Marks Along the Way
Sermon by James W. Crawford
April 18, 1999
Tomorrow some of you now in this sanctuary will find yourselves out in Hopkinton on what our weather people promise will be a day partly sunny, cool, with a solid Northwest breeze. Not too bad, they say, for running the Marathon and maybe coming up with a personal best. Because this is both the season of Easter and the Sunday closest to the marathon, you marathoners may well have come to church this morning eager to sing two great hymns of the church: one we might sing in a fervent, prayerful mode: "Guide My Feet, While I Run This Race." The other, anticipating your finish: "The Strife is O'er, the Battle Done."
We sing neither of those hymns this morning, but let me make reference to another aspect of the race tomorrow. It is the course, the 26 mile 385 yard course from Hopkinton to that yellow line just outside our front door on Boylston Street. Runners, I am told, know the marks along the way: the Common in Hopkinton, the summit of Heartbreak Hill, Cleveland Circle, Hereford and Boylston Streets. And along the way, of course, in Wellesley, the students from the college crowd along the route cheering the contestants on. What an encouragement that must be! In Hal Higdon's history of The Marathon, he writes of Wellesley students rooting for runners from the very beginning of The Marathon in 1897. Higdon tells us of Harvard's Dick Grant attracting attention of the Wellesley crowd in the first year, their slacking off when he failed to run in the second year, their enthusiasm when he ran again in 1899. In fact, as Higdon recalls, "In 1899, a Globe reporter gushed, 'The rivals were heartily cheered all along the route, but nowhere were the fagged out contestants applauded more liberally than at the home of Wellesley College. Of course, when the Harvard colors and the familiar face of Dick Grant were discovered, the bevy of pretty girls, all gowned in fashionable and vari-colored gowns, but with crimson predominating, arose as one, and standing on the very edge of the street, clapped hands and shouted to the Harvard man that he had the best wishes of the entire town.'"
"And in 1902," writes Higdon, "the same paper described [what it called], 'the pretty girls of Wellesley' assembling along the highway 'to flaunt their dainty kerchiefs and class colors in the faces of the heaving, panting leaders.'"
A personal footnote here: A wonderful Wellesley "alum" named Linda Lovett happened to marry me some years ago. Her mother preceded her at Wellesley and Linda tells me her mother stood, in the 1920s, among those "dainty kerchief flaunters." "And where were you when they passed by?" I asked. "You know where," she answered. "I was in the library." O Linda, God bless you!
Hal Higdon continues, "Much later in this century, "those [so-called] 'pretty college girls' were participating in the marathon themselves and expressing a different way of thinking. In fact, in 1994, a woman from Wellesley ran the marathon in a T-shirt that proclaimed, 'Wellesley is not a girls' college without men; it's a woman's college without boys.'" Touché!
I
So, Wellesley College, Heartbreak Hill, Cleveland Circle: marks along the Marathon way. What marks in this Easter season—almost as if we walked that road from Jerusalem to Emmaus—what marks, what milestones of grace do we recognize as we make way in God's world? How recognize the marks of Jesus Christ as we walk Christ's way?
Well, friends, the marks revealing to us the living presence of Christ will not be found in any runner's personal best tomorrow, not in the stars, not in this changing season. We will not discover the marks of the living God in some arcane philosophy, some isolated dogma, or complicated creed. It is different from that. Remember the beautiful story of the Emmaus Road and its aftermath we read a moment ago? What makes Luke's narrative so wonderful, it seems to me, lies in his description of the hospitality in that upper room. And later, in a scene we did not include in our lesson this morning, we see doors to that room broken through by the risen Christ. We see the disciples' fear of each other and the outer world dissolved, the barriers down, and Christ offering an invitation to those disciples to put their hands in his wounded side indicating to what extent love will go to accomplish its ends. Love and broken barriers, love and wounds, love and risk go together. They determine how we receive, treat and embrace other people. Hospitality, reconciliation, dissolved barriers—those seem to me basic marks of Jesus Christ along the way.
I came across a little poem of Jimmy Carter's the other day. In a collection of meditations he entitles Sources of Strength President Carter tells of his mother—remember Miss Lillian?—who at age 68 joined the Peace Corps. As he describes his mother's work, Carter pictures a world where, for any number of reasons, we desperately need each other.
A world where we desperately need each other!? My goodness, what a cliché that is. Why must we keep saying it? Why must we keep trying to make it happen? Could it be because of Albanian and Serb, Palestinian and Israeli, Ulster Catholic and Protestant, Hutu and Tutsi, male and female, Moslem and Hindu, gay and straight, global North and South—the terrible, exclusive and discriminatory barriers we build against one another, ending in humiliation, injury, war—is that why we pray for and insist on the unity of the human family?
In the case of Miss Lillian, illness and health warred with one another. As a Peace Corps volunteer she served a clinic near Bombay. Poverty, hunger, unemployment, pathetic health care took a terrible toll on the patients crowding into her clinic.
And leprosy! Leprosy! Contagious. . . but worse: a cultural symbol of inferiority, a religious symbol of personal damnation, a social symbol resulting in shunning and rejection. The surrounding populace considered lepers less than fully human. Ban them! Hide them! Dump them!
Well, Miss Lillian, remember, was a devoted Southern Baptist. She knew well the overflowing New Testament images of Jesus breaking into the lives of those who live on the margins or outside the boundaries, and those who set them apart. In her Bombay clinic she knew well, for instance, the parable of the Samaritan we call "good." But we know the people who first heard that story listened in shock, because to them, Samaritans were bad—cultural clods, religious quacks, aliens capable of only fraud and deceit. Talk about ethnic cleansing! Samaritans were confined to Samaria; no one could cross the border. Jesus, in one of the most daring illustrations of all time embraces in that story the enemy; and we have been living with it ever since. Who is my neighbor? Remember? The neighbor is the enemy. The one we fear the most, the person we would set outside the camp.
Well, Jimmy Carter tells us Miss Lillian discovers this truth while serving in that Bombay clinic. And he describes the revelation in a poem written as if Miss Lillian herself writes it, a poem he entitles, "Miss Lillian Sees Leprosy for the First Time."
When I nursed in a clinic near Bombay,
a small girl, shielding all her leprous sores,
crept inside the door. I moved away,
but then the doctor said, "You take this case!"
First I found a mask and put it on,
quickly gave a child a shot and then,
not well, I slipped away to be alone
and scrubbed my body red and raw.
I faced her treatment every week with dread
and loathing for the chore, not the child.
As time passed, I was less afraid,
and managed not to turn my face away.
Her spirit bloomed as sores began to fade.
She'd raise her anxious, searching eyes to mine,
to show she trusted me. We'd smile and say
a few Marathi words, then reach and hold
each other's hands. And then love grew between
us, so that when I kissed her lips
I didn't feel unclean.
There! What else, but along the way, on our journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus, a mark of the risen Christ?
II
And this breaking through barriers, this gathering for hospitality holds for our continuing passion for peace in God's world. My soul, how grapple with Easter hospitality, and dissolved barriers this morning? Peace? Hospitality in God's world? Two weeks ago, on Monday, April 5, the day after Easter, the Boston Globe carried a startling colored picture on its front page. Against a deep, blue sky there appeared a stark wooden Cross, a white sash hanging from its horizontal beams. And behind it the silhouette of an F-16 fighter bomber taking off from Aviano Air Base in Italy, headed for Yugoslavia. What a picture! What a statement!
Do you know what that bomber and that Cross signify? Can we grasp the depths of our predicament and our hope in that picture? I have been brooding over it for two weeks. I have thought, first of all, the Cross and the bomber are in some way cut from the same cloth. They show us in what deep trouble our human constellation finds itself. We are a fallen race. Our ambitions, our pride, the ethnic, national, religious political and partisan chauvinisms, our blinders and interests—our sin—builds Crosses and makes bombers inevitable.
And more. The stark tragedy of our condition finds itself reflected when a caravan of refugees, driven by an evil vision called ethnic cleansing, is bombed by the very forces detailed to protect them. 75, more or less, are blown to smithereens, the NATO pilot, serious, conscientious, one of our own brothers or sons, delivering the erroneous and devastating bomb, as the NATO spokesperson in Brussels explains it, he dropped the bomb in good faith.
Oh, the moral dilemmas we fall into. Is war worse than ethnic cleansing? Is aiding and resettling the exiled Kosovars, with nary a promise they may return to their homeland, a higher moral outcome than struggling against the perverse xenophobia, coercive displacement, the fierce, demonic forces of blood and soil set to gain hegemony through genocidal assault? If so, call a cease-fire and get on with the resettlement. If not, then for how long, for how much, for how many can we calculate the worth of the cause? That Cross and that F-!6 silhouetted against the sky show the scope and depth of tragedy in human existence.
And yes more. The Cross and the F-16 not only demonstrate the distance we live on this earth from the hopes our God treasures for us, it shows us how deeply our God is involved with us in our predicament. We are not left to suffer alone. Our God is in this mess with us. Who is that on the Cross, but Jesus Christ? God incarnate! Ours is not a God up there someplace, abstract, distant, invulnerable. The Cross demonstrates, if nothing else, that we have a friend, a companion, who knows what it is like to be us; who knows what it is to be abandoned, kicked around, with no place to lay his head, beginning life among us as a refugee and having it snuffed out by government decree.
The other evening, Linda and I, watching CNN, saw a little red-headed Kosovar boy weeping in Macedonia, a child who looked exactly like our 5 year old grandson, Jimmy. We could hardly speak to one another. And you don't think our God weeps, trembles, suffers while such human damage is done? How could it be any different? Love suffers. As someone said, if you love much you suffer much; if you do not love much, you do not suffer much. What goes on in Kosovo—weeping children, men lined up and shot point blank, women raped, human beings tossed in mass graves—what goes on in Kosovo and what goes on at the Cross we know, in faith, kindles Divine sorrow. God weeps. How could the God of Jesus Christ not be shaken and wounded by our treatment of one another, her children?
And yes, more. Just as that Cross, standing bleak against the blue sky, illustrates the tragedy of our existence and the sorrow of God, it bespeaks hope. We can never forget it is an empty Cross. Just as it illustrates the Divine sorrow, so it mediates the Divine patience. Just as it demonstrates what we are capable of doing to one another, so it shows what, in love, we can do for one another. Just as it demonstrates how we can dehumanize and demean each other, it affirms how we, through the mercy and grace of God, are in truth the precious children of God. It stands there as testimony that we are loved by God—all of us—even as we go about nailing the likes of Jesus to the Cross.
And thus, heart-breaking as it may be, the Cross inspires us, encourages us, undergirds us, even as we witness the worst. The Cross of Christ enables us to resist stumbling into a blind and furious hatred for our brothers and sisters, precious in God's eyes, brothers and sisters caught up in what one reporter calls "this war between the ancient and modern, between timeless ethnic and tribal struggles, mythologies and cruelties and the high-tech weapons and modern values of human rights and shared sovereignties of the Western world"—in any case, under God, a terrible fratricide. Amid it all, the empty Cross compels us to care for, and indeed intervene for God's sake, to care for the refugee, to risk ourselves for human rights, to feel revulsion at a social policy called "ethnic cleansing." Making no self-righteous claim that our hands may be clean, the Cross reminds us vividly that our hands are not clean. And yes, it encourages us—it compels us—to pray for this suffering, bleeding, fragmenting Balkan community, beseeching God to work through whatever surprising, providential means available: the Russians, the Communists, the Vatican, the Turks, the Saudis, the Orthodox, the Muslims—yea, even, who knows, (dare we even contemplate it?) the F-16s, a changed mind and heart of Slobodan Milosevic—beseeching God for resolution, compromise and reconciliation that may bring a tolerable and lasting peace to those protractedly threatened and suffering peoples.
Did you hear or see Bill Clinton's speech in Roseville, Michigan, Friday? I think he captures our hope as well as anyone. Reflecting on what he calls "the oldest problem of human society, our tendency to fear and dehumanize people who are different from ourselves," this problem's surfacing with fury in the Balkans and its threat to our children in the 21st century, he goes on to say, "We have to say to ourselves, as well as to the rest of the world, that there will be a great contest for the next several years between the forces bringing us together and the forces tearing us apart, between our commitment to empower people and those who would suppress them, between the idea that we can only find unity with people who are just like us and the idea that life is richer in every way, not just materially, when people can celebrate their own convictions, and their own ethnic heritage and their own religious faiths, and still reaffirm their common humanity and draw up a set of rules which permit us all to live together, to pursue our faith and pursue our humanity. . ."
President Clinton tells us that is why we are in Kosovo; that is what we must work for here in our own country. He then rejects Mr. Milosevic's vision of a paramilitary regime, denying the humanity of those who do not fall within his ethnic group, and then closes his address by stating, "But our version is democracy—messy sometimes, yes—votes and arguments and disagreements and demonstrations and religious differences and ethnic differences, but recognizing that it is better to work together for a brighter tomorrow because underneath our common humanity is—more important than anything that divides us—that we are all children of God. And it is hard to imagine that God would have ordained the construction of any religion or political philosophy which would justify the extinction of another of God's children simply because of their religious, racial or ethnic background."
Right on, Bill Clinton. Amid the tragedy that is the indestructible hope.
And so we close. We began with those dainty kerchiefs marking the halfway point on the Marathon route. Those Wellesley women will be there tomorrow. And thank heaven for them. But it is that road from Jerusalem to Emmaus that finally counts in this world. It is the discovery that Jesus, the compassionate, liberating, forgiving, releasing, encouraging, never-say-die Jesus walks beside us on our way blessing and enabling us, ourselves, to serve, in this troubled and wonderful, this precarious and beautiful world, as his radiant marks of hospitality, of healing, of reconciliation.
Let us pray: Gracious God, grant we may be ambassadors of reconciliation in your troubled yet marvelous, your broken, yet fantastic world. Heal our wounds, defuse our mythologies, release us from the memories that hobble and continue to rule our lives. Forgive us that we may forgive others and renew and restore our human community as you would have it. Amen
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