The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel & The Reverend Seth Ethan Carey
March 27, 2011, 3rd Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn,
Illinois, UCC
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Scripture: Romans 5:1-5
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God
through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this
grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of
God. And not only that, but we also
boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and
endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not
disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the
Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Sermon:
Seth Ethan Carey:
In
the darkness, I hear him breathe. My other senses have grown stale, numbed by
the thick dark of the sleepy hours before dawn, but I can hear him breathe. I
listen as the air in his lungs escapes his lips in slow, hollow gasps, rattling
like an infant’s toy, or a snake. I hear the rasping sound and imagine a lonely
zombie waiting patiently in the rain outside my bedroom window, breathing on
the glass, moaning low, watching me sleep.
The
thought startles me awake, and I realize that I’ve dozed off in the rocking
chair with the child still in my arms. The clock reads 3:46 a.m., and an old
Godzilla movie flickers on the television screen, the volume turned all the way
down. The giant, radioactive lizard stomps upon the burning wreckage of Tokyo,
howling silently. My son provides the soundtrack with a sharp, guttural cry
that would have done Godzilla proud.
What
can I say? My boy’s got good taste in movies. Come to think of it, I don’t even
remember turning the TV on.
I
marvel at how someone as ridiculously cute as this baby, swaddled in his cuddly
blanket like a tiny burrito, could produce a noise so dreadful as to inspire
nightmares. Little Ethan stirs and settles back onto my chest, hopefully
returning to dreams more pleasant than mine. But whatever it is he dreams of,
his slumber is restless. Ethan makes lots of faces when he sleeps; some of them
are funny, like the one that makes him look like a constipated turtle. Others
are anguished. His arms and legs rarely stop moving for long, and he seems to
be tormented by a racing mind, or perhaps something he ate.
St.
Paul writes that, “suffering produces endurance,” and I can now testify to this
personally. Having spent many long nights tending to the needs of a restless
child who refuses to sleep in his crib, staring at late night infomercials
through bleary eyes, my wife and I have suffered from varying degrees of sleep
deprivation for weeks. And for my part, I’m finding that I’m actually getting
used to it. Before Ethan was born, I needed 7 or 8 hours of sleep to function
properly. Now, I’m grateful for 3 or 4. As the old saying goes, ‘Whatever
doesn’t kill you will indeed make you stronger.’
But
I worry for my son. He has also suffered, far more than I have as of
late—suffered with the pain of being alive.
Caring for an infant, one becomes keenly aware of how difficult it must
be to inhabit a human body for the first time. His senses are always under
attack, overwhelmed by the frightful site of his mothers tangled hair after many
a sleepless night, or the pungent odor of his father’s cheap cologne. He
endures the lullabies that I sing him, too, most of them being pirate shanties
and depressing Tom Waits songs that aren’t entirely appropriate for children.
Deafening reports echo from Ethan’s diaper, and his liquid diet leaves much to
be desired. His every movement is clumsy, uncertain, like someone who’s driving
a car with a manual transmission for the first time. Ethan wears his body
uncomfortably, unnaturally, as though he were never intended to have one at
all. He was born knowing how to cry—and how to do it well—though he’s just
beginning to learn how to smile. But will he be able to keep smiling when life
gets hard? Yeah, someday he will.
Because
suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character.
Lillian
Daniel:
Two weeks ago, we were remembering Eve and the creation story.
Today we ask: Why did God create us with bodies? Why not leave us as spirits,
companions to God untroubled by physicality? Why not just let us exist as
bodiless creatures, free of colic, and the struggles of growing up, free of
earthquakes, physical addictions, hunger and disease?
Paul writes that suffering produces endurance and then that
endurance produces character. Could our physical bodies be a place of building
moral character and virtue? Could they, in their messiness, be the laboratory
where we work out spiritual matters, for better or for worse?
In the movie, The Fighter,
the main character is “Irish” Mickey Ward, a poor street kid from Lowell,
Massachusetts, who boxed his way from obscurity into a welterweight title in
the eighties. But his toughest battles took place outside the ring, with an
older drug-addicted brother, a boxer past his prime, but still coasting on the
one great moment when he knocked out the legendary Sugar Ray Leonard.
A boxing movie’s greatest accomplishment is always to interest
people with no interest in boxing… in boxing. The Fighter does that, by making you feel like you are right in the
ring, enduring the physical punishment of losing a match to someone with twenty
pounds on you, but seeing the skill, the endurance and art of it all. Clearly a
sport that requires tremendous physical discipline as well as physical pain,
those of us who would never enter a ring, enter into the physical endurance of
it with our imaginations.
The two brothers are a study in contrasts when it comes to their
bodies, their physical endurance and their character. There are countless
scenes where the younger Mickey works out on the punching bag with furious
intensity and endurance, determined to improve himself, while his older brother
parties with his friends, and abuses his once fit body with drugs and alcohol
all day long.
A has-been and petty criminal, Dicky, the older brother, imagines
himself training and mentoring his younger brother. He even convinces himself
that the documentary camera crew following him around is filming his boxing
come-back.
But later, when the show comes on television, Dickie, now in
prison, watches it and realizes that it is a show about drug addiction and he
is the star, but the star loser.
Suddenly, the former athlete sees himself as he really looks physically.
After years of drug use, the former boxer is bone thin, out of shape, and
missing teeth. And that’s his turnaround.
In the next scenes, Dickie puts himself into a constant regimen of
prison yard exercise, running, lifting weights and boxing. It is as if the
former athlete knows that in order to have any healing inside, he has to work
on the outside too. By the time he leaves prison, he knows he’s not ready for
the professional ring, but he has a body that is drug free and works again, and
you realize that the athlete might really have a come-back in his future after
all, not as a boxer, but as a responsible adult who can follow through for the
people he loves.
Because endurance produces character, and character produces hope.
Seth
Ethan Carey:
I
once heard a story about a young family with two children, one of them being
only a few days old. Having brought their infant son home from the hospital,
their daughter—only a small child herself—was found standing by his cradle one
night after she thought her parents had gone to sleep. She seemed to be talking
to to him, and from their vantage point just outside the nursery doorway, her
mom and dad heard her say something remarkably profound to her baby brother.
“Tell
me what God is like,” she whispered. “I can’t remember anymore.”
As
Christians, we believe in a world to come, an afterlife beyond our time on this
earth. But rarely do we ever speak of what might have come before this life.
Are our souls conceived alongside our bodies, or did they already exist
someplace else before being chained to this flesh, to these bones? The old Jewish sages wrote of a chamber they
called the Room of Guph, a treasury of young souls that dwell in Heaven,
waiting to be born. Perhaps we come into this world with vivid memories of that
place, still able to recall the colors of Heaven and the face of God. But as
our physical senses overwhelm us, those memories fade like dreams. We sink into
a prison of matter, bound by molecules and atoms and the limits of our sensory
perception—those things we can taste, smell, hear, see, and touch.
Why,
then, do the infant souls that drift in the Guph allow themselves to be born on
earth, to be confined to the strict limitations of the human body? Perhaps it’s because the human body doesn’t
confine these souls at all—on the contrary, it allows them to grow.
Suffering
produces endurance, and endurance produces character. And our character
produces great things, for it is more than the sum of our physical parts. I,
Seth Ethan Carey, am more than my arms and legs, more than the blood that flows
in these veins, more than the stubborn beating of my heart. I am a husband, and
a father. I have a weakness for Reece’s peanut butter cups and Japanese science
fiction. I have a morbid and unnatural fear of manual labor. None of these
characteristics that define me would be possible without my body—all of them
are a product of my physical senses.
But
what these give rise to other senses, too, beyond the physical ones? Doctors
and psychologists use the term Sensorium
to describe the totality of human perception; not just the things we can see,
hear, and touch, but also our opinions, interpretations, and beliefs about
those things. So while our Sensorium is rooted in the physical world, it also
extends well beyond it. That means that the human body is a Petri dish of
sorts, a crucible wherein the rare conditions for spiritual growth are made
possible. We are born with five senses, but with the potential to develop
endless sensibilities—things like
compassion, love, courage, generosity, and hope. Character produces hope.
And
so my tired eyes watched the television screen, watched as Godzilla sank
defeated into the waters of Tokyo Bay. And as my ears were filled with the
sound of my infant son wailing, my hands holding his small body close to my
chest, other senses were at work in my soul.
In
particular, I was hopeful—hopeful that if humanity could manage to silence the
deafening roar of Godzilla, I could at least manage to get my son to stop
crying and go to sleep before dawn.
But
how could I afford to be so optimistic? Because character produces hope, and
hope does not disappoint us.
Lillian Daniel:
When
I was a child I lived in Tokyo, for my father was a foreign correspondent, a
journalist covering the Vietnam War. We lived in a Japanese neighborhood, in a
traditional Japanese house, which meant that it had tatami on the floor, woven
straw mats that take the place of carpeting and in some cases furniture, for I
remember our neighbors’ houses where people sat in sparsely furnished rooms
with pillows on the straw mats on their floors.
Other
memories from the Japanese house include a bathtub that you stood up in, rather
than lay down. Picture a bathtub structure, but in the shape of a shower stall,
where it would be filled with boiling hot water higher than one’s waist. You
bathed before getting into the water, standing outside the tub, since that
bathtub water had to stay clean for the whole family to use. It was only filled
once a day.
And
I also remember the paper walls inside the Japanese house. They were like thick
screens that you could slide, in some cases, and they were flimsy. They were
not made to last, much like the whole house.
My
parents told me that these Japanese houses were built to be temporary.
Earthquakes were a part of that, and I remember huddling under the dining room
table as the world shook around us. But those earthquakes were small and seldom
very scary. We always came out all right with just a few broken items that fell
off shelves and hit that table instead of our heads.
Houses
were seen much like cars, not expected to last forever, but built with the idea
that they would be replaced. Today, my brother-in-law, Sid, and his Japanese
wife, Youko, and my three nieces and nephews live in a house very much like
this in the suburbs of Tokyo, built to last twenty or thirty years and then be
replaced. For houses do not live forever.
In
the days after the recent terrible earthquake in Japan, our family was greatly
relieved to hear news that our family was doing OK and that their house was
still standing. But it had been an
ordeal. Youko had been at home with a baby and a toddler, at first upstairs,
then downstairs under the dining room table as their belongings fell all around
them; and finally it was so severe she decided she’d be safer outside. My niece,
Grace, stayed at her school, along with the other students, for several hours,
where they were safer there in the playground. Sid had been stuck at the office
and was helping another man get to his hotel and did not get home to see his
family until 3 a.m. But at least they were all safe. My three-year-old nephew,
Louie, is still grabbing his favorite toys and storing them under the dining
room table in case it happens again.
The
people of Japan have gone through incredible physical devastation. The enormous
tidal waves swept away houses and cars as though they were children’s toys and
not the real thing. Any confidence we had in our ability to construct things
that last was swept away in those images. But it’s not just the houses that
were swept away, but people, and not just people, but hope, too. When you go
through that kind of suffering, when you are devastated by grief, your hope can
get swept away, too.
So,
I remember how moved I was by a news story that happened the same day that two
thousand bodies swept up on the shoreline in Miyagi. Exhausted rescue workers
were shocked at the horror of so much loss of life, but on that very same day,
Time magazine reported this incident:
“More
accustomed to hearing the crunching of rubble and the sloshing of mud than sounds
of life, they dismissed the baby’s cry as a mistake.
Until
they heard it again.
They
made their way to a pile of debris and carefully removed fragments of wood and
slate, shattered glass and rock. And then they saw her: a four-month-old baby
girl in a pink woolen bear suit. A tidal wave literally swept the baby from her
parents’ arms when it hit their home on March 11.”
“Her
discovery has put a new energy into the search,” a civil defense official told
a local news crew. “We will listen, look and dig with even more diligence after
this.” [1]
Human
hope is an amazing thing. In the face of two thousand dead bodies, it was the
discovery of one single baby in a pink bear suit that gave energy to the
exhausted, and gave the people hope once again.
Hope
is not logical, it makes no sense from a numbers perspective, and it’s not
something you can prove. But human beings seem to have been built with a divine
microchip inside us, the capacity for hope in the face of suffering. Against
the odds, we build our case not on the devastation of thousands but upon the
shrieking cry for life of one baby in a pink bear suit.
For
it was as a shrieking baby that God came to be born upon the earth as the baby
Jesus, to keep us company in these our awkward, fragile human bodies. Jesus
cried like a baby, and lived like a man. He suffered in his body but also must
have known great joy. He lived, died and then lived again and promised us that
while our bodies, these physical houses are not built to last forever, through
the power of our creator, we do.
Suffering
can devastate us for moment, but in the end it is the crying baby who reminds
us that hope is the greater reality.
Because…
Lillian: Suffering
produces endurance,
Seth: Endurance
produces character
Lillian: Character
produces hope
Seth: And hope does
not disappoint us.
Both: Amen.