​27 September 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Michaelmas
 
 
Jesus said, “Take up your cross.” (Matthew 16)
 
            I’m surprised how every now and then, some text or story that I read long ago but had completely forgotten, suddenly pops up in my memory. Maybe that happens to you, too.
            It happened to me this week with “The Tunnel,” a German surrealist short story written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt in 1952. I read it as an undergraduate when I was making what I have to confess was an only moderately successful attempt to learn German. It tells the story of a university student who one morning boards the same train he always takes to school, but when the train enters what had previously been only a very short tunnel, it mysteriously never remerges. The tunnel just goes on and on.
            Five, ten, fifteen minutes go by as the train rushes ahead, and the student grows increasingly anxious—especially because no one else even seems to notice. He finally confronts the conductor, who leads him up to the cab where they discover the engineer has already jumped, and the train is now hurdling into an abyss. “What shall we do?” asks the anxious conductor. “Nothing,” the student replies. “Nothing.”
 
 
           
            By now, the long shut-down in which we are living of what used to be normal life seems rather like that tunnel, doesn’t it? Think back to early March when things first began to close. It was the beginning of Lent, and we all rather glibly expected a relatively short abstinence, much like Lent itself. But Easter came and went, and we celebrated it only rather half-heartedly, thinking that surely by Pentecost, we would be back together again and able to celebrate Easter properly. But here we are at Michaelmas, and the tunnel still goes on. It’s as if Lent never ended, and never will.
            But to shift registers, the sense of time-endlessness is not just a liturgically unresolved Lent—it’s also political. This election season has also become a very long tunnel, and to make matters worse, the fear of falling into an abyss is palpable. You can feel it in the air, in the edginess of people’s voices, in the tension held in our own bodies. And in the political sphere, the long, dark tunnel from which we never seem to emerge has been going on not just months, but for years. And the question which many of us fear, is what is this abyss into which we feel ourselves falling?
 
            One thing is clear: our nation has become addicted to the mutually reinforcing intoxicants of violence, mendacity, hypocrisy, and anger. The fact is, that behavior lubricated by such attitudes is very seductive, because it’s so satisfying and cathartic. How pious it feels to fire off a self-righteous email, or put a nasty bumper sticker on the car. It is so much more beguiling than the more sober effort and steady restraint required by being truly committed to working for the common good of all. And like any person suffering from addiction, we as a nation will most likely have to hit bottom before things begin to change. Like the train in the tunnel, we may have experience what it’s like to fall over the edge.
            In his original version of the story, Dürrenmatt added an additional final sentence. After the student tells the conductor that “nothing” can be done, he goes on, “God let us fall and now we’ll come upon him.” Those words dropped out of a later version of the story, but we might still notice that they suggest a way of thinking about it that brings me back to today’s gospel.
 
            As we Christians understand it, the cross is both the nadir of human existence, and the beginning point of its exaltation. It is both the instrument upon which life lost the battle with death, and where love triumphed over evil. In short, the cross is what lies at the bottom of the abyss — if the abyss is thought of as the place furthest from God, yet also the beginning point of return to God.
            That, I think, is the great wisdom that lies at the heart of the tradition of AA — to understand that only when one has hit bottom, and come face to face with one’s powerlessness, does the reality of a higher power waiting for us to come home truly hit home. That, I think, is what happens to Satan in the story of the war in heaven we heard in today’s anthem, in which he fights against Michael: Satan hits bottom when he realizes that evil cannot and will not prevail.
            I don’t know when or how we as a nation are going to hit bottom in our current binge of societal craziness. But perhaps as we contemplate the present moment, one meaning of Jesus’ call “to take up your cross” is to accept responsibility even in these times for bearing the message of renewal and restoration that is at the heart not just of AA, but of the whole of the Bible’s prophetic tradition, and which reaches its climax in the cross itself.
            The literary jeremiad (which we are currently studying in the Sunday Forum) is exactly that. Taking its clue from the prophet Jeremiah, it is a discourse that moves from celebrating the gift of God’s covenant, to lamenting the people’s desertion and abandonment of it, to anticipating an eventual restoration of right relationship.
            Taking up one’s cross is to live a life that embraces the whole of this trajectory: from original blessedness, through current despair, to anticipated renewal. And as people of faith, our high calling is to bear witness both to the brutal realism within that trajectory, but also to its inextinguishable hope.
            This week, we’ll be mailing out the 2021 Stewardship packet to all the households of this parish, which will include a small wooden cross as a sign of this call to take up your cross and follow Jesus. At this particular moment, the cross comes with the strong encouragement to see yourself as being “Blessed, to be a blessing,” to be a witness in your own way of promise and hope in these dark times.
            For unlike the student on the train who in the moment of crisis said that “nothing” was possible, as followers of Jesus we hold that with God, “all things” are possible, even now. That is our confidence and our hope. Amen.   

​6 September 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
XIV Pentecost
 
Owe no one anything, except to love one another. (Romans 13)
 
            A couple of weeks ago I was down at our place in Hillsboro, walking one morning along Main Street toward the Post Office. Now, for years the big issue in Hillsboro has been people speeding through town — Main Street is also State Highway 152, and drivers passing through often pay little attention to the posted speed limit of 30 mph.
            So the common practice is for us locals to wave our arms up and down at speeders in that universal sign that means, “Slow down!”
            Well, sure enough, that morning, somebody came ‘round the bend going at least 50, so I waved my arms at him. His response, however, was to floor the accelerator, and by the time he was out of town he must have been going at least 80.
            There was something about that episode that really unnerved me. Why is it, that we are in a time when people are so mad and arrogant? Why such anger? And what’s the alternative?
            That question stayed with me the rest of the week, until one morning I woke up with a very clear thought in my mind: Brother Roger (Frère Roger) of Taizé, now there’s someone who knew how to live peaceably. Perhaps in the back of my mind was a comment made by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, who said that “Brother Roger was someone whose presence gave us the hope that it is at least possible to live peaceably in this world.”
            Now, peaceable is not a word we use very often. We are more accustomed to the word “peaceful,” implying a certain state of tranquility. But to live “peaceably” is a more active thing, something one has to lean into. It means to be civil, conciliatory, nonviolent, amiable—all words easily applicable to Brother Roger.
            He was born in 1915 into a Swiss Protestant family. Then as a young man having survived tuberculosis, he set out to find a place where he might form a religious community devoted to becoming what he called “a parable of reconciliation.” In 1940, he ended up in the tiny village of Taizé, in northeastern France, where he started his community, first by sheltering Jews from deportation.
            But it was still France, a Catholic country, and so one of his first decisions was that his community would transcend the Protestant/Catholic divide that was still strongly felt. He was, it has been said, an “innocent,” someone who saw things such as the imperative for Christian unity as being so self-evident, that he needed no deep theological argument for it. He simply set about living it out in his own life.
            Brother Roger’s peaceableness came to manifest itself, therefore, as a refusal to be drawn into conflict. He would be neither Protestant or Catholic: he would live as both.
            We live in a day when we are constantly reminded of what side of the divide we stand on: red or blue, liberal or conservative, mask or no mask. But to live peaceably, as Brother Roger did, means to move beyond the imprisonment of such labels.
            It means, for example, what Brother Roger said was his deep wish “to seek to understand everything in another person.” For him, a conversation always started with what the other person had to say. This longing to know the other came from the fact that he saw everyone as being offered the very same gift from God: mercy and forgiveness. The question is never who is worthy of such a gift, but only how we can help one another to remove any obstacle that might block us from receiving it?
            And this uncompromising belief in the mercy of God, was grounded in turn in another of Brother Roger’s intuitive convictions, that God is capable of doing only one thing: to love. God doesn’t do anything else. The divine unity that we speak of in so many prayers and hymns, means this one thing: God’s whole activity is to love. Not to judge. Not to condemn. Not to divide. Not to punish. But only to love, to draw people into communion with God and with one another.
            That belief was at the core of Brother Roger’s peaceableness. But it also goes further. In a letter that he dictated in August, 2005, on the afternoon before he was murdered by a deranged woman during Evening Prayer, Brother Roger spoke of the peace that comes out of love as enabling us “to look at the world with hope, even though it is often torn apart by violence and conflicts.”
            It is not our place to judge, to condemn, to divide, or to punish, when God does not. It is our place to contribute to unlocking the goodness of people by helping them simply to receive God’s mercy.
            Red or blue. Liberal or conservative. Mask or no-mask. The dynamic of human life, regardless of who we are, is that we are offered, and have to learn to receive, the gift of God’s mercy. And therefore, Brother Roger said, we have reason not only to hope, but to trust. There is, as the prophet Jeremiah said, a future of peace open to us.
            That is not to say, that Brother Roger did not struggle with doubt. One of his favorite Taizé songs was one that we have sung here at St. Michael’s: “Let not my doubts or my darkness speak to me.” But even doubt is held in the mercy of love.
            The last words that Brother Roger uttered in public were those with which his dictated letter left off, he being too exhausted to continue. He had said, “To the extent that our community creates possibilities in the human family to widen …” And there it ended.
            Community. Possibility. Widen. Those are three words by which we as followers of Jesus might also try to live peaceably, rather than angrily, in the days ahead. Perhaps we too need to slow down. Amen.