Accepting
Sermon preached by the Reverend Patricia Farris
June 19 - 24, 2005
Gracious
God, bless us this day to accept the things we cannot change, to change
the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.
It must be God’s
sense of humor to have a preacher from Southern California preach
on the theme of “Accepting” right after hearing the Psalm
about how “we will not fear, though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea…” You
know, we’ve been rockin’ and rollin’ out on the
Pacific Rim just lately and I suppose that God is working through
you to remind me that our help is in the Lord who made heaven and
earth, shifting tectonic plates and all.
Since we’re
still getting to know one another, I thought you might be interested
in knowing that I bring a somewhat eclectic musical background to
this work. I grew up in Children’s and Youth Choirs in my home
church in Arizona and I had considerable classical music training
through years of piano and viola lessons, orchestra and string quartets.
But then I also spent many Saturdays as a kid with my grandfather
who would sing to me while we drove around in his pick-up truck, singing
the mournful folk hymns he loved—“Wayfarin’ Stranger”,
“Motherless Child”, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”.
I was a happy
kid who hadn’t known much woe or pain or sorrow or death at
the time, but from Grampa’s songs, I knew it would come with
growing up. But from his songs I also knew that there was much, much
more to come also, in the great promise of God, a land of joy and
hope and peace.
The song we just
sang this morning, “How Can I Keep From Singing”, reminds
me of his old songs and that’s partly why I love it so. “My
life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation. I
hear the clear, tho’ far off hymn that hails a new creation.”
Lamentation, new creation.
Surely part of
our ministry as preachers, as musicians and artists in the church
is to help the people in our care to face and accept and tell the
truth about ALL that this life brings. To help them grow to be a beloved
child of God in an age of complexity and uncertainty. To foster within
them a faith strong enough and complex enough to acknowledge honestly
the sorrow and pain and woe we see, strong enough to lament. Yet through
it all to sing and teach what we also know with rock solid certainty,
that God is present through it all. And that God intends for us and
for this creation something beautiful and true and just and whole.
We accept life and this world for what it is--but in a “that’s
not all there is” kind of way, so that we might see reality
whole.
”Through
all the tumult and the strife, I hear that music ringing. It finds
an echo in my soul. How can I keep from singing? No storm can shake
my inmost calm while to that rock I’m clinging. Since love is
Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”
Our theme this
morning is Accepting. Accepting can mean many things and in our time
it is sometimes given meanings that are not very faithful. There are
those who say that we must just accept that the awful world is as
it is and do our best to live a tiny, safe and cautious life within
it as best we can. They misquote the Bible about “having the
poor with you always” as if God wants any of his children to
live miserable lives of want and despair.
That we should not accept, we should lament.
They speak of
“wars and rumors of wars” as if our only option is to
accept that human nature can be mean and violent and that all we can
do is feel blessed that it’s not happening at our doorstep.
But ours is a God, as the Psalmist tells us, a God pledged to make wars
cease to the end of the earth; to break the bow and shatter the spear
and burn the shields with fire. We do not accept perpetual war as inevitable;
instead, as God’s beloved, we are to witness and seek the things
that make for peace. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called
children of God.
Acceptance can never mean acquiescence or withdrawal or apathy in the
face of things that are not as they should be. That would not be the
way of our Savior, Jesus Christ. He taught by word and example that
now is the acceptable time, now the day of salvation. And so we live
with one foot firmly planted in the realities and challenges of this
world and one foot at home in the heavenly kingdom. This means that
we will know the sorrow and pain of this world, persecution even, as
did he. But even more, a blessing of courage and hope.
Blessed
are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is
the kingdom of heaven.
Some
of you in business may have read a very helpful book by Jim Collins
entitled Good to Great. One of the lessons Collins teaches business
leaders is an insight gained from the story of a prisoner of war that
he calls the Stockdale Paradox. It applies well to all of as well. “You
must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the
end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time, have the
discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality,
whatever they might be.” This is a definition of Christian acceptance
as well. While confronting the most difficult, the honest facts of our
current reality, in our lives and in this world, we maintain unwavering
faith that God can and will prevail in the end.
Musicians
are gifted and blessed with a particularly powerful way of taking in
the pain of this world while witnessing to something more. I want to
tell a story this morning that some of you may already know, the story
of a man now known to the world as “The Cellist of Sarajevo”
from Central Europe. Vedran Smailovic, 37 years old, was principal cellist
of the Sarajevo Opera Company, a Muslim deeply committed to the rich
beauty of a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, multi-racial Yugoslavia, where
Serbs and Croats, Muslims and Catholics were friends, neighbors, intermarried,
and created a society of tolerance, learning and art. But war came.
Neighbors turned on neighbors. Hatred and suspicion took hold. Serb
troops took position on the hills surrounding the center of the city
of Sarajevo and shelled it regularly.
On
May 27th, 1992, a bakery in Sarajevo had flour and so was making bread
and distributing it to the starving, war-shattered people. At 4 p.m.,
a long line of hungry people stretched into the street. Suddenly, a
shell fell directly into the middle of the line, killing 22 people outright.
Smailovic, who lived just a hundred yards away, was driven by his anguish
into action, and so he did the only thing he could do. He made music.
Every
day at 4 p.m. precisely, Mr. Smailovic would put on his full formal
concert attire, and walk out of his apartment into the midst of the
battle raging around him. He would place a little camp stool in the
middle of the bomb-craters, and play the Albinoni Adagio in G minor,
a concert to the abandoned streets while bombs dropped and bullets flew
all around him. Day after day for 22 days, one day for each man, woman
and child killed, he made his unimaginably courageous stand for human
dignity, for civilization, for compassion, and for peace.
As
though protected by a divine shield, he was never hurt, though one of
his darkest moments came one day when taking a little walk to stretch
his legs, his cello was shelled and destroyed in the very spot where
he had been sitting.
News
wires around the world picked up the story of this extraordinary ordinary
man, playing his cello defiantly in the face of bombs, death and ruin.
A fellow cellist, wrote: “[His cello] became the mightiest weapon
of them all.” And he went on to conclude: “It's the privilege,
the blessing, and the solemn responsibility of all of us who make music;
to try to make the world a tiny bit better each time we play.”
Only a person of deep faith can face head on into the pain and sorrow
of this world and draw from a deep, deep taproot of assurance and
conviction that wrong and suffering do not have the final word. Lamentation/new
creation! God is always singing a new song. We’ve heard it.
We know it. We are blessed to live its truth.
“What
though my joys and comforts die? The Lord my Savior liveth; what though
the darkness gather round! Songs in the night He giveth. No storm
can shake my inmost calm while to that refuge clinging; since Love
is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”
I
quoted yesterday one of my favorite contemporary Christian writers,
Anne Lamott. She says she was saved not only by the preacher and the
folks of her congregation, but by the singing of the little rag-tag
choir that assembled each week to belt out songs about what gave them
the strength to persevere.
“If
I happened to be [at the flea market] between eleven and one on Sundays,
I could hear gospel music coming from a church across the street….it
looked homey and impoverished, a ramshackle building with a cross
on top. But the music was so pretty that I would stop and listen.
I knew a lot of the hymns from the times I’d gone to church
with my grandparents. Finally, I began stopping in from time to time,
standing in the doorway to listen to the songs.”
“I
went back…about once a month. [eventually] it was the singing
that pulled me in and split me wide open. I could sing better here
than I ever had before. As part of these people, even though I stayed
in the doorway, I did not recognize my voice or know where it was
coming from, but sometimes I felt like I could sing forever. The singing
enveloped me. It was…coming from everyone’s heart. There
was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath
and food…Something inside me that was stiff and rotting would
feel soft and tender. Somehow the singing wore down all the boundaries
and distinctions that kept me so isolated. Sitting there, standing
with them to sing…I felt bigger than myself, like I was being
taken care of, tricked into coming back to life.”
Friends,
I have felt so privileged and blessed to be spending this week among
all of you wonderful musicians and lovers of music. As a preacher
I share with you the vocation described by that cellist: “It's
the privilege, the blessing, and the solemn responsibility of all
of us who make music to try to make the world a tiny bit better each
time we play”.
You
know what music can do to soften our hearts and open us to God’s
blessings. You know how it can change the world in the same way that
small rivulets can over time carve grand canyons. You know how the
music of our faith connects us to the faith of our grandparents and
their grandparents all the way back to the Psalmist himself and ultimately
and intimately to the great harmonies at the heart of our God.
You
know how music binds us together in congregations when sometimes we
barely like each other, how music reaches in to catch us unawares.
How it blesses our pain and our joy, salves our hurts, hallows our
disappointments and our greatest accomplishments. How music taps into
our tears and healing and courage and strength. How music helps us
accept the world as it is, but never abandons us to doubt and despair.
Lamentation/new creation! How making music, alone and together, creates
new possibilities, new realities for our lives and for this world.
People
of God, in the midst of this life and all that it brings, always listen
for the music. God is in the music of our hearts and lives, shaping
new harmonies, composing new melodies, tapping out new rhythms. Listen,
and you will hear God’s new song.
Notes:
“How
Can I Keep from Singing?” Text and music by Robert Lowry, 1860.
Lamott,
Anne. Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. New York: Riverhead Books,
2005.
The
story of the cellist of Sarajevo is told many places, including appleseedrec.com/Sarajevo/vedran/
For
further inspiration, see “Singing On” by Joan King,
godsfriends.org/Vol14/no2/singing-on.html
© Patricia E. Farris, 2005. Permission is given for brief quotation
with attribution. All other rights reserved.
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