Who? This Guy?

Matthew 13.51-58

“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

When Jesus had finished these parables, he left that place. He came to his hometown and began to teach the people in their synagogue, so that they were astounded and said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these deeds of power? Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all this?” And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not without honor except in their own country and in their own house.” And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief.

            Bob Dylan said, I was so much older then, I am younger than that now. 

            Have you ever gone back in your life, and heard the voices of your certainty, the purity of your convictions, the clarity and determination of being right?

            Have ever wondered where joy goes when it flees?  Is there a place love seeks as it moves away like water?  Why do I feel more like a child now than when I was a child? 

            One of the part-time gigs I picked up in Princeton many moons ago was driving a man to his daycare center.  Eugene was in his late-eighties, and he sang Hungarian folks songs as we navigated the twists and turns Jersey calls roads.  Before we would leave for daycare each day, Eugene would need some extra time to finish his raisin toast and orange juice which he partook at a small table in a booklined study.  When he was done his wife of a similar age and stature and shuffling gait would come and wipe the crumbs from his face and adjust his cardigan.  I would buckle him in and undo the buckle at the daycare.

            Dr. Eugene Wigner won the Noble Prize.  He was a physicist; quite a good one.  He provided the solution to one of Einstein’s theorems.  As I steered the car and he sang childhood songs, I couldn’t help but wonder, where is the man who undid a part of the universe to explain it; where is the mind that understood the structure of the cosmos?  Was he in there? Or was I looking at him, Eugene, the small boy who loved to sing?

            I was at lunch with my new friend Alex.  We were just getting to know one another.  He was a good 20 years older than I was, but we shared a similar place in life.  We were both younger than we once were.

            The moment we saw this came in a strange confession.  We both lost people we loved and who were defining in our lives; they were both the same age when they died, 39.  There was a long pause when we realized that much of our lives, from our adolescence to our step into middle age, so much of our lives both were lived believing life ended at 39.  We assumed we would die then.  And we were both quite shocked we kept living. 

            We were both defined by the questions we didn’t ask, shaped by the ideas we didn’t have.  Neither one of us considered the end of a career, retiring, because you generally don’t retire at 39.  Grandchildren, even though we had children, grandchildren were like a science fiction movie, a future we could not conceive, certainly not live, beyond our world.

            In so many ways we were opposites and lacking all likely connections.  But over our lunch of exceedingly spicy Indian food, as our sweat commingled with tears it was as if I found a brother, a part of me, a compliment to my awkwardness.

            We became cohorts in crime, breaking the rules of polite conversation and dictates of decorum.  He taught me to look for hawks and I am not sure if I taught him this, but what I tried to say again and again, was this: your faith, while quite irreligious, is a gift of God, a bit of heaven on earth.

            I am just glad I met him when I was younger than I once was.  The older me was quite stupid.

            When George Herbert was a young man, he was an up and comer.  A rising star in the world of London in the first half of the seventeenth century.  And then, something happened.  No one knows really.  It certainly was bad, or at the very least unfortunate, for he was sent to serve a solitary parish in the lake district of England. 

            In his exile from the power and prestige of London town, in the quiet of an empty church, there was no intrigue to unravel, no gossip to convey, so he wrote poems.  The verse was filled with irony, a supple mind of someone who is fine with contradiction.  He wrote of the altar and the bunch of grapes, love, and church music and the windows and the prayers. 

            He wrote about a pulley:  

             When Herbert was 39, he was dying, and the legend is that he put his poems into a satchel and sent them to London.  He wrote to a friend a short note about the contents, his verse.  He said, if you find something of worth in these, publish them, offer them.  If not cast them aside. 

            The satchel contained perhaps, in the opinion of some, of which I count myself one, the most beautiful and poetic yearning ever brought to life.  He died before he knew what came of them; he was 39.           

            I am feeling a bit older right now.  And I am sad about this.  I had hoped to persist in my falling upward toward adolescent delight. But gravity is wily ever prone to resume its weight, the water of time and dust. I find strength in hope, that faith is not certainty, but a trust in ambiguity, a readiness to wait in the fog instead of rushing forward.  My sincere hope is that I see again the flight of time running backward with the bride.

             In the narrow streets and clifftop houses of Nazareth, Jesus returned as a man.  His fame proceeded him, but his past was too much to let him become a moment where his former neighbors could believe the Kingdom of God has come near.  Perhaps he too was so much older then and was younger than that now.  Perhaps his childhood was not the unfettered freedom of walking from town to town, healing and preaching and proclaiming release for the captive, food for the hungry, sight for the blind, a friend to the stranger.  Perhaps as a boy he was too serious, too ready to demand, determine, define. 

            And then he wasn’t.  He became free to live as one without a fox’s den or a bird’s nest, somewhere he found the voice saying, don’t look back, look ahead, behold, you are the lamb of God. 

            The people who knew the child, could not see the man he became.  They could not see him born anew.  Remembering the one who had no intent but purity, no place but the temple, they could not see the one who dined with sinners and prostitutes, the one even John the Baptist would question.  It is hard to find the child of God in the ones we believe, we know, are not.

            Jesus did no deeds of power in Nazareth.  He could not bring hope.  He was yet too old to be young there.  He was old and could not be new to them.

             There are moments and people we can help; and there are moments and people we cannot.  This is not a particularly pleasant thought.  As heirs of the Apostle Paul all things are possible and thus anyone can be made better by our good intents.  How could there be people beyond the reach of our grace?

            When I met my surly secretary for the first time I tried to find something to help her understand how serious I was.  “You need to understand,” I began, “for a good portion of my life I believed that Gilligan’s Island was a real place.  The skipper, the professor, Marianne, they were indeed shipwrecked on a desert isle and the 24 minutes of each episode was some sort of early reality tv.  It pains me to say this, but I do not believe this to be the case any longer.”  She didn’t smile. Didn’t laugh.

            Through the years I would try and try and try again to help my surly secretary find a place of joy, to build a dam to keep the water of love from ebbing away.  I helped her, insured her, gave her time and latitude in moments of crisis.  Nothing.  She persisted in a complete lack of happiness about me. 

            I took comfort that I was not the only one she despised.  Her disdain for me was part of a tendency to look down upon tall men.  And then, one day, I thought, nothing to lose so I tried sarcasm.  Leaving for lunch I said, I am heading out, but you don’t care, not even concerned I am leaving and would perhaps be happier if I didn’t return.  Somehow, for some reason, this worked.  She started laughing each day more and more until it was a part of the job.

            Although I do not believe I will ever be her first choice for a long car trip, I believe she was sad to see me go after fifteen years. Maybe just maybe I was no longer the enemy.  Sometimes it takes a long time to be something good for a moment.

            Wouldn’t it be a better world if Gilligan and the Howell’s were really left to live together on a small island?  The skipper and Ginger are enough to ponder, don’t you think, to remember and find something new in life.  The ensemble was a spectrum of people brought together by fate or fortune; it is never quite clear which one or both.

             I was seventeen on a bus heading down a mountain the first time I read the words of the preacher.  Irony, irony, all is irony.  There is nothing new under the sun.  These words were a life line, a kind of rope thrown over the cliff to the ledge where I clung.  Lost in grief, I needed to hear despair, a lament without anger, a weariness affording no foolishness.

            The words moved like water in my heart going deep to the wounds.  The verse was a bidding, follow me.  You are too young to be so old, come and be born anew.  I remember that bus, the quality of light the seat and the bible I read when all my peers thought, “what a nut.”  And they were right.  Very right.  Anyone who would begin to doubt the truth of Gilligan’s Island, definitely a bit off.

            I was terribly older then, I am so much younger now, even now.

            I have gone back in my life, heard the voices of certainty, the purity of convictions, the clarity and determination of being right.  I have heard them and I am ready to offer mercy.  Who?  That guy?  Yeah.  I am ready.

            I wondered where joy goes when it flees.  It took a while but I spotted its perch. I believe joy does go away.  But it does not go beyond our reach, just too often beyond our sight. 

            There is a place love seeks as it moves away like water.  Love goes away with gravity but returns with grace.  Being born anew is learning to let the tide ebb and flow, come home and head out to sea.    

            I feel more like a child now than when I was a child.  I am still to the good side of adolescence and I pray I stay that way.  I pray I stay this side of being a child born of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.