Gloom, Doom, Tomb, Womb

Sermon

The English language can be so arbitrary and capricious. Take, for instance, the spelling of my sermon title, “Gloom, Doom, Tomb, Womb.” Despite their spelling, the words all rhyme. Doom and gloom are both o-o-m, while tomb and womb are o-m-b. But don’t assume either c-o-m-b or b-o-m-b will rhyme. Tomb, comb, bomb. English! While acknowledging the admirable cleverness of my rhyming title, these four words represent the narrative arc of Advent’s lectionary texts. Advent begins with gloom and doom (expressed as the end of the world and judgment day), it detours through calls to repentance (usually John the Baptist crying in the wilderness), and it culminates in the birth of a child whose mortal flesh embraces the tomb. In the process of which, humanity is offered new life through a spiritual womb. Westminster’s preaching theme this season is “Fear not!,” an imperative statement for our fearful times.

The imperative evokes the revolutionary love work of Sikh activist Valarie Kaur, whose teaching mantra is “The darkness of the tomb is the darkness of the womb,” which gives much needed reassurance as we face political challenges our high school civics classes did not prepare us to meet—not to mention global climate change and economic and environmental collapse, accompanied by the eerie suspicion that the personality of AI resembles HAL in 2001.

This Advent comes not a moment too soon, dying as we are, for hope. Fear NOT! The opposite of fear isn’t courage, it’s hope, and hope is a curious thing. It’s not really a goal toward which we can work. It insists on being how we get there rather than its being there. Hope is not optimism—“Everything’s gonna be OK, don’t worry.” In challenging times, hope is an act of defiance. Yet, today’s scripture lessons insist that Judgment is coming! The time is NOW! And they don’t mean, “Jesus is coming; look busy.” This is holding-all-creation-to-accountability judgment.

I recently had the opportunity to sit in on the adult ed class at Southminster Presbyterian in Beaverton. The class was studying a book called, For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional. The author, Hanna Reichel, who teaches at Princeton Seminary, writes as one whose family lived through Nazi Germany, not as Jews, but as Christians, both complicit and resisting. Her book was written in a faithful response to the inauguration of the current U.S. president, offering readers biblical stories and timely reflections. One of the chapters makes the case for emotions. “Feel your feelings,” she writes, “but don’t just trust them.” That “just” is the point. “But don’t JUST trust them.”  As a spiritual director, I encourage my directees to understand that emotions themselves are neutral and an integral part of one’s spiritual journey. They come in the service of processing the experience of our lives. Nazi Germany, Reichel writes, manipulated people’s emotions to establish the power base of fascism. Nostalgia stoked a sense of belonging, resentment pulled people away from democratic systems, love and loyalty to a charismatic leader was expressed as anger against The Other (Jews, Marxists, intellectuals, queers, minorities, disabled people). You can see where I’m going with this. Fear and anxiety are easily channeled into resentment and scapegoating. Fear, Reichel says, “narrows love and moral responsibility.”

This is where we remember the words of the apostle Paul, who makes an urgent appeal to the church in Rome. “Besides this, you know what time it is,” he says. He writes of a coming day in an urgent voice, a day part metaphor, part warning, part assertion of coming judgement. He begins his warning with a juicy “Besides this–” which begs the question, besides WHAT? He has just given the summation of all the commandments: Love your neighbor as yourself. Which makes “Fear not!” all the more important, since “Fear narrows love and moral responsibility.”

So where do we go from here? Feelings are not bad. But there is that “just” in Reichel’s invitation for us to feel our feelings. Don’t JUST trust them; test them. How does one do that? I often ask my directees to locate their emotions in their body. Where do they feel that anger or fear or deep sadness or joy? And when they can locate that emotion, we make friends with it, ask its origins and what message it brings. Emotions can be multi-dimensional, as symptoms of other things or a disguise for something else. An unexamined emotion can easily lead to conclusions you might not otherwise make or actions you would not take if you had your wits about you. Fear, as we know, usually translates into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Which of those responses do you really want to act on? Is your fear appropriate? Do you really fear that or something else? If you are testing your feelings, you can ask, “What do I want to do because of this feeling?”

Both Paul (in Romans) and Jesus (in Matthew) tell as that The Day is coming. What does that mean? What sort of day?  Do you remember the Left Behind books from the turn of the 21^st century? Those books were designed to instill a sense of urgency toward conversion, a sort of “Get your ticket to heaven before prices go up!” What they ended up doing for many was to leave a sense of self-righteousness, a “we’re in, you’re not” subtext to faith. And maybe that still has its adherents. The day of which Paul ominously warns and Jesus describes in parable form, that day sounds pretty dire. We’re a mere 2,000 years after these warnings, so we might not be taking them with the same sense of urgency as the original listeners. But Paul’s warning comes as an explication of “love your neighbor” and Jesus’ warning introduces Matthew 25’s parable of judgment, in which whether or not one has fed, clothed, healed, welcomed, and generally ministered to “one of the least of these” is the basis for a favorable judgment. Love your neighbor in concrete action is, apparently, how one prepares for The Day. In scripture (you may know this), love is not a sentiment or emotion, it is an action; it is something one DOES.

Sojourners magazine recently published an article entitled, “Hope Is Not Optimism, Hope Is Defiance” by Marion Sarkisian Ramón Pareja, in which she acknowledges that many good and kind people feel hopeless these days. “What can one person do?” we moan. The polarization in our country, world-wide violence and war, diminishment of other people’s humanity, hunger and needless disease, unraveling of social institutions. How could one NOT feel hopeless? And yet, she writes, “doing something is better than doing nothing. Because systems of oppression and violence don’t just thrive on power; they also thrive on silence. They grow stronger every time a well-meaning person chooses inaction over imperfect action.” What if you knew you didn’t need to succeed, you just needed to act? And let God do the rest.

My current thinking gains momentum from reading a wonderful book entitled Mozart’s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, an ornithologist and amateur musician who, upon learning that Mozart had a pet starling, set out to verify that story. Her scientific sleuthing and logic are an engaging read. What is pertinent to us today is the sociability of starlings. They hang together in huge flocks called murmurations. You’ve seen them—huge clouds of hundreds, maybe thousands of birds, swooping across the sky in an ever-shifting shape. Scientists have wondered for centuries how they do that without crashing into each other, since there is no discernible leader nor a pattern to the choreography. It seems to occur instantaneously. By applying high-tech photography and quantum physics modeling, ornithologists have concluded that, when one bird changes course, the seven birds closest to it respond. Which means that the seven birds closest to each of them responds, so that already it’s 49 birds, and then their seven closest birds and the seven closest to them. It’s a nearly-instantaneous and exponential response.

To me, this murmuration phenomenon might explain the collective unconscious or mob behavior of humans. When one person acts with compassion or hospitality, the seven closest people pick up that vibe and respond in kind. And the seven people closest to them do the same and so on. You can see the negative effect of this at certain political gatherings where someone shouts a hateful slogan and others around them echo it and an angry mob forms. Or perhaps someone wears a frog costume, so at the next gathering others echo that in their own costumes. The humor spreads—crocheting and naked bicyclists become nonviolent protest spontaneously. When people behave as if shouting at an opponent is civil discourse, it becomes how people “communicate.” But if people of opposing viewpoints listen respectfully to each other with curiosity, the seven people closest unconsciously do the same. It’s contagion in the best sense of the word.

Valarie Kaur characterizes this phenomenon as the darkness of the tomb becoming the darkness of the womb. Any gardener could tell you about death, decomposition, compost, fertile soil, abundant fruit. Yes, these times feel like doom and gloom. And they might be. But, as Nadia Bolz-Weber says, “The Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection. It’s about how God continues to dig into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life, in ways both dramatic and small.”

The opposite of fear is not courage; the opposite of fear is hope, which bears the fruit of peace. Peace is not “absence of war,” it is serenity, calm, acceptance. Hanna Reichel’s wise advice to feel our feelings and not just trust them is what we’re talking about. When to accept things as they are and when to do something about it. Other human beings are not our enemy. Even if they are Other. Thich Nhat Hanh characterized our enemy as violence, ignorance, injustice—in us and in other persons. I would add that contempt is a form of violence. Love your neighbor. Not as a sentiment or emotion; love your neighbor as an action, as a way of life. Paul says to start now, because you don’t know how much time you’ve got to learn it. And if Jesus can be believed, it makes all the difference in the world that you begin, and begin now.