Will you
pray with me?
Lord, may the words of my lips and the meditations of all
our hearts be
acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer.
Amen.
<>If you’ve spent any time at all wandering around the
woods
of New England, you’ve experienced it. You’re walking along, looking at the trees or
talking with your friend or listening to the birds.
Sunlight falls gently through the green
filter overhead, brightening the forest floor in patches and
occasionally showing
up the retreating tail of a rabbit or deer.
The only sounds are your own footfalls, perhaps the wind in
the trees,
the small movement of unseen things in the brush. After
a while, you begin to feel like yours
are the first human eyes to see this particular part of the universe. The world feels like it’s peopled only by
things with feathers, or fur, or scales, or leaves, and you. Forever ahead and forever to the sides and as
far as you can see, the forest primeval spreads out and away from you,
into cool,
green obscurity, never trod, it seems, by any shoe but yours all down
the ages since
God’s “Let there be”.
As you walk lost in your imaginings,
however, something odd
about the rocks on the ground up ahead slowly intrudes on your
consciousness. They’re close together,
you notice, too close together and too regularly placed to have gotten
there on
their own. A brief awareness that humans
have been at work here impresses itself upon your consciousness. And then, your eyes following the line made
by rocks, you realize their meaning, and the lie is given to your
explorer’s
dreams.
<>Other humans before you have been here, and they have
worked. The remains of an old stone wall
lie heaped and jumbled and broken before you, its once straight lines
blurred
and smoothed by time and the forest. The
former energy of its upward thrust spent, the wall has dropped or lost
its
stones one by one and now lies prone, and only the strange nearness of
so many
rocks lined up next to one another suggests the work they used to do.
What was the wall for?
Did it close something in? Did
it
close something out? Unless there happen
to be a few rows of ancient fruit trees arrayed nearby, its purpose is
lost to
speculation, for the woods on one side look to you pretty much just
like the
woods on the other; even the old apple trees look like they’ve gone
native. And as for the people, as for
whose land the
wall once surrounded and whose it abutted, only the historians and
keepers of
records know that these days, and there’s no way to ask the builders
what it
was that they feared enough to put them to this work.
<>So you stand there in the forest and wonder for a
moment
about the wall, and who worked so hard to put it up, and why. And you look at the tumbled stones, and the
forest whose roots and water and frost and animals and gravity are
slowly
undoing the work of intelligence and of opposable thumbs, and you
realize that
nature must feel about walls the way it feels about vacuums. Then you walk on.
In his poem Mending
Wall, Robert Frost writes in part:
<>Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast….
<>I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each….
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,…
I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
The End.
<>Well, at least when it comes to walls, it would appear
that
our God agrees with nature and with the poet: God doesn’t seem to like
‘em. In today’s story from 2 Samuel, David
has just moved into what is to become the holy city of Jerusalem.
He has just finished building himself a lovely palace. Having secured a permanent dwelling for
himself, he next turns his attention to God, who has been all this time
without
a house, traveling and living—like the people—in tents.
David wants to build God a house of cedar, a
house befitting the power of God, a house with walls large and imposing
and
beautiful enough to communicate to all who see it that someone very
important
indeed lives there, a house that will protect the glory of God from the
people,
and them from the glory of God.
And God declines.
Thank you very much, but no, God says.
I like my walls flexible. I’ve
been living in a tent ever since I came down off the mountain with
Moses, a
tent worked the whole time we were all moving around in the desert, and
a tent
will suit me just fine now that we’ve moved to the big city. I don’t need a house, I’ve never asked for a
house, you’re not going to build me a house, and you’re certainly not
going to
get the chance to put up a plaque on the wall that says, “God’s house,
made
possible by the generous contributions of David.” Thank
you, son, but no.
<>Something there is that does not love a wall, says the
poet.
By the time we get to our second
reading today, a couple of kings
of Israel
have, in fact, built a few houses for God over the years.
God lived in these successive Temples,
as everyone knew, still lives there all the time,
shedding God’s blessings on the people of Israel, and none other. God lives in the Temple, claim the kings and the
priests, and never leaves it at all.
God stays safely within the gilded walls the
people have built for God, and God’s power is safely contained—or so
they
think.
<>The walls of this house were designed not only to keep
the
people safe from God’s power, but to keep God safe from the approach of
the
unworthy. The courtyards leading up to
the entrance of the building were arranged in order of increasing
exclusivity;
by the time one reached the innermost chamber, the place where God
lived, only
one person in the whole world was said to be allowed to enter. The Court of Gentiles, the outermost
courtyard and the only part of the complex that non-Jews were allowed
to enter,
was separated from the inner courts by a stone balustrade, carved on
which were
the words, “No man of another race is to enter within the fence and
enclosure
around the temple.”
It was a members-only kind of place,
with God and the Jews
on the inside, and everybody else outside the Temple, outside the covenant, the
promises,
the hope of life with God. And the walls
that separated the insiders from the outsiders were more than just
physical:
- cultural walls
of belief and practice, dress and eating habit,
- age-old walls
of hatred and enmity, blood feuds and tribal squabbles between the
peoples,
- walls of
resentment at the way Jews had been treated by their Roman conquerors,
- and of course,
the wall cut into the very flesh of the male children of Israel,
circumcision, the central and most important symbol of Jewish inclusion
in
God’s love
Into this world step Jesus Christ
and his followers. In the few short years
of their work
together, they tumble nearly every wall that exists in Jewish law and
custom,
and many Roman ones as well. They tumble
the walls that exclude women. The walls
that exclude the sick? Down.
The walls that exclude the poor? Down.
Soon, even the first wall the people claim God erected, the
very wall
that tells us who are “we” and who are “they”, the wall between the
people of Israel
and
everybody else, begins to fall. Circumcision
and uncircumcision are nothing, they argue.
God’s love is for everyone. The
Temple
is not God’s
house, its walls are not the limit of God’s indwelling spirit, they say. The people
are God’s house, the hearts of the people are where God builds God’s
best
home. The hearts of the people, the home
of God, belong to no king, no nation, no lord but God.
<>And the walls come tumbling down, and the people climb
over
the rubble and begin to meet each other again, and slowly, slowly,
God’s real
palace, a house without walls, is built.
Something there is that does not
love a wall, says the poet.
<>The thing that Jesus knew, the thing they crucified him
for,
and the thing God raised him up again for, is that, more often than
not, walls
are about fear. Even as God asked David,
“Are you the one to wall me in?”,
Jesus stands at every wall, questioning its builder.
“What is it that you fear, you, who build
your houses and lock your doors? Is it
the cold, is it the dark, is it that someone might get your stuff, or
you?”
“What is it that you fear, you who
crisscross my very homeland
with your barriers and your checkpoints?
Those who worship your God in another way?
The end of your existence? That
someone might get your land? That you
might discover all the fighting has
been to no end?”
<>“What is it that you fear, you who would build a wall
across
the southern border of the United States?
That “they” will get your money?
Your land? Your jobs? Or is it the color of their skin?
“What is it that you fear, you who
build a wall of
invisibility around yourself when you walk past a panhandler, hoping
she won’t
talk to you?”
<>“What is it that you fear, you Christians who build
walls of
silence or resentment or ridicule between you and those “other” kind of
Christians?”
“What is it that you fear, and what
the walls you build
between each other, you who watch Fox News and you who listen to NPR?”
<>“What is it that you fear, and what the walls you build
between you and the idiots on the other side of the gay marriage debate? The abortion debate? The
Iraq
war debate?”
“What is it that you fear that makes
you build this wall?”
he asks. “And what if I ask you to take
it down?”
<>For, you know, something there is that does not love a
wall.
“Do not fear,” says God, “for you
are all my children. I know all that you
are and all that you’ve
done, and I love you.” And a stone drops
from the wall and rolls away.
<>“Do not fear,” says Jesus, “For there is enough, there
is
enough, there is always enough, and I am with you.”
And the words smell like green and sound like
sunlight, and another stone tips off the pile.
“Do not fear,” says the Holy Spirit,
“For I can make you
brave, brave enough even for peace, brave enough even for this.”
And as the promise rustles through
the leaves of the strong
young saplings overhead, another stone tumbles off, and rolls away, and
stops
at the feet of a walker in the woods.
And she reaches down to pick it up and replace it where it
belongs. And then she stops and laughs
softly to
herself. And she steps over the
tumble-down old wall and walks on. Amen.
