Buon Giorno!

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, October 24, 2010

Buon giorno!  Comé sta?  Benvenuti a culto.  Mi piacerebbe dire che Linda e ho avuto tre grande settimane in Italia.  Sono contento di essere ecco oggi, ma una parte del mio cuore rimasto in Italia.

Translation:  Howdy!  How y’all doin’?  Welcome to church this morning.  Linda and I are back after three great weeks in Italy.  I’m glad to be back, but I must say I left part of my heart over there with those great people and their great food and their long history and their exciting culture.  But after such a departure, we’ve had to return.  And after all the fanfare of our going, I wanted to try this morning to share with you some of what we did and some of what we learned and some of the questions I’m still asking myself after we were away for so long.

Three particular areas I want to get to before we’re through today:  how locked into my own physicality I am;  the apparent cyclic nature of life and politics and religion;  and how powerful myth can be, both for the good and perhaps for the not-so-good.

To begin, I want to hit the high points, visually, of some of where we went and some of what we saw:

[A slideshow of photos from the Colosseo, Forum, Vaticano;  Cinque Terre;  Venice, canals;  Florence, David, Baptistry, Savonarola, Parker;  hilltowns;  ruins;  and our flight home.]

 

It was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who said that we are not physical beings here to have a spiritual experience but spiritual beings here to have a physical experience.  I don’t know if Messr. Teilhard ever experienced jet lag, but that has been a real physical experience for me and continues to be.  Linda and I knew jet lag would be a reality so we did our best to prep for it - on the way over.  And it worked…

But on the way back, I didn’t think about it, I didn’t do much to counteract it, and now I’m paying the price - tired all day, sleepy at 7 p.m., I’m still not back on the CDT clock.  I WANT to be alert spiritually, but I can’t get away from how I feel physically.  We spiritual beings do indeed have a physical dimension, and it’s no use denying it.

2)  The cyclic nature of politics and religion.  One such politico-religious cycle happened in the city-state of Florence back at the end of the 15th century.  The story goes that Florence was becoming a crime-ridden and less than orderly city, and the good citizens wanted the town cleaned up somehow.  So in 1494, a monk named Girolamo Savonarola, from the Convent of San Marco in Florence, was installed as leader of the state.  This Savonarola was a pious sort, given to study and preaching and church work but not to having any fun, and he began to institute reforms, the first changing the punishment for the practice of homosexuality from a fine to death.  Then the Savonarola administration banned gaming and music.  They banned lewdness and pagan books and immoral sculpture.  They banned cosmetics and mirrors and fashionable clothing.  They banned poetry.  Begins to sound like the modern-day Taliban.  But these things happen - we go along okay, we see a reactionary Tea Party takeover for awhile, then we blossom again.

In 1497, gangs of youth working at the government’s behest went door-to-door gathering up illegal items and burned them in the Piazza della Signoria in the event you might know as the Bonfire of the Vanities.  Savonarola is said to have personally thrown paintings by Botticelli and other priceless Renaissance artifacts into the flames. 

But this cycle happened to be over relatively quickly - one Franciscan preacher challenged Savonarola to a trial by fire, Pope Alexander VI denounced him publicly, and he was arrested and put on trial in Florence.  On May 23rd, 1498, Savonarola, along with two associates, was ritually defrocked, hanged, and burned in the public square, that same Piazza della Signoria where he himself had burned books and art and vanities and a number of his enemies as well.

 

3)  The power of myth.  It’s hard not to be touched by the opulence and grandeur of St. Peter’s Basilica, San Giovanni in Laterano, Santa Maria Maggiore, and so many other church buildings - but especially St. Peter’s is lavish almost beyond description.  It was hard, while standing in that space and feeling the awesome power there - spiritual and otherwise - to remember that it was precisely that lavishness and opulence that led Martin Luther to begin the process of reform that led to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries.  It cost so much to produce so much art and architecture at that level that the Church resorted to the selling of indulgences, which were a sort of get-out-of-hell-free card for whoever felt the need, and everybody felt the need, rich and poor alike, for they’d all been convinced they were hopeless sinners.  But these indulgences seemed to Luther to impose a cynical spiritual treadmill on people in which, though the Church said you buy your way into heaven, you could never pay quite enough to actually get there.  And so came Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and Menno Simons and Michael Servetus and Sebastian Castellio and all the other reformers, and here we sit today, in their protestant religious and spiritual lineage, able to be somehow simultaneously in awe of the spiritual power and artistic grandeur of St. Peter’s and aware that the theology that props up such a space can be very deeply flawed and very deeply dangerous.

A question that occurred to me as I stood in that space was how so much great art and architecture can be summoned forth by and flow out of the Christian story, the Christian culture, the Christian myth if you will.  I think it’s true that the Christian myth has been and continues to be able to lift the human spirit to great heights of perfection and expression.  Especially when Christianity offers a vision of the best humanity can be, it can be a powerful force for the good.  When the gospel is that God is Love, that God is here with us, and that you are loved no matter what, I can only say ‘Amen!’ to that.

But like any myth - religious, social, or otherwise - when the Christian myth becomes mistakenly concretized, when it moves from the realm of poetry into the realm of absolutism and is no longer understood as a story that’s open to interpretation, then it can become dangerous.  When I decide that my Christianity or you decide that yours is the One True Faith, or when someone decides that his paganism or her Judaism or their Islam is the One True Faith, that’s when we start burning people in the town square and blowing each other up.

 

As Stephanie Paulsell says, “Whether we travel across a landscape outside of us or into a hidden landscape within us, or whether we move along an edge where what is inside of us and what surrounds us meet and touch, our journeys remind us that… we are always moving between departure and return.  We are always on a journey between birth and death, always inhabiting a moment that is a gift and a possibility.”

May we grasp the possibilities and accept the gifts as they are offered.

So may it be.

Arrividerci e grazie, ciao!



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