“The Grace of Small Things”
Rev. Dr. Steven Jungkeit
Texts: Luke 14: 25-30
It’s good to look out and to see so many of you back after the summer – our parents and families, our choir, all of you really. It’s nice to have the band back together after some time apart.
Over the last several years, mostly during the summer, but during the year as I’ve been able, I’ve been conducting a sort of raid upon the past, in search of wisdom for the present. In particular, I’ve been drawn to writers like James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann and Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, all of whom were at the height of their powers in the 1920’s and 30’s. It is, admittedly, a company that skews heavily towards the canonical, towards male and white and European writers, but it’s a more diverse list than it might appear. Proust was a gay man when such things were criminalized, and Woolf wrote feminist and proto-queer stories that continue to resonate with our own evolving experiences of gender. Kafka was Jewish, of course, and Thomas Mann came from mixed-race parents – his mother was Brazilian, with Indigenous and possibly African roots. Joyce was Irish, which experienced colonization long before the rest of the globe was carved up. Poor Eliot is the only outlier – a banker, a monarchist, and an anti-Semite who nevertheless produced some of the most searching poetry of his century.
What interests me about this period, and about these writers specifically, is the backdrop against which they were all working. Europe had just emerged from a horrific and shattering war, which was quickly followed by a global pandemic and then afterwards a fragile, very tenuous, and very ominous, peace. The dark clouds of fascism were taking shape. Each in their own way, in prose and poetry that is complex and thrilling, each of these writers is asking, “What does it mean to be alive, now, in this anxious threshold moment? How are we to speak and to think about what we have come through, and where we are going? How do we retain our humanity in the claustrophobia and confusion of the world, with its technological changes, and its rapid and unprecedented urbanization, its speed, and its savage violence?” I read these writers for solace, but I also read them for wisdom. Their world increasingly seems to be our world. Their dilemmas are, increasingly, our own.
What is remarkable about each of these world class thinkers is that in this moment of tectonic political shifts and upheavals, none of them wrote sweeping manifestos. None of them wrote proposed grand political theories. None of them wrote treatises about What’s Going On. They did something counterintuitive, and brilliant. In each and every case, they went granular. They described in microscopic detail the events of singular lives, often on a single day. In Ulysses, for example, we find Leopold Bloom, flawed and immensely likeable, making his way across Dublin hour by hour, trying to keep his composure while his home life seems to be unraveling. In Mrs. Dalloway (100 years old this year, and the best book you’ll read this or probably any year), we find Clarissa Dalloway moving through London on a single day after a long illness, while Septimus Smith, her spiritual twin, tries to fend off the ghosts of wartime trauma. They’re just trying to keep it all together as they take their walks, and make their visits. In this granular world, the powers of life and death are contained within each exchange, within a single glance.
Nobody does anything especially big in this literature of the everyday. There are no fist-shaking gestures of defiance, no fantasies of simple or uncomplicated solutions to the pressures of the present. And yet this literature, this art, represents no retreat into the private. It is, as I read it, an effort to salvage the ordinary goodness and dizzying complexity of human existence from the detritus and wreckage of the world. It is a representation of ordinary people, just trying to hold it all together for themselves, but also for one another, sometimes succeeding, and sometimes not. Not unlike you. Not unlike me.
I’ve had a few weeks this summer to sit and to ponder. And I’ve come to think that there’s a strange and powerful wisdom at work in these books, one that we in faith communities, especially those with a more public and activist variety might learn from. Sometimes, if we are to contend well and truly – faithfully – in a world that feels precarious, we must go granular, dwelling on the microscopic details of the everyday.
Don’t mishear me. Don’t get me wrong. We need big gestures sometimes, and we surely need public voices of conscience right now. As people of faith, we need to lean into this moment, rather than hiding from it, trusting that God will hold as we do so. But I’ve wondered lately if sometimes, just sometimes, we spend so much time telling stories about singular individuals who stand against the system, those who, through their courage or vision “changed the world,” as the cliche goes, that we actually wind up devaluing ourselves, and the texture of our own days and feelings and questions and worries. It’s crossed my mind that it might actually be discouraging sometimes to all of you, out there, and maybe dishonest for those of us who occupy a pulpit, to trot out one more story of how MLK stood heroically against the powers in Montgomery and Birmingham, or how Bonhoeffer gave his life to resist the Nazis, or how Mandela spent all those years in prison for what he believed. And again, don’t mishear me – I worry about churches that don’t tell those sorts of stories, and we’ll need to keep on telling them here, because they’re vital and important.
But I suspect something subtle and maybe a little insidious can creep in whenever we as preachers or people of faith more broadly reach into that storehouse of heroes. Because we begin to think, that’s what faithfulness must look like, that that’s what the practice of the Gospel, or allegiance to some great and noble ideal, necessarily requires of us. We begin to imagine that it requires something like martyrdom, or a life sentence in prison, or impoverishment or exile or humiliation. We imagine it requires our very lives, and nothing less.
Meanwhile, that’s not what most of our lives look like. It’s not what the life of most people of faith and conscience looks like. We buy our groceries. We pick up and drop off the kids. We follow the news, and do what needs to be done to get through the day. Are we to feel bad about that, because our lives seem so far removed from all those idealized and genuinely heroic reformers from years ago? Should we pile guilt upon ourselves, because we are not quite the heroes we have been told we ought to be?
The source of the tension seems to come from Jesus himself, in Luke’s Gospel specifically. We heard it earlier. Take up your cross and follow me, he says. Count the cost of being a disciple, because, in other words, it may require the entirety of who you are. You may have to renounce your family, he says, even your very life. You can almost hear the revival preachers that have gotten ahold of that passage over the years whispering from the wings – Jesus requires your all – your money, your possessions, your time, your talent, your life. Can you do it? Will you? Aside from the fact that it makes Jesus sound like a greedy, domineering, possessive and probably abusive husband, it also can and often does set up an impossible expectation for what the life of faith might actually look like.
I’m reminded of a story told by Fred Craddock, the late teacher of preaching down at Emory. He recalled hearing a sermon one summer as a child at summer camp, entitled, Are You Able? Are you able to go the distance? the preacher asked. Are you able to surrender all? Are you able to give your life for the sake of the Gospel? And poor young Fred thought to himself, yes, I am able! He said he had dreams of himself in years to come, persecuted for what he knew to be true, holding fast to his values in a faithless world. He had dreams of one day being lined up against a gray wall, and, after being given a final chance to recant his faith, hearing the words, “Ready, aim, fire!” And then Fred imagined how his friends and family would weep, though they would be proud that he had stood firm for the sake of the Gospel. And he imagined how a monument would be built there where he died, and that in the future people would gather there and take pictures and remind themselves of what it is to live with courage and dignity. “Yes, I am able!” Craddock thought. But then he continues:
“I was sincere then as I have been sincere these 45 years since. I am able to give my life, but nobody told me that I wouldn’t give my life for Christ by writing one big check. Instead it has been decades of writing little checks. Eighty-five cents here, a dollar thirty-nine there. Giving my life for (the Gospel) has meant being faithful in the small things over and over throughout my life. Nobody warned me that I could not write one big check. I’ve had to write 45 years of little checks.”
Might that be closer to what Jesus means in that famous passage? Perhaps, when Jesus tells people to count the cost, he’s referring to the accumulation of hours and days and years that add up to a faithful life, carrying boxes for the Food Pantry, say, or buying food to serve to the unhoused. Perhaps, in building the foundation that Jesus talks about, we’re actually just invited to attend to the minute details of human existence, those gestures of grace and compassion and humanity that are so tempting to toss away amidst all our other worries and cares about the state of the world. Perhaps it’s just the way Virginia Woolf or James Joyce imagined it during those pressure filled years of the 20’s and 30’s. Mrs. Dalloway storms no barricades. Leopold Bloom doesn’t end the British occupation of Ireland. Even so, they show up in the ways given to them to show up. Just by carrying the burdens each of them was given to carry, and doing so with as much grace and wit as they could manage. Just the way we show up, bearing our burdens, doing what must be done. Depending upon a grace much larger than ourselves to hold us.
What I wish to say to each of you today, as we begin this new year together, is that the minute particulars of your day to day existence matter more than you may think. What I wish to say to each of you is that the struggle against inhumanity right now may, in very crucial ways, be fought and won on the terrain of daily existence, as we move through our days. What I wish to say is that even if we cannot see how the story ends, and even if, probably, no one among us will be the hero or the martyr or the resistance leader for whom monuments will later be built, our ordinary and humble offerings of ourselves continue to matter – the small donation here, the presence at the protest there, the gracious word offered over here, the occasionally firm “no” expressed there – this is what mercy looks like. We don’t have to be heroes. But we do have to show up.
As for our work as a community, I confess to some doubts that our efforts alone at the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme will end the slaughter in Gaza – but we must raise our voices. And I have my doubts that our efforts alone are going to result in reform of immigration laws, or that our national leaders will become less cruel or barbaric because of our witness – but we must bear witness. I have my doubts that after hundreds of years, we’re going to be the ones to finally dismantle racism or that we’ll be the ones to singlehandedly turn the tide of homophobia or transphobia – but we’ve got to use the sphere of influence we’ve been given to create zones of humanity and creativity and hope right here. And yes, I have doubts that grateful people will one day stand before the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme in tears, because we alone stood against the rising tide of authoritarian control. Let us put an end to such fantasies, for such things have never been ours to achieve, and that has never been what our faith has asked of us. But the way of Jesus the Christ does call to us. And we shall and we must remain committed to the costly work of following along that way. But the cost will come in figuring out how to be faithful today, and then tomorrow, and then throughout the year and into the next, showing up in whatever way we are called to show up.
I’ll close with a story, one I’ve shared before, but that bears constant repeating. During the Second World War, Gayraud Wilmore, who would later become a Presbyterian minister and a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, was stationed in a small village in Italy. One morning, after scattered bombs and artillery fire had rained down on the village the previous night, he watched as the residents cleared the debris, and then went to work rebuilding the shattered terraces of their hillside town. He later saw the same rebuilt terraces destroyed by a new round of air strikes, and watched as the residents got to work all over again, setting things right. Over and over again he watched it happen. Wilmore thought it the perfect metaphor for the work of building a racially just society, the work of building a thriving democracy, the work of building lives of faithful witness. From generation to generation, we simply get up, get to work, and rebuild what terraces need to be rebuilt.
So it is for us. Sunday by Sunday. Day by day, we set out to do our best with what has been given us to do. Rebuilding the terraces. Walking across Dublin, or London or, as the case may be, across Old Lyme or Old Saybrook on a September day, carrying what we must, loving as best we’re able. Because so far as I can tell, the ongoing good of the world depends upon a thousand and one ordinary people, just showing up to do what the day may require, to be present in the small ways asked of us. People like you and like me. Small checks, written across a lifetime.