Sermon: Things Fall Apart; the Center Can(not) Hold?
Jim Brenneman preached this sermon for the fourth Sunday of our Lent series, “Covenant: The Tie That Binds.”
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. . .
Surely some revelation is at hand;
. . .now I know that
Twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
— William ButlerYeats, “The Second Coming,”1919.
I.
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. . .” Is this oft repeated line from William Yeats’ poem an accurate understanding of reality as we know it? When Yeats wrote it fresh off WWI, he thought so. If the poem reflects reality as we know it, today, and so many days since, perhaps it helps to explain our own deepest fears and anxieties. Is it the case that “the center doesn’t hold”? That “things are falling apart? That mere anarchy is loosed on the world? To answer these questions, let’s begin by reminding ourselves of some basic facts of life, the birds and bees of existence, those matters that influence how we at FMCSF frame our conversation of what it means to live together as a covenant community in this episode of our Lenten theme: “Covenant: Ties that Binds.”
Hundreds of years before Christ, both Greek and Indian philosophers imagined a core to existence made up of elemental, teensy, weensy, pieces of matter that were indivisible, and were labeled the foundation blocks of the universe. The Greeks named this basic building block, the atom (which literally means “uncuttable”).
Of course, they had no idea that modern science would eventually measure the average atom to be plus or minus 2 hundred millionths of a centimeter and that the atom could be further subdivided into even smaller particles called Fermions, Hadrons, quarks, leptons, bosons, baryons, and and many more tiny pieces — to say nothing of antimatter or antiparticles and their mysterious properties.
As learning and thinking humans, we have always sought to find the foundational core of existence, the core of the universe, the core-self, — thinking that if only we could get to the core, the foundation, we could explain the universe as it truly is. We supposed, then, that logic would lead us up from that primordial foundational core, from leptons to atoms to molecules on up the chain of cause and effect to, finally, us! — homo sapiens (the “knowing ones”), the crown jewel of nature. We imagined that building our existence on a firm foundation, a solid rock might help quell our anxious souls, our fears of things falling apart. Or so we hoped.
The problem with all such quests that set out to find such a firm foundation to life, the core of the universe, the core of the self, the core of anything really, has been a bit like peeling the layers of an onion and finding that the core of the onion is simply just another layer. For those of you whose children loved the Shrek movies, may recall in the first one, Shrek, the green hero Ogre (voiced by Mike Myers) tried to explain to the loud irascible Donkey (voiced by Eddie Murphy) the nuanced essence, the core beingness of an Ogre? “Ogres are like onions,” Shrek said, “Both have layers.” To which Donkey replied, “Oh I get it. You leave them out in the sun too long and they go all brown and start sprouting little white hairs.” Had Donkey read Gertrude Stein, he might have said of Shrek’s comparing himself to an onion, if you peel all your layers down to the core, you discover in Stein’s oft quoted phrase, “There is no there there.” No core-beingness there!
I have a dear friend, Alexander Grunewald, a former neuroscientist at Cal Tech and a former member of Pasadena Mennonite Church. His specialty was in how the brain perceives reality. He and I co-led a religion and science forum for two years at Cal Tech. We had wonderful conversations about the connection between the mind and its body, the brain and its mind. In wrestling with these questions, we even wondered whether one could even speak of a core-self. He would point out that “our sense of who we are” (our identity) is a product of the biological processes of the brain. A person who is brain-damaged, for example, can lose their self-awareness completely. He argued that when we speak of a self, biologically speaking, we speak primarily of a bundle of thoughts, feelings, emotions, electrical impulses overseen by some vaporous “I.” At any one moment, the core-self is pretty much a transient set of impulses that are recreated moment by moment with each interaction between a bunch of programmed brain cells mapping to body movement and stimulation. He argued that there is no biological core-self, per se.
In a world where the number of text messages sent and received each day exceeds the total population of the planet; where there are five times as many words in the English language today as there were in the time of Shakespeare, where a week’s worth of the NYTimes contains more information than the average person in the 18th century was likely to come across in a lifetime. In a world, that was shut down for two years, while we watched millions die of COVID and we couldn’t be together in this space for fear of harming each other. On top of that, it seems our factual world is being deconstructed before our eyes, in positive and negative ways.
On the negative side of the ledger, its seems our different opinions and politics and cultures and beliefs are increasingly weaponized against each other. We are increasingly afraid to share our various truth claims with each other (maybe even here at FMCSF) for fear of being misunderstood, cancelled or publicly shamed. The educator, cultural critic, author, bell hooks, wonders how we might then “hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”
It feels to many of us, that things are falling apart, that our democracy is at stake. All this, while being emotionally jerked around between extremes: either, tiptoeing around huge elephants in the room lest we offend, or screaming obscenities at those with whom we disagree. No wonder the anxiety levels of the human-world as we now feel it in our bones seems to be at an all-time high. At times of such vigorous disagreement, it can feel like there is no here here, no there there. There is no foundation beneath the salts, and sands and cobalt ore, only the hot fiery molten center of the only world we humans have ever lived on and it, too, is spinning around in this very moment and every moment at about 1000mph.
“Things fall apart,” the poet cries, “the center cannot hold; anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Is that true? Well, yes!
II.
And? No! The poet concludes his poem, as if to stave off the inevitable trajectory of a world falling apart, to announce an even more important truth: “Surely, a revelation is at hand. . .” This part of his poem is rarely quoted. Today, I want to describe my version of this revelation, a revelation “at hand” that I hope will serve as a life affirming take-away for all of us.
Dr. Antonio Damasio, another neuroscientist, describes the possibility for creating a good-enough, bold-enough, strong enough sense of the self to help us live a flourishing life. He says, we create this good-enough-self through memory and storytelling and imagination. He calls this the “autobiographical self.” Others have called such a good-enough-self as the “novelistic self” and that every ‘core self’ is fundamentally an “act of imagination.” We are the tales we tell (or are told to us). (Broks, Paul, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, is there anyone there at all?” Timesonline, Sept. 20, 2005).
What might be revealed to us from our musings so far about the birds and bees of existence. I believe it to be true that whether we are a Christian, an atheist, a person of another religious faith, a doctor, teacher, artist, we are the tales we tell of ourselves, or others tell of us. We are the combination of pieces of truth, multiple selves, bundles of nerve fibers, atoms, and elements, nerve endings, anxieties, anticipations, fears and hopes – all pulled together in bundles of complexity and coherence (or not) by biological and life processes, to be sure. HOWEVER, when it comes to meaning in life, identity in life, understanding reality itself, we are quite literally and literarily pulled together by great acts of imagination.
The question for all of us to ask ourselves is this: What story or narrative, which bundle of core values, what belief systems, do we want to shape who we will become? For all of us, no less for the believer or nonbeliever, these are faith seeking understanding questions, facts seeking meaning questions. And we have the power to shape who we are by choosing what core values we place at the center of our being and then our lives.
For me, and I hope for many (if not all) of us at FMCSF, the covenant we annually sign with each other is a holy imaginative story that helps shape who we want to become as spiritual, moral, loving, human beings. The story we will tell throughout the time we are together as a congregation, in worship, in fun, in small groups, in our programs, in service are given shape by the core values we proclaim in our story as described, in part, by our covenant. In this way we are no different than those who draft malleable, fallible, amendable constitutions or professional association expectations (APA, Rotary, Hippocratic Oath, etc.), or even the various covenants described in the Bible (Older and Newer Testaments or Covenants).
In today’s Scripture litany (see below), I purposely juxtaposed differing, even contradictory, voices found between the covers of the Holy Bible. As a professor of Torah studies, who has devoted my life to the Bible’s teachings, I relish in every such differing voice claiming to speak for God in its time and place across millenniums, in and out of every culture, voices of all genders, as each understood God’s divine voice for themselves or their community. The phrase “Thus saith the Lord” is one of the most frequently used phrases in the Bible to defend differing points of view. I marvel at how the Holy Spirit, the literary muse of heaven, gathered these 66 books (according to the Protestant canon; 88, plus for Ethiopic canon) together between the covers of one book, the very definition of e pluribis Unum, out of many, One. The Bible becomes a sign of the ever new, eternally old, diverse, inclusive, argumentative, beauty of the Integrity of Reality, itself.
What other spiritual tradition has a sacred book of arguments? Jewish rabbis (Talmud) tell the story of God enjoying the arguments between Elijah and the other prophets. When asked, how can both points of view, each claiming to be true, be so, God responds, “For you [humans], the argument, itself, is a form of truth.” God reminds us that each of us can only ever partially know anything. We are as much homo indoctus (unlearned humans) as we are homo sapiens (knowing humans).
In law, so as in interpreting Scripture, we build our truth-seeking task through debate, arguing back and forth. In so doing, we hope to discover enough truth to guide us into all truth. It is my opinion that this grandest of literary pieces we call the Book of Books, the Holy Bible, has lasted through time and into eternity, in large part, because it is an anthology of understandings, it is its own self-correcting apparatus. It is a literary masterpiece, ever challenging, always in motion, gaps opened and filled, a book of arguments about the nature of reality and God’s relationship to it. Its very nature as an example of e pluribus Unum allows for its adaptation over time and in multiple spaces and places as God’s word. It is flexible enough to adapt, yet stable enough to offer enough coherence as a wonderful guide in faith and practice leading to a wonderful flourishing life.
Our covenant at FMCSF is like all other covenants, biblical and other wise. It is a mini-scripture, holy and fallible — our best attempt to narrate our core values (like community, forgiveness, trust, Jesus followers, peace, justice, resisting domination systems, service, worship, and commitment, to list a few) woven together like a web of belief at the center of who we are and hope to become. Pull these core values embedded in our covenant apart and none of them are complete by themselves. Alone, they become onion-like in their solitary essences. Keep them together, weaving them close to the center of our web of belief, we begin to find ourselves transformed by the union of their power.
When I speak of our covenant or our core values as our web of belief, I am borrowing the philosophical structure of E.O. Quine and that of the Anabaptist philosopher of science/ethicist, Nancey Murphy, from her book Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning. All systems of understanding (scientific and otherwise) require some version of deep-seated core axioms/beliefs at the center of the web of belief, inferred-second-level axioms/beliefs a bit further out, and observations/evidence supporting said beliefs/axioms all along the way.
In this model of understanding, I am reminded of the tensile strength of spider web silk. Close analysis of the silk of a spider web reveals it has a tensile strength greater than the same relative weight in steel fibers and with much greater elasticity. Industry, apparently, is trying to copy the microstructure of a web to build better bullet proof vests and artificial tendons. The center of the spider web is reinforced and extra strong. Likewise, the core values in the story we tell of ourselves in our covenant, when placed near the center of our lives, are strong enough to endure. Borrowing from the Psalmist, “I was once young, now I that I am older,” I can say with some confidence, if you make these covenant core values the core of your life, “the center will hold” enough for you to live a meaningful, even flourishing life. Live these core values and they will offer us the steel-like structure we need to weather the vicissitudes and otherwise vacuous realities of life. The covenant core of our life together at FMCSF (and elsewhere) offers a flexible, adaptable, yet strong and durable framework for organizing our lives. The covenant core can help us navigate the boisterous sea of exabytes and megabytes that we are bombarded with in increasing momentum with each passing version of the iPhone or AI simulator. The covenant core will offer a structure around which we weave our own story — beginning, middle, and end – giving shape and ongoing coherence to our lives for the rest of our lives.
There are, of course, many great values and other covenants to live by – in this sense all of us, believer, unbeliever, scientist and poet, are living by faith seeking understanding. Here at FMCSF, we claim our covenant core values are centered in the life and teaching of Jesus, Yeshua, the anointed one of God. Even if you were to imagine living your life patterned after the values of Jesus, say, even as a literary figure, the protagonist of a novelistic reality, a story told of an antihero, who dies fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the needy, the outsider, the mentally fragile; who fights against the domination systems of the world — would that not offer the makings of a purposeful, meaningful life? How much more, an actual historical figure, named Jesus of Nazareth — even if not, for you, God-Incarnate or some other difficult doctrine about him to live by? How much more still, if Jesus, the anointed one, is truly a manifestation of the God of love and justice and well-being? I can think of far less noble value-laden core beliefs to live by.
In claiming these covenant core values as a community, we come to understand the tensile strength of other values that are inferred and grow out of this deep-seated core. We imaginatively, creatively, literarily and, I hope, literally confess that the most fundamental building-block of life, that spiritual atom indivisible by any force, that primal reality under girding existence itself, the core of life and death, is the simple and profound truth: “The Lord our God is One.” (the Great Shema/Deut. 6:4). God is one. . . the rest is a scattering. . . God is the ultimate Integrity of Reality.
And as our various covenants would tell it: all other axioms and beliefs and observations are in multiples and many. And no matter, above, underneath, in and out and all around our web of belief (our covenanted core), is that greater Integrity of Reality, that each one of us is unconditionally loved by God. Period. End of story. Yet, the beginning of the rest of our lives.
Scripture Litany
[Except for first and last lines, which are read in unison, alternate as if in a conversation, playing off the other, with a slight hint of a debate back and forth].
| Reader One | Reader Two |
| [First line in unison]: The Word of God for the People of God. | |
| A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. | The day of the Lord will come like a thief and the earth and everything that is in it will be destroyed. |
| The Lord said, “You cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.’” | Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, yet I live!” |
| No one has ever seen God at any time! | Jesus said, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” |
| Again, Jesus said, “For God, all things are possible.” | But the Lord could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron. |
| Do not answer fools according to their folly, lest you be a fool yourself. | Answer fools according to their folly, lest they be wise in their own eyes. |
| The fifth commandment says, “Honor your father and your mother.“ | Jesus said, “If anyone comes to me, and hates not their father, and mother . . . they cannot be my disciple.” |
| Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. | What about, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”? |
| “I the Lord your God am a jealous God; I will punish children for the iniquity of their parents to the third and the fourth generation.” | A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent, nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child.” |
| On that day, [at the end of time] thus says the Lord, “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” | On that day, [at the end of time] thus says the Lord, “Proclaim this among the nations: Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears; consecrate a war, let the weakling say, “I am a warrior.” |
| [Last line in unison]: The Word of the Lord. Thanks Be to God! | |
[Scriptures sited in order: Ecc. 1:4, 2 Pet. 3:10; Gen. 33:20, 32:30; John 1:18,14:9; Matt. 19:26, Judges1:19; Prov. 26:4,5; Exod. 20:12, Luke 14: 26; Exod. 20:5, Ezek. 18:20; Isa. 2:4; Joel 3:9]