An Appalachian Iliad

a Holy Trinity sermon on John 3 | June 3rd, 2012 | @ Grace, Boulder

It is good to be back living in the shadow of the mountains. As my accent might reveal in an occasional feel or well, I grew up in the shadows of the southern Appalachians. As I’ve grappled with this aspect of my identity, I have developed a deep respect for southern Appalachian literature. 

Life lived and described in prose in this place is always measured against the backdrop of the mountains. They function as monuments to eternity, as sentinels of the centuries. Generations come and go, trying scape together a life in this unforgiving terrain while the mountains remain. Against this backdrop, an emphasis of human frailty emerges and with it a theology that proclaims the importance of the by and by. Humanity’s fragile fate seems as certain as the enduring presence of the mountains. Against such incredible odds, these Appalachian theologies proclaim that the best we can hope for is the life God promises in the world to come, because most assuredly the new life of Christ isn’t coming in this one. 

A part of what drags me back to my Eden this week is the text. Our gospel from John includes John 3.16, that for God so loved the world that he gave his only son so that all who believe in him might have eternal life. As a child, as a Lutheran no less, growing up in this shadowed part of the world, these words were quick on the lips of many of my schoolmates. In my experience these words of hope were used much more often like a hammer, where one better believe if you are to have any hope of sharing in the rich gifts God promises us on the other side of the mountains and our lives. Embedded in this use of the text is that idea that this life is too transitory, too undependable to bear the weight of the incredible promises of God.

Woven in the late night questions and concerns of Nicodemus are the same anxieties that fuel an Appalachian anthropology. Nicodemus is a learned rabbi, a teacher in Jerusalem, but now, as Jesus turns water into wine, throws the money changers out, and proclaims the destruction of the temple, the foundations of society, are shaking. Nicodemus comes to Jesus concerned about the earth moving underneath his feet.

Jesus response confirms these seismic shifts. In the shadows, Nicodemus professes that Jesus must come from God, because only one from God is able to perform these signs. Jesus responds by telling him that ‘No one can see the kingdom of God without being born anew.’  Nicodemus’ confusion deepens as he asks, ‘How can one be born again?‘   Jesus responds by saying, ‘No one can enter into the kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit.’ 

Jesus’ proclamation of a kingdom of God that comes through new birth, confirms the suspicion that things are changing. This new birth reveals the transitory nature of what God is doing. Jesus proclaims that to be a part of the emerging kingdom of God one must be born again, a new, of water and spirit. And while this proclamation of new birth is not exactly a straight answer to Nicodemus’ questions, Jesus’ response is for Nicodemus and for all who find the earth shifting underneath their feet incredibly good news. 

Because despite anyone’s loud exhortations in a conversation on a school bus or painted on a eye black of a professional football player, what anyone can tell you, even down in the darkest of mountain hollers, is that you can’t make yourself be born. If you can’t hardly make yourself be living, trying to scratch together a life in the places where the sun rises late and the night shadows rise early, you sure can’t be the one to bring yourself into life. 

The good news this morning is that to be born again is, like belief, what God does to us. Jesus’ late night words to Nicodemus are an assurance that while the pivots of the temple are shaking, it is God who is birthing us anew, bringing us into new life in this world.

Being born anew, of water and spirit, is a process that happens to us. Certainly, we participate in it. Like Nicodemus, this new birth drags us into the darkness, wrestling with the questions that keep us up late at night.

But it turns out that we do not live in shadows cast by death and uncertainty. Rather we live in the growing shadows cast by the far reaching and mysterious mountains of God’s grace reaching out over the world God loves and comes to save. 

Whenever I get to write my southern Appalachian Illiad, that’s how I’ll cast the mountains. Not as symbol of our mortality and frailty, but as a sign of the enduring source of the new life that falls upon us all in this shadowed vail.

As we celebrate Holy Trinity Sunday, it must also be said that the wide embrace of God comes to us in very particular ways. Like the distinct expressions of the Trinity, like the vivid vision of Isaiah’s experience with the Holy One or even in the warmness of hearing a twanged accent across the grocery aisle, God brings us life anew in definite experiences. My favorite Appalachian writer, Ron Rash, describes beautifully an image of the most particular way that God’s promise of rebirth comes to us in his book One Foot in Eden. In it, the Jocassee Valley in the South Carolina mountains is about to be flooded by the local electric company. The Sheriff, born and raised in this valley drives away for the last time. And he thinks...

As for my life, it was in Seneca. My morning telephone call had woke me up in more than one way. It had been a reminder of something I had already known despite what I’d been able to pretend for a few hours - I had chosen my life long ago when I had picked up a fork, picked it up in a house I had believed to be as solid and permanent as anything on earth. 

But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest of foundations. You don’t need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life. 

When I had become a deputy I had made out my will and stipulated that I was to buried here in the Jocassee with the other Alexanders. I hoped I would be in that grave before they built up the reservoir so when the water rose it would rise over me and Daddy and Momma and over Old Ian Alexander his wife Mary and over the lost body of the princess named Jocassee and the Cherokee mounds and the trails De Soto and Bartram and Michaux had followed and the meadows and streams and forests they had described and all would forever vanish and our faces and names and deeds and misdeeds would be forgotten as if we and Jocassee had never been.

It is in the waters that wash away our deeds and misdeeds that God brings us to live anew. In these waters, the waters in which we baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, that the sacred process of faith, of belief and unbelief, takes root and is set into motion. As we emerge out of those waters, gasping, God gives us our first breath of this new life. They are both so expansive and particular. These waters cover each nook and cranny of the valley and of us. They come to each of us, as in the baptismal liturgy we proclaim that you, that Zach, that Margaret or Bob or Donna, you are baptized in the name of the Trinity. They flow over each of our days, calling us in the waters of the shower, or the reservoir or even in the streaming flow of rush hour traffic, reminding us that as we walk down shifting paths, it is God who is bringing us to live again. Amen.