FESTIVAL OF HOMILETICS, 23 MAY 2008
TEXT: EXODUS 14:10-31;
15:20-21
PREACHER: FREDERICK J. GAISER
SOMEONE THERE IS THAT DOESN’T LOVE A WALL
In Robert
Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” Frost’s rather grumpy neighbor keeps insisting
that “good fences make good neighbors”—so much so, in fact, that, recalling the
poem, people often think that was its message. But it was not. Frost recognizes
a certain temporary truth to the claim that good fences make good neighbors,
but he knows that the more lasting truth is this: “Something there is that
doesn’t love a wall.” Every spring reveals new gaps in the wall between the
poet’s fields and the neighbor’s, so they meet at the boundary to mend the
damage. It comes from the ravages of winters, from hunters, from who knows
where—maybe elves, suggests Frost—but the gaps keep showing up, because “something
there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
Spring is
the mischief in me [says Frost], and I wonder
If I could
put a notion in his head:
‘Why do
[walls] make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there
are cows?
But here
there are no cows.
Before I
built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was
walling in or walling out,
And to whom
I was like to give offence.
Something
there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants
it down.’1
The exodus story—indeed, the whole Bible—reminds us that the
something that doesn’t love a wall is actually a someone—indeed,
none less than God.
We learn
that first in this central Old Testament story, when God breaks people out of
captivity in
I tell
seminary students and pastors that, if they urge people to read the Bible, they
should have a brief and clear answer to the question, “Why? What’s it about?”
One response would be this: The Bible is the book that tells us how, again and
again, over and over, generation after generation, century after century,
millennium after millennium, God breaks down walls. God just doesn’t like them.
We all know
the biblical story: the sons of Jacob had gone to
But, of
course, then and now: something there is that doesn’t like an immigrant; so,
when the Israelite immigrant population begins to grow, the Egyptians, out of
fear, strike back: Better lock these people up, better wall them in, lest they
upset our economy, our lifestyle, our security. So, the Israelites are
enslaved. With taskmasters and overseers and soldiers and ghettos and shackles
and chains, the Egyptians literally and figuratively wall them in.
Ah, but the
God of Israel doesn’t like walls. We know what happens: God sends Moses to
confront Pharaoh, and after a series of plagues and disasters, Pharaoh finally
agrees to set the captives free. But a journey out of slavery is hard—both
physically and psychically—so the people want to turn around, and Pharaoh, of
course, wants them back. But God still doesn’t like walls, not for oppressors
who want to hold on and not for people who are afraid to let go, so God keeps
opening doors—and even seas—to reveal this new and scary world of freedom to
God’s beloved people. God delivers, God frees, God turns loose—God opens the
doors of life, and invites people, even preachers, to take the risk of going
out to blossom and flourish.
Exodus—exit—a
way out—it becomes the Old Testament’s basic paradigm or model for the work of
God. Every year our Jewish neighbors gather around the Seder table at Passover
to remember the exodus—but never just as history, always as a present reality.
The exodus is now. They get it right: God is never finished breaking down
walls, opening doors, and setting people free. It’s what God does; it’s who God
is. God says, in Leviticus, “I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the
land of Egypt, to be their slaves no more; I have broken the bars of your yoke
and made you walk erect” (Lev 26:3). Pretty good!
Seven
hundred years after the original exodus, the story repeats. Once again,
In trouble
again? asks God. You bet, say the people. Well, remember the exodus! Of course,
says
In every
generation, God’s deliverance is the exodus and it is not, because God’s work
is always constant, but God’s work is always new. And new or old, God just doesn’t like walls. The
prophetic servant in Isaiah announced that God “has sent me to bring good news
to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the
captives, and release to the prisoners” (Isa 61:1-2), and this, as we recall,
became the text for Jesus’ first sermon, because it described precisely his own
mission as well: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the
captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the prisoners go free...”
(Luke 4:18). This is who God is; this is who Jesus is: the one who lets
prisoners go free. God doesn’t like walls, and neither does Jesus. For Jesus,
it’s in the genes he got from his father.
Thus, the
moral of the story of God’s deliverance of
Can we
believe it? Sometimes, we have seen too much as preachers, and it gets hard.
Sometimes, we think we could have believed more easily then. Most of us have
seen the old Charlton Heston movie, where it is all so clear. You got your good
guys and your bad guys, your heroes and your traitors, and, best of all, you
got your special effects crew. Who can miss the hand of God, the wind of God,
the voice of God, the miraculous wonder of it all? God, give me something like
that, and I would never doubt again.
But
unfortunately, in the movie Cecil B. DeMille lets us see more than we should.
The Bible knows that it was harder than that, that God’s actions in the past,
just like now, were seen only by the eyes of faith: “Your way was through the
sea,” the psalmist says of God; “your path through the mighty waters; yet your
footprints were unseen” (Ps 77:19). Yes, God works in every generation, but,
this side of heaven, every generation sees God only by faith rather than by
sight.
Robert Frost
knew this, too, perhaps metaphorically, in his wonder over the gaps that kept
appearing in his stone wall:
No one has
seen them made or heard them made,
But at
spring mending-time we find them there.
Like God’s, the footprints of Frost’s wall-breaking elves are
unseen.
But those
gaps do appear. For
And what of
your neighbor’s prison? The one for which you might play some role in being God’s
agent of liberation—physical or spiritual? The immigrant, the poor, the
imprisoned, the lonely, the ill, the frightened, the homeless, the unemployed,
the silent parishioner. Visualize that neighbor for a moment....
My own
captivities? I could choose from many, but here’s one: Living and teaching in
Zimbabwe, especially in these later years when everything was falling apart and
people were growing more desperate and daily life more dangerous, I was always
a little guilty about the security I felt when I arrived home at my flat in
Harare, because the walls, the guard, the gates, and the locks brought at least
the illusion of safety. Forget about “thy rod and thy staff,” my
walls and my locks—they comfort me! But one day, the realization struck
me that it was not so much “they” who were walled out, it was I who was walled
in—separated from my neighbors, from freedom, and from life by artificial
barriers. I prayed for God to break them down—maybe not physically, but
spiritually and morally. My wealth separated me from my brothers and sisters,
and I suddenly realized the terrible freedom brought by poverty. “Blessed are
you who are poor,” said Jesus, “for yours is the
So, with
you, I invite God to break down my walls, to set me free—including, at last,
from the big one: the prison of sin and death. Not just the people in the pews,
but we, too, are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves. Not sins, so much,
not just the various wrongful acts and hateful deeds that plague us day by day—though
those are bad enough—but sin, the separation from God that makes us always and
forever less than we are meant to be, less than we want to be, yearning for
something more. The gate to the Garden of Eden is closed, that wall has no
gaps, and I seem forever sentenced to live outside, where wolves abide and
death.
But, dear
friends, God hates those walls, too, and he is out after them. God means to
have us for himself with nothing in between. Even that barrier of sin and
death, Jesus comes to break down—and he does it now and every day as we hear
for ourselves, in Jesus’ name, the word we so often announce to others: that we
are forgiven, accepted, and loved by God unconditionally, and that even death
has lost its sting. Not even the stone that closed the tomb could keep God out.
God hates walls and stones and barricades and prisons. All of them. Yours and
mine. The political walls of the oppressor or the personal walls of wealth; the
walls we build for security or the walls we forge in hostility. The walls that
separate me from you, and me from me. We all have our walls. But God is coming
to break us out, to break them down. Because God loves exits, but God just
hates walls. AMEN
Mending Wall
Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn’t
love a wall,
That sends the
frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders
in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can
pass abreast.
The work of hunters is
another thing:
I have come after them and
made repair
Where they have left not one
stone on a stone,
But they would have the
rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.
The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or
heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we
find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond
the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk
the line
And set the wall between us
once again.
We keep the wall between us
as we go.
To each the boulders that
have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some
so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to
make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our
backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough
with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of
out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to
little more:
There where it is we do not
need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple
orchard.
My apple trees will never get
across
And eat the cones under his
pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences
make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me,
and I wonder
If I could put a notion in
his head:
‘Why do they make good
neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask
to know
What I was walling in or
walling out,
And to whom I was like to
give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t
love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could
say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly,
and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see
him there
Bringing a stone grasped
firmly by the top
In each hand, like an
old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it
seems to me,
Not of woods only and the
shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s
saying,
And he likes having thought
of it so well
He says again, “Good fences
make good neighbors.”
From Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995) 39-40.