Sermon for the Sunday of Yale Reunion Week
Battell Chapel, June 6, 2010
Texts: Psalm 31:3-5, 9-11, 14-17a; Matthew 6:25-34
In the oft-quoted phrase of British novelist Leslie Hartley, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Reunions, like anniversaries and other occasions of remembrance, enable us to travel to that foreign country. My mind, for instance, travels to past times in this very sanctuary when I was inspired by the great preacher George Buttrick, challenged by the towering theologian Paul Tillich, and prodded by William Sloane Coffin – university pastor, preacher, and prophet. My debt to Battell Chapel’s ministry is enormous, which makes this opportunity to share with you all the more special.
Our reunion-ing of the past week has been a rich experience. Much of that which had been dis-membered by the inevitable passage of time has been re-membered. We delighted
- in old friends and classmates, as well as in new friends;
- in recalling mentors: teachers, coaches, glee club directors, chaplains;
- both in familiar places and in the awesome changes to the university’s face, like the rare book library and the new west campus
- in singing old college songs that brought tears to my eyes;
- in the incomparable richness of the Yale education that has shaped us.
Much delight, yes, and for this we are profoundly grateful to God. But if you’re like me, this week may also have reunited you with something else.
My awareness of a certain nagging undercurrent was shaped the other week by a visit with a dear friend just before her potentially life-threatening surgery. “George,” she said, “ I feel my life is so incomplete. So many things I’ve started are left hanging.”
At this reunion time I have felt within myself, alongside great gratitude and joy, a sense of incompleteness and an undercurrent of sadness. What first comes to mind are the broken ties to the many of our classmates who we remembered in beautiful memorial services right here, and whose names are listed in the bulletin. Of my class, over 160 out of about 1000 have died.
Further, for all the great things about my student days at Yale, my educational experience feels incomplete. I lament what it was not — the courses I didn’t take, the great professors I never got to learn from. And what we did work so hard to learn can be so dated now. Do you ever think about what your education has not been?
I lament as well the personal limitations I struggled with. It hurts to recall the bewilderment, the sense of dislocation, even shame, as I struggled so hard to fit in at Yale. Here I was — an Indiana kid come East for the very first time, not from a prep school but from a pretty average high school, without a clue about preppy dress, so convinced that every other freshman was so smarter than I that in seminars I was totally tongue-tied.
In making friends I did the best I could, but I know I must have let others down; just after our graduation I sought out a psychotherapist, and my first words to him were “I don’t know how to love.” I wish I had been different then. For all the many positives of my Yale experience, I think our college song “Bright College Years” is a bit over-optimistic in declaring our time here as the “shortest, gladdest years of life.”
On the larger scene, when in our senior year African-American students sat-in at dime store counters in North Carolina, and kicked off other sit-ins in dozens of cities, this historic ferment made barely a stir on the Yale campus; and I regret that.
I also regret very much that the voices of women were wholly absent from our classrooms, either as fellow students or, as far as I knew, as professors. Though we really missed the companionship of women, did any of us see women’s exclusion as the justice issue it so obviously was?
In life there are many moments of completeness and fulfillment we get from anniversaries, birthdays, and a major college reunion, as well as from very personal moments, as when a baby falls asleep on your shoulder or hand in hand you watch a beautiful sunset, or you experience a rich time of prayer. In such moments time seems to pause and we have a semblance of being complete, being “full-filled.”
But aren’t the moments of celebration and completion so fleeting, so provisional? All too soon the party’s over and the ragged edges of life are again exposed. Tomorrow begins your 51st, or 41st, or 21st year since graduation and we don’t know what that year will bring – joy or sorrow, excitement or boredom, health or illness, life or death. Time moves inexorably forward into uncertainty and incompleteness.
Some goals do get accomplished. Relationships can beautifully mature. Deep healing does come. Children magnificently blossom. But also: Hearts get broken. Dreams can be dashed and hopes put on hold. Tears still fall. Addictions still tempt. As Chaplain Ian Oliver wrote me last week, “Graduation’s over. How inspiring and how sad.”
History’s like that too. For me, President Obama’s election seemed to fulfill the promise of the Civil Rights Movement I was fortunate to be a part of. But just as we thought perhaps we’d entered a “post-racial era,” suddenly hate groups across America double in number. (A reputable poll suggests that a third of Americans choose to believe Obama’s actually a Muslim.)
As I ponder these contradictions, I’m consoled, even empowered, by Psalm 31. When the psalmist wrote this, it was not a sunny day for him or her. The psalmist was nearly demolished by threat, suffering, and despair: “Be gracious to me, O Lord,” the psalmist cries out, “My life is spent with sorrow and my years with sighing; my strength fails… and my bones waste away….” Then, remarkably, the psalmist makes a bold declaration: “But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hand.”
Can we join the psalmist in such bold faith? Can we say that in and through the magnificence and the limitations to experience at Yale or wherever, all those times are in God’s hand? Can we entrust all the ups and downs of our past to God’s hand? Can we place our unfinished present and future in God’s hand?”
To know our times to be in God’s hand is to know that our pasts and our memories are not lost, but deposited, held and cherished in a transcendent realm. Our human joys are embraced in a transcendent joy, which brings their completion. The sorrow, guilt, regret, unfulfilled yearning and all the loose ends of life rest not alone on our shoulders but are being gathered together by the One in whom we live, and move, and have our being, and in that One are brought to completion.
Maybe life is structured to be incomplete, so that we need to reach out to one another and have an unquenchable yearning for “more”. As Augustine put it, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”
The God in whom all things find rest and completeness is not a boxed-in God, limited by language and metaphor and imagination and circumstance. Rather — in words we may have heard Paul Tillich preach from this pulpit — our times rest with the God beyond the God of theism, the God beyond the God of conventional usage, even of conventional belief. Our times rest with the God who is the Ultimate Foundation and Mystery, whom Tillich called our very Ground of Being.
From this vantage point our laments and limitations, our delights and joys, our living and loving, past or present, are received and forgiven. In a formulation of Tillich’s that has meant so much to me: “You are accepted….accepted by that which is greater than you….Do not try to do anything, perhaps later you will do much….Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.” Said another way, God’s final word to us is Yes.
So with our checkered past, our incomplete present, and our uncertain future all in the hand of God, what then is there to do, or not do? Jesus, in whom we Christians discern the very image of God, has a Word for us. Mark Dollhopf read it so beautifully a moment ago. “Do not be anxious, do not worry about your life. What you eat, what you drink, what you wear. Can any one of you by your worrying, Jesus asks, add a single hour to your span of life? Well, maybe by cutting down on salt intake – but Jesus has the larger picture in mind.
Rather than worry, he says, “Strive first for the Kingdom of God and God’s righteousness.” Be about the tasks of God’s justice.
Those college students who sat in at the Greensboro lunch counters, demanding that the store that sold them shoelaces also sell them sandwiches, were striving first for God’s justice. The Mississippi sharecroppers I met in 1964 who risked homes, incomes, and their very lives to register with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party were striving first for the Kingdom of God.
Maya Lin’s powerful monument in front of Sterling Library to the absence and the presence of women at Yale is a sign pointing to the Kingdom of God, and, I might add, to the need to find a better translation of that phrase – some suggest “the Kin-dom of God.”
My wife and I teach New Testament and pastoral care in a state prison. But whatever we may be teaching them, we find they teach us much more, about the Kin-dom of God, about the principalities and powers which fight it, about connecting across huge gulfs of life experience, about honesty and repentance, about living day by day by the grace of God.
Jesus and the Apostle Paul teach us that the Kin-dom of God turns upside down the customary hierarchy of values – whether Greco – Roman or American. The preponderant voices of ancient and modern culture place at the top power, wealth, fame, appearance, status, and educational attainment.
But Jesus himself had none of these and Paul sought to divest himself of what advantages he did have. For Jesus, the highest and best was love, self-emptying, sacrificial love – and the justice that implements it. That’s why he declared that the last may be first and the first last. Paul underlined this reversal of values when he said, “What outlast everything are faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.”
And that word is as valid in New Haven and New York today as in Jerusalem and Corinth in biblical times. Knowledge passes away, eloquence fades, power vanishes, bodies wear out. Finally what matters is not a Yale degree, or anything else except how we have loved and striven for God’s righteousness.
The consummate reunion for the followers of Jesus is the Lord’s Supper, which we are about to share. This Holy Communion is a Holy Reunion with the founder and followers of the upside-down Kin-dom. Around this table we join the disciples of Jesus from all generations – from Peter and James and Mary Magdalene and Phoebe to Jonathan Edwards, the Timothy Dwights, the Bill Coffins, the Letty Russells, those known and unknown to you and to me, whether from prison or palace. With us are some who may not have named the name of Jesus but have walked the Way of Jesus. We now gather with all these to receive new nourishment to strive first for the Kin-dom of God and God’s justice. Let us invite the Spirit of God to enter us in fresh ways. And let us give thanks that all our times – reunion times, communion times, ordinary times, hard times, joyful times – are indeed in God’s loving hand. Amen.
