20 November 2005

Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

Church of the Redeemer

New Haven, Conn.

Scripture:  Matthew  25:31-46

Alert to What?  Part II

I believe that salvation is something that happens within language, through words.

And I believe that I am being Biblical about this.  In Genesis, our world itself is a deed from God’s word.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus is himself the Word of God.

I know that there are spiritual experiences without words.  But when all is said and done, I don’t believe we really know what was done until we hear what was said about it.

Lincoln was wrong when he said about the Gettysburg Address—given, by the way, one hundred and forty three years ago yesterday—that the world would little note nor long remember what was said there—on that dedication day.  For we will always note and forever remember what was done there because of what he said there.

Word and deed.  That’s about as far as l’ve gotten on the spiritual journey with God.  I believe that it is a Christian way of looking at life.  And so this is a sermon about some words and deeds, especially as having occurred down near Battell chapel with the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., once upon a time and then again not so long ago.

I started building expectations for this sermon by last week asking: “What do you pay attention to, and why?”  I mentioned the pathetic fog of inattention, deficit attention, that we are in as a society, as well as the attention disorder we suffer as individuals by way of our instantaneous ego reactions, our inner road rage.  It seems that no matter how pathetic our foggy minds are, the one thing we seem to know how to pay attention to is our ego security, the state of our personal survival.

Our hope is that there is a way, a better way, to be alert to God and to be true to ourselves, a way to know how to act, so that in the end, when all is said and done, our meeting God—first time or second—is a good thing.  In the story that Jesus tells in our scripture today we do meet up with God again—as the servants do with the king.  Today is Christ the King Sunday because of this story.  It imagines for us the Second Coming of Christ as the King.  But what is revealed is not really that God shows up a second time.  What is revealed is that God was there the whole time.  The teaching point of Jesus story is that we, the people, can wake up for the first time!  And by means of this story Jesus, compassionately, gives us a second chance to see what we have been doing all along.  It is in the words of the story that there really is a Second Coming—once heard we needn’t wait any longer.

So the salvation place, the place of eternal beatitude, is the place revealed by words about the deeds that bring us into the presence of God.  In that particular place we are in the God-giving place.  And we know where that place is!  We just heard it listed for us for the second week in a row.  I believe it bore repeating.  It is the place of human need and suffering.  That is where God is, where God’s deeds are done and God’s word said, saying:  “Join me there.  Meet me there at the corner of need and suffering, or College and Elm.”

When by grace and work we put our ego where God is, we will be paying attention to the right thing at the right time, and we’ll know what to say and do, words and deeds.  Jesus’ story says, in our language, that the end point to life is to ego-identify with God.  This is why the story ends our liturgical year as well, the last lectionary reading before Advent. And it tells us that careful attention is simply attention full of care, care for where God and humanity suffer.

The story that Jesus confronts us with in Chapter 25 of Matthew lives on.  In it God is saying, “I was naked and you gave me clothing” (vs. 36).  Jesus has God saying, “For I was hungry and you gave me food” (vs. 35).  We see how those words live on in the deeds of church children this day in their food offerings to the food bank!

The story lives on in the people who know the words and who do the deeds.  And my sermon today comes from my own forty year history with such words and deeds—as they have come to me and lived on through the life and ministry of William Sloane Coffin, a liberal Protestant minister, chaplain at Yale, minister of Riverside Church.

In my own little history with Bill Coffin, from when I was 20 to when I was 60, I see a story of salvation—told and then retold.  I offer it as a witness, a testimony, and as a paradigm or even parable of how a Christian can pay attention, to what, and why.

I don’t know if my story of word and deed will speak to you.  But it may help you hear those words and deeds the way I did if I tell you a little more about myself.

I mentioned last week that having grown up with little or no available ego—my parents making me a Christian before allowing me to be a human—that I know the importance of having a so-called healthy ego.  I’m not one of those preachers who tries to shame people out of their humanity.

So the instant and enormous attraction to me in meeting, listening to, and knowing Bill Coffin was that he was clearly a man with an ego.  But then also amazingly, he was a Christian with an ego, and he knew, by and large, what to do with his ego.  Now, I have never gotten—for better and for worse—a big burly ego like Bill Coffin’s.  I didn’t have the money or the mother that he had.  But I got to feel and to receive and to know the God that he had, that we had.  And I got to understand the ego-less absolute awareness possible for all of us in God.

 Now, I spent two summers during my seminary days living with Bill Coffin’s older brother and his family on their huge horse farm on the North Shore of Long Island.  One of my charges was Tad Coffin, who later won an equestrian gold medal in the Olympics.  We mucked out stalls together!  I learned those summers to value people who have a lot of money and a lot of love.  They have the psychological equivalent of salvation.  By that I mean the peaceful, nearly noble bearing that these Coffins had seemed to me to be not unlike the goal of faith:  people with the courage to be (and not to be anxious) and the strength to love (and not to be self-centered.)  I wasn’t sure they all had Christ.  But I could see how old money and real love were almost as good.  I learned that the trick to Christian salvation was to be able to act like your mother loved you and that you had a lot of money even when it wasn’t true for me—except as how I had the love of God and the riches of the Holy Spirit, which I was working on having, hoping.

So underneath the parables of this sermon is the story of a young man, Duncan Newcomer, receiving a Christian witness and an ego ideal, of sorts, from Bill Coffin.

But, without my auditioning here for the Oprah Show, the deeper story here for me is I’ve never had enough money or love, or God or spirit, even now, to have the ego to do this job:  being a minister.  Keeping on in ministry—and I hate that this is true—is always a crisis for me. The only thing worse for me than a church full of mean people is a church full of sweet people like you all, because then I have to face my ego for what it is, or isn’t.  Now I’m not melting down here.  Part of testimony is to reveal our shared humanity.  At Chicago when I was getting my degree in preaching we had feed-back sessions.  One of my friends said, “Duncan has the gift of agony!”  After three years we got to see into each other’s souls.  The agony for me, and it’s a human agony for all, is:  “Do I have a place here, a place in the world, in the church?  Am I really welcome at Christ’s table, and/or humanity’s?”

Now, I decided a few weeks ago that my spiritual life and my Christian faith absolutely had to help me with my ego pains, help me to find a safer way to be with myself, a place where I, myself, am not paying attention to my ego and its pain.

I believe that place is the God place. To be with God in the God place or even perhaps as the mystics have it, to be God in the God place, is my only way to stay in ministry: to pay attention to God in the world and to have that feel good—like joy, beatitude—to feel good in the way that faithfulness feels good even if it’s a kind of suffering.  Love feels good because the ego-self is gone and what Buddhists call the Self, what we would call God’s self, is there.  And I believe God feels good being God when the sufferings of God are being met.  “When I was naked you clothed me.”  Being clothed, giving clothes, feels good, is a beatitude place.

Now Bill Coffin just has had a knack in his life of being in that beatitude place and welcoming people into it with him.  One of his best beatitude-place quips is how he opens any speech he gives now.  He’s over 80.  He has had a heart attack, a couple of strokes, is in a wheel chair from neuropathy in his legs.  So he opens by saying, “At my age it’s good to be anywhere.  And I’m living now against doctor’s orders.”

So how does one get to a beatitude place where paying attention is possible, where being realistically alert is a joy, an ego fulfilling, and divine place, where God is too?

You need a scripture for the words, for the language.  We don’t ego-identify with the sufferings of God without a source.  Literature alone won’t give you the words.  My witness is that a Biblically saturated ego-consciousness like Bill Coffin’s is testimony for us as to how to pay attention God’s way.

Now once upon a time I was sitting in required Sunday evening chapel worship at Davidson College in North Carolina.  We knew ourselves to be 1000 hand-picked scholars.  We were white gentlemen.  If we didn’t like the preacher we passed one of us overhead, prone, horizontal, by hand, up and down our congregated Presbyterian body.  Imagine being a revered old southern preacher and watching before your dwindling sermon a horizontal Davidson gentleman, or two, passing back and forth like a shuttle cock on a loom before your eyes!

But not that night!  The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Chaplain from Yale, was preaching.  At that moment in time, Biblical time, I could point out, I was 20 years old, President Kennedy had two months left to live.  I was 22 years from my wedding date with Nancy.  Coffin was 39.

I don’t remember all of what he said exactly.  It was no nonsense and gruff.  It was urgent and cocky and it was from a profound soul and heartfelt place, as much as it seemed like a quip.

He opened with something like, “Gentlemen, I don’t have to waste your time or mine telling you what an honor it is to be here among you preaching this evening.”

That covered a lot of territory for me, in an instant.  His slurry tone of voice made being a gentleman not so prissy; clearly he was an honored person but clearly he somehow instantly wanted to share that honor.  Like the monk that bows and says, “I honor the divine within you,” he included us within himself as well.  And then we had to push on.  Urgent and Biblical matters lay before us.  And we needed to attend to them.  The title of his biography is A Holy Impatience.  Clearly Bill was in drive, not neutral.

It is not a problem, only a loss, that I don’t remember more of the sermon.  It was Biblical.  He was entering Biblical stories and coming out with impassioned truths for now.  I knew the tradition.  I want you to revalue it yourselves.  The Biblical tradition, the tradition of Bible words interpreted passionately.  And I knew Bill Coffin was in there digging.

He made three points and a poem.  He retold Cain and Able and he asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  And he admonished, “I am my brother’s brother!”

Now nearly forty-some years later, last spring, I’m walking down College Street at the corner, turning right onto Elm, there were daffodils everywhere, with Battell Chapel—Coffin’s old place of work—on my right.  I’m telling my good friend Eileen about the great time one winter day when in 1967 I had driven up to Yale in my little orange and white Volkswagen Karman Ghia with the broken heater.  I had not met Coffin personally until that day.  I told him about my cold and snowy drive up.  It was five-plus years since he preached at Davidson.  I’d written him a note about a youth center I was running in Wilton.  I wanted him to come to Wilton High School to talk about the Vietnam War.  I’d said I knew his brother and his brother had said he was an O.K. guy!  My idea of a quip. It worked.  He’d said he’s come to Wilton.  Just as I was walking out of his office he called after me and threw me a wool army blanket he had on a file cabinet and said, “Stay warm on your drive home.”

O.K.  Now I’m not saying I never washed that blanket!  But as a 20 something I felt I had a talisman from a real man, a consecrated thing.  Perhaps that’s why I keep a wool blanket in my office now.

But anyway, I’m telling Eileen this story.  We’re walking around killing time before we go into Battell to hear a panel on the war in Iraq featuring Bill Coffin.  My gaze drifts to my left.  Some commotion around a van.  Vermont plates.  Out comes Bill Coffin.  Rises from his wheel chair and walks a few steps standing waiting for his wife and friends, and wheel chair now right in front of me and Eileen. I stick out my hand.  “Bill, Duncan Newcomer.”  “Ah yes,” how are you, how are you,” he slurs.  I introduce my friend and say I was just telling her of the time you gave me a blanket for my cold car ride home.”

He chuckles and shrugs saying, self-effacingly, “I was naked and you gave me clothing.”  And he adds something like, “what can I say?”  As if the tag line from scripture was only to make clear what was an ordained moment, a predestined occurrence.  As if saying, “Of course, what’s a man to do?!  What’s a Christian man to do:  you were cold.  Here’s a blanket.”  For almost forty years I remembered the deed.  His deed.  That day I heard the word.  God’s word that had shaped the deed, the instant act of kindness.  Words recalled and delivered in as equally an instant moment.  I am my brother’s brother!  Clothe the naked!  Where does such awareness and attention come but from a Bible-shaped person who has put his ego in the place where God is and then sees and acts and speaks freely from that place in that moment.

And who was I to him that day.  I was God, no? I was naked, I was in the suffering cold place.  I needed the blanket.  And didn’t the ego-ideal turn into brotherhood?  And who was he?  He was the one inheriting the kingdom prepared for him from the foundation of the world.  He was the God-recognizing Christ-like man who saw in Deed where God was:  in that event one day, and then in Word on one day again, some forty years later!

Amen.