Preacher: Brad Hendrickson

Date: November 05, 2023

Scripture: Matthew 22:34–40, Luke 6:34–36

Audio for this sermon can be found here: To be posted

As I’ve taken these last few weeks since Jenn and Nathan first invited me to speak to think over how I might reflect here with you this morning on some of my experiences leading up to, enduring through, and then returning home from my time on the front lines of Ukraine, I confess that it’s been quite a strain. How could I possibly give to you with words what took so much more than mere words for me to receive?

And now, all the more, as curious loved ones have messaged me over the last ten days, asking me to speak to the violence visited a week and a half ago upon so many families in Maine, in a town in which I have worked and lived, I have little to offer by way of answers. I have been reminded, though, that the struggle to find the right words is as long as the human story, and so I can be merciful with myself and know that I am good company in that struggle. I’ll begin with this line from a troubled troubadour of my own generation, Marshall Mathers, a man grappling in this song with the complexities of truth amidst so much of his own disordered relational brokenness.  He says… I can’t tell you what it really is I can only tell you what it feels like And right now there’s a steel knife In my windpipe

Right now, we too might find ourselves at a loss for words, whether with a lump in our throats or with might feel more like a blade. Our own hearts all remain stunned, and numbed, angry, and so very sad in so many different, exhausting directions about these last couple weeks’ violence against innocent life

— in the forgotten towns and villages of eastern Ukraine, as the cold of winter sets in once more, and as news cycles learn that their coverage of even newer anxieties will yield more ad revenue as the West’s attention span grows bored of an untidy Soviet invasion

— in the 1300 Jews slaughtered in one morning (four weeks ago now) by a theocratic death cult who have hijacked, among so many other things, the noble and life-giving aspects of the Muslim religion of their neighbors along with every good-faith effort those same Muslim and Jewish neighbors have made to ensure peaceful coexistence for each other, a cult who celebrates not only the innocent Jewish deliberately targeted, but now the loss of the innocent lives of their own terrified neighbors used as human shields as Israeli authorities all too predictably take the bait of catastrophic escalation

— and just up the road from where I live in Maine to Lewiston – a town where I have not only worked and lived, but have even gone bowling – one of our own, himself a bearer of the image of God, was swallowed up by what Scripture calls “the principalities, the powers, the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” I was reminded recently of something said almost casually at the dinner table by a friend’s child at just 9 years old: “Anger is just sadness you don’t know what to do with.”

It can feel, for many of us, hard to so much as catch our breath, let alone work out what we might do or say, whether for those hearts and homes most directly and horrifically broken, or for the rest of everyone left in the wake. What has been done, has been done. In addition to our earlier readings from Scripture, there are a few more pieces of poetry that have helped me give voice to this unease as well as to our response.

This opening poem — this prayer, really — is restoring to today’s Order of Worship for us here this morning something of a confession of sin: as the Book of Common Prayer leads us to name, “by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” The poet, Ilya Kaminsky, was born in what is now Ukraine, in a town called Odesa, and I invite you to search your hearts with these words, which were — and remain — stirring and troubling to me in the years since I first heard it:

WE LIVED HAPPILY DURING THE WAR

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough.  I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. I took a chair outside and watched the sun. In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us) lived happily during the war.

This next poem came to mind over and over again in Ukraine as I would load folks — many of whom were elderly and even invalid — who’d held on to their homes and possessions for as long as they dared, now in need of rescue as the Russians were coming down their street, prepared to execute anyone who remained.

It’s a poem by Stanisław Barańczak called “If China” (“china” referring not to the country, but to the finer dishes we might use to prepare and serve a meal).

If china, then only the kind you wouldn’t miss under the movers’ shoes or the treads of a tank; if a chair, then one that’s not too comfortable, or you’ll regret getting up and leaving; if clothes, then only what will fit in one suitcase; if books, then those you know by heart; if plans, then the ones you can give up when it comes time for the next move, to another street, another continent, or epoch or world: who told you you could settle in? who told you this or that would last forever? didn’t anyone tell you you’ll never in the world feel at home here?

It is hard to sit with this unease, this sense of impermanence, this promise, in a way — whether we want to receive it or not — that on some level this world is not, in fact, our home, despite all of our attachments and love and longings for it to be so.

Another poem that comes to mind as I think on how unjustly the blessings and riches of our beloved country are — especially here on our nation’s beautiful, beloved Capitol Hill — so deeply if perhaps a bit gluttonously enjoyed by so relatively few of us is “Luck,” by poet Langston Hughes:

LUCK

Sometimes a crumb falls From the tables of joy, Sometimes a bone Is flung. To some people Love is given, To others Only heaven. 

We think of course of those whose hearts, whose lives and limbs, are torn apart by the violence we’ve named — whether from Soviet artillery, or rockets in the Holy Land, or from a handheld weapon of war wielded by someone who’d just this year sought no doubt long-overdue psychiatric care from his community in Maine for the torments of voices in his head. We are challenged, though, and indeed commanded to love not only the victims of violence, but those who perpetrate it against us as well. This poem from Don Paterson, called “The Lie,” speaks quite hauntingly to the kinds of secrets and shames that swallow us up from within, leaving us unknown, unseen, unloved, unaccepted.

THE LIE

As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour before the house had woken to make sure that everything was in order with The Lie, his drip changed and his shackles all secure. I was by then so practiced in this chore I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye. Such, I liked to think, was our rapport. I was at full stretch to test some ligature when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore his gag away; though as he made no cry, I kept on with my checking as before. 𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘥𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘮𝘦 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘦? he said. I swore: it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor. The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore. He was a boy of maybe three or four. His straps and chains were all the things he wore. Knowing I could make him no reply I took the gag before he could say more and put it back as tight as it would tie and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door

We who have not been utterly swallowed up by such a Lie and swept out to sea and shipwrecked by the tides of brokenness and brain chemistry are not, as we might suppose, better than the recent shooter in Maine, Robert Card. We are lucky. We are blessed.

The more intimately I am made aware of my own brokenness — my own angers, and abandonments, my own habits of soothing and forgetting — I am increasingly and perhaps inescapably inclined to not only weep with those who weep (as it is right for us to do), but to hold within my heart compassion for the shooter as he left a farewell note for his son and then crawled off to a cold and lonely trailer to forfeit his own life.

I think of this passage from George MacDonald:

“Who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessèd, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven?

“Who, in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation — who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother? — who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father?”

Once, in Ukraine, as I came upon the burned-out remains of a Soviet tank, from which the remains of its occupants had since been removed, I was reminded of yet another poem of a likely well known poet here named Mary Oliver.

The poem is called WHITE OWL FLIES INTO AND OUT OF THE FIELD:

Coming down out of the freezing sky with its depths of light, like an angel, or a buddha with wings, it was beautiful and accurate, striking the snow and whatever was there with a force that left the imprint of the tips of its wings — five feet apart — and the grabbing thrust of its feet, and the indentation of what had been running through the white valleys of the snow — and then it rose, gracefully, and flew back to the frozen marshes, to lurk there, like a little lighthouse, in the blue shadows — so I thought: maybe death isn’t darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us — as soft as feathers — that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes, not without amazement, and let ourselves be carried, as through the translucence of mica, to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow — that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light — in which we are washed and washed out of our bones.

I was reminded then, too, of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian pastor in Germany during WWII who famously preached many calls for powerfully effective non-violence and pacifism. When he was later arrested and sentenced to be executed for planning to introduce Adolf Hitler to this same scalding, aortal light, he wrote to his sister-in-law Emmi saying: If I see a madman driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.

Ultimately, Bonhoeffer concluded, there was no other way to stop him than to stop him. Now, it may not be my place, as your guest, to say this — perhaps especially here, where it is quite tidy and quiet and clean — but I wonder if, insofar as a Land Acknowledgment of the space we currently enjoy feels a necessary part of what we gather here to say and do and affirm, perhaps we should also routinely acknowledge that the abundant privileges of calm and safety that we enjoy this morning (while many others around the world do not) are secured in part by the unchosen Providence of two enormous oceans, but also by an ever present deterring promise of, yes, violence — albeit a promise we have outsourced to others to keep in the hopes of securing for ourselves hands that feel to us and appear to others as clean. I can already hear voices of objection to such arrangements saying that it is only for God to judge those who perpetrate unjustified violence against innocent life, and yet I confess that I, too, both grieve and share Bonhoeffer’s reluctant conclusion that there may very well be times and circumstances where it might be our moral duty, as our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, to arrange that meeting between such perpetrators and the scalding, aortal light of an All-Loving Creator.

I remain conflicted about what it might mean to love peace, to pray for and work for durable, lasting peace. But as I think on what resources we might choose to use to pry the “steering wheel” from the hands of various madmen around the world and in our midst, I am reminded of this brief passage from J.R.R. Tolkien, writing a novel of fiction in the aftermath of Germany’s

bombings upon England: “War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

I will close this morning with this meditation from Dag Hammarskjöld, a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961 while brokering peace in Africa.

Tomorrow we shall meet, Death and I — And he shall thrust his sword Into one who is wide awake. But in the meantime how grievous the memory Of hours frittered away. Friends, though many answers remain hidden, of this we can be sure: Time is short and there is much work to be done.

May the Hound of Heaven, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the fullness of whom was pleased dwell in his Son and our Lord, Jesus of Nazareth, find you here and now and send you forth today filled with his relentless Holy Spirit. May these words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts reveal to us how we are to answer the Divine call with faithful allegiance as the hands and feet of Christ in our midst.

Amen.