SERMONS 

Harmony
Auction Sermon

Ah, auction sermons. I always forget how challenging they are. I love getting ideas for sermons from different people—but the idea of living up to an auction idea is a little scary. Whatever is paid—whether low or high, these are sermon ideas people care deeply about. I am grateful for the trust, and humbled by the responsibility.

I want to thank Carolyn Adams for this topic. This one is another auction idea I’ve gotten excited about. It happens just about every time. This is a sermon about harmony in relationships. About the delicate balance of maintaining good relationships and preserving our individual integrity. It’s about what happens when we give too much of ourselves away. About how important it is to stop, before there is nothing left to give. It’s a sermon about boundaries, about drawing lines—inside us and between us.

In fact that episode of “I Love Lucy” comes to mind. Maybe you remember the one. Maybe you remember it better than I do. All I remember is the humor that results when Lucy and Desi attempt to settle a dispute by drawing a line down the middle of their apartment. Each of them hopes that drawing this line in the proverbial sand will solve things—that they will be able to hold on to their fixed positions, win this fight, maintain their individual identities, remain unchanged. Slapstick is a wonderful vehicle for demonstrating the illusion of such an approach. It forces us to face the folly of our desperate attempts to hold our ground.

There’s a Dr. Seuss story that does it, too. It’s about a North-Going Zax and a South-Going Zax who meet foot to foot, face to face. “Look here, now!” the North-Going Zax said. “I say! You are blocking my path. You are right in my way. I’m a North-Going Zax and I always go north. Get out of my way, now, and let me go forth!” Of course the South-Going Zax takes a similar position—and you can guess what follows. The highway comes through, the world closes in, and the Zax do not budge.

It helps to see Lucy’s goofy attempts to stand her ground. And the Zax’s rhyming stubbornness. Our own intransigence is harder to see. This is one side of the paradoxical tension that always results when we enter into relationship with someone else. As John Wellwood says, we long to “break out of the shell of separateness,” while also “hanging on for dear life to the very separateness we long to overcome.”

We cannot enter into relationship without the existence of otherness. (Rainer Maria Rilke, in fact, describes relationship as “the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes.”) It is also true that relationship is not possible without the surrendering of some of that otherness—letting go of a part of ourselves for the sake of being in relationship. Compromise, surrender, trust, blending, whatever we call it, it comes down to giving over some of ourselves.

In weddings and other times people speak of relationship, the language of unity is used. It is often said that we “become as one.” That is language used in our closing hymn today. That is some of the incredible power of relationship. Harmony is bringing diverse sound together and making it as one. Dancing, two bodies join as one. It’s language that makes me a little uncomfortable—because the paradoxical companion to this unity is left unacknowledged. Without our neighboring solitudes, relationship is impossible. We are as one, only because we are two.

I know it’s a little funny, but I get kind of nuts in weddings when people light a unity candle and extinguish the candles that represent the individuals coming together. The symbolism can work that way. But I am more comfortable when three candles remain burning—to show that a marriage is the union of two individuals. In this way the unity candle is actually a wonderful illustration of the paradox. The flame can give of itself without losing itself. In relationship, we can create something beyond ourselves. We can come together, offer ourselves to one another, and become more than we were. That is, simply put, why love is so powerful. Miraculous even.

Though I use this illustration from a wedding—I am not talking only about romantic, primary relationships. Anytime we enter into a relationship this possibility is present. Real love is synergistic. Synergism is the “interaction of discrete agencies or conditions such that the total effect is greater than the sum of the individual effects.” Or we might say, love is that which brings us to be more than we knew we could be. As someone said to me, “it’s adding to.”

As we are human, other things sometimes happen in relationship. Sometimes we give to another person in such a way as to take away from ourselves. Sometimes a person with whom we are in relationship demands, or expects, that we will abandon ourselves (we might say extinguish ourselves) for the sake of the other. If relationship is the goal, this is never the way. Otherness is a necessary component to relationship. Without our selves there is no possibility of relationship. Perhaps this, in fact, is the way to tell what love is.

It brings to mind the wisdom of King Solomon as told in the Book of Kings. It’s the story of the two mothers who live in the same palace and give birth to sons around the same time. One of the mothers wakes one morning to find her son has died. She gets up in the night, removes the other woman’s son from the other woman’s bed and replaces him with her own dead son. The next morning the second woman sees that her son is dead—and with a closer look realizes what has happened. They go together to the King to resolve the dispute over who is the mother to the living son. They King calls for his sword. He tells them he will divide the baby in two so that each of them may have part of the baby. The second woman pleads with the King and tells him that the other woman can have her son. The first woman says, “It shall be neither mine nor yours; divide it.” And the King, of course, knows which woman is the boy’s mother.

Love does not demand the extinguishing of life for the sake of love. And yet, how often we allow it to happen. How often it is easier to deny little parts of ourselves. We don’t want conflict. We are afraid of losing the union, of being alone, and so mistakenly we deny who we truly are. We can tolerate a little bit of this kind of denial—but at some point, if we are lucky, we will see that we have given ourselves away. Sometimes this giving away, or extinguishing, results from our not knowing ourselves to begin with. Sometimes from fear. Sometimes from a mistaken notion about relationship. Whatever causes this diminishing, it is the work of relationship, of love, to find our way back, reclaim our integrity, so that we can engage from our wholeness with someone else.

Well, not wholeness really. Wholeness is only a vision of what we are growing toward. It is not the destination of wholeness that we must focus on—but rather the process of growing toward it. And of course, that is often difficult to discern. We can so easily fool ourselves into believing we are growing when we are really protecting ourselves from change that we fear. Here’s that other side of the paradox again. Unless we are willing to give ourselves over to relationship, to let go of the fixed and rigid picture we have of who we are, then relationship is not possible. This is complex business.

The reading I shared offers the much-used analogy of a dance. Though I am not very experienced, and not at all trained, I love to dance. A couple of years ago I got an informal lesson from a friend. It was a swing dance. The most interesting and challenging thing he taught me was how, even though (in dancing terms) I was following, it was my responsibility to push. Literally. Just the right amount of resistance in my hand was necessary to respond to the direction in his. It doesn’t work at all if I am limply following. If there is no substance to me.

Another analogy that I believe works here is gumbo. I borrow this from my friend Melanie Sullivan, minister in Chattanooga. She uses it to describe the beauty of diversity. It also works to illustrate this paradox of relationship. She and I know about gumbo because of our roots in Louisiana. I grew up on gumbo. My mom learned how to make rue as a child in Winnfield, Louisiana. The way to make gumbo is to take lots of different ingredients, put them together, spice them up, and make sure that each and every ingredient maintains its individuality in the end. A gumbo is not a stew. A stew will tolerate the disappearance of individual tastes. A gumbo requires intact okra, with its own bizarre texture and flavor, along with whatever else you choose. With a gumbo you see and taste every part of the mix and experience the way ingredients added together can become more than the sum of their parts.

Jason shared this quotation with me, from a student in Golden, Colorado. It comes from the Coca-Cola company’s campaign to get people to interpret the theme “living in harmony.” Living in harmony, to me, is like playing in a band. It wouldn’t be very interesting if everyone played the same notes on the same instrument. But introduce diversity among the instruments, and give everyone their own unique part to play, then you have an intriguing song. If everyone works toward the same goal, then we can produce a fresh, new sound.

Harmony requires attention to individual detail, respect for integrity, trust in others, faithfulness to the process of creating something new. We don’t get to make all the choices that create harmony. Some of those choices are completely out of our hands. With practice, though, we will find that creating harmonious relationship becomes a little easier. And though sometimes our own choices, or the choices of others, create dissonance, if we engage faithfully in the process, we will grow in the direction of beautiful music.

It is that process that we can trust. We cannot always trust ourselves or others to get it exactly right. We sometimes have to let go of relationships—if they are diminishing us to a greater extent than they are enlarging us. But we must never let go of faithfulness to the possibility of love. Love is beyond us. It remains true, in its mystery, even when we have failed it.

The balance is like a razor’s edge. That is the description John Wellwood uses. I like the image because it is true to the reality of the suffering love brings. Our ability to maintain balance comes from within us. We attempt to place this responsibility on others, or on external factors. But drawing a line down the living room, dividing the baby in half, these efforts will not provide balance. Only the boundaries of our own self-understanding and self-differentiation will allow us to move and grow within a relationship. Knowing who we are. Being true to who we are. And then with faithfulness to the possibility of love to bring something more, to make us something more.

Love is beyond us. It remains true, in its mystery, always.