Sermons by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Pentecost 2001
You Can't Wear a Purple Flamingo Hat and Think of your Own Death at the Same Time
The world may be controlled by the tightly-wrapped, but they don't enjoy it.
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Cathedral Church of the Nativity, BethlehemIt's great to be here to celebrate the Fiftieth Day of Easter, and I relish the opportunity we have to be gathered as one family today. Your flexibility is one of your best traditions. I hope you still remember the secret to celebrating resurrection. (Do you?)
Well, it hasn't exactly been a quiet week in our little town, but in the midst of it all, God has been gently knocking with a two-by-four, or perhaps a rubber chicken.
There has been a lot of somewhat burdensome church stuff going around nationally, as you may know. The religion page in the Morning Call yesterday was a good example of two ways of looking at the same thing.
But the problem is for those of us who get very serious -- and now listen up especially you folks who are trying to accomplish things in life- - the problem is that studies in many fields show that when you can no longer play with ideas, when everything is heavy and serious, it is very difficult to think new thoughts. You can't think outside the box unless there is a little sand in it.
Well anyway, there I was worrying night and day about how to save the Episcopal Church from itself, and it was the Friday before Memorial Day. A secret committee formed and decided that if they were going to have a party, then there should be party hats and so on. So at the party, out come lovely flowered lei's for everybody. The women also got flowers for their hair, and the men got caps like the captain's on Gilligan's Island. Pretty good. Except they didn't give me a cap. Hmm. After a pause, out came the mandatory plain brown bag, and I was presented with a stunning head piece to match my wonted purple shirt. You simply cannot wear a purple flamingo and think about your own death at the same time.
Well just in case I wasn't getting the message, there came the opportunity to go across the street for the dedication of the playground for kids living at New Bethany. Interestingly, the hardest part of the little service was getting the adults to step off the grass into the play space. I've thought about that a lot. A metaphor is lurking somewhere here.
Anyway, we had a good time, and once again there are some interesting pictures, including two of my staff members on the swing set, hanging upside down like fruit bats. But nobody else would play. I was starting to get the picture.
But it was a little girl, a girl thirteen months old, who delivered the final blow of the two-by-four. Her name is Emily, and she was at my niece's first birthday party at the end of the week. She toddles. She has blond hair, very wide blue eyes, and an especially guileless face, even for a baby.
Except for the folks over seventy, we all were sitting on the floor for the great opening of presents. Emily would just toddle over to somebody -- we were mostly strangers -- and plop right down on their lap, look up like she had done something clever, and expect to be played with. How do you resist that? Even the most serious person there (I won't mention any names) had to come out of their shell and play with Emily. Playing with a baby awakens parts of our brain that don't need words.
But I must use words here. One of the psalms used on Pentecost goes like this:
Psalm 104:25-32
25 O LORD, how manifold are your works! in wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
26 Yonder is the great and wide sea with its living things too many to number, * creatures both small and great.
27 There move the ships, and there is that Leviathan, * which you have made for the sport of it.God's spirit fills the world, gives its variety, and even has a little fun. Leviathan, of course, is a word for whales, great leaping, splashing, singing animals. The latest word I have is, as they evolved, that whales are mammals who came out of the sea, didn't like the land very much, and went back to the water. I know that evolution is about survival, but does survival possibly include the quality of life idea that maybe life on dry land wasn't as much fun for them as it was in the water? Sorry, that isn't serious enough. Well, anyway, whales have always been my favorite since my 15-year-old son said, "Papa, if I ever kill you, it will be with a harpoon."
Why do folks go whale-watching? Dolphin watching? Big animals doing what looks to us at least, like purposeless behavior just for fun. As one of the six people on the planet who have actually read all of Moby Dick, I think there are two ideas in the book. (1) Whales are pretty interesting, and (2) Captain Ahab was entirely too serious, so the whale had all the fun.
The idea that there might be Mind, Design or Purpose in the universe has always been a big question, and it's a hot one again today for academics. I've seen ads for several summer seminars on the question of Design in the cosmos. Well, you don't need a Ph.D. Purpose and design have always been hot questions -- question for people who suffer, for people whose children are unable to play, questions for people who must die. It has always been one for people whose lives get so tangled and difficult that they feel like their heads are going to explode, or that they might as well die. The food chain isn't all that much fun to contemplate, even from the top. Life as we know it cannot exist without violence -- even plants don't grow so that we can eat their young.
We are here in church because in our very fragility amidst violence Jesus has touched us, and we know ourselves and God when his gospel is proclaimed. But the reason we call it religious FAITH is because we get clues, invitations, signs, about the meaning of what is around us, and have to live the rest. The spirit of God broods over creation -- trying to break in when it can, and remind us of life, our life in and with God.
Jesus's last gift was the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not just Ingredient X for anything we don't care to explain. It is what is there from the beginning, the lordly giver of life. Babies, playgrounds, whales are all invitations to be rejoice in the basic spirit of life itself. That's the reason the last words in the baptismal prayer ask for the child to be given "the gift of joy and wonder in all your works." Did your education enhance that gift of joy and wonder, or systematically stamp it out?
Playing is thinking out of the box; in fact, it is escaping the box, to the larger dimensions of life. Why did people in the Nazi death camps tell jokes? Why is Jewish humor so earthy, a little too body-function-oriented for many WASPS? Lots of reasons, I guess, but one of them is that when you can laugh about oppression, death and immodest bodily functions, you are still alive, you are still free. The world may be controlled by the tightly-wrapped, but they don't enjoy it.
When I started one of my favorite sports, and no, this one isn't golf, the advice I got was "stop practicing the second it stops being fun -- you already have a job."
The psalm repeats the idea that God rejoices in creation, and that our lives make sense when we enter that rejoicing and sing to God as long as we live. That starts with being open to the possibility of play.
Perhaps one of the many meanings of Pentecost, that birthday of the Church, that launching into mission that I have preached about before is also this: when we are being so serious that people around us get tense, when all we see in the world is the disease process and not the healing process, the spirit comes -- whether as dove or rubber chicken -- and says, Get a Life. Get a life.
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live. How about you?
Home Site Map Please direct any questions or comments to the webmaster@diobeth.org
