9/30/18 “The Grammar of the Covenant” by Dean Victor Judge
Good morning.
Two years ago, you welcomed me to Pullen Memorial Baptist Church for the sacred occasion of Brian’s ordination to ministry,
and from this pulpit, I had the privilege of addressing the congregation by preaching upon Emily Dickinson’s poem titled, “I
dwell in possibility” in which the speaker employs the architectural figuration of the House of Poetry as her preferred
dwelling because in the House of Poetry, Possibility is among the “fairest of visitors” she will receive and who cross the numerous
thresholds leading into the house. I suggested that Brian’s vocation as a minister is analogous to the vocation of a literary
artist, and as a theologian he, like a writer, would assume residency in the “House of Poetry” where he would forge a
theological grammar that would attest to the Holy Mystery of God.
You have welcomed me again into your congregation—a Roman Catholic invited to stand in a Baptist pulpit—the evidence
that Pullen Memorial is indeed, a House of Possibility. The title I have given to this morning’s sermon is “The Grammar of the Covenant” and is based upon my interpretation of the third, fourth, and fifth verses from the fifty-fifth chapter of the Book of the Hebrew prophet, Isaiah, and upon an unforeseen experience when this chapter from Scripture became incarnated for me, an experience I should like to narrate for you.
Among the opportunities offered by the city of Nashville which has made me proud to call Nashville home was the city’s decision
this past spring to mount an exhibition of “The Violins of Hope,” a collection of restored stringed instruments played by imprisoned
Jewish musicians during The Holocaust. Our local government and communities of faith determined that the exhibition would
inspire a citywide dialogue on the Discordia, the cacophony, of the Holocaust and the resilience of the human creative spirit. As a
catechist for my parish, I was asked to develop a curriculum for my congregation’s participation in the dialogue, an assignment I
accepted without reservation, and our studies would culminate in attending a concert by the Nashville Symphony when violinists of
the orchestra would play on the restored instruments. As one who seeks to conduct my life at the intersection where education, the
disciplines of art, theology, and political history converge and become interchangeable, I determined that the curriculum must
aspire to this intersection whereby we would become witnesses to the triumph of the indomitable human spirit.
We had the privilege of hearing Amnon Weinstein and his son, Avshalom, second- and third-generations luthiers from Tel Aviv
who have dedicated their lives to collecting and restoring sixty-six instruments that survived the concentration camps and the
pogroms and have been named by Mr. Weinstein as “the violins of hope.” We studied Marc Chagall’s colorful representations of the
violin in his paintings and his memorable character, the Fiddler on the Roof; and in a stark juxtaposition, we lamented when viewing
black and white photographs depicting the Catholic clergy, the religious leaders of our faith tradition, raising their right hands,
not in a sacerdotal gesture of blessing, but in the Fascist salute, and we offered prayers in which we asked for forgiveness of our
tradition’s complicity with the horrific, violent mathematics known as the Final Solution.
To prepare the congregants for the Nashville Symphony’s concert of The Violins of Hope, I attended rehearsals whereby I could develop a study guide for our parish retreat on the morning following the concert. I encouraged the parishioners not to consider their attendance at the concert merely as an aesthetic experience but to consider their crossing the threshold of the symphony hall as an act of solidarity, as a political-theological act of resistance in which they would bear witness to the sounds drawn from instruments whose original players—whose identities had been subjected to a calculated process of diminution: from unrepeatable human being, to a stereotyped scapegoat, to being compared to disease-ridden vermin that must be exterminated, to a number, to an ash, to a memory. I encouraged the congregants to
imagine the concert as an encounter with the Sacred, when the hands of the violinists of the present, upon playing the instruments, would resurrect the hands of those generations who had held and played upon the strings. I invited them to consider the violins not as mere musical instruments but as sacred relics that could not be silenced by legislated hatred, to consider the violins as primary historical and biographical documents of survival, each one endowed with a narrative that the annals of history could not document conclusively; and I encouraged them to observe the hands of the maestro, who upon conducting the final note of Jonathan Leshnoff’s fourth symphony commissioned for the Nashville exhibition, a composition that concludes on Bflat—how the maestro would then, without pause, begin conducting the violinists to play Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings—which begins in Bflat. Without an audible transition from the symphonic
composition to the adagio, the solemnity would be sustained by the absence of applause, and when the final note of the adagio was
played, the maestro kept his hands raised, in the gesture of the orant, a female figure from ancient Greek and early Christian art
standing with outstretched arms in supplication as a symbolic gesture of respect for the faithful dead. While assuming the posture of the orant, the maestro was seemingly conducting silence.
The sacred silence, however, would be disrupted the following morning during the parish retreat when a question—a question that eclipsed all the effort I had invested in developing the curriculum—was asked, a question that fell violently upon my ears. We began the retreat with a lecture by a musicologist from the Vanderbilt University faculty who discussed the structural and thematic relationships among the
sounds we had heard the previous evening and how the sounds were suggestive of hope, and when he asked if there were questions that he might address, a congregant raised his hand, and upon acknowledgement, began this unctuous litany of praise for the lecture which resulted in the other congregants rolling their eyes, and I confess to you that I was among the eye rollers; as a child I was notorious for rolling my eyes to register my displeasure, and my mother would admonish me by saying, “Victor, stop rolling your eyes to heaven; you look like a
dying calf.” I suppose the references in Mother’s simile to heaven and a calf had religious symbolic significance; I privately referred to her directive for me to be less melodramatic as “the bovine admonition.” At last the litany concluded with this question: “Professor Lee, you have spoken about expressing hope through sound; how could the Jews have hope when they did not accept Jesus as the Messiah?” My eyes no longer rolled; they were arrested in shock. I drew my posture erect and quickly began to survey the room, fearful that among the participants would be members from the synagogues who attend the lecture series at the parish. My fear of having to resolve what could have proven to be a public relations-ecclesiastical debacle was allayed by remembering that they would be observing the Jewish Sabbath. But the question remained unanswered. My colleagues at the Divinity School, who know of my propensity to mount my theological high horse whenever I hear platitudes, or worse, interpretations that are theodicean or facile explanations that are casually attributed to Gods’ Will—these colleagues have bestowed upon me a sobriquet, the nickname, “Towanda,” an allusion to the alter ego of the character, Evelyn Couch, in Fanny Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café; the actor Kathy Bates plays the role of Evelyn in the film adaptation of the novel, and there is one scene that inspired my acquiring this nickname . Evelyn has endured, to quote Hamlet, “the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune” by the repeated insults from ill-mannered individuals who, as we say in the South, “act ugly” toward her. But on the day when Evelyn goes shopping at the Winn Dixie and is awaiting her turn to enter the only available parking space, she finds herself cut off by two young women driving a red Volkswagen convertible and who usurp the space.
When Evelyn says, “Excuse me, I was waiting for that space,” one of the young women retorts, “Face it, Lady, we’re younger and faster!”
Evelyn, appalled by such insensitivity, then channels the spirit of Towanda, the Amazon warrior, the righter of wrongs, the queen nonpareil, and then she proceeds to aim her town-car toward the Volkswagen and to ram, gleefully, the vehicle four times. Seeing the effects of Towanda’s vengeance, the two women run from the Winn Dixie and and exclaim, ”What are you doing? Are you crazy?” Evelyn replies: “Face it girls, I’m older, and I have more insurance.” My colleague Michael, sitting beside me, knew how to interpret the language of my posture as I removed my glasses and folded my arms, a sign that I am not amused, because he leaned forward and whispered anxiously, “O dear Lord, please, not Towanda.” To have summoned the spirit of Towanda would have most likely resulted in my being the lead story on the evening
news and my risking excommunication. If not the spirit of Towanda, perhaps God would send forth the Holy Spirit to intercede and guide me if the answer given to the question proved theologically inadequate.
Upon hearing the question, “How could the Jews have hope when they did not accept Jesus as the Messiah?”, the lecturer replied, “I’m a musicologist, not a theologian; let us direct your question to our pastor,” to whom all eyes turned, but who apologetically inquired, “I’m sorry, what was the question?” I was older than the majority of participants, but I have not taken out a policy for theological insurance, but I was determined that the question could not be spoken again into God’s Creation, and so I answered, in my conviction as a postHolocaust
Christian, by merely stating, “Their hope lies in the covenant, and a covenant is never relegated to the past tense.” The pastor merely said, “Oh, that’s a good answer.” But receiving an ecclesial imprimatur for providing a “good answer” does not abate the frustration I continue to
experience when reflecting that in the year 2018 such a question is introduced into an inter-faith discourse conducted within a parish that has made a commitment to an initiative dedicated to the restorative power of art. To be charitable toward such a question is difficult for me as an educator and as a Christian because history records for us that as the Jews disembarked the trains and entered the concentration camps to the strains of the violins played by the musician-prisoners, among the opprobrious chants that fell upon their ears was “Christ killers.” And if I had remained silent and not responded to the question, I would have been complicit in sanctioning an impoverished theology that contradicts my faith in a God who does not will suffering for humankind. I have learned that from my studies of the French Nobel laureate Albert Camus that I have the choice either to resist and disrupt the silence of indifference by an act of language, or, I can become complicit in stoking the crematoria fires of Buchenwald. And so I spoke, aware that my action would reinforce the stereotype that is imposed upon Catholics who teach at “that Divinity School,” but as the African American writer Alice Walker contends, and I quote, “I cannot control how other people see me; I can only hope they do their best.” But how may I defend, theologically, the claim I made in response to the question? What is my theological insurance? Or perhaps I should ask, what is my theological assurance? How may I argue, by the God-given faculties of reason and imagination and by faith that hope does indeed lie in the covenant? So I turned to Scripture, to the poetry of the prophet Isaiah, a book, which upon my entering, I discovered to be a House of Possibility. The Book of Isaiah commences with an exhortation to listen and to attend to the voice of Yahweh—to abandon one’s willful, obstinate self whereby one may re-turn one’s being
toward God’s Mystery.
I entered the book from the perspective of a theological grammarian; grammarians study the behavior of language; when a writer places one word beside another word, a grammar, a behavior emerges, and theological grammarians remind us that the grammar of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospels is predicated upon our brokenness as participants in the drama of the human condition, and the grammar of the
Scriptures is a grammar, that when diagrammed by the human hand, in concert with the Divine Will of God, guides us to act in faith, in hope, and in charity. In the fifty-fifth chapter of the Book of Isaiah, the prophet proclaims that God’s beneficence, will provide for us sustenance that is greater than corn, wine, milk, and bread; the sustenance God offers us, from a generous economy of grace, is God’s steadfast Word, which God expresses in what I interpret as, the grammar of a covenant, a grammar for fathoming the Holy Mystery of God, a grammar of sustenance, a grammar that sustains us as believers in God’s steadfast Word.
God reveals this grammar through the prophet, “With you, I will make an everlasting covenant out of the favors promised to David. See, I have made of you a witness to the peoples, a leader and a master of the nations. See, you will summon a nation you never knew, those unknown will come hurrying to you, for the sake of Yahweh your God, of the Holy One of Israel, who will glorify you.” When we diagram these verses as representative of God’s covenantal grammar, we discover the verbs are in the imperative mood—not in the subjunctive or in the conditional, but in the imperative; we are instructed twice, in succession, to see, to look upon “the behavior,” the effects, of a covenant. A
covenant is not an abstraction that is imperceptible by the human faculties of sense and reason; a covenant is an intimate, palpable relationship with God, a relationship that is manifested in a world that God continues to create, a relationship that can be diagrammed to the Davidic lineage and monarchy, and in the grammar of the covenant, God does not speak tentatively; God says unequivocally, “I will make, I have made, I will glorify;” God speaks in the historical-present and future tenses because a covenant can never be relegated to the past tense; in the grammar of the covenant, the tenses which humans construct to measure the passage of time in our realm of constant mutability—these tenses ultimately collapse and prove irrelevant in covenantal grammar; as we do not speak of God in the past tense, we do not speak of a covenant in the past tense because the covenant is from God; and God is and God will be. The grammar of the covenant invites us to enter not the tenses of chronology but to enter and to abide in sacramental time: “as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever more.”
When God makes a covenant, the words of God’s decree become liberated from temporality, and as God speaks through the prophet, “The word that goes from My mouth does not return to me empty, without carrying out My will and succeeding in what the Word was sent to do.”
When God places two words beside each other and speaks the words into Creation, the grammar God constructs—this linguistic act initiates a promise, and the grammar remains under construction until God’s will has been fulfilled. We may participate in this construction; as Thomas Aquinas describes the act of creation as “the Good under construction,” we can serve as custodians of the grammar of the covenant—a grammar that attests to the presence of God amidst our brokenness; a grammar that offers hope in the grayness of uncertainty and ambiguity; a grammar that can deliver us from despair and prevent our descent into nihilism; a grammar in which forgiveness and reconciliation are inherent properties. We, who share a common birthright as children of the God of infinite love and mercy, can serve as God’s instruments who reclaim and forge the covenantal grammar for those, who in their brokenness, who have been wounded by a violent
theology, understandably, feel hopeless; we can be ministers of presence and merely hear and honor the narratives of the broken whose participation in the drama of existence contradicts any sentimental platitude about hope.
We can describe the grammar with the hopeful intention that others may see the correlations of their narratives to the narratives recorded in Holy Scripture, but in our roles as instruments of the covenantal grammar, we must give primacy to the voice of the narrator and not interpret and explain another’s autobiography in our own voices; such an act renders the grammar monologic, platitudinal, and reduces the grammar to spiritual nosegays tainted by false equivalencies; the grammar of God’s covenant is predicated upon the dialogic; as instruments of this grammar, we must never presume to know absolutely; our omniscience is limited and fallible; as in effective teaching, as in the opening words of Isaiah’s prophecy, we hear; we attend; and we resist any claim that excludes anyone from the economy of God’s grace and perhaps, perhaps, when one feels less broken, less lonely, one may begin to experience the hope that lies in the covenantal grammar; one may feel supported to take the risk—to lean into the transformative, the regenerative, the redemptive, the inexhaustible power of the covenantal grammar, a grammar that cannot be taught, memorized, and recited like a catechism, but a grammar that is lived, embodied, incarnated; a grammar in which no person’s humanity is denied; a grammar that emerges like the circle of light from the dark rectangular lines of Alexander Liberman’s painting titled Covenant Red that illustrates this morning’s order of worship—from a background of linear darkness, the geometry changes to a circular light from which emerges a larger circle of intense red. Liberman’s painting inspires me to believe that the grammar of God’s covenant is not diagramed in lines as when we diagrammed sentences on lined notebook paper in grammar school, but diagrammed in circles that beget more circles, a grammar that excites our theological imaginations to anticipate a World Without End, a world like a circle, where the point of beginning and ending are indistinguishable; a world where God’s covenantal grammar will be fulfilled.
