Sermons

Sermon, The Rev. Christopher McLaren, April 25

Listen to audio version of this sermon.

St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Sunday April 25, 2010 Easter 4C
Preacher: Christopher McLaren
Text: Revelation 7: 9-17
Theme: A Vast Bridge Swung Down for A Vast Multitude

Today in the Revelation to St. John we receive a vision of heaven at the end of time. The biblical book of Revelation is apocalyptic writing that attempts to “lift the veil” of the hidden reality of God. In Christian theology knowing our final destination intends to shape how we live in the present.
The vision of John is majestic and expansive. He looked,
And there was a great multitude that no one could count from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

It is a vision of paradise regained, “They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. (Rev. 7:16,17)”
Whatever we think about “Salvation,” John’s vision makes clear that it is not just a personal encounter. No, salvation involves peoples, tribes, nations, languages, and multitudes. Salvation is not a private or elite reality. Salvation is something wild that cannot be controlled or limited by us, because it belongs to the God.
Recently I read of a man who made it his spiritual practice while he was in airports or waiting in a lounge to focus on people – as they walk by or sit across from him and ask, “Did Christ come to save that person?”
In doing so he tries to focus on the strangest or oddest people in the lounge or airport and ask, “Is Christ risen for that person?” “Does Christ’s love extend to that person?”
He explains, "It's my little discipline to see just how much I can swallow of the expansive nature of Jesus Christ without choking."

One thing we know for sure about Jesus Christ is that he saves. By his life he pulls people back into life. He saves people that nobody thought could be saved. There is a kind of relentless reach in Christ’s work among us, a kingdom that is always expanding, a circle that is always enlarging, forever assembling that great multitude that no one can count.

I want to tell you part of a story by Flannery O’Connor from her short story entitled Revelation, that helps to get at this idea in an unusual way. However, I need to warn you that Flannery O’Connor was a very devout catholic writer from the Christ-haunted south, and at times she uses language that is shocking, even offensive in the southern grotesque style. There are descriptions of people that are boiling with prejudice and not normally meant for polite conversation. But in a way, Flannery O’Connor is her own sort of apocalyptic writer, lifting the veil off of what ordinary people think privately but would never dare say publicly.

Mrs. Turpin, a self-righteous white woman sits in the doctor’s office waiting room. Mrs. Turpin sits with her taciturn husband, Claud, described as a "lean stringy old fellow." Across from them sits (In Mrs. Turpin’s designation) a "white trash" woman with her sick child and also a pleasant, plain woman with her unattractive daughter whom Mrs. Turpin judges to be about 18 or 19. The girl is reading a book.

Mrs. Turpin attempts to make conversation. In her mind she compares herself with all the people in the waiting room, one by one and comes off quite favorably. She may not be the most educated or privileged person in the room, but she judges herself to be one of the best. But that "fat girl" who sits across from her bothers her with her silent scowl, but Mrs. Turpin chatters on.

Sometimes, just before going to sleep at night, Mrs. Turpin would occupy herself with thoughts about "who she would have chosen to be if she couldn’t have been herself," if Jesus had given her a choice of who she wanted to be. What if the only choice was “white trash” or in her words a "nigger”? She was horrified at the thought. Mrs. Turpin has a very well developed social stratification system in her mind. She places each person she meets at some level, with herself somehow always near the top of the heap.

The “ugly girl” across from her is still glaring in the most disconcerting way. But still, Mrs. Turpin chatters condescendingly to the others as she carefully places each of them in her assigned human categories.

At the mention that Mrs. Turpin and Claud have a farm with hogs, the “white trash woman" blurts out, “One thing I don’t want, is Hogs. Nasty stinking things, a-gruntin and a-rootin all over the place."

Mrs. Turpin rises to the bait, "Our hogs are not dirty and they don’t stink. They are cleaner than some children I’ve seen. We have a pig parlor." Even Mrs. Turpin’s hogs are superior to the swine of others’ certainly cleaner than the child of the poor woman sitting across from her.

Mrs. Turpin continues to chatter, as best she can with the lowly creatures that surround her in the doctor’s waiting room. Hearing a song on the waiting room radio, she agrees with the saccharine lyrics, thinking to herself that she is a good person who always tries "to help anybody out that needed it whether they are black or white, trash or decent."

By this time she notes that the girl’s "eyes were fixed like two drills" upon her. Noting that the girl is reading, Mrs. Turpin says, "You must be in college." She is determined to draw the "ugly girl" out and into polite conversation. She is determined to shame her into having some manners. The girl says nothing. Her mother answers for her. Her name, it turns out, is Mary Grace, and she has just returned home for the summer from Wesley College. Mary Grace?

"It never hurt anyone to smile," says Mrs. Turpin, loud enough so that the girl can hear her, "it just makes you feel better all over."

Then Mrs. Turpin muses aloud, "If it’s one thing I am, its grateful. When I think of all I could have been besides myself, ¦ I just feel like shouting, "Thank You Jesus, for making everything the way it is!"

At that moment the book that Mary Grace had been reading strikes Mrs. Turpin just over her left eye. She sprawls on the floor as others scream. The girl from Wellesley is restrained and removed from the premises but not before she can deliver a message to Mrs. Turpin. She focuses on Mrs. Turpin and whispers into her ear her words of judgment, "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog."
Now Mrs. Turpin, felt entirely hollow except for her heart, which swung from side to side as if it were agitated by a great empty drum of flesh."

Mrs. Turpin, the once-large self-assured, confident woman, is reduced to a "hollow, empty drum." She is descending to some hellish place where everything is strange, disrupted, cut loose. After being examined and patched up by the doctor, as she and Claud turn into the dirt road toward their house, she looks toward their home fully expecting to see, "a burnt wound between two blackened chimneys," so terribly dislocated does she now feel."

Lying in bed that night, a damp washcloth over her bruised eye, Mrs. Turpin attempts reassure herself, tearfully repeating, "I am not a wart hog from hell."

"But," says the writer, "the denial had no force. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied¦ the message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman." And a girl named Mary Grace delivered the message.

The next day Mrs. Turpin staggers down toward the hog pen, the "pig parlor" which once caused her such pride. "You look like you might have swallowed a mad dog, " Claud says to her as he hands her the hose used for cleaning the hogs.

She stares at the hogs in their pen. She speaks words of fury, "How am I both a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?"

Christian theology has long wrestled with this paradox of humanity, created good in God’s image while at the same time tragically flawed. Justified, made right by God in Christ and at the same time sinful. How can we be both of these things at the same time? When the reality of our lives is stripped bare, when all of our pretensions are removed (just as they were for Mrs. Turpin) when the truth is exposed about us, how can we be both cherished by God and in need of the salvation of the Lamb?

Mrs. Turpin received a "revelation," delivered in the sneering words of the disturbed, “ugly girl” in the waiting room. Flannery O’Connor made the girl to be a prophetic agent delivering a judgment with which Mrs. Turpin could not argue. For one stunning moment, one terrible moment she has been made to gaze in the mirror of truth and seen her life as it is “ a poorly constructed sham built upon her need to be better than others and her habit of placing everyone else beneath her. She is worse than the "white trash" she abhors. She is a "wart hog from hell," a person whose constant need to be reassured of her value over against that of others is testimony to how terribly unworthy she actually is.

When her "negroes," black workers on their way to work in her fields that morning, reassure her with flattering words about how sweet and pretty she is (I never knowed no sweeter white lady says one), she knows they are flattering her with lies. She has had an encounter with the truth about herself and she is about to experience a death.

So, at the fence of the pig parlor, Mrs. Turpin, a considerably reduced person, calls out to the gathering darkness, seeking some response to her misery. She looks at the pigs, "as if through the very heart of mystery," she looks and listens, "as if she were absorbing some abysmal, life-giving knowledge." There is a "visionary light" amid the grunting and rutting of the pigs. She sees a vast bridge, swung down from heaven to earth.

Upon it a vast horde of human souls are traveling toward heaven. There on that road were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the rear of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable, as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. Yet she could see by their shocked faces that even their virtues had been burned away.

Even their virtues are burned away. They have nothing, even those who thought they had something, nothing except the gracious, embrace of God who calls them up to his kingdom. All those whom Mrs. Turpin had scorned are ahead of her, and she and Claud, now stripped of their virtues dance at the end of the procession.

O’Connor’s story holds a double revelation. The first is the revelation of judgment in the girl’s message. Now, with her alleged "virtues" having been burned away, Mrs. Turpin is made clean, ready for a second revelation, a vision by the pig parlor, a vision which ends with her hearing, "the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah."

The revelation of Mrs. Turpin finds its power in the revelation of St. John. We are all of us, rich or poor, intelligent or simple, sophisticated or cheesy, intense or easy-going, native or immigrant, uptown or downtown, impulsive or reflective, introverts or extroverts, PhD or GED, contemplative or activist, gay or straight, brown or white, sorters or collectors, elitist snobs or commoners, conservative or liberal, hybrid or SUV, joyful or angry, all of us are in need of God’s saving love.

Just as Mrs. Turpin did, discovering our own need of God is a strange and difficult work. At times the revelation we most need can be simply devastating. To say that salvation belongs to our God, is to say that we know we need God, that in that relationship, our healing, our joy, our belonging is to be found.

Like Mrs. Turpin, we are all of us, once our pretensions are peeled away, "wart hogs from hell," and at the same time God’s beloved ones. To be Christians is to live inside of this delicious paradox. To live in this paradox is to know that the kingdom of God has room for all kinds including us. Too often our vision of the Kingdom has some rather restrictive membership requirements that are not shared by God.

The revelation of St. John is meant to animate our lives in the present that we might, work, pray and love in such a way that the altar of St. Michael’s begins to look more and more like the throne of God, like that “great multitude that no one could count from every nation, and tribe and peoples and languages who need that same devastating truth and wild love in their lives.

Could we see our place of worship as a microcosm of John’s heavenly vision? Could we see it as the world’s table, as the table that attracts all kinds of people because of God’s wild and expanding love? Could we dare to see our neighborhood around this table?

Can we see into the heart of the mystery of the kingdom of God? The more our vision of the Eucharistic table, of our community expands the more the kingdom of God has come near? Can you hear "the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah?”