COUNTERPOINT/COUNTERPART
Here is some news that may shock you: They teach us much less in
seminary that you imagine. For example, I went in to seminary a musical
illiterate, and I came out in much the same state. I had one class in
church music, but it did not bring down my grade point average because
it was pass or fail. Music is to me a foreign language. Most of what I
know is that you raise your voice if the little dots on the page are
higher on the staff, and you lower your voice if the opposite is true.
But my lack of education does not mean that I am not open to learning
more. For me, some recent education has been around the word,
“counterpoint.” One music reference book tells me that counterpoint is
the ability for a group of singers to sing two things at once
comprehensibly. It involves simultaneous voices that can make sense on
their own, but that become extraordinarily beautiful when sung
together. You may roll your eyes at the following detail, but the word
counterpoint, I have learned, derives from Latin for “note against
note,” from the practice of establishing one line of music and then
writing more notes against that line. These are notes that could easily
fight one another, but are somehow held together by the skill of the
musician writing them and the singers singing them.
Singing two things at once comprehensibly. When I hear that definition
I start thinking theologically, something about which I did learn a
thing or two in seminary. I think of how we can have two different
preachers in Christendom read the same lectionary text and have two
entirely different sermons, and yet remain together as priests in the
church and witnesses to the resurrection. I think of what it is that
draws disparate people together in one room or in one denomination or
in one religion called Christianity.
As you know from your own experience, all of us Christians do not look
alike. In fact, all of us Episcopalians do not look alike,
cultural stereotypes to the contrary. Our counterparts in other
churches, to put a human face to the word “counterpoint,” can be very
different from us. I have seen some Episcopalians worship with
their hands in the air and some almost invisible behind clouds of
incense. I once worked in a colonial-era Episcopal Church with clear
glass windows and not a single image in the room of Jesus or a
saint. I visited another congregation a thousand miles from here
that had a big Arkansas healing crystal in the middle of its cross hung
over the altar, and a baptismal font that glowed from beneath like
something on the Starship Enterprise.
We and our counterparts, like counterpoint, may each make some sense on
our own, but our being drawn together tells a larger story. Our
divine calling is to be brought together, and such is the lesson today
from Genesis and Mark's gospel. In order to see that truth, and
in order to hear the good news that is its foundation, the first thing
we have to do is to set aside the presenting issue of marriage and
divorce in these two lessons, and concentrate instead on a bigger
message from God to all people, of which marital status is simply the
example today. In that the plurality of people in this country if
not the world are not married, if there is to be good news in these
lessons for the single, for teenagers, for the widowed and divorced,
for those burdened by either poverty or wealth, then we have to get
beyond a discussion of marital legalities.
In today's lesson from Genesis, God says that it would be good for Adam
to have a partner. But, as some diligent commentators tell us, it is a
notoriously difficult passage to translate from the Hebrew. “Wife”
instead of “partner” does not work. And neither does “helpmeet,” the
word used in the King James Version. A translation that might be more
accurate is that it would be good for Adam (or more precisely, good for
the being made out of humus, the human) to have a counterpart, someone
who is set against him. To start looking at what is good for Adam in
that context takes the story way beyond sex and procreation and
marriage licenses, and turns it into a story about humanity's need for
other human beings as a way to see what is most sacred and most
valuable in the universe. I would contend that we learn more about
ourselves and about the divine love that holds the universe together,
precisely when we are in contact with that which we would not love
otherwise. We don't start understanding unconditional love, we don't
start understanding God, until we are brought face to face with that
which is different from us.
In Genesis, Adam realizes that his counterpart, his person in
opposition, is made of the same flesh and bone as is he. If there
is a lesson that is universal from this story in Genesis, that is it,
not some moral about marriage itself, for marriage has changed
dramatically from the time that this passage was written. The
universal lesson is that even that which is against us shares the same
flesh and bone. It is so important a truth that the first words
we hear in the Bible from a human being—Adam’s first utterances—are
about the marvel of human connection. “This at last,” he says when he
sees another human being for the first time, is “bone of my bones and
flesh of my flesh.” He sees a connection when he meets his counterpart,
when a mirror image of himself will not suffice. It is then that
the music of the universe begins to build as Adam gives voice to
relationship. It is then that something urges humankind toward its
omega point, as Pierre Teilhard once described the ultimate destiny of
all created order, or what we call the ultimate reality of the kingdom
of God.
What that “something” is what today's gospel is all about. Did
you notice that the Pharisees come asking about divorce, about how to
go about separating people? And isn't that where we put so much of our
energy as well? But Jesus takes the discussion in a different
direction. He tells us about the divine will, about connections.
From the beginning, counterparts find communion. God joins while we try
to tear apart. Unconditional love joins us while conditional love
separates us. It is a universal truth from the beginning, a truth made
most plain in the love of Jesus on the cross, and God’s love for Jesus
and the world that not even death could overcome.
It is the story that we come back week after week to retell. In a
world that tries so hard to separate one from another, to categorize
and ostracize and vilify and marginalize, our story is that God’s
unconditional love reconciles us to God, and that we will live best, we
will be holy, when our lives show glimpses of that unconditional love
as well. This holy room is precisely where counterparts—polar
opposites—can begin to see one another in a brand new way. Here
we can become like Adam, looking around and proclaiming, “At
last. Flesh of my flesh.” Maybe that is ultimately why the
church for all these centuries has talked about bread made flesh in the
Eucharist. Every time we gather around the holy table it is the
creation story all over again. “At last. Flesh.” We
connect, for it is not good that the man should be alone.
That is good news for the single, the happily married, the lonely
worker, or the bluff extrovert with a secret hole in his heart.
God’s holy self offers to mingle with us, and we are thus connected
with one another even if we sing different tunes. The risen
Christ, as brother to us all, joins the songs together and makes them
comprehensible to a world hungry for something it can hold on to, not
run away from. God has been doing this since the foundation of
the world, and what God is joining together, no one will ever be able
to separate.
Amen.
Larry R. Benfield
Proper 22 – Year B
4 October 2006
St. James, Eureka Springs