Simplest Moments So Full

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 

Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons,

and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters;

multiply there, and do not decrease.  But seek the welfare of the city where

I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf,

for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

(Jeremiah 29:5-7)

 

 

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on 14th Sunday after Pentecost, September 2, 2007

Volume 2 Number 9

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6^th Street, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 

 

Live your life with an eye to discovering that the Simplest Moments are So Full.  That, I think is Jeremiah’s message.  It’s a great message to people of all times and places, to be sure, but in the context of Jeremiah’s words to Judah, a message of life and hope to a people recently defeated by the Babylonians, their brightest and best removed from Jerusalem and forced into exile, prompting the words of Psalm 137, “by the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when they remembered Zion, hanging our harps on the willows.”   

 

Anguish is obvious and real, but Jeremiah encouraged a different spirit.  “Build houses and live in them.  Plant gardens and eat what they produce.”  He advised the people of Judah to engage life, to marry and have children.  “Multiply THERE,” he said, wherever providence finds you.  “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile.  Pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

 

I chose this text for two reasons:  because this text highlights the value of labor for this Labor Day weekend, and because I want to say something about the nature of Holy Communion as we come to the Lord’s Table this morning.  Regarding Labor Day, I want you to notice how Jeremiah’s words sanctify the mundaneness of labor — building houses and planting gardens. 

 

For Jeremiah, the national jolt which Judah received in 586 B. C. was to be countered by a love for life, the day-to-day fulfillment of work and play, the joy of family, honest labor and simple laughter.  However mundane that may sound, Jeremiah sees it as vital to spiritual well-being.  It is as if he lifts the chalice filled with the wine of joy and proposes, at a most inopportune moment in national history, the Jewish toast, L’chaim, “to life!”

 

L’Chaim is a unique way of offering blessing to one another, of wishing for life in its fullness to be experienced by those we love.  It was made famous in the English speaking world by Fiddler on the Roof, and is a toast that distinctively emphasizes the Hebrew philosophy of life.  Long before my love for the Hebrew language developed when in seminary, I was introduced to the phrase in one of my favorite movies from my high school days, the 1972 film, The Poseidon Adventure.  The luxury liner Poseidon, on a New Year’s cruise, is hit by a 90 foot, earthquake- generated tidal wave.  Poseidon capsizes, and the movie follows a small band of survivors as they struggle to escape through the hull of the ship. 

 

The imagery is an apt metaphor for life, reminding us that sometimes our lives can be turned upside down in an instant, leaving us to struggle back to the top with courage.  A central theme of the movie, expounded by the irreverent Reverend (played by Gene Hackman), is that life matters.  This is poignantly shown when Shelly Winters, playing the overweight Jewish mother and grandmother, Mrs. Rosen, jumps into a water-filled compartment to save the group, insisting she’s should, since when she was 17 she was an underwater swimming champion.  She makes it through the twisted steel, saving their lives, but the stress is too much for her heart.  Before she dies, she gives the Reverend a medallion on her necklace and asks the preacher to give it to her grandchildren, explaining that the necklace says, L’Chaim, “To Life.”  It was a selfless act of sacrifice that was her toast to her family . . .  L’Chaim! 

 

Jeremiah is saying that, even in calamity, let not circumstance rob us of our determination to live. He’s also saying that calamity can re-ordering of our priorities, that in those things which make up our daily living, calamity can make us realize that the Simplest Moments are so Full. 

 

Our own nation experienced such a re-ordering of priorities on another September day six years ago, infamously known as 9/11, a day when our comprehension was strained to make room for the incomprehensible.  The attack upon our country with the loss of some 3,000 innocents, instantly re-ordered our priorities, forcing a separation of the utterly essential from the merely important.  Old sensations, old celebrities, old topics of national discussion, lost their savor as in an instant as we witnessed the galvanizing effect of tragedy.  Just as Judah was vitalized by her circumstances to appreciate anew the basic pleasures of life, so were we made to relish the simple gifts of life.  Simplest moments such as building a house.  Yet, so full.  Simplest moments such as planting a garden.  Yet, so full.  Simplest moments of laughter with family.  Yet, so full.

 

For the moment, we re-defined the heroes in our midst.  No longer celebrities, either of sport or screen.  They were seen for who they are — talented and gifted people whom we like and enjoy.  But heroes?  No.  Our new heroes were faces we would never recognize in the paper, servants wearing uniforms of fire and police, playing the role of Mrs. Rosen in real time, giving themselves so others could live. 

 

Calamity can remind us, as the Welsh poet David Whyte wrote, “I don’t want to have written on my tombstone, when finally people struggle through the weeds, pull back the moss, and read the inscription there – ‘He made his car payments.”  In other words, there is more to life than job and house and car.  There is a danger of becoming lost in the crevice of careerism, busying ourselves so with the day-to-day that the blessing of family and community are missed.

 

In an instant of national tragedy New York and the entire nation was able to share the sense of community experienced in small towns.  Small towns such as our own Mountain Home have a bit of an advantage.  Fast-paced urban America experienced this post 9/11, slowing down even as events sped up, learning to relish the simple, learning the importance of community.  September 11 intensified our nation’s search for this sense of community.  

 

What we crave is community.  Lewis Mumford points out that cities did not grow beyond walking distance of the church, out of the earshot of the church bells, until the mass communication of the 19^th century.  So central was the church to the community that the bells must be heard, the bells that call us to God and to each other, especially in times of community crisis.  In the days after 9/11, this national hunger for community was our craving to be within earshot once more of the church bells. 

 

In this, the small town has an advantage.  There is a certain quality in small town life, elusive of definition, which makes the simplest moments so full, so piercingly fine that they illuminate all the rest of life.   Moments at the gathering places of our town -- the supermarket, the restaurants where we meet friends for coffee or lunch, the town square on a Friday night of music, the football stadium where proud parents and grandparents gather with community to watch our youth and cheer for victory, the schools, the churches.  These are places where people know you, know your name.  These render the Simplest Moments So full.

 

There was another moment of calamity that gave birth to community, the community of faith.  The meal we share now was born in a Simple Moment that was So Full – a small band of disciples gathering with their teacher in the Upper Room for the Passover meal.  From that meal comes our Holy Communion.  Hardly simple now, you may think, a meal surrounded with ritual and music and ceremony.  Nevertheless, from its inception the power of this meal has been the simple gathering of friends forged into family by calamity, of Jesus knowing he was being betrayed, stepping from that Upper Room into Gethsemene, into the tumult of the arrest and torture and death.  Yet even here, lifting up his glass to disciples whose world was about to be turned upside down, and saying, “L’Chaim!” 

 

 

Sources:

“A Livable City,” an essay by Christine Whittemore, in PARABOLA, Volume 18, Number 4 (Winter 1993, The City). It was this essay which inspired my title, “Simplest Moments So Full.”  Speaking of life in the city, Ms. Whittemore writes, “. . . a certain quality, elusive of definition, made the simplest moments so full, so piercingly fine that they illuminated all the rest of life.”