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Matthew 17:
14-21
February 21, 2010
OUR MEETINGHOUSE AND THE STORIES OF JESUS A number of years ago someone sent a letter to our church saying that he wasn’t a member of our church and never intended to be one but as a boater, for years he had used our Meetinghouse spire as a landmark as he sailed up and down the Connecticut River, and so, as an expression of gratitude, he enclosed a check for $100. Last week I had a mathematical exercise in which you were invited to estimate the number of times the old bell may have rung during the 90 years of its life. Taking the average of what several of you calculated, the number would have been about 5.2 million. That’s how many times the bell rang from 1817 until that fateful night of July 2, 1907 when it tolled one more time at midnight. So, here’s your brain teaser for this week. Calculate how many boaters there are on the Connecticut River, and if every boater followed this person’s generous example and gave our church a $100 contribution for the use of our Meetinghouse spire as a landmark, how much would we raise in just one year? Suffice it to say, whatever the number is, it would make the job of our Board of Stewardship a lot easier! With this year marking the 100th anniversary of our Meetinghouse, each week in this series of sermons, I’m having us contemplate some detail, some aspect of this building and I’m trying to make a connection between those architectural details and the life and teachings of Jesus. Next week we will conclude this series with a special focus on the cornerstone, an all important part of the foundation of this building, but this morning I would have us contemplate our Meetinghouse spire. Now, some might legitimately wonder about my priorities, that it may be topsy turvy to put the spire before the cornerstone, but I take my wisdom for this from Henry David Thoreau who said, You have built your castle
in the air; that is where it One cannot look at our Spire without being struck by the idealism, even, you might say, the audacious idealism it represents, and allow me to say that we should never underestimate the impact that architecture has upon our spiritual identity, and in our prayers of thanksgiving for all the many ways that our church is engaged in ministry and mission, we should consider the ways, the subtle ways, oftentimes the unconscious ways in which the identity and the idealism of our church has been shaped and inspired by this building in which we worship, and I’ve used the word “inspired” quite intentionally. To my knowledge, there’s no etymological connection between the word “spire” and the word “inspire.” Nevertheless, I cannot help but think of the spiritual connection between these two words. The word “spire” comes from an Old English word that means a “slender stalk” or a “blade of grass” – with emphasis upon the vertical -- but the word “inspire” comes from the Latin word for breath or spirit, and in the Greek word, “Pneuma” and the Hebrew word “ruah”, there is the suggestion that what we breath in and what we breath out is not just air but indeed the very “breath of God,” and so the ancient people would have thought of “respiration” as “inspiration.” Be that as it may, even though there may be no etymological connection, in the history of many cultures, including our own, the vertical dimension has had spiritual significance, something that takes our breath away and gives it back a hundred fold, for there is something awe inspiring about a tall tree, the vaulted ceiling of a Gothic cathedral, a starry night, and the sight of our meetinghouse spire against a blue, blue sky. While we can do other kinds of mathematical calculations, it would be impossible to calculate the ways in which the identity of our church has been shaped and the members of our church and thus the ministry and mission of our church inspired by this spire. No etymological connection, but a pun very much intended. When I meet with our Sunday School children I always try to impress upon them how we believe that the church is the people and not the building; nevertheless, we also need to acknowledge that it’s part of the human condition to be affected spiritually, emotionally and psychologically by the environment in which we live, and so without apology I give thanks for this building in which we worship. Now, having said that, I am amazed that this spire ever made it out of committee. Having attended who knows how many board and committee meetings during my tenure here, I’ve always been impressed and sometimes frustrated by how practical and down to the earth the New England soul can be, and believe me, there’s nothing very practical about this spire! But to gain a full appreciation for this, we need to go back to the predecessor of this building. This building is almost a replica of our church’s 4th Meetinghouse which was built in 1817, designed by Samuel Belcher, the same one who designed the Florence Griswold House and also the Sill house that now belongs to the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts. The first 3 Meetinghouses were built up on Meetinghouse Hill by our Puritan and Pilgrim ancestors, and if you know your history, you know that the places of worship for the Puritans and Pilgrims were exceedingly, some might say excruciatingly simple. As they believed that the only thing necessary to be a church was a group of people and the bible, quite intentionally they kept their Meetinghouses as austere as possible. And believe me, if Cotton Mather or John Winthrop or Moses Noyes came back from the grave, they would suffer from apoplectic shock to see the architecture of this building! And, if they had their way, for this series of sermons I’ve been preaching, they would have had me jettisoned in the same way that Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were sent into exile. So, in 1817 there was still enough of that old Puritan/Pilgrim soul still in existence to mitigate against Samuel Belcher’s notion of putting a spire on our Meetinghouse, but also of course, there’s the issue of practicality. For Yankee New Englanders, so proud of their ability to “get by and make do”, I’m amazed that they consented to the idea of a spire. Part of it, we have to admit – to be historically accurate – is that church architecture here in Connecticut had been changing and more and more churches were adding spires to their buildings, and so our ancestors here wanted to “keep up with the Jones.” Human nature being what it is our spiritual ancestors looked around the state at some of the other beautiful Meetinghouses that were built, and so they said to Samuel Belcher, “we’d like to have a Meetinghouse that would equal the one in Ellington and Lebanon”, both of which had spires. Like all of us, their decisions no doubt were driven by both noble and ignoble aspirations (and there’s that pun once again.) Whatever their motivations may have been, the 1817 Meetinghouse was to become the pride and joy of this community, and you can only imagine what it took to hoist the spire up on top the roof, but according to our church records, it was occasioned by a great celebration. The spire was built on the ground and then, like an old fashioned “barn-raising” with the use of “many men and cattle” it was hoisted up onto the roof. Meanwhile, the women of the congregation brought over to the building site “wash tubs of clam chowder and other delicacies.” Speaking of refreshments, in rereading our church history, I discovered how our ancestors were able to survive long worship services in an unheated Meetinghouse. Right next door to our 4th Meetinghouse was “Parson’s Tavern” and during the long worship services on Sunday mornings, there would be an intermission in which they would go over to Parson’s Tavern and warm themselves by the fire, but also, while they were there – according to our church records – they drank something called, “Hot Flips” which was a mixture of beer, rum and sugar in which a red hot iron had been dipped! So, maybe for more than one reason, they incorporated a furnace into the design of the new Meetinghouse! They were doing what they could to keep the parishioners away from Parson’s Tavern! Now, after the fire of 1907, the congregation had some decisions to make, but despite an economic recession, they didn’t hesitate at all in their decision to do all that they could to build a replica of their beloved 1817 building. Only they had no architectural plans, only photographs and paintings, but they engaged the services of the architect, Ernest Greene, and what I would like you to do is to imagine yourself a member of the building committee when he brought in this magnificent drawing of what would become our Meetinghouse spire. In this series of sermons I hope I have shared enough with you how extraordinarily meticulous Mr. Greene was with every detail of this building, and so I find myself intrigued by the fact that he presented them with a plan that would make our spire about 12 feet taller than the previous one. If one were to look at 2 photographs side by side: a photograph of the previous 1817 building and a photograph of this building, one could easily see the discrepancy in height. Also, unless I’m mistaken, the law of proportion being what it is, Mr. Greene could have taken the known measurement of some detail of the previous building – the height of the cornerstone for example – and from that he could have extrapolated fairly accurately the height of the spire, and so being the romantic that I am, I have to believe that Mr. Greene intentionally designed this Meetinghouse to be 12 feet taller than the previous one. So, you’re the building committee reviewing this design. Given how practical and down to earth the New England soul is, and given the fact that in 1907 there was an economic recession and a fairly small congregation, and Mr. Greene from New York City comes in with these plans not only to put a very impractical spire on the Meetinghouse but also he has designed one that is even taller than the previous one, by about 12 feet! Now, was this a matter of pride – a “steeple chase”, if you will, with Ernest Greene trying to outdo Samuel Belcher by making the spire a little bit higher? One could certainly make that claim, but knowing what I know about Ernest Greene, I don’t think so. Rather, I think as an artist, he designed our spire to be as beautiful as it could possibly be, and if you look at the measurements, you’ll see that it is 136 feet 4 inches from the tip of the weather vane to the roof, and if you were to stand out on MacCurdy Road and look at the building as a whole, I think you would see that in terms of proportion, it’s probably taller than what the horizontal plane would seem to recommend. And that also, I would like to suggest is part of its appeal, or, at least, its theological appeal. It is as if the vertical plane says to the horizontal plane, “measure yourself by me and you will see that you have more work that needs to be done. As I reach higher and higher up into the heavens, it’s incumbent upon you to stretch out the footprint of God’s love to more and more people.” When I read the documents of our church history, I’m amazed that there was so little dissent back in 1907, that from what I have read, the building committee and the architect were in one accord with regard to the spire. It would reach up into the sky as high as the previous one did, and indeed a little bit higher. Whether this was a conscious or unconscious decision, I don’t know, but it was, I submit a spiritual one. If you were to follow the Connecticut River about 95 miles North of here, you would come to the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, and in the late 19th century, little by little, the poems of a young woman from that town were just beginning to be made known, and in my flight of fancy, I like to think that perhaps Ernest Greene read one of those poems, and this poem then served as something of an inspiration for the work that he did in the design of our spire. While there’s absolutely no proof that he knew anything about this poet, I can see wonderful synchronicity between the soaring, even disproportionate height of our spire and one of my favorite poems by Emily Dickinson. I like to think of Ernest Greene in his New York City office taking a break from his architectural work and for his spiritual sustenance, he picks up a copy of a poem by Emily Dickinson that was first published in 1896, only 11 years before he began his work on our Meetinghouse. In my imagination, he reads this poem to himself: We never know how high we are And then if we are true to plan Our statures touch the skies
-- Did not ourselves the Cubits
warp I’d like to suggest that the spire that Ernest Greene designed is the architectural equivalent of Emily Dickinson’s poem. For those of us – being the mere mortals that we are – who are forever underestimating our capabilities, for all those who feel beat down and diminished by the circumstances of their lives, for all those of us who so often and too often belittle ourselves, I hope and pray that our Meetinghouse spire might be a weekly, if not daily reminder of what our spiritual stature is. And what is true of individuals is true of churches as well. We’re forever selling ourselves short; churches are forever saying, “There’s nothing we can do about this and there’s nothing we can do about that.” In a world that measures success in megatons and mega bucks, understandably we sometime feel so small and so powerless, forgetting that the gift of God’s Love is the most powerful force on earth -- Truth more powerful than Lies and Hope more powerful than despair. Throughout New England, there are churches languishing in self-pity and self-doubt, churches that need to reclaim their proud and noble stature, churches that need to stand up tall and say, “I can and I will”, churches so much needed in the struggle to build God’s kingdom of love and justice. For those in the human family that suffer from poverty and deprivation, for those who have long since given up on themselves and so desperately need to know that they are loved, and not only loved but also needed, for children in need of our care and compassion, for these and so many others we need to know and we need to be reminded that we as a church are so much more capable than what we think we are. The disciples were among those who were forever selling themselves short, and so Jesus said to them, “if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” May our Meetinghouse spire be a perpetual reminder of that blessed Truth. For boaters out on the Connecticut River, for bikers and walkers and worshippers may this spire inspire us to be the children of God and the church of God we were created to be, to rise to the noble stature that Jesus exemplified, to be more heroic in our articulation of the truth, to be more courageous in our love. As high as it was before the fire, it is about 12 feet higher now. What is true of the Meetinghouse, may it also be true of the church: May “our statures touch the skies.” Amen.
David W. Good Old Lyme, Connecticut
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