GOSPEL PARADOX: The “both – and” nature of God

A Sermon for Sunday, October 19, 2008

(refrain from Hymn # 556, The Hymnal 1982)

“The autumn leaves drift by my window…” That lyric is from one of my personal favorites, a tune I learned in my college singing days, called “Autumn Leaves.” One day last week I took a long walk in Baker Park, just to look at the trees and leaves. I took some notes in my mini-journal. Here is what I wrote:

In the fall, trees are in differing stages of change. Their transformations are similar but not the same. Their leaves are mostly of one new color – green, yellow, brown, red, orange. But when I look more closely, even though a tree’s leaf color looks like a single hue, I can see that the leaves are of a mixed color. (Hand out leaves.) Leaves are even more colorful than they first appear. And when the wind blows, the leaves drift, mixed together. As they pile up, the leaves are no longer of just one type or species or color, but of many, coating and covering the earth. Leaves have no control over where they go or which other leaves they hang out with.

And then I wrote: God has created these trees and leaves, and God has created us. We, too, are contradictions, both alike and different – the same in many ways and yet, in different stages and colors. We are more polychromatic than we will ever know, more multivalent in our thoughts and feelings than we really like to admit. And we are blown about by God’s mighty Wind, all mixed up together with each other, in ways that are not of our own choosing. How challenging! How strange! How wonderful!

I have always loved the fall. But when I discovered the work that a Quaker Christian named Parker Palmer has done – reflecting on nature’s wonderful world of wisdom in the four seasons – I began to see how I really loved them all. Winter, with its demands and clarity. Spring, plug ugly before its splendor. Summer, in all its abundance. And fall, that autumn contradiction of both beauty and decline. Before he unpacks these and other phrases, Palmer sets a seasonal stage. In his essay “There Is a Season,” he says, “Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life….It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all – and to find, in all of it, opportunities for growth” (Let Your Life Speak, p. 96).

Unlike the people of Jesus’ day, we do not live in an agricultural society, even in Maryland. The seasons as both metaphor and fact no longer, as Palmer puts it, “frame our lives” (ibid.). Yet metaphor and parable are what Jesus was so often about.

Starting in summer and into the fall, we’ve been hearing lots of Sunday parables. Parables are metaphoric, paradoxical stories from nature that begin “the kingdom of heaven can be compared to….” or “the kingdom of God is like….” Parables are symbolic stories about nature’s paradox, found in fields and flowers, trees and leaves and seeds. For Jesus, God’s kingdom, God’s reign is like…well, God’s creation. “Thy kingdom come”? In a manner of speaking, in a parabolic, paradoxical way, God’s kingdom, God’s reign is already here, in God’s creation – right in front of us, all around us…even within us.

But how can that be? How can God’s reign – which, if any of us has been paying attention lately, is not yet with us! – how can God’s kingdom already be with us and in us? How can the kingdom of God be both: both not yet come and already here? How can Jesus’ parables, God’s paradoxes be true? In his very first book, written almost thirty years ago and just reissued, a book called The Promise of Paradox: A Celebration of Contradictions in the Christian Life, Parker Palmer planted the seed of an idea about God’s parabolic, paradoxical kingdom. Here it is:

“Contradiction, paradox, the tension of opposites: these have always been at the heart of my experience, and I think I am not alone. I am tugged one way and then the other. My beliefs and my actions often seem at odds. My strengths are sometimes cancelled by my weaknesses. My self, and the world around me, seem more a study in dissonance than…harmony….” But, he continues, “perhaps contradictions (and parables and paradoxes) are not impediments in the spiritual life but an integral part of it. Through them we may learn that the power for life comes from God, not from us” (p. 2).

God’s kingdom, both already and not-yet here. God’s Good News, in both death and resurrection. A widow put it to me this way: “Over time, I have come to see that my dear husband has brought light and life to me through the darkness of his death.” God’s nature, it seems, is both-and. Dying and rising, seeding and breaking open. Both summer and fall, winter and spring. Even this: both giving the emperor what is the emperor’s – the government what is the government’s – and giving God what is God’s. How do we do that? The only way I know is this: we look around us, we listen, and we see and we hear: God’s Good News in Christ is parabolic. God’s Gospel is a paradox.

How easy is it to embrace the Gospel paradox? One nature writer put it this way: “The metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly demands a lot, including courage, sacrifice and hard work. It requires resourcefulness….It requires nurturing. In return, it offers a deep experience of life” (Rod MacIver, “A Pause for Beauty”, the HeronDance newsletter, 10/15/08). I had a deeper experience of life about twenty years ago, when a young mother came to speak with me. A graduate of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, she had decided not to be ordained, using her gifts as the religion writer for a local big city newspaper.

Her news that day, told through tears, was not yet for publication. She had just miscarried, and she was devastated. Her husband and her young son were so looking forward to another child in their family’s life. But this mother said something I never expected, spoken with the power of paradox: “I need to ritualize this,” she insisted. “I need to create a liturgy, a service for worshiping God, out of this loss.”

She and I worked together to shape what today is a more common liturgy: a memorial service for mothers and families who have lost their expected child. In church, we set the communion table with fair linen and a rose. And she brought a recorded, contemporary tune to play, whose text was based on the paradoxical teaching of Jesus in the gospel of John: “Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds onto life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal” (12:24-25, The Message).

As the music played, her young son got up, began to move – and then, to dance. Without a doubt his mother’s son, he danced the entire song. Every eye was on him. In the following days and months he came to say the Lord’s Prayer – including the part about “thy kingdom come” – louder than anyone else.

In this, our parish season of stewardship, we are reminded that our paradoxical, both-and God is both giver of all gifts and receiver of all gifts. We are reminded at this time of year to be grateful for what we have been given. But what we have is not a measure of what or who we are. One internet devotional writer asks, “Why (in this time of financial crisis) do we not despair? One reason, maybe, is that (in the midst of what feels like dying) there is the seed of something worthy born in each of us” (Joe Riley, Panhala, 10/7/08. www.panhala.net/Archive/Index.html.

Palmer has the last word: “In a paradox, opposites do not negate each other – the cohere in mysterious unity at the heart of reality. Deeper still, they need each other for health, as my body needs to breathe in as well as breathe out….Autumn constantly reminds me that my daily dyings are necessary precursors to new life. If I try to “make” a life that defies the diminishments of autumn, the life I end up with will be artificial, at best, and utterly colorless as well. But when I yield to the endless interplay of living and dying, dying and living, the life I am given will be real and colorful, fruitful and whole” (Let Your Life Speak, p. 99-100).

The Rev. Thomas A. Momberg
All Saints' Episcopal Church, Frederick, MD
October 19, 2008