“Finally
Comes the Poet”
Isaiah 30:8-14
Colossians 3:12-17
First Presbyterian
One
of the Bible’s most important sentences, it seems to me, occurs in the twelfth
chapter of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans when he writes that followers of
Christ should not be conformed to the ways and means of the world but should be
transformed by the renewing of our minds. One
of the things I have loved about the Presbyterian Church across the years of my
life is its emphasis on the life of the mind.
It is so easy to be seduced into living unthinking lives.
It is so tempting to go along in order to get along without regard for
the impact of our thoughts and actions on others, much less ourselves.
It seems less exhausting to live unquestioningly, to go with the flow,
and to assume that the majority opinion is always the right one.
There is a tremendous pull on us to conform to the dominant values of the
world around us.
(By
the way, when the Bible uses the word “world” in this pejorative way, it is
not referring to the created world with all of its beauty and wonder and
diversity. The word “world,”
when used in the way that Paul used it in the scripture verse I mentioned a
moment ago, refers to the forces and powers that stand against the dream and
desire of God for life on earth.)
Sometimes
we bring the values of the world into the church and say them with such
conviction that we come to believe they are true.
For instance, across the years most of us have heard it said that:
“God
helps those who help themselves.” Really?
Does that not sound like the “works righteousness” that the Bible
deplores but that too often is used to justify antipathy toward those we believe
to be undeserving of our aid. We set
conditions on God’s conditional love.
Sometimes we say, with good intentions, that:
“The
church should be run like a business.” But
I wonder when we say that if we are remembering the business model Jesus lifted
up in Matthew 20, for instance, in which the day laborers who worked only one
hour in the vineyard were paid the same full day’s wages as those who had
worked since sun up in the morning. The economy of the gospel is different than
that of the capitalist world.
One
of the chief purposes of the church is to examine the wisdom of the world in the
light of the gospel. The purveyors
and profiteers of that wisdom do not much like the alternative world the gospel
calls into being and the cross on which Jesus was killed is exemplary of their
antagonism. That is why, I think,
Annie Dillard suggests that worshipers be outfitted with hard hats and crash
helmets when they come into the sanctuary, for the gospel is not for the timid
or the faint of heart. The gospel
intends to transform our thinking and, in so doing, and to use Dick
Redington’s definition of transformation, to change our hearts and habits.
Poetry
is the Bible’s primary tool of transformation.
I leave it to Walter Brueggemann, our day’s pre-eminent Old Testament
theologian, to tell us what biblical poetry is.
Such poetry, Brueggemann says, “…does not mean rhyme, rhythm, or
meter, but language that moves like Bob Gibson’s fastball, that jumps
at the right moment, that breaks open old worlds with surprise, abrasion, and
pace.” Brueggemann goes on to
say that “poetic speech (in the Bible)…is not good advice, nor is it
romantic caressing, nor is it soothing good humor.
It is, rather, the steady, surprising proposal that the real world in
which God invites us to live is not the one made available by the rulers (and
wisdom) of this age.”
What
the Hebrews called prophets the Greeks called poets.
So, we have in scripture poet-prophets like Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, Micah,
Isaiah, and many others who invite us to consider living in a way that is just,
sustainable, and generous because that is what God wants of us and for us, all
of us. Such a stance is not very
popular with those who like the world as it is, who profit from the arrangement
of things as they were. Such people,
Isaiah said, do not want to hear God’s instruction and say to the
poets, “Do not see,” and to the prophets, ‘Do not prophesy to us what is
right.” Rather, speak to us smooth
things, prophesy illusions, leave the way, turn aside from the path, and let us
hear no more about the Holy One of
Jesus
not only was a poet-prophet, teaching in poem parables that changed the lives
who heard them and took them to heart, but he was himself the poem par
excellence of God. If you think such
a designation is far fetched, I can tell you that in the second chapter of
Ephesians, in the verse often translated as “we are God’s handiwork,” the
original Greek wording is autou gar esmen poiema, literally, “for we
are poems,” and our lives are meant to become no less than poetry that
transforms the world.
Poetic
speech always runs the risk of being heard as fantasy or fluff or falsehood.
It seems to fit so little with the seeming realities of the world around
us that it sounds like fiction.
“Love
your enemies.”
“Pray
for those who persecute you.”
“Do
not resist an evildoer.”
“Do
not kill.”
“Blessed
are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers.”
But
it is exactly the work of fiction, like poetry, like art, to probe beyond what
is presumed to be the truth of things, to dig deeper than the superficiality
that besets us all around, to unearth new possibilities of being human, of human
being, in the world. It is
the work of fiction, like poetry and art, to destabilize present deadly designs
in favor of alternatives that lead to life and hope and peace.
It is profound irony that almost always those who decry fiction, poetry,
and art with their too smug taunt to “live in the real world” do not.
“What you can see,”
I
like this little verse found in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass when he
says:
After
all the seas are crossed (as they seem already cross’d),
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist,
the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet(s) worthy of that name,
The true (children) of God shall come singing (their) songs.
Precisely!
It is not that the work of the captains and engineers, the scientists,
accountants, and politicians is unimportant, because it is not.
But it is the poets, “the children of God singing their songs,”
who enable and ennoble the transformation of all other life and work, who see
and speak truth amid the falsity and fabrications of life, who call us toward
and into our full humanity that, when we arrive there, even if only in fits and
starts, mirrors divinity.
Joseph
Sittler, the great Lutheran theologian, in his book entitled Gravity and
Grace, writes: “That is
what the sermon in worship is for: to hang the holy possible in front of the
mind of the listeners and to lead them to that wonderful moment when they say,
‘If it were true, I would do it.’”
So the questions that always are put to those of us
in earshot of the poetic speech of the Bible’s poet-prophets are:
Shall we believe it? Do we
trust it? Will we, as
Poetic speech that leads to transformation is what
the church uniquely has to offer to a world that often is mired in the prose of
status quo, resignation, and flattened expectations.
It is costly, poetic speech is, both to those who risk to speak it and to
those who act accordingly because it calls into question the inevitability of
the way things presently work in the world and dares to suggest that there is “a
still more excellent way.”
So I invite you and challenge you to ingest the
biblical poetry, to chew on it a while, and then to take it into you in full
measure so that you may become heralds and harbingers, poems even, of God’s
ways in the world. Else what are we
doing here?
Amen.
Hymn after the Sermon:
“Break Thou the Bread of Life”
Break
Thou the Bread of Life
(Mary Ann Lathbury, 1877)
Break
Thou the bread of life, Dear Lord, to me.
As
Thou didst break the loaves Beside the sea;
Beyond
the sacred page I seek Thee, Lord;
My
spirit pants for Thee, O living Word!
Bless
Thou the truth, dear Lord, Now unto me,
As
Thou didst bless the bread By
Then
shall all bondage cease, All fetters fall;
And I shall find my peace, My all in all.