February 27, 2008

            In Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” Frost’s neighbor keeps insisting that “good fences make good neighbors”—so much so, in fact, that, recalling the poem, people often think that was its message. But it was not. Frost recognizes a certain temporary truth to the claim, but he knows that the more lasting truth is this: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Every spring reveals new gaps in the wall between the poet’s fields and the neighbor’s, so they meet at the boundary to mend the damage. It comes from the ravages of winters, from hunters, from who knows where—maybe elves, suggests Frost—but the gaps keep showing up, because “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

            Spring is the mischief in me [says Frost], and I wonder
            If I could put a notion in his head:
            ‘Why do [walls] 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 like to give offence.
            Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
            That wants it down.

The exodus story—indeed, the whole Bible—reminds us that the something that doesn’t love a wall is actually a someone—indeed, none less than God himself.
            We learn that first in this exodus story when God breaks people out of captivity in Egypt. God really doesn’t like walls. And the lesson continues throughout the Bible. God doesn’t like prisons; God doesn’t like jails; God doesn’t like iron bars; God doesn’t like shackles; God doesn’t like chains; God doesn’t like barriers; God doesn’t like slavery; and God really doesn’t like walls.
            I tell seminary students that if they urge people to read the Bible, they should have a brief and clear answer to the question, “Why? What’s it about?” One response would be this: The Bible is the book that tells us how, again and again, over and over, generation after generation, century after century, millennium after millennium, God breaks down walls. God just doesn’t like them.
            According to the biblical story, the sons of Jacob had gone to Egypt to seek grain because of a famine in Israel. In other words, they were immigrants, crossing a desert and a river to find a better life. So, what’s new? In the Bible it’s not the Rio Grande or the Arizona desert; it’s the Sinai desert and the Nile—but the theme is the same: people forced to uproot their lives because of despair in one place and hope in another: immigrants. These are our biblical ancestors as well as our American ancestors and many of our American neighbors.
            But, of course, then and now: something there is that doesn’t like an immigrant; so, when the Israelite immigrant population begins to grow, the Egyptians, out of fear, strike back: Better lock these people up, better wall them in, lest they upset our economy, our lifestyle, our security. So, the Israelites are enslaved. With taskmasters and overseers and soldiers and ghettos and shackles and chains, the Egyptians literally and figuratively wall them in.
            Ah, but the God of Israel doesn’t like walls. We know the story: God sends Moses to confront Pharaoh, and after a series of plagues and disasters, Pharaoh finally agrees to set the captives free. But a journey out of slavery is hard—both physically and psychically—so the people want to turn around, and Pharaoh, of course, wants them back. But God still doesn’t like walls, not for oppressors who want to hold on and not for people who are afraid to let go, so God keeps opening doors—and even seas—to reveal this new and scary world of freedom to God’s beloved people. God delivers, God frees, God turns loose—God opens the doors of life, and invites people to take the risk of going out, to blossom and flourish.
            Exodus—exit—a way out—it becomes the Old Testament’s basic paradigm or model for the work of God. Every year Jewish people gather around the Seder table at Passover to remember the exodus—but never just as history, always as a present reality. The exodus is now. They get it right: God is never finished breaking down walls, opening doors, and setting people free. It’s what God does; it’s who God is. It does in fact, become a definition of God in the Bible. In text after text, God says in particular, “I am the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage...,” and people respond in general, “Praise God who sets prisoners free”—here, there, and everywhere.
            Seven hundred years after the original exodus the story repeats. Once again, Israel is in captivity to a great power—Babylon this time rather than Egypt. Once again, separated from home—this time not by a great sea but by a great desert. A new exodus is needed—like the old one, but not. And through the prophet Isaiah, God plays with that paradox.
            In trouble again? asks God. Well, remember the exodus! Of course, says Israel, we do! Good, says God, now forget it, because “I am about to do a new thing?” And what will this new thing look like? the people ask. Well, says God, remember the exodus? This is the exodus and it is not: that one was a dry way in the sea, this one is a wet way in the desert, to bring Israel safely out of Babylon (Iraq!) and home to Jerusalem (Isa 43:14-21).
            In every generation, God’s deliverance is the exodus and it is not, because God’s work is always constant, but God’s work is always new. Yet, new or old, God just doesn’t like walls. The prophetic servant in Isaiah announced that God “has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners” (Isa 61:1-2), and this, as we recall, became the text for Jesus’ first sermon, because it described precisely his own mission as well: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the prisoners go free...” (Luke 4:18). This is who God is; this is who Jesus is: the one who lets prisoners go free. God doesn’t like walls, and neither does Jesus. For Jesus, it’s in the genes he got from his father.
            Thus, the moral of the story of God’s deliverance of Israel at the sea is not that God acted once upon a time in the days of old to break down walls, but that God acts always to break down walls. For you and me, too. God flat out doesn’t like walls.
            Can we believe it? Sometimes, I suppose, we think we could have believed more easily then. Most of us have seen the old Charlton Heston movie, where it is all so clear. You got your good guys and your bad guys, your heroes and your traitors, and, best of all, you got your special effects crew. Who can miss the hand of God, the wind of God, the voice of God, the miraculous wonder of it all? God, give me something like that, and I would never doubt again.
            But unfortunately, in the movie Cecil B. DeMille lets us see more than we should. The Bible knows that it was harder than that, that God’s actions in the past, just like now, were seen only by the eyes of faith: “Your way was through the sea,” the psalmist says of God; “your path through the mighty waters; yet your footprints were unseen” (Ps 77:19). Yes, God works in every generation, but, this side of heaven, every generation sees God only by faith rather than by sight. Thus, we pray daily that God give us eyes to see.
            Robert Frost knew this, too, perhaps metaphorically, in his wonder over the gaps that kept appearing in his stone wall: “No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.” Like God’s, the footprints of Frost’s wall-breaking elves are unseen.
            But those gaps do appear. For Israel, for Frost, and for us, because God doesn’t like walls. Name your own jail, name your wall, name your oppression, name your prison, name whatever separates you from your neighbor or yourself or your family or full life or God. What is it that you want God to break open—you can name it better than I. Take a minute....
            And what of your neighbor’s prison? The one for which you might play some role in being God’s agent of liberation—physical or spiritual? The immigrant, the poor, the imprisoned, the lonely, the ill, the frightened. Visualize that neighbor for a moment....

            My own captivities? I could choose from many, but here’s one: Living in Zimbabwe, especially in these later years when everything was falling apart and people were growing more desperate and daily life more dangerous, I was always a little guilty about the security I felt when I arrived home at my flat in Brunton Court, because the walls, the guard, the gates, and the locks brought at least the illusion of safety. Forget about “thy rod and thy staff,” my walls and my locks—they comfort me! But one day, the realization struck me that it was not so much “they” who were walled out, it was I who was walled in—separated from my neighbors, from freedom, and from life by artificial barriers. I prayed for God to break them down—maybe not physically, but spiritually and morally. My wealth separated me from my brothers and sisters, and I suddenly realized the freedom brought by poverty. “Blessed are you who are poor,” said Jesus, “for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20)—and I do long for that kingdom. So, with you, I invite God to break down my walls, to set me free.
            Our lesser or greater prisons may differ, depending upon our experience and our needs, but the big one, of course, applies to us all: the prison of sin and death. We are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves. Not sins, so much, not just the various wrongful acts and hateful deeds that plague us day by day—though those are bad enough—but sin, the separation from God that makes us always and forever less than we are meant to be, less than we want to be, yearning for something more. The gate to the Garden of Eden is closed, that wall has no gaps, and I seem forever sentenced to live outside, where wolves abide and death. So, the Lenten sentence applies to all of us: From dust we come, and to dust we shall return.
            But, dear friends, God hates those walls, too, and he is out after them. God means to have us for himself with nothing in between. The barrier of sin and death is the big one and the final one that Jesus comes to break down—and he does it now and every day as we hear, in Jesus’ name, that we are forgiven, accepted, and loved by God unconditionally, and that even death has lost its sting. Not even the stone that closed the tomb could keep God out. God hates walls and stones and barricades. All of them. Yours and mine. The political walls of the oppressor or the personal walls of wealth; the walls we build for security or the walls we forge in hostility. The walls that separate me from you, and me from me. We all have our walls. But God is coming to break us out, to break them down. Because God loves exits, but God just hates walls. AMEN

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they 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 like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”