“Cloud
of Witnesses”
Hebrews 12:1-3
The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
Scripture: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinner, so that you may not grow weary or lose heart.” (Hebrew 12:1-3)
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I want you to know I tried. I really did set out this week with the full intention of NOT including a Mary Oliver poem in this sermon, just to prove to myself, if nothing else, that I could do it, breaking my streak of, what, maybe two hundred twenty consecutive sermons to which she has contributed. But, in the end, I could not do it. I know I have to enter Mary Oliver rehab, but this was not the week. So, a “Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith”…by Mary Oliver!
Every summer
I listen and look
under the sun’s brass and even
in the moonlight, but I can’t hear
anything, I can’t see anything –
not the pale roots digging down, nor the green stalks muscling up,
nor the leaves
deepening their damp pleats,
nor the tassels making,
nor the shucks, nor the cobs.
And still,
every day,
the leafy fields
grow taller and thicker –
green gowns lofting up in the night,
showered with silk.
And so, every summer,
I fail as a witness, seeing nothing –
I am deaf too
to the tick of the leaves,
the tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet –
all of it
happening
beyond all seeable proof, or hearable hum.
And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in dirt
swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?
One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn’s beautiful body
is sure to be there.
(from Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume 2, page
130)
It
is humbling to think about twenty-six years of preaching, as I have done, and
then to realize that most everything I would want or hope to say about the life
of faith can be found in a single poem by a woman whose religion has been
nurtured more in nature than in nave.
Mary
Oliver is our day’s pre-eminent “poet of attention.”
She has made it her life’s passion to notice in minute detail the
natural world around us…its beauty and terror, its splendor and caprice…and
then to relate what she finds to our lives.
In this poem, she is telling us that whether we can see it or not, hear
it or not, comprehend it or not, the world, and thus also its Designer, can be
trusted. Or, perhaps, it is the
other way around. Its Designer can
be trusted and, thus, also, the world.
The problem is that we have a
hard time trusting, particularly the God we cannot see.
We speak of faith, but we push for certainty.
We try to codify our faith. It
is as if, with our doctrines and dogmas, we are setting out a systematic rubric
by which we think we can bind God. “This
is how the God of our faith works,” we declare, forgetting that if we can
explain God, it is not God whom we are explaining.
Whenever explanations are pressed, whenever our creeds claim more than
they possibly can know, it makes “the faith” less true, at least for me, not
more so. “The faith” it seems to
me is not a body of beliefs to be affirmed but a body of believers
affirming…affirming that God can be trusted, that, no matter the appearances
of things, no matter the seemingly random vagaries and vicissitudes of life, no
matter that we cannot always see God’s handprints on events in our lives and
in the world, when all is said and done, “the honeycomb of the corn’s
beautiful body is sure to be there.” Therefore,
“let the immeasurable come…the unknowable…”
“How can we look at anything in this world and tremble, and grip our
hands over our hearts? What should
we fear?”
Therefore, says the writer of
the letter to the Hebrews, because we need ultimately fear nothing at all, we
are able to run with perseverance the race that is set before us, like the cloud
of witnesses did who have preceded us. To
be sure, there are scary things in the world, frightful things that come into
our lives. But none of them finally
can threaten our essential personhood because our lives are kept in God.
That is the meaning of resurrection, is it not?
That God’s final word is not death, but life.
So Hebrews points us to Jesus as a prime example of how to live our
lives, of how to run our races, because he trusted God completely “beyond
all seeable proof, or hearable hum.” Even
the prospect of an early and ignominious death did not deter Jesus from running
his race.
On
All Saints Day, we celebrate the cloud of witnesses that the Bible says
surrounds us, people we have loved and who have been important to us in our
lives, who yet live on in some mystical and mirthful manner.
The letter to the Hebrews tells us to begin with Jesus.
To me, it is not the empty tomb that is the proof of the resurrection of
Jesus. I do not care about the
physics and mechanics of that resurrection.
I do not care how it worked. All
I care to know is that I and so many others across the centuries have
experienced his spiritual presence, and it has made all the difference.
We have not come into this room today to worship a dead corpse, but a
living presence, a part of our cloud of witnesses whose company with us ought to
encourage us, make us less fearful, and deepen our commitment to running our
race. And, as Jesus was raised from
the dead, so, too, shall all of us be.
Archbishop Oscar Romero of
Have I told you about the time a
couple of years ago, it was a Sunday, when all through the day I had a whelming
sense that I was being called to go to Lily Dale?
All afternoon it rained and poured, a gray and bleak November day, and I
resisted, held back, did not go. But
my reticence would not release me from this unrelenting call, and so, finally,
in the darkness after supper, the rain now of Noahic proportions, I got into my
car and drove there not knowing why, and, on my second pass through the grounds,
coming to a halt at a stop sign, I looked to my left and there was Katy, my Katy
who had died, standing against a stop sign, flashing her trademark smile, and
then a few seconds later she was gone.
What to make of it?
I don’t know. “Let the
unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.”
Some would say it was projection, wishful thinking, a grief-induced
hallucination. But, even if so, why
do we think imagination is less authentic than corporeal reality?
It is by imagination that the world gets changed.
That was the only time it has happened to me, her only appearance save
for a few times in dreams which, by the way, perhaps we should not brush off as
easily as we sometimes do. In the
Bible, dreams are a common way of Spirit getting through to people.
During the course of my ministry, I have had more people than I can count
tell me that they have sensed from time to time or in a particular circumstance
the presence of a deceased loved one. Cloud
of witnesses….witnesses testifying, perhaps, to the reality that there is life
beyond this life, and so, as Jesus said, we are not to seek to save our lives in
this life but to spend them on love and loving, on pursuing truth as it rises up
within us no matter where it takes us, on running our race that is set before
us.
A few years ago, Angus, Shari
Erickson, I, and a few others not related to our church made a Saturday evening
exploration of a place in the Kiantone Valley that, in the mid-1800s, was home
to a community called Harmonia that, during the summer seasons, attracted as
many as fifteen thousand people a year, many of them coming to partake of a
place where the veil between earth and the “more” that we call heaven seemed
especially thin and of two springs there that were thought to possess healing
qualities. The springs still are
there today. But as we stood in that
valley, all of us could sense the presence of those people who stood a hundred
fifty years ago where we were standing that night, and to a person we felt
encouraged to continue to stretch the boundaries of what we presently knew, like
those people had, and to be open to life larger than we had imagined.
Indeed, as I think about my life, that seems to be the race that
has been set before me to run. What
is your race? Do you sense a cloud
of witnesses encouraging you?
Life is one, my friends, life is
one. Even when we are paying careful
attention, there is more to it, as Mary Oliver teaches us, than we can
apprehend. So, I say again as I have
said before, live expectantly without specific expectations.
Run your race without fear of the consequences, as Jesus did, for unless
you live your life’s truth your life will seem to you a lie and you will not
thrive, and you will not be able to share your gifts with others to their full
capacity, and your suffering will not be redeemed.
Finally, be encouraged by the cloud of witnesses who, by their living
presence, show us that our faith in the God of life is not misplaced, that
though we cannot see or understand it all, “one morning in the leafy green
ocean the honeycomb of the corn’s beautiful body is sure to be there.”
And all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things
shall be well.
Amen.
© Copyright First Presbyterian Church 2007