“To the Lighthouse?”

Matthew 5:1-11
Matthew 5:14


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

August 5, 2007

Jesus, we just heard in our first reading, (Matthew 5) “saw the crowds,” “went up the mountain,” “sat down…” and began to speak. How often have you ever visualized that this Sermon on the Mount was spoken sitting down? In the early days of the church the words spoken, after the scriptures were read, were spoken by the president of the congregation, called “the presider” sitting down. Given our bouts with the air conditioning repair people these last two weeks, I have been unsure of the setting of this sermon. Fellowship hall sitting in a circle? On the stage standing? Or with a pulpit, in the sanctuary?

Seated on a hill, perhaps a breeze would be nice, no?! In fact, my own relationship with God began in such a setting on a hill sitting. It was not in church, first, even ’tho my father’s Biblical preaching wonderfully cultivated my mind; my soul was born on a hillside in central Pennsylvania sitting with my little collie-setter dog, named “Woofie” watching the soft grey boulders that had emerged from the ground – pretending that they were sheep.

That would have made me a shepherd, and while the bible told me a “world of meanings” for that word “shepherd” it was the spirit that touched me in that hillside setting and my awareness of my soul began. (I’ve been encouraged by some to share my spiritual journey more. I hope I’m not repeating myself already!)

Last week before we looked at Jesus’ parable about prayer, the man knocking at the door, seeking, asking for bread, I had lifted up for us the spare version of the Lord’s Prayer as Jesus first spoke it. Christ is the word-smith of true words simply spoken, taking us – if we go – to a whole new world. No one is more post-modern than the pre-modern Jesus.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for their’s is the kingdom of heaven.”

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Words that Johannes Brahms chose for the slow-heart-beat of his “A German Requiem” which like John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” adds words to soul, as Jesus did.

And lest we take our own brains too seriously, I want to share that the best interpretation of this Sermon on the Mount that I have ever heard comes from a song by that Holy Sinner, Leonard Cohen, when he says of the beautitudes, “I still have no idea what they mean.” We who are so smart need that simple tribute to mystery.

And it is with mystery, even dark mystery, that I wish to frame today’s beatitudes and the following sentences from Jesus: “You are the light of the world.” It is from the attitude and atmosphere of mystery that I want us to hear those words about us, perhaps, and about light, and about the world. I say “dark mystery” because the other line I love from Leonard Cohen is the simple line, “It’s getting darker.”

That is prophetic for us. I love my sense that the 40-year-history of this church is so similar to my own 40-year journey with God through America, 1967 to 2007. And just as there is a difference between a sermon given standing a sermon given seated, so is there a world of difference between how we could have heard the words of Jesus, “You are the light of the world” 40 or 50 years ago, 1957, 1967, and how we and our children and their children can hear them now: “You are the light of the world.”

For Americans, those words have just been preamble to the next line about a city set on a hill. It was as a city set upon a hill that the New England Puritan’s first “baptized” America: our new world, the colonies that were to be a light back to the old world. That is a once-upon-a-time perspective, once so ennobling and now so dangerous. Ennobling, yet dangerous, that is the ambivalence with which I approach our symbols of the day: light, city of light on a hill, and lighthouse.

Lighthouses being one of my favorite all time images – but now one that I only reluctantly see as an image potent with ambivalence. For now, lighthouse light itself, I see only as a rotating beam, intermittent through the darkness, communicating enlightenment and a warning of danger as we near land.

How do you see this image of a light upon a hill? Now do we place ourselves in that picture? And now, as it so easily morphs into the image of the Light House on a hill, do we locate ourselves in that picture? I must confess that I’ve always seen the lighthouse light just as the Puritans saw their new Godly city – a light as a beacon of goodness and good news.
Whether we are lost in the old world of dead religions in England – as the Puritans thought – or lost at sea looking for a safe land’s end, the light on a hill, and seeing that light, always seemed like a happy visual experience.

But meditating upon this placement of a person seeing such a light, I had the sudden sensation of the mixed feelings and even the dread that at least a seafarer would have upon seeing a lighthouse – as through a fog darkly. The seafarer would feel, “Yes, I’ve been signaled that land fall is near. But yes, also I’ve suddenly been alerted that I am near dangerous shores, rocks and undersea land, that could easily crash my ship. So there would be dread as well as guidance and good news upon seeing the lighthouse light and the city lights on the hill.

If you’ve even visited a lighthouse and looked at the old navigational charts, you see the inked crossed where ships went down. You see the cluster of marked names and dates where this or that ship went down. “The Sir Richard” – April 12, 1841. A cluster of doom is where the light is put. So, in the so-called “social location” of the seafarer, the lighthouse is as much a warning of suddenly present danger as it is a peaceful light out of some dark night promising home.

To me this double message is important for us as a country and for us as a people of faith at Rockville United Church.
As a country, it’s clear that when we think of ourselves as a city of light set up on a hill we have also set ourselves up for the mighty fall of pride. There is, as Reinhold Niebuhr warned, tragically, a direct line of thought between the Puritan concept of “us” as a light to the world and the arrogance of imperial power we now see in pre-emptive war strikes. But we know this.

The harder insight to accept is how we ourselves think we are the light of the world, think of ourselves as the lighthouse keeper, and think we can navigate if we are at sea, directly to the light without the danger of crash and sink.

Once, for me, and many, the beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, and its injunction that you are the salt of the earth, the light of the world, were words that named my identity, our identity. Coming out of the victories of the “so called” now greatest generation, white North American Christian males in the 50’s were clearly the great! Then, to me in the 60’s as I worked with hippies and gangs in Greenwich Village and the East Village of New York City, the beatitudes of Jesus were nothing less than “a hippie manifesto.” And with the beacon of prophetic truth that was the Civil Rights movement God clearly had brought a new light and a new age into this old world. And so it was with the ambivalent truth and dangers of those ideas that this church was born.

Reading some of the writings of some of the founders here, one can easily feel that old familiar 1960’s liberal cocky lingo. The dangerous rhetoric of the religiously confident, the intellectually successful, the morally evolved. So much is that our tempted language today.

We had a rare opportunity in the 1960’s to have an American Christian Prophetic voice. It was a rare moment of truth and for truth. For those shining moments Martin Luther King Jr. was the voice of the conscience of America. As his namesake, Martin Luther, split Europe between Protestants and Catholics, so did Martin King as he lead one of the most successful social revolutions for Human Rights in world history, so did his prophetic truth split the church once again on Civil War rightwing, leftwing lines, and split the democratic party giving the South the Republicans in exchange for a more just society. What King did for minority Human Rights, William Sloane Coffin, Yale Chaplain, did for peace and to imperial war-making. Those Reverends and those movements were pillars of light and in their light much of this church’s history was created.

Those were wonderful booming male voices. Prophets. But the roles of prophet, priest, and pastor are now played out in a very, very, different world. It is a world we need to listen to, and listen to deeply. It’s a world of many voices with many partial truths.

Now, what makes a lighthouse light work so well is not that it sat atop a tall tower without a cover, but that a system of many angled mirrors was designed to reflect the light, to re-reflect the light, to focus the light and then to have in turn around and around. Lighthouse light is partly a straight line, like reason. And partly it’s an encompassing circle, like truth. It repeats its straight line many times, many truths. But it turns in one circle.

We here are one line. We are not the only line and we do not fill the circle. And those who come to us, or are guided by our light, will still have dangerous waters to navigate. Much more than our light is needed for the world, and within our own lighthouse many mirrors are needed to build up our candle power.

My sermon words, paraphrasing scripture, is this: God says, “In my Lighthouse are many mirrors. If it were not so, I would have left you in the dark.” Amen.