At A Loss for Words
Rev. Douglas Olds (all rights reserved)
Advent 2018
Isaiah 6:1-8 (NRSV)
1In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. 2Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3And one called to another and said:
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”
4The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. 5And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
6Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. 7The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” 8Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”
Luke 1:8–25 (NRSV)
8 Once when he was serving as priest before God and his section was on duty, 9 he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and offer incense. 10 Now at the time of the incense offering, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside. 11 Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. 12 When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him. 13 But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. 14 You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, 15 for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. 16 He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. 17 With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” 18 Zechariah said to the angel, “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” 19 The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. 20 But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.”
21 Meanwhile the people were waiting for Zechariah, and wondered at his delay in the sanctuary. 22 When he did come out, he could not speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the sanctuary. He kept motioning to them and remained unable to speak. 23 When his time of service was ended, he went to his home.
24 After those days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she remained in seclusion. She said, 25 “This is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.”
---
I met Jan Karski in the early 1980s.
He was a neighbor of mine, an old-world, courtly figure who taught history at Georgetown University.
In middle age, he had married the renowned modern dancer Pola Niresnka, a Polish Jew who had escaped the Holocaust yet whose entire family disappeared in the prison camps.
Now an older man, Jan told me of his and Pola’s past.
In…1940 Karski[, a Pole], began [as] a courier … [between] … the Polish underground [and] the Polish Government in Exile …
During one such mission in July 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo in Slovakia [and s]everely tortured. He managed to escape.
In 1942 Karski was…twice smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw Ghetto for the purpose of directly observing what was happening to Polish Jews.
Also, disguised as an Estonian camp guard, he visited a sorting and transit point for the Bełżec death camp.
Karski then met with Polish politicians in exile and the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, giving a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and Bełżec.
In 1943 he traveled to the United States, meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Oval Office, telling him about the situation in Poland and becoming the first eyewitness to tell him about the Jewish Holocaust.
He also described the Holocaust to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.
Frankfurter, [a Jew himself, sat politely through] Karski's report. [1]
Recollecting, Karski told me that Frankfurter told him, "I cannot believe you of what’s happening to the Jews in Poland. I do not say that you are lying, I am saying that I CAN NOT believe you.”[2]
If FDR had acted immediately to stem the atrocity by bombing the gas and incineration complexes in the death camps, perhaps 2 Million Jews could have been saved from destruction.
By the time Allies did act against the camps, Karski’s efforts were estimated to have saved ¼ million Jews, making Karski the most effective savior of European Jewry during the war.
Yet Karski lived with the knowledge that perhaps 10 times more could have been saved, IF ONLY. If only FDR had acted immediately.
While he acknowledged that perhaps deeper levels of military strategy may have prevailed upon FDR, Karski told me that he regretted that he had failed to find the right words in his efforts to convince FDR and the other Allied leaders of the necessity to act. Karski, who had trained for the diplomatic corps, strained every diplomatic muscle he had in trying to persuade the Brits and Americans. In his appeal, he even extravagantly addressed FDR as, “Lord of Humanity.”
Karski also struggled with words around the prisoners: their condition almost rendered him silent. He recognized he was in the midst of the struggle of good and evil. In that struggle, there were moments of irrepressible holiness by the prisoners straining every sinew of their being to help each other stay alive.
Karski recognized these were stories of struggle, stories of fierce love inside inexpressible trauma and horror.
Later, Karski volunteered to sneak into the darkness of the Warsaw ghetto and Bełżec death camp to bring the news of Allied efforts to the prisoners.
He brought hope. He was an example of the volunteering saint, representing Isaiah's "send me" attitude. Karski felt the call of his Christian upbringing to make a prophetic difference to people who were enslaved, oppressed, and daily murdered.
I place this man’s episodic struggle to find compelling and suitable words into the context of Zechariah's being struck dumb by the angel's announcement of the impending birth of his son who would become John the Baptist. Sometimes, the irrepressible call of God works by the suppression and reconstruction of voice such as we discern in the calls of the prophets--Jeremiah (1.6-9) as well as Isaiah. We see this in the call of Moses, who develops a stutter and bashfulness when confronted with God’s call—and in the New Testament, with the progressive muting of Nicodemus by Jesus when he tries to interrogate the latter on his messianic bona fides (John 3:1-17).
The Old Testament examples of call narratives of Prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Moses report that the silencing of the called prophet presupposes a kind of human unworthiness in the face of approaching holiness. Their silences are like an involuntary imposition of Sabbath.
It is as if the human need and gift for communication is suspended because of the necessity to observe and honor the holy inbreaking of God’s activity. From the vocal nothingness of silence, a kind of death of a uniquely human capacity, the person’s human ability to speak may be created anew by God’s Holy Spirit. A voice may be reborn for a holy service.
In 1985, the French Film Director Claude Lanzmann released a 9-1/2 hour documentary series Shoah which documented the living witnesses of the Holocaust. I committed 4 afternoons of a winter week in early 1986 to seeing Shoah at the Key Theater in Georgetown of Washington, DC. During the second installment, Jan Karski appeared on screen discussing the conditions he had found of the Jews confined in the Warsaw Ghetto, and he wept. Then I was moved to tears in the dark and flickering theater by his descriptions of what he saw and what he experienced in the conditions at Bełżec.
I left the theater that gloomy Tuesday emotionally spent and got on the bus. It was raining. I sat down and focused internally on my memories of the moving witness to the Holocaust in the documentary. I then became aware of a disturbance at the front of the bus.
It was my friend Jan Karski, whom I had just seen on screen, off from his shift as professor at Georgetown University. He was having difficulty putting away his umbrella while trying, in flustered English, to secure his senior citizen bus discount. The bus passengers were surly at the delay and, hearing his accent, cast their anger frontward at him:
some shouted, “Down in Front!” and “Go Back to where you came from!”
Carried by instinct, I got up from my seat and went to the front and embraced Karski,giving him my arm for support as I almost carried him to a seat. At our seat, I told him of my emotion at having just then seeing him in Shoah.
“Yes,” he said, “Lanzmann has made an important document of the time. Pola can’t watch it, it’s too painful for her.”
Since that bus ride, I’ve often wondered if I should have addressed the surly passengers on the bus—shamed them, perhaps with the words, “this is a great man, people!”
But in the presence of holiness I was silenced.
I sat a mostly silent vigil with Karski during the bus ride back to the Maryland suburbs. I had nothing profound to say, and the moment seem to require something moving and deep and profound that I couldn’t utter.
For me, like Zechariah, Nicodemus, and the prophet Isaiah, there is the season of speaking out—a time of moral revival and assertion.
For us in the church confronted with the ugliness of depression, oppression, and violence in our fellows, there may come a season when we can find no words. In those times, connection isn’t in the thundering eloquence of the pulpit or in the rebukes of the crowd we offer, but in the soft companionship of standing firm next to someone until they are ready to go their own way.
There may be in our recollections times when we were silenced—when our common human inheritance for communication was brought up short. These times should be approached with great tenderness and discernment of recollection, because I believe our souls have at those times been confronted with something intended and sent from God. Something of holiness.
Practicing the virtue of recollection, we might gather a spiritual truth from these times when our voices failed.
For at the risk of his life Karski took forth into history’s deepest darkness a message of hope, compassion, and concern. Risk is the price for the companionship with the Holy and the vigil with the Divine that we all crave.
My silence on that bus, I later recollected, inadvertently had discovered that holiness—that common, unobtrusive love-- is not found in rebuking the mob, but rather in companionship and chaplaincy with an elderly and struggling man on a rainy evening as he struggled with his umbrella.
Sometimes, we are not called for the glamour positions—
the shiny speaking positions, the apostleships and prophecies—
but rather to fulfill our role companionably in the local milieu in which we are called—to a witness of presence—
a witness of presence for rightness and compassion through silent accompaniment.
We may often experience ourselves as bursting with expression which threatens to overwhelm others’ capacity for listening. Especially when events and personalities make a mockery of our deepest, shared morality. At those times, being given to silent companionship can provide the ailing and the onlookers a sign of our trust in goodness when the world is hostile and collapsing.
Ours is to companion and bring stories of enduring wonder with the mystery of God and the enigma of faith, speaking and living life to the fullest. In this, we risk that even our words and stories will for a season fail. Holiness—God’s humble love--demands it.
Yet God can bring even out of our silence—our communicative nothingness--a new narrative, a new history, a new world, a new virtue, and a new collective commitment to goodness that sweeps over God’s eternal world like the tide. Our acts of love live eternally in God’s cosmos, even if we can’t see their immediate impact. Our task as disciples is to fearlessly model authentic humanity as a sign and invitation to others. That is evangelism without words, a song of the heart visible in actions. It is holy, and it pleases God.
As we develop the appropriate individual virtues and practices, the holy, whirling air known to the ancient Israelites as ruach will howl politically to blow apart the “closed-loop discourse” that human society interminably engages on its solipsistic issues. The economic ash heaps and airless discourse of humanity need the fresh and dazzling sunlight cascading through God’s Holy Spirit atmosphere. The Holy Spirit can and will renew our voice.
Go forth from here, with the militancy of the Holy Spirit—with the intention to resist dehumanization in the world—
in Gaza, in Sudan, in Central Los Angeles and in the police districts of St. Louis and fracking fields of North Dakota—go forth evangelizing by your actions the goodness of God’s intended humanity, risking that your words may fail for a season, but that God does not. If your voice falters, sit with it for a season, then recover it for justice. Your silence prepares you for tending God's Kingdom justice. Your silence prepares you for Christmas--its glorious, inbreaking incarnation of humanity's model for holiness who brings God's definitive message of the triumph of love and life.
May your voice be for God’s kingdom in all of its peace, humanity, and justice. May it be so for you and me. AMEN.
No comments:
Post a Comment