"Shine, Perishing Republic"

Photo by Elisa Stone

From Robinson Jeffers, California’s own poet/prophet, comes a warning from 1925. Eerily prescient. Seems to me that every hundred years or so, humanity must descend again into ignorance (and the cruelty that always follows in its tracks) before we learn again to exorcise the demons that have found room to grow while we’ve naively slept.

 

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,

And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass

      hardens,


I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.

Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and

      home to the mother.


You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or

     suddenly

A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.


But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center;

     corruption

Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the

     mountains.


And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable

     master.

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught–they say–God, when he walked

     on earth.

“Earth, Fluid Like the Sea” a poetic selection from Rachel Carson

It’s springtime and in northern California that means the annual parade of crane flies. Some people call these large, gangly creatures mosquito hawks, or mosquito eaters. But a crane fly has nothing to do with mosquitos, and while they look a little fearsome, they’re utterly harmless and play an important role in our eco system. Every springtime, they find any opening and push their way inside the house, so determined that even when I grab one gently and take it outside and into freedom, they seem to turn right around and come back in. 

Inside the house, they quickly die and fall, crumpled, into corners and near baseboards. 

Luna, the other day, our three year old granddaughter, just old enough to start asking questions, found one, dead and crumpled, and picked it up. In her little hands it looked enormous—like an adult holding the fragile body of a broken bird. She brought it to Elisa whom she calls by Elisa’s Dutch ancestral title, “Oma.” She shows no fear of the dead creature and holds it up curiously as if to say, “What is this? And why doesn’t it move?”

Elisa realized this as a teachable moment. . . .

Continent’s End, a poem by Robinson Jeffers, interpreted by Chris Erdman

In the century old poem, Continent’s End, California’s poet, Robinson Jeffers, speaks to the Ocean, that vast expanse of the Pacific, a being he also calls, “Mother”:

“You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline. / It was long long ago; we have grown proud since then and you have grown bitter . . .”

We, the proud child, and our Mother, now bitter.

Does he mean disappointed, angry, or does he mean something else? People who’ve heard me read the poem don’t like this personification of the ocean as a bitter mother. But I sense what Jeffers is after. . . .

"Let no one judge the love between two people" by Maria Popova, interpreted by Chris Erdman

“No one ever knows, nor therefore has grounds to judge, what goes on between two people.” That’s the way Maria Popova begins a particularly poetic section of her writing, a section that speaks a profound and enlightened wisdom against the bigoted intolerance of the Far Right’s regressive social politics. Love is a power that can move heaven and earth, but religious and social fundamentalism fears that power and locks people’s bodies and souls  inside narrow expressions of love, stifling the heart-song love longs to sing through us, leaving us dull to its universal music, leaving us longing for the melody we somehow sense  exists, the harmony that can make us whole. And this is the great tragedy: love wants to set us free but we’d rather crucify it—and those who celebrate it and those who seek it—rather than allow love to disturb and transform our lives and liberate our bodies and souls.

This is the great irony, of Christianity, for example: for all its talk of love, it keeps crucifying those who, like Jesus, want to love without the artificial limits religion places on the many kinds of love we feel. . . .

"Here's to You, the Crazy Ones" | a vision for the future of religion and religious communities

This is my final sermon as a pastor: my “Swan Song,” and the final in a three week series closing out my ministry. In the first of the three sermons I I explored the bigness of God and why we must not shrink from what I call the “heretical imperative”—that is, the freedom to break the dead chains of orthodoxy when they hold us captive to lesser views and experiences of God. In the second sermon, I meditated on the truth of our common and sacred humanity, its relation to the tradition of the Incarnation, and how, in the immortal words of Victor Hugo (Les Miserables), “to love another person is to see the face of God.”

In this final and capstone sermon is based on the Gospel of John 11.32-44 and imagines what religion and religious communities need to become in the future if they are to be relevant. If they fail to live into a vision like this, not only will religion become increasingly irrelevant and harmful to humanity, but the human race will be bereft of the perennial wisdom humanity needs to be a benevolent presence on the Earth rather than an malevolent one. The video of the sermon can be found here.

1.

Today’s sermon is my last sermon. It may not be my last sermon ever, but it’s my last sermon as a pastor and my last sermon as your pastor.

Someone asked me this last week if I thought I’d ever pastor another congregation. I said, “Where would I go? This congregation is a crown jewel. This time with you has been the pinnacle of a career that’s spanned over thirty years. There is no other congregation I would want to serve—no other congregation I think I could serve after having been your pastor. So, no. I’d like this to be my last church. I want to remember this experience with all the fondness and wonder and sense of accomplishment that I now feel. I am immensely grateful to have been your pastor.”

Today, then, is probably my last sermon as a pastor. . . .