by The Rev. Dr. Craig Lemming, Associate Rector
Click here to watch the sermon recording on YouTube.
In the name of God who makes a way out of no way and transforms never into nevertheless. Amen.
Jesus says, even the hairs of our heads are all counted by God. Since I am now limited to half of my follicle potential, I hope it pleases God that it takes half the time to count my hairs!
Today’s sermon is about how limitations can become sacred sites of liberation. Limitations may be what we are born into: a body, a family, a society, a time in history. Limitations we had no choice but to live within. Limitations may be imposed upon us by principalities and powers over which we have no control. Limitations, innate and imposed, can be both frustrating and liberating. Today’s lament from the Prophet Jeremiah expresses the raw tension between divine liberation and the limitations humans suffer. Jeremiah cries,
within me there is something like a burning fire
shut up in my bones;
I am weary with holding it in,
and I cannot.[1]
What do we do with that burning fire of frustration with life’s limitations? When our bodies become needy. When we lose a job. When a relationship becomes distorted. When governments persist in misinterpreting one’s personhood. When we are stuck in a web of impossibly complex circumstances. What do we do with that burning fire shut up in our bones? Artists, musicians, and poets can help.
Franz Joseph Haydn spent nearly three decades serving as a court musician for the immensely wealthy Esterházy family. Haydn, the court musicians, and their fellow indentured servants lived at the lavish rural estate of Esterháza in Hungary, where they suffered immense loneliness and homesickness. Haydn wrote, “I was cut off from the world; there was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become original.” Indeed, it was during those three decades that Haydn composed some of his most innovative symphonies and string quartets. This creativity in captivity is expressed perfectly by Maya Angelou. She wrote,
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill,
of things unknown,
but longed for still,
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill,
for the caged bird
sings of freedom. [2]
In the wake of Juneteenth, as this country commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, how do we make meaning of freedom when so many innate and imposed limitations still enslave us?
I listened to a recent interview with the Vietnamese-American poet, essayist, and novelist Ocean Vuong. Ocean Vuong spoke eloquently about how to live creatively within the cages of this American life. Ocean Vuong said this,
History itself is filled with people stuck in coal mines; stuck in marriages they never wanted to be in; stuck in towns they couldn’t get out of. And I’m interested in asking, “If so much of American life, as I understand it, is a kind of cage — and I’m convinced now at age 37, that to be an American is to be trapped in a free country — if we are in the cage, is it worth singing? What kind of songs could one sing? And does that make the cage bearable?” It’s a very dark idea. But, as a poet, I knew that it was not as morbid as it sounds because the Sonnet, which we owe hundreds of years of Anglophonic innovation, is also a cage with 14 bars. We have the clever little thing on the 10th and 12th bars called the “Volta” where something is supposed to change, a twist occurs, that site of innovation. From Shakespeare to Milton to John Donne to Gwendolyn Brooks to Ben Lerner, we have participated in a vast tradition of joy and sorrow inside this cage. [3]
How will we create the Volta within the limitations of our own lives? How will we accept the limitations of our loved ones, our neighbors, and this country, and still live creatively?
Turning back to this morning’s First Lesson, the 20th chapter of The Book of Jeremiah is set in early 6th-century BCE Judah, during the tumultuous reign of King Jehoiakim. During this era, Judah was trapped in a geopolitical tug-of-war between Egypt and the rising Babylonian Empire. The chapter details the prophet’s public beating, his subsequent emotional anguish, and the Babylonian exile. Jeremiah’s theology of lament frees us to express our own profound frustrations to God, secure in the knowledge that God’s steadfast, divine deliverance will ultimately prevail. Jeremiah’s Volta proclaims:
O Lord of hosts, you test the righteous,
you see the heart and the mind;
…
Sing to the Lord;
praise the Lord!
For God has delivered the life of the needy
from the hands of evildoers.[4]
For followers of Jesus Christ, our sacred Volta has been, is, and always shall be, sacrificial love. Love that is extravagantly creative within sacred boundaries. Haydn lavished creative love within the boundaries of Sonata Form. Poets like Ocean Vuong lavish creative love within the boundaries of the Sonnet. Followers of Jesus are called to lavish creative love within the limitations of human existence: limitations, innate or imposed, in our own needy lives and in the needy lives of those entrusted to us.
Jesus says, “whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Life’s limitations are filled with loss. We lose what was. We lose what could have been. Taking up Christ’s cross of love in the ever-present now and following Jesus, following the way of God’s love, helps us to embrace our own limitations and the limitations of others. Every person is doing their best to find the Volta in the Sonnet of their life. Every person is doing their best to compose something good, and true, and beautiful within the limitations of the symphony they were born into. We and they are mortal, so we choose to love one another now.
Our mortality is the ultimate limitation. And yet, Jesus says, “Do not fear those who kill the body for they cannot kill the soul.” In Christ’s love, our souls are limitless. This is the Christian Volta. That sacred twist in the poetry of life, when God’s love made flesh transforms never into nevertheless. In Saint Paul’s words,
if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; and the life he lives, he lives to God.[5]
May we cease from making idols out of life’s limitations. May we go forth and share God’s love creatively so that life’s limitations may be transformed into blessings. May God’s grace release us into new understandings of life’s frustrations. May the creative voltas of God’s loving-kindness make a way out of no way for all people. Amen.
[1] https://lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp7_RCL.html
[2] Maya Angelou, “Caged Bird,” in Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (New York: Random House, 1983), 35.
[3] https://www.instagram.com/reels/DZcMyrMO_Fh/
[4] https://lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp7_RCL.html
[5] https://lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp7_RCL.html
