June 13, 2010 Des Moines

Galatians 2:15-21

A Shift in Self

Deep into the outdoor landscape art museum called Storm King in upstate New York can be found a piece by the British landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy. Simply titled “Storm King Wall,” the work is a 5-foot high, 2278-foot-long site-specific sculpture created from stones gathered from the Art Center property. The wall weaves in and out of trees, following and extending the path of an old stone wall that had existed previously on the site, meandering downhill to a nearby pond and eventually out from the other side. As art, the contemporary piece echoes the miles and miles of similar, ancient-feeling stone walls that snake their way across New England and New York.

But those older walls that inspired Goldsworthy aren’t ancient at all – although they are very old, dating back, some of them, to early colonial days and up to the Civil War. But one thing is for sure: there are a lot of them. According to researchers, by 1871 there were over 250,000 miles of stone walls in New England and New York—a span longer than the U.S. coastline, or even the distance to the Moon; long enough, in fact, to circle the earth ten times. All together, according to Robert Thorson in his book Stone by Stone, the walls employ a mass of stone greater than that from all the remaining ancient monuments put together. Built, according to historical record, by slaves, Indians, indentured servants, children and farmers, the walls likely began as discard piles along fence lines where waste stone was thrown as it was cleared out of fields preparing for cultivation. Which is to say that, “however tidy well-built walls might appear, most functioned originally as linear landfills, built to hold non-biodegradable agricultural refuse.” (Thorson, 180-185)

Before long, however, they found their way into more proprietary use, surrounding cemeteries, cow pastures, farms, or animal compounds. According to Susan Allport in her book Sermons in Stone, by the early 1650’s there were laws on the books about minimum heights and such things, plus requirements that towns hire fence inspectors who would levy fines if the standards were not maintained.

Of course the walls eventually served the purposes of independence – separations between “mine” and “yours”; in essence, “No Trespassing signs written in stone.”

But as old as they are, these walls – like any other – don’t last forever. Time – and natural forces – are their enemy. As Robert Thorson points out, “Bacteria tarnish them. Lichens dissolve them. Vines penetrate and loosen their stones. Trees, blown down during hurricanes, knock large gaps in walls, as though taking bites of the earth. Left untended, every wall will come apart, tumble to the ground, disperse over acres of soil, and be buried by the encroaching vegetation.” (214-19)

Which recalls the wisdom that poet Robert Frost pointed out in his oft-misunderstood poem Mending Wall: “Something there is,” Frost observes, “that doesn’t love a wall...”

...That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it

and spills the upper boulders in the sun,

and makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and i am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, “good fences make good neighbors.”

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I build a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.”

Frost just couldn’t escape the hunch that, regardless of his friend’s assessment of their contribution to neighborliness, sometimes walls – like those the two of them annually repaired – are rather absurd. Other times they are down right heretical. Those were the walls with which Paul was concerned in his troubled letter to the Galatians – the walls people seem determined to erect between people of difference; between “outsiders” and “insiders” – Jews and Gentiles.

In Paul’s particular circumstance, he thought that all these things had been worked out during a meeting held in Jerusalem – whether or not everybody was going to have to go at things the same or whether there would be tolerated differences of practice among the followers of Jesus. But then he got word that Peter – who had been party to the Jerusalem agreement – had refused to eat with non-Jews and along with other leaders was discouraging others from doing so either, and Paul felt compelled to speak his mind. Here was a barrier that Paul couldn’t abide. Anticipating by centuries President Reagan’s rhetorical demand of the Communist leader regarding the Berlin Wall, Paul was saying something like, “Mr. Peter, tear down this wall!”

“Something there is,” in other words, “that doesn’t love a wall.” And as far as Paul understood him, Jesus wasn’t too crazy about them either – Jesus, who according to the letter to the Ephesians, had “broken down the dividing wall of hostility between us” (Ephesians 2:14).

“If I then build up again the very things that I once tore down,” Paul observes, “then I demonstrate that I am a transgressor…” We don’t make ourselves right, he went on to say, by following all the rules; we make ourselves right by following after Jesus.

But rules, as it turns out, are the stones we use to build walls, and walls are something we have trouble living without – even people in the church. Or perhaps “especially” in the church. Jonathan Swift once made the acidic observation that we have “just enough religion to make us hate one another but not enough to make us love one another.”

Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, points out how ironic it is – and tragic – and prophetic – that “the first recorded act of religious worship [in the Bible] is directly followed by the first murder, the first fratricide.” (Jonathan Sacks p. 46)

Little wonder, he notes, that the old Rabbis found it necessary to continually point out that “the Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’, but in no fewer than 36 places commands us to ‘love the stranger’”. “God cares about the stranger, and so must we.”

“It is no longer I who live,” Paul asserted, “but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law [and all of its ways of keeping me separate from others] then Christ died for nothing.”

That’s what that word “justification” is ultimately about – lining up with God’s sense of the margins, like text in a Word document. It is this “shift in self” – when Christ lives in us – that Paul believes changes everything about how we relate not only to God but to others.

Nonetheless, we are still building walls despite Jesus’ best efforts to eradicate them – through Jerusalem, along the southern U.S. Border; in our Constitutions and through our neighborhoods and workplaces and polling places and codes. We justify them in all sorts of reasonable sounding ways – law and order, security, or the wise-sounding but ultimately paranoid insistence of Robert Frost’s neighbor that “good fences make good neighbors;” but this concern about difference is the real mortar that holds them together. We still use stone, but more often these days we use wire and wood and concrete and glass; we use rhetoric and fear and sometimes even scripture.

But something holy there is that doesn’t like such walls. And perhaps as people who through Jesus have experienced something of a shift in self – who have begun to see the world and those around us as Jesus sees them – can begin to serve as spiritual lichens and vines that penetrate and loosen the stones that have been piled up between us; hurricanes of faithful determination that knock large gaps in their span.

According to the historians, “Left untended, every wall will come apart, tumble to the ground, disperse over acres of soil, and be buried by the encroaching vegetation.” But do we really have to wait that long to see accomplished God’s justifying intent?