterness and my resentment.  

As in Exodus, when God speaks to Moses, Love sees  a possibility in an unpromising situation, with a precarious future, and says, 

        I will be with you.

Ted [Cobden], in his beautiful “epistle” to us this morning alludes to this Presence of Love that would move two dying embers closer together so they may re-ignite.  The Presence of Love sees the possibility and a future when we can’t, and has no plans for leaving the hearth untended.

Naomi and Ruth arrive in Bethlehem. While Naomi professes her bitterness of what she believes is God’s harsh treatment of her, Ruth, the Love bearer,  unhurriedly and uncomplainingly goes to work gathering up the left-over grain as permitted for those in need.  In an act of generous benevolence, hesed, Boaz, the owner of the field, grants special protections to the alien Ruth who is unknown to him.

Thus Naomi is abundantly fed by  Love’s steady harvest of the field’s left-overs.  That’s just the way Love is.  It simply makes do with anything that is left lying around!

Nourished by the food of Love, Naomi revives and sees an opportunity for Ruth’s future.  She sends her to lie down beside Boaz who is asleep on the threshing floor, guarding the threshed wheat.  It is no surprise here that the threshing floor is a both a place of illicit sexual relations and a place of theophanies, appearances of God.  

As instructed by Naomi, Ruth-Love, lies at his “feet”(a euphemism for genitals) until he wakes and asks, trembling, “Who are you?”   She answers in Love’s singular way, confidently yet modestly:  “I AM Ruth your servant.  May you spread your cloak over your servant, for you are a redeemer.”  

 

You know, the Presence of Love waits for us like this:  Gently, quietly, confidently at rest next to the most vulnerable parts of us, which are paradoxically the most fertile places in us for new life.   Love waits for us to wake up so She can say:

I Am Thine.  Marry ME!   We will make Something from Nothing together.

This is how Love speaks to us, enticing us to give ourselves away.  Love desires, as did Ruth, to gently decant the generosity, the benevolence, the hesed, we didn’t know we had in us. 
 

We also see in this story that the Presence of Love does not take “no” for an answer.  Neither does Love recognize things being closed off or shut down.  And the Presence of Love is not boastful or arrogant, nor unkind to us.  Love waits patiently by our side, never leaving us, for however long it takes for us to recover from our losses. Think of the flooded Taft Farm fields last year and the trucks full of vegetables that have been sent from it  to New York City this year! 

So Ruth and Boaz marry and conceive.  Love delights in this!  Imagine—a family from a pair of childless widows!  Grace Church from two homeless congregations!  A renewed fire from dying embers! 

May we awaken each day on the threshing floor of our lives to the devoted Presence of Love who, mysteriously confident in us, whispers to our trembling surprise,

            I am Thine.  Marry ME.  We will make Something from Nothing together.

AMEN.

 _______
* A group of Jewish and Christian scripture students in South Berkshire County, MA, met for several months this year to begin reading together the Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford). They recommended to me the following books which I found very helpful preparing this sermon on Ruth:  Reading the Women of the Bible (Frymer-Kensky. Schocken, 2002); Reading Ruth (ed. Kates and Reimer. Ballentine, 1994); Certain People of the Book (Samuel. Knopf, 1955).  I am also indebted to James Alison and his monumental new education series soon to be released, The Forgiving Victim: An Induction into Christian Vulnerability. http://forgivingvictim.com/

A Sermon Preached at the Feast of the Ascension June 5, 2011: How Love Got Through

by Lee Cheek, Lay Preacher

And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy –Luke 24:52

I was so glad when Francie asked me to preach this Sunday and gave me the option of using the Ascension propers this morning, because unless you attended services in Pittsfield on Thursday, when David Pott was received into The Episcopal Church, you may have missed the Feast of the Ascension this year.

Unlike Christmas and Easter, there is no cultural holiday or ado made of this feast which celebrates the end of the forty days that Jesus spent with his disciples in those paradigm-shattering experiences of a dead man who comes back not to haunt them, but to forgive them.

Interestingly, most Christian churches don’t make a big to-do about the Ascension either. That’s too bad, because the moment of the Ascension is the moment of joyful recognition of the disciple’s HUGE discovery that they—even THEY!—had been loved into being a part of God’s true purposes, a part of God’s dream for the world that was much, much bigger than they had ever been able to imagine before.

Just to recap prior events, let us recall that the young rabbi Jesus had been going back and forth for three years between Galilee and Jerusalem inviting everyone without exception to God’s project of love: the complete elimination of violence which requires giving up the idea of retribution and vengeance.[i] This was not popular with the powers that be, then as now, who were politically skilled at using resentments and revenge for their own purposes. So sensing an uprising during Passover they chose to channel the energies of various conflicts in one direction, executing the one person they could agree to hate.

Jesus’ commandment to love was too demanding for his disciples to follow at that point … for they might be killed, too, hated and reviled by association with him. They betrayed him, lied about knowing him, and abandoned him to suffer alone what they saw was a degrading, humiliating end.

What they could not see then was that Jesus shared God’s eye-view of the world which was, of course, Love’s eye-view of them and thus was much more interested in expanding their ideas about love than their goodness or badness.

So when confronted with the risen Jesus, they came to gradually discover and trust that indeed, they had been entirely wrong about who and how God loves. For forty days they were saturated with the wisdom and knowledge that comes from the forgiving nature of love.

And according to the accounts we heard this morning, it ended for them in the scene depicted on our bulletin covers.[ii] I like that the woodcutters captured the sense of joy, not only for the disciples whose imaginations had been cut loose, blasted apart from the old paradigm about who can be loved, but for Jesus, too, at the sight of it all. He is doing some happy dance on that cloud!

And we see not only Jesus’ joy, but choirs of angels most likely singing Alleluias at the top of their lungs that Love had finally been able to free these people. Maybe that would be the original praise music! I think a crazy mix of East 17’s “House of Love” (you know, the song on the T-Mobile Royal Wedding spoof) and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus would fit the occasion.

Since that day, one person at a time, Love has been blowing apart earth-bound imaginations about who is lovable—or as we might say in the Christian language, who is in on God’s dream for the world. I would like to tell you one of those stories about how Love got through.

I was 15 years old in early June 1964 when I was caught pulling a long face during lunch at the Egyptian Music Camp in DuQuoin, Illinois. My piano ensemble teacher asked me why I was sad. With no sense of irony about being north of the Mason-Dixon line, this culturally blinded daughter of the Old South told her that I heard on the radio that the end of segregation was near.[iii]

To this day, I remember her deeply compassionate eyes as she asked me sweetly, without reproach, what that meant for me. I said that my school would be integrated, as if that were the most unheard of thing in the world.

But something in me was put off-kilter by the kindness of her unblaming gaze which signaled regard for me and who, from that moment, I would be on my way to becoming.

I like to think that looking at me just so, she knew that one day I would come to know the joy and delight of being in the company of people whose skin was darker than mine. In that most promising moment when she did not point the finger back at me for being a teenage bigot, her reproach-free imagination gave birth to my gradual discovery of mercy.

This mercy would enable me to begin forging a new story for myself that did not involve making someone else wrong or bad or dirty or stupid so that my place in society behind the Cotton Curtain, or anywhere else, would be secure.

Another way of saying this is that my teacher’s unconcern for my goodness or badness gave me room to eventually see that yes, I was wrong to transfer my anxiety and conflicts on to a repugnant, reviled other who would bear the blame.

And after some time, I came to be very happy indeed to be wrong, for I was able to share in some measure God’s eye-view of the world, where no person is to be called profane or impure[iv], not even me!

No wonder the disciples returned to Jerusalem with great joy. They were happy to discover that their hope of redemption and reception of mercy did not depend on their goodness or badness, or on the whims of a rescuing or avenging god, but solely on Jesus’ commandment of love that teaches us to pay no heed to the judgment the world makes concerning precarious, marginal people.

There is so much to say about what it’s like to be on the path of Love—the courage needed, the empowerment of the Spirit of Truth, the Love that got us here this morning, the Love that planted Gideon’s Garden yesterday morning, the Love palpably present at the celebration of Ruth Ide’s life yesterday afternoon, the Love that the world is still aching for, that we are aching for. But we can offer all that up in prayer in our petitions and thanksgivings.

So for now let us tarry here just a moment longer on the under-celebrated Feast of Christ’s Ascension which I like to believe that the Anglican priest and poet George Herbert had in mind when he wrote “Love (3)” which appeared the year of his death, 1633.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

If I lacked anything.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,

I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

My dear then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

So I did sit and eat.

AMEN.[v]

---

[i] Matthew 5:38-40.

[ii] Free access and non-commercial use of over 31,000 woodcuts from The Digital Archives of Pitts Theological Library of Emory University, Atlanta, are available online: http://www.pitts.emory.edu/dia/woodcuts.htm; this image from Antwerp, 1646, by Christoffel van Sichem II and his son

[iii] The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the Senate on June 11 and was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson June 19.

[iv] Acts 10:28

[v] The inspiration for this sermon was from Catholic priest and theologian James Alison, especially his Raising Abel (New York: Crossroad, 1996).

A Sermon Preached Easter Vigil, April 23, 2011: Greetings!

by Lee Cheek, Lay Preacher

at St. Paul's, Stockbridge, MA (St. Paul, St. George, St. James, Good Shepherd Episcopal Churches)

Good Evening—or is it Good Morning? I’m not quite sure. I’m kind of dizzy from all the time travel we’ve done this evening from the beginning of creation to Matthew’s empty tomb.

These and all the other stories in the Hebrew Scriptures are the rich record of a people who heard the voice of a God different from their friends, families, and enemies. They all began, about 4000 years ago when our forbearers—the elderly Abraham and Sarah--left their fathers and the idols of their fathers to follow the God of Love wherever faithfulness to this God would lead them.

And what a journey it has been with this God who was gradually shorn of violence and sacrifice and discovered to be the one, true God of Love! These are holy stories of the spectacular ups and tragic downs of a people remembering and forgetting who and whose they were. Desire for mammon. Desire for God. Temples built, destroyed, rebuilt. Humiliating defeats and painful exiles. Feasts. Famines. Self-serving retribution. Gracious benevolence. Eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth. Joseph, Job, Esther, Jezebel. Judges, Kings, and Prophets. Laws and punishments. Treachery. Lies. Murder and salvation.

Think of it! All those stories have brought us here to sit in this lovely sanctuary of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 2011 years this side of a Passover Feast in Jerusalem, when human desire went wrong (again) and converged in a vortex of violence that ended in a tomb of a murdered man.

A murdered man, who if we are to believe our witness Matthew, emerges from that tomb of tombs and says to the first people he meets, “Greetings!” Imagine that! “Greetings!” “Hi!”

That just slays me! I mean isn’t what we expect from a murdered man something like, “Wooooo, I’m going to get you!”? Something like the ghost of John the Baptist that visited the guilty Herod?

No. Matthew clearly does not want us to think that this is a ghost, for he writes: “And they--Mary Magdalen and the other Mary--came to him, took HOLD of his feet (!), and worshiped him.” You can’t hold on to the feet of a ghost.

This realness that Matthew and all the gospel witnesses insist on, is how they are saying to us that even though they were with Jesus for three years and hung on his every word, they were not able to piece it together and really know Jesus and what he was doing in any real way until after the events of that horrible, wrenching week in Jerusalem.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem! The city that kills the prophets”¹ was a city on the brink of disaster then: a brutal occupying Roman army, rival factions at each other’s throat about how to deal with it, a volatile mob tired of it’s most recent celebrity, bitter memories of captivities and exiles, and a handful of desperate leaders whose only common interest was to quell the surging waters of violence that threatened to overflow and destroy them all.

They succumbed to the temptation, not unreasonable, of selecting a common enemy to draw all the violence in one direction. “It is better that one man should die for the many.”²

Who better, then, for the accusing finger to point to than that charismatic young rabbi whose life for the past three years had been a living interpretation of their own holy scripture—their holy stories of being called out by Love on a journey to a Promised Land where no one’s life or dignity or well-being would ever be sacrificed for the good of the order.

So then, the shameful spectacle of trumped up charges and trials. At no point did the young rabbi run away from his teaching of absolute non-violence. Not even in the face of empire, temple, crowd, and faithless friends.

The brutal public execution and burial in a sealed and guarded tomb brings us just this side of something extraordinary. Matthew sets the scene:

Earth-quake! Angel that looks like “lightning! Fainting soldiers! Angel rolls back the stone of the tomb. Waits for two Marys. Tells two Marys, “don’t be afraid, look inside, and run tell the disciples that Jesus will be waiting for them in Galilee.” Two Marys dash off to Jerusalem. Two Marys met in road by Jesus.

And then--after all the tortured, wretched, sorry business of the past three days—Jesus tosses out the word that sets the world in forward motion again, spinning out Love’s light from the abyss of the tomb of tombs, so that we, each and every one of us since then—betrayed and betrayer, tortured and torturer, slave and enslaver, liar and lied to—is miraculously back on the road to the Promised Land, inconceivably forgiven and loved.

“Greetings!” The word, evacuated of anger, reproach, even triumph, that gives us—we who have turned out to be wrong!—a very soft place to land. A soft landing where our nervous systems can relax.

Surprised and gentled by the infinite friendliness and patience of this forgiveness, we can feel the tension draining away, and it becomes possible for us to love others back into their dignity, as well.

“Greetings!” he said then, and still says to us today,

“I know your pettiness, your distorted desires, your tightly held grudges, your pride and your prejudice. I like you anyway! Now, go. Be on your way, and play your part: Tell everyone I’m coming, because, My Dears, when you waste Forgiveness and Love on them, I will already have arrived!”

AMEN.

---

¹Matthew 23:37

²John 18:14

The preacher gratefully acknowledges:

James Alison, http://www.ravenfoundation.org/projects/making-religion-reasonable/james-alison-s-forgiving-victim-dvd-series

Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian, O-Books, 2011

Nina Simone who preached it in song at Montreux 1976 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dlrXCYrNYI&feature=related

A Sermon Preached November 7, 2010 (All Saints C) by Lee Cheek

FREEDOM TO LOVE

“Love your enemies.” Luke 6:27
“But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever” Daniel 7: 18

It’s Sunday, March 7, 1965, and Jonathan Daniels, a 25 year old, white seminary student at what was then known as Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass., is watching on national television the dramatic and violent events of a civil rights march gone wrong. A little later in the broadcast he hears Martin Luther King urge Northern white religious leaders to come to Selma, to complete the 52 mile historic march to Montgomery.

Later, at evening prayer, Jonathan sings with gladness the words of the Magnificat: “My Soul doth magnify the Lord.” When he gets to “He has cast down the might from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly,” he knows that he must answer King’s call. On March 9, Jonathan and ten other ETS students travel to Selma where they join thousands of clergy and nuns who accompany King and his followers to Montgomery.

Because of a ban preventing the second march, many leave before it finally takes place on March 21. Jonathan and fellow student Judith Upham decide to stay in Selma through the spring semester. They move in with a black family, tutor the children, and take them to the city’s segregated Episcopal Church, St. Paul’s. Their activism earns them the title of “white niggers” from the local white supremacists. Jonathan writes: “We are deep in enemy territory.”

Jonathan participates in a voter registration march in Camden and has a realization about his attackers while being tear-gassed and threatened. He writes in his journal: “I began to change. I saw that the men who came at me were themselves not free. Even though they were white and hateful and my enemy, they were human beings, too. I began to discover a new freedom in the cross: a freedom to love the enemy and in that freedom to will and to try to set him free.”

In August 1965 Jonathan and several members of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) picket a grocery store for abusing black customers in Ft. Deposit. They are arrested and put in the Haynesville jail for several days. They choose to not put up bail in order to buy time for an injunction for the case to go to Federal Court. They are suspiciously released. While deciding what to do they walk to a nearby store to purchase cold drinks. A special deputy is waiting for them at the door with a shotgun. He says: “The store is closed. If you don’t get off this god-damn property I will blow your god-damned brains out.”

Ruby Sales, a 17 year old black SNCC worker, is pulled from behind, the gun is fired and Jonathan falls. He dies immediately. About a month later, the deputy is acquitted by an all-white jury after only two hours deliberation.

After Jonathan’s death, people got stronger. Soon the southern jury system came under attack in scores of affirmative law suits. Within five years blacks were serving on juries, voting, sharing public facilities and holding public office.

Today Jonathan Daniels is honored in the Martyrs Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral and in 1994 his name was added to the Episcopal calendar as a martyr and witness to the Gospel.

Nearly 2000 years before Jonathan’s death, a young rabbi began to proclaim that God is love and has nothing to do with violence. A large group of disciples gathered to join him in his project of turning the long page of history by revealing once and for all the truth about human violence. To make absolutely clear what living in the Kingdom of the God of Love entails, he told them this: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.

His message was clear: Do not return tit for tat if you have faith that the world can be otherwise.

Less than three years later, every single one of his friends abandoned him to the jaws of the sacrificial death machine that says it is better that one man die. But … three days after his death, they were—to their astonishment—met by a forgiving, totally pacific, loving presence of their betrayed friend that was so real to them, that they rededicated themselves to the spreading the Good News that the True God NEVER requires a sacrifice.

The pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God ceases early for some like Jonathan Daniels, and we call them the holy ones, the saints. Through the witness of their lives, they have passed on the treasure of our inheritance: The knowledge that God is love which bestows upon us the freedom and power to love others without exception.

A very necessary part of my own pilgrimage is the time I spend with you each week to hear the stories and sing the songs of the people who gradually came to know that God is Love. Today, like always, we will come to the table together and together be forgiven. We will be sent out together to magnify this Love in the world in the unique way given to each one of us.

But can I remember by the time I even get to coffee hour? Will I continue to blame my less than charitable responses on someone else’s behavior? Will I continue to make my home in a world shot through and infused with self-righteousness, resentment, reprisals, and the triumphalism of avenged honor? Will I slip out from under the demands of justice and compassion and continue to reproduce what is done to me?

Of course, it is not easy. But to a God who loves me so much that I am forgiven before I ask, I pray: Guide me each moment of my life. Keep me company each day with the un-triumphant saints. Help me learn to love my enemies. So that one day, I may be able to say as Jonathan did:
“I realized that as a Christian I was totally free … at least free to give my life if that had to be, with joy and thankfulness and eagerness for the Kingdom no longer hidden from behind my eyes.”

AMEN.

[Facts from Jonathan Daniels’ story are taken from the 2005 film broadcast on PBS Here I Am, Send Me (available in streaming video at http://episcopalonline.org/Featured_Video). The remainder of the sermon was borrowed heavily, gratefully and shamelessly from the writings of James Alison (see publications at http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/index.html), René Girard (Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Stanford University Press, 1987, and other publications http://www.imitatio.org/), and Rowan Williams (Writings in the Dust, Eerdmans, 2002).]