Alterations

Alterations

(A supplement to the sermon series, “Try THIS on for Size!”)

As many of you as were baptized into Christ

have clothed yourselves with Christ.

(Galatians 3:27)

Rev. Siegfried Johnson

Thursday, June 7, 2007

First United Methodist Church

Mountain Home, Arkansas 72563

Why Alterations? I suppose I wasn’t quite ready to let this series go. It’s been with me for quite a while, blossoming since the January weekend in which, while on retreat at Subiaco, I mapped out a first rough sketch. As its contours became more discernible to me, and certainly as the sermons were offered to you, there was much material that I simply laid aside. To use the analogy of the lakes around Mountain Home which Sherry and I are only now beginning to explore, there are many enchanting coves to which we have not yet been, and will never be, introduced. Likewise, this sermon series has pretty much steered us down the main channel. Perhaps Alterations will provide an opportunity to duck into a cove or two.

Thanks for your participation tonight, for being unwilling to wear this series just as I offered it “off the rack,” but rather to submit yourself to a little more work to make this series even more meaningful (“Submit” is a carefully chosen word to describe it, since I’m an “off the rack” kind of shopper myself, uncomfortable standing in front of the mirror like a mannequin while tape measures and pins fix hems and sleeves). In any event, whether here enthusiastically, or just submitting, thanks for being here, for joining us as we make Alterations.

I begin with a story which didn’t quite make the cut during week-to-week sermon preparation. Still, I regard it as a story most apt to spark our thinking and get ideas percolating. It’s from an essay titled “Pascal’s Jacket” by Noelle Oxenhandler in the Fall 1994 issue of PARABOLA. The essay begins with a quote from Pascal, The Life of Genius, by Morris Bishop (Reynal & Hitchcok, 1936). “A few days after Pascal’s death, a manservant, arranging his clothes, noticed a curious bulge in his jacket. Opening the lining he withdrew a folded parchment, written in Pascal’s hand. Within the parchment was a scribbled piece of paper . . . the record of his mystical illumination, his two hours in the presence of God. For eight years he had worn them as an amulet, hiding them in his coat, sewing and unsewing them at need . . ..”

It will be no mystery to you how I originally thought to use the story of Blaise Pascal’s “curious bulge” of the jacket. The third sermon, Phylacteries (Hebrew: Tefillin), described those boxes which our spiritual ancestors strapped onto their left arm and forehead in obedience to God’s command as recorded in the book of Numbers. Out of sight within those boxes, you will recall, are four parchments from the Torah.

Oxenhandler notes that in our day we walk about with our passions emblazoned on our clothes: “Stop Global Warming!” or “Visualize World Peace!” or “Save the Humpback Whale!” What Pascal did was fundamentally different in the same way that phylacteries are fundamentally different than “wearing our message.” Within Pascal’s Jacket was his intimate possession of something hidden from view, the inner, private core of his faith.

You see, the tefillin, and certainly Pascal’s parchment, is not about display, but about personal intimacy with a God of redemptive presence and power. In fact, it is the abuse of this private intimacy, turning it into a public display, which was the cause of Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees. “The scribes and Pharisees . . . do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi . . . Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth” (Matthew 23:5-7, 25-28).

Blaise Pascal, the famed French mathematician and scientist, had a mystical experience on the night of November 23, 1954, when he was almost killed crossing a bridge in Paris during a lightning storm. His life was spared as he was thrown from his carriage before it plunged over the bridge, killing the horses. This began two hours in which he felt a direct presence of God, which he regarded, ever after, as the most significant moment of his life – though he never told anyone of the full experience. From that point, he made his scientific career second to his theological pursuit, writing his most famous work, Pensees (French: Thoughts).

He was, in his words, completely absorbed with “certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace.” The record of this experience was sewed inside his jacket, wearing it so that the experience might stay with him until the day of his death. It was as if, in his intense longing to remember, he wished to feel the texture of the parchment as a way to remind him always that this experience was not imaginary but quite real, possessing form and texture. The shape and weight he gave to this experience would forever serve as reminder of this experience.

The phylactery, while hiding the parchments, was yet worn outside, thus, seen. Still, the Torah makes clear who should see -- the children, who would be prompted to ask, “What does this mean?” a question giving the parents an opening to share the power of God in the Exodus from Egyptian bondage.

A poignant image. A grown man, mathematical genius, brilliant inventor and philosopher, deriving comfort from the physical presence of papers sewn into his jacket, just as a child might gain security from a blanket. Hardly childish, though. There is, in fact, a kind of beautiful logic in that “curious bulge,” something suggestive of hidden hearts made full by a mysterious Presence. Are not our hearts the pouches, the temple of the Spirit, the secret and sacred site which, though hidden from the world, can never be and should never be hidden from ourselves, nor certainly forgotten in the clutter of living?

I began several of the sermons with the image of children venturing into the attic, pulling from an old trunk the clothing of parents and former generations. I hope this conjured the image of children at play, trying on shoes, hats, necklaces. In this scene, one can sense the curtain of a child’s imagining arise. Trying on those clothes, the children are briefly transformed. In the wearing of dad’s hat, of mom’s shoes, no detail is left out, from mom’s dislike of the cat to imitating dad’s telephone voice. Those things we thought the children hadn’t noticed, the things we don’t ourselves notice, are imitated and edited to its most humorous. The children are pretending to be someone Other than they themselves, “trying out as much as trying on” (as Richard Lewis writes in “Trying on a Hat”) what these other realities feel like.

Surely it’s one of the oldest rituals of childhood – inventing ourselves, playing the characters which we see ourselves Becoming. Such play is both rehearsal and real thing – hinting at a life’s journey in which the stage keeps turning into something Other. And doesn’t clothing similarly allow adults to imagine being something Other? How might clothing raise the curtain of our imagining, allowing us to become actors in our own emerging lives? Perhaps -- for some with ears to hear what has not, cannot, be spoken -- through hearing this series, the stage of one person’s life has shifted into something Other than before, allowing them to “be clothed” with Christ, leading them to a secret awareness of that sacred inner sanctum of God’s presence in their life, the place where clothing with anything but Christ is impossible, the place where to be without Christ is true nakedness.

Now (time permitting), here is the rough sketch of the sermon that wasn’t, the sermon I might have (should have?) placed in third spot, right after Sackcloth. This Alteration will add an entirely new garment to the wardrobe and so, for a moment, let’s Try THIS on For Size.

The Veil

Shield of the Forbidden/Cloak of the Glorious

Moses came down from Mt. Sinai . . . (he) did not know that the skin of his face shone

because he had been talking with God. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses,

the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him . . .

When Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a VEIL on his face.

(Exodus 34:29-30, 33)

Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory

so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face,

a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory?

Indeed, what once had glory has lost its glory because of the greater glory,

for if what was set aside came through glory, much more has the permanent come in glory!

All of us, with UNVEILED faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror,

are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.

(2 Corinthians 3:7-8, 10-11, 18)

Last week we examined the Sackcloth worn by Job in his distress and the Ninevites in their contrition. Surely we can relate. Pain. Suffering. Grief. Loss. Confusion. Tragedy. Adversity. Loneliness. Depression. Fear. Sin. Guilt. Desperation. Failure. With which of those words are any of the human family unfamiliar? Which of those words leaves us guessing as to its meaning, grappling for a definition for a concept completely foreign to our lives? We are, you see, by nature, Sackcloth people. Fragile. Wounded. Broken. Sackcloth holds no mystery for us.