Human Being

“Human Being”

Isaiah 2:1-5

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

December 2, 2007

Advent 1

You may or may not know that the presbytery to which our church belongs recently has undergone a three-year process leading to a significant restructuring of the way it is organized and seeks to do its ministry. (For those who are new to the Presbyterian Church, a “presbytery” is a geographic grouping of churches for the purpose of cooperating in the strengthening of congregations and in mission outreach. Our presbytery, the Presbytery of Western New York, encompasses Erie , Niagara , Cattaraugus, and Chautauqua counties.) As a part of its redesign, the presbytery has decided to eschew the typical hierarchical model of presbytery leadership. Instead of employing an executive to oversee the presbytery, that oversight is being shared by a couple of major committees. The staff the presbytery is seeking to hire consists of two in-the-field persons…one of them is a Director of Discipleship, Nurture, and Leadership Development and the other a Director of Congregational Transformation. I am on the search committee for the latter, for the Director of Transformation. We have had four meetings and because we have a contrarian on the committee (who shall go nameless here today), we probably are farther away from accomplishing our task than before we had any meetings at all.

The problem I have with searching for a Director of Transformation is that I do not believe that transformation is something that is directed or managed. Transformation is not a product of control and manipulation. Transformation, whether institutional, societal, or personal, occurs via an engaged imagination that envisions new ways and means of being, behaving, and relating. So I am lobbying our committee to seek a Poet of Transformation.

Walt Whitman knows the value of poets and poetry, as evidenced by this little snippet from Leaves of Grass:

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, (and presbytery directors of transformation),

Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name,

The true son of God shall come singing his songs.

Good poets and poetry help us to push through the presumed world in which we so often feel trapped. By “presumed world,” I mean the one that seems to be dominant around us…the established order…the one in the face of which we often feel powerless to make or effect significant changes. The presumed world is a prose world in which the grand and glorious truth of life gets reduced to certitude, formulas, and utility…and thus it begets greed, violence, and despair. I do not need to tell you how religious certitude sets sect against sect or nation against nation. I do not need to tell you how rigid adherence to creeds and doctrines, be they theological or political, leads to division and death by ideology. I do not need to tell you how the claim of acting in “the national interest” covers over a multitude of sins against others and against the world as a whole, against a whole world.

Walter Brueggemann, this generation’s pre-eminent Old Testament theologian, says that we need poets and poetry to speak against a prose world. By poetry, Brueggemann “does not mean rhyme, rhythm, or meter, but language that moves like (Roger Clemens’) fastball, that jumps at the right moment, that breaks open old worlds with surprise, abrasion, and pace.” He goes on to say that “poetic speech is the only proclamation worth doing in a situation of reductionism, the only proclamation…that is worthy of the name preaching. Such preaching is not moral instruction or problem solving or doctrinal clarification. It 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 of this age” (Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet. Minneapolis : Fortress Press, 1989, p. 3).

Isaiah is one of the Bible’s foremost prophets, but a prophet is also a poet. The poet/prophet is a voice that dismantles “the way things are” and evokes new possibilities among those who hear it and takes the voice to heart. Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Roman Catholic scholar, says that “God needs prophets in order to make (God’s self) known, and all prophets are necessarily artistic. What a prophet has to say can never be said in prose.”

So here comes Isaiah, daring to declare into the midst of his “presumed world” and ours that

“In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established

as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and

all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say,

‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God

of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his

paths…they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears

into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither

shall they learn war any more.”

Such poetic speech in the Bible always runs the risk of being heard as fantasy or falsehood. It seems to fit so little with the presumed world around us that it sounds like fiction. But it is the work of good fiction, is it not, like good poetry, to tell glorious lies on the way to the truth? (The latter part of that sentence is a Ross Mackenzie line!) It is exactly the work of fiction, like poetry, like art, to probe beyond presumed and settled truth, 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, like art, to destabilize present deadly designs in favor of life-giving 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 vainglorious taunt to “live in the real world” do not. Their folly is that they have both feet planted firmly in the presumed world that is passing away.

The first congregation I served after seminary was located in Catonsville , Maryland , an inner ring suburb of Baltimore . Just three short blocks from the church was the Knights of Columbus building where, in 1969, at the height of the Viet Nam war, Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, and eight others broke into the second floor draft board office located there, dragged the draft files down the back stairs and out into the parking lot, whereupon they then doused the files with napalm and incinerated them, their ashes wafting toward heaven. Berrigan and his compatriots, subsequently dubbed the Catonsville Nine, were arrested, tried, and eventually imprisoned by the presumed world for their actions. I cannot tell you how many times during my years in Catonsville I took my lunch to that parking lot and sat there, holy ground to me, and found my theology, my view of the world, my life being shaped by the acts and utterances of that poet/prophet. At his trial, Berrigan made the following statement to the court, poetry proffered toward the transforming of the world, words as apt and applicable today as when they first were spoken, which is why they bear repeating this morning.

Our apologies, good friends,

for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper

instead of children, the angering of the orderlies

in the front parlor of the charnel house.

We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.

For we are sick at heart, our hearts

give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children ,

and for thinking of that other Child of whom

the (Bible) speaks.

(That) infant was taken up

in the arms of an old man whose tongue

grew resonant and vatic at the touch of that beauty.

And the old man spoke, saying, “This child is set

for the fall and rise of many in Israel ,

a sign that is spoken against.”

Small consolation - a child born to make trouble

and to die for it, the First Jew (not the last)

to be the subject of a "definitive solution."

And so we stretch out our hands

to our brothers and sisters throughout the world,

we who are priests to our fellow priests.

All of us who act against the law

turn to the poor of the world, to the Vietnamese,

to the victims, to the soldiers who kill and die

for the wrong reasons, for no reason at all,

because they were so ordered by the authorities

of that public order which is in effect,

a massive institutionalized disorder.

We say: Killing is disorder;

life and gentleness and community and unselfishness

is the only order we recognize.

For the sake of that order

we risk our liberty, our good name.

The time is past when good (people) may be silent,

when obedience can segregate (us) from public risk,

when the poor can die without defense.

How many indeed must die

before our voices are heard?

How many must be tortured, dislocated,

starved, maddened?

How long must the world's resources

be raped in the service of legalized murder?

When at what point will you say no to this war?

We have chosen to say

with the gift of our liberty,

if necessary our lives:

the violence stops here,

the death stops here,

the suppression of the truth stops here,

this war stops here.

Redeem the times!

The times are inexpressibly evil -

Christians pay conscious, indeed, religious tribute

to Caesar and Mars

by the approval of overkill tactics, by brinkmanship,

by nuclear liturgies, by racism, by support of genocide.

They embrace their society with all their heart

and abandon the cross.

They pay lip service to Christ

and military service to the powers of death.

And yet, and yet, the times also are inexhaustibly good,

solaced by the courage and hope of many.

The truth rules. Christ is not forsaken.

In a time of death some people -

the resisters, those who work hardily for social change,

those who preach and embrace the truth -

such people overcome death and

their lives are bathed in the light of the resurrection.

The truth has set them free.

In the jaws of death

they proclaim their love of the brethren.

We think of such people

in the world, in our nation, in the churches,

and the stone in our breast is dissolved, and

we take heart once more.

Liturgically speaking, Advent is the beginning of a new church year, a new time, a new opportunity to begin again the rehearsal of the story of the supernal Christ as it was manifested in Jesus of Nazareth. But the purpose of the church’s liturgy is to call us beyond liturgy. It calls to us to go poetically and prophetically into the present presumed world with hope and courage, bearing and becoming the good news of a coming time when there will be war no more, when nation will befriend nation and neighbor will embrace neighbor, and there shall be only peace and well being on the face of the earth. a time of truly human being.

After the present presumed world has offered its full course of polemics and politics,

…finally shall come the poets worthy of that name,

the true children of God shall come singing their songs.

Will you be found among the winsome, wonderful Advent chorus singing a new world into being?

Amen.

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