Texts: Isaiah 24: 18b-20; Psalm 40: 1-3; Luke 7: 11-17
“When Things Fall Down, Who Lifts Them Up?”
Today’s sermon unfolds something like a Chinese box, where removing the lid from one box reveals another, similar box inside of it, and then another inside of that. It is a story that, when opened up, leads to another story, and then another, all of them intricately related. Here then, is the topmost story, the first layer of the box.
Last Sunday night, I arrived home after a long day, and after a dispiriting week. Most of you know by now that after celebrating the end of our Sanctuary case, Malik and Zahida’s restaurant was stripped bare by the one they had trusted to run it in their absence. But then there had been the horrific shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, one more spasm of American violence aimed at a vulnerable community. On Sunday night, Laura and I attended a service with members of Temple Emmanuel, a synagogue in Waterford, and we witnessed the anguish of that community. Meanwhile, Brazil had, that very day, elected a man who was openly nostalgic for the days of that country’s brutal and repressive military dictatorship. And then of course our own elections were, and are, looming, when it seems every regressive and reactionary and mendacious element within our democracy is being unleashed. By the end of the day, I arrived back home feeling what a lot of us are feeling just now – emotionally drained, a little unsteady, and worried that somehow the ground was giving way beneath my feet, beneath all of our feet.
It was time for the kids to go to bed, and it was my turn to read to Elsa that night. We selected a new novel from Dave Eggers, who visited Old Lyme this past summer to write about our sanctuary work. It’s a children’s fable called The Lifters. I pulled it off the shelf, took it to Elsa’s room, lay down on her bed, and flipped the book over to read the synopsis on the back.
“When things fall down, who lifts them up?” the back cover asks. And suddenly, just like that, where I had been feeling tired, I was alert and awake, because just then, that felt like the most urgent question in the world. “When things fall down, who lifts them up?” We started to read, just a chapter or two, but I went to bed that night thinking about the question, and what Dave Eggers was trying to convey. When I woke up in the morning, I was still thinking about it, and so in the next couple of days, I devoured the book like the hungry and thirsty and needy soul that I most deeply am. Might there be such a thing in the world as lifters, forces within the world that push things back up when the ground seems to be crumbling beneath our feet, that lift, that restore, that strengthen and uphold when things seem to be falling apart? I try to remind us all that such things exist whenever I stand in the pulpit, but God’s honest truth is that I need to be reminded of that as much as anyone. Despite the week, despite the relentless onslaught against humanity and decency that we most of us experience on a daily basis, I went to bed last Sunday night, and most nights thereafter, feeling…well, lifted.
That’s the first layer of the story. Now remove the lid, and let me tell you what was in the pages of that extraordinary fable, The Lifters.
*****
Gran is the new kid in town. His family had just moved to the little town of Carousel, where his father hoped to find work as an auto mechanic. Times had been hard, and money had been tight in Gran’s family. An illness had left his mother without the use of her legs, and work had dried up for his father, and so the family moves into the house that Gran’s great-great grandfather had once built.
But things are strange in the town of Carousel. There’s the house that Gran’s family had moved into – it seems to be leaning, as if it’s not quite stable. Come to think of it, a lot of buildings in the town of Carousel seem to be listing, this way or that. There’s the fact that no one in Gran’s middle school even acknowledges his presence for weeks on end – not teachers, not students, not administrators, not anyone. It leads Gran to suspect that he might be invisible, like a ghost. There’s the hard truth that the job for Gran’s father that brought the family to Carousel hadn’t worked out after all, leading to arguments about money, and long absences from home by Gran’s father. There’s the grown man riding around town on a children’s dirt bike in the middle of the day, guiding his sullen pit bull by a leash. And there are the huge sinkholes that keep opening up around town, swallowing houses and other buildings. Everyone in town seems sort of dazed, or empty, or just lost, as if they were walking around with one of those lead blankets on top of them, the kind they give you at the doctor’s office when they take an x-ray.
A quick aside: Have you ever visited a place like that? Have you ever lived in one or seen one? I have, when I was attending junior high and high school in Middletown, OH, a once vibrant steel town that was eviscerated in the late 80’s and 90’s. But I’ve seen those towns all around in the years since then – a lot of them exist right here in New England. A gray, ghostly pallor seems to set in, and no amount of sunshine can quite dispel it. I don’t know where Carousel is located on a map, but even so, I know I’ve been there.
Back to the story. There’s one more strange thing about living in Carousel. It has to do with a mysterious girl named Catalina who attends Gran’s school. She seems to have the power to disappear into thin air, and she remains absent for long stretches at a time. She’s a little gruff and a little nice, but she’s the only person that speaks to Gran at school, and so naturally, Gran wants to know more about her. But she keeps disappearing. One day Gran follows her on a path deep into the woods, cutting across clearings and going around hills, when all of a sudden, she simply vanishes into a hillside, creating a door, an opening, where before there had been no door, and no opening. Catalina disappears into the earth.
Gran tried to find the opening into which Catalina had disappeared, but he has no luck. There are no hinges or cracks or anything that suggests a doorway. So he chooses to wait at the hillside, sleeping in the cold until finally, Catalina emerges from the same place she had disappeared. A door in the earth swings wide, and there stands Gran, wishing to know more. At first, Catalina is embarrassed and alarmed to have been discovered. But eventually she shows Gran an ordinary looking door handle that she carries, one invested with magical properties. When placed against the ground in the proper way, something fastens onto the handle, and it can be used to pull back a doorway within most any plot of ground. Beyond the door is a network of interlocking tunnels beneath the entire town, crisscrossing beneath houses and schools and public buildings.
And here let me pause again, simply to note the evocative power of discovering doors where there were no doors, openings where there were no openings. You may be sitting out there with a furrowed brow and a baffled expression on your face, and you may be thinking, you know, Steve, that’s not how the world works. Doors don’t appear where there were no doors. To which I will cheerfully reply, “Of course they do!” Is that not what a book is? Is that not what a good story can do? For that matter, is that not what a good sermon can do, or a powerful song? Isn’t that what the Bible, and the life of faith, is all about when it comes down to it? Aren’t all of those – stories, songs, faith itself – things with hinges, that swing wide to reveal possibilities that weren’t there before? I happen to believe that such doorways actually exist, in the town of Carousel, but all around this world, your world and mine, as well.
But back to our story. Now traveling in the tunnels beyond the door, Gran discovers an entire drama unfolding beneath the town of Carousel. He discovers it by accident, when he first hears a roaring sound approaching, and is then caught up in a whirlwind, a vortex, an underground hurricane boring through the earth. The whirlwind is powerful and violent, and it catches Gran within it, hurling him against the walls of the tunnel. At last it comes to a dead end, and the whirlwind seems to retreat, leaving Gran gasping in one of the tunnels. But Gran senses that the hurricane is gathering strength, in order to return with greater fury to blast new passages beneath the earth. Soon after plucking him out of harm’s way, Catalina informs Gran that the whirlwind is called the Hollows. It’s a force that feeds on sadness, she says, and it operates wherever great wells of despair reside. It creates enormous cavities beneath the ground until eventually, things on the surface become unstable, and collapse. The Hollows are what make all the buildings in Carousel tilt and shake. Catalina explains that the Hollows are like sharks sensing blood in the water and then coming to feed. Only instead of sharks, it’s a voracious underground hurricane, and instead of blood in the water, it’s despair, emptiness, and hopelessness that attracts the Hollows.
Maybe now is the time to pause again. Because most of us know a little something about the Hollows. There are times when the ground does seem to shake beneath our feet. There are times when the foundations of the earth do seem to tremble and quake. It happens within our personal worlds – a crisis or a death can send shockwaves through the emotional or spiritual foundations of our lives, and sometimes those foundations can give way beneath us like a great crater. We know about the Hollows, but the Bible knows about it as well. In Psalm 40, the poet writes about finding himself in a desolate pit, stuck in a miry bog. Is that not what it is to have one’s life consumed by the Hollows? But it’s not only about our personal lives. Whole areas of the world can be undermined by the Hollows – towns, regions, sometimes whole countries. The Bible speaks about that as well. “The foundations of the earth tremble,” the prophet Isaiah writes. “The earth is violently shaken. (It) staggers like a drunkard, it sways like a hut.” That too is the work of the Hollows.
We know something about that, don’t we, as tectonic forces shift beneath us? Wars and catastrophes certainly do that to us. September 11thdid it, and the economic collapse of 2008 did it. I would dare say that for many of us the election of 2016 did it as well. But really it’s the slow erosion that occurs in the aftermath of events like that that make the ground unsteady. It erodes us of confidence, of a sense of well being, of an ability to trust what had once seemed steady and sure. That’s the Hollows. It makes the ground tremble beneath our feet.
Except that’s not, thank God, the end of the story. The Hollows are real, but there is that within the world which counteracts the Hollows, reversing and confounding it. There are ways of subduing it, diminishing its power and its reach. That’s what Gran and Catalina are tasked with doing, along with a small army of young and old people all around the world, wherever the great cavities form. They all create supports beneath the ground that repair the damage done by the Hollows. It’s restorative, upholding and upbuilding labor, a repairing of the breach after the Hollows slice through. The work is urgent, for of course, the ground does still shift and quake from time to time.
But the lifters…all the lifters work to insure that it doesn’t happen as often as it might. And because of their unseen ministrations in the darkness of the earth, laboring to restore the foundations after they’ve been shaken, sometimes, slowly but surely, recoveries take place. I won’t give away any more of the novel except to say that creativity is rediscovered. A vocation is found. Communal ties are revived. Shared purpose is rekindled. Hope is somehow discovered and despair somehow recedes. And when those things happen, the Hollows recede as well, such that the ground beneath Gran’s and Catalina’s feet becomes trustworthy and steady once again.
*****
When things fall down, who lifts them up? That question was still on my mind on Thursday, when I closed the pages of the book. And here we remove another lid in our series of boxes, revealing a third story, about you, about me, about our shared lives together. Because is this not a parable of faith, a way of describing what churches and synagogues and mosques and other worshiping communities are up to, at least when we’re at our best? We’re each of us called to be lifters. We’re each of us presented with the bold and confounding task of tunneling underground, becoming acquainted with the voids and blank spaces made by the Hollows. The voids keep on appearing – a shooting over here, a hate crime over there, deportations by the hundreds, environmental rollbacks by the dozens. We can’t do everything, and God knows we need all the help we can get, but isn’t every person of faith and conscience asked to hold things up if and when the ground gets shaky?
What does it mean to be a lifter? I don’t know for sure, but here are a few thoughts I’ve had. First, it’s not about being positive or optimistic in the face of a disaster. There are times that’s helpful, but it can also be delusional, which simply feeds the Hollows even more. Instead, it’s about being willing to confront a mess, to get into the mess, to be a mess. It’s about committing ourselves to lives of decency and integrity within that mess, to lives of honesty and courage, even when the earthquakes are real. It’s about sharing common projects together that bind us, one to the other. It’s about standing up for what we know to be true, even when we risk damage to our reputations, or our financial bottom line. It’s about doing what we do to the best of our ability, teaching kids and restoring old homes, writing laws and volunteering for work that needs doing. It’s about practicing the ways of peace and nonviolence in a culture addicted to weapons. It’s about finding the good in others, no matter what the Hollows may have done to undermine that goodness. It’s about affirming those around us as often as possible, saying, I love you. I miss you. I care about you. I respect who you are. That’s something of what it means to lift.
But here’s the most important thing to say, the thing that I began to sense last Sunday night when I first encountered that question, “When things fall down, who lifts them up?” Maybe it’s us, in part, but maybe that “who” transcends us as well. Maybe there is a power at work in the world that lifts and upholds, that stabilizes and supports that which is in danger of collapse. “You set my feet upon a rock,” the Psalmist writes, after being lifted from the pit. “You make my footsteps firm.” And so maybe that “who” needs our help, but maybe it’s also true that without that power to have one’s feet set upon a rock, nobody would go into the craters of the earth in the first place to lift things up. Maybe without that power no one would build churches and volunteer in soup kitchens and provide sanctuary and dream up gorgeous stories like The Lifters. Maybe that power is calling to us because it’s already at work all around us in the world, waiting for us to find it, hoping we’ll notice. When the Hollows are unleashed, and they are being unleashed, the most important affirmation we can make is that even amidst all that would tear us asunder, there exists in the world that which does bind things together, that which does lift things up, that which does stabilize the ground. It goes by many names. It comes in many guises. There is that within the world that Lifts.
