First United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: Psalm 34, Psalm 39
February 22, 1998
A preacher happens upon a group of boys who are surrounding a stray dog. Stopping within earshot, he listens to their conversation. Then he enters their circle and inquires as to what is taking place. The boys tell the preacher that they have found this stray and are deciding who, among them, will get to take him home. So they are participating in a contest of sorts. Whoever can tell the biggest lie gets to keep the dog.
The preacher is visibly offended by this revelation and decides it is time for a little street-corner moralizing. “When I was a boy, I cannot remember ever telling a single lie,” he says. Whereupon the boys look at each other, look at the preacher, and say: “I guess he’s your dog.”
* * * * *
Truth is a precious commodity. One should never tease it, trade it, tamper with it, or take it lightly. One should tell the truth he knows. And one should tell the truth he is. Another way of saying the same thing is to suggest that there are two ways to utter falsehood. One is to lie about the facts. The other is to lie about one’s life.
Forget those who lie about matters factual. The world will quickly find them out. Concern yourself, instead, with those who lie about matters personal. For the world may never find them out. Worse yet, they may never find themselves out. Those who lie about their lives fall into two camps. Those in the first camp lie about themselves….which is called misrepresentation. Those in the second camp lie to themselves….which is called self-deception. Both are bad. But the latter is worse.
Which is why I have always tried to be honest, each time I step into this pulpit. Honest about what I know. And honest about who I am. For if a congregation discovers.…even once….that there is a severe discrepancy between the two, then credibility suffers. Along with believability….in both the messenger and (alas) the message.
An honest effort. That’s my pledge. And this morning it continues, with the subject being “life in the Spirit.” If there are seasons in the calendar….and seasons of the heart….is it not also possible that there are seasons of the soul? And while one may move among several seasons (so that one is not bound by one spiritual climate), is it not also possible that there is one primary season that suits the soul better? If that be so….and I think it is….then my spiritual season is that of winter.
Which is somewhat ironic, given that (climatically) winter months are the ones I like least. I endure them…..and, occasionally, enjoy them. But once past Christmas, I would just as soon leapfrog into April. Yet contradictions abound, even in integrated individuals….meaning that a “wintry soul” can abide in a “summery body”….just as lions and lambs can lie down in the same bed, and infants can play over dens of adders.
Martin Marty is, perhaps, America’s foremost Protestant. A Lutheran who teaches at the University of Chicago, he is my guide to the seasons. His (too) is a winter journey. One delights in finding a learned companion. One senses there are others.
Martin Marty has written over 45 books. But the one that intrigues me most, A Cry of Absence, is the one that follows the death of his wife. He writes 172 pages with no mention of her passing. The reader has to know this from other sources. He begins:
Winterless climates there may be. But winterless souls are hard to picture. A person knows that winter will eventually come to Chicago in January. But near the equator, winter is escapable. As for the heart, however, where can one escape the chill? Winter can blow into surprising regions of the heart when it is least expected. Such frigid assaults can overtake the spirit with a persistence of an ice age and the chronic cutting of an arctic wind. Who tends the spirit when winter takes over?
The author continues in words that are clearly autobiographical. He is describing a telephone conversation in the wake of his wife’s death:
Picture someone (he says) who is hungry for the warming of the spirit. He calls a friend who is self-advertised as being “spirit-filled.” “Praise the Lord,” she responds as she picks up the telephone. The two talk….then agree to meet in person. He is chilly, but open to stirrings. She is well-characterized as being full of stir. But what transfer of spirit can occur when the filled person is compulsive about the summer and sunshine in her heart? No frown clouds her face. Lips are locked in a smile that is relentless. Concerning the tragic death, she says: “The Lord wills it.” That is that. First word. Last word. “The Lord has satisfied every need,” one hears, so that it would be akin to sin to stare, once more, at the void within. “Christ is the answer,” the spirit is warm, and there are no cracks in the window of the soul for letting cold air in or warm air out.
She is, of course, one of the summery ones. She is filled with the language of abundance and life. She can describe, in retrospect, her dramatic passage from old life to new life….old self to new self. It is clearly a birth passage. Her language is well chosen. She advises never looking back…. or within. Only up. If the ways of the Lord seem mysterious and strange, she does not see it. She has easy explanations. Her style is country and western, rhythmic Christianity….foot-stompingly exuberant.
On meeting the summery sort, feelings abound. Some feel judged. Some feel jealous. Along the way, many of us discover that we do not belong to that region of the faith where sunshine language comes easily. Is it, we wonder, a matter of personality? Is it a matter of biography? Or is it a matter of inadequacy? One quietly hopes it is the first or second. One quietly fears it is the third.
One man, widely respected, decides after much soul searching to leave First Church. “It is not spiritual enough,” he says. He goes on to tell me that it isn’t my fault. But while kind in his disclaimer, he believes it is my fault. He means for me to take it personally. But, in the same week, another writes: “It grieves me to have to move away from First Church (given my job transfer), because in an entire lifetime of searching, I have never been so wonderfully fed or so spiritually led.”
Is one right? Is the other wrong? One thinks not. What we have are the reports of a summer and winter Christian, with one feeling a resonance with the preacher and the other, a dissonance. One tries to be a man for all seasons. But sometimes who one is conditions what one brings.
But one can only be who one is. So one pleads: “Let there be no war between the spiritual styles….only a peaceful coexistence.” Karl Rahner is, along with Hans Kung, the preeminent Roman Catholic scholar of the 20th century. It is Rahner who suggests that the future will clearly delineate two types of piety….the summery and wintry styles. Neither of which will be chemically pure. And to neither style should the church give preference. Then Rahner adds: “For the dual purpose of caring for people or for winning them in the first place, the church should not place all its hopes on the summery sort….and ought to listen very carefully to those who, even while praying diligently and receiving the sacraments regularly, find themselves at home in a wintry sort of spirituality in which they stand alongside the atheists, but (obviously) without becoming atheists themselves.”
Ah, at last a clue to understanding the wintry folk. We find it in Rahner’s closing words: “They stand alongside the atheists, without becoming atheists themselves.” If one describes the atheist in simple terms….as one who has excluded God from the horizon of his vision….then it could be said that the wintry sort also have an occasional horizon problem. For they do not always see God clearly, nor do they always understand what they see….given that much of what they see does not look like God.
In my former church, I led a Saturday morning men’s group (very similar to the one I lead here on Wednesday mornings). One of the active members was a Christian of the wintry type. Concerning another member of the group who was more summery in temperament, he said: “If I could just have a faith like his that ignores all the things that contradict it.” In pushing him deeper into his point, I discovered he did not really want that kind of faith at all. There were too many contradictions in his horizon to ignore. What he wanted was permission to be a Christian of the wintry sort. I gave him that permission. Which is why he liked me.
But we wintry types are not alone. We have lots of company. It’s good company. Which we find by reading the Psalms. The Psalms are often called “the prayer book of the Bible.” Others call the Psalms “the hymnbook of the Bible.” Nobody really knows who wrote them. Whereas the church once assigned most of them to King David, it now assigns very few of them to King David. Rather, they are a collection of several voices, gathered over several centuries.
But one reads the Psalms because they offer something found almost nowhere else in the Bible. They do not tell us much about who God is….what God wants…..or even what God’s followers ought to do. Instead, the Psalms tell us how God’s people feel. They reflect the temper and temperament of their authors….their dispositions….their longings….their affirmations….their despairs….their confidence….and even their lack of confidence. Much to our surprise, we find that over two-thirds of the Psalms are written from the wintry perspective.
To be sure, summery Psalms abound. One need look no further than Psalm 34.
I will bless the Lord at all times.
His praise shall continually be on my lips.
(One often finds this type on the street corners of major cities.)
He frees me from all my fears.
Every face turned to him grows brighter
and is never ashamed.
The angel of the Lord pitches camp around those who fear him.
He keeps them safe.
How good the Lord is.
O taste and see.
Young lions may go needy and hungry,
but those who seek the Lord lack nothing good.
Ah, a Psalm for the summery sort. But then one turns to Psalm 39, which is also very typical.
Lord, you have given me but a hand’s breadth or two of life,
The length of my life is as nothing to you.
Every human being that stands on earth is a mere puff of wind.
Every human being that walks, only a shadow,
A mere puff of wind is the wealth one stores away,
Not knowing who will profit from it.
So now, Lord, what am I to hope for?
My hope is in you. Save me from all my sins.
But do not make the butt of fools.
Take your scourge away from me.
I am worn out by the blows you deal me.
Like a moth you eat away all my desires.
Lord, hear my prayer. Listen to my cry for help.
Do not remain deaf to my weeping.
For I am a stranger in your house,
A nomad like all my ancestors.
Turn away your gaze that I may breathe freely,
before I depart and am no more.
This is a Psalm for the wintry sort. The writer has a horizon problem. He looks at life, but what he sees does not compute. He sees life’s brevity. He sees life’s injustice. He sees the awesome absences of God. He hears the deafening silences of God. He cites his claim on God’s hospitality: “I am your guest here. If this the way you treat your guests, look away from me. Let me draw my own breath. Let me see if I can do better by myself.”
One must read this Psalm (as one must read many Psalms)….not as a carefully-reasoned essay on matters theological, but as the uncensored cry of the wintry heart. One needs to hear the psalmist wrestling with the question: “Why bother with God?” Such psalms are like letters you write when you can’t sleep at night, but aren’t supposed to mail until you read them in the cool, dispassionate light of morning.
There once was a farmer who owned a mule. This mule was much valued because he was especially good at plowing. But the mule got very sick one day. So the farmer called in the veterinarian. The vet looked the mule over, diagnosed the malady, and prescribed some very large and foul-tasting pills. “Give the mule one pill, three times a day, and he’ll recover. But the mule won’t like the taste of the pill and will likely spit it out. So I am going to give you this long tube-like cylinder, with a diameter just slightly larger than the pill. Put one end in the mule’s mouth. Slip a pill into the other end. Then blow. Before the mule will know what is happening, the pill will be down his throat.”
The next day the farmer was already waiting in the office when the veterinarian came to work. “You look awful,” said the vet to the farmer. “What in the world happened?” To which the farmer replied: “The mule blew first.”
And that’s the way it goes some days. Life does us before we can do it….and there are large and bitter pills to swallow. The life of the faithful is not an all-night victory party, nor is the testimony of the people of God limited to an endless anthology of success stories. Theologically speaking, “every day with Jesus may be better than the day before.” But every day with Jesus does not always feel better than the day before.
Still, the wintry sort are not pessimists. Far from it. The wintry sort may have a horizon problem. They may stand alongside the atheists who exclude God from what they see….or perhaps because of what they see. But wintry Christians do not become atheists themselves. Wintry spirituality is still spirituality, in that it hungers after God until it finds him. And the findings may be unpredictable and episodic….like the January thaws which do not always come in January…..but always come. And because they have come before, one trusts they will come again. So one remembers….even as one waits and hopes.
The wintry Christian walks the landscape, knowing that somewhere there is a room with light and fire and warmth. Sometimes it seems as if that room is a long way off. All one can see is the glow of the fire through a distantly-frosted window….or observe smoke curling from the chimney into the crystalline blackness of the night. But one knows that the room is there….that the fire is there….and that having been there before, one will be there again. So one keeps on. But there is a special quality to the “keeping on.” It is not toughness, cussedness, defiance, or even courage. It is trust.
Trust is what rings through the wintry landscape of the Psalms. It is trust in the best, carved out in the midst of the worst. It is my belief that tables will be prepared in the midst of mine enemies….and that my feet will be set upon a rock when hosts are camped against me. The Lord is close, says the Psalm. Close to who? Close to those whose courage is broken and whose spirit is crushed. The great word of the Psalms is the three-letter word “yet.”
Yet, says the psalmist, over and over again.
Yet, which means “in spite of all evidence to the contrary.”
Yet, “will I put my trust in thee.”
And it is that trust that gives us wintry people one of our most engaging qualities. I am talking about our endurance. We ride the rapids with God.
A Swedish beekeeper, dying of cancer, is living out his last winter. Semi-isolated in his beloved cottage, he writes:
It is a gray, pleasant February….fairly cold….hence, not too damp. The whole landscape is like a pencil sketch. I don’t know why I like it so. It’s pretty barren. And yet I never tire of moving about in it.
Can’t you hear it? It is the enduring “yes” in the midst of the world’s “no.”
The actress, Lili Palmer, paid a visit to the painter Oskar Kokoshra and dared to show him some of the paintings she had done. She was just a beginner. He was one of the 20th century masters. He examined them carefully….silently….while she waited anxiously. Finally she could wait no longer. “Do I have any talent?” she asked. “The question is irrelevant,” he answered. “Thousands have talent. The only thing that matters is, do you have staying power?”
We of the wintry persuasion….whatever else we lack….have abundant staying power. For we have spent inordinate amounts of our lifetime waiting for God.
Note: The quotations from Psalms 34 and 39 are abbreviated. The primary translation used is that of the New Jerusalem Bible. This sermon owes a debt of gratitude to Martin Marty and his book, A Cry of Absence. I am also indebted to Brent and Diane Slay (and a group of their Grand Rapids friends) for allowing me the opportunity to work through some of this material in a theological seminar in their living room, earlier this winter.
