 | The New England Church PulpitNew England Congregational Church UCC |
This Strange New Wilderness | Luke 10.1-3 | November 11, 2001 |
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
With economy of words, she weaves together the frustration and pain of those moments when life’s tragedies, great or small, steal our achievements and undermine our control. She expresses the way we feel when our carefully constructed lives shatter and fall apart. We are thrust into a strange new wilderness of vulnerability and brokenness.
I’ve seen it happen most often in the hospital. Someone who used to work 10-hr days, running from one thing to the next, conducting meetings now finds it fatiguing to sit in a chair for an hour. They have to learn to put one foot in front of the other all over again. They can’t lift their head without enormous pain. Whatever event or virus has rendered them helpless, they find themselves in a strange new wilderness, shattered by a great fall. Life is different.
In a crisis our priorities change. Work, among other things, is put on the back burner. And some of those things that we never had time for–like visiting friends or playing with the kids–moves to the top of the list. Life takes on a new value when we are confronted with losing it. It’s a strange new world.
We make our list of priorities. Remodeling the basement can wait; the family can’t. Shopping isn’t the most important thing on our minds; relationships are. Having a job is important, but having a life is more important. It is easier to see the priorities against the backdrop of a life-and-death emergency. The king’s horses, the king’s men, the money in the bank, modern technology can’t put us back together again.
Our country has fallen off the wall; we’ve been in the hospital, as it were. We’re in the process of sorting through our priorities. What we arrogantly took for granted in terms of our freedoms and our national power we are reassessing. And what I hear from many people is that they want to get back to normal. (Pause) I really don’t want to get back to normal. Oh, yes, it would be nice to continue tripping along as we used to, but too many important priorities are being reorganized today that I’m grateful for the discomfort that keeps us on our toes and forces us to unite in ways we wouldn’t have done otherwise.
Colleague Barbara Brown Taylor says that whenever she hears someone long to get back to normal, her heart skips a beat. “I don’t want to go back to the way things were.” It seems blasphemous to say so, but as a professor she has noticed a difference in the students. A few weeks ago they didn’t even know what the Taliban were. Now they voraciously strip the newspapers from the racks each day, and know more about Muslims and the U.S. policy in the Middle East than they ever did before. They are becoming informed and active about their involvement in world politics. “I don’t want them to go back to normal conversations about the comparative virtues of their car stereo systems or the best party prospects for Saturday night.” (The Christian Century, November 7, 2001)
I want us to keep struggling with what it means to be a Christian church in a pluralistic world. I want us to keep struggling with the normal assumption that the flag and the cross do not stand for the same thing. I want us to keep struggling with the scriptures of our own tradition which reminds us we are lambs among wolves, to keep struggling with our penchant to domesticate the gospel, that when it says ‘love your enemies’ it is talking about more than a cranky old neighbor you don’t like. I want us to keep wrestling with priorities when it comes to spending our money and our time. I want us to keep struggling with the need to see our freedoms and our privileges, our money and our time, as gifts to be used to better the world around us.
A young boy, praying at a meal, means to ask God to ‘make us ever mindful of the needs of others,’ and instead asks God to ‘make us ever needful of the minds of others.’ How strange that both are true, and intertwined. Being needful of the minds of others makes us mindful of the needs of others, and vice versa. The harvest is plentiful, but laborers are few. Laborers in hope are vital when the harvest of the unknown is plentiful. These are the times that provide occasions to see how religious faith inside a culture addresses that ordinary world alongside the extraordinary devastations and even more extraordinary demands for hope. (Context, Nov 15, 2001).
It is a strange new wilderness that we live in. Some of it is unchartered territory, where the wolves of vengeance and normalcy seek to devour the lambs that struggle with priorities. As people of faith we are not about taming the wilderness, but about finding meaning in it. We are not about claiming exclusive rights to God but about exploring our diversity as the creation of God. I don’t want to go back to our arrogant independence but to struggle with what it means to be interdependent upon one another. I want to move beyond just tolerating other faiths because we want them to tolerate us as well; I want to learn what other faiths have to say to bolster our understanding of life and humanity and divinity.
Our nation has been in the hospital, and we are poised on the edge of a recuperation that will take a lifetime. Flexing our political muscle will not be the same as it was before. Tromping about the world as giants will give way to baby steps toward the future. When we consider our future, both personally and nationally, what will be our response? I hope it will not be to long for the way things used to be. We cannot go back to the garden of Eden where life was idyllic, and struggling with priorities was an exercise in finger wrestling. We are called to go forward into a strange new wilderness, a wilderness with unknown possibilities, a dry and parched land where living by faith is the only map we have, trusting in a God who doesn’t rush to put us back together again when we have broken into a million pieces.
It’s not business as usual for the church these days; returning to normal is not one of our priorities. The church knows something about marching to a different tune against the popular culture. The church knows something about wandering through the wilderness and walking through the desert. The church, along with mosques and synagogues, must lead the way in throwing ourselves among the wolves of consumerism that will consume, nationalism that will polarize, and parochialism that will divide. Mother Goose got it right when she said that nothing human could put Humpty together again. Our hope is not in government or power or normalcy or being at the top. Our hope is in the One who sends us out to live faithfully in this strange new wilderness.
–Gary L. McCann
| Copyright © 2001 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved. |