Chevy to the Levee
Drove my Chevy to the Levee
Sermon, Homily, or WhatHaveYou & ThankYouVeryMuch, Fr. T. The Rev Tom Weller. Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, Florida. Sunday, June 7, 2015, Proper 5, Year B. Text: 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1 Common English Bible
Sermon, Homily, or WhatHaveYou & ThankYouVeryMuch, Fr. T. The Rev Tom Weller. Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, Florida. Sunday, June 7, 2015, Proper 5, Year B. Text: 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1 Common English Bible
And the three men I admire most
The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.
A song in my life that made poetic sense of life for me was/is “American Pie.” The tune, the music is perfect, somehow in jaunting contrast to strange, melancholy words, as Don McLean’s poetry stirred an era in which America lost the magic, romance and song of the age when I grew up. McLean recently sold his manuscript and unfortunately revealed his own secrets about the song, which robs the mystery, because “American Pie” is timeless pop that actually means whatever it means for the listener of the moment and place in life. The song does not say what it means, you have to sense what it means for you in order for life to make any sense at all, and each one hears in different time and space:
"A long, long time ago
I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.
They were singin’ bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’ 'This’ll be the day that I die
This’ll be the day that I die'"
Saint Paul makes me uneasy glorifying life after death that he hopes for, and has faith in, and claims to “know” but has not experienced and so does not know, yet is longing for. I’ve preached and blogged about this before, but its relevance keeps popping up over life's years, and Paul stirs it again today.
I don’t recall exactly what verses of scripture we were discussing in our Sunday School class that morning 25 or 30 years ago, but Paul was enumerating virtues and vices, and a woman in the class allowed that the greatest sin is not one of these on Paul’s list, but despair. Despair. That caught me up short at the moment, but the years we knew her after she arrived from up North, the fall of 1985 literally on a hurricane weekend -- when most everyone had evacuated town and a handful of us were having a hurricane liturgy at Trinity Church -- and she settled into our community where Apalachicola River flows into Apalachicola Bay. An intellectual, she always showed keen wisdom, wise words, ponderable thoughts. She's an entrepreneur, artist, and goldsmith fashioning exquisite, unique jewelry, a person of many talents, and in our church years together her mind and life experience (and sometimes her Yankee mouth) were a challenge. She did not like Saint Paul, as many, especially feminists, detest the Apostle Paul. She was wary of patriarchal terms like “king” and “kingdom” and “lord.” She grew up in an intellectual home, her father, a professor at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin, apparently somewhat authoritarian in her growing up years, and so she did not hold the word “father” in awe as the great, comforting protector.
Her whole family eventually moved to Apalachicola, and that was when I found out that Unitarians, agnostics, atheists, doubters could become faithful, thinking Episcopalians, because they were and they did.
When she first moved to Florida, she marveled over the boiling clouds in our coastal skies, and clouds were a feature on some of her jewelry. Linda and I think of her when we exclaim at wonderful clouds over St. Andrews Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
So anyway, “despair is the greatest sin,” she said. Despair. And I once heard her pair it: despair ... and ingratitude. Indeed, the two are intertwined, homoousious, one substance.
Depression and ingratitude manifest in deadly despair. She experienced this when her nephew, her brother’s son, committed suicide as a teenager, devastating his family. And I witness this each time I’ve officiated a funeral after suicide and see its effect on loved ones left behind. Suicide is the flip side of a coin: tails of the denarius whose obverse is despair and ingratitude. Against all those left behind -- who will never understand, who will always blame themselves -- taking one's life is the ultimate sin against their humanity, rejecting their love -- and against the love of God, the Holy Spirit, the Giver of Life, irreversible ingratitude for God’s loving sacrifice of his Son. Why do I speak so depressingly on a day of summer vacation when I should be preaching you to sleep as usual, or trying to make you laugh with one of my bad jokes, or exciting you for Shell Island Sunday next week? It’s because of today’s reading from 2nd Corinthians, and Paul’s mention of gratitude, and his false denial of depression, and Paul’s dangerously tempting promises about the alternative.
That same parishioner's wisdom comes to my surface each time a loved one is ill, or in danger, or threatened and I feel despair creeping into my soul because at this age I finally realize that I am no longer in control, and never was. In our reading this morning, Paul says, “we are not depressed,” but he is depressed, and his relationship with his church at Corinth is tense and contentious and depressing, and his Corinthian audience is depressed, and that alarms me, because depression is deadly.
Years ago, a parishioner came to me to say he was ending his life. His mind was made up, and he wanted me to tell him how God would deal with his everlasting soul. He was alcoholic, erratic, acerbic, emotionally out of control; depressed, raging with fury, sometimes despondent, his life, marriage and family in shambles. If that wasn’t enough, his mother had died and shocked him by leaving control of the family estate to his stepfather, her second husband whom years earlier she had stunned her son by marrying one day while the son was at school; and he resented the man all those years. By early middle age, he was an eccentric who posted signs on his house and on his door and in his yard and driveway, saying he would shoot anyone who tried to take his guns. So this day he comes to say he is killing himself. “What will happen in the afterlife?” he’s asking.
Confronting him, I said, “This is the Episcopal Church, we have a God of mercy and lovingkindness, God who understands depression and despair, God who forgives our sins before we ask. I do not believe or accept anything any church has ever taught about suicide being the unforgivable sin and going to hell, a fear tactic of the medieval church. Whatever happens after this life is in the mind of God alone, we do not know --
“-- but we do know and I will tell you this. Statistics are devastating for the children of parents who commit suicide. A suicidal father communicates to his son that killing oneself is an acceptable way out of life’s problems. The suicide statistic for the son is desolating. If you commit suicide you will be telling your son that you did not love him enough to share life with him when your life got tough. Worse, worst, he will copy what you have done, and from your grave you will have murdered your son, and I will bury him just as I bury you, is that what you want, or don’t you care? Regardless how bad you think life and its problems are, lay this selfishness aside, and face your pain, and for once at last let your son be more important to you than you are to yourself.”
My report more than 25 years on is that he changed his mind. He eventually died in his alcoholism years after that morning’s conversation, not by his own hand.
Why am I here today with this dour message and recollections of my life as a parish priest? The precipitation is that I also understand heartache, depression, fear, despair, and a desire to run, to sleep. The ignition is today’s reading, Paul from Second Corinthians about life after death: Paul writes it promising, assuring, inviting, even tempting. It’s something we pray, to be “heirs, through hope, of thy everlasting kingdom.” But the Bible tells us at Hebrews 11:1, that faith and hope are not certainty.
Life is hard, life can be overwhelming, life can seem unbearable. But we who are baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are at baptism infused with the Holy Spirit to lift us up, strengthening us to live life as it comes. Life is not our own, life is God’s gift, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. And God is here, God is present, present in and as God’s loving people, and God is good, and God will see us through.
Paul’s word about depression and gratitude stirred remembrances of my own life and ministry as a parish priest. Paul’s promise of a heaven he had not seen but only longed for -- and the perhaps startling news that Paul’s faith and hope were not in life after death in a heaven beyond the clouds as we imagine; but apocalyptic on this earth at the end of time after the Second Coming when God’s kingdom is established right here in the midst of us with Christ the Son of Man returning to earth as King of kings and Lord of lords.
A sermon is for whoever needs to hear it. In any ecclesia of human beings, someone is challenged to go on, pondering alternatives. Maybe someone here, today. Maybe someone you know. Please: if you or someone you love needs to come and see a priest, your pastor, do not hesitate -- come. Come. We are not God, but we know and are living life just as you are, and we will invoke the presence of the Holy Spirit into your need.
Bye-be, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’ “This’ll be the day that I die. NO!
No. A human age and its poetry and romance pass into history; but life and love abide. May Almighty God bless, preserve and keep you in Christ Jesus. Amen.
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2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1 Common English Bible
13 We have the same faithful spirit as what is written in scripture: I had faith, and so I spoke.[a] We also have faith, and so we also speak. 14 We do this because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will also raise us with Jesus, and he will bring us into his presence along with you. 15 All these things are for your benefit. As grace increases to benefit more and more people, it will cause gratitude to increase, which results in God’s glory.
16 So we are not depressed. But even if our bodies are breaking down on the outside, the person that we are on the inside is being renewed every day. 17 Our temporary minor problems are producing an eternal stockpile of glory for us that is beyond all comparison. 18 We don’t focus on the things that can be seen but on the things that cannot be seen. The things that can be seen do not last, but the things that cannot be seen are eternal.
5:1 We know that if the tent that we live in on earth is torn down, we have a building from God. It’s a house that is not handmade, which is eternal and located in heaven.