A Child Of God's Time

March 30, 2018

Musical Meditations on Good Friday

Five Spirituals (arranged by Sir Michael Tippett from A Child of Our Time), four readings from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and four meditations by the Very Rev. Dominic Barrington, compiled for Good Friday, 2018.

First Spiritual

Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus,
Steal away, steal away home;
I han't got long to stay here.

My Lord, he calls me, he calls me by the thunder,
The trumpet sounds within-a my soul;
I han't got long to stay here.

Green trees a-bending, poor sinner stands a-trembling,
The trumpet sounds within-a my soul;
I han't got long to stay here.

Isaiah 42:1–4

Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching.

First Meditation

The trumpet sounds within-a my soul… I ain’t got long to stay here.

What would you do if you knew that today was your last day alive? What would you do if you discovered that this was your last day on earth?

I hope that the answer for me, let alone for any of you, might be that you would do just what you have done anyway. Why should today be any the more special, just because it is your last day alive? After all, I suspect that many of you here this evening will probably have sung that classic hymn by the 17^th Century English divine Thomas Ken, Awake, my soul, and with the sun thy daily stage of duty run. And in the hymn, Bishop Ken exhorts us to live this day as it ‘twere thy last.

Well, that’s all very well, of course – but I know how I like to relax when I get a day off work. And it often involves getting up late, eating an over-large breakfast, loafing around the house, and generally being self-indulgent. Which, to be honest, is not how I would like to be remembered – and is not, therefore, how I would like my last hours to be witnessed. When I peer into my mind’s eye and see the epitaph on the tombstone: He was a lazy so-and-so who ate too much bacon and died, I realize I could, perhaps, do better. 

Bacon – and, if I may so at the risk of offending all of you amongst whom I now live – English bacon in particular – is wonderful. But, at the end of the day – and particularly if it comes to the end of the last day I will ever know – it doesn’t make the trumpet sound within-a my soul.

My problem, of course – and those of you who know me will recognize the truth in this – is that when the trumpet sounds inside me, I tend not to leave the trumpet where God put it – within-a my soul – I tend to want to pick it up and shout about it out loud. So when I think about the issues about which I would want to be remembered, the things which make me passionate – and, great though bacon sandwiches are, I’m talking about something even greater – when I look at the ditches in which I would die, I want to get up and shout about them. I want to shout about them, because I want to bring forth justice to the nations.  I want to see justice established in the earth.

Who wouldn’t? Doesn’t the desire for justice make that trumpet sound inside you? Isn’t justice worth being passionate about?

Well, of course – it is. For justice, coupled with mercy, is close to God’s heart. And God desires justice for God’s world, as we are reminded in the passage of Scripture we have just heard – the first of those four songs by the anonymous figure we have learned to call the ‘Suffering Servant’. 

We know nothing about this curious figure that appears in the prophecies attributed to Isaiah, but we do know that he was of enormous significance to Jesus. We can say with a fair degree of certainty that these passages stem from the period of the Exile, in the middle of the sixth century before the Common Era, when all the Israelites of any significance at all had been dragged into a harsh captivity in Babylon.

It was a time of bitter oppression, and the anguish of the Exile is made gut-wrenchingly clear in one of the most famous of the psalms, which recounts how By the rivers of Babylon…we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.

Tormented and humiliated, the Israelites are goaded to Sing one of the songs of Zion for their captors – but they refuse: How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? These oppressed underdogs – the forebears of the Jews of the Kristallnacht, whose plight inspired the reworking of the great African American spirituals by Michael Tippett we are hearing this evening – these underdogs know what they were passionate about, for as the psalmist continues:

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. 

And – for the psalmist – the Babylonians deserve to pay the highest price for their cruelty. In verses often squeamishly edited out of contemporary Christian worship for being too nasty, the psalm ends with a sentiment of revenge, trumpeted out loud in no uncertain terms:

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! 

Those words tell us of a climate of oppression, of discrimination, of racism. They remind us that there is, of course, nothing new under the sun, and they help us understand why it is that in each and every generation, there have been people who have sung Nobody knows the trouble I see, Lord, nobody knows the trouble I see.

As a result of this bitter and severe exile, over the years, Babylon has often been a pseudonym for evil, and, indeed, for Satan, and that is why, all too often on this imperfect earth, people have had to sing, O brothers / O sisters / O mothers, pray for me and help me to drive old Satan away.

And, as so many have done in different contexts in different ages, it was just last Saturday so that so many people marched to drive away some of the Babylons and Satans that scar and degrade the common life we strive to share in this, our own era. Marching against violence, against oppression, against some of the many manifestations of evil that prevent people having that abundant life which Jesus came to bring to the earth.

And it’s about all this – and not about bacon sandwiches – that God calls us to be passionate. For – as we learn on today of all days – God is passionate – totally, properly, and utterly passionate. And that is why this cathedral church is essentially dark and empty today, devoid of all its usual ornamentation, and with attention focused solely on that instrument of torture that is the cross.

But there’s passion and then there’s Passion. And while we have been reminded of the milieu of oppression in which the Suffering Servant appears, we should note, and note very carefully – and here I preach so very much to myself before I dare preach to any one of you – we should note that being passionate does not always mean being passionate. For, says God,

Here is…my chosen in whom my soul delights...he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench…

Earlier today, in the principal liturgy of the Church, we recalled the moment of Jesus’ death on the cross. And when Jesus dies, so the gospel-writers recount for us, a remarkable thing happens to a prominent individual. The Roman Centurion, who is the senior soldier on duty supervising the executions – a task to which we can easily assume he was very well accustomed, this hardened, capable, soldier, who is an icon of the hated occupying power in the lands we now call holy…. The Centurion watches Jesus die, and immediately acclaims the profound truth that Truly, this man was the son of God.

It is the utter brokenness of Jesus, and his final sequence of words – words which vary according to which gospel you chose to read, but which are anything but bombastic or angry – it is this extraordinary death that demonstrates to the executioner himself the remarkable truth of a God become incarnate. A trumpet sounded inside this man’s soul, and sounded in a remarkable way – for God doesn’t always sound God’s trumpets out loud, and Satan gets driven away not by force…. But by love. 

And it is in this extraordinary, and converting death, that we come to understand how God’s servant will establish justice in the earth - for this is the kind of servant in whom God’s soul delights. Jesus was the person who absolutely did live each day as if it were his last - and on his last day, after his last breath has been exhaled, the impact of his death, the love of his death, makes his very executioner his disciple.

For this is real love – not the indolent and indulgent love of the bacon-sandwich eating self that lurks inside both me, and, in its own way, each one of you - this is real love - love that starts with God and with neighbor, and loves self only as a way of loving others. That is what makes someone into a servant in whom God can delight.

And it’s that kind of servant, and only that kind of servant, who can help the world drive old Satan away.

Second Spiritual

Nobody knows the trouble I see, Lord,
Nobody knows like Jesus

O brothers, pray for me,
and help me to drive old Satan away.

O mothers, pray for me,
and help me to drive old Satan away.

Isaiah 49:1–6

Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away! The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away. And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” But I said, “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God.”

And now the Lord says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of the Lord, and my God has become my strength—he says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

Second Meditation

Nobody knows the trouble I see, Lord…. Nobody knows. 

So here we are – Good Friday evening. Do you know, this is the 14^th service in this cathedral church since the beginning of Holy Week. Fourteen services thus far in a mere six days. I know of some churches that don’t have fourteen services in a month, let alone ever in a week.

Fourteen services, of which some have been well attended, and others, of course, not so well attended. Fourteen services which have required bulletins, and music, and ushers and acolytes, and planning and promoting. And at the end of the day, if something goes wrong, or if something fails to please – whether it fails to please a one-off visitor who happens to pass by, or whether it fails to please the Bishop of Chicago himself – if there is a complaint or an issue or a problem, where does the buck stop for these fourteen services, let alone what is yet to come? The buck stops with me.

You know, until I came to Chicago, I’d never done a service on the night of Good Friday. I’d never done a service at this time of day. God dies at 3 pm, and, so I had always thought, that’s that. If God, in Christ, had done all that God could do – did I really need to walk a liturgical extra mile, create a 14^th service, spend Good Friday evening back in church – back in church to hear another servant of God cry out from the pages of the Old Testament: I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity… And this other servant of God – he didn’t have to worry about congregational numbers, or pledges, or budgets, or staffing levels, or any of the things that keep me awake at night.

Tell me about it, O Servant of God – tell me about it. You labored in vain, you spent your strength until there was nothing left. I want to believe I know your weariness and I want to believe I know your pain. I want to believe just how true it is that Nobody knows the trouble I see, Lord…

Because, of course, there certainly are days that I do worry about my job. There are days when I am disappointed when beautifully planned and executed liturgies fail to attract what seems like an appropriate number of worshippers. There are days when I absolutely do feel that I have labored in vain and that I have spent my strength for nothing…

And I know I’m not alone in saying that. For, in truth – although I don’t always admit it – being Dean of a cathedral is not, when the chips are down, the most vital job in the world. If I let a typo slip into one of Alan’s superbly crafted bulletins, nobody dies. If Choral Evensong on a Sunday night attracts twenty and not fifty or a hundred worshippers, the sun still rises in the east the next morning.

So I have to roll up in church for one more hour on Good Friday night… well, so what? For you and I know full well that there are people, many people, here in and around our own city of Chicago, who have been working longer hours and harder hours than I have worked today, probably doing jobs I couldn’t bear to do. I bet the folks who have swept our streets and got rid of our trash – folks in jobs that are often near enough invisible to people like me – I bet they’ve had a harder Good Friday.

And that’s before we even think about the folk who have no job, and who have spent this Good Friday worrying about what they will eat, or feed their family – or where they will sleep or take shelter.

That’s before we think about people like James, who Stuart Hoke and I were privileged to meet earlier today, at the remarkable recovery center Above and Beyond, that has been our nominated Lenten charity this year, here at the cathedral. Founded by a man whose own encounters with the consequences of substance abuse and addiction changed the nature of his family life beyond recognition, Above and Beyond seeks to give the very best of recovery treatments and support to some of the most vulnerable neighbors of ours in this big and sometimes ugly city.

James happened to be visiting the center as Stuart and I were being given a tour around its facilities, and were being introduced to some of its dedicated and loving staff. And, from what I could ascertain of the paths down which life has forced James to walk, he has seen many, many days that make my anxieties seem properly and utterly trivial.

For there are many people – too many people - who, if I were to share my petty and self-aggrandizing concerns with them, would simply wonder on what planet I really lived. People like the wife-and-mother figure who we encounter in the early stages of Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time, anxious and wearied as the society in which she is living is getting more intolerant, oppressive, and making it all the harder for her to survive. A woman for whom Tippett penned the words. 

How can I cherish my man in such days, or become a mother in a world of destruction? How shall I feed my children on so small a wage? How can I comfort then when I am dead?

A woman who, in other words, really gets the right to sing again the song of oppression and slavery which we just heard: Nobody knows the trouble I see, Lord…

And it is at this point in Michael Tippett’s oratorio, for which he borrowed and reworked these great spirituals we are hearing sung this evening, it is at this point that the mother’s despairing and angry son commits the murder – the murder of the Nazi diplomat in Paris that sparked Kristallnacht and lit the fuse of the Holocaust. Tippett scripted it like this:

A curse is born…His other self rises in him, demonic and destructive. He shoots the official…

But he shoots only his dark brother…

Unlike me, Michael Tippett was a pacifist.

Now, it’s easy to say this so many decades after an event which took place well before I was even born, but had I been born some forty years earlier than I was, I think I would have answered the draft – I think I would probably have volunteered to serve in the Allied forces and take up arms to fight against Hitler and the forces of the Nazi evil that so dominated Europe back in those terrible times.

And so, I am sure that I would have picked up the gun handed to me by an army officer, and I would have pointed it at the enemy, and I can only think and believe I would have used it as necessary.

Unlike me, Jesus was a pacifist.

And that troubles me, and reminds me that war is sinful, and that violence between humans is also violence against God, and that God, in Jesus, was unequivocal when he said:  

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek…offer the other also.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. [I say to you]  love your enemies…

And, under the perceptive and powerful influence of Jung, Tippett wrote in his libretto He shoots the official. But he shoots only his dark brother…

A powerful and terrible reminder that, as Paul said to the Romans, there is no distinction…all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And between me and Hitler there is a difference, but it is only a difference of degree and not of kind. There is a difference of degree, and nothing more. And while Tippett, like the rest of the world, was so shocked and horrified by the events of Kristellnacht and all that followed it, he also lamented the assassination that triggered that awful night of shattered glass and shattered lives.

Much attention and energy is currently focused across this nation on the rights or wrongs of gun control. The arguments, the legislation, the rallies – all of it would have bemused Jesus of Nazareth, and, I am confident, bemuse a weeping God looking down from heaven. For I am quite confident that God has no place for guns – and therefore has no place for gun control. Because God’s agenda would be gun eradication. For God deals with other weapons – weapons that are ultimately more powerful and more effective:

The Lord called me before I was born,
while I was in my mother’s womb he named me.
He made my mouth like a sharp sword,
in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me a polished arrow,
in his quiver he hid me away.

And that’s a costly set of weapons to wield. Guns have a pretty instantaneous effect. Herschel Grynszpan, the young and anguished Jew, shot Ernst vom Rath, the Nazi official, on that fateful morning in 1938, and vom Rath died. And that very night, the Nazi regime moved from economic and social oppression of the Jews to physical, violent, murderous oppression. That was all pretty instantaneous.

But God’s way is a longer way and sometimes a frustratingly slow way, for that is the way that love sometimes takes, because love does not want to shoot our ‘dark brother’ – which is only the way to shoot ourself, and sometimes love can leave us crying out that nobody knows or understands our troubles, and that we are labouring in vain, spending our strength for nothing and vanity. To which God makes an astonishing reply.

For God is the God of all things and all people, including, apparently, those who are great at improv, for God’s reply to the Servant, when he bemoans his seemingly wasted effort…. God looks down and simply says, “Yes… and….?”

It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations... that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.

Because the truth is that God did not stop, and does not stop, and will not stop until Love and the words of Love ring out to right the wrongs of fallen humanity – to right the wrongs of fallen humanity across all of God’s creation. And when you and I sing out and act out the truth of this love, then guns will cease to fire, for our words will, like those of God’s servant, be the ultimate sharp sword and polished arrow.

And that is why those who first sung the song we just heard knew that the ending of the phrase Nobody knows the trouble I see is to acknowledge the truth that nobody knows…like Jesus,

James, down at Above and Beyond, James gave us a brief insight into the life he has lived over several decades. A life that has had more downs than ups – way more downs than anything that I could ever lay claim to have experienced or even understand. And one of the staff listening to him speak, being supportive, said, “That’s hard…”

“No,” replied James, gently but clearly. “It’s not been hard, it’s just been real. Because God loves me.” And before any of us could draw breath, he got down on one knee and offered a prayer to Jesus that thanked him for the blessings he had received, and asked for the strength to continue to say no to drugs, and yes to the kind of life he knew he was really called to be living.

He made my mouth like a sharp sword,
in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me a polished arrow,
in his quiver, he hid me away…

Nobody knows like Jesus.

Third Spiritual

Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land,
Tell old Pharaoh to let my people go.

When Israel was in Egypt land,
Oppressed so hard they could not stand,
“Thus spake the Lord” bold Moses said
“If not, I'll smite your first born dead”.

Isaiah 50:4–9

The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens—wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught. The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I did not turn backward. I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.

Third Meditation

The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher... 

The scene is a bar in New Hampshire – a weary-looking man is imbibing rather a lot of whiskey at an hour that’s just a bit too early for that kind of drinking. He has been making idle conversation with the only other person seated there – a woman who looks professional and competent and is clearly rather curious about him. And as the camera pans in, she asks him:

You’ve been a what do you call it? 

A professional political operative…

You’ve been one your whole life?

Well, there was a while there I was in elementary school.

And are you any good at it?

Yes, [he said] I’m very good at it.

What’s your record? How many elections have you won?

All together? Including city council, two congressional races, a senate race, a gubernatorial campaign and a national campaign? None.

So says one of my all time TV heroes – the brilliant but angular Toby Ziegler, from the wonderful, but fictional series The West Wing. In this flashback scene that takes us to the very first steps of the campaign to get the wonderful Jed Bartlett elected to the White House, Toby has been sheltering in a bar, worried that Bartlett is going to go off-message in a way that will lead to Toby being fired. But, for Bartlett, off-message is about honesty and a bigger and more truthful message that helps charm his audience, and only propels him one step further to the goal he seeks – and will thus provide Toby with his first and only campaign victory.

What’s your record? How many elections have you won?

None.

The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher…

So says one of God’s servants, and, as we have just heard sung for us, another, even more ancient of God’s servants stands up to say Let my people go.

But Moses didn’t find it easy to stand up and speak. Let me remind you of the opening of the fourth chapter of Exodus. God is trying to appoint Moses to be the spokesmen for the oppressed Israelites, who have been condemned to make bricks without the straw they need to achieve this task. God is trying to give Moses the tongue of a teacher, to teach Pharaoh that actually there was only one God involved with this dispute – and it wasn’t him.

But Moses wants none of it. Moses is very reluctant to let his tongue be used by God: O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant [he argues] I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.

It’s not a sentiment that goes down particularly well with God, who rebukes him, pointing out that it is God and only God who ‘gives speech to mortals’, and guarantees that God will teach Moses what he is to speak. And, even then, Moses has the nerve to say Please send someone else, which, so the author of this passage of Exodus tells us, kindles God’s anger, and eventually leads to a divine-human compromise with the appointment of Aaron as Moses’ sort of deputy speaker, to help with that great message that the oppressed have sung ever since the pre-history of the Israelites – Let my people go.

Moses is clearly worried that he might end up like Toby Ziegler:  

What’s your record? How many elections have you won? How many slaves have you emancipated? How many wonders or plagues have you brought about?

But if Moses was worried about an ability to proclaim God’s message, that was not the issue for God’s anonymous servant from whom we have just heard. For he was able to say The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious. In his understated way, this Servant of God is not worried about losing a race, for he knows that with God’s help, he shall not be put to shame.

It is the Lord God who helps me, cries the Servant – who will declare me guilty?

Michael Tippett saw Herschel Grynszpan, the assassin of the Nazi diplomat, as being a victim of the dark forces of the world, and a scapegoat figure, burdened by the oppression of his people, and burdened the more by his arrest after the shooting and subsequent imprisonment. As the strains of the ancient words Let my people go die away, Tippett penned words for his ‘child of our time’ as he languished in captivity: My dreams are all shattered in a ghastly reality…earth and sky are not for those in prison. And, in despair, he cries out for his mother, who sings in response, What will become of us now? The springs of hope are dried up…

Earth and sky are not for those in prison, laments the Child of our Time. Hell is deep and a dark despair, sung the enslaved African Americans – hell is deep and a dark despair, stop - poor sinner…and don’t go there.

Well, that can be easier said than done. After all – how many elections have you won? Failure is not often considered to be an attractive quality, and it can lead, as God’s servant discovered, to being insulted, spat at, having your beard pulled out and being physically attacked. Despair and failure are, here, as so often, the appetizer that leads one to feast on full blown shame.

Tonight’s bulletin contains a quote from one of the leading British journalists of the War and post-War era, who wrote about what he saw on the streets of Berlin during and immediately after Kristellnacht. He said, I have never seen anything as nauseating as this…fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the "fun".

The ‘fun’ of harassment, torture, violence and racial hatred. The ‘fun’ of pulling the beard, and insult and spitting. The ‘fun’ of shaming another child made in the image of God. The ‘fun’ of pulling someone down to what has been called ‘the true swampland of the soul’, that reminds us, although most of us need no reminding, that Hell is, indeed, deep and a dark despair…

We don’t know the full story of the Suffering Servant. We do not know what led him to have to give his back to being struck, and to subject himself to insult and spitting. But, if we listen to his story, we know what it was he was given to make his tongue the tongue of an effective teacher – how it was that he learned how to sustain the weary with a word. It was his knowledge of God’s presence with him and alongside him - just like James at Above and Beyond, of whom I spoke just now. That is what allows a servant of God to say I know that I shall not be put to shame.

For with God, and, just sometimes, with humanity (when it bothers to open its ears and its mind and its heart), just sometimes we come to learn that success is not always measured in what looks like victories. My fictional hero Toby Ziegler has given his life to politics, and is asked by the stranger in the bar if he is any good at it – and he is, and he knows he is - even though he has yet to win a single electoral victory.

But he is not ashamed of that fact, for he has learned what it means to sustain the weary with a word. He has learned that it is not a disgrace to lose an election, and that such a result need not take one to the dark despair of hell.

As Stuart Hoke reminded us earlier this week in his powerful preaching, those in recovery often say that their shame is healed when they hear their story told on the lips of another. And, indeed, when I asked the Executive Director of Above and Beyond if there was something useful that volunteers from St James Cathedral could do in a practical way to help the center’s work, quick as a flash he responded, “We need people to come and note down the stories of the lives these people have lived,” he said - “these are stories they need to tell and to share with other people.”

And tonight we have more than that. We see the story of human oppression, despair, pain and struggle not just retold, but re-lived out in the life – and in the death – of Jesus of Nazareth, who, like the one who served God some 600 years earlier, did not hide his face from insult and spitting.

At the end of the same episode of The West Wing from which I have been quoting, the wise and wonderful Leo McGarry, who, at this point, is running Bartlett’s campaign for President, having been the one to persuade him to do this in the first place, Leo is giving Bartlett a word or encouragement not be overcome by the insults he is receiving from his rivals and opponents. And he says to him:  They say a good man can’t get elected president – I don’t believe it. Do you?

Well, in the real world in which we live you will have to make your own mind up about that statement. All I can tell you is that whether or not a good man can be elected president, a good man – the goodest man of all – can be crucified. And he takes to the cross the full knowledge, the full stories, the full burdens of all our heavy loads and failures and miseries, of us, and of all our fellow human beings.

But he is not disgraced, and he is not put to shame.

And that is why we get to avoid the deep, dark despair of hell. That is why we get to lay down our heavy load. 

Fourth Spiritual

O by and by I'm going to lay down my heavy load.

I know my robe's going to fit me well:
I've tried it on at the gates of hell.
Hell is deep and a dark despair:
O stop, poor sinner, and don't go there.

Isaiah 52:13–53:12

See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. Just as there were many who were astonished at him —so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals— so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate. Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

Fourth Meditation

Your face is like a song
Your sweet eyes whisper
And I want to sing along
Your features are in tune
Let's sing together
And turn every month to June
Your face has - makes me a happy fellow
No more singing a capella
No longer lonely
Loving you only

Thus sung Dan Castellaneta, better known as Homer Simpson, just a few days ago, in the most recently broadcast episode about the life of the world’s favorite dysfunctional family, reprising a cult song from a niche short film, Your Face, created back in 1987.

Your face is like a song, your sweet eyes whisper, and I want to sing along…
Your face hums - makes me a happy fellow
No more singing a capella,
No longer lonely, loving you only.

It’s a sweet song of love and beauty - put on the lips, whether by its original creator, cartoonist Bill Plympton, or more recently by the team who give us The Simpsons, put on the lips of a cartoon man whose own face, as he sings this love song, distorts, and goes through a series of ever more bizarre and repellent shapes - none of which stop him singing ever so happily, no longer lonely, loving you only.

For today is a day of distortion, and yet today is also a day of love songs. For there were many who were astonished at him - so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance…he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

God’s Servant, we learn, is not just despised and rejected, he is as one from whom others hide their faces…held of no account. A fate similar to that of Tippett’s Child of Our Time, who, we are told, at the very end of the oratorio, is broken in the clash of powers, and overpowered by God.

And yet…through him, the prophet tells us, through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. Both for him, and - and perhaps more importantly - through him, God’s will shall prosper, we are told - a will that is redemptive, and not just for a scapegoat-cum-servant. Because of this figure, we are told, there is a redemption so widespread, that it is even for us, for you and for me - for all we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Somehow - and now is not the time for a forensic theological discussion of exactly how - but somehow oppression has not been allowed to be the final answer; punishment has not been allowed to be the final answer; suffering has not been allowed to be the final answer; death has not been allowed to be the final answer.

For, so God tells us through the prophet, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high - this very same servant who has been wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, and by whose bruises comes healing - healing, apparently, even for you and for me.

And the remarkable truth is that you do not need to be religious to be aware that there is a truth to this that is eternal. The history of the world shows us that tyrants, despots and oppressors do not, ultimately, get to keep the upper hand. History tells us that walls that are erected to divide peoples get pulled down again, and that totalitarian and oppressive governments do not last, and that those who preach or practice hatred do not prevail.

For even in my own lifetime of just a bit more than half a century, I have watched with joy and amazement as the Iron Curtain that divided Europe after the Second World War came tumbling down, and the apartheid regime of South Africa was - peacefully - dismantled. One does not need to be religious to learn that evil does not prevail.

Michael Tippett, whose choral music has heightened our worship tonight so profoundly, Tippett was a dedicated atheist from an early age, but in the last of his own words in his oratorio, as he struggled to come to terms with the horrors of the Nazi regime’s evil actions of the late 1930s, he felt able to say, atheist though he was, Courage, brother, dare the grave passage. Here is no final grieving, but an abiding hope... 

Our friend and invaluable colleague Robert Black shared with us on the staff an article in yesterday’s New York Times that moved him a great deal. It is a brief piece, penned by the novelist Jennifer Finney Boylan, entitled The Agony of Faith. She was reflecting about the half-century of friendship she has shared with four people she first met in Seventh Grade, all of whom, like her, are now turning sixty.

Chatting over a regular reunion they spend in a vacation house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, she was surprised to find their conversation turn to religious faith. She explained how, as a child, she had lost any sense of faith, and how the tipping point for her had been the literal belief her mother expected her to have in the Old Testament story of Balaam and his talking donkey, as set out in Numbers chapter 22.

But then, just a few years ago, to her own surprise, she found herself sitting in a back pew of a Manhattan church one Sunday morning, only to be transfixed by the sermon - a sermon, as she recounts, that was not about talking donkeys. It was about working for equality. It was about justice…about giving refuge…it was, in the end, [so she explained] about only one thing: the necessity of loving one another.

Jesus, she thought, I could get behind that.

And I think I know why she might have thought that. I think she might, deep down, have realized that getting behind that necessity of love is what takes one through the one, deep, dangerous river that all of humanity, ultimately, is called to cross. She recognized, somehow, that she was called to get behind love - for it is only love that enables us to cross to that camp-ground of God’s, where, truly, all is peace.

And then, at the end of that church service, she noticed a copy of the very same 15^th Century religious painting that had been on the wall in her childhood church, where she had done battle with Balaam’s ass. A painting of Christ in agonized prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. A portrait, she realized, of a man thinking, “Please God, don’t make me do it.” And yet he did it anyway, in spite of his doubt. 

And she is right - Jesus, building on the legacy of Isaiah’s anonymous Servant, building on the vocation from God that he heard when he first waded into the Deep River and was baptized by John, Jesus goes and crosses the deep river of death, and he does so in spite of doubt, despair and agony - he does it despite being despised and rejected by others, oppressed and afflicted, and, finally and ultimately, being cut off from the land of the living. He did it anyway.

And as he crosses the river, Jesus carries us with him - carries our stories of despair, pain, shame, suffering, and every other burden that we carry - strips every burden away so that all we are left to carry for ourselves is the crown of God’s love for us - the crown that reminds us of the glory of being created and loved in the image of God. The crown that is the sign of the love from which all other love this world has ever known has sprung. A love that defies any and all shame and can restore any and all despair.

Boylan and her four special friends - like us - have had lives that have had their share of hardship and grief. In her article, she acknowledges that there have been all kinds of misfortunes. There have been car accidents and job losses, divorces and heartbreaks, newborn babies whose lives were endangered. One of us, she tells us, is in a wheelchair now.

And then she acknowledges the real revelation in her piece: it occurred to me that I have seen things a lot more improbable than talking donkeys turn out to be true. What greater miracle could there be than friendships that last a lifetime?

For this is a foretaste - a very wonderful foretaste - of the love that was lifted high on a cross to die this very afternoon. The love that waded the river in which flows the deep waters of death, of love that, as the prophet knew, will ultimately startle many nations and make kings…shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate. Contemplate, even in the lofty pages of the New York Times.

Listen [demands Boylan of her New York Times readers], Listen. I do not know if an actual person named Jesus rose from the dead. I hope that this is true, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I know this though: On Sunday morning I stood on a beach with the friends of my youth, our arms around each other’s shoulders. The rising sun burst over the ocean, and the light sone on our faces.

No more singing a capella
No longer lonely
Loving you only. 

That is today’s love song - the song of crowns cast down in the camp-ground of peace. For today is the day that we come to that Deep River, through which God went on ahead of us, taking all our broken humanity with him, taking the worst of our stories, to give us a new hope.

I want to cross over into camp-ground…Lord.

Fifth Spiritual

Deep river, my home is over Jordan,
Deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into camp-ground.

Oh chillun! O don't you want to go to that gospel feast,
That promised land, that land where all is peace.
Walk into heaven, and take my seat,
And cast my crown at Jesus' feet.