I couldn't let go of the connection between John's Gospel and Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men as I prepared to preach this week. The movie version of the novel cleaned up at the Academy Awards last night. I took my sermon from Chicago last week and re-wrote it in relation to the texts yesterday. People responded really well, not only because they are--like most of us--curious about what's making the news, but also because many church-folk share 1) Sheriff Bell's pessimistic optimism about our times, and 2) think that ought to be said in church once in a while to keep us honest. So here ya go.
St. Paul, Old Saybrook
Lent 3: Exodus 17:1-7+Psalm 95+Romans 5:1-11+John 4:5-42
“ I read in the papers here a while back some teachers come across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools around the country. Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools. And they come across these forms, they’d been filled out and sent in from around the country answerin these questions. And the biggest problems they could name was things like talking in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework. Things of that nature. So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs, Suicide. So think about that. Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I’m gettin old. That it’s one of the symptoms. But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I’ve got. Forty years is not a long time neither. Maybe the next forty years of it will bring some of em out from under the ether. If it aint too late.”
The voice of Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff in Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men. The adaptation of the novel to film, directed by Joel and Ethan Cohen, is predicted to win the Oscar for best film and was nominated in eight categories. It is on the surface a thriller novel, fast-paced and violent, detailing the story of a sheriff and a drug deal gone bad on the US – Mexican border. Perfect for the movie tastes of our day, and no surprise that in the skillful hands of the Cohen brothers, the movie has garnered praise.
Yet a deeper look reveals that the story is more than merely a thriller; it is a deeply disturbing parable about our time, an awful but ultimately not hopeless accounting of the world our children will inherit. I haven’t seen the movie because I can’t stand to see the violent images, even if I can stand to imagine them as I read the book. Why think seriously about such a book, then? Cormac McCarthy’s wisdom, that’s why. And his honesty about the world we live in. I bought the book a week ago. I wanted help trying to come to grips with the newspaper headlines. Tonight, as the Hollywood stars stroll across the red carpet and into the Kodak Theater in Los Angles, students and their families, staff and faculty will walk slowly into the Convocation Center at Northern Illinois University. Before they return to classes tomorrow, they will gather in a memorial service to remember the horror unleashed on February 14 when a young man named Steve walked silently into a college classroom and opened fire.
At times like these I think maybe it is too late. Perhaps we in the church have our heads in the sand, with our happy-clappy songs and stained-glass view of the world. I find some of our church language trite, too simple, unable to bear the depth of outrage and sorrow I feel. I don’t really want to hear the nice words of Psalm 95. I don’t really want to “sing for joy to the LORD” or hear that “the LORD is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care.” Where is that care when the wolves come? I hear that Psalm and choke on the words. Psalm 44 is better. “Awake, O Lord. Why are you sleeping? Why have you hidden your face?” John’s Gospel is better. “Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of the light because their deeds were evil.”
Cormac McCarthy’s novel ends with Sheriff Bell reflecting on something he’d noticed outside of a house out in the country. “Where you went out the back door of that house there was a stone water trough in the weeds by the side of the house. A galvanized pipe come off the roof and the trough stayed pretty much full and I remember stopping there one time and squattin down and looking at it and I got to thinking about it. I don’t know how long it had been there. A hundred years. Two hundred. You could see the chisel marks in the stone. It was hewed out of solid rock and it was about six foot long and maybe a foot and a half wide and about that deep. Just chiseled out of the rock. And I got to thinkin about the man that done that. . . . That man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasnt that nothing would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know bettern that. I’ve thought about it a good deal. . . . I think about him settin there with his hammer and his chisel, maybe just an hour or two after supper. I don’t know. And I have to say that the only thing I can think of is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I don’t have no intention of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that’s what I’d like most of all.”
In this conclusion, McCarthy is in a sense having Sherrif Bell answer his own brooding and cautious hope for the next forty years, “if it aint too late.” His answer comes with a cry of longing for the One who has made a promise to last ten thousand years. In a way we all want that kind of promise, too. We are like that woman standing at the well in John’s gospel, thirsty for more than water, thirsty for the transformation of our lives so that we can hope again. We, like that unnamed woman, come to the well seeking to be known in the depths of our being, and to be forgiven for our shortcomings, and to be given a promise so powerful we will never thirst again.
And indeed, Jesus comes to us in as dramatic a way as possible by taking us into his own dying and being born again so that we might not die but have new life in him. We know we are desperate for this word. We see the desperation daily in our world. Lord, we see the water trough you have carved out of the rock, carved to last ten thousand years. You fill it with the living water, full of your promise of life eternal. And you give us that promise so that we can go into the world to share the news: Come and see the one who has given me the water of life so that I may never thirst again.
We walk on our Lenten journey in that hope, bearing that promise to the world. We, of all people, have a message to share, and that message is: “It aint to late.”
Amen.
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