Sermon – Wondrous Love

Any death is a startling reminder of the preciousness of life. The death of someone like Myra Addington, who gave her whole heart and received so much love from this congregation, is also a startling reminder of the preciousness of community. Community is something that, like life itself, we tend to take for granted if we have it. But the absence of it is nothing short of terrifying. It’s an existential terror to be isolated – soul crushing and bleak. For a human being, there is nothing worse.

 

And everyone knows it. Our prison system knows it when it inflicts solitary confinement as the ultimate punishment. Ancient people knew it when they wrote the Judeo-Christian creation story in which God makes an earthling out of earth and then considers it for a moment and makes another one, saying, “It is not good for the earthling to be alone.”

 

We know it’s not good, and yet so many of us are alone and we’re lonely. 40% of American adults describe ourselves as lonely. And this loneliness does violence to our bodies and our spirits. People who feel socially isolated actually get sick more, get more depressed, sleep less well, and die younger. We get lost in ourselves when we’re isolated. Isolation is the great ailment of our day.

 

Today is the kickoff to our stewardship campaign and the minister’s role in this particular game is to preach a barnburner sermon that makes people “feel generous.” Now I have no problem talking about money. I don’t think it’s crass or evil. I am proud of what we are doing here at First U and I think it’s a privilege to be financial stewards of it. I have no problem talking about the fact that we are growing by leaps and bounds, there is electricity in the air here this year, and we need money, actual money, to keep the actual electricity on in the building and get all the engines humming at a higher rpm. I have no problem with any of that.

 

But that is so not what I want to talk about today. And it’s so not what I feel I should talk about as your pastoral minister. I want to talk about Myra and this community and the magic that I saw happen here over these last few weeks. Some of you who are newer here may not have known Myra but those of us who did, knew her as a person of great depth, dignity, and kindness. We’ll have a chance to talk more and celebrate her life at her memorial service and I encourage you all to come.

 

But what struck me most throughout her illness was how this community rallies around its members – in this case Myra and her husband Dale – in their time of greatest need. The outpouring of support has been stunning to watch. You brought homemade meals, you wove a prayer shawl as a gift, you took Dale out for evenings with the guys. You sat with Myra and listened and let her talk without having to sugarcoat the truth. At the prayer circle we held a few days ago, forty of you gathered to share prayers and blessings. You sang songs and lit candles. You wrote messages of love on brightly colored pieces of paper and Garnett strung them together as prayer flags. When Myra saw them, her eyes grew wide and her mouth fell open in amazement. We hung them in her hospice room and even though she couldn’t speak at that point, it was clear that the love had reached her. 

 

It feels like a strange time to say this, but Myra Addington was lucky. Most people don’t have anywhere what Myra had here. It’s almost cliché to talk about how communities have gotten eroded in this country over the last 50-100 years. Independence is prized above all else and the American dream is to live in a single-family home and drive your car alone to work alone where you have your very own corner office. Over half of all New Yorkers live alone. The structures that used to tether us together by necessity have dissolved.

 

As we’ve gotten wealthier as a nation, we’ve changed. People no longer stay working at one company for 40 years, because both the employers and the employees “trade up” when they can. People no longer stay rooted in the same town for their lives – we pick up and leave our families and childhood friends as a matter of course. If we’re lucky, we end up with friends scattered across the country and try to stay in touch by social media. Our relative wealth has created the illusion that what communities used to provide, we can now buy – the illusion that what we used to do for each other, we can now do for ourselves.

 

With Myra’s illness and death, we’ve just come through a shining, messy example of a different model – a spiritual model – a model of real community in which we know that no one can do it all for ourselves. We need each other. Shining in that it brought out the best intentions to be there for others; messy in that we were falling all over each other to make the right gesture, give the right amount of space, find the right words at the right time. It’s hard. It’s always hard and, from what I’ve seen, this community does not shy away from the hard, messy, spiritual work of it.

 

After that second earthling was created in the Garden of Eden, it wasn’t all happily ever after from there. Rev. David Bumbaugh retells the story in this way:

The fall from grace, the great disruption of primordial order, the original sin, had nothing to do with eating apples or talking to snakes.  The instrument of our fall was a wooden back-scratcher, that piece of wood, bent at the end so one can reach the unreachable spot … where the most persistent itch always takes up residence.

 

Before the back-scratcher, before that simple, infernal device, we, like all our primate kin, depended on others to do for us what we could not do for ourselves: ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’

 

Before the back-scratcher, before that simple, infernal tool, we needed each other to scratch the unreachable itch. The wooden back-scratcher dissolved the bonds of reciprocity, unloosed the ties of community, and tempted us to believe in our own godlike self-sufficiency.

 

And God walked in the cool of the garden, and saw a primate standing alone.  ‘What have you done,’ God asked, ‘that you stand alone?’

 

I have found a back-scratcher,’ said the beast, ‘and now I need no one.’

‘Poor beast,’ said God, ‘now you must leave this garden; in Eden, no one stands alone; each depends on the others.’

 

And thus began our wandering, our pacing up and down the earth, scratching our own itches, pretending self-sufficiency, trying to ignore the persistent sense of loss, the vague yearning for a primordial order, a world where you scratched my back and I scratched yours.  A wooden back-scratcher is poor compensation for the gentle touch of a living hand.

 

David Bumbaugh is right. I think it’s fair to say that American culture has become a wooden backscratcher culture. All too often when we want to do something nice for someone, instead of offering them the “gentle touch of a living hand,” we offer them a higher-performance back-scratcher.

 

Of course the problem – the problem that everyone knows about but that few talk about – is that back-scratchers don’t work. The deepest itch is unreachable by even the longest back-scratcher. It’s the itch for connection. It’s the desire to be loved. It’s the need to feel like we’re not alone in this world; that when we’re sick, someone’s going to be there for us; that we mean something to others; that we are part of something larger instead of spinning by ourselves in outer space. The back-scratcher doesn’t work. Having money doesn’t work. Having stuff doesn’t work. Having influence or even fame doesn’t work.

 

But we here in this room, we know what does work. We know that real live flesh-and-blood people talking together, making music together, worshipping together works. We know that a religious community, connected by our love and by our common passion for making the world a better place works. We know that supporting each other in our spiritual journeys works. We know that listening works and that hugs work.

 

And we know that we need it. We know that life is hard and we all struggle. There are other members of this congregation with cancer. There are members of this congregation with Alzheimer’s and with AIDs. There are members of this congregation with mental illness and members with physical disabilities. There are members of this congregation who have lost a spouse and members who have lost a child. There are members of this congregation who are unemployed and don’t know how they’re going to pay their rent. There are members going through a divorce, members whose children are sick.

 

This is the real, raw stuff of life and for many of the people in this room, there is nowhere else in the world where you can really talk about it, really get into it, and give and receive the hands-on loving kindness that we all crave. This place is a vital, irreplaceable resource for the people here and for the people who are not here yet but who will be.

 

Our community is growing, more now than it has for many, many years. There are people here with us this morning in this sanctuary for the very first time. How many of them will feel welcomed enough to come back, to become members, to grow with us? How many will eventually move into the warm heart of this community, to give to it, and in their times of their life’s greatest travail, also receive what Myra received from her long affiliation with us? It’s up to us.

 

Yes, we need to keep the lights on; we need to pay staff and grow our programs to meet the needs of our growing congregation. We need to establish more ministries that take our love out into the world and heal what is broken in our society. And that’s reason enough for us to be generous during our stewardship campaign. But this morning, as we face our losses and continue our work to comfort the bereaved, what we should be most mindful of is that we offer each other a gift beyond measure; a community of love and support to inoculate us against the disease of loneliness.

 

It is not good for the earthling to be alone. We earthlings were made in the plural. We were made to depend on each other and to take our greatest joy from scratching each other’s backs. We get this here in this congregation. We get it deep in our bones. And that is so rare. We are a little pocket of living protest against a world of isolation. Let’s keep building this Garden of Eden together with wondrous love in the midst of this big and lonely city.