Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scriptures: Philippians 1:3-11, 4:8-9
William Shakespeare suggested that sermons could be found in stones. And Annie Dillard once wrote an entire book under the title, Teaching a Stone to Talk. Both ideas are figures of speech. Stones do not talk. Neither do they preach. You may hold opinions to the contrary. But in this season where the spirit of charity is supposed to overwhelm us, I trust that you will keep them to yourself.
What Shakespeare and Dillard are suggesting is that everything has a story. Even the most inanimate object can speak with the eloquence of angels, if someone has ears to hear and a mind to understand.
Life is like that. You go along from day to day….not noticing very much….not seeing or hearing very much….then all of sudden, when you least expect it, things you have heard and seen a hundred times suddenly speak with such power that they force you to pay attention in an almost holy way.
In a book of essays by Fred Buechner, there is the description of a few hours in a single day…. hours in which nothing much happened….but in which, as it turned out, everything happened. Fred Buechner lives and writes in the mountains of Vermont. But he comes and goes for purposes of fulfilling speaking engagements, leading writing seminars, and meeting publishers. Which is how it came to pass that he was returning to Vermont from the state of New Jersey. The following three remembrances happened over the course of that day. And, if you indulge me, I will share them with you now.
The first thing occurred on the train just outside of Newark. It was November, a gray and sunless day….one he describes as being as bleak as a migraine headache. The train windows were coated with dust (which may have actually been preferable to looking at Newark)….especially that section of endless factories, black as soot against the sky….with tall chimneys belching flame, like a landscape that Dante might have painted, had he used a brush instead of a pen.
Somewhere in that twilight zone between being too tired to read but not tired enough to sleep, Buechner found his eyes drifting until they came to rest on the only bright thing in the entire coach….a large framed photograph above the doorway to the forward car. It was a cigarette ad which featured a pretty girl and an equally good-looking guy. They were sitting together beside something blue….a stream perhaps….maybe even a small lake. There was a blue sky overhead….lots of green trees….a crisp, sunlit scene. Full of beauty….full of youth…. full of life….that’s what the picture was full of. Except for the bottom left-hand corner where one could read the Surgeon General’s warning concerning the fact that cigarette smoking might very well be hazardous to one’s health.
Buechner reflected on the irony of it all. Drab train….drab landscape….drab Newark. Pretty pictures….fatal message. We see it thousands of times, yet we miss the irony of it all. I’m talking about the way the words fit with the picture….or don’t fit with the picture. There, in the midst of all that youth and all that beauty one reads: “Buy this. Even though it could kill you.”
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to focus on cigarette smoking, cigarette advertising, or even the cigarette industry. It’s the irony I want you to see. What those ads seem to be screaming (in their own understated way) is that we are our own worst enemies. It is hard for any sane person to deny. Pretty girl, good-looking boy….lakes and streams in their pristine purity….blue skies and green trees (symbols of all that is fair, benign and innocent). And tucked down in the corner of the picture is the grim little warning that we will end up killing ourselves if we are not lucky. Yet, upon seeing the picture, nobody stands up and shouts, “This is madness.” Because there is something in us that has grown exceedingly comfortable with the idea of our own destruction.
After a while, the train rumbled under the river and through no woods until it came, not to grandmother’s house, but to midtown Manhattan. To get to Vermont would require a bus. And to get to the bus would require a cab (or a walk to the Port Authority bus terminal). Buechner chose the walk, cutting along West 42nd Street. About which he writes:
I haven’t lived an especially sheltered life, as lives go. I have knocked around like everybody else and have probably seen my share of life’s seedier side. I was born in New York City and lived there, off and on, for years. I walked along West 42nd Street plenty of times, seeing what there is to see….though I tried not to see it…. yet wanting to see it at the same time.
Movie houses….each one featuring one more X on the marquee than the next one….as if to say: “Try us. We will cater to your lust with a level of grotesqueness and depravity that you can experience nowhere else.” Bookstores. Peep shows. Massage parlors. All with people standing in the doors trying to coax you through the doors (which doesn’t always take much coaxing). And then there are the not-all-that-pretty girls and the not-all-that-pretty boys….many of them hardly more than children….trying to sell, beg, borrow or steal anything that can be sold, begged, borrowed or stolen….all the while trying to avoid the 42nd Street drunks (which are not the comic, amiable, lampshade-on-the-head kinds of drunks you see on television, but the angry, loudmouth drunks and the sickly, drooling drunks that you seldom, if ever, see on television). But the drunks you see on 42nd Street are what most drunks look like, once they pass the point of being funny and amiable.
There’s hardly anybody here who doesn’t know the 42nd Street scene….who hasn’t walked the 42nd Street scene….or at least driven through it in a cautious and wide-eyed sort of way. And as with the experience of the cigarette ad on the train, there is a deeper point here….not to be missed. The point has nothing to do with whether there should be a sex industry or a wine industry….or whether city government ought to do a better job at policing such industries. Instead, the point comes in the form of a second irony….an irony that says: “Look how drawn we are to the things that appall us.” We hunger after things we openly decry. The 42nd Streets of the world offer us license to be a little bit sub-human….not just sexually….but in any other way that happens to appeal to us. And if you and I are tempted to believe there is no part of ourselves that hungers after such things, we need only remember (as proof to the contrary) some of the dreams we dream, the secrets we keep, and the battles with temptation we fight in the darkness. The unlucky ones are simply those who get caught in the jungle and never learn how to find their way out.
Sometimes people who don’t know me very well discover that I am a preacher. Whereupon they put me down (or write me off) by suggesting that I am privileged to work among the saintly and godly, while they have to go out there, day after day, and muck it up in the real world. I always want to tell them that in my “saintly and godly” version of the real world, I am no longer surprised at anything. Because I have seen it all, heard it all and smelled it all. Which is not a reflection on the churches to which the Bishop keeps sending me, but a reflection of the fact that even the saints are a little more “seedy” (or is it “gamy”) than even the Bishop suspects.
A minister in his mature years (a man of national stature and reputation) was recently arrested by an undercover police lady posing as a hooker. Fortunately for him, everything was handled discreetly, given that discretion is one of the saving graces that money can sometimes buy. And while his colleagues felt the pain, they did not feel the surprise. Because they knew that even saints are sometimes drawn to the things which appall them.
But back to Buechner. He was no longer walking to the Port Authority bus terminal. He was on his way home. And home was the source of the third picture….the third lesson of the day. It was late in the evening when he got there. But there was light on in the house. His wife and daughter had waited supper for him. There was a fire in the wood stove and a cat beside it (sleeping on his back with one paw in the air….which sounds ridiculous, unless you have ever had a cat).
All of us have problems at home. But mine were nowhere to be seen. There was nothing, just then, except stillness, light, peace, and the love that had sent me to New Jersey two days previous. Which was the same love that had brought me back and was waiting for me when I got there. And it may have been only a couple hundred miles from West 42nd Street. But in another sense, it may have been light years away.
But listen to what he says next:
As I entered that room with wife and fire and kid and cat (which was, at that moment, everything that represented warmth and light and love to me), it seemed to me that wherever such things are to be found in the world, they should be treasured, nurtured and sheltered from any darkness that might threaten them.
I suppose that that room, at that moment, was not unlike the monasteries of the Dark Ages where truth, wisdom and charity were kept alive in the midst of barbarity, corruption and misrule. The world is not always a pretty place. Sometimes it is a downright ugly place. And not all of the ugliness is out there. Some of it is in here. But every once in a while….more often for some of us, but at least occasionally for all of us….there are places where it happens and people who make it happen. Make what happen? Things like peace and love and warmth and light and beauty and goodness. And whenever those things happen, we should hold onto them for dear life. Because they are dear life, don’t you see. They are the dearest life we know.
But some of you are going to hear this and run with it the wrong way. You are going to take the words “hold on to dear life,” and use them as license to become clutchingly possessive…. restraining and imprisoning “dear life” until you have squeezed all the “life” out of “dear life,” which is not what I am suggesting at all.
I am suggesting that by holding on to dear life, that we hold up dear life….as in the sense of elevating and honoring dear life (even as we recognize the importance of dear life). I am suggesting that we begin to think like the general manager of a baseball team who announces his willingness to trade every player but one….the one he holds on to, the better to build a franchise around. If that be true, don’t you suppose there are some things so precious that we ought to build our lives around them, instead of taking them for granted while we build our lives around other things instead?
This is the season of Thanksgiving, is it not? And, if I have figured it out correctly, the essence of gratitude consists in the fact that there are precious things in our lives….even priceless things in our lives….which we did not so much earn as receive. Meaning that we ought to stop and calculate their worth in measurements other than dollars. Which is what “counting your blessings” is all about….not in the sense of adding them up, but in the sense of holding them up.
It may surprise you to know that Paul didn’t love all of his churches equally. Which is one of the things that humanizes Paul. But if he loved one of them more than any other, it was the little church at Philippi. His letter to the Philippians is a short one….short on verses….short on chapters….short on admonitions and warnings….short on complaints to air or disputes to settle. The church at Philippi has no dirty laundry that Paul feels a need to wash, clean and fold. Which is why his letter to the Philippians sounds like a conversation among friends. Which leads to this gentle urging at letter’s end:
Finally my brethren, whatever is true….whatever is honorable….whatever is just….whatever is pure….whatever is lovely….whatever is gracious….if there is anything excellent or worthy of praise….think on these things.
Which, as a text, is well known to you. But the Greek verb for “think” is a strange one. Actually, the word “think” is a poor translation. For it does not mean “consider” or “contemplate.” Neither does it mean “philosophize” or “fantasize.” It does not even mean “respect.” It means to think about things in a more active sense, as if one were considering the cost of committing one’s life to them….as one might do if one were “holding” them, don’t you see.
I don’t know what that may mean to you. But I know what it means to me. It means I need to keep discovering how to “hold” on to dear life….not in the sense of clutching it, but in the sense of cherishing it….especially when the word “cherish” is not a word that flows freely from me, or an act that comes naturally to me.
Several years ago, a seminary invited Fred Buechner to teach a master’s class on preaching. Which gave him great uncertainty, given that he was not necessarily called to preach nor has he done it with weekly regularity. But he was talked into accepting, whereupon he drafted several lectures on the art of sermon construction….teaching his students how to write introductions, formulate conclusions, develop arguments and insert illustrations. But halfway through the semester he came to the conclusion that his students were not becoming better preachers. Their sermons were more technically proficient. But they weren’t “coming across.” So figuring he had but a few weeks left, he devoted the remainder of the sessions to teaching preachers rather than teaching preaching….inviting them to look at who they were (and what they were about), in the process of doing whatever it was they felt called to do.
One day he said: “It will help your preaching immeasurably if you pay special attention to those times you find tears in your eyes.” Which only echoed Robert Frost when he wrote: “Every good poem begins with a lump in the throat.”
Both are right, of course. So if you want to write a poem, preach a sermon or express your gratitude around the Thanksgiving table….I mean, if you really want to do that….then pay special attention to those moments when you have….
Tears in your eyes
Laughter in your soul
A lump in your throat
Courage in your spine
Adrenaline in your veins
A snap in your fingers
A lilt in your step
Music in your ears
A smile on your lips
Peace in your heart
Or someone special in your arms.
For those may be the first symptoms that you have stumbled upon “dear life.” Then think on those things. Hold them up. Cherish them. They are the stuff of which blessings are made. So name them. Out loud. Then count them. One….by one….by one….by one.
