Originally given as the final sermon to colleagues in a class on Preaching and Poetry
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Marina Abramovic is a provocative performance artist.
She’s known from her work in the 70s in which free form audience engagement is combined with the presence, or implied possibility of real physical bodily harm. She once had a collaborator draw a bow and point an arrow at her heart; she’s laid down on ice and in fire…
I bring her up, not to talk about her early work, but just to place it in contrast to the work she has come to now, much later in her life.
You see, her works of endurance have lead her now to think in challenging ways about how to engage in intentional, focused presence, engaging in practices that counter-socialize us and serve to distance us from our smart-phone ridden, distracted, notification addicted culture.
For example, the seminal work in her 2010 retrospective at MoMA in New York was a piece called “The Artist is Present.” It involved her sitting in a across the table from an empty chair, and the performance of the work was that the audience was invited to sit in the chair and stair into Abramovic’s eyes for as long as they would like. She sat in that chair for 8 hours at a time, every minute that the museum was open, for three months. This piece however, was not about mere endurance or engaging in prodding the psyche of the public, it was also the practice of being present with someone, seeking undistracted engagement . . . and while it was met with some cynicism and criticism, many people who stared for long periods of time into her eyes, left deeply moved by the experience.
Her most recent work is open now, and when you attend, you are asked to lock your cell phone, watch, tablet, lap-top, fit-bit, and whatever other technology you may have brought with you into a locker. You then are given a pair of noise cancelling headphones and are directed to sit in a relatively comfortable chair and prepare yourself for a performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. And by prepare yourself, she means to sit in silence, trying to clear your mind of distractions for just over a half an hour. Then after than half hour Igor Levit – and the piano he will play – gently glide out to center stage and he performs, from memory, the stunning 86-minute baroque aria with 30 variations.
And, from what I hear, it is incredibly moving… One woman said that she saw visions; another woman said that she was transported back to the birth of her child; one man said it was the most peaceful experience of his life; many said, in one way or another, that the experience changed them. This is because, at least as the artist puts it, our brains have not evolved to function in the ways or at the rate that technology has evolved, and we now live in a world that is prohibitive to true focus, presence, and even existence as we are made to be.
Personally, I think that’s a little much…
but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth to the benefits of practicing mindfulness and clearing our heads on occasion. So this evening, before we read our text for today, I’d like us to take some real time, (don’t worry, not a half hour, but) a substantial break to clear our minds and prepare our hearts to hear the word. At least that how we often hear it said, right? Prepare your hearts. In a way I think that’s what Marina Abramovic is after… So… let us prepare our hearts.
Our scripture this evening comes from the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 7, verses 1-14.
Listen now for the Word of the Lord:
A good name is better than fine oil,
and the day of death, than the day of birth.
It is better to go to the house of mourning
than to go to the house of feasting;
for this is the end of everyone,
and the living will lay it to heart.
Sorrow is better than laughter,
for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad.
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning;
but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise
than to hear the song of fools.
For like the crackling of thorns under a pot,
so is the laughter of fools;
this also is vanity.
Surely oppression drives the wise to madness,
and a bribe corrupts the heart.
Better is the end of a thing than its beginning;
the patient in spirit are better than the proud in spirit.
Do not be quick to anger,
for anger lodges in the bosom of fools.
Do not say, “Why were the former days better than these?”
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
Wisdom is as good as an inheritance,
an advantage to those who see the sun.
For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money,
and the advantage of knowledge is
that wisdom gives life to the one who possesses it.
Consider the work of God;
who can make straight what God has made crooked?
In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider;
God has made the one as well as the other,
so that mortals may not find out anything that will come after them.
This is the word of God, for the people of God.
Thanks be to God.
PAST
We’re all tempted to live in the past…
Ask uncle Rico, or Troy Aikman, or really anyone who has had some “good ole days” and you’ll see. The past – for many of us – is a place of refuge from the problems of now…
“If only it were like it was when kids could safely play stickball in the streets and we never worried about candy from strangers…”
But the problem with this, of course, is that those times never existed… at least not as pristinely as we remember them.
There’s this comedian named Louie C. K., he’s a pretty big deal, you’ve probably heard of him… anyway he has this bit about time travel…
He says, basically, “look…
there’s a reason that only white people fantasize about epic, trans-century time travel…
There’s a reason Doc Brown is white…
As a white guy I can basically go to any point in history I want to, I can go to the year 2! I don’t even know what’s happening then, but I know when I get there they’ll say,
“Welcome, we have a table right here for you, sir.”
and I’ll say, ”Thank you. Oh, it’s lovely here in the year 2.”
I can go to any time…
but if you show a Black person a time machine there gonna be like, “I don’t know… last week? a few years ago? Really anything before 1980 and it’s gonna get dicey…”[1]”
You see, whatever time we look back to as the ideal past is most likely a myth… at the very least it was not a great place for everyone. The world has never been a perfect place, and that’s something that the author of Ecclesiastes understands all too well.
He puts it this way:
Do not say, “Why were the former days better than these?”
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
Our first wedding anniversary was a couple of days ago and we spent some time reflecting on our beautiful wedding day. It was incredible… and we cant think of another time when all of our favorite people will be in the same place at the same time again… it was magical.
I admit that I was tempted to lounge retrospectively… spending the day flipping through our photo album, checking the Timehop app to see all the nice things people posted on social media, eating some New Orleanian cuisine, and sipping a NOLA Blonde ale. I wanted to play our wedding playlist and dance around the living room, remembering the wonderful night of a year ago… but had we done that… what new memories would we have made? Of course it would not have been a bad thing to reminisce, but in some sense, what good would that have done?
FUTURE
For me… for some of us… graduation looms in the relatively near future. Just the other night I found myself perusing the Church Leadership Connection website of the PCUSA to see what jobs were open, in what towns… my mind wandered.
What would it be like to live in Charlotte?…
I wish there were more jobs in New Orleans..
What would it be like to take a position working with youth again?
The next thing I knew a half hour gone by and Lauren’s asking me where I went… She can always tell when I’ve drifted away from myself, lost in my head…
In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other, so that mortals may not find out anything that will come after them.
The future has its good qualities…
It can help us set goals.
It can be a check and balance on the output of our systems…
Put another way, it can help us ask, “Is this the way we want the world to be…?”
Any good theologian would tell you that the way we understand “the age that is to come”, the end times, our eschatological hopes, shapes the way we act in the world today…
But…
Qohelet seems to understand that the future is also vanity… it is vapor… it is breath… a feeding on the wind.
That’s the thing about wind, it does a lot of good stuff.
It helps to pollenate plants.
It provides respite from the heat of summer.
It rustles the leaves of the Aspens in the mountains of Colorado, and thereby creates, perhaps, one of the most soothing and beautiful sounds nature has ever made…
But if you try to eat it, it will not sustain you.
You will go hungry.
So it is with the future… it might be beautiful and compelling, and it is fruitful for reflection and guidance, but it cannot nourish us.
We don’t live in the future. We are here and now, and the only end we can honestly see for ourselves, Qohelet says, is the day of death. This is the end for everyone, and beyond that mortals will not find out anything that will come after them.
Look, he seems to say, it’s fine to have hope for the future, but the real tangible thing that you and I have to work with is our life. This one. The one we are living right now; these “few days of our vain life, which pass like a shadow.”
PRESENT
This, of course, only leaves us with the present. And it’s no wonder that so many of us would seek to escape it into an idealized past or an imagined utopian future, but Qohelet, in this anti-escapist manifesto says, “no.” We must be here. We must live these days we’ve been given.
If we’ve learned anything as a poets/preachers this semester, I is the benefit of being present to what’s around you.
We read of Mary Oliver’s walks through the woods, Audre Lorde’s keen eye to the people she loves and the events of her day, Wendell Berry’s earnest attention to the river and Billy Collins’ to ordinary table ware… and when we read these gifts, we realize that they came to us because the poet was present and open to the world around them, in a way that only they could be.
Life is not always glamorous.
Often it is devastatingly sad.
Even more often it seems it can be terribly mundane.
But what I think Qohelet can teach us is
to be joyful in the day of prosperity
that by expressing our deep sadness the heart is made glad
to remember God in the day of adversity.
“Be in the day you are living,” he seems to say.
And I think for us preachers, poets… this is wisdom.
Let’s live with eyes open. Let’s live the life that’s now.
Amen.
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chad wright pittman 