Grand Rapids, Michigan
November 16, 2003
32:22 The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok.
32:23 He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had.
32:24 Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.
32:25 When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.
32:26 Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me."
32:27 So he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob."
32:28 Then the man said, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed."
32:29 Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him.
32:30 So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved."
32:31 The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.
"The Regional Writer,” Flannery O'Connor
When (Louisiana author) Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsmen asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he said , "Because we lost the War." He didn't mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence--as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of the country.
Not every lost war would have this effect on every society, but we were doubly blessed, not only in our Fall, but in having the means to interpret it. Behind our own history, deepening it at every point, has been another history. H. L. Mencken called the South the Bible Belt in scorn and thus in incredible innocence. In the South we have, in however attenuated form, a vision of Moses face as he pulverized our idols.
Sermon
Where were you when it happened and what were you doing? When the planes were flown into the Twin Towers, or the Shuttle returned in pieces or took off and exploded, or when the US Embassy in Iran was overrun, or when Nixon resigned, or Saigon fell? It’s been said that we measure out our lives in part by moments of cultural disruption, as well as elation, like walking on the moon, or the Berlin Wall coming down, or the sight of Lady Liberty standing gracefully if not leaning precariously in Tienamen Square. So, where were you 40 years ago this Saturday when John F. Kennedy was assassinated?
Studies on memory have shown that although these moments make a deep and profound impression on us, our recall is not as exact as we insist it to be. Human beings do not remember the detail of their activities during these events as well as their literalism leads them to claim! There seems to be an almost innate capacity in us to mythologize past events by weaving a narrative from recall and hope, to give a story larger in meaning and significance than just “what happened.” We don’t “falsify” our pasts. But, we do take our experiences and create from them narrative strains that have cosmic and mythic themes, because these mythic, cosmic themes, and the urge to shape our experiences towards them, are part of the religious impulse that itself is part of human nature.
I was in Miss Bozworth’s 4th grade class the day President Kennedy was shot and killed. It was morning and we were finishing our weekly math tests. They were 100 simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems that we had to complete in one minute! The principal poked her head into our class and urgently announced that the President had been shot. There was a collective gasp among the students. Other classes were quickly herded into our classroom, huddled around a television that was wheeled into the room. For the first time I watched television at school. Later that day I walked home in silence with my friends, a kind of mock funeral procession that would be reacted on television for the entire nation a few days later when the President’s funeral procession would end with little John John’s salute to his father and the world. Since those days, every time I hear Dion’s song from which the sermon title is derived, “Abraham, Martin, and John,” an anti-Vietnam, pro-freedom cultural lament, I think about the events of that single day and how it changed a nation.
I will tell you that my day happened in just that way, although in the same breath I have to admit that I know memory studies indicate that I probably was not doing that day many of things that forty years later I claim is the true story! The story I just imparted was laced with fact and imagination such that I cannot tell which is which. It’s useless to try! This mythologizing capacity of telling our own lives in the way of a sacred narrative is part of humanity’s religious impulse!
There is no way anyone of us, scholar or not, can tell what actual events composed the incident that has been handed down to us as Jacob wrestling with an angel at the river Jabbock. There is no real way to tell what portion of the narrative is genuine, anymore than what I told you of my experience of President Kennedy’s death, or even your own story of that day! Jacob wrestles with an angel after Jacob has sent his family across the river. He is returning to his brother Esau to ask for forgiveness for grievous acts of betrayal. The wrestling match with the angel is unexpected, and through the physical brawl Jacob is wounded. But he defeats the angel and demands a blessing, which the angel obliges. The angel gives him a new name, Israel, and a new identity, that of a nation. By virtue of the wound and blessing from an angel, what was once just a man and his family became a nation! By wound and blessing a nation was conceived.
Last week I had the opportunity to hear my old seminary professor, Dr. Martin Marty deliver a lecture at Grand Valley State University. He was talking about “Art After 9/11,” and the ever-present tension of terror and beauty that art contains, which was, coincidentally, what we engaged together in worship the last Sunday in October. He used the metaphoric image of the angel. The angel is a heavenly creature distinct from God, and is oftentimes portrayed as possessing a jealousy of human beings’ freedom; a freedom that is the source of God’s loving attention to us. The angel is a beautiful image, and its heavenly origin is depicted in art with shades and colors and facial expressions and body positionings that all radiate beauty. But in the presence of an angel, men and women in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures have to shield their eyes because of the terror of the holy which the angel also contains. Terror and Beauty, the inherent contradiction of art, is the very composition of an angel and of the essence of the holy itself.
There is a fascinating story in today’s paper about the pink suit that Jacqueline Kennedy was wearing the day of the murder, the same blood stained suit that she wore as Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in shortly after President Kennedy died. Then, many of us didn’t even know it was pink, because the photos and televisions produced black and white images. And, in the pictures of her standing beside LBJ, the photos have been altered to remove the bloodstains! I would argue that we remember that suit for the same reason that Jacqueline later becomes the culture’s version of an angelic, first supermodel; that is, the image of terror and beauty.
In the 1960’s our country underwent a change not unlike that of the Civil War one hundred years previous. There was cultural disruption alongside of political assassination. The Civil War was a war we both won and lost, symptomatic of a nation’s internal war; especially one which in the nation’s conscience is known, shouldn’t have had to have been fought anyway! We know in our conscience that civil rights are the possession of all men and women! The Vietnam War was one we both won and lost, if for no other reason that we cannot reconcile having sent good, young men to fight a war that we weren’t even preparing to win. It, too, revealed a nation’s internal war. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in his memoirs released in 1995, admitted the government didn’t have a clue as to how to fight the Vietnam War. And when he toured the country in 1995 to promote his book, he was frequently screamed at during question and answer sessions. Reported one historian: “These weren't anti-war people, but many whom had been pro-war. They would berate him, asking, ‘How dare the government send my son, my father, my brother off to fight and die without a plan?’” (From an interview with historian Alex Bloom)
The Vietnam War, like the Civil War, lives on long after the last shot was fired, and will be an open wound until the last vet dies. The memory of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination is the memory of our country’s Fall; from the innocence of being one country among a group of country’s fighting against Fascism, and winning the good fight of World War II, truly to make the world safe for freedom, to a country which assassinates its own ideals. From JFK into Vietnam our country became a vision of terrible beauty. We “fell” into what it means to be a nation of world citizens! There is a kind of grief that our nation has carried with it since the shot in Dallas was heard, and then seen, across the nation and the world. We can live in innocence no longer, thinking we are somehow exempt from what other nations are or have experienced, for it is for us “after the Fall.” We are no longer innocent. We know. We know how we are capable both of fulfilling and destroying a freedom and liberty that is the birthright of all souls. Does that knowledge lead us to the nihilistic, deterministic paralysis of not doing anything because we know we can screw it up? Does that knowledge lead us to forge ahead uncritically, to damn any suggestion that we can betray the ideals we say we hold? In other words, do we fear the knowledge yielded by a Fall from innocence into a truer existence?
I would argue that by the act of President Kennedy’s assassination, by virtue of the nation’s wound there came the blessing, mixed as it is, of being a nation of world citizens. We wrestled with the angel at the river Jabbock, our innocence was wounded forever, and out of an old family a new nation was conceived. Camelot was both our wound and our blessing. We became a citizen of the world. We have responsibilities now larger than the narrowness of partisan political thought and exclusive religious creed. Our allegiances now must serve to judge our country’s choices by measurements larger than national interest. Freedom and liberty are divinely given gifts for all souls.
It’s been said that the Kennedy White House was the first modern presidency, and there are so many reasons for saying that. But it is the peculiarities that catch my eye. Why was it that John Kennedy, Jr. had, until his death, largely escaped the voracious appetite of the American press and public for Kennedy dirt? As Dr. Marty and I were talking this after his lecture Wednesday night on art after 9/11, we recalled that the image of the angel as terror and beauty also included a third dimension: When angels appear and speak in Hebrew and Christian sources, their first words often are, “Be not afraid.” When they speak out of the terror and beauty they are, they say to humans, “Be not afraid.” It’s what FDR said to the nation after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And it is what little John John’s salute meant. He was an angel, in the midst of the terror and the beauty of his father’s and our President’s death, conveying with his hand what he could not verbalize. Although we have fallen, from innocence into modern nationhood, in the terror and beauty of all of this, “Be not afraid!”
The events of 9/11, although to some may have signaled an end to our innocence, were the terrible reminders of modern nationhood. We are citizens of the world. The things that happened to us have been happening around the world for some time now. And although it is tempting to insist we should do nothing; and it is even more tempting to run off and attack somebody, somewhere, damning anyone or any suggestion that we might betray the ideals we say we hold, there is another path, too, evident on this upcoming anniversary of our wound and blessing. We have responsibilities now larger than the narrowness of partisan political thought and exclusive religious creed. Our allegiances now must serve to judge our country’s choices by measurements larger than national interest. Of the terror and beauty of this moment in time, “Be not afraid.” Of your grief and your hope, of your loss and your love, of your despair and your faith, “Be not afraid.” Be humble in knowing we can easy go astray and destroy what we say we hold dear. Be courageous in knowing and insisting that liberty and justice is the birthright of all souls. Be humble, be courageous, and be not afraid.
AMEN.