Sunday
August 27
Have You Not Known?
By Marsh Chapel
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It’s a privilege to be with you today, in the presence of both this university and the broader listening community. In gratefully accepting Dean Hill’s invitation to preach today, I had no idea that it would coincide with the first category 4 hurricane to hit the Texas coast since before I was born. My heart is heavy with concern for many friends whose churches are closed this morning and who might not even be able to tune into this broadcast for lack of power. I ask you to keep the communities of the whole Gulf Coast and inland areas in your prayers, not just during this service, but in the long rebuilding time to come. And now will you pray with me?
I am the product of two United Methodist-related institutions—Emory University in Atlanta for seminary and Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, for my bachelor’s degree. I’m a trustee of Southwestern now, and it’s been interesting to watch its relationship with the church change, even as the role and place of the church in our broader society has also shifted. You may be acquainted with those in the world around us who are way too smart to find themselves in church. You also may be acquainted with churches you are too smart or too nice a person to be a member of. It is an interesting time. But it is not a time in which the church is exactly sure of what to do with itself. What used to be clear isn’t anymore, and the word “decline” hangs as a dark cloud over our heads.
Yet we are here, in body or earshot, because we still believe there’s something to all of this. The church reacts to its changing context, either by trying out new venues and songs and language, trying desperately to crack the code and reach old and new generations of people who either stopped listening to us or never started. Or we hunker down and sing old songs with fingers in our ears, hoping the place stays open long enough to do our funerals. But there has to be something more to what we are about, doesn’t there? Something underneath and above and in the middle, a truth we could not have made up for ourselves. Even as the ground shifts beneath our feet, we hope, we believe, there’s a deeper foundation still.
In today’s gospel, Jesus calls Peter a rock, the foundation for the whole church, which is kind of funny, knowing what we know of Peter. A rock? Really? Peter is, among other things, bone-headed and selfish, and on his worst day, he denied knowing Jesus at all. Yet Peter on this day knew one thing, the one important, true thing, which was who Jesus really was. And somehow Peter’s knowing, combined with the strength of that Jesus truth, was itself enough. Peter, with all his failings and fear and short-sightedness, was able to serve as the foundation for the church, because there was something bigger and better at work in him, despite himself, and he knew it. We are heirs of that foundation, that rock, that truth. Today, this moment, is a time when we as church in this country need to get clear about what that inheritance is and how it lays claim to us. And here in a chapel on a university campus, at the intersecting point of faith and knowledge, we sit in a good place from which to ask ourselves, “What do we know? What is true? What is the living word we have received and which Christ calls us to pass along, as challenging as the times may be?”
\My story of what I know starts with being a preacher’s kid and getting a full, early dose of church. By the time I arrived at college, I was trying on my own adult life, putting intentional space between my parents and myself. I struggled with profound feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt. I studied political science, history, and Spanish. I worried about all the nuclear weapons we and the Russians had pointed at each other, and I hoped to help find a way to work for peace. I had serious questions about the faith I had inherited. I wondered whether the story of Jesus might have been a fairy tale written to help us live better lives. I learned in college anthropology and then later again in seminary that it’s very natural for humans to figure out ways to make meaning, to interpret the world around us beyond our control, and that religion is one response to that impulse. I took philosophy courses and tried to decide whether I was a hard or soft determinist; I considered that it’s very possible that most of what we call reality is something we’ve made up.
Yet every Thursday, I sat in chapel, in a place very much like this. I sang with the University Chorale my whole time in school, and sometimes we had to be there for worship. But I came even when I didn’t have to, drawn in by that space, set apart—its height and color, dark and light, cool and quiet, the sound of the organ, even the smell, which in Texas includes the aroma of bats. That chapel to this day feels to me like the embodiment of an alma mater, mother of my soul, always somehow pointing me up and out, while at the same time reaching in, deep, and bridging the distance between the two.
That’s actually one way I could describe my whole education—an ongoing process of connection and communication between the deepest place in me and the wild wonder, the out-there-ness of the world. And as we turn to today’s Old Testament text, I hear this same deep and wide soul connection in the reading from Isaiah. This prophetic word was a message of hope and consolation to the people of Israel, exiled in the 6th century BCE from their land and seemingly from their identity. They despaired over what would become of them and what it meant that their life in the Promised Land had been so violently cut off. They must have wrestled with the accusations and judgment of the early prophets, who called out the power structure of God’s people as unjust and brutal toward the poor. It was a tough and traumatic time, as they tried to figure out who they were now in relation to their covenant God.
The 40th chapter begins a long section that announces consolation for the people and hope for the future. As a pastor I can tell you that the first verses of Isaiah 40 are used today by the church as readings for Advent, while its final verses, which we read today, are common in the funeral liturgy. This is a big chapter, an important word resonating across the centuries for people who doubt or wonder or suffer, for whatever reason. And the consolation of this word comes in part through the message that God is life, at a cosmic level—stretching out the skies as you would pull open the drapes in the morning. Princes and rulers, those with power to wage war and exile whole nations—these wither under the breath of God, these of shallow seed and fragile root. No matter what trouble the people faced, the prophet proclaimed, God was bigger.
We live in a context very different from the one in which this particular text was written, yet much also remains the same. It is intriguing, for example, to consider the rulers of this day as withered shoots, blown away by a stiff wind. The crazy roller coaster of news that hurtles us through every week, leaders here and elsewhere, ones you agree with and ones you don’t—all blown away by the breath of God. Then there are the oppressive burdens borne by so many in our nation and the world—racism, both blatant and unacknowledged; systemic poverty, held in place by law and practice; state brutality, civil wars that terrorize the most vulnerable; journeys of fear and flight from one land to another, families seeking refuge on foreign shores, often without finding it.
And just as troubling, somehow, in the midst of so much suffering, we have become unable or unwilling to experience each other’s reality. Especially in this country, we have created bubbles of homogeneity and deafness for ourselves, unfriending and categorizing and writing each other off based on yard signs and Facebook posts. We’ve begun to believe that there’s something fundamentally wrong with “those people.” We’ve armed ourselves and taken sides and crafted narratives that explain the guilt of the other, without challenging or calling ourselves to account. And the weak and the long-oppressed continue to suffer, discounted as one more special interest group. How we might wish a hurricane like Harvey might wash it all away. It doesn’t happen that way, though.
So why, then, do we hope? From the perspective of the heavens, we are grasshoppers of a sort, scattered across the land, small and vulnerable. There is much about this complex life I—and we—do not know. But what I do know, I have learned in part from a community of people rooted in a God vision, not ready to be conformed to this world, not ready to say “uncle” in the face of great, destructive power, even when that destructiveness lies within ourselves. I have learned what cannot be proven, in the scientific sense, but what I have come to believe within the deepest fibers of my soul—that there is something bigger than me and us in this life, and not just bigger things that can hurt us. There is a different power at work for good in us and the world, and we know it because we experience it; we’ve seen it transform people and even whole communities.
The power to which we point as people of faith is that found in the final verses of today’s passage, words of comfort for generations of Jews and Christians and all kinds of people who have wandered into funeral parlors. Because you know it happens; hard things happen—youth do sometimes faint and grow weary; young ones do fall exhausted, to say nothing of older ones. Maybe it’s happened to you or your community; maybe it’s happening even now. But our proof of power lies in the strength that comes to us from outside ourselves when we are weak. Perhaps it comes through people gathered together, through music or quiet or the stars strewn above our heads. We may see it when what looks like randomness takes on pattern, or when selfishness becomes sacrifice. But it comes. Life and trouble, death and evil continue, but strength also comes, and it makes all the difference.
One name for that kind of power is love. It is love to which this text testifies; love in the eye of the Holy One without equal, who sits above the circle of the earth; love that Christians receive and proclaim in Christ Jesus; love that centers so many other faith traditions, too. It is love that breaks opens hearts and minds to the new idea, the different perspective, the stretch that true learning and listening require. It is love that allows us to take seriously testimonies of experiences we haven’t had, and to lay down power and privilege on behalf of people who are unaccustomed to either. It is love I have always found in spaces like this one and at the gracious table of Jesus Christ—welcoming, feeding, moving me up and out.
As church, as university, it is the power of love to which we should witness. In this brilliant world, traveling at breakneck pace; in this culture, which has trouble remembering what was important five minutes ago; in a land where human hearts are as selfish as forever yet also yearn beyond words for fullness of life—in this moment we must strive to create disciples of Christ who will testify to love and its power in their lives and communities. We must be and invite and form people who know there’s something important that’s bigger than they are, who sit upon the earth like tiny grasshoppers but who yet use their compound eyes to take in and know the world, and use their legs to sing a song of praise. We must testify to being lifted up as on eagle’s wings, humbled and empowered by strength that is not our own, and inspired to walk and serve and speak out on behalf of others and ourselves. We must be and invite and form mature, moral citizens, compassionate neighbors, people with what we call emotional intelligence, in addition to all that other intelligence y’all practice around here. From where I sit, I don’t know what to call that but love.
21 Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
28 The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
God does not faint or grow weary;
God’s understanding is unsearchable.
29 God gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
We have inherited a word, a vision, a deep knowledge, a solid rock of truth as our foundation, and our work is far from finished. May God bless us with the joy and opportunity of sharing what we know, even in this uncertain and troubling time, as people transformed by love.
– The Reverend Laura Merrill, Assistant to the Bishop for Clergy Excellence
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