Copyright ©
I. Psalm 90
Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou [art] God.
Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.
For a thousand years in thy sight [are but] as yesterday when it is past, and [as] a watch in the night.
Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are [as] a sleep: in the morning [they are] like grass [which] groweth up.
In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.
For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled.
Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret [sins] in the light of thy countenance.
For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale [that is told].
The days of our years [are] threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength [they be] fourscore years, yet [is] their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, [so is] thy wrath.
So teach [us] to number our days, that we may apply [our] hearts unto wisdom.
Return, O LORD, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants.
O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad according to the days [wherein] thou hast afflicted us, [and] the years [wherein] we have seen evil.
Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children.
And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.
Divinity School Address, Ralph Waldo Emerson
And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding days can be done by us? The remedy is already declared in the ground of our complaint of the Church. We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In the soul, then, let the redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. When a man comes, all books are legible, all things transparent, all religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the wonderworker. He is seen amid miracles. All men bless and curse. He saith yea and nay, only. The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man, - indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake… None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed… They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.
II. The Lamb, William Blake
Does thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing woolly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice.
Making all the vales rejoice:
Little Lamb who made thee
Does thou know who made thee.
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee;
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by His name,
Little Lamb God bless thee,
Little Lamb God bless thee.
The Tiger, William Blake
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
-
this poem functions as a companion poem
to "The Lamb"
- the Lamb: the creation of gentleness, goodness, love
- the Tyger: the creation of force, destructiveness, power
- how can the God who created goodness be the same God who created evil?
- the smithy like the fire of hell
- the tools: anvil, hammer, chain--hard metal; mechanistic
--the artist/creator here is not a figure of love but of "dread"
- but tyger not simply evil
- admiration of energy, strength, beauty: what is the significance of
"symmetry"?
- ambiguous: is the tyger to be feared or admired?
- like the French Revolution: both positive and destructive
- contraries as opposed to unity
- open-ended questioning
SERMON
Two items from recent news that deserve deeper examination: Roy Horn, of Siegfried and Roy fame, was bitten by one of the duo’s tigers during a performance a little over a week ago. He was bitten in the forearm and tried to fend the tiger off with his microphone, when the animal bit him again in the neck and dragged him off the stage. The tiger was subdued, but Roy remains in critical condition.
On the same weekend NYC police received a telephone call from a man who claimed he had been bitten by a pit bull. They rushed to the apartment building, meeting the man in the lobby and whisking him off to the hospital. They later learned why he met them in the lobby when they received calls from neighbors complaining of a foul odor emanating from the man’s apartment. The police investigated and found a fully-grown Bengal Tiger in the man’s apartment. The Swat team had to repel down the side of the building and tranquilize the creature so it could be hauled off safely. When the tranquilizer dart hit the wild animal its roar shook the huge apartment building.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
If one exists solely in the world of matter than the news events of this past week are facts in a world of hard knocks and nothing more. But if one seeks to walk with others in the realm of the spirit, the proper place for the religious life, then the events of any week contain and exhibit meanings far beyond facts. In the world of the spirit, the religious world of the imagination, there is much, much more.
We exist in the overlapping shadows of two worlds, the world of innocence and the world of experience; the world of the lamb and the world of the tiger. The world we live in is a fallen world, fragmented, divided, destructive; a “tiger’s world” of a fearful symmetry, where we ourselves are part of that schism in that we do what we know we shouldn’t, we don’t fulfill agreements we make, we don’t complete projects we’re given, “the spirit is indeed willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Matthew 26:41) And, yet, that is not all we are or our world is. There is a herd of sheep I pass every weekday morning when I take my son to school. We live in this “lamb’s world,” too. There is indescribable beauty, harmony, a unified sense of our connection with the natural world, a rhythm to life that that full moon the other night invites us into and the colors of autumn cry out today and tomorrow, “God bless thee.” We are creatures that create meaning in life, who nobly try to hold fast to that which is good, strengthening the faint-hearted and supporting the weak. We are the ones that flesh out hope and love from this world-weary, lamb and the tiger existence!
But we constantly confuse the two. We want to cuddle the tiger like it’s a lamb. We want to make tigers household pets. We want the whole world tame. Siegfried and Roy call themselves illusionists and they are very good at that. People were actually astonished that the tiger attacked! It was a ferocious reminder of the danger inherent in creation.
And the tigers we imagine in our world are infinitely more dangerous than the ones that actually roar.
It is interesting to watch and listen to our community in light of the Thanksgiving Worship issue. A few years ago an interfaith worship service was initiated by several of us in Grand Rapids, with GRACE, the Grand Rapids Area Council on Ecumenism, being the primary supporter. A few weeks ago GRACE pulled its support, saying that the objections of member churches and their ministers, along with its declining financial support, prompted their decision. The quotes in the paper from area Christian clergy who had objected to GRACE supporting this interfaith worship were stinging. Those clergymen said they would not worship with people who believed differently than they.
The Grand Rapids Press has failed to address the breadth and depth of the destructive forces beneath this issue. “Leave it to West Michigan to get into a major political ruckus over prayer,” read a Press commentary yesterday, leaving the impression that this was like the childish bickering that politicians engage in over frivolous issues; West Michigan’s version of the Texas legislature escaping to New Mexico to protest gerrymandering! Other suggestions have been made that GRACE’s actions were the understandable result of financial need. They were doing what their constituency wanted in order to serve their membership better and continue as an organization. Intolerant hatred justifiably supported in the name of the larger good of a religious organization’s survival! We do so want to tame our world that we will hug a tiger like a lamb, or worse still, not admit how dangerous the tiger in the living room really is!
Siegfried and Roy are not just illusionists but are symbols of 21st century humanity! The underlying issue of West Michigan’s Thanksgiving Interfaith debacle is the central issue of our time, not some local ruckus, and everybody knows it but few will say it out loud. Why is it that men and women of faith, who profess to serve a God of love and justice, cannot love others who are different, and thereby bring about an increase in the condition of justice and state of grace in existence? Whether it is GRACE, the objecting members of the organization, or foreign religious groups, the question is the same all over. Why do human beings foster this ferocious brand of intolerance, and maintain the inability and unwillingness to see the theological contradictions in it?
I had an interesting conversation a few years back with one of the clergyman cited in the origin story as saying he could not worship with those who believed in a different God than he. This man is a good, good man, and is minister at one of Grand Rapids oldest, finest, and largest churches. His church is Dutch in heritage, and has as members some of Grand Rapids most notable names. This clergyman admitted to me that his main struggle was ministering to a congregation of Dutch ancestry, who were witnessing their monopoly over the area’s culture and society disintegrate. They guided the moral, political, social, and civic direction of this area in the past, and now their power and influence has diminished to that of mere philanthropy!
I think that the human capacity for confusion is so immense as to, in appearance at least, dwarf our capacity to love and bring about justice. And I think the human capacity for confusion is the yield of deep human anxiety over time. We feel the present slipping away. We know the future includes our end. So we clutch the past in a death grip, “cannot see in secret,” and “love to be blind in public,” like a man who thinks his tight clutch over the sand in his hand successfully holds it, while unbeknownst to him it leaks out the bottom of his fist.
The past is soothing and the future frightening because we do not have faith. We heed the dead creeds of the past over the exigencies of the current hour. We trust the intolerances of yesterday over the transformations we can work in the world today. We love what was, regardless of its shortcomings, simply because we have the security of knowing what happened, instead of accepting that to live is to have faith that love and justice can be made real and the past redeemed. And that we are called by creation’s God to shape existence into the likeness of love and forgiveness, those higher sentiments which have been given to us at our birth.
Emerson and our Unitarian forbears confronted it in their own time, over different particulars. Jesus and Moses did, too, and is probably why the phrase “teach us to number our days” would appear in the same Psalm with the plea and pronouncement, “And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us.” The central issue is the same. The tiger hasn’t changed, and still resists being cuddled. For some reason men and women love the past, love their prejudices, love their pride more than they do one another.
In Emerson’s time men and women had no confidence in their own capacities. They relegated inspiration to the past because of a narrow view of human nature. They believed inspiration was the possession of the past because they did not trust their own capacities to receive inspiration. They did not trust what they could see. But today, men and women have no confidence in anything but what they as individuals can see. They see no faith but their own, and think God fashions himself into their likenesses of Him. We are illusionists, and think we can domesticate God as well as tigers! And we fight to the death, usually the death of others and of hope, justice, wisdom, and love, so that the illusion remains.
But, what we don’t see today exists as surely as it did in Emerson’s, Jesus’, Moses’, and all time. “God speaketh, not spake!” There is a spirit alive over which hatred and intolerance and prejudice and death and destruction has no dominion. And it is this spirit alive in the world that is the source of beauty, hope, and love, the lamb’s world of innocence that originates in the imagination and towards which the world of experience needs be aimed! There are facts in this world. Tigers can’t be tamed! But the world is more than just one of fact. It is also a world of the sprit, now and tomorrow.
Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children.
And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.
AMEN.