2 Thessalonians 2:13-17
Luke 20:27-38; 45-47
My November Guest by Robert Frost
It is that time of year again…
Yesterday, as Cary and I went for our daily walk down the bike path, I noticed, for the first time, the houses beyond the trees that had been hidden from view summer long.
The leaves, down from the Tulip tree and the Norway Maple, are sodden now, making a patchwork quilt of our backyard.
The four sky-blue metal chairs that have their summer home in the backyard had fallen over and were looking forlorn from long neglect. Carrying them down to the basement, I sighed. Forget daylight savings — stowing the summer chairs is the true sign that the lazy days of warmth are gone.
Good bye fireflies,
spider’s in the eves.
Another winter on its way.
Around midweek I received a lovely note in the mail with a “United Church of Jaffrey” sticker as a return-address.
Someone has gotten wind of the fact that I can, today, add another 365 days to my half-century on this earth.
51 years.
I suppose that means this is my 51st autumn.
And my 51st winter.
Strictly speaking, this is true enough – but since much of my childhood was spent in the tropics – first Thailand and then Singapore – I knew nothing of fall and winter until I came the U.S. at 13 years of age.
But even though I’d only known tropical heat, and the rainy season – I did have an inkling of what the fall is like in New England, because of a gift my mother gave me at a very young age.
Opening her tattered Modern Library edition of the Collected poems of Robert Frost, she read me a poem called: “My November Guest”
Since I was born on November 6th, she said, I was her “November Guest.” The poem wrapped its mystery and its beauty around me. I was entranced and so I worked at memorizing it. This soft, lovely, sad poem, has always been her gift to me.
My November Guest
My pleasure when she’s here with me
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay
She talks, but I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds have gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray,
Is silver now in clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy skies
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eyes for these
And vexes me for reasons why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days,
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so
And they are better for her praise.
I give this poem to you today, not only to mark my birthday – but also to illustrate a point.
This is an “expansive” poem.
What do I mean by this?
The poem would be narrow if it was only sad. Autumn is sad – yes, that is true. But we knew that.
The poem would be narrow if it was only about beauty. Autumn is beautiful – yes, that is true. But we knew that.
The poem is expansive, because, with its gentle rhythm, it shows us – it doesn’t tell us, it shows us – that there is an undeniable sublime beauty at the very heart of loss.
Sadness is beauty.
Beauty is sadness.
The two cannot be separated.
Every year, the fall in New England surrounds us – embraces us – in this truth.
Death is gorgeous!
Sadness is sweet.
These two things – that we thought were separate, even opposite – are revealed to be entwined,
Inseparable
Mysteriously united.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy skies
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eyes for these
And vexes me for reasons why.
Religious truth too, lives within this expansiveness – the expansiveness of being able to hold two things at once.
Sadness and beauty.
Death and life.
Law and grace.
Take, for example, today’s Gospel lesson from the 20th chapter of the Gospel of Luke.
Luke tells us that the Sadducees, wanted to test Jesus so they asked him a question.
Now when Luke introduces the Sadducees, he says that they were “those who say there is no resurrection.”
Here, I think, Luke is winking at the reader as if to say – these folks had an agenda. They wanted to prove that they were right about something.
When someone wants to prove that he or she is right about something, that person has a “one-idea-view” of that thing. For the Sadducees, in this case, their “one-idea-view” was this: “there is no resurrection.”
The Sadducees pose a technical question to Jesus.
You can tell that the questioned is designed to flummox him.
It’s that kind of question.
Imagine, the Sadducees say, there is a woman who marries a man who has seven brothers. Her husband dies, and (in keeping with Jewish custom of the time) she is then given in marriage to her dead husband’s brother. This man also dies. And the pattern continues so that eventually she marries all seven brothers, each of them dying in his turn. Finally, thank heavens, the woman dies too. When the resurrection happens, the Sadducees ask, which of the dead men can claim her as his wife?
What?
I don’t know about you, but I hate this kind of question.
It reminds me of one of those analytical questions that used to appear on the SAT’s – you know the questions I am talking about? Here is one that I found on the internet:
A group of friends live in a house. The house is divided into one apartment per floor. Shawn is in the apartment below Claudia. Madeleine is in the apartment above Sara. Sara is in the apartment below Shawn and Claudia lives with Roger. Peter lives on the top floor. Who is in the bottom apartment?
When I hear questions like this, my mind just shuts down.
I don’t know who lives in the bottom apartment, and I don’t care.
I hope someone lives there and is keeping warm on those freezing cold nights in the middle of the winter. That’s what I care about.
The Sadducees use the scenario of the unfortunate widow to trap Jesus into admitting that the notion of resurrection is an absurdity.
If we are all resurrected at the end of time, and all seven husbands are there at once – who is the woman married to?
Resurrection, according to the Sadducees, wreaks havoc on Jewish custom.
Which proves, according to the Sadducees, that “there is no resurrection.”
Jesus takes the question seriously.
Instead of making resurrection fit into Jewish custom, though, he simply says that marriage is a custom that is proper for “this age” but that it does not apply in “that age.”
If all those husbands and that poor woman who was widowed seven times are lucky enough to be resurrected into the Kingdom of Heaven, they will not be in the least concerned about who is married to whom.
There is, according to Jesus, a place and time – which we are resurrected into – that is different.
It is different from our human world.
He does not elaborate a great deal on what it is like – this other place – but he does seem to suggest that the preoccupations of human culture that are so precious to us in this life – things like marriage and status and wealth – have no particular significance in “that age.”
On the contrary, Jesus seems to suggest that the marks of status and piety that elevate people in human culture may have the opposite effect on one’s prospects for eternal life:
Beware of the scribes, he says, who like to walk around in long robes, and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”
Jesus expands our vision of the world.
He introduces a new, alternate way of being that defies convention.
He takes the cherished marks of status and piety and turns them on their head, making them signs of condemnation rather than honor.
Resurrection, here, seems less about visioning the world to come, than about re-envisioning the here and now. This re-envisioning breaks down the cultural reflexes that keep us rigidly in our place.
Religion is about ritual. Yes.
It involves justice, and so law is part of it – yes.
But the Kingdom of Heaven is also about forgiveness, and about human dignity.
Slavish adherence to social rules can bind people in a “one-idea-view” of the world.
When he ridicules the “scribes who walk around in long robes,” Jesus challenges us to examine the cultural assumptions that are embedded I our lives. Jesus asks us to consider the possibility of another world – another world in which dignity lies not in appearances, but in the reality of God’s grace.
This “other” world – is it one that we will be resurrected into in a distant future?
Or is it now?
Or both?
Jesus talks about God’s grace as if it is in the future. He also talks about God’s grace in the now.
Like the beauty and sadness of November in New England, the now and the not yet are held together.
They are inseparable.
Jesus teaches us that we do not need to live in a “one-idea world.” We can live in a world of expansive truths.
Now, and in the time to come, let us examine the lives and be resurrected into expansive divinity –
Sadness is beauty.
Not yet is now.
Law is love.
Justice is grace.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days,
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so…
And they are better for her praise.
And they are better for her praise.
Amen.