I need a poet
A sermon for Sunday, May 17 at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Pasadena, CA
That was the Gospel according to Aja Monet
Whatever touches your heart
A future inevitable as hurt
Let it wind through ou
Be fiercely undone…
let light lead you into the darling darkness
of not knowing
yet to know what it is to feel alive living
whatever
whatever it may be that touches your heart
that vibrating hungry, heavy-handed heart
I wish the author of First Peter was more of a poet.
Or maybe that’s unfair.
Peter, or whomever it was, has his moments
Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.
That’s some verse
So, maybe I’m not being fair to Peter.
Maybe, in the immortal words of Taylor Swift … “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me.”
Maybe I don’t have the ears to hear him.
Or maybe his verse is being outroared by the voices that have used his words to justify some of the deepest pain.
Maybe his verse is being outroared by the cry of offense coming from my own heart when I hear him say:
“Do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.”
And I wonder if maybe I am not alone in this room where for many of us “fiery ordeal” is not so much a poetic turn of phrase but a literal traumatic memory of what we have endured and are still enduring as too many of us have not yet returned to our homes and for too many disaster capitalists and vulture investors have given those most desperate and vulnerable among us pennies for the land that housed our memories and was supposed to ensure our security as life concluded.
I wonder if maybe I am not alone in this room. I wonder if many, most or even all of us are completely unsurprised by the fiery ordeals that keep taking place, by the atrocities of the day that have become the soul-killing white noise that maybe is outroaring any virtuous poetry that Peter has to offer.
“My grandchildren will have fewer rights than I did,”
my friend the Rev. Gayle Fisher-Stewart lamented to me this week as we talked about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
I wonder if maybe I am not alone in this room when I bristle as I hear spoken from church lecterns this morning a call to “rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings”
Maybe I have heard too many generations of preachers standing in places like this quoting these words and others from Peter’s letter.
From Thornton Stringfellow, the prolific slaveholding Virginia pastor who used Peter’s letter to justify slavery and saying “the duty of the slave is obedience” to Evangelical megachurch pastor John MacArthur of Grace Community Church right here in this century in Los Angeles who preached on this very passage
“God may use persecution to purify His church.” and “Christians are to accept suffering as part of God’s purpose.” all the while sitting on nearly $15 million in personal assets from his career of so-called preaching of the Gospel.
Mmm mmm … Iranian poet Kamand Kojouri was right when she wrote:
“Some people are in such utter darkness, they will burn you just to see a light.”
Maybe those hateful voices are still too loud in my ears. Maybe my own reactivity to them is too sharp, as I feel bile rising that I don’t want to spew over you wonderful unsuspecting people, whether you share it or not.
Maybe I need to take a moment.
And maybe you can join me.
Maybe we can take a moment.
Take a moment and close our eyes.
And feel
Whatever touches your heart
A future inevitable as hurt
Let it wind through ou
Be fiercely undone…
let light lead you into the darling darkness
of not knowing
yet to know what it is to feel alive living
whatever
whatever it may be that touches your heart
that vibrating hungry, heavy-handed heart
Feel it. And know you are not alone.
Feel it.
And look at one another.
And know we are not alone.
I was talking to Kim Jackson this week, an Episcopal priest and Georgia State senator, and we were talking about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and I asked her what her heart was saying or singing or screaming and she said:
Yeah, there’s an old, old song from the African American tradition that I feel like it rose in my spirit in a way that feels totally contradictory to what my actual body was feeling. So, my spirit had the song that says, I don’t feel no ways tired. and I do physically feel tired and I am physically very much tired of having to fight to defend the franchise for Americans, right? But that rose up in my soul.
I don’t feel no ways tired.
And I had this clear sense of like this is work that I don’t do by myself …and the reason why I can say I don’t feel no ways tired is because there’s this whole cloud of witnesses. All of these folks together with our energies combined are ready for this and are able to propel like I think I got this clear sense of we’re not doing this alone.
Feel it.
whatever it may be that touches your heart
that vibrating hungry, heavy-handed heart
And now you are not alone.
And look at one another.
And know we are not alone.
Know that we are exhausted and yet at the same time we can look in each other’s eyes and say “I don’t feel no ways tired.”
And that we can feel all those things and much, much more … at once.
Peter was writing this letter to followers of Jesus in Roman provinces in northern and western Asia Minor. His readers were being persecuted because they would not participate in the cults that worshipped an Emperor who thought he was a God.
Hmmmm..
His readers were being persecuted because they would not worship an Emperor who occupied their streets and threw their friends and family into prison without charge, who used the fruits of their labors to raise armies to kill in other parts of the world and fund imperial building projects like arches and grand halls and to sustain an elite lifestyle for him and his cronies. Who used increased surveillance and arrest to control the people and punish his adversaries.
They would not worship an Emperor who imposed a system where elite senators and wealthy landowners held enormous power, while laborers, women, immigrants and anyone who did not pledge fealty to that Emperor had limited rights if any at all.
If Green Day were playing Pontus, Galatia and Cappadocia, Billie Joe Armstrong still would have sung
Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay
Or maybe today we can just hear Robert Plant sing
California sunlight
Sweet Calcutta rain
Honolulu starbright
The song remains the same.
And so maybe Peter does have some wisdom for us.
Maybe when Peter writes:
“Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you”
we can pause for a moment, think and say, “yeah… we probably shouldn’t be surprised because this is nothing new.”
But I still need a poet to help me understand his next words that put me on the struggle bus something awful.
But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.
Rejoice in suffering?
I need some help with that.
Because if this isn’t the false Gospel of Thornton Stringfellow and John MacArthur….
If this isn’t cold comfort and a promise of pie in the sky by and by to keep us quiet … I need some help.
I need a poet to help me understand … and it needs to be one who knows the heart of suffering, like the women survivors of deep violence of whom our sister Becca Stevens of Thistle Farms writes when she talks of women who “know the backside of anger, the underside of bridges, the inside of prison walls, … the short side of justice and the violent side of racism and sexism.”
Because there is deep wisdom here in what Peter is saying. And it’s a wisdom I need to hear not from those who are telling Dr. King in his jail cell to “wait” but from those who have waited long enough.
I need poets like those women from Thistle Farms who write:
I am from chaos and confusion
I am from my father’s lap, crawling down after he’s passed out.
I am from a pony bottle of Miller Genuine Draft.
I am from a closet where I hide from my father.
I am from a bathroom watching the blood from the needle shoot to the ceiling
I am from a highway to hell on an early Saturday morning.
I am from my kids crawling out of my lap after I nodded out.
I am from the smell of alcohol on many men.
I am from addiction.
I am from scorched Hamburger Helper that my babies had to eat. (And…)
I am from a life of one to a life of many.
I am from bleakness to pure light
I am from dying to recovering.
I am from anger to forgiveness.
I am from being nothing to being everything.
I am from bondage to freedom.
I need poets like these.
Poets who don’t just “kill for inspiration and sing about the grief” but I need poets who know deep suffering to interpret Peter for me.
Because It’s hard for me to think about rejoicing in suffering until I remember something those poets have begun to teach me.
Wisdom from those who have suffered and yet lived.
Wisdom of those who are
from bleakness to pure light
from dying to recovering.
from anger to forgiveness.
from bondage to freedom.
I remember the wisdom of Kim Jackson … that I can be absolutely exhausted, and I can wail with the last wisp of breath in my lungs “I don’t feel no ways tired” … and both can be true.
We can lament and scream at the suffering we are enduring and we can stand with generations of freedom fighters in the street and defiantly sing with joy to bring it on.
“We ready. We ready. We ready. For y’all.”
It’s hard for me to think about rejoicing in suffering until I remember that rejoicing doesn’t mean we can’t lament … that rejoicing doesn’t mean we shouldn’t lament. Because the only way to healing is not around but through.
Rejoicing in suffering is not the toxic theology of so many comfortable preachers who depend on sanctifying oppression to keep the cash flowing. As Delores Williams writes in Sisters in the Wilderness
“There is nothing of God in the blood of the cross.”
The Gospel truth is that Jesus did not come to show us we could endure suffering or survive death or that there was some virtue in either. Jesus came to show us we could live more fully. And part of that living fully is leaning into the pain and the suffering, the grief and the anger.
It is a truth that springs from every major religious tradition.
Whether it is Peter’s words here
… or Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk writing
“There is no heart so whole as a broken heart”
“Indeed, with hardship comes ease.”
…or Sikh Guru Granth Sahib saying
“In pain as well as pleasure, meditate on the Lord.”
…or even Thich Nhat Hanh saying simply:
The only way to the joy is to go through the pain together.
Because as the centuries pass, the poets keep singing and the song remains the same. Poets singing out of suffering they know so well.
Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth. (From Kindness)
Tears are a mystery,
Smiles a mystery
Love a mystery,
The tears of that night were the smile of my love.
I am not a tale to be told
Not a song to be sung
Not a sound to be heard
Or something that you can see
Or something that you can know
I am common pain. Cry me out. (From Collective Love)
Or Andrea Gibson screaming
And finally
There are stars in your dark side brighter than the sun.
When we don’t hold hands and meet eyes and lean together into our suffering that suffering becomes the cancer that silently consumes us.
And yet if we do,
…as we do,
the love that is the greatest power for healing the universe will ever know is set free to do her work.
Of all the lies Empire has told in the past decade none has been deeper, more insidious and more catastrophic in its effect than the casting of vulnerability as weakness and empathy as sin.
And it is a false Gospel preached with great intent because on some level those preaching it know that if they allow not only those who are suffering but themselves to be vulnerable and empathetic the whole system would collapse … and though it would liberate them too, they would have to go through the pain of feeling to heal that is the only way through for all of us.
There is a reason I have yet to meet a community that has come together and allowed themselves to acknowledge and deeply lament with waterfalls of tears the trauma and tragedy of the COVID pandemic.
We followed too quickly the orders to get back to work and get back to normal because even though our bodies were and still are literally carrying the pain and grief of so much loss we experienced during that pandemic
… we were more than happy to soothe our aching bones and hearts in the anesthetic of a familiar way of life that was killing us before the pandemic even happened singing “I don’t feel no ways tired” in the same breath as “hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go”
There is a reason why so many of us hide our feelings even from ourselves, quickly apologize for tears and pathologize anyone who can no longer contain their anger even though we live in a world where anger is often the most healthy possible response.
Because sometimes it feels like the only thing harder than the suffering is confronting it.
And so, we pretend it’s possible to go around it … when the cross tells us not that suffering itself is good and redemptive … but that the only way to healing and joy … is through the suffering… together.
I know it’s true … and still I need a poet to open my heart, to till its ground, to plant the seeds of truth and healing that will be watered with the tears I both crave and resist.
I need a poet like Kamand Kojouri, who sings to us of the suffering we have wrought and are wreaking in her native Iran, as she reminds us
I need her to sing to me as she writes
Do not succumb to the half-life
to the indifference and apathy
of those cool and aloof individuals
Nothing affects them.
Their lovers desperately cry
Out for affection
But they shrug their shoulders
For they are always shrugging
And transcend the messy drama
Of the human situation
Oh, this transcendental invincibility
— the shit of the bull!
Even Christ chose immanence
So He could feel as the people felt
Suffer as they did.
You must revel in your neuroses
your sensitivities and sensibilities.
Burn your excitable characters
Do not extinguish the fire. Stay within
Taste the immediacy of living.
Be in life with others
Do not yield to the hypocrisy
The world demands!
Do not succumb to the shadows,
To the half-life, the half-light
We are not gods.
Be human.
Be human.
Be human.
Alleluia. Amen.