Series: September 2024
Speaker: Rob McClellan
Today's Sermon
"Stick Season: Who We Are Series 2"
First Reading
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. 10For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. 11Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? 12And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.
Second Reading
1 Corinthians 12:12-27
12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
14 Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15If the foot were to say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16And if the ear were to say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. 17If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? 18But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as God chose. 19If all were a single member, where would the body be? 20As it is, there are many members, yet one body. 21The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ 22On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable,23and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; 24whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, 25that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. 26If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.
27 Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
Stick Season: Who We Are Series 2
It’s appropriate we sang during the scripture because today’s sermon title was inspired by a popular song. “Stick Season” by singer songwriter Noah Kahan is a beautifully written song. The title comes from the colloquial descriptor of autumn in Vermont as the “season of the sticks,” a grey, cool, and in some accounts, miserable time of year. It’s after the colorful leaves have fallen and browned; all that’s left are brittle sticks all around. It’s a song about loneliness, love lost, having been abandoned.
Thematically, that is the opposite of what we’re talking about today; we are focusing on sticking together. The passage from Ecclesiastes is the genesis for this entire sermon series we’re now doing on who we are. We’re so good at saying who we’re not, that it’s important to also be able to say affirmatively who we are. Last week we focused on the proclaiming that we are spiritually tough, committed and resilient, even if sometimes uncertain. Today, we say that we are people who believe in sticking together.
There are so many voices telling us that we are better if we break apart, that there is a “they” who are the problem. I don’t have to give you a tour of the landscape of our divisions. These are well worn paths. At our annual retreat last spring, our elders explored what it means to be this spiritual community in these times. We sat with how tense things were in the larger culture. We noted fog of dread hovering as we headed into the election season. Then, as happens when you sit open-heartedly with something, something else emerged, a question of how we could offer a different kind of spirit during this season. When everyone was tightening up, pulling back, circling up with one’s own crowd, when everyone seemed to be getting nervous or angry or both, we imagined what it would look like to offer an alternative way. That’s what the gospel calls us to do.
The phrase that emerged was “joyful engagement.” How could we encourage engagement—interaction, connection, relationship, and how could we lean into joy as the character of that connection. I have the receipts to prove we were onto this well before joy became something onto which the wider culture was latching. Of course, the deeply connected, the deeply spiritual, faithful, have always understood the rightful place of joy at the heart of it all.
The terms warrant a little deeper exploration. Engagement, let us step out and be with. When you think of this spiritually, it isn’t so much forging new connections as recognizing preexisting ones. We are fundamentally connected. This is a spiritual and scientific truth. To engage is to honor that we are connected, and our wellbeing depends on us recognizing it in everything we do. We have a tendency to think we can provide for our own wellbeing in isolation from the fate of the other, but this is merely an illusion. Disengagement will not make you happier nor well off. To be faithful is to be engaged, to attend to relationships, to invest in them as much as the material pursuits that separate us. To be faithful is to widen the field of vision of to whom you are related.
The Apostle Paul, who authored 1 Corinthians, depicts our relatedness as being members of one body. It is intimate and functionally essential. Importantly, the body is one, but it consists of many members. The distinction, the identity of the parts, is retained. Oneness doesn’t erase identity, it accents it. Each needs the other, fundamentally. No one part can say to the other, “You don’t belong.” Paul specifically reminds us that no one part gets to put down another who appears to have a less honorable place or function. In fact, we are to clothe those parts with greater honor. When we degrade the other, share untrue and degrading stories of them, we do violence not to some disconnected other, but to the very holy body of which we are a part. It’s self-harm. It’s suicide. Paul gives to people of faith the image of being the risen body of Christ, a body that together should behave Christ did when he walked among us.
A key characteristic of that behavior, of that relating, is joy. Joy is an orientation to the world that stays rooted in the gift and goodness of it all. Joy is remembering the miracle the ground on which we’re standing, which, too, is both a spiritual and scientific truth. Joy isn’t living in denial, whitewashing hard truths, or ignoring the very real challenges or challenging people. Joy is the disposition and the spirit we bring to the challenges. It is the way we show up. Joy is our reservoir. The true spiritual masters, those who have seen great pain, all maintain some level of joy. It’s how the go on. To be faithful is to cultivate joy like a garden of the soul.
Ecclesiastes is a book not one necessarily associated with joy. It is deeply in touch with what it describes as the futility of life. “All is vanity,” fleeting, says the mysterious writer at the outset; we toil and we die. Yet, in the midst of a somewhat cold understanding of reality, a heartwarming image emerges: “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall one will lift up the other…a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Eccl. 4:9,12). That’s a scientific and spiritual truth you can demonstrate even to a child. A single stick breaks easily but put just a few together and a new strength is found. My childhood pastor used that passage for weddings, and it’s good as a reminder for all relationship. We are stronger when we stick together.
There are ample and important critiques of unity for unity’s sake, simply falling in line while failing to redress wrongs, telling those who have drawn the short stick to get over it and stick with the rest of us, but that’s not we’re talking about. That’s the opposite of what we’re talking about. Holy sticking together is about being committed to one another, which involves using the chosen proximity to see and heal what is broken. To be faithful is to stick together.
Beyond the utility of sticking together, there is a beauty, dare I say a joy in it, because it reminds us of what we know to be true but tend to forget. It is especially touching when we find ourselves bound with unlikely others. Sticking with the musical theme of the day, two examples from the past year come to mind. The first is the unlikely friendship between comedian and talk show host Stephen Colbert and country singer Toby Keith. Colbert played a satirical bumbling character on his show, his way of exposing and critiquing the other side of the political spectrum. Keith, you could fairly say, fell on that other side. He was famous for, among others, the song, “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American),” which was better known as “The Boot in You’re A**” song because of a colorful line that appeared in the middle of the angry post 9/11 anthem.
Colbert learned of the perception that he had it out for some of his guests. Keith would be the perfect mark, and going into the interview, Colbert indeed had a plan for him and his “Boot…” song. Just before he went onstage, however, Colbert looked down at his own shoes and thought to himself, “What are you doing? You’re a host. He’s your guest. Make him feel welcome. See who he is.’”[1] Don’t engage cynically and maliciously, be a little open, see who he is, show up with a little joy.
Wouldn’t you know, Colbert and Keith hit it off. I didn’t say they agreed. I didn’t say they came to see the world the same way, but they saw each other, and over time the two developed a genuine friendship. In 2015, when Keith was inducted into the songwriter’s hall of fame, it was Colbert who introduced him, a sign the admiration went both ways. When Colbert recounted this story on his show back in February, listing Keith’s vast accomplishments, he did so through a choked-up voice because he was announcing Keith’s death after a bout of stomach cancer. “I knew Toby was ill,” he remarked, “but I still had hope that we’d see each other again.”[2] Once you truly see someone, it’s hard to see them go. It’s hard to see them hurt.
There was another beautiful organic musical moment this year. In 2023, recording artist Luke Combs scored a smash hit with his remake of Tracy Chapman’s 1988 song “Fast Car.” The visible contrast between the two figures is stark. Combs, a young white, straight, burly, male, country singer and Chapman now an older black, lesbian, folk singer who got her start busking on the streets of Boston.
“Fast Car” has a distinctive guitar lick. You know it the instant you hear it. It tells a story of trying to find a way through a hard life, finding a little joy, maybe some hope, along the way. During this year’s Grammy’s, the industry’s biggest awards show, the camera zoomed in on a guitar. It produced that familiar famous lick. The stage lights were so bright, it was a little hard at first to see the color of the hands playing the guitar. When the camera tilted up to reveal Chapman’s identity, hair now grayed, I got chills. Chapman had not played a concert in 15 years. Then the camera panned over and there was Combs. They sang the song they shared 35 years apart, now together, powerfully and revealingly, singing it as a duet. Something happened in that moment. If you watch it on YouTube you can see the two smiling, perhaps at their own journeys, perhaps at how it had brought them together. The crowd, too, wore smiles black and white singing the same song, smiling maybe for some different and some same reasons. It was a needed symbol in these divided times.
These are feel-good moments. They don’t fix everything. We’re still divided. But they remind us of what is fundamentally true. In a moment where so many are telling us to break apart, we need to stick together. As people of faith, in word and in deed, indeed we are here to say, “We are better together.” We need each other. It may not always be easy. We may not like each other all the time. We will not agree all the time, but in a moment of alienated enragement, we choose joyful engagement. That’s who we are as people of Christ.
As the fall approaches, and some want to proclaim we’re just a field of dead branches, we are to be the ones to say, “No, it’s stick season, and we stick together.” It’s not just that we are better together, it’s that together we get better.
Amen.
[1]https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/stephen-colbert-toby-keith-tribute-1235818460/