“Another
Road”
Matthew 2:1-12
First Presbyterian
Perhaps you remember a few years
ago I quoted our nation’s then poet laureate, Ted Kooser, quoting an old
proverb that says, “When God wishes to rejoice the heart of a poor man, He
makes him lose his donkey and find it again.” It
is a piece of wisdom that has stuck with me and I want to talk about it again
today with a slightly different twist.
Kooser tells of the time in 1998 when he lost the donkey
on which he long had ridden, the ability to write.
It was something, he said, that had given meaning to his life for forty
years, and now it was gone. It
happened when, quite unexpectedly, a sore spot on his tongue that he thought was
“probably nothing” turned out to be squamous cell carcinoma, a cancer that
subsequently was found to have metastasized to his lymph nodes. Surgery ensued,
and then there followed an aggressive regimen of chemotherapy and radiation
treatments every day for six weeks. From
the first of June, Kooser reported, until early winter, he was exhausted,
anxious, depressed, and unable to write.
As time went by, he began taking
walks each morning but, because he had been told to stay out of the sun for a
year, he did so before dawn, hiking the isolated country roads near where he
lived. Then, one day in early
November, following his walk, he surprised himself by scribbling out a poem.
The next day, too, and many days after that. (1)
Here is the poem he wrote after his early morning
wandering on November 29 of his cancer year:
A round hay bale,
brown and blind, all shoulders,
huddled, bound tightly
by sky blue nylon twine.
Just so I awoke this morning,
wrapped in fear.
Oh, red plastic flag on a stick
stuck into loose gravel,
driven over, snapped off,
propped up again and again,
give me your courage. (2)
Kooser ended up writing
one-hundred-thirty poems that winter. His
heart rejoiced. “God had taken
my donkey,” Kooser wrote, “and helped me to find it again.”
I have a bit of a theological quibble with the proverb in
that I do not believe that God parceled out cancer to Kooser in order to give
him writer’s block so that he could in time rediscover his craft with new
appreciation. But his point is
otherwise well taken. Life
has a way of taking our donkeys, does it not?
Not only illness, but the death of a loved one, the elimination of a job,
the closing of a business, the betrayal of a friendship, the break up of a
marriage, the dying of a dream, the volatility of the stock market, the changing
of the times, even the loss of a zest for living…all of these and more can
steal away our equilibrium, our sense of well being, our at-home-ness in the
universe, our confidence, our purpose, our hope.
And then what?
I do not believe that God takes
away our donkey. “What
parent,” Jesus said, “if your child asks for bread, will give a
stone? Or if asked for a fish, will
give a snake? Just so, if you
know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more does God
know how to give to God’s children who so ask.”
I do not believe that God takes away our donkey, but I do believe
that God can help us to find it again. It
is not that God reaches down from some celestial perch to make everything
instantly better. It is that in the
teachable moments of our lives, in the times of crisis, confusion, heartache,
transition, lostness, or loneliness, if we are open to it, we may become more
keenly aware of God’s abiding presence and providence (which we experience as
God’s deep and pervasive wisdom, the wisdom coursing through creation).
I have told you on other
occasions that my daughter’s illness and death took away the donkey I had been
riding most of my life. With each
passing day of Katy’s suffering, what I thought I knew of theology and faith
melted away like snow in a warming sun. At
the same time that my daughter was slipping away, so, too, was my grasp on God
and thus, also, on life as I had put it together.
Here is what kept me going in those days.
You did. You were the
metaphorical arms of God that caught me in my falling.
You did that by coming to worship, by singing the hymns, by committing
acts of faith, by believing for me when I had a hard time doing it for myself.
That was grace, and within the God-filled grace and space you provided I
began to find my donkey again though it did not look or feel the same as it did
before I lost it. But that is
always how it is for no thing and nothing and no one ever stays the same after
going through the fire of the crucible of loss.
And, truth to tell, the donkey I found rides as well as or better than
the one that was taken away.
Do not get me wrong.
I cannot say that the donkey I have found is worth the price of my
daughter’s life, but, life happens as it does, and our donkeys are taken away
soon or late. And if instead of giving up we open up to the Spirit of God, to
the Divine Mystery, to the Ancient of Days, to the Bright Morning Star revealed
in worship, prayer, sacrament, the gathered community, nature, and in a myriad
of other epiphanies for, as the poet writes, “Christ
plays in ten thousand places,” life can become as rich and richer than ever
because we are being drawn more deeply into it.
I think at least something like
that is meant by our Epiphany Sunday scripture wherein Matthew writes that when
the truth about Herod dawned on the wise men who had come from far away to see
the heralded Christ Child, they were led to take a different way home.
Being in the presence of Jesus the Christ itself caused them to lose
their donkeys, and their old allegiances and alliances dropped away in favor of
an untold but hopeful future. “Behold,
in Christ we are new creations; the past is finished, the new is come, and
coming.”
All of us, and most of us many
times, lose our donkeys in life. And
while that may be fearful, it is not fatal.
If losing your donkey serves to open you to a larger and deeper life and
living, and thus also to the God who is more than we can ask or think or
imagine, then neither is it futile.
To conclude, I call again on Ted
Kooser, telling this time of a woman he witnessed in a waiting room of an
oncology clinic, a woman who, like Kooser himself with cancer, had had her
donkey taken away but who obviously was finding it again amid the changing
circumstances of her life.
At the Cancer Clinic
She is being helped toward the open door
that leads to the examining rooms
by two young women I take to be her sisters.
Each bends to the weight of an arm
and steps with the straight, tough bearing
of courage. At what must seem
to be
a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
smiling and calling encouragement.
How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick
woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still. (3)
We all will lose our donkey soon
or late. When that happens, as it
surely will, our faith tells us to trust that God not only will set before us
another way, another path, another road, but also another donkey on which to
ride.
Amen.
(1)
Kooser,
Ted, Local Wonders.
(2)
Kooser, Ted, Winter Morning Walks.
(3)
Kooser, Ted, Delights and Shadows.
© Copyright 2009 First Presbyterian Church