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March 5, 2006
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture:
Genesis 9:8-17, Psalm 25:1-10, Mark 1:9-15
“The Rainbow Earth: So High, So Low, So Wide, So
Walled”
The image of “Rainbow Earth” comes from Eduardo
Galeano. He says the indigenous flag of the Andes pay homage to the diversity
of the world. It is “born of the encounter between the female and the male
rainbow. And this rainbow of the Earth,” he says, “has more colors than the
rainbow of the sky.” Once again we celebrate this morning the utter diversity
of the world’s peoples, cultures, creeds, and conditions. (We just heard from
our Muslim friends how great faiths of the world may build upon one another.
www.sierraf.org)
We celebrate this rainbow earth – so high (we can’t get over it!), so low (we
can’t get under it!), so wide (we can’t get around it), yet so walled (we can
barely get through it!). Perhaps the rainbow can be seen, in Robert Frost’s
image that calls us to and sends us from worship this season, as a “mending
wall” in the sky. After all, on the second day of creation God says, “Let
there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from
the waters.” It is as if the dome, called “Sky,” serves as a wall to
separate “the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above
the dome.”
“Mending Walls” -- “The Walls in Our Way” as we
call our worship theme for the season of Lent -- are walls that may be built to
divide and conquer us, separate and condemn us, to one side of the wall or the
other – as if we were irrevocably odious and dangerous to one another. We think
of “Berlin Walls” and walls now in-the-making, between Israel and Palestine,
Mexico and the United States – and we wonder how walls can be asked to do the
work of the people who live on either side of them? How can walls do the work
of Christ, whom Paul says in Ephesians 2, in the last passage of walls in the
Bible (as contained in this yellow folder for the Lenten season) comes to
destroy the walls of hostility growing between us and to give us the ministry of
reconciliation – of getting along with one another – by whatever means it
takes?! So we also know of “great walls,” and “wailing walls,” of Vietnam
memorial walls in which to find ourselves reflected in the victims of wars, and
of mural and even some positive graffiti walls. . . .
We concede there are at least some senses in
which “Good fences make good neighbors!” (Remind me to draw upon “Midsummer
Night’s Dream” and “The Fantasticks” sometime this season!) The poem says these
neighbors “ meet to walk the line” of the wall between them and to “set” the
wall as they go – picking up fallen boulders, some like loaves to be broken and
eaten together, some like balls to be kicked and thrown and batted and played
with together. I’ve never lived in New England among the stone walls, but is
this right? You walk the walls at the point where winter gives way to spring?
Rebuilding the walls, repairing the breaches
between us, even restoring the great walled cities of biblical times – (The best
“wall” books of the Bible probably are Ezra and Nehemiah and what pride and
power those exiled from Jerusalem find in rebuilding the walls of the city!) –
This is hard and rough-fingered work. Yet, adds the poet, serious wall-building
may be “just another kind of out-door game!” It is so important for us to
discern where, and how, and for how long, walls are needed -- and where they are
not! Otherwise, as the poem concludes, either side can become “like an
old-stone savage armed,” and move in the darkness of cycles of sin -- as
division and separation, conquest and condemnation, passed on by generations of
spiteful stubbornness and stubborn spitefulness.
But think of the rainbow at the end of the story
of Noah’s ark – like a “mending wall” in the sky, sign of a covenant both
undergirding and overarching as the waters above and below us. We long for the
pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet the very nature of covenant,
according to God, is that it never has to end! The covenants we make between us
-- like the most creative and inviting of walls that connect and bind us
together -- are infinitely knowable, nameable, speakable, negotiable,
forgiveable, and renewable. I try to find ways to say that to each couple
who come to work to me to work on marriage. I know it does not always seem
possible. Some walls that grow between us -- as well as within us, among
us, around us -- prove to be insoluble and insurmountable. There must be a
grace and a mercy by which covenant ends – even while it remains.
And yet, even when a covenant ends, it remains
paradoxically true that nothing has to end it. God builds covenant here
with Noah into creation itself – reflected in ever-recurring rhythms of
“seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night” -- God
proclaims “my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every
living creature that is with you!” “Never again shall all flesh be cut off by
the waters.” Covenant is built in to the very nature of creation herself! A
destroying form of wall is dissolved by the rainbow, a mending form of wall.
All of creation shares one destiny, one descendancy. We, many as we are – and
different! -- are one body! Thoughtful and truthful persons of all faith
traditions now are growing in a consensus that transcends traditional suspicions
of science and concludes we are all on and all of this earth together! Buddhist
and Hindu, Moslem and Jew, Christian and whomever – Either we live together as
friends, says Dr. King, or we perish together as fools! No matter what side we
are on of any particular wall, we cannot escape, we cannot avoid, we cannot
ignore one another.
As our friends at Sierra Interfaith Action put
it, any just and lasting peace between and among us must begin with, what? With
respect! Respect for each other, respect for ourselves, respect for the God and
sources from whom we all come and descend. Respect requires a new kind of
walking the walls together – an honesty of how often we hide ourselves from one
another, in ignorance and in fear. An openness to understanding, and even to
accepting without understanding, of just how life is for others – what it is
like to walk in the shoes of others, we say, to see through the eyes and hear
through the ears of others – much less to taste through the mouths of others –
as we have the chance to do, not only in holy communion, but in “Noah’s Pudding”
this day! If we are to do so, we must become intimate with, involved with and
invested in one another. We must hold one another’s hands, hear one another’s
stories, sing one another’s songs, touch one another’s hearts, share one
another’s fates, join in one another’s services of work and worship – as we are
doing in Confirmation Class.
The dove of the Spirit brings back to Noah the branch that means the flooding
has ended -- even as we are seeking for signs of spring these days! Robert
Frost’s poem says spring is the mischief in us! We’ll try to see how that
is in this season. Jesus is very mischievous indeed. The very same dove
alights upon Jesus, and us, in baptism. We are assured as well that God is
still renewing covenant with us, all of us -- our species and the others.
The Spirit drives Jesus directly from baptism to temptation! Baptism
to temptation, “without passing Go,” says to us, it is not enough just to know
how loved we are by God. We are empowered by God to act to bring God’s
love for us to bear upon all the world – starting right where we are.
Satan would have us keep all that love for ourselves and use it to take power
over others by whatever means. The love God reveals to Jesus, in baptism,
in temptation, in transfiguration, and beyond – in crucifixion and in
resurrection – is love that shares power with others – all others! -- instead.
Such mischievous love makes all kinds of trouble – for John, for Jesus, for us.
In closing, I ask us throughout this season of counting and pounding the walls
in our way to remember the way itself – the way, the truth, and the life Jesus
offers. I ask us to remember those who are missing and have disappeared
behind walls of our awareness and of our attentiveness – right here, in our own
lives and relationships, in our own neighborhoods and communities – even right
here in our own congregation! Who disappears, who hides, who comes and
goes, without our even noticing? – and throughout the earth.
I ask us to remember those of the Christian
Peacemaker Team (www.cpt.org/iraq/response/resources.php)
in Iraq – James, and Tom, and Harmeet, and Norman – who are being held hostage
behind hidden walls. Their pictures are on the covers of the yellow folder of
meditations on walls for this season. They are only representative of the
disappeared and the hidden on all sides of all walls anywhere in the world. One
of them, James Loney, wrote the “Litany of Resistance” where we find our “Words
for Meditation” this season. CPTers call their work for peace the work of
“getting in the way” of violence and war. That is the trouble it gets us all in
to imagine that God is Love for all people. To imagine a way beyond walls that
divide and conquer, separate and condemn. A way beyond walls to the table of
life that embraces and welcomes us all!
Amen.
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