Text: Matthew 10:24-39
June 20, 1999
James R. Gorman
I had two main pieces of work this past week. One was to recover from a major computer crash in the office (the technical support person at the other end of the phone line at one point said, "Man, your computer is having a heart attack"). The other piece of work was to build a wall.
Rick Schmitt is helping me build a retaining wall for a patio on our house. Or, I suppose I should say, I'm helping Rick Schmitt build a retaining wall for a patio on our house. I'm the laborer and he the craftsman. It has been some time since I've done that kind of intensive labor, being the more clerical type. When our daughter was three or so she was asked what her father did for a living and she said, "He types on a typewriter." So, while doing the work necessary to move a couple of tons of dirt and gravel and paving block and bricks, I began thinking about walls.
There is a line from Robert Frost's poetry that goes, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." It's a wonderful line and to get a better fix on what the line means, I looked it up. And it turns out that what I thought it meant is the opposite from what Frost actually meant.
I thought that the line was a kind of question. Sort of like, "Is there nothing that doesn't love a wall?" At one point Frost quotes his neighbor as saying, "Good fences make good neighbors." And I thought that Frost was describing a landscape just north of Boston where the picturesque walls made of boulders from the fields are part of the wonderful picture of Massachusetts rural life.
In fact, the line, the first line from his 1914 poem called "Mending Wall," really means that there is some sort of natural conspiracy against walls. In other words, "There is something out there that just doesn't like walls." Every spring Frost would go out with his neighbor to inspect the line of walls, and every spring he would find that huge gaps have mysteriously appeared in the wall over the winter. Some gaps might be due to the natural heaving of the frozen earth during winter, which topples the boulders off of the topmost layer of the wall. Others might be due to hunters who pull boulders apart in order to expose rabbits nests "to please the yelping dogs." No one has seen the gaps created or will admit to how they were created. There just must be some unknown natural force that "doesn't love a wall, that wants it down."
So, at spring-mending time he contacts his neighbor over the hill and they walk the length of the wall, keeping the wall itself between them as they go. And each working on their own side of the wall, they lift the boulders, some looking like loaves of bread and others perfect balls, and place them carefully on the wall again. As Frost puts it, "We wear our fingers rough with handling them."
But then Frost wonders about walls in general and this is the genius of his poem. He says to his neighbor,
"Why do [fences] 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 giving offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down."
The neighbor to the south of us has built a fence. A six foot high cedar fence which is solid so that you can't see through it. Like the fence that separates Tim the tool man Taylor from his neighbor Wilson. Not many neighbors like our neighbor to the south. He's kind of crabby. He's also taciturn. He only seems to speak when he has some complaint about the noise of the dogs in the yards around him. He has been known to make anonymous phone calls to other neighbors to complain about their yelping dogs. We like the fence that he built because, well, "Good fences make good neighbors."
By contrast, our wall only retains dirt so that we can have a patio that will be like a back porch where we can sit and watch folks walk by, say hello to them, catch up on how their children have grown over the winter, how the kids can ride bikes now and how cute they look in their new helmets. Our wall, Rick will tell you, is really a friendly wall that brings our living space closer to our neighbors, not farther away.
Like Robert Frost, my manual labor for this last week has led me to think more broadly about walls and their place in our world. Walls are needful of course in some respects. They are certainly needed just now in Kosovo and Yugoslavia where NATO and Russian forces are needed to keep the Serbs and Albanians apart until their wounds can heal. But still, walls can be destructive to a common life. For when you build a wall you must give some thought to what you are walling in and what you are walling out.
The Gospel texts for this morning are difficult. They are probably the most difficult texts in all the sayings of Jesus. As one commentator put it, "If we were to do a condensed version of the Scriptures, these are the texts we'd be sure to leave out."(1) And it certainly makes it all the more difficult to preach on this passage of scripture on Father's day. This is not a touching Hallmark sentiment about family cohesiveness, after all: "I will set a man against his father and a father against his son."
But this passage is about the inevitable conflicts that come at the walled in and walled out places. Here is this Jesus, of whom we all would surely say that he doesn't love a wall and would want it down, saying that something crucial is at stake in this Gospel and it may force a committed Christian to make decisions that he or she would otherwise like to avoid having to make.
This tough teaching of Jesus was important to me during the civil rights movement and the Viet Nam war when I was on the opposite side of the wall from my family on both counts. Especially was I in disagreement with my irascible old grandfather. It is of great comfort to me that before he died, my grandfather let it slip that he had finally come to the opinion that we never should have been in Viet Nam in the first place. But that was after a decade of not being able to talk of such things in his household.
Jesus here is talking about a commitment that may result in confronting walls that could isolate the follower of Christ from his or her own very family. And these words--these tough words from Jesus--are a warning that there is something at stake here that the follower might not want to give a lot of thought to while in the warm bath of Jesus' love.
Still, I don't think that Jesus is suggesting that we build the walls. Rather, he is reminding us that love for this Gospel may well result in facing the walls already built by a society which rejoices too much in making distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys, the rich and the poor, male and female, Jew and Greek, Serb and Albanian, black and white, young and old, gay and straight, beautiful and homely, conservative and liberal.
To ask the question about why the wall is there can get a follower of Jesus into trouble with the wall builders and Jesus just wants us to know that right up front.
I have come to learn firsthand about the walls that exist between father and son or more generally parent and child. I remember the story of a rather stern old member of our church, now deceased, whose granddaughter had a baby, as we say, out of wedlock. His great-grandchild was a little boy and this child's birth, though no fault of his own, had caused a rift between the old man and his granddaughter that seemed unassailable. The old man was sure that his granddaughter's mistake had threatened everything he treasured about the sanctity of the family. He insisted loud and long that he didn't want to see his granddaughter nor her son ever again. As far as he was concerned, he no longer had a granddaughter nor a great-grandson, and he didn't see either of them for a full year.
But the old man's wife knew him better than he knew himself. His uncompromising exterior belied an interior warmth that only his wife could really know much about. His wife arranged for their granddaughter to come by the house when the old man was there watching TV in his favorite chair, remote control firmly gripped in his channel-selecting hand. The old man's wife told the little boy, who was now walking, to walk into the TV room from the kitchen. The little boy, only a year old and completely innocent of the great wall between himself and his great-grandfather, toddled in and stood in the middle of the room and looked at the old man. The old man looked for a moment away from Dukes of Hazzard and fixed his gaze on the little boy. He looked back at the car chase on the TV, expressionless. A moment later he looked again at the boy and smiled a bit. The boy saw the smile as a kind of invitation and approached the chair and the old man scooped him up into his lap.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall.
It was like a dry Arctic cold front that had met the warm humid air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. Along such a cold front there is the potential for storms and violent weather and only angels and fools rush in to do the work that needs to be done there.
It is in the midst of that front-and in the face of those walls-that Jesus asks us to do the tough work of justice and love without regard for the possible costs to life, limb and even sometimes family peace. The old man's wife risked real disaster by letting the child go into the room with the grandfather, who had insisted so loudly and so frequently that he had no great-grandson. But it was a risk worth taking or else the cold front would never have moved and the storms would continue to have raged.
So, Jesus is not advocating building walls. But he is warning us that there are real risks in confronting the walls--real and emotional--that stand between us and justice and peace and righteousness and truth and even our own emotional and physical well-being.
In the final analysis, we Christians need to ally ourselves with those things that don't love a wall.
1. Texts for Preaching Walter Brueggeman et. al. Westminster/John Knox Press. p. 377.