“Message in a Bottle”
By Rev Tom Reiber
January 21, 2001
Jonah 1: 1-17
and
Matthew 14: 22-33
couple of weeks ago as I was writing the letter to the
parents of our confirmands, listing all the things to bring on the ski weekend,
and I mischievously put down “Bible.” I
wasn't sure if we'd use them or not, but I thought it would be fun to get the
nine different families digging around their homes asking, “Where is that
thing? I know I saw it somewhere.”
Now, I can joke around like that since over the last
thirty-some odd years of my life there have been periods during which my Bible
sat on a shelf gathering dust. Even recently, when reading the Bible is
essentially part of my job description, there are times when I get a little
turned around.
Just this past Monday when Wayne, Julie and I were planning
today's service, Wayne asked me for the chapter and verse citations for the
Jonah passage for the Bulletin. All I
had to do was find the book of Jonah and figure out which verses to read. But I panicked. All of a sudden I couldn't remember where the book of Jonah was.
Now, before you start thinking you hired a total airhead, let me assure you I
more or less have the books of the Bible memorized. But the pressure was on and I couldn't recite all the books of
the Bible with them looking on, that would be like counting on your fingers or
something. So, much like Nick Poyner on
the confirmation weekend, I peeked at the index then slyly leafed through the
pages as if I knew what I was doing, when in fact I was looking for page number
859. To their credit neither Julie nor
Wayne let on.
So I can sympathize with those of you who have
let your Bibles languish. And yet, at
the same time, I believe deep in my heart that there is a reason these pages
are gilded in gold. Not because what's
inside is perfect; but because it comprises the hard-won insights and wisdom of
a group of people who devoted themselves heart and soul to the ways of
God. Yes, there's a lot that's odd and
hard to understand and some things we simply can't believe. But we can't let that stop us from gleaning
the wisdom that's here. Like spiritual
archeologists, we need patience and faith that there's something valuable
hidden within these ancient ruins.
And even when we have that faith, we still need to figure
out how to apply what's here to our daily lives. That's the kind of thing the Stephen Ministers concern themselves
with. How can we apply the insights of
this book to real life situations, to times of crisis? Where do these ancient stories and modern
life intersect?
One place this intersection occurs is popular culture, like
in the film Shawshank Redemption. I imagine many of you have seen the
movie. Tim Robins plays a banker who
gets wrongly accused of murdering his wife and sent to prison. Once inside the prison Andy makes the best
of it, leveraging his knowledge of tax law to earn favors from the guards. Eventually the Warden comes to realize that
he, too, can benefit from Andy's expertise, so he makes a surprise visit. Andy gets tipped off just before the warden
arrives, so when his cell is tossed by the guards with the Warden looking on
he's standing in his cell at attention, holding his Bible at his side. You don't realize until later in the movie
that Andy has a small rock hammer hidden away inside his Bible, but you need to
know that to fully appreciate this scene.
The Warden takes the Bible from Andy and without opening it
says, “I'm glad to see you're reading this,” and he asks Andy if he's got any
favorite passages. Andy says he's
always liked, “Watch ye therefore, for ye know not when the master of the house
cometh.” They spar back and forth a bit
more, the Warden trying to see if he can entrust his crooked books with Andy,
and Andy's trying to see if there's
anything in it for him and his fellow prisoners.
After their interaction the Warden and guard exit the cell
and the Guard yes, “Lock ‘em in” and the cell door slams shut the way only
prison doors can. The Warden begins to
leave then stops and turns, saying “Oh,
I almost forgot,” and reaches through the bars to give Andy back his
Bible. “Wouldn't want to deprive you of
this,” he says. “Salvation lies within.”
Of course he doesn't realize he's giving Andy back his rock hammer that
he'll soon be using to chip through to an early release date.
Now, notice we don't bother asking ourselves, “Did this
really happen?” Because we know
intuitively that's not the point. The
novelist Stephen King dreamed this up from his imagination, but the symbols in
art are often more revealing then the most vigorous non-fiction. And what is the symbolism, the person in
charge, with all the secular power, reaches through the bars to the weak and
oppressed, handing him a Bible that contains his means of liberation. Now for those of us who would like to pursue
that notion a bit further, we're left wondering how to use its stories for our
own personal and collective liberation.
I'd like to look at our two texts that we've read today in
order to try and dig down into the ruins a bit deeper. To do that I'd like to suggest that we step
back from a literal reading so we can see the underlying thematic structure,
not just of these particular stories but of our whole religious tradition. Like the Shawshank
Redemption, the overall theme of the Bible and the specific stories we're
looking at today are ultimately about spiritual liberation. We know the tale of the Israelites being
liberated from Egypt which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made such powerful use of in his reference
to entering the promised land. Jonah's
bondage comes in the form of a giant fish.
For Peter, it's a storm that he has to pass through to get to
Jesus. Stepping back and taking in our
tradition and these stories in their most basic elements enables us to see our
religious tradition as a symbol system capable of restoring a sense of
wholeness and meaning to our lives.
So to relate all this to the ancient stories we read today,
we'd want to dispense right away with the unnecessary but understandable
questions of “Did a big fish really swallow Jonah?” and “Did Jesus really walk
on the water?” If it helps you to let
go I'd say the answer to both questions is “no.” But that's not the level we
want to remain on—fiction or non-fiction, because this is powerful mythic
material which is a genre all itself.
Instead we ought to be asking ourselves what kinds of storms have nearly
drowned us, and what kinds of figures have so inspired us that we've been
willing to step out of the boat voluntarily in order to walk out into life's
storms.
At first I thought these two images might be
so distinct that they'd be better treated separately. But after sitting with it for a while it occurred to me that
there's a relationship between these two distinct religious experiences. We could say that the Jonah experience
points to those times in life when an emotional or interpersonal storm
envelopes us against our will, much like the snow storm that enveloped us last
night. We find ourselves swallowed up
in the darkness of a process that we feel powerless to control. The Peter experience, by contrast, speaks to
those times when we make a conscious choice to step out of the boat to walk
into the storm. Given the freshness of
last week's King readings, we can invoke the image of Martin Luther King Jr.
giving up the safety of a prestigious pulpit to venture out into the storm of
the Civil Rights Movement, a storm that eventually took his life.
I'm personally very
interested in the relationship between the Jonah experience and the Peter
experience. In religious circles
there's an ongoing debate between those who are concerned about social justice
and those who place their emphasis on internal religious experience. Some—and I would include myself here—are of
the opinion that these two poles are not mutually exclusive but are in fact
joined as one.
We all, like Jonah,
have to go through our time in the belly of the beast. This can pertain to times of acute
suffering, or merely long periods of languishing in situations which frustrate
our basic potential in some fundamental way.
Now I think this applies to all of us.
We're all here for a reason, and yet who among us has achieved his or
her full potential? Those of you who
have can just head over to coffee hour now, or stick around to better
understand what the rest of us are going through. As Joseph Campbell puts it, we're all engaged in the hero's
journey. We've got our tasks, yet we
have to descend into the depths of our respective psyches, wrestling with the
demons of past generations before we can seize the prize.
For me, personally, my time in the belly of the beast was
the couple of years leading up to my divorce and its immediate aftermath. That was the darkest time in my life that I
was only able to escape with the help of a couple of very special angels—my
sister Linda and her partner, Mary. But
with their help and the grace of God I saw my way through it and got spit out
of the whale, finding myself on the shores of New York City and starting out at
Union seminary. Just the other day, a
few days after my ordination, I had a powerful dream that serves as an inner
capstone to this inner journey I've been on:
I was with
Lynette in the ocean. I looked behind
me and saw a huge wave that had appeared out of nowhere rising up to pummel
us. It came crashing down on us and
pushed us to shore. As soon as I could
stand I began running back with the receding water, looking for Lynette. I found her and lifted her up out of the
water and saw she was going to be okay.
Those of you attended the psychology and religion Adult Ed.
event know that I put great stock in dreams, believing they are fundamentally
spiritual in nature. I take the wave in
this dream to be my divorce and it did nearly drown me. But at the same time it's what washed me up
on the shore of my new life. Like
Jonah, I tried to run from my destiny.
And like Jonah, I ended up running smack into the storm. Like Peter, I had to reach out for help to
get through the storm and to avoid drowning.
So aspects of both archetypal patterns are present in my personal
storm. I have come to see that there is
a relationship between our own healing and liberation and our capacity to reach
out to others. In our Stephen Ministry
here at the church we've made that discovery as well. We've found we have to continually work on our own spiritual
growth to be of use to others.
We see this modeled in today's text as well. The gospel account says that after he
dispersed the crowd, Jesus went up to the mountain by himself to pray. And then, the following morning, he ventured
forth into to the storm to find his disciples.
The gospel narrative spurns a solely introspective model of
spirituality, lifting up something more akin to what Harvard theologian Harvey
Cox has called an “engaged mysticism.”
Cox says of this new spirituality, “that it is nurtured not by a
single-minded withdrawal from the world but by a rhythm of advance and retreat,
of wading into the pain and conflict of the secular realm, and repairing
regularly into the sustenance of solitude and a [supportive] community…. One encounters God not by turning one's back
on that world, but by plunging into it with the faith that the divine-human
encounter occurs in the midst of the encounter of human with human, especially
in the struggle to create signs of the coming of God's reign of peace and
justice” (Religion in the Secular City, p. 210).
The Trappist Monk and writer Thomas Merton knew something
about this tension between contemplation and action. Merton entered a Trappist monastery and devoted his life to the
inner way, but the social turmoil of the sixties kept compelling him to speak
out—or as was more often the case—to write about issues of peace and
justice. In his diary from 1967 he made
an entry that resonates rather dramatically with this morning's newspaper
headlines. He writes: “I don't have much news of what happened in
Washington [yesterday]—an enormous peace mobilization at which there was
evidently some violence. An ex-novice
whom I happened to meet outside the gate Saturday said that troops had been
called to “protect the Pentagon” and in his opinion this made sense “because of
all those juvenile delinquents.” Merton
then goes on to critique the “stupidity and blindness of American power, which,
in its own terms is perfectly “logical”—and yet its terms are fantastically
arbitrary and respond only to the “reality” of a thinking that goes on within
an artificial and closed system. To
defend your own reality and then impose it forcefully on the outside world is
paranoia.”
We see even in an introspective Monk like Merton a movement
from the inner world of soul to the outer world of social injustice. This is the lesson of Peter, who leaves the
safety of the boat. And of course very
little has changed since Merton made his journal entry. Today America spends more on its defense
than the next twelve countries in line combined. Now, either that's a wise, necessary expenditure, or it is a
profitable arrangement viewed as expedient by those in power. I wonder which position King would take if
he were alive today? With the cold war
over, an ocean on either side of us and undefended borders to our North and
South, is there really a need to increase what we spend on the military? Can we honestly say that the need for the
next generation of fighter planes or the elevation of war into outer space is
more important than feeding our children who will go to bed hungry in America
tonight? I wonder what King would say
about that.
I invoke King's name because I think there's a lesson in his
life and death. For it was when he
began to illuminate the connections between racism and poverty and militarism
that the threats against his life began to pour in. Yet he walked out into that storm, “not fearing any man.”
You might get the
impression that I'm proposing a lone ranger approach to spirituality. But trust me, I'm not. From what we know of Jesus' early disciples
and the early church, there was a balance between individuality and
community. It was the kind of “engaged
mysticism” that Harvey Cox writes about, where you get sustenance from your
community and then venture out into the Empire. The strength of community was what made it possible for the first
Christians to take this message of non-violent love into the brutal and
barbaric world of Rome.
I would venture to
say that we have sailed out on faith together.
We don't pretend to have all the answers and we yet we're not hell bent
on leaving tradition behind. We're simply
sailing along with a compass that says God is love and our task is to spread
that love in the world. And the boat is
filling up—soon we'll be expanding the hull to make more room.
I don't know if this
image works for you, but it sure works for me.
I see us as a community of faith embarking on a grand adventure at the dawn
of the twenty-first century. In a day
and age when people are letting go of religion and yet starving for
spirituality, we're somehow managing to hold both in a healthy tension. And yet a storm is gathering on the
horizon. We're buffered here inside the
ship, but we know it is raging somewhere out there. And God is calling to us, to step out of the boat, to venture
forth into the storm. And at the same
time to let this sheltering space be a place to escape the storm, even if just
for an hour on Sunday morning.
If we're going to
shelter people from the storm we need to know something about the storms out
there and what we have to offer. By
going through the open and affirming process we learned that living life in
America as a gay man or woman is like living in the eye of the hurricane. You're always moving to avoid contact with
the potential wall of hatred and violence.
If you're Asian or Black or Latino, the storm of racism follows you
wherever you go. If you're poor, it's
hard to find shelter from the storms.
If you're a woman, the storm whips up in the most unexpected places, at
home and at work, on the train and in traffic, on the sidewalk in downtown
Summit. These are the external storms, the storms of homophobia, racism and
sexism that continue to ravage our society and the world. But the truth has a
power all its own, a power that can carry you through the fiercest storms the
world has to offer.
We see evidence of
this even in the bleakest low-points of history. Take for example, the Pinochet regime in Chile. Chile's been on
my mind lately because a friend of mine, Lorena Cuevas, who was born and raised
in Chile, just returned to visit her family and interview relatives of the
disappeared for her Union thesis. But the Chilean I want to lift up this
morning is Jose Zalaquett, who was an official in the Allende government who
after the coup went on to organize the resistance amidst constant threat of
death, imprisonment and torture. Zalaquett has this to say about what happened
when Pinochet took power:
The military immediately began to round up people. Because the prisons were not large enough to
accommodate the many thousands taken prisoner, they were put into a soccer
stadium. Congress was dissolved and the
military burned the electoral rolls, forbade political parties and trade
unions, and established a curfew, which lasted for twelve years.
The resistance
remained strong throughout the next fifteen horrific years, and eventually
helped form the truth and reconciliation commission in the aftermath of
Pinochet's reign of terror.
After democracy was
restored, a benefit concert was held in the very same stadium that alleged
“dissidents” were detained and tortured in.
I happened to stumble across a videotape of the concert while visiting a
Maryknoll, Catholic retreat center in Houston, Texas. One of the performers was Sting, who sang his hit song, “Message
in a Bottle.”
I must have heard that song a million times without ever
really listening to the words. But in
that stadium that had once been a house of horrors and this night was being
reclaimed, I heard every one. He sang
it solo, with only an acoustic guitar, and he sang it to a group of people who
had endured one of the most vicious assaults on the human spirit in recent history.
Listen to the words,
“Just a castaway, an island lost at sea.
Another lonely day, no one here but me.
More loneliness than I can bear, rescue me before I fall into despair.”
Then the chorus about sending an SOS to the world. A year passes during which time he discovers the importance of
hope. Then the third verse goes: “Walked
out this morning and don't believe what I saw.
A hundred Billion bottles washed up on the shore. Seems I'm not alone in being alone. A hundred billion castaways looking for a
home.” And at that point the crowed
roared.
The people
who penned these stories were writing from their own spiritual island, and
their message in a bottle has washed up on our shores. Some things have changed; some remain the
same. There is still injustice and suffering in the world, but we followers of
Jesus here in America today are no longer persecuted by the Empire. We are the Empire. Here at Christ Church we have access to tremendous resources and
power, both spiritual and secular. My
prayer is that our spiritual community will continue to explore these spiritual
ruins, so that we might discover the living presence of a homeless Jewish
prophet who dared speak out on behalf of the untouchables and marginalized. There are so many people out there
hurting. Let this place be a shelter in
the storm. Let our eyes be opened so
that we, too, might say, “Woke up this morning and can't believe what I saw, a
hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore.”
Engaged mysticism.
Advance and retreat—and advance!
Amen.
