Wooly Poetics Psalm 100, Romans 14:1-12

If you’ve got a few minutes to spare sometime,
standing in the checkout line or on hold with computer tech support,
then you can easily entertain yourself by asking the simple question, “Why?”
Just that. “Why?”
Like, “Why, of all the people in the world, did I marry the person I married?”
Or, “Why did I end up working in D.C. instead of Las Vegas?”
Or, “Why do I find myself a Christian, going to Rockfish Presbyterian Church
instead of a Muslim attending a mosque in Istanbul?”
We in the church file such questions under the heading, “God’s providence,”
but scientifically we may, in the end, simply say, “It’s just random.”
“Our lives are governed by random chance.”
“I zigged when I could have zagged, but that’s the nature of choice
and once I’ve made a choice there’s no going back.”

But even in the world of science, things are not always as they seem.
With the advent of powerful computers and the capacity to see on a subatomic level
even many scientists are beginning to give in to the idea
that beneath the seemingly chaotic and random nature of existence
there is a deeper, more elegant, unanticipated order to things.

In other words, scientists are beginning to catch on to what poets have known all along:
Being able to see the order inherent in God’s creation
simply requires taking a longer view than we might otherwise take;
being patient, opening our eyes a little wider,
entertaining possibilities outside the norm.

It’s a poet in Northern England who has come up with a novel way
to illustrate the deeper meaning beneath seemingly random movements.
Writer Valerie Laws received a public arts council grant of £2000
to create a living poem with sheep.1
She took a haiku poem which reads:

CLOUDS GRAZE THE SKY;
BELOW, SHEEP DRIFT GENTLE
OVER FIELDS, SOFT MIRRORS,
WARM WHITE SNOW.

and she painted one word from the poem on the back of each sheep.
From a raised platform, she then watched the sheep rearrange themselves
as they grazed and slept in a pasture.
She made notes from the groupings she observed,
and from the notes she created new poems.
Some examples:

SNOW CLOUDS THE SKY,
GENTLE SHEEP GRAZE

SOFT WHITE MIRRORS BELOW
DRIFT WARM.

WARM DRIFT, GRAZE GENTLE,
WHITE BELOW THE SKY;
SOFT SHEEP MIRRORS SNOW CLOUDS.

I’m guessing that some groupings were more poetically significant than others.
GRAZE THE DRIFT SKY OVER MIRRORS is a tough sell as a poem,
but generally, I think Ms. Laws makes her point.
There is beauty to be found even in what we might think of as a random pattern.
There is meaning beneath even the most chaotic-seeming series of events.
Ms. Laws’ poetic experiment reiterated what scientists had already discovered.
It usually takes patience and the willingness to take the long view
before the holy and sacred, the beautiful and the meaningful, begins to emerge.

Psalm 100 says,
“Know that the Lord is God, it is he that made us, and we are his.
We are his people and the sheep of his pasture.”
Jesus himself used the metaphor of a flock of sheep to describe his followers,
and he referred to himself as the “good shepherd.”
Author and Lutheran pastor Peter Marty suggests that the church would do well
to think of God as writing poetry with OUR lives.
It’s as though God has marked each of us with a word,
and waits to see how WE will group ourselves.

You have grouped yourselves, at least on this day, as the congregation
of Rockfish Presbyterian Church.
You are a voluntary organization, not one of you is required to come,
and if you think of the choices that have guided you here as entirely random,
then it’s easy to imagine that it really doesn’t matter if you come or not.

But if poets and scientists and theologians are right, your presence here is NOT random,
God is writing a poem with you here, God has marked your back,
and EACH of you is a critical component of God’s poetic experiment.
Whether you are a tiny preposition in God’s poem
or a complicated twenty-dollar adverb,
if you are not here, the poem is incomplete, its meaning diminished.

Another thing to remember about this kind of poetic experiment,
is that not every grouping will result in profound meaning and unparalleled beauty.
Some Sundays you come to worship and you leave uninspired.
Words fall flat, prayers grate, the deepest feeling you experience is indigestion.
On these days our grouping seems a jumbled mess, a chaotic cacophony.

This is where faith comes in. And patience. The willingness to take the long view.
The richer and deeper the pattern, the more difficult it is to discern right away.
The loudest critics of church life –
the ones most likely to grouse about the church’s irrelevance
or how the church is riddled with hypocrisy,
are the ones who likely have never stayed with one congregation long enough
for the patterns of meaning to emerge.
The patterns of God’s mercy and righteousness are sometimes simple and apparent,
but sometimes they are complex and intricate,
visible only through the long lens of hindsight.

Other than not showing up consistently
what must frustrate God to no end is the way we so willingly limit the vocabulary
we as a congregation offer God to work with as God writes God’s sacred poems.
It is our nature to spend time with people who are like us –
to foster conformity, to exclude those whose habits and practices
seem strange and unfamiliar.
But we have to realize that when we group ourselves with such exclusivity
in this congregation,
when we invite into this space only those with whom we feel most comfortable,
it’s like offering God the vocabulary of the old Dick and Jane Readers to work with
instead of the eccentric, eclectic, soaring lyricism
of King David, or Langston Hughes, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or Dr. Seuss.
When we so willingly segregate ourselves from other who are different
It’s like being content with:
ROSES ARE RED
VIOLETS ARE BLUE,
SUGAR IS SWEET,
AND SO ARE YOU.

instead of:
LOVE
LOVE IS A RIPE PLUM
GROWING ON A PURPLE TREE.
TASTE IT ONCE
AND THE SPELL OF ITS ENCHANTMENT
WILL NEVER LET YOU BE.2
On those days when God’s poetry fails to inspire us,
it may be because key words are missing.

The church in Rome was apparently under the misconception
that they would be more useful to God
if they could just trim the branches a bit;
if they could bring more order to their ranks
by being more exclusive about whom they congregated with.
“We don’t need no stinkin’ vegetarians,” some suggested.
“Oh yeah? Well WE don’t want Bambi killers,” others cried.
Some observed the Sabbath strictly as they’d done all their lives.
Others dismissed Sabbath observance as a remnant of Jewish law.
Each thought the other was wrong and should be shown the door.

In the midst of this melee, Paul blew his referee’s whistle,
held up his hand and said, “Stop.”
If Paul had anticipated Valerie Law’s sheep poetry experiment back then
he might have said something like this:
“Look. the church of Jesus Christ is like a herd of sheep.
We’re not that bright.
We keep stepping in manure
But for some reason, God chooses us for God’s own.
Never is there going to be a perfect church.
Never will we come to the point where God’s presence and activity
is one hundred percent apparent one hundred percent of the time.
The way we keep limiting the material God has to work with,
it’s a wonder God is able to do anything with us at all.

But that’s the mystery of the covenant God made way back with Abraham.
And that’s the promise of the communion we celebrate today.
God’s promise is that our lives do have meaning.
and that it’s when we offer ourselves to God and to each other
that the “Why” of our existence comes into focus,
and our life together becomes sheer poetry.

1 Marty, Peter, The Poetry of Sheep: A Metaphor for Congregational Life, The Christian Century,
September 9, 2008, p. 10.

2 Hughes, Langston, Love Song for Lucinda.