A sermon by the Rev. Dr. Alan Gregory, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
and Associate Professor of Church History, given on September 6, 2007,
in Christ Chapel

Blank, Texas is about forty-four miles east of Dallas. I spent a night there once. Most of us want to avoid Blank since it’s the quintessence of nowhere. A random, wretched, shabby huddle, fallen by the highway: gas station, general store, Dairy Queen, a few abandoned cars, empty dumpsters, and the Blank motel. The sort of ugliness it takes years to create. No one admits to coming from Blank: “Oh, somewhere in Texas,” they say, “near Dallas.” If you’re born in Blank, you need an alibi. Short of birth, how do you end up in Blank? By accident, I imagine - a perverse concatenation of vocational devils. Whatever the sad perversity, you probably hush it up. You took a turn and there you were. The sad girl in the Dairy Queen pats your arm. Perhaps she thinks, “another lost soul” but she says, “have a nice day.” And it sounds like a curse.

My night in Blank was entirely unplanned. My wife and I were moving from Atlanta to Austin. We traveled in convoy: Suzy in the Jeep with the parrot whilst I led the way in a 23 year old Pontiac with a dog and two cats. After 800 miles of uneventful road, the Pontiac coughed, shook a bit, and died. I got out and stood on the roof. Strewn by the highway, about 2 miles off was Blank, Texas. The dog, two cats, and I squeezed into the jeep. Suzy drove to the gas station, and, after arranging for a tow, I left my car in the hands of a long-term manic-depressive named Billie Bob.

Over in the Blank Motel, an Asian lady in a sari sat at the desk watching a Brazilian soap opera.

“I’d like a room,” I said.

She spotted Suzy getting out of the car.

“One hour or two?” she asked.

“Oh no,” I panicked, “you don’t understand. I’m a priest. I need all night.”

She clearly thought I was flattering myself.

“Well, as you’re a priest,” she smiled winningly, “you get the discount - all night for the two hour rate.”

I think she’d done this before. I imagined a stream of ministers - Methodists, Pentecostals, revivalist clergy, Episcopalians - all slipping down to Blank for the naughty discount on their off nights. “Don’t know what the church is coming to,” I thought as I opened the car. The Indian lady watched us through the office window, she frowned as I unloaded the dog, parrot, and two cats. Clearly, she was pondering their sexual destiny.

Around nine, I trudged over to the gas station. My Pontiac was in bits, lots of bits, the “well-we-can’t-remember-where-this-goes-so-we’ll-leave-it-out-and-hope-it-doesn’t-matter” sort of bits. Billie Bob was amusing his friends squirting gasoline into the carburetor with a water pistol. This is probably irrational prejudice but I couldn’t help remembering that the ranks of Space Shuttle designers and open-heart surgeons were pretty thin on men named “Billie-Bob.”

“Failed fuel pump,” he said, “I put a mechanical in but it ain’t working, so’s you better have electric.”

“Is that expensive?”

He then offered to buy the car.

“Do you realize,” I said grimly, “that not only do I have an strong emotional attachment to this vehicle but this is my only, my absolutely only way out of sunny Blank.”

Eleven o’clock next day I paid grandly for the electric pump. We left, Billie Bob still raising his offer for the car. 40 miles later I broke down outside a truck stop in Dallas. Blank, Texas has a long shadow.

Elijah fled...he went on for forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God. He entered a cave and there he spent the night (1 Kings 19.8-9).

Dearest Belladonna,

I checked into this hotel soon after breakfast. From the window, I can see the mountain, its edges as hard as your heart. I’m not sure this will reach you, if it does, though, I’m certain you won’t want to read it. Seeing, however, that you have cast me off and that I cannot even remember the name of this hotel, receive it, my dear, as a postcard from nowhere, about nothing, from nobody. Outside, the olive trees climb the mountain, stopping only at a snow line - cool like you. The sun throws white fire through their gray-green leaves. Soil glints, bark crackles, fences glow. My heart, however, catches nothing. Don’t be misled by the way I’ve filled this card. In truth, it remains – like my heart – a blank. I write only because I cannot stand being so damn speechless.

Farewell, your loving,
Elijah.

The night before my mother died, the surgeons removed one of her lungs. Before the operation, my father visited. He sat by the bedside. “It’s late,” she said, “you shouldn’t have come.” They talked of this and that; about his day; the flowers she’d been sent; a kindly nurse – but not about the lung, or the short passage to death, or the fear. On an old map, beyond the borders of the land where town and village, river and hill are named, it says “here are the speechless lands,” the rest is blank. The monitor beeps by the bedside. Downstairs, the operating theatre is prepared. Up here, though, we do not talk of how they will lift the lung from her chest; of how desperate it all is; of thirty years loving and living, soon past. “It’s late,” she said, “you shouldn’t have come.” “It’s no trouble,” he patted her shoulder. The words are cover stories, alibis, if you will: “we are not here, really” – my mother, my father deny their whereabouts, caught in the speechless lands, the silent wastes of the blank.

More people, I am told, live in slavery today than at any other time in history; a newspaper article confirms that technological growth has so far outstripped our ability to direct it ethically that humanity’s experience of the worst of its unpredictable consequences is inevitable. On an other page, a mother in Basra is shown, keening over her dead son. I am appalled at how short a life such truths have for me. I send them on their way into silence, gliding on excuses, vain reasonings, distractions. I catch them, only for a moment, out of the corner of my eye, as they recede, vanishing into the blank: that extended and extensive sphere of all I am afraid to voice and don’t want to name; everything to which I choose not to give room, don’t want to give the life of speech. This far country, land of forgetfulness, ruled by the politics of anxious sanity, sweet rationality, the haunts of what we what fear to name, the world we speak of not at all or only in the cool whisper of reason: this land is vast. Outside, there is the world we deny – and, inside, the heart we evade. For our hearts, too, have their blanks, zones of the unspoken, full of emptiness, the dead halls of the unattended. The memory we cannot face, the unacknowledged fear that haunts us, the sin unforgiven, the loss we cannot bear to reckon: inside and out, we are besieged by the unspeakable.

And there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake (1 Kings 19.11).

Dearest Belladonna,

I know why this room came cheap. There’s a railroad under the window. Train came through after lunch. Damn near shook me off the bed. Rumbling, screeching, walls bending out, ceiling dropping plaster, bed howling at the joints. But I want you to know this, Belladonna. I lay here like a stone. Not a flicker in this wasted soul. Nothing to that turbulence. Nothing to fill this heart. Nothing to break the silence, not even to voice a moment’s rage.

Farewell, your loving,
Elijah.

We cannot – or so we’re taught – say what God is, we can only say what God is not. God is, finally, unspeakable. True. But perhaps, also, it is not enough to say that: perhaps that is not yet the gospel, not yet the disturbance, the unsettlement we need, not yet the redemption. Perhaps this unspeakable God is yet truly the most communicable reality: from the beginning Word, voiceable, eager for articulation in flesh and blood. Perhaps the problem is mostly ours. Perhaps we would rather not be with God where and when God speaks: where and when he becomes what he most truly is - communicable, love, Word. “Who could have believed what we have heard?,” asks the prophet, “where has the power of the Lord been revealed?” “His form was disfigured, beyond recognition. Foul beyond words. We despised him, turned away our eyes. He became a curse for us, not even to be whispered in good company. Come, look away, talk of other things, of this and that but not...not him.

Pierced, tormented, struck down. Who has words for this? We assigned him a grave in silence, in the land of forgetfulness, in the blank.” In the center of history, there is the unspeakable. A conspiracy of silence. We have put it there, fleeing from our neighbor and from ourselves, covering the tracks of our violence, creating a vast and silent blank for all – inside and outside us – all that falls by the wayside. “We held him of no account but yet he was pierced for our transgressions.” Where the fear, the horror, the grief is cordoned off by our evasions, and alibis, and cover stories: here, God voices himself, naming the unnamed as the house of his dwelling, the transformation of nowhere. In the center of history, in the unspeakable, voiceless blank, there is the Unspeakable God, speaking words of mercy, speaking himself. The Word, filling in the blank. This is the gospel. Remember the Transfiguration? On the mountain, they watch his glory: his smile on Moses, his arm around Elijah. To and fro in the glory, talking of Exodus, mapping the way into the unnamed country, that near and distant wilderness: the unrecognized neighbor and the uncried pain – the blank.

And then a still small voice (I Kings 19.13).

Dearest Belladonna,

Forgive me. Woke up this morning, banged the jug by the bedside, spilt water all over myself, soaked. Slumped back on the bed, knocked the Gideon Bible off the shelf above my head. It hit me full in the face, and lay across my nose, like a raft. It was the end, Belladonna. I didn’t move, just stayed there, cursing the day I was born. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. Swearing like the bell tolls, damn, damn, damn. Then, Belladonna, underneath, I heard my heart – like a stranger, tapping. Damn, damn, damn...tap, tap, tap. My empty heart, speaking as it filled, filling like a shell fills with the sea. Spirit on Exodus into the blank heart, the heart singing in its still small voice. Dry husk of a soul, watered, blooming. Blank no more, Belladonna, no more that claustrophobic, scrunched up, self-pitying, damnable silence. I whined good, though, didn’t I? White noise - signifying nothing. But believe me, my love, this card is full, really full, written on the inside and the out. Like the scroll of God, Belladonna. Opened, shouting from the rooftops.

Goodbye, your loving,
Elijah.

“Then the Spirit drove him into the wilderness.” With wild beasts and a coagulating silence. There he sat, singing softly, and summoning angels, laying the foundations in his own flesh, of a new fellowship. Here begins the Church: a community of courage. A community, as we say, of the Word, the Word that breaks the silence. For, God knows, we have had enough of silence; we are dying of the quiet politics of sanity, from keeping our heads. We need, desperately, the madness of one singing in the desert, crying out our woes, shouting the names of the ignored and the wretched. “It’s late,” she said, “you shouldn’t have come.” No! You should have come and you should have clung together howling your woe to the Most High. There is too much silence. Too much turning away. Too much is left unsaid, far too much evil left without protest, too much we cannot admit to ourselves, even from the stores of our own heart. Too little reality finds a voice in us, in our imaginations, in our loving.

So where do we find God? In the wilderness, in the speechless lands calling us to join him. The Spirit drove him into the wilderness. Why? That we might make of the wilderness a city full of speech. Because men and women are called to make Exodus, to be with God in the deserts of the blank, learning how to break its silence, learning how to speak. Discovering how to articulate the world, in words and deeds to articulate the world as a world beloved, a world being formed in the Divine mercy. We have to practice the language that transforms a wilderness of silence: forgiveness, lament, naming evil, love, welcome, recognition, thanksgiving – and praise, praise for the God who sets the silent halls of the dead a buzzing with voices.

For this, the Spirit makes Exodus into our trembling hearts. Brooding, tender and fierce, forming the courageous soul, opening the stopped mouth that has become a tomb for hope, freeing the tongue. It is in this Holy Spirit that we discover freedom of speech – and the life it lets us in for. Honestly, I find this prospect, the prospect of confronting the unsayable, of resisting my fearful desire for silence: I find this prospect almost as daunting as I do hopeful – almost. The alternative, after all, the alternative is illusion, idle chatter, silent embarrassment, words without Word; striking ourselves dumb. The alternative to learning the liberating speech of God, is to live our lives as alibis, denying our presence in the unspeakable, settling for sorry distractions, shuffling in the line, queuing in the Blank motel for that seductive, ministerial discount.

Amen.