The sermon below starts at 6 minutes an 23 seconds of the video above.
I do some of my best thinking in the kitchen.
A wise person (for the life of me, I can’t remember who) once let me in on a great secret that has been of enormous importance to my creative process. If you really want to think things over, do something totally routine – take a shower, drive somewhere, vacuum the house or go for a walk.
This really works for me.
When my body is occupied doing some mundane activity that requires almost no mental energy to accomplish, my mind is free to wander off on its own meandering paths, and I can make the connections and associations that would otherwise be hard to make, when my imagination is hindered by a million “little things.”
Cooking can be like this. It does require some thought – ingredients, levels of heat, a sense of timing – but if you are making a favorite old recipe, and you know your kitchen well, and you can lay your hand on your trusty spatula as you shift your weight from the sink (where you have just washed your hands) to the stove (where the oil is heating up) – you can fall into a rhythm – that allows you to do this elaborate, fun, dance and, at the same time, ruminate.
Marinate.
Simmer.
Think.
I’ve been thinking.
I’ve been thinking about my life.
About this virus.
And about that demanding first line of Psalm 130:
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
What an incredible line!
The Psalmists didn’t mess around.
The great Biblical scholar and Christian writer, Walter Brueggemann, wrote about the psalms, saying that they…
…are not the voice of God addressing us. They are, rather, the voice of our own common humanity… and so when we turn to the Psalms we enter into the middle of that voice of humanity and decide to take our stand with that voice… to express our solidarity in this anguished, joyous human pilgrimage. We add a voice to the common elation, shared grief, and communal rage that besets us all.
Later in the same book, Praying the Psalms, Brueggemann writes
…the events at the edge of our humanness, that is, the ones that threaten and disrupt our convenient equilibrium are the events which may fill us with passion and evoke in us eloquence. The Psalms reflect such events of passion and eloquence when we are pressed by experience to address the Holy One.
…pressed by experience to address the holy one…
Surely now, as never before — in the memory of even our oldest parishioners — is a moment that– “threatens and disrupts our convenient equilibrium.”
Surely now, as never before, we find ourselves taking a stand with the voice of humanity.
If, in this moment of extremity, we turn to the Psalms, could there be a better psalm to invoke?
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
Personally, though, I’ve always had a hard time with this line from Psalm 130.
It has challenged me in ways that I have felt unequal to.
Let me explain.
My father was Japanese – he was born in Tokyo in 1929. This meant that he was 14 years old in 1945 when the Second World War came to its cataclysmic conclusion with the birth of the Atomic age in Hiroshima.
An American incendiary bombing raid on the night of March 9-10, 1945 turned 16-square-miles of Tokyo into a lake of fire.
“Operation Meetinghouse” as it was called by the American forces, killed an estimated eighty to one-hundred thousand people in one night and was the single most deadly bombing campaign of the Second World War.
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
Forty years later, as a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, my father recalled the aftermath of this experience in his book Mount Fuji and Mount Sinai:
In wilderness Tokyo we were hungry. We were confused. The wilderness outside invaded our souls. There was, however, one attractive aspect of the desolation… It has a stark simplicity. The wilderness threatens, but it also issues an invitation to meditate on essentials. Desolation had purified our souls… In my Christian experience the image of baptism and that of wilderness became inexpressibly united.[1]
Witnessing human violence and suffering on such a scale can destroy a person. At the very least, one cannot rise from such a crucible without being forever altered.
I have always attributed my father’s integrity and, in turn, his academic success, to a solemnity of purpose that I believe followed directly from his experience on that night in 1945.
At fourteen years of age, my life was a string of Tom and Jerry cartoons. My father, at fourteen, had an unblinking awareness of what was at stake in this veil of sorrow that is the human condition.
When he said:
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
He invoked a knowledge – a deep spiritual understanding that I could not hope to share.
Part of me – part of my spiritual development as a Christian, has been a struggle with this ironic problem…
I would be a fool to wish that I’d grown up during a horrifying, bloody war…
But my good life, with its well-insulated house, its pantryfull of food and its dog asleep in front of the woodstove – this equilibrium, as Brueggemann calls it, is a life of spiritual superficiality.
I may have an intellectual appreciation of what I suspect might be at stake with human life, but I lack the suffering – the stark purification of desolation that my Dad spoke of – to have any real understanding of the depths from whence the psalmist calls out to God.
**
Cary and I have been walking a lot.
These walks have partially been for the sake of gathering footage for this video – but more importantly, they are an expression of our relationship – the joy we have resting at ease in each other’s company as we get the exercise and the fresh air that we sorely need after working all day on our respective computers.
The walks are one of the ways that we take the advice Lynn Ungar gives in her poem Pandemic when she offers the notion that this corona-virus time could be seen as a Sabbath – a sacred time – a time to “Center down” and “Touch only those to whom you commit your life.”
I love Ungar’s poem, not only because it opens up the possibility that this Pandemic may have surprising personal and communal results – but also because I push back against it – and this pushing back opens up even more ways of thinking.
The psalmist pushes back against Ungar’s poem.
Out of the depths, I cry to you O Lord…
…is the lament rising, now, from New York City, where more than 44 thousand people are infected and more than 500 people have died.
Out of the depths, I cry to you O Lord…
…is the accusation that arises from the Bergamo region of Italy where more the 1300 people have perished.
In these places, where grief, fear, and death are an immediate and profound reality – Ungar’s poem feels like an absurdity and polly-anna ditty.
But while I do not say that people dying is ever a good thing…
I will say this…
We are in the middle of a lesson of immense consequence and scale.
We are all – all of us – learning what is at stake with this condition of being human.
We are just beginning to understand the psalmist’s depths.
Because unlike Pearl Harbor.
Unlike 9/11.
Unlike Chernobyl
And the Holocaust
And Sandy Hook Elementary School
And Hiroshima
This virus makes none of the distinctions that we have been so fond of making between race, religion, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation, age, wealth, or lack thereof.
The virus, as bad as it is, is not directed by human intention. It is a morally ambiguous force. If you are human, this virus wants you as its host.
So – going back to Brueggeman – this virus calls us to take our stand with the voice of our common humanity
At the beginning of March 2020, there were an estimated 7.8 billion people on this planet.
Today, as the month of March nears its end, we are no longer 7.8 billion individuals.
We are now one single 7.8 billion person community, drawn together by a common understanding – a common fear – that each and every one of us is vulnerable.
This adversity – these deaths – this threat to every living human – could be nothing more or less than an immense disaster in which many millions die and then we go back to the way things were.
And learn nothing.
That, I think, would be the real tragedy…. All those people lost for nothing.
Could this be something else?
Could it be our chance?
Our last chance to make the connections and associations that would otherwise be hard to make, when our imaginations are hindered by a million “little things.”
Could it be…
Could it be our chance to let the planes sit on the tarmac?
Our chance to grow our own food?
Our chance to wean ourselves from fossil fuels?
Our chance to accept that perpetual economic growth is not sustainable?
Our chance to return to a sacred reverence for the land…
Our chance to localize our economies?
Out of the depths I cry to you O Lord
You have given us this chance!
Bless us with the wisdom and the will to seize it, before it’s too late.
Amen
[1] Koyama, Kōsuke. Mount Fuji and Mount Sinai : A Critique of Idols. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985. Print. 31.