July 5, 2020: Sunday Sermon by David Brooks at Washington National Cathedral

it's such an honor to be at this pulpit this is my second time here I got to preach a sermon several years ago before Co vid and I have to admit that the audience in the hall was bigger the turnout was bigger back then but the gift is the same just to be in these arches and spires I'm speaking to you here on Independence weekend in our nation's capitol in our nation's Cathedral at a time when we are going through over rocky ground going through hard times the sins and wrongs of our country are fully exposed there's a sense we're not fully living up to the dream of our country and so my subject today is beauty in a storm this is a church service and our concerns are the highest thing so if you don't mind I thought I'd start by talking about Jesus there are many different lenses through which to see Jesus there's the Florence lens of Renaissance art the pale wispy white guy with his two fingers raised there's the Oxford Jesus of CS Lewis and TR tolkien the calm and masterful Aslan always in the control my background is Jewish so I see Jesus through a Jerusalem lens to see him in that lens is to see him embedded in the Jewish world of 2,000 years ago that world there's nothing like the peacefulness of an American church pew it's nothing like the quiet domesticity of a modern Bible study it was a world of strife combat and fractious intensity the Holy Land then is now was a spiritual in a literal battleground the primary fact was foreign occupation Jews and Jewish homeland had been oppressed in occupiers for centuries the Babylonians the Syrians the Romans certain questions would have been electric in the air why are we oppressed who amongst our people is betraying us in collaborating how do we survive as a people under the crushing burden of their power everything was fraught semi hysterical and tension-filled desperate gangs roamed the land minor-league revolutionaries were perpetually rising up NT write lists lists seven separate revolts between the years 26 thirty-six about the time of Jesus's ministry a few decades after the crucifixion and Egyptian Jew led religious band and they marched into Jerusalem and were slaughtered by Roman soldiers the mass suicide at Masada came a few years after that Galilee was a common origin points of these revolts Galilee was a poor hardscrabble tough zone on the fringes the historians Simon dubna was exaggerating but not by much when he wrote from Galilee stemmed all the revolutionary movement movements which so disturbed the Romans if you were Galilei and you were mad bad and dangerous too no pressure from the occupation was bad partisan fighting within the Jewish world was also intense it was a profusion of cults and factions the Essenes and the Pharisees it was a time of great intellectual ferment rabbis rose up hill al tarf on rabbi Hanina Ben dosa was a first century healer and miracle worker who lived about ten miles from Nazareth he was a man of intense passion zeal who like Jesus cared less about minor religious regulations and more about the purity of the inner life I'm trying to describe a world in which everything was loud everything was pressure facts words and hatreds clashed by day and night when you see Jesus in this context you see how completely bold and aggressive he was he lived in a crowded angry world yet took on all comers he faced stoning and Nazareth he offended the rich of Capernaum John the Baptist was beheaded for her leading a ministry and Jesus walked in his footsteps he entered Jerusalem at a time of power jostling between Roman and Jewish elites Pontius Pilate power was aiming the high being the high priests were trying to take advantage Jesus Jesus walked into a complex network of negotiated and renegotiated power settlements between various factions and he challenged them all with a stroke or perhaps it's more accurate to say he pierced through them and went right to the core at a moment of elite polarization he was bringing access to the kingdom directly to the poor he was offering triumph directly to the Drowned trodden he fit in with none of these factions and plowed through them all when you see Jesus through the Jerusalem lens the Beatitudes are even more astounding in the midst of conflict here was another way another path a higher serenity they were an inversion of values they were beauty in the storm Ramana Gardini put it beautifully and the Beatitudes something of the celestial grandeur breaks through they are no mere formulas for superior ethics but tidings of sacred and supreme realities entry into the world Jesus was love and beauty in the midst of muck and violence and the most difficult circumstances imaginable you don't have to be Christian you can be atheist Jewish Muslim whatever and you can be astounded by this man and astounded by the faith he inspired when you see him in this context you see the beauty is more powerful when it's in the middle of the storm it's beauty in the storm that is powerful enough to inspire a leap of faith faith is weird faith doesn't make any sense faith is the hope and something unseen it takes something truly remarkable truly counterintuitive truly beautiful to inspire a leap of faith events have got to push somebody so hard that only faith can explain the inexplicable and of course faith is not just a decision you make one day it's a decision to make every day as Frederick Buechner put it you've got to wake up every morning and say can I believe all that all over again and Bikaner says if you wake up 10 days in a row and you say yes you probably don't want faith is that your faith should be maybe three days out of ten but Bikaner says when you say that yes it should be great laughter so faith itself is not serene faith itself is a storm it is pushing toward the beauty you tasted amid the storms of life it is making that beauty not an interruption as Chris Wyman says but part of your life rabbi Sol Joseph soloveitchik understood how bumpy faith is especially in moments like these in moments of storm he wrote the popular ideology contends that the religious experiences tranquility ordered tender and delicate on the contrary it is exceptionally complex rigorous and tortuous where you find its complexity there you find its greatness it is in a condition of spiritual crisis of psychic ascent and descent contradiction arising from affirmation and negation religion is not at the outset a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and the desperate an enchanted stream for crushed spirits but a raging clamorous turrent of man's consciousness with all its crises pangs and torments what keeps faith alive during storms like now are the awareness of beauty the essential goodness at the ground of our being I always love quoting my friend Catherine Cox who once said that when her daughter was born she realized she loved her more than evolution required and that points to the achievement of the world it should points to the incredible care we have for each other at the core of our being the power of love in the world and we get reminded of that and that essential goodness of transcendent love through those moments of beauty the moments we glimpse from time to time I'm a big admirer of Dorothy day who lived in the first part of the 20th century and devoted her life not only to serving the poor but living within the poor among the poor she was a beautiful writer and at the end of her life Robert Coles asked her if she would write a memoir and she said you know I tried once I sat down with a piece of paper and I wrote at the top of it a life remembered and then she told Coles this I just sat there and thought of our Lord and his visit to us all those centuries ago and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had him on my mind for so long in my life that's just a moment of tranquility and beauty that inspires now I turn to our country our country is in a storm or maybe an earthquake I think the earthquake started and around five or six years ago forces of protests and activism rose up on the one hand the populism that led to Donald Trump there were school shootings there were young adults facing the reality that their life might be worse off economically than their parents they were the killings of Eric garner Michael Brown and Tamir rice the beginnings of the black lives matter movement an earthquake of all sorts of dimensions had begun kovat 19 and the killing of George Floyd hit like hurricanes in the middle of that earthquake they are not the source of the change we're enduring but they have accelerated every trend and there's a growing awareness that we are struggling to rise up to this moment we had one great task this year to defeat this disease and we are failing at it we have failed to care for the common good and the social hold there's great marching there's also a great shock people are changing their opinions they're facing police brutality they're facing the sins endemic so long in our culture and it's hard to know where things will sit it's hard for me as a commentator to make sense of it all some days so it's testing faith Americans are less patriotic now than at any time in our history 71 percent of Americans are angry about the country only 17 American percent of Americans are proud about the state of our country a lot of people look around at the conditions of this country how Africans Americans are treated how communities are collapsing how Washington doesn't work and none of it makes sense none of it inspires face and none of it do they feel a part and we have to admit that a lot of today's distrust is earned distrust people lose faith in each other when people are untrustworthy to each other institutions fail people don't look out for each other and this is a danger when congregations lose faith in God the church collapses when people lose faith in each other the nation collapses if you don't breathe the spirit of this nation if you don't have a fierce sense of belonging to each other you're not going to sacrifice for the common good and yet I think if we look around we see that beauty is produced by storms as well there's beauty even in the storm were in in 1770 amongst another moment of national storm that storm produced the preamble to articulation all men are created equal and they're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights the storm of the 1860s bought Lincoln's second inaugural with malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds I've been reading Albert Marie of late he's an African American writer who in the 1970s published a book called the Omni Americans one of his points in that book is that the storm and the struggle of being at African American in this country created a culture of beauty and strength that was manifested particularly in his mind in the blues he wrote the blues ballad is a good example of what the blues are about almost always relating a story frustration it could hardly be described as a device a device for avoiding the unpleasant facts of black life in America the sense of well-being that always goes with swinging the blues is generated as anyone familiar with black dancehalls knows not by obscuring or denying the ugly dimensions of human nature circumstances and conduct but rather through the full sharp and an inescapable awareness of them when a black musician or dancer swings the blues he or she is making an affirmative and hence exemplary heroic response to the human condition it is in the storm directly facing this torment and making an affirmative response and we see beautiful responses around us and so I guess the first message I'd like to leave you with is it one familiar to our tradition be not afraid storms are normal parts of life storms and storms are moments of transition when bad things go away and new things are born their moments of creativity the second thing I'd like to leave you with is that in storms it seems we have two systems of response we have the normal bodily response which is fight-or-flight fear and anger but another style of response emerges from our souls from that core piece of ourselves that doesn't have any shape size color or weight but gives us infinite value in dignity and this response is an aesthetic response it's the one that causes us to hunger for beauty to be called by beauty partaken beauty to pay attention to compassionate actions to sacrifice for a neighbor to keep a neighbor safe these actions and these acts of beauty like the Sermon on the Mount like the Lincoln's second inaugural often involve flipping the script up ending values on one level these acts of beauty and pure gift and loving care are radically illogical they are vulnerability in the face of danger they are gentleness in the midst of bitterness they are compassion in the midst of strife but these are the acts that have the power to shock these are the acts that have the power open hearts these are the acts that have a power to shock a revolution in our culture and in our consciousness we don't get to choose our condition we do get to choose our response and even in the bitterness of this hard time I've seen in turn individual acts and collective acts of giving and change and facing hard truths and uncomfortable conversations that are little sparks of beauty in what has all been rocky and dark thank you for your attention god bless our beautiful nation

Channel: Washington National Cathedral

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Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020