“Let Us Break Bread Together”

A Sermon by Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 23 November 2008

I have two readings I’d like to share with you this morning.  The first is a poem by Denise Levertov called “The Fountain.”

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water to solace the dryness at our hearts.

I have seen the fountain springing out of the rock wall

   and you drinking there.

And I, too, found footholds and climbed to drink the cool water.

The woman of that place, shading her eyes, frowned as she washed,

   but not because she grudged the water;

Only because she was waiting to see we drank our fill

   and were refreshed.

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.

That fountain is there among its scalloped green and grey stones.

It is still there and always there,

   with its quiet song and strange power to spring in us

   up and out, through the rock.

And from this morning’s hymn:                                                                                                        

Come thou fount of ev’ry blessing, turn our lives to higher ways.

Lift our gloom and desperation, show the promise of this day.

Help us bind ourselves in union, help our hands tell of our love.

With thine aid, O fount of justice, earth be fair as heav’n above.

Friends, I had every intention of preaching a sermon today about immigration, about the political questions raised by the symbol of the Thanksgiving table, the welcome table – who’s welcome at the table, who’s not.  Who picks the food that will be on our Thanksgiving table?  It’s a sermon I’d been planning to give for a long time.  It’s long overdue.  The choir had graciously put together music of early America and of the Americas as a way to symbolize my theme this morning.  But I’m sorry that I’m not going to be able to preach that sermon this morning.

Early this morning, I received a phone call from a dear friend who grew up in D.C. and whose family remains here though he now lives in Oregon.  He called to tell me the tragic news that his parents who live in Chevy Chase, D.C., were found in their home yesterday, having been murdered.  Ginny and Mike Spevak.  Ginny was an upstanding member of Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church and a crusader for social justice in that community.  Mike was a psychiatrist who worked in the prisons and worked with troubled adolescents.  They themselves might have appreciated the sermon on immigration this morning as they had served as foster parents for children who had come to this country as immigrants.

Unfortunately, tragedies like this take place in our city every day.  And certainly we don’t always stop what we’re doing and change the sermon to acknowledge them.  But it just so happens that this one touches your minister pretty personally.  And it just so happens that he answered his cell phone this morning.  It’s one of the occupational hazards of being a preacher, not knowing when you pick up your phone on a Sunday morning, how the news that you are about to receive will impact what you are going to say just a few hours later in the pulpit.  And sometimes you just can’t go on with what was planned.

That’s been the lesson for us this week here at All Souls Church.  You heard the litany of prayers from Shana this morning.  And you heard the news that we all received earlier this week of Reverend Louise Green’s illness.  And, gratefully, we have every reason to expect that she will make a full recovery.  But it’s made all of us on staff this week pause and take stock of our lives, of what’s important to us, of what we want to do with our brief time here on this earth and how we need to care for those we love.  And so it seems to me that Thanksgiving couldn’t have come at a better time this year; it seems to me that this Thanksgiving we might remember those things that are most important to us:  to be grateful for those blessings that we have in our lives.   In this time of scarcity and anxiety in our country, sometimes we need to check in and remember what it is we have to be grateful for which, this Thanksgiving, is a meal to sustain us and loved ones with whom to share it.

Mary Oliver has a poem that I often reflect upon when I need to get back in touch with what’s important because she ends this poem with three lessons for living that I’ve been reflecting on since I received this phone call this morning.  I want to share that poem with you right now.  It’s her poem, “In Blackwater Woods.”  It’s a poem that also beautifully evokes the fall.

Look, the trees are turning

their own bodies

into pillars of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment.

The long tapers of cattails

are bursting  and floating away over

the blue shoulders of the ponds,

and every pond, no matter what its

name is, is nameless now.

Every year everything

I have ever learned in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side is salvation,

whose meaning none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

 you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

The last time I saw Ginny and Mike Spevak was this summer when I had the privilege of officiating at the wedding of my friend, their son, and his fiancé, out in Portland, Oregon.  Chris and I went out a day early so we could visit one of my favorite places in the world – the Columbia River Gorge.  For those of you who have never seen it, the Gorge is a deep, wide, emerald canyon that guides the mighty Columbia from the high plains of Idaho across the Cascade Range and out into the Pacific.  Its wide and deep swath was cut from the earth fifteen thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, by a flood of biblical proportions.  Great, glacial lakes in what is now Montana burst their dams, unleashing 2.6 billion gallons of water per second, in a torrent that sped to the ocean at 80 miles per hour, destroying everything in its path, leaving behind the wide gorge and its tall, sheer canyon walls.

The jewels of the Columbia River Gorge are the many waterfalls that cascade down those sheer walls.  To hike the canyon’s rainforest, its dense cover of redwoods, ferns and mosses and then to suddenly encounter one of these waterfalls is to feel as though you’ve stumbled upon some fount of primordial blessing, the fabled source of some elixir of life eternal.  From below the waterfall appears to flow from heaven itself; you cannot see its source.  All around you the water falls and crashes, sobering you with its thunder, caressing your body and face with its spray, charming you with the rainbows that it creates as spray and sun mix.  It is baptism by full emersion, a baptism into the beauty, power and grace of the world.

Don’t say there is no water to solace the dryness at our hearts.  I have seen the fountain springing out of the rock wall and I too found footholds and climbed to drink its cool water.

Friends, this Thanksgiving, let us reconnect with the fount of blessing at the center of our lives.  Let us rediscover the cool water that will solace the dryness at our hearts, and thus quenched, let us reach out with generosity and with love, to both neighbor and stranger.     Amen