This morning we welcomed back The Rev. David W. Good to our pulpit. David serves as
our Minister Emeritus and was our beloved Senior Minister from 1975 to 2012.
Genesis 22: 1-14
Revelation 21: 1-5
A FEW THEOPHANIES:
INSPIRED BY MARTIN HEIDEGGER, LOUIS ARMSTRONG AND WILLIAM BLAKE
Good morning, it’s very good to be with you this morning! Before we begin this sermon, I would first of all like to thank my friend Steve for so graciously inviting me to preach this morning. It’s an honor to do so, and I want to use this as an opportunity to thank Steve, Carleen and Laura and indeed, all of you for your prophetic and compassionate ministries among us. I confess on Sunday mornings, as I take my place in the very last pew, I give thanks for this church in so many ways, and I consider it a privilege to be in your pulpit once again.
I also want to thank my friend, Connie Cihocki Howard for her ministry of music this morning. At the close of the sermon, I’ve asked Connie to play that beautiful piece made famous by Louis Armstrong, “What A Wonderful World.” More about that in a few minutes.
I am proud to think of Connie as a “graduate of our Sunday School,” if you will. Back in 1989 when Connie was just graduating from Old Lyme High School and just before going off to Stanford University as a freshman, Connie decided to join us in our first visit to apartheid South Africa as a group from the church.
As part of my sabbatical, Carleen and I had been there the year before, and so in 1989, we were anxious to lead a group so that others from here could witness not only the atrocities of apartheid but also to see and be inspired by the work of the churches and all those who struggled to give birth to a new South Africa. That was the beginning of our South African partnership and it’s how we first met our friend, Bishop Paul Verryn. But it might very well have come to a screeching halt on our first day in South Africa.
After attending church in Soweto, we visited a squatter’s village called Mashingoville. After walking through that place where the people there so valiantly tried to create a life for themselves with make shift tents made out of cardboard, sticks and black plastic, when we returned to the van and as we were saying our goodbyes, we were surrounded by a group of young men brandishing knives. As I was the driver, they demanded that I turn the keys of the van over to them, and to make their point – literally and figuratively — I was sliced a bit on my arm as I dove out the other side of the van.
In my peripheral vision, I could see Connie running and jumping what looked like a 7 foot fence. Each year in our recollection, that fence keeps getting higher and higher!
As you can imagine, we were traumatized by this experience, but to this day, I can’t tell you how proud I was of our group. When Carleen and I laid out for everyone the option to go back home; everyone said, “no”; they said that it was now more important than ever to continue with our journey, to bear witness to the injustices of apartheid that give rise to such violent acts of desperation. So, having lost all of our luggage in the loss of the van; we regrouped, gave everyone enough money for one change of clothes, somehow persuaded the rental company to give us another van, and off we went on the rest of our adventures.
In our stops along the way, Connie would frequently play the piano, and in particular, I have fond memories of a place called Old Joe’s Kaia, a small hotel on the Crocodile River. There was an old rickety out-of tune piano there, and after supper, to the delight of all the guests, Connie played piece after piece by ear on that old piano. After our traumatic experience in Mashingoville, this was exactly the good medicine for the soul we all needed to hear. Thanks to Connie’s lyrical music, even the crocodiles fell sound asleep!
Now when we got back home and told everyone here about our great robbery; it’s a wonder that didn’t bring to an end our fledgling partnership with South Africa, and the fact that you didn’t give Carleen and me our “walking papers”, well, that just shows how “foolish”, how out of touch with reality this congregation is. And that, by the way, is meant as a complement.
And the fact that you did respond as you did led to many different chapters in our South African partnership – the many visits of Bishop Paul Verryn, our participation in the Jimmy Carter Work Project for Habitat for Humanity in Durban, South Africa, Carleen’s ordained ministry in which she received her theological degree from the University of South Africa, the same school where Nelson Mandela received his education, and of course the magnificent music of Mxolisi Duda and the choirs from South Africa with yet another visit coming up at the end of September. All of this might have been precluded if you hadn’t been so inexcusably foolish and out of touch with reality back in 1989.
And that – to move to our sermon today — I would like to suggest is what “Theophanies” do. They can lead us to be “out of touch with reality” or, to put it in a more positive way, to be in touch with a deeper reality.
Theophany. It’s one of those words that I know will get me into trouble when I get back home. My wife dislikes anything that smacks of theological or ecclesiastical jargon, and rightfully so. Some of the theological terms can lead us to think that perhaps we’ve been deprived, that those in seminary know more about God than we do.
Paraphrasing his most famous words, Albert Schweitzer said that we would know God or we would know Christ as an “ineffable mystery,” that “we should look for God in our own experience.”
So, in talking about “theophanies” – which means “God’s Appearances” we are in a realm of experience that is inevitably autobiographical. My Theophanies will not be the same as yours, and so today’s sermon is at best suggestive. I hope that by sharing a few of my “theophanies”, this might lead you to examine your own life and perhaps some occasions where you too have experienced something of that “ineffable mystery.”
Now, let me say at the outset that my theophanies will seem rather peculiar and boring, especially compared to what is perhaps the most famous theophany of all time, one that found it’s way and amplified by one of Bob Dylan’s songs,
Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”
As Steve knows, Dylan made up the Highway 61 part – needing something to rhyme with “done” — but otherwise, it’s pretty much the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, and it shows how a Theophany almost led Abraham to sacrifice his own son.
So, theophanies can be dangerous, and they need to be examined. They might be nothing more than a hyperactive pituitary gland, but then again, they can lead us to do some unbelievably cruel and ugly things, and so for good reason, there are those who would dismiss “theophanies” altogether, saying, “let’s keep religion within the realm of reason alone.”
In the case of Abraham and Isaac, I wonder how many children have been sacrificed or almost sacrificed on the altar of such gods as Militarism and Nationalism and all those other “isms”, those false gods that demand our obedience. So, compared to Abraham’s so called “theophany”, I’ll take my own rather boring ones, thank you very much!
I have 3 I would like to share with you this morning. The first has to do with the book on our communion table, entitled Sein und Zeit, or translated from the German as Being and Time, a work of philosophy by Martin Heidegger. I told you mine would be boring!
I came to the writings of this German philosopher circuitously. In college, I was introduced to the amazing poetry of Theodore Roethke, and as I read his poems, I discovered that this poet who grew up in Saginaw, Michigan was heavily influenced by the German theologian Paul Tillich who in turn was deeply indebted to the philosopher, Martin Heidegger. So it is it seems with theophanies! They can lead you on some strange journeys – Highway 61, maybe, but maybe also the wild goose chase, the circuitous road between poetry and philosophy.
I was between my Junior and Senior year at college, and I don’t know what possessed me, but I opted to take a graduate level course on the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. So, to get a head start, I decided to stay at college over the Christmas break to read all of Being and Time from cover to cover. It was a daunting task, so with coffee after coffee after coffee, I sat down day after day to read this book.
One of the things I noticed in reading this book is how much German translators love to use a hyphen, connecting sometimes a long string of words, as if the hyphen was not so much a form of punctuation but only what you could see of a precious thread, a golden cord connecting all the words we use, there to remind us of how wonderfully and extraordinarily interconnected everything is. There’s really no new thought that necessitates a new sentence or paragraph, only a continuation of what came before. If Faulkner wrote a book – Absalom, Absalom! — with a sentence that ran on for 2 ½ pages, I would write one where every word would be connected to every other word by one of those tiny hyphens.
Sometimes our theophanies can lead us into some really bad ideas! Be that as it may, I was intrigued by how Heidegger referred to language as “the House of Being.” I’ll come back to that idea in a few minutes, but for now, I would ask you to think about the words you use, the language, the running conversation you have with yourself, the language we use out in the public square, the dialogue of Self and Soul, as Wm. Butler Yeats would say. Think of that as the House of Being and what the implications might be.
Speaking of language, Heidegger spoke of “Idle Talk” as the kind of talk that typifies “inauthenticity.” One of the popular songs at that time was Simon and Garfunkel’s song, “The Dangling Conversation”,
and this led me to some self-examination, thinking that maybe my “house of being” was too small and needed to be reexamined, maybe rebuilt, with new and different words. I think we all get tired of “superficial sighs, the borders of our lives”. We all yearn for deeper conversations, and the words we use – connected by that golden hyphen – can enable us to live beyond the provincialism and small circumference in which we live, the “borders of our lives.” Words can and should enable us to live in a larger and deeper world, an alternate reality, a New Being, if you will.
Then as I read on in his analysis of inauthenticity and authenticity, the philosopher described “resolute” as quote, “being ahead of oneself for the sake of oneself.” Now, those words may mean little to anyone else, but for me, at that time, they were exactly what I needed to hear, and they were as prophetic for me as the shadows on the back wall of a cave were for Plato.
Being “Resolute”, “being ahead of oneself for the sake of oneself” suggested living for a purpose. It suggested leaning into the wind. It meant heroic defiance, and free association being what it is, I thought of Martin Luther standing at the door of his church where he had scribbled out the changes he envisioned for his church, standing there and saying, “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise. God Help me. Amen” words that would help to shape a new House of Being. That’s what it means to be resolute. Being ahead of oneself for the sake of oneself.
I thought of Don Quixote and his impossible dream, a dream that showed just how far out in front of oneself one can be. And I thought of Martin Luther King Jr. who stood on our nation’s capital and helped us all to be “ahead of ourselves for the sake of ourselves”, and thanks to his being so resolute, someday, we as a nation, we will get to the place he envisioned. That’s what it means to be ahead of oneself for the sake of oneself, and so with my #2 pencil I underlined sentence after sentence, understanding that that pencil was also the point of a compass pointing back at my own inauthenticity, my own flawed humanity.
Back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, like many of my generation, I was a “rebel without a cause”, but that wasn’t good enough any more. Thanks in part to Heidegger and what I now call a “theophany”, I wanted to be a rebel with a cause. That yearning brought me back to the lessons I learned in Sunday School about a man by the name of Jesus, one who surely exemplified what it means to be resolute, one who showed us the Way to be ahead of oneself for the sake of oneself – or more precisely, the Way to be ahead of oneself for the sake of all humanity. One who more than anyone else I know exemplified what Heidegger meant when he spoke of Being-Toward-Death and so gloriously showed the freedom that comes from facing and not running away from our own mortality, a freedom expressed so well in Martin Luther’s great hymn:
Let goods and kindred go,
This mortal life also.
The body they may kill,
But truth abideth still….
God’s Kingdom is forever.
I love that bravado. That’s not whistling in the graveyard. It’s a full blown aria. It may be wrong to generalize, but I think we all yearn for that kind of freedom.
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For my next Theophany, the year was 1983, and I was on sabbatical at Trinity College, Cambridge University in England.
I had just finished afternoon tea at Aunties’s Tea Room and was walking back to my flat on Jesus Lane. How’s that for an address for a minister on sabbatical?
I was walking the back lanes of Cambridge when out of a record store, I heard a song I had never heard before. I had been a disk jockey in college, and so it’s all the more shameful that this song was brand new to me. Remember, this was 1983, and the song I heard was Louis Armstrong, singing, “What a Wonderful World.”
This song was released in 1967 but didn’t really become popular until a few years later, but for me, I heard it the first time in 1983 on my way back to Jesus Lane… you could almost say, “the way back to Jesus.” The more I listened to this song and the more I contemplated the time and the context out of which it was born and as I reflected on the life of the singer, Louis Armstrong, the more I fell in love with this song:
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do
They’re really saying I love you
I hear babies crying, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll never know
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
Yes I think to myself what a wonderful world
Think about what was happening in 1968 when this song was finally heard. It was far, far from being a “wonderful world.” In March of 1968, there was the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Tet offensive was during that same year, and by Feb. 1968 over 500 of my contemporaries were killed every week. Many of our families – my own included – were horribly divided and dinners together became battlefields on the political issues of our day.
Then, in April of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and then in June of 1968 Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Hardly what any would call, “A Wonderful World”.
And then, when you reflect on the life of Louis Armstrong, the song becomes even more remarkable. He grew up in what was called the “Battlefield Neighborhood” of New Orleans, and as was true with many young Black men and women – then and now – Louis Armstrong struggled with poverty and racial discrimination, and music for him became a form of resistance, a way of transcending the horrible conditions in which he lived, a way of moving, if you will, from one reality to a deeper reality, a place, a magical place where the “trees were always green.”
It wasn’t so much a form of escapism, but more a matter of heroic defiance, a way of saying, “I will not allow myself to be defined by the walls that imprison me. No matter how hopeless my exile may be, in Babylon, there’s always a need for a trumpeter; and for those who can’t play an instrument, there’s always a need for those who know the words, the words out of which we can construct a New Being, a New Reality.
The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do
They’re really saying I love you
If Heidegger is right, that Language is the House of Being, then that’s a place I would want to call home.
As a child, embattled Louis Armstrong, living in the Battlefield Neighborhood of New Orleans, was befriended by a poor Jewish family living nearby, and so in honor them, he wore a Star of David for the rest of his life.
I read a lot of great theology during that sabbatical at Cambridge, but it was this song, “What a Wonderful World” that taught me the most important theological lesson on what it means to be a church.
As a church we also need to live in a transcendent reality. We need to be “ahead of ourselves for the sake of ourselves.” Week after week, we need to be in a place that is out of touch with reality as it is, a place that keeps alive the songs and the beatific vision of how God created the world to be.
We’ve all been in a spiritual place called Battlefield. While we may not have been victims of racism and prejudice as Sachimo was; we’ve all known the sting of exclusion. Even on Jesus’ lane, even if we grew up on East Street, we’ve all been denizens of “Desolation Row.” We all know what it’s like to be embattled, and so we need our community of faith, and we need each other to be reminded of what a Wonderful World this could be, so that we too, like Sachimo, can be “ahead of ourselves for the sake of ourselves.”
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Finally, for my third theophany, I would share just a glimpse of the artwork and poetry of William Blake.
When I saw an exquisite collection of Blake’s engravings at the British Museum at Yale, I was struck; indeed I was stunned by just how small each of them is. The one on the front cover of our bulletin is only about 9 inches by 7 inches.
But to look at it, you know that the poet is dealing with all kinds of huge mythological and philosophical themes. In one of his poems he says, “Thy own humanity learn to adore” and this is a recurrent theme throughout his poems and engravings — how do we stay human; how do we claim, how do we reclaim, how to keep from losing our humanity in the face of all the inhumanity all around us? How do we restore the sanctity of God’s creation in the face of what he called “the dark satanic mills” of the industrial revolution, a time when tiny children were enslaved as chimney sweeps, a time of the unbridled greed of empire and conquest? How do we break out of what Blake called our “mind forged manacles” and finally become the children of God we were created to be? These and so many other huge topics were addressed on these very small works of art.
One of the things I love about this church, past and present, is how we also work on a small canvas. We live in a small New England village with less than 8000 residents. It would be so easy to draw a red line around our community and foreclose on the rest of the world, engaging in nice “idle talk” and “dangling conversations”, but we refuse to do so. We are adamant, resolute, determined to bring whatever love we can to places all over the globe – in the Middle East, the so-called Holy Land where Palestinian children suffer from detention and incarceration – we want out love to be there — in Haiti where the people there yearn for decent schools and a good education to rise above their impoverishment – we want our love to be there as well — along the border with Mexico where children are separated from their parents and forced to live in squalid, inhumane conditions – we want our love to be there — in prisons where a disproportionate number of young Black men languish in prisons owned by those who profit from their incarceration – our love needs to be with them also — in the killing fields of Syria where those who struggle to survive yearn for refugee status so they can be resettled in loving communities such as this.
I don’t know about you, but I’m proud to be a part of a church community that refuses to do as banks used to do, draw a red line around what we will and will not do. I am proud to be a part of a church that is adamant – and if you look at that word – you’ll see the word steel there as well. I am proud to be a part of a church that exemplifies what it means to be resolute, always trying to be “ahead of itself for the sake of itself.”
I am proud to be a part of church that speaks a different language, and if Martin Heidegger is right in talking about Language as the House of Being, then listen to the language of this place, and you’ll find yourself transported to an alternate reality.
Come through these doors and you’ll hear all manner of words, bien veni from Haitian Creole, Mitakuye Oyasin from the Lakota, umbuntu umbuntu from South Africa, sabah al khair from Palestine, mi casa es su casa from our Spanish speaking neighbors…all linguistic reminders that we live in the House of Being, a house of New Being, not a Tower of Babel where everyone talks at everyone else, not the place of idle talk and dangling conversations but a house of Pentecost, a place where Karl Marx and Adam Smith can sit down for coffee and say, “come now, let us reason together. How can we bring the wealth of nations? How can we bring prosperity to all of God’s children?”
Walk through these doors and you’ll find yourself in a parallel universe. In this church being a sanctuary for those threatened by the policies of our government, you’ll find you’re in a place where time — past present and future — no longer exist, a place where your nearest neighbors, your kindred spirits will be those of Le Chambon, France, those who offered shelter for Jews in flight from the Nazis.
When Louis Armstrong sang about a Wonderful World, he wasn’t singing about Main Street America as it is; he wasn’t putting a sugar coat on the mean streets in which he grew up. Rather, he was singing about this place as God Created it to be, a place where all are welcome and no one feels afraid.
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Finally, what I love most about the engraving on the front cover of our bulletin is the small orb that the young man or woman is carrying. It’s been described as a “vortex of energy” or – and here is what I love – “a portable sun.”
Hopefully, that’s what we all do when we leave this place on a Sunday morning. We take with us a portable sun, to bring light, and hope and enlightenment wherever we go.
In Blake’s engraving, I see a young person, opening the door to a very dark place, perhaps suggestive of what Joseph Conrad called the Heart of Darkness. I see courage in this figure, and as I ponder that portable sun, I think of how Jesus said, “I am the light of this world.” As if to say, I’ll lead the way, follow me, and together we’ll build a New Jerusalem, a place where love and light will be triumphant.”
I think of this and I think of how a young woman, Susan Aboeid, a rising senior at Yale University who traveled with us to Palestine and was so moved by the experience she went back again by herself to volunteer to help in a medical center in Hebron, and then, as if that were not enough, this summer, she went to the Greek Island of Lesbos to help the Syria refugees there with their medical needs. Thank God for those who bring their portable sun into such dark and lonely places.
I look at this engraving, and I think of Connie, as a young high school graduate, who despite our traumatic experience, stayed the course in our first journey to South Africa and with her wonderful music being like a portable sun, a vortex of energy, she brought hope to those who languished under apartheid, and with her music, she helped to quiet the crocodiles of fear and anxiety in those of us who traveled with her.
I think of the young people from this community who have been so thrilled to join Ted and Becky in their journeys down to Haiti. There’s nothing like the vortex of energy that a young teenager radiates, and the way they play and laugh with the Haitian children, I’m so grateful for the portable sun they bring with them in their smiles and compassion.
But one doesn’t need to travel very far from home to share that portable sun with someone else. I think of my good friend, Betty Kent, over at Essex Meadows. At nearly 100 years of age, Betty doesn’t drive anymore, but she drives a mean walker, and everyday, you can see her portable sun in the warm smile she brings to her neighbors in the Essex Meadows Health Center. For those facing the darkness of their own mortality, Betty brings the radiance of her love and kindness.
And as I sit in the back row on Sunday mornings, I cannot help but notice how attentive this congregation can be. I see those who are new, and I see those who have been around for awhile who greet them with a warm smile – “I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do; they’r really saying, I love you.” That portable sun manifests itself in all manner of ways.
And Louis Armstrong, what a gift to the world he is, and with that song of his, what a portable sun! What a vortex of energy he brought into our world!
As it wafted through the back lanes of Cambridge, his song was for me like a “portable sun”, a reminder, that if we want to look for a theophany, a good place to start is with our own humanity or as William Blake said, “Thy own humanity learn to adore.” Amen
David W. Good
Minister Emeritus, The First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, Connecticut
