Sunday, December 7, 2014

Sermon - God's Possibility: Poem Versus Memo

As usual in worship, the Scripture readings that preceded the sermon were read from the lectern and pulpit. But on this Sunday Abby Hendricks sang the "Canticle of the Turning," accompanied on guitar by Peyton Jernigan, for the final portion of the reading, Luke 1:46b-55.

Luke 1:5-55
God’s Possibility: Poem Versus Memo
James Sledge                                                               December 7, 2014 – Advent 2

   It’s a most improbable story. An old woman and her equally old husband, childless for years, long since having given up hope of children, will have a son. Despite the word of the angel Gabriel, Zechariah cannot believe such a thing. And so he finds himself mute, divine confirmation of the angel’s promise.
   A teenage girl, not yet married and still a virgin, visited by the same angel and told she will have a child who will be Son of the Most High and restore the throne of David for all time. “Impossible,” thinks Mary, but the angel tells her that the power of God will make it so, and Mary becomes the model disciple, responding to this improbable story with “Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.”
   And the improbable story continues. The young girl goes to visit the old woman, and both become prophets, declaring the new thing that God is about to do and is doing. (God) has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.
   Imagine that when Abby got up to sing a few moments ago she hadn’t sung verses from a hymnal but instead startling new words about what God is about to do and is doing. What if she sang of God bringing down one percenters and lifting up minimum wage workers, illegal immigrants, and crowds shouting “I can’t breathe”? What if she insisted that God would do this new thing through her? Who among us would believe her?
   Who is going to take the word of a teenage girl all that seriously? Have you ever been at a school board meeting when a middle school girl spoke. People smile and mentally pat her on the head but don’t pay that much attention. She’s just a middle school girl, after all.
   Of course, many of us don’t take improbable biblical stories all that seriously. Elderly women having children, a virgin birth? Ancient stories from ancient, pre-scientific, unsophisticated people who could believe in gods impregnating young women. And we smile and mentally pat the gospel writer on the head. It’s just an ancient story, after all.
   One of the nasty tricks that the modern, scientific age played on us, from the most liberal Christians to the most literal fundamentalists, was convincing us that “truth” is about facts, figures, logic, and what really happened. 
   Heavily seasoned with Greek philosophy, the modern era elevated science and reason and facts and figures above other sorts of knowledge. Quite a few biblical stories couldn’t be “true” by such standards, and in response, Christians tended to go one of two ways. Some resorted to a fundamentalism that assumes science and history are wrong even while accepting the modern, scientific definition of truth. Others accepted the scientific truth of evolution and the Big Bang while claiming that the Bible and faith dealt with a different sort of truth. I clearly fall more into the latter camp, but this view often comes with some pretty arrogant assumptions.

   For many moderate and liberal Christians, Scripture became an unsophisticated, prescientific text that requires ferreting out its truths from the ancient words of ancient folks who didn’t really understand the world and weren’t nearly so smart as us. And so engaging the Bible became an exercise in culling something useful from fanciful tales that ancient simpletons believed.
But as any good Bible scholar will tell you, the biblical writers, while pre-scientific, were anything but unsophisticated. The fact that the book of Genesis tells two, incompatible creations stories and two, incompatible versions of the Noah’s ark story make clear that they were never writing about “what happened.” They were up to something else.
And so it may be helpful to let go of some modern assumptions as we hear an improbable story of two pregnant women, one very old and one very young. The gospel of Luke does not tell these stories because the unsophisticated folks of that day would believe such silly things. For Luke to cast a middle school aged girl as God’s prophet was even more outlandish and unbelievable in the patriarchal time of the gospel than it is today. It was absurd and even scandalous to think that God would enter into human history in this manner.
   And that brings be back round to the question I raised earlier. What if Abby had not sung a hymn from a hymnal but sung of the new thing God is doing? Could we even entertain such a possibility? Or are we too certain in our knowledge that religious truths come via seminary educated sorts who carefully dissect ancient, unsophisticated texts and translate them into our, modern worldview, or through denominationally sanctioned liturgies, or through the music that meets our standards of what good church music is, or through whatever other hoops we imagine God must jump through? Will we insist that the God who came in Jesus abide by our comfortable notions of what is possible, of what is logical and reasonable?
   As I wondered about whether God can break into the carefully constructed worldviews that we imagine tell us what is true and possible, that allow us to keep things neat and orderly, a colleague called the church to ask about renting our Fellowship Hall. We engaged in the typical chit chat of pastors; “How’s Advent going?” and such. She mentioned a quote from an Advent sermon by Walter Brueggemann she was going to use. I asked her to email the sermon to me. She did, and my eyes teared up as I read it. Brueggemann gave two paragraph synopsis of the Western civilization descended from Greek philosophy that so shapes our worldview and then said,
Except this! Mostly unnoticed and not taken seriously, mostly under the radar in this adult world of control and order, there have been Jews. For the most part Jews have not committed to reason and logic and memo and syllogism and brief. Because the Jews came with their peculiar stories of odd moments of transformation, all about emancipation and healing and feeding and newness, all under the rubric of “miracle.” And behind the stories there were poems…lyrical, elusive, eruptive, defiant. Jews have known from the outset that a commitment to memo and syllogism will not make things new. Jews have known all along that in poetry we can do things not permitted by logic or reason, because poems never try to sound like memos. Poetry will break the claims of the memo. Poetry will open the world beyond reason. Poetry will give access to contradictions and tensions that logic must deny. Poetry will not only remember; it will propose and conjure and wonder and imagine and foretell.[1]
   And a middle school aged girl sings the song God gave her, and we must decide whose truth we will embrace; whether God’s poetry can break the claims of the memos that control our world and open us to newness and possibilities beyond reason.
   Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Come quickly.


[1] Walter Brueggemann, from “The Poem: Subversion and Summons,” preached at Columbia Theological Seminary, December 5, 2010.

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