November 15, 2009
‘Stopping When To Know” November 15, 2009
Rosedale United Church
(Psalms 23, 137, 150) Doug Norris
Let me begin by giving my regrets for next week. I will not be here next Sunday as I have been invited to join the congregation at First United Church in Port Credit for their 184th anniversary service. This is the congregation where I was confirmed in 1977 and sponsored for ordination ten years later and now I am invited back to preach there next week.
They say that a preacher is someone who will cross the world to give a sermon but will not cross the road to hear one. So, off I go, at least across the GTA for the morning.
What this means for me personally, among a lot of other things, is that I will stand in the pulpit which, while I was a teenager, was the territory of Rev Earl Coulter. That name needn’t mean anything to you, and in fact if you dig too deep you’ll learn that he was eventually ‘dishonourably discharged’ from the United Church. But all of that came later.
In the late 1970’s I was a student assistant to Earl Coulter – I went to U of T during the day, worked night shift at factory nearby, then came to church to help with services, lead the youth group, and so on… – one day – advice – use a deodorant stick!
Earl was a commanding presence in the pulpit. Very fine black Geneva gown with burgundy stripes – tall man, strong voice, bright. All of the markers of authority.
There may have been a time when that notion of the pulpit as a place of great power and authority held some attraction for me – I have to concede that now, however, the pulpit is a dangerous place (maybe something Freudian going on in my stepping out here?), a place of risk, and after 25 years, after roughly a thousand outings, it is a hard place to be.
For this reason : It is the place most likely to expose my limits… Opening one’s mouth, week after week, to say something, about what is ultimate, about Divine Presence, about where hope may lie… This becomes intimidating to the point of a knot in the gut in the days and hours leading to the pulpit.
Here’s what I’d rather do – hear a poem, sing a hymn, listen to some music. I’ll come back to this point.
Let me sketch the three moving parts of this dilemma : We experience something astonishing, we must speak about it, give it words, then we understand, increasingly, that we must fall silent, for it is the ‘unsayable’.
We find that in the midst of it all – there is a deep and holy Life to be held… There is a powerful hunger at work in the human heart – driven by joy and driven by grief and driven by fears that keep us awake at night – there is a deep hunger and when we find a way – when we find the One, when we locate the Presence that astounds and fills us we cannot be silent.
‘ I have looked far and wide, inside and outside of my own head and heart, and I have found nothing other than this man and his words that offer any answers to the questions of this tragic and troubled time. If his light has gone out, there is no light… ’ (Malcolm Muggeridge)
You may have had this moment – you may yet be waiting for it, longing for it – it is the coin of the realm for Christians – an experience of the Holy.
And when hold this – we must speak about it – it is to be proclaimed. Jesus himself said so. Now, he said, Go, Teach! Go to the world, proclaim, baptise!
And then, when we begin to speak of it, when for a time we have been putting it into words, we will find, sooner or later that we are constitutionally unable to do more than mumble and point.
Wendell Berry
‘When we convene again
to understand the world,
The first speaker will again
point silently out the window,
At the hillside in its season,
sunlit under the snow,
And we will nod silently,
And silently stand and go.”
———-
Next Sunday, I am told that Mrs Woodward is going to introduce me, and she is going to give some recollections about when I taught Sunday School. I’m a little worried about what anyone might remember about what I taught the kids. Frankly I found it hard to believe that they let me teach the kids. I was 17, I was only rarely allowed to borrow the family car – could not be trusted to be out later than a midnight curfew, and here they were handing me 10 little kids every week – saying – go on – teach them about God ! About deep meaningful things.
I met a couple of those boys last year – one brought his son here to be baptised, and another came with his father to have a funeral for his mother. They both remembered me. They both remembered that when we ran out of things to talk about we had paper airplane races in the classroom. I’m a little worried about whether Mrs Woodward knows about this.
But here’s the thing – when I got to the classroom there, I didn’t have to make up the words to tell the old sacred story. Because there was a book. Peter Gordon White had been there before me, and he and his United Church publishing team had written a book and there it was and I could lean on the words of the wise people who actually knew about God – with their words I could teach the children.
Some of you will know this about Peter Gordon White, and some may not – that Peter has been one of our finest guides, as the United Church has danced with words over the years. In our dance with words about God, Peter has been a teacher and an editor and as you have heard today, he has loved the capacity of language to lead us to a glimpse of what is holy. Words are in fact a good response to our experience of the Holy.
In 1963 Peter led the movement in the United Church to launch what we called the ‘New Curriculum’, which took us from simply rehearsing the old wisdom of the Scriptures to exploring them with all of our faculties – allowing the new tools of literature and critical thought to be part of our devotion. What do the gospels say, and, why do they say it? And who actually said it? And, is it all true? Or can we be not only devout with what we say about God but also intelligent and discerning?
Needless to say it was provocative – there were vocal opponents – this ‘New Curriculum’ was blamed for loss of membership and for breaking up the church. One day not long after the launch of the program and at a time when there were still angry calls coming in, Peter had to stay home from the office for a few days, he had had a minor collision in a car and was resting up. A call came in to the office, a very irate woman wanting to speak with Peter about just why he had undone the basis of what she believed and how dare he challenge the Word of God. Peter’s secretary explained that he was not available, that he was recovering from a car accident. There was a silence on the phone, and the woman who had called said ‘I believe that was no accident.’ And hung up…
When I went to teach Sunday School I held these two things – I held a barely formed and still forming conviction, an experience – that there was holiness and meaning to be found in the world, an adolescent conviction about Jesus of Nazareth and the ways of God, and I held some words – some from Peter and his team – increasingly my own – to speak about this experience. And for a time this is enough.
For a time there are things to say.
—————–
Not many years later, while I was still a student, I was with a very good friend on the night she learned that another very good friend of ours, a young man, had died – suddenly and tragically. We wept together a bit, and then she turned and asked – as though she had suddenly remembered that she was with someone who apparently knew about such things – she asked ‘Where is he now? Right now? Where has he gone? This life?’
And I understood two things at that moment – that we had in fact received from our tradition some things that could be said, and, that there was nothing that could be said or known.
That our tradition gives us the comforts of : ‘he is now with God’, and ‘he is now not suffering, but is at peace’, and that the limits of our humanity drive us to have to say ‘but I don’t know… I can’t know…’
Out of our experience we are led to some words, and then as soon as we begin to speak we see on the horizon the limits of our speaking. God must be spoken into being and God cannot possibly be spoken.
Which, today, leads me to this. Because I am not ready to let the limits of knowledge undo the practice of faith. We are driven, in time, away from speaking, and into these spiritual practices : silence, and poetry, and music.
Not as a kind of abdication, not simply conceding that we were wrong, and can say nothing, but as the receiving of a great gift – that there is, for us, not only the knowing that comes to us in words and the knowledge that is the work of thinkers and preachers, but the knowing that is the work of the soul and that comes to us in mystery and this is the work of the artists, the musicians who understand that they are vessels for some greater soul and music that moves through the universe,
It is likely the most fitting thing, then, that in our practice, week by week, we move from the preaching, from another risky venture into wording what cannot be worded, to singing together, words now lifted by music, to postlude – to the mysteries of the faith articulated as Wayne takes the air we have just breathed together and gathers it and moves it through these pipes and with nothing spoken at all we understand how it is we are sent – stirred, lifted…
Oftentimes I dream of music, Of the river that freely flows.
And it sings a song sweeter than honey, One everybody knows.
Late at night, I hear it singing.Then again when I wake at dawn.
And it fills me up with hope and goodwill, The will to go on, Go on.
There is a river in Judea, That I heard of long ago.
And it’s a singing, ringing river, That my soul cries out To know.
(Jack Feldman)