St. Mark’s Presbyterian
June 12, 2005
Mr. Head woke up with a smile on his face. It was early in the morning, well before dawn on the day when he and his grandson Nelson were to venture out on their big trip to the city. Mr. Head was smiling in confidence that the education his grandson so sorely needed would be greatly furthered by the trip. Mr. Head had been raising his grandson for years now since the death of his no-good daughter. It had been a test of his patience. No one seemed to appreciate what a noble thing he had done least of all his grandson. But today that would all change. “ He’s never seen anything before,” Mr. Head mused. “ Ignorant as the day he was born, but I mean for him to get his fill once and for all”. The trip to the city and his exposure to the wide world would show that child who was boss, would show that ungrateful youth that he must bow to the wisdom and experience of his betters. There was no mistaking that grandfather and grandson were kin. Anyone one who happened to notice them as they got off the train would see the family resemblance. and if they happened to overhear them they would hear a running battle of wills like only kinfolk could carry on.
As they wandered the city streets hour after hour, Mr. Head got great satisfaction in pointing out to his grandson the wonders and dangers all around them. It was not exactly clear when Mr. Head realized or could admit it to himself that they were in fact lost. But Nelson was exhausted and said he could not go another step without resting and immediately fell asleep by a stair step. Well this was the perfect time to teach that boy a lesson about respect for his elders. Mr. Head quietly slinked away to a nearby alley where he could watch the boy without being seen. When Nelson woke up a few minutes later, his grandfather was nowhere to be found. In a panic, he rose and began running down the street in the opposite direction. Mr. Head jumped out of the alley and galloped after him but Nelson was almost out of sight. As Mr. Head followed along as best he could what he saw next made his blood turn cold. Two blocks down the street was Nelson and an elderly lady spread-eagled on the street with groceries everywhere. “You’ve broken my ankle and your daddy will pay for! Every nickle! Police! Police! Something forced Mr. Head to approach this dreadful scene and as he walked up Nelson roused himself and grabbed him around the hips and clung for dear life. The crowd that had gathered turned their fury on Mr. Head. “He’s a juvenile delinquent. Where are the police? Somebody get his name and address. The woman on the pavement said, your boy has broken my ankle. Police. Mr. Head his eyes glazed over with fear said, “ this is not my boy. I never seen him before”. The women dropped back staring at him with horror as if they were so repulsed by a man who would deny his own image and likeness that they could not bear to lay hands on him. Nelson released his embrace. Mr. Head walked on through a space they silently cleared, and left nelson behind. Ahead of him he saw nothing but a hollow tunnel that had once been a street. So Flannery O’conner depicts a story of the fall. A story in which a grandfather commits the inconceivable sin of denying his own kin. And so falls into inhumanity.
It has been said that the Biblical story from Genesis of the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve is the story of humanity’s “fall” into freedom. This story is about humanity’s fall from the unknowing innocence of all creatures into the terrifying self-consciousness of human beings. Humankind is self-conscious in a way that allows us to reflect on ourselves, to imagine possibilities, to raise questions, to make choices. The divine image within us is this capacity for free choice. We experience what the philosopher Kierkegaard called the dizziness of freedom. And this is the anxiety of making choices that can sometimes have tragic consequences. In truth, the story of the fall in Genesis maps the path of all human development that each of us must walk: we grow up, and gradually come to more and more self-awareness by learning the connection between freedom and responsibility, between choices and consequences. We are always faced with the choice between what is more human and what is less human. I am made in the image of God which means that throughout the time that I am given on earth, I walk on a continuum, getting closer or falling away from what that potential implies. I am constantly on the journey of choosing for or against the potential that lies within me as someone made in the image of God. Like Mr. Head in Flannery O’conner’s story who of us has not known a moment of self-recognition when I understand that in my flawed freedom, I am quite capable of anything and that no matter how I perceive myself or how I strive to appear before the world, I am a problem to myself, a living contradiction, a fallen creature.
Who of us has not had moments as Barbara Kingsolver described when a moral choice is called for, a choice for love and justice and integrity and we miss the mark? Kingsolver tells this story of a fall that occurred on the streets of Tucson. “ I was headed home with my mind on things when my thoughts were bluntly interrupted. A woman was being attacked fifty feet away from me. My heart thumped hard as I watched what was happening. The woman was slight, no taller than my older daughter but she was my age. Her attacker a much taller man had no weapon but was hitting her on the head and face with his fists and screaming vile names at her. She ducked in a way that any animal would to save the most fragile bones of her face. She was trying to get away from him but she couldn’t. I felt my body freeze as they approached, maybe 10 feet away and then moved on past us. I say us because I wasn’t alone here. I was in a crowd of several dozen all within earshot. Unbelievably, most weren’t even looking. And then I did my own unbelievable thing: I left. I left that battered woman behind.” Barbara Kingsolver confessed that it had taken her a long time to finally depict this moment in her life and to ask her readers: can you believe that I did what I did? Does it seem certain that I am heartless?” Kingsolver goes on to do a painful soul searching as she analyzed that split second crisis. Admittedly she had few options. Should she stop her car right in the middle of the street? Verbally challenge the attacker? But when she was honest she recognized something in her self that was less than flattering. In her honest confession, she shared that she could imagine the scenario and how it would reflect on her. Honking horns. Blocked traffic. The public nuisance she herself would have to become. All the people shaking their heads with impatience at the foolish do-gooder who was getting herself mixed up in somebody else’s domestic dispute. But this was not a domestic problem it was everybody’s problem. Is it certain that I am heartless? She asks. Barbara Kingsolver’s courage in sharing her moment of cowardice helps all of us remember the moments in our journey’s when we too may have experienced a fall. Who among us does not carry in our hearts the memory of moments like these where we know that we have missed the mark. The best that can be hoped for is that we will have the courage to name and face these moments in our own lives and in taking responsibility for them to know ourselves as forgiven. And then in the mercy that comes to the fallen we pray that the next time a moment comes, we will be ready. Sometimes our moral character is more profoundly shaped for the good not by our moral triumphs but by our falls.
Most of us will experience a moment in our earthly pilgrimage that will leave us feeling cast out of innocence, fallen and lost. We can identify with Mr. Head and Nelson in the big city wondering if they will ever truly find their way home again. But they do finally make it home. Through a bizarre and strange encounter with grace, as could only occur in the faithful imagination of Flannery O’conner, Mr. Head begins to feel the action of mercy touch him. O 'connor writes: “He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood that this mercy was all a man could carry into death to give his maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his heart, the sin of Adam until the present when he had denied poor Nelson”. Back home, Grandfather and grandson stood beside the railroad tracks and watched as the train glided past them and disappeared like a frightened serpent in the woods. Mr. Head understood that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter paradise.”
This morning we have told stories of the fall. But we can never simply tell the story of the first Adam and his fall without also invoking the story of the second Adam and his rising. The story of Christ, is the story of a human being in which the divine image shined so clearly and brightly that no one could say for sure where the human ended and the divine began. It is this new Adam, this new Christ who has come to restore in all of us the imago dei, the image of God within us. It is the Christ rising within us who reopens the gate to Paradise, now and in the life to come. In the words of the prayer of invocation: “Loving God to turn away from you is to fall, to turn toward you is to rise. And to stand before you is to live forever.”