FROST S BOULDERS AND SATAN SERMON PREACHED ON NOVEMBER 18, 2012 FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH BOB RUDOLPH, CHAPLAIN

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1 FROST S BOULDERS AND SATAN SERMON PREACHED ON NOVEMBER 18, 2012 FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH BOB RUDOLPH, CHAPLAIN READING The opening lines of Robert Frost s famous poem, Mending Wall : Something there is 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.... Oh, just another kind of outdoor game, One on a side. It comes to little more.... SERMON Re-reading Robert Frost s poem and a quiet controversy about property lines have got me thinking about property and how it connects with our belief in our own importance. And THAT has got me thinking about Satan and the sin of pride. THAT connection may set you to wondering if I ve gone off my rocker, but I hope to be able to explain as we go along this morning. Here are some thoughts about Frost s poem. The speaker of the poem is ambivalent, it seems to me, in regard to the importance of marking one s property line with something as solid as a wall. On the one hand, it is he who questions the importance of the wall that he and his neighbor keep rebuilding year after year. On the other, it is he who rebuilds the wall during hunting season when the hunters and their yelping dogs knock holes in the wall, leaving not one stone on another. And it is he who conscientiously calls up his neighbor to make a date for wall repair and does his part to rebuild the wall, springtime after springtime after springtime. The speaker does not find walls sheer folly. But in his ambivalence he IS aware of something else, something larger that doesn t love walls, that keeps knocking them down. Presumably, if the speaker didn t come out to rebuild during hunting season or neglected to call up his neighbor to do his part in the Spring, over

2 time there might not be much left of the wall. A nameless something keeps upending these human efforts, mocking man s attempts to make his illusions solid and lasting in this case the illusion that private property has ultimate reality. Private property IS real, but not ultimately so. It is real only in the human mind and in the property deeds and laws that the human mind creates to make property seem real. Birds, cats, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, leaves of trees falling in the autumn, the ivy in my front yard that keeps growing onto my neighbor s lawn and must be constantly cut back none of these knows anything about property lines. Nor do dogs. But because dogs can dig things up in my neighbor s yard and God forbid might bite someone, their utter ignorance about property lines causes difficulties. Neighbors can get into shouting matches about keeping dogs tied up or on a leash so that they just stay out of their garden. From a certain ultimate perspective, I maintain, private property has no reality. But thinking it does surely is profoundly human. Mommy, Paul s using my toy and won t let me have it! Parents and grandparents, have you ever heard comments like that? We re coming up on Christmas. Daddy, how come Mary gets five presents and I only have four? Parents and grandparents, in your gift-giving have you ever bought an extra gift so that a child would not feel slighted because a sibling got more things? Private property pretty real for children. Those of you who understand child development know what s going on here. Children are developing a sense of their separateness from others and are learning to assert themselves to preserve that uniqueness. This is really basic stuff I m talking about. Ego. Ego. Ego. Yes. But in our individualistic world, it is profoundly important to our functioning that we know and respect personal boundaries. As we can t just tread on other people, we have to be able to stand up against people when they try to tread on us. Which brings me to my own property line issue and the feelings it generated and generates in me. Gladys and I have a long backyard there on Sagamore Road. In fact, if you look at the plat, ours is the longest backyard on the block. Some 45 feet, I think. Along the property line between us and the backyard of our neighbor on Inwood Street, we have some oak leaf hydrangeas and an assortment of weed bushes that were there when we bought the property. Also, there is an old wire fence just on the Inwood side of the part of the yard that looks like a jungle if you can imagine a jungle in Toledo, Ohio. Over the years, neighbors kids, taking shortcuts through our property, have bent the wire fence down in the corner of the property for easy access back and forth. It used to infuriate me that they cut through the property and had so little regard for us that they would mangle the fence as they did. That was years ago. They re all grown up and gone now, and the devil take them too, so says one voice in me. I don t pay much attention to this far point in the garden. As I say, it s like a jungle back there all those weedy bushes I can t name and never planted. But one day this summer, I was doing some weeding back there when I noticed something. Our Inwood Street neighbor had taken to dumping his grass cuttings over into the corner of our yard, just where the fence

3 had been mashed down, AND he had mashed the fence down even more. I was appalled. I was furious. How dare he do such a scummy thing to us! So I gathered up the clippings and dumped them back over into his yard. I m glad I don t own a gun. Time went by. Autumn came. And guess what I went back there again one day to find that more grass clippings and a pile of leaves had been dumped over onto my side of the fence. So once again in an absolute rage I fired all that stuff back on his side. I felt personally offended, disrespected, trampled on, by someone I ve never talked with, would not recognize, but have to live behind. I also felt that someone who would do this sneaky thing was an absolute scumball. His inherent worth and dignity disappeared beneath my fury. But WAS this an offense against my person that should cause me to be enraged? Am I really my property? Here s where we get to Satan, for the Middle Ages, the chief exemplar of pride, a being ignorant of his true nature and the nature of something larger than himself. Pride swallows us up in self-importance, causes us to lose perspective on our true nature, and builds impediments to our spiritual growth! As depicted by the Middle Ages, Satan was the protagonist of a myth about a war between God and Satan. In the myth, both have separate kingdoms, with their own armies. Satan wants to overthrow God. God wins the battle between them, of course. In the hierarchical world of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this notion was appealing, especially to kings and noblemen. Usurpers need to be kept in their place as God triumphed over Satan and sent him to Hell. For Satan to challenge the divine, he entirely misperceives who he is and who God is. Satan can see God since both of them reside in heaven. He has a throne. God has a throne. They are equals in the same plane of being. Wrong. Satan s reality like the reality of everything else in a medieval Christian view derives from the creative power of God. Without God, Satan has no reality. God is ultimate. Satan is derivative. For Satan to miss this and to think of himself as on an equal plane of being to God is not only misguided, it is sinful. God is at the top of the hierarchy of being. To think you are His equal is to think of yourself as god-like. Which is exactly what Satan thinks. This notion of the sinfulness of pride lies behind the medieval representation of pride as the root of all other mortal sins. How so? Well, again putting ourselves back into medieval styles of belief, sinfulness means the breaking of God s laws and opposition to His will for humanity. God laid down certain laws explicitly and implicitly. These are recorded in Holy Scripture. For an individual to say, Too bad. I want to live according to my own lights and be a law unto myself, thank you very much, is to set oneself up as an equal to God. You can thumb your nose at God since He is no better than you yourself. Why should you have to conform to God s will when your own will is perfectly satisfactory for you? So if, carried away by lust, you want to commit adultery, go ahead. If, carried away by gluttony, you want to pig out while others starve, do it. If, carried away by anger, you want to shoot the guy who s throwing his grass clippings onto your backyard, by all means grab

4 your gun. You are self-sufficient. You are all important. You don t have to worry about consequences to others. You are god-like. For 21 st century Unitarian Universalists, all this is historically interesting and helps us understand the mindset of contemporary people of many religious persuasions as well as that of people in earlier times. But I think WE also need to consider pride to be an impediment to our spiritual development and, in that sense, like sin. I find useful the following definition of sin taken from the website, Catholic Doors: "Sin [the website says] is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor.... It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity. The sin of pride, in particular, reflects a stupendous misunderstanding of our place in the universe. If you re like me, you carry about with you every day, all day, a sense of your own importance. This is a must. Otherwise, you ll get trampled. Humans are notoriously competitive. Competitiveness is literally in our DNA and the chemical make-up of our brains. It s a contributing factor in our success as a species. But this sense of my own importance also has negative consequences. All day long, I m looking for the world to acknowledge my importance. When it doesn t, a couple of nasty things can happen. One is resentment and anger. Think for a moment about driving an automobile. Here you are going along at the designated maximum speed in the right-hand lane while a car-length or so ahead someone else is driving at the same speed in the left-hand lane. Sure as shooting, what happens? Some so-and-so comes roaring up in the left-hand lane, sees the car in front of him driving slower than he wants to go, and cuts in front of you, nearly causing an accident, and speeds away down the road. As you catch up to this dope at the next red light, have you ever experienced the desire to blow your horn at him just to show him up? Why is he so much better than you are that he can get away with this kind of behavior? Where is a policeman when you need him that can lock this bird up? Can you see how such feelings arise from a sense of one s own self-importance and how they interfere with our living out our goal of being peace-makers? Pride can make you expect deference from others and entitlement to special treatment. I have a title. I am a department head. I deserve the extra pay I receive. I deserve having access to my CEO. I deserve living in a gated community. I deserve my Mercedes-Benz. I worked hard to achieve my pre-eminence. I m obviously better at my job than other people or I wouldn t have been promoted to department head. I m so much better than everyone above me that someday I ll be over them. Well, maybe so. But in the year 3012 will anyone know how wonderful you were? If not, how wonderful are you? It s so easy for us humans to allow our native-born sense of our own importance to get out of hand, to lead us into sin in the sense of an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; [a] failure in genuine love for God and neighbor, [an injury to] the nature of man and human solidarity. My irritation with my unknown, unseen neighbor arises from my sense of self-importance as reinforced by the belief in my property rights as an expression of that importance. He was throwing those grass clippings

5 not only on my property but also on ME. But how silly! To get exercised about such things is nonsensical. We are NOT our property. Our inherent worth does not depend on having a Mercedes-Benz or living in a gated community or having a bigger house than our neighbors. To expect that others should bow down to me because I am talented is ridiculous. To expect that is to lose sight of who we really are. We are not solid or permanent. We are transient. Our beings ARE derivative. We are temporary, miniscule expressions of the timeless, endless universe, like bubbles on water that float for a moment and then collapse into their essential components. Out of the stars in their flight, out of the dust of eternity, here have we come, writes Robert Weston. This is the wonder of time; this is the marvel of space; out of the stars swung the earth; life [then arose] upon earth. To miss this is to put on blinders of self. To miss this offends reason, truth, and right conscience and limits our spiritual growth toward love and understanding, the goal of all religious exercise. To embrace this is to move through life as a healer, an enlightened one, a bodhisattva perhaps, a person who has achieved the highest potential of humanity. To embrace this is one way of moving ourselves toward achieving our ideals of peace, community, equity in human relations, granting ourselves and others a legitimate sense of inherent worth and dignity. And to that I say, Amen. CLOSING WORDS Adapted from a computer blog by Reverend Dr. Gary Blaine: I watched the sun rise up from the Eastern cusp of the horizon about 7:15 A.M. Every morning is a virgin lifting herself up off the bed of freshly planted Kansas winter wheat. She is young and her innocent fingers of light shine through the branches of autumn and the lingering fog. The darkness flees westward. What is our responsibility for such immaculate time? She is unblemished and chaste and not yet stained with human blood, or besmirched with sloth, or defiled with greed. How might we shepherd her through the day, hoping that she blossom in her own time bearing her fruit in due season?