Sermon: Mystery and Moment

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Mystery and Moment

By Charles Rush

December 2, 2001

is week someone sent me an email with a list of things that kids have actually said about Church and God. I'd like to share a couple of them with you…

After the christening of his baby brother in church, little Johnny sobbed all the way home in the back seat of the car. His father asked him three times what was wrong. Finally, the boy replied, "That priest said he wanted us brought up in a Christian home, but I want to stay with you guys!" That might have happened at Christ Church.

A little girl was sitting on her grandfather's lap as he read her a bedtime story. From time to time, she would take her eyes off the book and reach up to touch his wrinkled cheek. She was alternately stroking her own cheek, then his again. Finally she spoke up, "Grandpa, did God make you?" "Yes, sweetheart," he answered, "God made me a long time ago." "Oh," she paused, "Grandpa, did God make me too?" "Yes, indeed, honey," he said, "God made you just a little while ago." Feeling their respective faces again, she observed, "God's getting better at it, isn't he?" Truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes you just can't believe what little kids can say.

In the story Luke tells (Luke 1:5-22, 57-65), Zechariah couldn't believe what he was hearing either. It was just too good to be true. History had overtaken him and he was speechless in the face of the good favor of God.

I was born in the late 50's into a world defined by the Cold War. One of my first childhood memories was the Cuban missile crisis. We lived in Little Rock, Arkansas at the time and grown people were concerned that the Russians might attack us at any time. Several people that we knew -- and they were not yahoos but Lawyers and Dentists -- had fallout shelters built in their back yards, laden with food supplies, in case the Commies tried to nuke us. It was an era that gave us the great movie Dr. Strangelove. The whole generation cut their moral teeth on the ironies produced by the Cold War-some of them still with us. This morning's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Saad Mehio, reminds us that 30 years ago, we encouraged Islamic militants to fight the spread of Communism. [i]During that same time, both the United States and the Soviet Union, kept adding missile after missile to their nuclear arsenals to the point that we each could blow up the entire world several hundred times over and the stated nuclear policy was called Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD for short.

In the early 80's I remember hearing a lecture by the ex-Director of the C.I.A. -- I believe it was Stansfield Turner -- in which he described a time that our country was on red alert, tracking a suspicious movement in the air flying over the artic circle towards Alaska. We actually got to T minus 30 seconds to launch a retaliatory strike against the Soviet Union with nuclear bombs. At the last minute the suspicious movement in the air was identified. It turned out to be an extremely large flock of migrating snow geese. It was an era where the tension and fear of the Soviets was real enough that we put ourselves in a position to accidentally blow ourselves up in order to defeat them.

There was no question that Communism was really evil. We had Alexsander Soltzheintzen documenting it in detail and in such a way that you ended those books thinking it is a horrible tyranny that will never end.

That was certainly the way the world felt to Alexander Ogorodnikov in the late 70's. Alexander was a graduate student, I believe in cinematography at the Moscow Institute. Alexander came to have a deepening spirituality, impressed by the witness around him of people like Solshientzen and Andrei Sakharov, though less famous. He had organized some graduate students from other colleges and was planning a documentary film on the restless spiritual quest of young people in Russia. For that he was arrested and given a 10-year jail sentence. I believe the official charge was ‘spreading religious and anti-Communist propaganda.” Since I was a graduate student at the time, I took particular interest in Alexander's case. In the U.S. we organized efforts, wrote letters with pictures, to try and get these prisoners released. Actually, we had little hope of that but we felt that keeping them public might well prevent the worst abuses from happening to them in the Gulag.

Alexander had settled into prison life in the infamous Perm 36, so well documented during that period. After a few years, President Mikhail Gorbachev took a short list of prisoners of conscience, at the suggestion of President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and pardoned them. Alexander walked out of jail a free man.

Within a very short amount of time, Communism fell, and Russia was to hold free elections. The Communists wanted to hold elections forthwith because they were organized and known, much more likely to win. Alexander decided to run for political office with almost no money, little time. He did it the old fashioned way, door-to-door. On every street corner in his district in Moscow, he would get up and tell his story with a slogan that was something like ‘A new face for a new day'. People listened. In those days, ordinary citizens in Russia didn't know who to trust. Spending some time in the Gulag was something of a moral requirement to get a hearing. And it worked. His race went to a run-off, so he got into the paper. He won the run off.

In 1990, I went to Russia with Dr. Ernest Gordon, Dean of the Chapel at Princeton University, and director of our organization CREED. We went by to see Alexander at his office in his district, off of Arbat Street in Moscow. There was a fairly long line of people outside his office door, each bringing their problem for him to solve. He gave us a big bear hug. Looking out of the glass windows over Moscow, I said to him, “the view is much better here than in prison.” He smiled, “And the food is better too”, he said.

The two of us talked about the future of Russia and the West, both in our early thirties, with all the excitement and possibility that we might be able to make a difference. Alexander stopped at one point and said, “sometimes I have difficulty expressing my hopes for the future because we do not yet have a language for these ideas.” He took us on a walking tour of his district to show us some of the social and economic problems that Moscow faced and they were profound.

Back at his office, saying goodbye, I said to him, ‘did you ever think you would live to see this day?' He said, ‘from our village as a child, I could never have imagined this possibility.' I was thinking at the same time, if you had told me as a child playing in the back yard with those fall out shelters in the neighborhood in Little Rock, Arkansas that I would one day meet a non-Communist member of Congress in Moscow. Alexander said, “God has done a great thing and I hope he is not done yet.” “I hope He is not done yet either.” It was a moment that the Bible calls ‘Kairos time', a time of fulfillment, a rich time compressed with great meaning. (For more on Alexander Ogorodnikov and the Ministry that he is engaged in presently, click here).

I had a small sense of hope that comes from Kairos moments, listening to Vladimir Putin being interviewed on National Public Radio recently. We share more things in common. I got to thinking that before I am an old man, we just might be good allies. That is a lot of healing.

Zechariah lived in a world like that. The Spirit of God caught him up unawares with a mighty and unpredictable blessing. There was a saying that was popular just before John the Baptist and Jesus were born. The saying was “There was no frequent vision in those days.” “There was no frequent vision in those days.” That means that they felt that God was far away from them. It had been 300 years since there had been a prophet.

Around 538, the Jews returned from exile in Babylon, what is modern day Iraq. They rebuilt their Temple, reinvigorated their religion, returned to Israel. By 300 B.C. however, a series of Greek and then Roman ex-generals ruled the region and a long period of spiritual darkness fell upon the land. “There was no frequent vision in the land.” There were no fiery prophets to galvanize the people to spiritual renewal. Religion had become compromised, meaning that it was used to by the Greek and Roman rulers to keep control of the population and only priests that acquiesced to these foreign powers were allowed to serve the Temple. It was a spiritually cloudy environment, depressing.

People in those days used to read from the prophet Joel, one of the last prophets to write, three hundred years earlier. Joel looked forward to a time when God would be present with the people again. Joel said, “In those days, old men will dream dreams and young men will see visions.” Young and old will become creative again after decades of stagnation.

For Zecharaiah, much like Abraham and Sarah, it came in the birth of an unexpected child. He was too old, his wife was too old. They had given up, resigned themselves that good things would pass them by. It couldn't happen. And it does. He is struck dumb by the events around him.

I was talking with a good friend who has been divorced for about eight years. It was a rancorous, hurtful divorce. Their kids are mostly getting grown up now. I was asking her how the holidays had been, they are so often difficult, trying to negotiate strange behavior from her ex, strange behavior from one or more children, and then her ex's ‘significant other'. So usually she recounts another chapter of “My Family: The Horror Show”. This year, she just looked for long time and then she said, “You know, it was more than civil and I can see that we can be sort of friends.” And she smiled.

New chapters do open up before our eyes, sometimes when we least expect it, sometimes in a manner we could not have predicted. Zechariah wrote on a piece of paper, “His name is John”. His mouth was opened. People were in awe. A new chapter was begun.

The witness of the Christmas season is that God is still at work in our world, that God is working for our good, in an around us, through us and in spite of us, through the times of blessing and the seasons of spiritual sterility. May you be blessed to live in a time pregnant with possibility, to wonder to yourself with a sense of awe, and reflect on the three metaphysical questions: Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going? Watch, my friends, and keep hope alive. It might just settle on you too.

Amen.

[i] “Islam and Politics”, New York Times, Sunday, December 2, 2001, The Week in Review, p. 10.