United Church of Jaffrey
2/2/20
Matthew 5:1-12
An Excerpt from the Play Antigone by Sophocles:
One of my favorite things about being a minister is that precious fifteen minutes between 10:45 and 11AM on a Sunday morning when I get to wander about, here and there in the pews having little conversations with you.
Here is one conversation that I often have.
One or the other of you may remark on the weather, and then ask:
“How was your trip up to church this morning?”
If it is winter, I may say something about the ice on route 119. If it is fall I may mention something about the color of the leaves or the persnickety flock of turkeys I encountered on Fitzwilliam Rd.
You are familiar with these observations because they are often the subjects that I fall back on when I am looking for something to liven up my invitation to the offertory.
As a way into my sermon, this morning, I want to briefly analyze that everyday conversation about my trip up to Jaffrey.
It is an everyday conversation — nothing special — and that is precisely why it interests me this morning.
Hidden in everyday conversations are assumptions that we make that are almost completely invisible.
Let’s look at that question again:
“How was your trip up to church this morning?”
We can ask this question in 2020, and it does not seem in the least bit odd.
But not all that long ago, it would have been completely odd.
The Ford Model T was not popularly available to people until 1908, and it wasn’t until 1956 that Eisenhower Administration passed the Federal Aid Highway Act that helped get the state highways well established.
Not all that long ago, if I’d wanted to get from my home in Turners Falls, Massachusetts up to Jaffrey New Hampshire, it wouldn’t have been a trip I could have managed in a morning.
A couple of the invisible assumptions that are built into the question “How was your trip up to church this morning?” are:
- I have a car
- The roads are in good condition
Without these invisible assumptions at work behind the scenes, your question would have to be: “how was your trip up to church this week?”
**
Sophocles
As you all know, as well as being your minister, I am also an English teacher.
For the last several years American Literature has been my specialty, but this semester, for the first time, I am happy to be teaching World Literature.
And this, of course, is how I’ve recently come under the sway of Sophocles — that ancient Greek Playwright, whose play Antigone was mwritten 4 hundred years before the birth of Christ. In this morning’s second reading, we hear from Haemon, the prince of Thebes, who tries to convince his father, Creon, the King of Thebes, that changing his mind is not necessarily a bad thing.
Let not your first thought be your only thought. Haemon says to his father:
Think if there cannot be some other way.
Surely to think your own the only wisdom,
and yours the only word, the only will,
betrays a shallow spirit, and empty heart.
It is no weakness to the wisest man
to learn when he is wrong, know when to yield.
Young Haemon, of course, is not asking his minister what his early morning drive up to New Hampshire was like. Haemon, like all of Sophocles’ characters, is concerned with a tremendously urgent moral concern — a matter of life and death. With these reasonable words, Haemon is trying to save Antigone — his fiance — from Creon, his father, who has sentenced her to death. It being Greek tragedy, needless to say, things don’t turn out well. In the process, however, Haemon leaves us with an important principle…
Let not your first thought be your only thought. Think if there cannot be some other way.
Haemon’s words are relevant to this morning’s proceedings because he challenges us not to weigh our options carefully before deciding on a course of action.
Haemon says “Let not your first thought be your only thought.” But assumptions — the ideas that are underneath many of the most basic things we think and say — are not even our “first thoughts.” They come before out first thoughts….
Assumptions “go without saying” and so — we don’t bother to say them. We just assume them, and, as a result, they operate before we even think.
This makes assumptions dangerous.
Since they usurp thought, assumptions short-circuit knowledge, undermine wisdom, and handicap the imagination.
Haemon’s principle emancipates. Finding ourselves hemmed in by assumptions we can simply “think if there cannot be another way.”
For the vast majority of human history, the speed and distance a human could travel was limited by how fast and long a horse could gallop.
The inventor of the automobile, though, was unsatisfied with this state of affairs, imagined a new way and revolutionized the way we live.
Breaking all the assumptions we advance. Edison lit the darkness. Alexander Graham Bell made our voices move across vast distances. The Wright Brothers took us even into the very heavens!
What a piece of work is man, says Prince Hamlet…How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet…
And yet…
And yet, I find myself uneasy…
A religious man, I am acutely aware that our ever growing technological prowess — the pace of which never slackens — is not matched by any parallel growth in ethical sophistication.
Plenty of energy is going into figuring out new things we can do, but very little energy is going into figuring out how these things should best be done, both to serve our needs, and the needs of our suffering planet.
Enter, at last, this morning’s gospel reading. A famous one. These are the beatitudes — the sermon on the mount — arguably, Jesus Christ’s most oft quoted teaching.
As I thought about them this week, Haemon’s principle opened them up for me in a new way.
Who is blessed?
My first thought — almost an assumption, in America in 2020 — is that the person who has the greatest access comfort and ease is the most blessed. So that would be a person who has great personal wealth. Surely the rich person is blessed.
But no.
Let not your first thought be your only thought.
Think if there cannot be some other way.
Jesus says:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven
Who shall inherit the earth?
Well, my first thought is that the earth is likely to be inherited by powerful, forceful people who know what they want and know how to get it. Either that, or maybe the fabulously wealthy — seems like when it comes to “inheriting” things they have the corner on the market…
But no.
Let not your first thought be your only thought.
Think if there cannot be some other way.
Jesus says:
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
At first, these beatitudes just seem counter-intuitive.
But I think they are more than simply puzzling.
I think they challenge our assumptions.
God
God challenges our assumptions.
These beatitudes do, for our moral imagination, what darkness did for Edison, and what the reaches of the heavens did for the Wright Brothers.
They emancipate our ethical reasoning from the limitations of that our assumptions place on them.
Jesus gave us a language to begin re-imagining and re-inventing our moral world views.
And it is our role, as Christians who are alive in 2020, to face the moral concerns of our day, and find out where God’s moral imagination leads us.
Amen.