|
Home
Peace & Justice Activism
weekly
updates
Worship
Schedule
Sermons
weekly
updates
stART
Contact
History
Directions
Info
Judson House
Links
|
|
A Sermon for Judson Church
January 28, 2007
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
When the Old Home Disappears
Ancient Testimony: Genesis 37:18 - 36
I am a slow eater, especially in restaurants where I am usually as interested in the conversation as I am in the food. That means that waiters often ask me what I find to be an obnoxious question: 'Are you done or are you still working?" This question interrupts both the flow of the conversation and the eating, and I don't like it. Which is why I usually answer meanly, "I am not done and I am still eating, not working." The waiter usually wonders what his grumpy mother is doing in the restaurant, but that is another story.
Using the words "done" and "working" in the same sentence gets me going. You and I are not done. We are also not working, especially during the leisure of eating our meals. How does this linguistic silliness connect to Joseph's homelessness? It goes to the place I want to call the PIT today. The pit is homelessness, writ large. It is the place of interruption of flow. It is the place where we have been put, rather than the place where we have put ourselves.
Homelessness is lots of things, including just not having a home. There are people across the street right now who would not appreciate all the linguistic finery I'm going to attach to homelessness today. They would tell you that homelessness is living out of a shopping cart on a park bench, even when it is cold, snowing, or raining. I will agree: homelessness is surely that, especially in its undressed form.
Homelessness is also living in the place where people other than yourself put you. In the case of Joseph, it is his brothers who pit him. He thought he was dead, but he was just sold. That is another version of homelessness: to be sold, to have many others in charge of your fate. In the case of Joseph, there are many others in charge of his fate. He has gone from the hatred of his brothers to the slavery of Pharaoh. We have been with Joseph now for four weeks. We have spoken of him as the man who had to leave home to find home, as the man whose many-colored coat went to his head, as the one who was the favorite of his mother and then his father, Jacob. Joseph goes from a great home to a pit to an enslaved home and back to a great home. He is an emigrant and an immigrant at the same time. What marks him as a man who has lost his home? It is the way other people become in charge of his life. Even his intimates take charge of him and throw him into a pit. He escapes from that pit, only to be sold into slavery, again by his own brothers. We can stick with the material unpleasantness of all of this or we can go into the metaphoric unpleasantness of it. Most of us know from pit. We know from others being in charge of us. We know from our own intimates hurting us. We know from thinking we are dead only to find out that we are just sold.
Pits take many forms. There are celebrity pits and there are ordinary pits. I think of some notorious pits like that of Senator George Allen of Virginia apologizing for referring to an Indian American as Macaca; or Mel Gibson's apology for a drunken anti-Semitic rant; or Pope Benedict XVI apologizing for including in a speech the words of emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who wrote, "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Like corporations that agree to settle a claim without admitting any wrongdoing, people often find themselves in the pit of having to explain and apologize. Often these apologies take the pitted, then pitted some more, form: "I am sorry, but…" - which is typified in Mel Gibson's words, "I am sorry but there is a distinction between an articulated and thought out statement and one that is blurted out in a moment of insanity." Aha. Either way, you are pitted. When we have to apologize or defend ourselves, we are in the pit. We are not at home. We have allowed something to take us over - even if all it is is a moment of temporary insanity. Mel Gibson, by the way, is not the only one to have these. We all have them. Words escape our mouths and we wish we could put them back. When we know we can't put them back, or go home again, we are pitted.
More ordinary pits might include memory loss or the utter tedium of having to act like everything is ok all the time. I am still reading Christmas letters. One that came from an elderly friend yesterday really got my attention. She spoke in vulnerable and open terms of "a little memory loss" and then went on to say that she would be giving a workshop at Chautauqua last summer. This came from a woman who used to edit the bejeesus out of my work. The workshop she hoped to give last summer is a form of pit for her. She is no longer at home in her own mind. She, by the way, is not the only person to suffer from memory loss. Many of us will go there from our current home in our right mind. Another ordinary pit was well described by CBS on the night before the President's State of the Union. Mimicking late night make-fun-of-news news shows, this show did fast clips of the last 18 State of the Union speeches. Presidents were shown, all saying just about the same thing: The State of the Union is Sound. The State of the Union is Strong. The point and music of the piece turned into sound and strong, sound and strong, so much so that you wanted to dance to it. How are you? I'm just fine, sound and strong. There is a tedium to having to act at home when you are not. There is a tedium to the constant selling of the self in good news terms. Are you done yet? No, of course not, I am still working on it. I'll be better in just a minute, you can count on it.
Celebrity pits are apologies. Wild animals jump in and chew a piece off us. They tear our coat. They sell us into slavery. Ordinary pits are the failure of the body or the mind to be real. They too bite off a piece of us and chew on it.
I happened to be in a casino on Friday. It is a long story, but suffice it to say there was no other open restaurant nearby and it was pouring rain. I sat down next to a group of six corrections officer on holiday. They were laughing their heads off in their pit. Their pit was their work, which they described with horrifying detail, between beers and laughter. "She is still turning tricks with that guard for candy bars, now why would she do that for candy bars, when I would gladly have brought her some?" "That girl is going to throw that baby in the trash the second she is done using it for privacy in this rat hole of a jail. I tell you, for sure, that is what she is going to do." "If they put me in that Spanish class one more time, after I done told them I can't do languages, I'll just quit, that's what I'll do, I'll just quit. I hate this job anyway. Pass me that salsa, baby, and don't give me no lip." "That bossman, 'Mr. Supervisor', thinks he knows something about women in jail but he knows nothing, I mean he knows twice nothing. What you figure they pay him for knowing nothing and telling us to do what he don't know?" These women were at home in their homelessness, again if you think a form of homelessness is somebody else being in charge of you. They were not in charge of their work, except as they built a simple joyous community of shared suffering with each other. They were the brothers Rueben tried to be. They were the brothers that would try to get you out of the pit.
It is important to say that homelessness, for the immigrant, or for Joseph, or for Mel Gibson, is not all bad. There are ways to decorate the cage with flowers. The flowers are communities that get built on the road, in exile, as Abraham Joshua Heschel would be glad to articulate about the American Jewish community. I must mention here our good friend, Joan Hemenway, who is very ill with a brain tumor. Very ill. But I have it on good report that she just recently spent the night with people who sang Methodist Hymns for her, and she is said to have recognized some of them. Even in the desperation of late-stage illness, sometimes a little music gets through. When we say, 'This is the pits," we are remembering that we can decorate the place with flowers. Even in the pit, sometimes, good things happen.
These pits of which I have spoken so far are personal places. They combine in excruciatingly interesting patterns with what I might call more public pits, the ones in which we have all been thrown. Surely one such public pit is the emphasis on outputs. I might call it "out pits," but that is another story. We live in a society that has an outcomes obsession. You probably have it at your work. I may or may not have it in my workplace, but I surely have it internalized. Produce, is the name of the commandment of this internalized, externalized pit. I was joking around with the words input and output this week, thinking that what I really needed was a little more input before I could do any more output. I needed some quiet, a little sleep, a lecture that I didn't write and a sermon I didn't preach. I got that at a conference I attended, next door to the casino. I realized that life is a balance between input and output, or what I will now call inpit and outpit. We get out of our pits by laughter and community in casinos, we get out of our pits by singing hymns together at deathbeds, and we get out of pits by input balancing output. "Are you finished?" "Or are you still working on that?" Slow down. Still play with it. There is freedom to take more input in a world that is only interested in output.
Another public pit that concerns us all is the great partisan divide that has overwhelmed the United States. There are people who really care -a lot - about mentioning the devastation of New Orleans in a State of the Union Speech and people who express surprise at such a bother, if omitted. There are people who care and people who don't care about racism. There are people who really think we can have a big dig in Boston without governmental supervision and people who really think that private charity can manage levees and the response to them should they break. There is an enormous battle afoot about whether we are all alone in each pit or whether we are in there together. In that context, I am fascinated by Arnold Schwarzenegger's saying that he is post partisan. I hear many leaders fishing around for this kind of language. Is it post pit to be post partisan or just another trick our brothers are playing on us to sell us into slavery? In other words, whom can we trust? What can we trust? Can we trust each other? Can we talk to people who don't agree with us? Is Barak Obama right when he says, in The Audacity of Hope, that we have to get over the sixties, stop worrying about authority figures, and forge compromises across party, racial, and gender lines? Is he right when he says that "Fusion" is the new name of the compromised game? Is "fusion" a positive vision of globalization or immigration? What if you just don't know? Is that a pit too?
What about Amory Lovins declaring that global warming is a great insurmountable opportunity, not disaster? What about his response to someone saying he thinks out of the box? He says there is no box! Maybe there is no pit either. Maybe we made up the pit. What about his saying he is only interested in solutions, not problems, and that, managed right, carbon freedom can be the new site of great profit for the many, not just the few? We who think we are dead, or might soon be, from global warming, are we just being sold into a new kind of slavery? Or is there hope, even from within the pit, that the nation might be truly sound and strong and not just tricked? Can inpits and outpits remarry? Or are they divorced?
When we are forced out of our old home and live in the pit of homelessness for a while, what happens to us? Are we able to crawl out of these pits and move on to new homes? Joseph did. He more than did. He also got sold into slavery as a form of liberation from the pit. He created a new people and a new community, right in the midst of slavery. Indeed, it was bloody. Indeed it was difficult, but he did it. Me, I just hope to give a workshop on this whole matter last summer, which is to say there is a whole lot I know that I would like to forget. I need to get a new past in order to get a new future. Many of us have pasts in pits of some size or another. Our nation surely does. How do we get over it and out of it?
One route is Amory Lovins thinking outside of the box by saying there is no box. I don't like it but some people do. Post partisan, post box, post pit. Go for it if you can. My God is more incarnate than that and turns the pit into promise. In my pit the women laugh and drink beer and go back to jail to work. They are not done yet, but they do keep on working on it.
In my world, we are all uprooted, out putted, and in pitted. That has been my favorite Epiphany: to know that we know that we are in one kind of pit or another. That realization is like the first day you wear glasses or complete Lasix surgery. What a bright world it is when we know that we know we are inpitted and outpitted on a regular basis. That we are in many ways homeless: people who have many other people in charge of out fate, until we stop letting them be in charge of our fate. Is God in the pit with us? Yes, and out of it as well. Both, and - not either or. God is input and output, inpit and outpit. Ask Joseph. He thought he was done. But he was still working on it.
Amen.
|
