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June 21, 2009 Exodus 20: 24-25 LIVING STONES Though anyone who digs in the ground around here would probably disagree, one of the gifts of our New England hardscrabble landscape is stones, ask any Midwestern visitor! Our stones, heaved up year after year, as if newly growing in the soil, are a grief we have turned into a thing of solidity and sometimes even beauty. Countless farmers and stone masons over the last three hundred and fifty some years have built enduring walls of these stones, walls to keep the cows in, walls to mark the property boundary. Some of these walls are rough, slipshod affairs, some expertly laid. And we, aftercomers, can read the skill and even attitude of their builder, long after the builder is gone. Walls of stone may seem like an unlikely image with which to open a sermon on Father’s Day, a day we celebrate both the many gifts our fathers bring and have brought us and, more largely, the gifts of all who nurture and safe-keep others. Yet walls, house walls especially, whether made of stone or, more likely 2x4s, do play a big part in our safe-keeping at home. We all need shelter, a sense of solidity, a safe and peaceful place, a home. Now we all know that this day brings with it not only the joy in celebrating all those who have fathered us, but also memories of loss and recognitions, sometimes painful, of the imperfections and obstacles in all our human relationships. These kinds of days remind us of both what is perfect and what is imperfect. This sermon on walls, on enlarging and reimagining our own home walls is perhaps more for the imperfect than the perfect. But this sermon is also for those fathers, and families, of all sizes and kinds, all among us and those many of us in this country right now, as well as all over the world, who feel they cannot be good enough parents and care-givers, even of themselves, because they are in danger of losing their walls, their homes. There is a devastating, though too often silent, worry among us, about our jobs, our mortgages, and the fear of foreclosure, homelessness. In May, in the United States, foreclosure rates were the third highest on record. A million homeowners have now faced foreclosure. A million. Add to our real material worries about keeping our walls, our homes intact, the psychic and spiritual damage: we live in a secular culture which has prospered on the idea that a home represents self-worth and that castles are what a man particularly should have to be a man. So what can we here, the gathered body of Christ, do about our walls, our broken ones, our crumbling ones on this day in which we celebrate home life in all its diverse forms? This is a sermon in which I invite us all to re-imagine our walls as places of shared repair both in reality and in spirit. Real walls and spiritual walls, with an emphasis on each as necessary. Oddly enough, odd because Robert Frost is not a Christian, it is America’s most famous wall poem, a stone wall poem, that shows us how to begin to see our own walls differently. Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” opens with the startling pronouncement, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” The scene is this: two farmer neighbors are getting together in the spring to repair the frost-heaved stone wall that separates their properties. Frost has apple trees on his side, his neighbor pines. Each requires a different kind of soil and so they must be kept separate. When their backs are turned to the wall, in winter, nature itself has worked to undo their wall. The stones won’t stay still. Now there are gaps in the wall. Nature doesn’t love a wall asserts Frost. Yet Frost’s neighbor, working on the other side, thinks that it is “Good fences [that] make good neighbors.” Is the neighbor right—is it a wall that makes for peace and good neighborliness? The poem I think suggests something different. What is making these two farmers good neighbors is not the fact of a permanent wall between them but the fact of their coming together time after time to “mend” their wall. It’s their work again on these walls, their living work, mending the fences, the reminding each other of each other, their meeting, and not the fences themselves that makes good neighbors. It’s not the thing, but people building the thing together that is what is all important. They keep their boundaries—this isn’t about everyone sharing all in common, though some have gone this route; but it is about seeing our boundaries as shifting, porous meeting places, mending places. Frost’s poem points us, but Peter in his letter gives us a deeper, powerful, wonderfully haunting image for us all to remember, for us all to use to see all of our walls differently. Peter, whose name itself means rock, calls us, Jesus’ people, to see ourselves, the builders, the repairers, the beloved community, as living stones in any wall. Our walls, made of living stones. The strength of our walls, not only our church walls, but our house walls, in the people of us, the people who made it, who repair it, who house-keep it, and the people whose memories echo in that wall. People as the strength in a wall, not inert matter, stones, or 2x4s. The building, loving people in our lives as our safety. Peter says we are to be living stones building a spiritual house. He’s not talking about building a church building here. He’s talking about our building anywhere. Peter is following upon the readings from both Exodus and John: God is everywhere, not to be confined in a house, the altar should be movable, the true temple, the true church is, Jesus says, my body, and not any temple made of inert stone. Jesus in John has shocked the elders who ask for proof of who he is. They’ve been building the second Temple in Jerusalem for years and he promises that if it is destroyed, he will rebuild it in three days, the three days of his movement from the crucified body to the risen one. Jesus has come to be the frost heave of their idea of God in any fixed physical Temple on any spot of ground. Jesus’ temple, of his body, is movable, is everywhere, right here and in our homes when we return. We’ve got to keep our eye on the spiritual house we are building as Jesus’ people, as Jesus’ body, says Peter, the risen house, the mansion in the sky, the enduring, unassailable castle. And yet I recognize that this image, of our building a spiritual house, however wonderful, is yet not necessarily a comfort to someone at the moment of losing their home. But I don’t think that Peter is all about the spirit and nothing about the body, all about heavenly houses and nothing about real ones here and now, just as Jesus isn’t, and just as we aren’t here as people of his way. But neither is Peter saying that spiritual houses, seeing our houses as houses of the spirit is at all irrelevant. Keeping our eye on the spiritual house built by all of us means living in hope and safety, of a far different and more reliable sort than say the hope of winning the lottery. Keeping our eye on the prize of the living stones spiritual house keeps us moving on when the going gets tough, moving on not in silent fear but in confidence and hope together. To illustrate this rather complicated idea, this difficult theology that is at the center of our church, the body with the spirit, I want to take us to see a living stone wall, a real wall, that is also a spirit house wall. You can see it. We can see it. I want to take you to New London, to a weedy field near the highway, a field three feet of which will be excavated because the earth is contaminated with lead and arsenic. It will be purified. I want to take us to the lot next to 72 Fitch Avenue, and to invite you all to come down in the months ahead. We’re building a real house nestled in the spiritual house. You can come and see living stones built into the walls of this house. The newest Habitat for Humanity house sponsored by this church, with the gift of land from Shirley Williams, is a house for the Birriel family, a mother, Sarita, with her six children, one of whom now sleeps in a closet. 70 or so women from this church and friends will be largely the ones to build, with her and her family, a house, real walls, of 2x6s, yet walls that are spiritual walls as well, walls of hope and love, walls that are pointers to the mansion to come. We women, bringing gifts of skill and courage and faith, gifts from both our fathers and our mothers, will be, once we are in the walls, rather like the stones a master stone wall builder describes in one of his walls: He says, Every stone gets to its place on a wall in its own way. No two stones are alike. …Their pasts separate them… Their formation in the earth’s crust may have come millions of years apart…. Once in place on a well-built wall, the character of individual stones blends together to create one coherent, readable line on the face of the earth…..Viewed from a distance, the wall’s form has a strong presence…. No two of us stones alike. Each with a deep past. Christian, Muslim, Jew. Young. Older. Yet once in place in the wall, blending, coherent, and strong. The wall: a strong presence. We will, with Sarita and her children, share stories as we build, weaving a rich tapestry into these walls and all of us will remember this house as a meeting and mending place. We will someday leave the house and turn the key over to the Birriel family. It will be their house. But it will also be our house in a way. We will never forget what we have done together, not we nor the family. At night when they go to bed and look at a wall, they will remember the figures of some of us who built that wall and painted it. We will, all of us women, be standing like loving and serene sentinels around the perimeter of this house, guarding it with our love. I am thinking about the days after the house is built, thinking about what we will all do as energetic builders later (and join us, women on the women’s build, and men on the apostles’ build which will be another Habitat House next door!). I’ve been thinking about how we can here perhaps work together to help each other more in rebuilding our own walls, the fragile walls of our homes as well as our spiritual house. We do work on this all the time, but perhaps we could do so more intentionally as a community. Because I’ve been thinking and working with Habitat now for some months as the team leader of the women’s build, I’ve been thinking about Koinonia Farm, where the idea for Habitat started. Some of you have been there. Sarita last Saturday sprinkled some of its soil on her own. She wept. Perhaps it’s time to go again, to refresh and extend our vision. Perhaps we could learn yet more truth and light from this intentional Christian community, where people live side by side in houses built by each other, learn how to see our own more scattered dwellings here as part of our beloved community, houses in our care, families in our care, mending places. I am here setting out a dream and a question, how could we help each other more? If the Amish can raise their barns together, what could we do more of to be the living stones for each other? Is it a dream, or is it our calling, to be the visionaries of hope, building all the temples still undone? Amen.
The Rev. Eileen Syhpher
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