NOVEL
SERMONS:
The Gospel in Literature and Life
10.
“Jayber Crow”
Matthew
5:1-12
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
August
30, 2009
There are no lengths
to which I will not go to share with you the gospel.
First of all, the novel I read as the basis of the sermon today is 363
pages in length, a good 150 more than my customary limit.
And second, right in the front of the book there is a page that carries
this message:
PERSONS ATTEMPTING TO
FIND A “TEXT” IN THIS BOOK WILL BE PROSECUTED; PERSONS ATTEMPTING TO FIND A
“SUBTEXT” IN IT WILL BE BANISHED; PERSONS ATTEMPTING TO EXPLAIN, INTERPRET,
EXPLICATE, ANALYZE, DECONSTRUCT, OR OTHERWISE “UNDERSTAND” IT WILL BE EXILED
TO A
-BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
Ah, the things some
preachers risk in the pursuit of a sermon! I
would not mind the exile to a desert island about now, but the company of other
explainers would be excruciating!
The author’s name is
Wendell Berry, a
Have you ever had an
experience or insight that moved you deeply but for which the telling of it
seemed to diminish it? Someone, for
instance, responded lukewarmly to something particularly wonderful you shared
with them and it made you sorry you said anything?
I have to admit that when I came to the end of Jayber Crow I got concerned that you would have to read it
for yourself to really get how exceptional the book is, to experience the depth
and wonder of it, that I could not convey it, and maybe something like that
accounts for the author’s aforementioned warning.
Jayber Crow is not a
book merely to be admired or respected, though
I paired Jayber Crow with the Beatitudes of Jesus this morning because
both are about the forming and nurturing of community life and of our lives
within a community. Jayber Crow
narrates the story of his life from the vantage point of his old age.
Born in 1914 near the town of Port William, Kentucky, he was orphaned
twice by the age of ten, first by his parents who died during an outbreak of
fever epidemic and then later by his older aunt and uncle who had taken him in
and afforded him the opportunity of a happy early childhood.
Sent to a church-run orphanage, Jayber believes he “hears the call”
to become a preacher and subsequently enrolls in a college for pre-ministerial
studies. But he runs into problems
when he begins to question orthodoxy. For
instance, he says,
“I
took to studying the ones of my teachers who also were preachers, and also the
preachers who came to speak in chapel and at various exercises.
In most of them I saw the old division of body and soul that I had known
at (the orphanage). The same rift
ran through everything here at (the college); the only difference was that I was
able to see it more clearly, and to wonder at it.
Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to
the soul. It scared me a little when
I realized that I saw it the other way around.
If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all
the worst sins – hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and
lust – came from the soul. But
these preachers I’m talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong,
but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to
associate with the flesh and the world. And
yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.”
Touche!
He continued:
“I
went to my professors with my questions, starting with the easiest questions and
the talkiest professors…They were decent enough men.
The problem was that they’d had no doubts.
They had not asked the questions that I was asking and so of course they
could not answer them. They told me
I needed to have more faith; I needed to believe; I needed to pray; I needed to
give up my questioning which was a sign of weakness of faith.”
“Those
men could go on all day about the sins of the flesh or the amount of water
needed for baptism or whether you could go to Heaven without being baptized or
who could or couldn’t go to Heaven, but they couldn’t say why, if we’re to
take some of the Bible literally, we don’t take all of it literally, or why we
kill our enemies (when Jesus says to love them), or why we pray standing in the
synagogues and in the corners of the streets that we may be seen of men (when
Jesus says to pray in secret).”
Jayber resigned from
school, echoing the words of Dante, “I
was a lost traveler wandering in the woods, needing to be on my way somewhere
but not knowing where.” “Somewhere”
ends up being his boyhood home of Port William from which he had been gone since
the age of ten. Having learned the
barbering trade at the orphanage, Jayber buys the vacant shop in Port William
and barbered there for thirty-two years. He
says, “I felt at home.”
He said, “After I got to Port William, I didn’t feel any longer that I needed
to look around to see if there was someplace I would like better.”
I get that, for that is pretty much the way I feel about this place
where I live and work. In a
memorable phrase, Jayber said he felt “captured
by gratitude.”
That Wendell Berry has
some concerns about organized religion can be seen when he writes that “Jayber
walks up to church every Sunday ‘over a cobble of quibbles.”
Jayber sees himself as the consummate Protestant who, after years of
reading the Gospels has come to believe that “Christ
did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an
unorganized one.” (I keep
doing what I can to make religion around here disorganized, but the good staff
around me keeps putting it back in order!) What
Jayber really was protesting was religion that is neat and certain and all tied
up and self-serving rather than scattered about and questing and questioning and
out in the world with all of its attendant messiness.
Wendell Berry, himself
a farmer, also laments in this novel what we have lost of community in the name
of so-called economic and social progress. Troy
Chatham was Mattie Chatham’s husband and the son-in-law of Athey Keith,
Mattie’s father. (More about Mattie later.)
Keith was one of the most respected citizens of the Port William
community or “the Port William Membership” as
“The
new way of farming was a way of dependence, not on land and creatures and
neighbors, but on machines and fuel and chemicals of all sorts, bought things,
and on the sellers of bought things – which made it finally a dependence on
credit. The odd thing was, people
just assumed that all the purchasing and borrowing would make life easier and
better on all the little farms. Most
people didn’t dream that before long a lot of little farmers would buy and
borrow their way out of farming, and bigger and bigger farmers would be
competing with their neighbors (or with doctors from the city) for available
land. The time was going to come –
it was clear enough now – when there would not be enough farmers left.”
Jayber also reminisces
about what happens when the local school is closed and the children are bused to
a neighboring town and the effects of a new interstate that bisects Port
William.
“The
interstate cut through farms. It
divided neighbor from neighbor. It
made distant what had been close, and close what had been distant.
It interrupted the flow of water through the veins of the rock.
All the roads that had gone through our part of the country before had
been guided at least somewhat by the place – by features of the land, older
roads, property boundaries. This
one, the great casting away of the earth, respected no presence, no limits.
It remembered nothing. Anything
that was in its way had to move or be moved, house or hill, barn or field,
stream or woods. Big bulldozers cut
the land away down to the rock. Power
drills bit into the rock. Explosions
cracked and shook the rock and the pieces were hauled away.
Places where lives had been lived disappeared from the face of the earth
forever.”
“That
great road – moving, it seemed, purely according to its own will – was the
mark of an old flaw come newly ordered into the world.
Who could doubt that if everything stood in its way, nothing would be
left?”
But it was Jayber’s
love for Mattie Chatham, the wife of Troy Chatham, that is perhaps the biggest
part of his story. There is never
anything untoward in Jayber’s relationship with Mattie.
He never tries to get Mattie to leave her husband even though her
marriage to Troy Chatham was troubled and often unhappy.
He never tells anyone about his love for her.
It is not until the last paragraph of the book that we find that Mattie
had any inkling of Jayber’s special affection.
At one point, Jayber “marries” Mattie, not legally of course, but in
his heart and is faithful to her for the rest of his life.
Jayber married Mattie though Mattie did not marry him and when he asks,
for his readers’ benefit, what good he got out of such an arrangement, he
answers, “I got to have love in my
heart.” A few times
during their lives, Jayber was able to help Mattie in difficult situations, but
always in an understated and respectful way.
Jayber’s is a love that personifies St. Paul’s hymn to love in as
true a way as I ever have read in literature.
It is a love that wishes only good for the other and a love that finds
joy in knowing it has loved. It is a
love that does not seek any payback.
Jayber calls himself a
man of faith even though “faith puts you
out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark.”
Faith does not exempt the faithful from pain, Jayber says, but
assures that “there is a light that
includes our darkness, and day that shines down even on the clouds.”
Faithfulness, for Jayber, is not about getting something for one’s
efforts but in itself its own reward.
Jayber
Crow, the book, does not contain in it any Pollyanna
gospel but rather one that counts the cost and is willing to pay it so as to
stand against the impersonal and impervious spirit of the age that would crush
in the name of progress beauty and love and community.
Jayber Crow, the person, in his restraint, humility, wakefulness,
integrity, and devotion to others provides a picture of a human being alive from
the depths and in touch with a different Spirit whose name is Love whose name is
God. Jayber Crow does not condemn us
who may lack or lag, but inspires us and helps to makes us new.
Blessed indeed are
those who are poor in spirit; blessed indeed are the meek, the merciful, the
peacemaker, the poor in heart; blessed indeed are those who mourn and who hunger
and thirst for righteousness. And
blessed by them is the world so much in need of such.
Amen.
©
Copyright 2009 First Presbyterian Church