“How Was It?”

Deuteronomy 34:1-8

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

October 21, 2007

Stewardship Sunday

Mary Oliver is one of this country’s pre-eminent contemporary poets. Her body of work, as you can tell from my repeated references to her poems in my sermons, has been one of the primary shapers of my life in middle age. Mary Oliver lived with her partner, Molly Malone Cook, for forty years until Molly, or M. as Mary always called her, died in 2005. M. was every bit the photographer that Mary Oliver is a poet, premier artists both of them. Over the summer, Mary Oliver’s most recent book was published, a posthumous tribute to the work of Molly Malone Cook entitled Our World. The book is comprised of some of M.’s finest black and white photographs interwoven with stories that Mary shares about their life together. She plans a sequel volume featuring M.’s color photography.

In the book, Mary quotes from M.’s journal, in which M. wrote about Mary returning from yet another of her walks into nature, M. writing,

Mary has just returned with yellow flowers and a wet Luke who

has been swimming in the ponds. I always ask her for news.

What does that mean, what news am I looking for? Good, I

imagine. What I mean is news of humans. Mary comes home

with fox news, bird news, and her loving friends the geese Merlin

and Dreamer, who are going to become parents under Mary’s

eyes again. How many years has she been watching them? They

come running to her. That’s Mary’s news.

In the book, Mary responds to M.’s journal entry by saying,

I don’t think I was wrong to be in the world I was in, it was my

salvation from my own darkness. Nor have I ever abandoned it –

those earthly signs that so surely lead toward epiphanies. And

yet, and yet, she wanted me to enter more fully into the human

world also, and to embrace it, as I believe I have. And what a

gift to read about her wish for it, who never expressed impatience

with my reports of the natural world, the blue and green happiness

I found there. Our love was so tight.

In fact, Mary tells how M., unfailingly, whenever Mary came home from a walk in the woods or fields, would ask, “How was it?”, and how dear that question always was to her, to Mary.

“How was it?” I have been caught by that question this week, turning it over and over in my mind and heart. “How was it?” It can be asked, of course, about singular events. How was dinner? How was the test? How was the conference? You might go out from here today and be asked by someone who was not present at worship, “How was it?” (to which your appropriate response is, by the way, to say, “Fabulous. Never been better!”) The question also can be asked in reference to a chunk of our lives. How was your childhood? How was it, your first marriage? I inquired of an old man at the ballpark this summer who sometimes sits with me, “How was it for you to serve in Viet Nam ?” “How was it?”

It also strikes me as being the telling and poignant question we might ask in the evening of our lives as we look back across our years. “How was it?” Or, to ask it in the way that Mary Oliver does in one of her poems, “What (have you done, are you doing) with your one wild and precious life?” It is the ultimate stewardship question. “On what are you spending your life?” In the evening of our lives, as we look back across our years, what kind of answer shall we be able to make to the question, “How was it?” What kind of a steward of our lives will we reckon we have been?

I wonder if that was the question in and on the mind of Moses at the end of his life as he stood at the top of Mt. Pisgah overlooking the Promised Land toward which he had been leading his people through all those wilderness years. I wonder if he was simultaneously looking over his life, asking himself, “How was it?” As is true with all of us, perfection had eluded Moses. There was that matter of the man he had murdered earlier in his life in addition to whatever other sins and sorrows had been a part of his living. But that was not his measuring stick, I am sure. Moses knew that first and last his life had to do with God. He knew that, as with all of us, his life was not his own are but was to be given to the purpose of helping to bring goodness into the world. He knew that his life was about glorifying God by helping humanity.

You had to know it was coming, a poem by Mary Oliver, and hopefully you will appreciate how it contributes to our discussion. It is called “Wild Geese.”

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Do you get it? “You do not have to be good/You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting/You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves…the world offers itself to your imagination/calls to you like the wild geese…/over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” Mary Oliver implores us to leave behind a view and experience of the world in which we have constantly to prove ourselves, to adhere slavishly to cultural standards and social conventions, to say sorry for upsetting the decorous expectations that others may have of us. We already belong. We already have a place in the family of things, our place, and we are to live as fully into and out of that place as we are able. When we ask ourselves some day down the line about our lives, “How was it?”, we shall only be able to answer positively if we have been good stewards of our own lives, the lives we know deep down we have been called to live.

The question, “How was it?”, also applies institutionally. When my time with this congregation is over, and I look back on this leg of our church’s journey we have made together, my estimation of our stewardship of this church’s ministry will be made on how generous and just we have been, how kind and humble, how large-minded and big-hearted, how inclusive and open to the world.

William Martin is an ordained minister in the Reformed Church of America who has had a decades-long fascination with the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese wisdom scripture that is the second most published book in the world next to The Bible. It is his paraphrase of the Tao Te Ching with an eye toward becoming wiser in the second half of our lives that our “Aging and Saging” group is using. I first became acquainted with Martin’s work in 1994 when he released his debut book entitled, The Art of Pastoring. In it, Martin interpreted the Tao Te Ching in a manner that enables pastors to reflect on the way they are going about their work. The Tao Te Ching is comprised of eighty-one very brief chapters, and I am want to read for you chapter fifty-seven, in which Martin via the Tao Te Ching says to pastors,

If you try to teach the rules of God

you will create rule breakers.

Let go of the rules and the people will keep the Word

perfectly in their hearts.

If you try to raise money,

the church always will struggle.

Let go of fund-raising, and that which is needed

will arise effortlessly.

If you try to teach religion,

the people will become Pharisees.

Let go of religion, and people will become spiritual

in the deepest recesses of their soul.

If you try to work for justice,

you will become self-righteous.

Let go of your concepts of justice, and righteousness

will flow like a never failing stream.

Let go of your plans,

and the church will reflect God’s Love naturally.

I love that this church - you - knows that the church is not the point or purpose of our being called together into a congregation, but that love is…love for the world and all who live in it. In the twenty-first chapter of the Book of the Revelation, in that chapter that so poetically tells of the new heaven and the new earth that is the kingdom of God fully realized, the consummate and representative city of that new age, the new Jerusalem, is described. It gives the city’s dimensions using numbers that convey perfection; it tells of a city bedecked in gleaming jewels and glistening beauty; and then John says of his vision of the city, “I saw no temple in the city, in the new Jerusalem, for its temple is the Lord God Almighty…”

No temple, no church, in the kingdom come, because all for which the church at its best stands will become part and parcel of the fabric of the new creation. It may seem odd for me to say on a Stewardship Sunday, but I am asking you to give – your money, your commitment, your passion, your gifts – to and through a losing organization…one that, like its Lord, best serves by losing its life in acts of unwavering love, unfettered trust, and extravagant generosity.

If we can do that, if we can be faithful to God by exhibiting to the world God’s big and unconditional and inclusive love, when we look back on these years when the stewardship of the gospel through this church has been entrusted to us and we ask ourselves, “How was it?”, we shall be able to answer, “It was good. Very good.”

Standing at the crossroads of Christ and community, may we continue, our church, to be a herald and harbinger of hope for both.

Amen.

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