Nothing gold can stay

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I want to begin with a poem by Robert Frost.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

“So Eden sank to grief.” Today we step into Eden and watch as God walks at the time of the evening breeze, and confronts the human ones. God asks them God’s eternal question for all human beings: “Where are you?” Now, surely God knows where we are. But God knows that we do not know where we are. Like Eve, the mother of all human beings, we know we want wisdom. We know we want enlightenment. We know we want answers. Adam wants these things too, though he cowers in silence while the serpent shows Eve one path to wisdom. A problematic path — a terrible path! — but a path to wisdom nonetheless.

Eve and Adam, our parents — they want wisdom, and that is not wrong, even though they get lost, even though they “sink to grief,” in their effort. They search for wisdom in ways that lead them away from true, life-giving, community-nourishing wisdom. We might relate to their experience in moments of our lives when we try to master something, or (more accurately) we try to control something, but our attempt only makes everything worse, leaves us confused and frustrated, and tears at the fabric of community. We want wisdom without yielding our individual control; we want community without being vulnerable; we want to be gods.

But before I go further, I want to clear away from this primordial story the rust and dirt of misogyny and patriarchy, the choice that so many readers down the ages have made to assign blame for human misery to the woman, Eve, and through her all women. This is an ironic as well as an awful thing to do, for the characters in the story all do this, too: in their frantic effort to make things right, they assign blame to the serpent, and then to the woman. But if we clear this “blame game” away, we see two things shining brightly for us in this story:

We see the human desire for, and pursuit of, wisdom: a good thing, even a gift of God! 

And we see that God walks through the garden at the time of the evening breeze, calling out to the human ones, offering them again and again a better path to wisdom. God’s response to what happened sounds harsh, and it is harsh: God soberly tells the humans and the serpent the consequences of their actions: living and acting in a free universe sometimes leads to deep grief and regret. But God remains with the human ones. God does not give up on them. And that is a powerfully encouraging thought.

But there is more grief for us to see, more grievous loss for us to understand, to know, and to wrestle with, on this day, another Sunday in God’s garden, the first of many summer Sundays. 

Back to Robert Frost: “So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.” Today we travel from Eden to Galilee and see Jesus facing two grievous confrontations. His family believes he is out of his mind, and they want to restrain him, to pull him back into the privacy of their home. His words and actions frighten them. They are losing who they thought Jesus was, and they are also losing their hopes for his, and their, future. (Their family’s reputation in the community is also at risk.) His message of repentance, of turning and following God into a strange new kingdom — this is not what the family of Jesus had in mind when they nursed great hopes for him. The bright dawn of his promise as a youth is going down to a dull day of a disappointing prophet who says and does things that will only get the family into trouble.

But the authorities from Jerusalem go further: they mark Jesus as evil. They are also, like his family, in distress: their hold on power depends on social stability, and they see Jesus disrupting everything. They may resemble leaders of our own day who want no part in dismantling the systems of oppression, not necessarily because they themselves are consciously evil, but because “dismantling systems of oppression” is painful and disruptive, particularly for those in authority, for those who are wealthy and privileged, for those who benefit most from those same systems. “Nothing gold can stay,” writes Robert Frost with elegant ennui. And that can refer not only to our passing youth or our loss of innocence. It could refer to a golden age. Old times, easy paths, all things 2019: they don’t stay. A new and better future is coming, and it will destroy even the lovely and pleasant things of the past, along with all the terrible things.

And that is troubling. 

So: if we decide Jesus is crazy, we can restrain him and save face for the family. 

But if we decide Jesus is evil, then we can not only restrain him; his punishment will warn others who share his destructive impulses. Stability will return. Everyone will feel more secure.

But let me say this: as I felt empathy for Eve and Adam, so too do I have empathy for the family of Jesus, and for the frightened authorities. Despite their mixed motives, they want good things, as virtually all frightened and angry people do. They want the world to make sense; they want today to draw upon the good things of yesterday; like Eve and Adam, they would also like an answer or two. They want wisdom.

In both stories we encounter human beings in deep distress, pursuing understandable, deeply human longings. And in both stories we encounter God speaking to that distress, though not always clearly or easily.

And so, finally, I have an antiphon to respond to that beautiful blue poem by Robert Frost. It’s a good response as well to today’s gloomy (but all too realistic) Psalm 130, a psalm that for centuries has captured the depth of human grief in our myriad struggles, mistakes, atrocities, and dreadful losses.

St. Paul gives us this happy antiphon. In his second letter to the church in Corinth, he tries to buck them up, and I think it works: “So we do not lose heart,” Paul writes. “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure…”

Paul imagines — rightly, I think — the bright future of life with God that God invites us to walk into. 

With God’s presence and power, we help each other not lose heart. We gather here, and even when we gather from a distance, it is here, in community, that we prepare for this “weight of glory beyond all measure.” It begins here. Unlike cowering Adam or lonely Eve, we have each other and we build our bonds together. Unlike the anxious family of Jesus, or the reactionary Jerusalem officials, we practice walking with God, in serenity and peace, right here. God leads us into wisdom, but only together, only when all of us pursue it together. That is the Good News Jesus preaches. That is the calling we hear at the time of the evening breeze.

“Where are you?” God asks us.

We are here. We are all here.

***

Preached on the Second Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, June 6, 2021, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Genesis 3:8-15
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35

Art: Marc Chagall, The Expulsion from Paradise