what was that all about?

 

What Was That All About? (Ps. 103.15-18, Mk. 1.14-15)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

July 12, 2020

 

Earlier this year, before the pandemic struck, my family gave me a gift. It was a special gift, something they knew I had long admired. They gave me a wristwatch.

I loved the watch because it was a throwback. It contained a mechanical movement, not a battery. It needed to be wound. It told the time very accurately. And it didn’t do anything else. It didn’t connect to the internet. It didn’t send texts. It didn’t offer news or weather updates. It didn’t even indicate the day or date. It only told the time.

I enjoyed looking at the watch and found it calming. The hour and minute hands situated me. The sweep of the second hand was vaguely meditative. Not long after I began wearing it, Deb Olin Unferth wrote an essay expressing my feelings. “On the elegant analog clock,” she wrote, “time swells and recedes like waves and seasons and life. The hands evoke the rotation of the earth, the movements of celestial objects, the cosmos.”[1] Yes, I thought, that’s exactly it.

If it sounds a little lofty, then all I really mean is that looking at the watch changed my experience of time. Since it wasn’t a smart gadget that did a hundred things at once, it rather focused my attention on one thing. I could observe minute changes. It was relaxing. And whereas my phone was always telling me the time as a calendar might do, indicating where I had to be and when, my watch told me the time in order to orient me. This is where you are, it was saying. You’re at this time.

Of course, there is a certain humor in it. I was given the watch just before a global pandemic closed everything down. Many of us began to stay home every day and the days folded into each other, blurring our experience and leaving us disoriented. Often I had no idea what day it was. Some days I even forgot the month. But I always knew the time. I thought it was funny. And strangely reassuring.

All of it has me thinking about how each of us is experiencing this time. I can’t imagine that many people are checking their watches as I do, because they simply enjoy looking at the time. But I can imagine that many people are checking their calendars, checking the news, checking the data on Covid-19 in South Carolina, checking their finances, their plans, their lives, and wondering how long this might go on. And I can imagine that we are not only experiencing time differently, but experiencing different kinds of time.

In my own reflection, I move between natural, existential, and ethical time. When the pandemic began, and we unplugged our alarm clock and slept with the windows open, I attuned myself again to the world’s great time, to nature. I woke with morning light and birdsong. I paid close attention to the sky, watching for afternoon showers. I ran by the ocean, observing the tide. My ears rang with blackbird trills. I knew when the sun was setting, when the light changed, when the stars came out. I felt newly aware of the natural rhythms and movements of the day.

As the pandemic continued, I began to consider existential time. At almost fifty years of age, I find myself squarely in mid-life, forced to stay home for my health and the health of the community. I am aware that I now have fewer years ahead of me than I do behind me, and I am eager to put my time to good use, to be of some help and service to the world. I think of so many others and the seasons of life they’re in, each one bringing existential questions of its own. Young children just beginning. Adolescents coming into their own. Students and graduates making their way into an uncertain world. Parents and working families in a busy season, now given many extra challenges. Retirees and wise elders, many of whom may be vulnerable to the virus, forced to reimagine this time in their lives. All of us, in our own ways, considering the questions of our existence that the pandemic has brought us.

And in this hot summer of the pandemic, we are also invited into a kind of ethical time. As our government fails to respond to the health crisis, as so many of our politicians show a complete indifference to suffering, as we continue to witness unchecked police brutality directed at Black Americans, and as the symbols of white supremacy begin to be pulled from their pedestals, we feel the demands of this moment. We are living in an extraordinary time. People’s consciences are stirred. They are asking moral questions. Young and old are on the march, protesting, writing letters, sending bail money, acting out at home and on the street. We feel the summons of the moment and know that part of how will we one day understand this time is in and through our ethical responses to it.

So we are moving between natural, existential, and ethical experiences of time, and it can be a bit disorienting. It reminds me of a favorite joke. I have told it before, but it bears repeating as we think about time.

A man is sitting on the couch watching television when he hears a knock at the door. He answers, but no one is there, just a snail. He picks it up and throws it as far as he can. Then he goes back inside.

Two years go by.

The man is sitting on the couch watching television when he hears a knock at the door. He answers, but no one is there, just a snail. And the snail says, Hey! What was that all about?

I love that joke because it’s about our experience of time. Because it isn’t told at anyone’s expense. And because I feel like the snail. I know that one day we’ll look back on this, after a long, slow journey, and ask, What was that all about?

I wasn’t sure if I should tell a joke because this is such a serious time. But laughter is a form of catharsis and I hope it helps. So are tears and we have shed more than a few during this time. Tears for ourselves. For our church. For our country. For Black lives. The two go naturally together, laughter and tears. They are, I think, the hour and minute hands on our emotional clocks. These days it may not hurt to ask ourselves how long it has been since we last laughed or cried. It’s one way of checking the time.

In his book, Felt Time, neuroscientist Marc Wittman observes that we don’t have any biological way to perceive time. We cannot taste, touch, smell, or see time. Yet we can perceive change and movement. As we observe changes, we know that time is passing.[2] Some changes are very small-scale, as in the ticking of the second hand or the playing of notes in a score. Others occur on a much grander scale. We look at photographs taken decades apart, we watch our hair go gray, we wait for a supermoon or the arrival of a comet. Yet in every case, the changes and movements help us make sense of the time.

We are not the first, of course, to try and make sense. The psalmist, whose words we heard this morning, put it poetically. Our time is relative. We are like grass, flourishing one day, gone the next. Our stories and our hopes are passed from one generation to another. And all of it is held in God’s time, held in the great Mystery the psalmist understands to be sacred. There is a steadfast love, he writes, from everlasting to everlasting. It’s an ancient mysticism, but the psalmist trusts it. There is something greater than us, greater than our lives, greater than our time. We have experienced it in the mystery of love, which has come to us and sustains us through every season.

And then Jesus, who spoke of time at the very beginning of his public ministry. Only a few paragraphs into the Gospel of Mark, which is the oldest of the canonical gospels, he said that the time had come. The kin-dom of God was near. He invited people to join it in their time. And we are invited to join it in ours. Which leads us to ask how the kin-dom is near. . .to us. How we experience it naturally, existentially, and ethically. How we will look for it and listen to it in our time. It’s all around you, he said to his friends at the end of the Gospel of Thomas. The work is to recognize it. It takes time.

It brings me back to the snail in the joke. Rather than asking one day, What was that all about? we are given the chance to answer this very day. What this is all about is what we make of it. So let us ask the question and then answer it with our lives. And let us be grateful for the time we are given in which to do it.

Amen.

 

[1] Deb Olin Unferth, “How Analog Clocks Can Give Us More by Giving Us Less,” The New York Times Magazine, May 5, 2020, accessed online at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/magazine/how-analog-clocks-can-give-us-more-by-giving-us-less.html

[2] Marc Wittman, Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016), pp.

when dietrich went to harlem

St. Matthäus-Kirche, Berlin, where Bonhoeffer was ordained

 

When Dietrich Went to Harlem[1] (Ps. 96, Matt. 11.28-30)

Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

July 5, 2020

 

When Dietrich went to Harlem he was restless. He had been looking for something, listening for it, and hadn’t found it anywhere.

He had spent most of his life in the halls of the academy, but its customs of reading, writing, and argument, left him wanting. He was devoted to the Lutheran church, but he didn’t find much of Jesus there, more often than not it was simply German culture suffused with a growing nationalism. He wasn’t sure where he belonged, and so when he accepted a fellowship to Union Theological Seminary in New York, he was restless.

At Union, Dietrich was initially dissatisfied. The liberal theology of the time took progress as inevitable and seemed to ground itself in culture, often eschewing the way of Jesus in favor of what was fashionable. At least that’s how Dietrich felt. He wondered what was becoming of Christianity, if it was relevant to a person’s existential condition, if it could still be transformative or if it had simply been coopted by the times. And then he went to Harlem.

Thanks to his friend Al Fisher, a Black student from Selma, Alabama, Dietrich began attending the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which was pastored by Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. There, for the first time, his restless soul found something. Or heard something. A new song.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had stumbled into the heart of what was called the Negro Renaissance, the full flowering of Black culture and arts centered simultaneously in New York and Washington, DC. The movement became known as the Harlem Renaissance, a term preferred by James Weldon Johnson, but it was taking place all over the country as Black people dispensed with society’s negative portrayals of their lives and culture and put them on proud display. It was one of the most vibrant periods in American cultural history, and Dietrich walked right into it.

What he found at the Abyssinian Baptist Church was something radically different than he had known before. Rather than a strictly academic theology, content to remain within the cloistered walls of the university or divinity school, Dietrich found a people’s theology. While the Black church was as academic as the white church, it was not content to leave it there. The Black church of the time grounded itself in the story of Jesus and related itself to the experiences of Black people. And the story of Jesus was a story of suffering. So what the Black church offered was something you could feel.

Dietrich had been looking for something he could feel, listening for a certain song. He hadn’t found it anywhere. Not at the University of Berlin. Not at Union Theological Seminary. Not anywhere until the Abyssinian Baptist Church. In his wonderful book, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance, Reggie Williams explains what Bonhoeffer found:

The language of sin and salvation was present at Abyssinian, but the white liberal modernist hope for human achievement was not. Jesus, not modernity, was the reason for hope within Black Christian communities like Abyssinian. Jesus was evidence that God knows suffering; if God was with Jesus in his suffering at the hands of injustice, then surely God is with black people who suffer in America.[2]

Dietrich heard this theme every week as he attended Abyssinian with his friend Al. The preaching, the music, and the lived experiences of the people all emphasized that Jesus was with those who suffered. At the same time, Dietrich read of lynchings, he saw the hatred directed at Black Americans and the currents of legalized segregation in which they were forced to move. He began to feel the injustice of it all, to let his anger and discontent rise. He knew that Jesus was with the marginalized, the least and the lowest, the despised and the outcast in America or any place. It was no longer an academic exercise for him.

He had learned a new song. In American terms, it was a spiritual. He heard the harmonies of those Harlem choirs. It was also a blues song. He felt the weight on the shoulders of his friends, heard in in their voices, saw it in their eyes. And in Biblical terms, it was a kind of psalm. Like the one we’ve heard today. O sing a new song, says the psalmist. Not like the old one. And the verses go on to contrast the way of faith with the regular order of things. The psalm begins with praise, warns against idolatry, envisions all creatures as part of the chorus, and then differentiates between God and the current politics. One day, the psalmist says, God will judge with fairness and equity. One day there will be justice.

Dietrich began to hear that song. And he began to hear Jesus in a new way. Jesus was one who suffered with others. He lived with them. He shared their lot. He did not lord over but walked with. And he was lynched just like a Black man in America. The people at Abyssinian were drawn to him because he was one of them. When he said things like, Come to me all you that are weary, he said it as one who was weary himself.

Reggie Williams suggests that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was transformed not by his time in America, but by his time in Black America. There he moved from a strictly academic theology into a theology that was felt, lived, and experienced. It was a theology of solidarity with all who were suffering. And if Jesus was Black in America, then as Dietrich returned to Germany, it was not difficult to find where Jesus was hidden there. Once he was back home, he saw Jews rounded up, put into cattle cars, shipped off. He knew exactly where Jesus was.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer went down in history as a German pastor who preached and witnessed against the National Socialist Party, the Nazis. He was a leader in the minority of churches who vocally opposed the regime and its violence on the grounds of their Christian faith. Most German churches went right along with it. But a few resisted. And they suffered for it.

Dietrich was sent to a concentration camp where he died in April 1945.

Most of my life I thought I knew the story. But I only knew half of it. It was told to me that Bonhoeffer studied at Union, not that he worshipped at Abyssinian, before deciding to go back. Yet I have come to believe that Bonhoeffer was less a product of the academy than he was a student of the Black church. It was there that he learned that Jesus always takes a side, and that is the side of the suffering. It was there that he learned a new song, a song of faith, hope, and love in the midst of experiences of real oppression. It was there that he learned that religion could actually be transformative. After he went to Harlem, everything changed.

I share this story on a weekend that we celebrate a national holiday because it runs against nationalist narratives. The America Dietrich found was not a just nation. The Germany to which he returned was quickly descending into a nightmare. We should not hear in the story any allegiance to one nation or another. Rather, we should hear a story of our allegiance to each other.

What Dietrich found in Harlem was a song of universal brotherhood and sisterhood, a new song of relationship between all people. That song changed his life. But not everybody wanted to hear it.

Friends, the same is so with us. If we follow the way of Jesus who suffers with others, then we know the way we must go. It isn’t the conventional way. But if our souls are restless in this moment, if we are looking for something, listening for something, and wondering if faith could still be transformative, then let us do what Dietrich did. Let us tune in to Black America to listen, learn, and say. . .

Amen.

 

[1] See Reggie Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014).

[2] Ibid., 25.