What Do We Do With All This Beauty?
Rev. Lilli Nye
December 3, 2006
One of my favorite lines in the congregational welcome that we say to acknowledge new members is this one: “Welcome into the community of all that we have been, and are, and hope to be.” I love this line because contained in these words is the idea that we are part of an arch of continuous community that spans three centuries and more—generations of people who have gathered together in faith and hope, in loving fellowship and religious quest.
Way back in the very early 1700s, we first gathered as members of the Second Parish of Roxbury. Then, when the town of West Roxbury incorporated in 1851, we became the First Parish of West Roxbury. For 100 years we have been gathering as a community in this very space, and since 1962 we have called ourselves the Theodore Parker Church.
But through various names and buildings, through individual births and deaths and comings and goings, we have nevertheless remained a congregation unbroken in continuity, each generation inheriting the covenant, living into it, and passing it on bearing their legacy. This continuous arch holds all that we have been and all that we are. And as this generation, those gathered today, continue to live ever more fully into the covenant and eventually pass it on, the arch reaches toward all that we hope to be.
But this arch of generations has another dimension, and that is the hundreds of years of history that it has arched through. Each generation has had to face and wrangle with a new set of conditions in a changing landscape, a changing society, a changing America, a changing world.
To think how the members of this congregation were right in the middle of roiling unrest that became the American Revolution. For a later generation it was the terrible crucible of the Civil War, then the two world wars, and then Vietnam.
Like us, our predecessors stressed over local and national politics, the elections of governors and presidents and the legislation of laws that affected their lives. They wrestled with social upheavals and reforms and civil rights, and they had to adapt in the midst of continuous economic, demographic, and environmental change.
Undoubtedly they faced times of terrible choice. Each generation was called to things that they felt inadequate to respond to. Yet each generation drew strength and joy from the community itself, and continued to celebrate births and marriages, growing children, new endeavors, the beauty of the natural world. Had they not done so, this congregation would not have survived.
Rebecca Parker’s essay, “Rising to the Challenge of Our Times,” asks us to consider the very difficult conditions we face in our age and admits that, like our predecessors, we will sometimes wish we could get out of the assignment: “Why this, why us, why now?”
She invokes the story of the call of Moses, which, regardless of whether it comes from scripture, is really one of the all-time great human stories. It tells of a person of no special capacity, who responds to the demands of his time and his situation, first with great resistance and trepidation, and then with increasing courage.
Moses is born a slave child. He is born to a Hebrew woman at a time when their people are in bondage under the Egyptians. But by an unusual set of circumstances, he is adopted as an infant by the Pharaoh’s daughter and is raised in the Egyptian royal court.
As he comes into adulthood, however, he feels a strong bond of love and kinship with his own people, and he becomes increasingly angry about their oppression. One evening he comes upon an Egyptian brutally beating a Hebrew slave, and he becomes so enraged that he murders the Egyptian and then tries to hide his reckless deed by burying the dead man in the sand. But the word gets out very quickly about what he’s done, and he has to flee and disappear into the wilderness, a criminal on the lam.
Stripping away his Egyptian garb, he eventually finds his way into the household of a wealthy nomad, marries Zipporah, one of the daughters of the family, and for many years he leads a very quiet life as a shepherd, blending in, keeping his head down, contented to be a humble nobody.
But one day as he’s tending the flock out in the desert, he sees something very mysterious and wonderful—a bush burning with a strange fire: It burns, yet the bush isn’t consumed by the flames. And he creeps toward it, full of curiosity and fear, and as he steps nearer, he hears his name being called out from that mysterious fire.
Now he’s really scared and really curious! And as he comes closer, the voice says, “Stay back, and take your shoes off—you are standing on holy ground!” Instead of turning and running in terror, he recognizes with wonderment that he is, indeed, on holy ground, and takes off his shoes.
And the voice, which he learns is the voice of the God of his kinsfolk, says, “I have seen the terrible suffering of my people, and I want you to go, and face Pharaoh, and lead the people out of their slavery.”
Moses is flabbergasted by this charge, and for a long time he argues back and forth with God: “Who, me? But, who am I to do this? I’m a nobody, a nobody who’s wanted for murder, by the way. Even if I’m not arrested, no one will listen to me…. I can’t face Pharaoh, I can’t even talk right, I stutter and get tongue-tied, I can barely speak to my wife’s father, much less to Pharaoh, much less to thousands of restless, suffering people. You know, my brother Aaron is very articulate, very persuasive! I think he’s your man. Send him to do this. Not me, please not me!”
But over and over the voice out of the holy fire repeats the call. “No, it’s you I’m talking to. I need you to go, and I will be with you.”
Eventually, both Moses and his brother go as a team to confront Pharaoh, Aaron being the spokesperson while Moses rises to the occasion and provides the leadership. He ends up doing something totally extraordinary. He ends up not only leading the people out, but also guiding them and forming them as a people, remaining their leader and their prophet for some 80 years until his death at age120.
Now this is all epic, mythic story, but that does not mean it’s not true in some very human way. That moment when Moses is called upon to do something that is too big, too frightening, something he doesn’t want to face, something he feels entirely unprepared and unfit to do—this is a very human experience, an experience we can all relate to.
Why did the voice from the fire call him? How did it persuade him, even command him, to go back to Egypt? Was it his conscience? Was it the truth that his heart was with his people, who he loved and whose suffering he had taken upon himself as a young man, even to the point of killing, in order to protect someone who was vulnerable?
Rebecca Parker says that it’s the beauty that truly calls us. When we have really seen, when we have truly taken it in and let it move us, when we have faced the fact that it is in terrible jeopardy, we have two choices:
We either close our eyes to all that beauty and all that endangers it, or we will have to go back into Egypt.
Like Moses, we face an overwhelming set of conditions in our time. We have inherited such beauty and such danger. We’ve probably all had the experience of trembling in our boots (or our sandals, or our bare feet), wishing it was someone else who was being called, but knowing there’s no getting out of the assignment.
I’ve shared with you that I grew up in a rural farming town and spent a whole lot of time romping around in nature as a kid. But we actually lived just 20 miles south of the then down-and-out city of Springfield, Mass., and we would go there sometimes for certain errands. I remember coming home from Springfield one winter evening when I was around 10 years old. My mother was driving the car and I was looking out the window as we drove out of the city in silence. The sun had just set. The sky was an eerie blood-red, and it was silhouetting an industrial skyline that struck me at the time as almost nightmarish, with clusters of huge refinery pipes releasing billows of exhaust into the air.
It was one of my earliest memories of a vague, universal foreboding, and a sadness about having been born into this time, this age, with these conditions, the feeling that there was no escaping it. I knew, wordlessly, this was going to be my world, and I was going to have to deal with it.
But it’s not the memory of that nightmare of the smog-producing refineries that compels me to shoulder up, as best I can, the demands of this age I have inherited. It’s not the images of the homeless people on the streets of Springfield. Because if I had known nothing other than suffering, destruction, and the decay of human community, I would have grown callous and hollow.
The seed that was planted in me to respond to the call of my age came from my love for the rolling fields and the woods and streams that I grew up in. It comes from having known tenderness and caring between people, the certainty of what human community can be at its best, whole and free and inclusive. It is that beauty which calls me, that stops me in my tracks, and commands that I do something: the beauty, which I need the way that I need food.
The motivation to clean up this mess because it’s ugly only gets us so far. I don’t think this is where our real energy comes from, and there’s no question that, if that’s all we’re going on—the rage and sadness—we’ll slide right down into exhaustion and bitterness and we’ll have to start closing our eyes to escape the pain.
No, the real motivation comes from what we love, not what we hate. The Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara said that “the true revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love.”
Paul Loeb, in the introduction of his book The Impossible Will Take A Little While, talks about seeing Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak at a Los Angeles benefit for a South African project. He’d been fighting prostate cancer and he was clearly tired when he arrived that evening.
Yet, as he came before the audience and addressed them, he lit up with joy, expressing with great animation and amazement that his country, given its terrible, shameful history of racial oppression, had been able to show the world an unforgettable example of reconciliation and hope.
After the speeches were over, a band took the stage and broke into irresistible rhythms, drawing people into dance. And then, suddenly, Paul Loeb noticed Tutu, right in there, in the middle of the crowd, boogying to the music. Loeb goes on to say:
…the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz has written, “There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor earth.” Tutu, like other social and political activists who haven’t forgotten the importance of enjoyment, passionately embraces the gifts placed before him. If it’s a gift of music, he will dance. If a gift of food, he will eat. If the company of friends, he will converse, laugh, and share stories. Such are the small but necessary pleasures that enable him to look evil in the eye and be confident that the fight must be fought. For only someone who knows how good life can be is in a position to appreciate what’s at stake when life is degraded or destroyed.
Rebecca Parker exhorts us to recognize that “We must count ourselves among the saviors and redeemers.” This is pretty darn heavy. “What, me? A savior? How can you possibly mean me?”
Yes, you. Yes, me. For, having been drawn to be members of this congregation, this community of love, we know that, somehow, in whatever way we can, whatever the size of the task, we are called to do saving, redeeming, healing work.
But, she exhorts us to something else that’s just as important, as does Paul Loeb, and Desmond Tutu, and so many others who have hung in there when the impossible has taken a very, very long time. They all tell us that we must sustain ourselves with joy, with pleasure, with beauty. We must always remain open to the gorgeous gifts of this earth, and the gifts of grace wherever they come from.
That is the other reason we are drawn into a community of love—not only
to rise to the challenge of our time, but to rise together, in one another’s
strengthening company, celebrating, singing, laughing, dancing, learning, sometimes
crying, sharing food and connection and family milestones, sharing candlelight
and the sunlight coming through these windows…
We are to help one another to always keep our eyes open to the beauty.
And may it be so.
The reading is drawn from Rising to the Challenge of Our Times, by Rebecca Parker
In the end, it is not ugliness that gives us the energy to rise to the challenge of our times. It is beauty. Yes, we are enraged by the destruction of life, but our sustained action is impelled by our experience of life’s sweetness. James Baldwin looked at all the pain done to his people and its consequences in the world, but his ultimate question was, “What do we do with all this beauty?”
This is the way it was with Moses. Moses was out doing his job one day, minding his own business in the pasture, keeping watch over the flocks, when he saw a bush on fire! You’ve seen it. I saw it one morning as I watched the dawn light skim the tops of the cedars, transfusing the mists over the silver water. You’ve seen it in the face of a newborn child, or in your lover’s eyes in a moment of intimacy. You’ve seen it in the rain forest or the high ridges of the mountains. You’ve seen it in the middle of a church service when people were singing, or felt it in the silence. It has whispered to you in a tender voice. It has held you and stopped you in your tracks.
And you, too, have asked, “What do we do with all this beauty?”
When Moses saw it, the voice from the [burning] bush said, “You must go back to Egypt where I have seen my people in their travail. You must lead them to freedom.”
Moses, of course, said what anyone would: “Ask someone else to do this!”
But the voice was insistent. “No, you must go. You must offer this leadership.”
And Moses wrangled with God and said, “Look, my brother Aaron would be much better at this, okay? The Quakers would be much better. The progressive Catholics would be much better. The reconstructionist Jews, they could do this!”
The voice was insistent. “No, you must go. You must do this.”
Beauty confronts us with the requirement that we place ourselves among the saviors, the redeemers, the leaders in the protection of life. Once you have seen the bush on fire, you are not going to get out of the assignment unless you close your eyes to the beauty. But if you have seen, if you have taken off your shoes [knowing you were on holy ground], tasted the blackberries, and felt the tenderness of love, if you have seen how the full force of the soul is in each child that comes into this world, you either have to close your eyes … or you will have to go back to Egypt to set the people free.
More is asked of us than we have imagined. The blessing of life is that it will not let us go until we ourselves have offered the blessing we have to give. As Rumi said, “Let the beauty we love be what we do.” Let us, in faith with all those who have gone before us, place ourselves among those who bless the world.