A Wild Bunch

an Earth Day sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church, Alton, Illinois, April 19, 2009,

after a reading of Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”:

 

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean--

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

 

 

A Wild Bunch

I have a green yard.  No, I don’t mean it’s organic or enviro-friendly or saves water or turns sunlight into electricity.  I mean the grass is green, and thick, and lush, and about as weed-free as any yard I’ve ever seen.  My neighbors tell me how nice it looks.  People who are walking by comment on it.  It’s strange, but I receive public affirmations about what a good guy I am because my yard looks nice.

It wasn’t always thus.  I moved to my present house almost twenty years ago now.  At that time, it was a burned-out shell in an iffy neighborhood on the south side of the City of Saint Louis.  My friends and family thought I had lost my mind.

The tiny, postage-stamp yard was a wild mixture of zoysia, clover, violets, and mud – mostly mud.  My best dog ever, Spot, loved the mud, and trampled down as many of the growing things as she could to make way for more mud.

As the neighborhood around me went through a transition, so did my yard.  After Linda and I married and she moved in, when we weren’t working on the interior of the house, we dreamed of renovating the scrappy-looking yard as well.  Eventually, we put sod down one side of the back yard.  The next year, we sodded a section of the other half of the back.  The trouble with sod, we slowly learned, is that the weeds you put the sod down on top of just grow up through the new turf.  Who knew?  I guess I skipped most of grass class in college… at least that kind of grass…

The years have passed.  Spot has passed.  I have spent untold hours on my hands and knees pulling weeds, patiently or not-so-much-so trying to get their roots out as I go, re-seeding with fescue and bluegrass and shade mixes, mowing often in the spring, watering just enough in the deep summer.  And all that time and all that effort has finally yielded a tiny, postage-stamp yard full of lush green grass that is a delight to my neighbors and a collection of local birds and bunnies.  How nice.

I tell you this not to brag.  I tell you this to confess.  At what cost to the environment have I done all this work?  The grasshoppers and the bunnies and weeds will have it all in the end, will they not?  Certainly I have gotten a tremendous sense of spiritual satisfaction out of the mindless labor I’ve put in, but mightn’t I have found something more productive to do with my time?  Is the end of my Zen practice a patch of grass that is not compatible with the rest of the world?  Is this what I want to do with my one wild and precious life?

 

The weekend before I was to meet our construction missionaries in Iberia parish on the Gulf Coast just a couple of weeks ago, Linda and I drove to New Orleans for a short couple of days.  We have loved the city since we went to Mardi Gras many years ago, but we hadn’t been back down since Katrina crushed the levees and the city back in 2005.  We were anxious about what we would find when we got there.  We were concerned from the photos we’ve seen and the stories we’ve read of the population still dispersed across America, a crime wave continuing to escalate, a tourism industry still suffering.  When we got to the French Quarter, though, we were surprised to see overwhelming crowds of cars and people.  Ah, at least tourism is back, we said.  Here on a Saturday during Lent, you could barely walk the streets of the Quarter, sit down outside Café du Monde, or grab a muffaletta at Central Grocery.  All those tourists, Linda and I concluded, Linda and I included, seemed to be having a great time and pumping money into the economy. 

On Sunday morning, we went to worship at First Church of New Orleans.  Looking on the bright side, we were among the more-than-half of those present that day who were visiting from somewhere else – we took it as a good sign that far-flung people are still supportive of the plight the congregation and the city finds itself facing these days.

On the downside, though, the congregation’s building is still in need of huge amounts of renovation.  Where the pews were in the sanctuary before the flood, a wild mixture of folding chairs now awaits worshippers.  The sanctuary floor is still bare concrete.  The most prominent feature on the chancel is the set of scaffolding left from work on the stained-glass windows.  The walls of the first floor of the entire building are still raw drywall and signs of damage are still evident in every room.

Upstairs, there are a couple of rooms now set up for visiting crews of volunteers to stay while working on projects at the church and around the area.  There is a lot of work to be done, and the people there know it.  And the church building is set up to help other people come down to help rebuild for a long time to come.

When we left the church, we went to eat at Deenie’s out in Bucktown and then drove around town for a little while before taking Linda to the airport.  Some parts of town we saw look okay, most still show overt signs of the flood.  Some of the housing we saw is in fine shape:  new roofs, new siding, new windows and doors, nice landscaping and fine-trimmed lawns - you’d never know there’d ever been a problem from looking at those places.  However, most blocks in the poorer parts of town have a least a few houses that are still boarded up.  On some blocks, the board-ups predominate.  Some of what were once neighborhoods with friends and families and kids running all around are now wastelands of collapsing former homes, the yards overgrown, the houses disappearing under lush vegetation, the grasshoppers and the bunnies and the weeds taking over.  The government has no money to tear down the dilapidated remnants, which may be okay because in some cases it’s obvious that people are still living in those ruins.  Some of the wild and precious life of what we once knew as New Orleans is still there;  much of it is very evidently never coming back.

 

Last Sunday was Easter, and when I came into the sanctuary to get ready for the service that morning, the choir was already in place back there behind the pews and ready to begin rehearsing together.  They are a lively crew whenever they’re together, and they were having a grand old time on Easter.  When I opened the Order of Service that morning and saw in the announcements the title for this morning’s sermon listed there, I realized I had chosen a title that suited the choir quite well:  “A Wild Bunch.”  I’ve sat in with them during rehearsal and performance and I know they have a good time.  From my perspective up here in the pulpit, I’ve gotten to witness their hands in the air during hymns and anthems, and their swaying to-and-fro in time to the music, and all their delightfully impromptu liturgical dance routines.  It’s good that there’s a bunch of them, many more than there used to be, but regardless of their numbers, it’s their wildness that most impresses, I think.

The whole church has seemed pretty wild lately, actually.  There’s an awful lot going on around here.  Chalice Circles, UU&You!, the Buddhist group meeting weekly, the Pagan Group twice a month or thereabouts, the Women’s Drumming Circle, Building & Grounds workdays, highway clean-up, task forces, committees, Board of Trustees meetings.

The Social Justice calendar alone is enough to make your head swim.  4^th Saturday Lunches, United Congregations of Metro-East meetings, planning for the Decade of Racial Reconciliation in Alton, Gender Identity workshops, the Katrina Relief trip to Louisiana, a mental illness awareness series starting in May and another film series starting soon - no one can do everything that’s available.  It’s practically impossible simply to remember it all.

Besides which, we just registered child number 50 in the Children’s Religious Education program.  We can handle more, but it’s a landmark to get to this point and I want us to remember to celebrate it.  If you’ve been in the RE wing lately, or if you’ve been here for worship the last few Sundays, you know it’s been wild around here for awhile.  I say this with the utmost joy and amazement:  it’s a wild bunch we have here, not just in RE, but in choir, in leadership, in the pews and in the pulpit.  We’re doing an awful lot, we’re getting a lot done, we’re moving ahead in some really important ways.  And I’m thrilled.

There was a seed planted here a hundred and seventy-some-odd years ago, and it feels like it may be sending out shoots once again.  The wild bunch that’s here now hasn’t sat back and waited for the seed to grow.  Some of us have gotten on our hands and knees trying to make this happen, and the effort is paying dividends.  And not just in numbers but in visibility in the broader community, in effectiveness in the world, and in depth of spirit as well. 

But I tell you all this not to brag (at least not too much).  I tell you this mostly to confess that I still ask the question of myself from time to time:  is this the right thing to be doing?  At some point, everything returns to the earth, and the grasshoppers and the bunnies and the weeds can have it all.  But for right now, even though I’ve gotten a tremendous sense of spiritual satisfaction out of the labor I’ve put in, might I have found something more productive to do with my time?  Returning to Mary Oliver’s plaintive question, is this what I want to do with my one wild and precious life?

The Board of Trustees and I are about to embark on a renegotiation of the roles of congregation and minister.  When I began here four years ago, we developed a covenant together that was loose enough for all of us to be comfortable so we could grow into a relationship in whatever ways seemed most helpful and productive at the time.  We have grown, and we’ve grown into a different size and flavor and nature of congregation, and it’s time we reexamine how we relate to one another and adjust our practices and processes so that we can keep moving this congregation into a vibrant and healthy future.  To do this, we have to be honest with each other – about what’s working well, about what needs improvement, about what kinds of things I should be doing or not doing, about what kinds of things the leadership and laity and you should be doing or not doing.

In a conversation that I took as a prelude to these upcoming negotiations, it was suggested to me that my job boils down to loving you all.  I do love you all – I don’t always like all of you;  I don’t always like myself, nor do you always like me.  I do love you, but I take that not as the end of my job, but rather as the beginning.  All that I do should rightfully spring forth from love.  I couldn’t do all that I do, to paraphrase the Apostle Paul, if I had not love – some days, of course, to paraphrase Ricky Nelson, it’d be easier to drive a truck.  But on the whole, I have somehow been able to wake up every day and make the decision to love you, to love what I do, and to give praise and thanks for the opportunity.

If I’ve worked hard here, so have many of you:  The grass is greener and all the growing things are healthier here at church.  Those of us who have been told we were weeds elsewhere in our lives have found a home where we can flourish and grow.

But if I have work to do, so do you:  learning to be more honest with each other, learning to pay attention to how you treat one another, learning how to speak the truth in love while remembering to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person, not just the ones you like when you like them, but all of us all the time.

I told you I was asking questions of myself: is this the right thing for me to be doing?  Is this what I want to do with my one wild and precious life?

My answer, today, is yes, absolutely.  What’s yours?

 

So may it be.