Trinity Cathedral, 11 March 2020
Jack Hardaway
FALLING APART WITH STYLE
God is a chronic condition. I wrote that once. It was for one of those Lenten quiet days where I gave a series of reflections on the parables, and God, and everyday things.
The thing about chronic conditions is that they are always there. They are chronic. Always eroding. A tedious overwhelming inconvenience that won’t let us get away.
God is chronic.
The choice isn’t so much about taking, or leaving, but rather to cope, or more accurately, which way to flounder, like a child learning to swim.
Like Jonah and his getaway, doing the flounder, spat up by that fish. Then when he thought he was safe on dry ground there was that worm killing the one shade tree, and then that killer hot sun, wanting death, but no such relief.
The big fish and the worm, God’s one two punch in that theological parable that really nasty people are still “precious in his sight.” Poor Jonah. Having to love “those people.”
Parables take every day stories and show us God. Chronic is a good word for so many of our own stories. Our stories of coping, and floundering, and then finding so much even as everything familiar is washed and chewed away a bit at a time. A chronic condition.
If I had to choose a title for this reflection it would be something like “falling apart with style.” The Lenten theme of walking the pilgrim road, of being on a journey to somewhere, I would like to challenge the usual version that says faith is about progress and improvement and growth. There is truth to that.
But I think the long, long walk is more about learning to live with pain, tragedy, disappointment, decline and death. Great fun things like that. What do we do with suffering? How do we respond? Falling apart with style. Like when Buzz Lightyear in the movie Toy Story was told that he wasn’t really flying, he was only falling with style.
We as a society and church have bought uncritically into the idea of progress, and improvement that simply doesn’t prepare us for the contingency, and frailty of human flesh, and human communities. We miss the way of the cross, the way of letting go, of walking with others in their suffering. Some things cannot be fixed. What do we do with that?
We treat God as the fixer of every problem. When the stories of faith from scripture, and the saints say something very different. God doesn’t so much fix things as interrupts things, refocusing our attention. God as the chronic interruption.
You may have heard about Saint Irenaeus and his quote about the glory of God, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Look it up. It isn’t what we have been led to believe.
A misquote of a sort. Irenaeus was habitually christocentric, more than Karl Barth, maybe even more than the Apostle Paul. The quote read in context goes more like, “The glory of God is a living man and the vision of God is the life of humanity.”
“A living man,” in this case is “the man” Jesus. It means that Jesus is the glory of God, and that to see the life-giving glory of God at its fullest is to see Jesus. See Jesus and live-in other words.
It’s not how most people use the Irenaeus quote. Being fully alive for most of us usually means some kind of physical and mental vitality. It means feeling really good and feeling very aware of the world around us, very connected, which is not a bad thing. But is that the glory of God?
Considering that the cross in John’s Gospel is literally Jesus being glorified, then this glory is something more than the java and gym suit vitality most of us hope to enjoy.
It has more to do with suffering. God’s glory when seen in context of scripture and the old theological writings has less to do with feeling good than with coping with suffering. The glory of God is a real blankety, blank, blank, blank. A chronic condition really might well describe the ongoingness of living with God.
On the other side God probably experiences us as a chronic condition as well. Much of the Old Testament feels like watching an on again off again romance between God and Israel, each blaming the other for not being faithful.
It is like those gatherings of old dear friends, each trying to outdo the other with their health problems, comparing bowel movements, and swollen joints.
“So, there go God and Israel, like two old men competing for bragging rights, comparing their scars and bent limbs, so in love with each other that they can hardly stand each other.”
So, God and suffering. What’s the connection? I am not really interested or capable of explaining suffering, of making it make sense, of justifying it or God for that matter. I simply can’t trust any explanation for this anymore. It is almost visceral. I won’t listen to it anymore.
It’s just that the connection is always there. Find one you find the other, God and suffering, suffering and God. Incriminating evidence of something, but what? It always seems to come down to trusting God anyway, despite the facts, despite the experience.
A belligerent contrary thing, our experience says one thing so believe the opposite. Shoot, we’re in South Carolina, we invented belligerent and contrary, it’s a chronic condition ya’ll.
Life is full of pain, therefore God can be trusted. That’s the faith formula. Most of the time it helps on the bad days. Denial can be a gift on the bad days. But it is deeper than that. God draws us in, the glory that sustains, that vivifies as Irenaues and his kin like to say, we find it on the bad days, the cross days, the trauma days.
Doing the flounder in the darkness again, and bumping into the glory, yet again. We have got to stop meeting like this.
I am a priest. One of those priests who somehow has just stayed put, a stick in the mud, in a seriously burned out mill village that is retooling itself and doing a really good job at it. Lots of history there, lots of contrasts, lots of generational stuff. And roots, and love, and hard living, and hard fun. It is a lush green overgrown mystical tragic city of sinners who try real hard to be saints with no illusions of ever getting there.
Our smoky bars are still very smoky.
You can tell a great deal about the soul of a community by how well the non-profit sector is developed and supported. Anderson has a very bright soul.
The parish has a long history of members with the gift of encouraging others, of saying thank you, the gift of what the Apostle Paul calls edification. Which I think is why the parish has always done better than pretty well, even during the hard times. Encouragement. It is a really good super power for a parish to have.
I have married, baptized and buried whole families. A rich life to live. Meaning seems to run me over rather than my having to go searching for it.
Apparently, I have become very good at preaching at funerals. Not something to put on your own tomb stone, but I seem to be stuck with that as part of my reputation.
To be fair, most of our funerals are for people that I have known and loved for years. All these amazing people who really write their own funeral homilies, which is the point of this reflection that we are wandering through together. I just call attention to their message, their truth, delivered across that wide chasm. It’s easy and hard. Like a gift I get to give back.
There are different theories, and expectations for funeral sermons. It is an easy time to manipulate people, and it is an easy time to miss the whole point. Some like to over eulogize, pull the body out, and drag it around.
This appeases many. We like to see, and remember who is gone, the memories connect us to each other, and to the one who has died. Memory connects. It’s a good thing. But faith calls for more. The temptation is to only offer the comfort, and the sentiment of memory, and then to cram the body back into the ground.
Of course, I was taught not to eulogize at all. It is all about the resurrection of Jesus, death calls us to that hope, and that action of living it out. At some point I realized that to deny the humanity of the memory of the dead is to deny the humanity of Jesus, a sort of liturgical Docetism.
Resurrection requires humanity, not some ghostly presence. Humanity is always very particular. Humanity always has a specific name and face, a portrait, a biography. It is a simple theology of death that I stumbled across through a deluge of pastoral grieving.
Each life is simply another book added to the four Gospels that reveal God in some way. A reading from The Gospel according Bill, or De, or Tom, or Barbara, so, so many books added to the chronic testament of God. The memory shows us the glory.
The divine image has been shown. Did we pay attention? So, we more than remember, more than grieve, more than celebrate, and give thanks, we look for God in the life of this person.
I don’t know, it works for me. People keep wanting their sermons before they die. It’s like we all desperately want to know how God touches the world through us, hoping, trusting, floundering belligerently despite the experience that says otherwise.
“I want you to preach at my funeral.” “But you don’t go to my Church. What about Pastor Dan? Shouldn’t he get to do it?”
It’s a strange adventure of faith to go with the dying as far as you can go, and to tell the tale of finding God there. I was recently given a book titled, Why Don’t You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?
What sermon is my life preaching? How is God being made known by me? Is it too late for me to correct my eulogy?
How is God connected to the hot mess of my life?
Our lives reveal God. There it is. The beginning assumption and presumption. How far down that pilgrim road have I gone?
We worry that we might be running out of time to get it right. When the faith is that the stuff of life is holy. We don’t have to make it more holy. This isn’t some cosmic self-improvement scam where if we do more, and do better then everything will be amazing.
God has done something amazing by taking on our flesh and bones, and pain, and meanness, our memories, and our forgetfulness. It has all been hallowed.
In the early, and medieval church, and even now the bodily remains of the saints were set apart. Earlier today I spoke about the remains of St. James at the end point of the pilgrimage walk in Spain. The pilgrims just camped out as near the bodily remains as possible. Over the centuries, larger and larger church structures were erected around the remains and the pilgrims had to camp out further and further.
Even though they were dead and gone, the dry bones and desiccated flesh were hallowed by the life that they held.
It is like the reserved sacrament, the remains of the blessed bread and wine from the eucharist that are set aside, reserved for being taking to the sick, and also as the real presence of the body of Christ hallowing the bones and bricks of our churches.
The remains of the saints are a reserve, set aside, reserving the dead if you will.
The stuff of life hallowed by the image of God, disposed of reverently.
What does this have to with the theme of the Lenten reflections -Walking the Pilgrim Road?
How do we get from that pilgrim road to this sacred grotesque of the bodies of the saints?
All the stuff of life, all the wonder, and all of the entropy, the relentless decline, and disappointments, the betrayals, and the hurt, the unfairness, and the smelly stuff, all of it is worthwhile, it is worth the trouble.
No matter how we mess it up, or how much it messes us up, it is hallowed, reserved, set aside as holy, revealing God, and in that revealing the world is made more complete.
That is the faith. Even when experience says otherwise, even when it wears us down, and we just cling to the edge of the cliff by the tips of bleeding fingers, it has been hallowed.
Even if there isn’t someone to preach our sermon, our life is the sermon that God is speaking through.
The pilgrim road is the journey to the grave, of falling apart with style, of slowly and suddenly collapsing back to dust, earth and ashes.
There is no good reason that makes sense of why it hurts so much all along the way.
Jesus’ last words on the cross, just before his breath left him, were to ask why.
The world shook after that, as if in agony.
But there was no answer. Just the aftershocks. Days of silence.
Then something happened. It didn’t answer why. It didn’t make it all better.
The body was hallowed.
The hot mess of it all was hallowed.
Not abandoned, not forsaken, not forgotten.
These bones, and sinews, ligaments, muscles and skin, these tingling neurons and quivering innards, they carry God into the world.
The frailness of our bodies and minds, the brevity and fragility of families, friends, and communities, they all carry so much, and they hurt so much, they reveal so much.
God and suffering. Suffering and God.
They are always found close by to each other. Incriminating evidence of something, but what?
Like a chronic condition.
Just keep walking the pilgrim road, just keep walking, keep falling apart with style.
Keep walking until you return to the dust.
I bid you a holy Lent.