View pdf of bulletin

Sunday, August 23, 2015 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Letting in to Go Out

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 84
1 Kings 8 (selected verses)

Anthony de Mello

There’s a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine—some of you may have seen it—that shows in the distance a burning bush. Closer up, but off to the side, is a tall tree with a white-bearded man leaning out but mostly remaining hidden behind the tree trunk. Trying to get the attention of a person whose gaze is fixed on the burning bush, the white-bearded man calls out, “I’m over here. That bush just happens to be burning.”

As the cartoon suggests, it seems like God wants us to know where to find him; at the same time it seems like God wants to remain hidden. This sums up a theological tension that is found throughout the Old Testament: a tension between a God who wants to be a personal God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and a God who refuses to show his face, refuses to have any name other than “Yahweh,” “I am who I am.” It is the tension between God’s immanence and God’s transcendence.

While it may seem as though these are opposite characteristics of God that could not coexist, most theistic religions that have endured over time have worked really hard to find ways to reconcile the two. Christianity reconciles them by saying that God is omnipresent. God is present everywhere and can be so only because God cannot be contained. Only because God transcends every specific time, place, and situation can God be immanent.

In the passage we read from 1 Kings, we see King Solomon trying hard to recognize God’s transcendence despite the fact that Solomon has just completed building the magnificent Jerusalem temple, the first house ever built for the Lord. We know from chapters 5, 6, and 7 that strenuous and elaborate effort went into building and furnishing this temple. To be sure, the temple was King Solomon’s crowning accomplishment. Yet, when it came to the temple dedication, listen to what King Solomon said in his dedication speech: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!” Solomon rightly recognized that despite its magnificence, this house would not be God’s true resting place. No earthly place or human-made house could contain God.

So 1 Kings speaks of God’s presence as an uncontainable cloud. The cloud of God so filled and suffused the temple that the priests were prevented from carrying out their duties in it. Whether in the fire of the burning bush or in the cloud of God’s glory, God refuses to be seen, contained, and pinned down.

In past weeks, I have been reading in the news more about life in prison—journalistic accounts of imprisoned people, the inability of people to make bail, and studies about the psychological effects of solitary confinement. Some of these accounts are so bleak that they leave you wondering if there are places where God is absent.

In a memoir entitled Within These Walls, the Reverend Carroll Pickett, a Presbyterian pastor who served fifteen years as a chaplain at the Huntsville unit of the Texas prison system, shares his observations about the bleak world of prison society. Listen to what he writes:

Prison life is a world unto itself, a mind-numbing routine in which the punishment of those who call the prison home is to be held accountable for their every movement. Meals are served at the same time each day, head counts done morning and night, showers last exactly three minutes, time for “lights out” never varies, and small privileges are awarded for only the best behavior. There are so many rules that no man can be expected to remember them all. (Carroll Pickett, Within These Walls, p. 31)

When one’s total existence is entirely routinized and regimented, you wonder if there is any possibility that God might be present.

One of Carroll Pickett’s responsibilities was to conduct regular worship services. While he couldn’t do anything about the myriad rules and restrictions, he was determined to make the chapel a welcoming place, as close to a church in the free world as possible. To the few people who came to worship, he announced that the chaplain’s office door was open to anyone who wished to visit him. No one came. New to the job, he wondered why. Someone then told him, “You can’t expect people to come to you. They’re waiting for you to come to them. That’s how it works in here.”

So he went to them. He visited inmates in solitary confinement, where, aside from a bed, there was nothing other than a commode on a bare concrete floor. Over time they let him into their solitary lives. He regularly heard concerns, even from the toughest and most feared among them, that their wives, girlfriends, children, and parents never visited or wrote. That’s how it became an almost daily practice for him to make calls and write letters to strangers, gently reminding them of the importance of making contact (Pickett, p. 45).

A little over a year ago, when I attended a National Council of Churches Christian Unity Gathering, I heard something that I thought we could do here and that churches could do everywhere. The theme of the annual gathering was mass incarceration, and over the course of a few days, we heard so many different experts speak about different aspects of this serious and complex issue. One panelist was the Reverend Dr. Harold Dean Trulear. I remember being struck by what he said in particular. He spoke about what churches can do to reduce the recidivism rate. People released from prison often return to prison. Lots of things can help to prevent them from relapsing into criminal behavior: employment, housing, etc. But did you know, he asked us, that more than any of these things, the thing that makes the biggest impact is having a significant relationship with someone in society? Then he began to get specific. More impactful than relationships with mothers are relationships with fathers, and more impactful than relationships with fathers are relationships with pastors and church folk. Speaking to an audience of church folk, he got our attention. Churches can’t always provide jobs, housing, and education. They can, however, provide relationships. Relationships are a resource in which we are rich.

After his presentation, I talked to Dr. Trulear about us, and I asked him what he thought we could do to relate to an imprisoned population. He shared different ideas with me, and the one that I could imagine taking root, at least in some of your hearts, was the idea of letter-writing, being pen pals.

I have to say that I am a little guilty of romanticizing the age-old practice of writing letters. I think of Paul’s letters to the churches, some of them written while he himself was imprisoned and many of them making reference to the letters that he received from newly formed congregations. I think of the precious occasional letters that my father receives from his brother’s family in North Korea, letters that, if they come, take over a month to reach us and have become increasingly more rare, likely because of the risk of writing and receiving them. I think of the daily letters that I received from my father when I was in college and how much I looked forward to checking my mailbox each day at the student center.

It turns out that it’s as hard for a letter to be let into a prison as it is for a letter from a stranger to be let into someone’s heart. Making contact with a prisoner via post requires getting past a maze of rules and regulations, the kind that Carroll Pickett wrote about in his memoir as a prison chaplain. I’m still trying to figure them out in order to find a way in. The hurdles shouldn’t surprise me, though. Creating any kind of relationship requires reaching out, and even when we are willing to reach out, much of the work required is to be let in.

There are some places so closed off and totally controlled that you really wonder how God could be present. And yet we believe that even there God is present. We believe that God is able to be anywhere and everywhere, as much here in this splendid sanctuary as with Daniel in the lion’s den; as much where there is freedom and choice as where people live under totalitarian control. We believe in the immanence of God made possible by the transcendence of God. We have to believe it, because we place our hope in it. Our hope and our prayer is that God be present in the most locked-down places.

In the most closed-off places, there are people in need who are waiting for us. We cannot expect them to come to us. That’s not the way it works. We have to go to them. From Christ who came to us by no easy path and stands at the door and knocks, waiting to be let in, we have learned that you have to let him in so that he can show us the way out. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church