Heaven's Scent

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
November 10, 2019
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
It all started when I climbed up on the step stool in front of the hot stove.  Grandmother Taliaferro gave me an oversized apron, a long handled wooden spoon, and put me in charge of stirring the gravy.  She kept it on low, and while she cubed loaves of white bread and chopped celery and onions, I stood sentinel, assuring that the simmering brown goodness thickened, but did not stick to the bottom or sides of the pan.  Even talking about it brings back the smell of memory.  Her kitchen was spotless and efficient and I loved that I was the only one allowed in her domain.
 
That started a life-long love of cooking that I have nurtured and studied ever since childhood.  My mother says the cooking gene skipped a generation, and through the passing of generations, I have become the marshal of our Thomas family feasts.  What this means in this season is that requests for the Thanksgiving menu have started to come my way.  With a vegetarian daughter, a brussels sprouts loving wife, a corn pudding loving son, an oyster dressing loving mother, and a growing guest list of attendees from all corners of our tradition, the planning requires careful allocation of casserole dish assets, precious oven time, and the age-old question as to how to and when to cook the turkey.  Brine and baste? Deep fry and crisp the skin?  Stuffing or dressing?  And then, there is the procurement and preparation of the best Virginia ham (and that is another whole sermon).
 
The one unifying and absolute constant is my grandmother Thomas’s icebox yeast rolls.  While everyone has their favorite dish, the rolls bring it all together.  And that smell, that heavenly scent, is the perfect harbinger, the sweet incense of all kinds of goodness and memory.  And yet, the rolls are the biggest challenge.  We use the recipe from the stained and spotted index card written in her own hand.  It calls for a ball of shortening about the size of an egg, sugar, warm water, yeast, and flour.  The exact proportions, proving, and cooking times are a matter of constant debate and experimentation.  The quest to get as close to what she produced with such ease and regularity throughout her life is illusive at best. Her light arthritic touch may have had as much to do with the perfect product as anything.  We can imitate, and get pretty darn close, but we will never duplicate exactly the perfect browning of the outside and fluffy light insides.  Be that as it may, no one requests biscuits or cornbread.
 
Remembering is a key feature of this approaching season.  Like all families, we are complicated and evolving, but the steady stream of sweet yeasty memories is like glue that attaches us across time.  Like so many memories, the arguments and tensions of growing up and apart fade into the constants of a table gathering.  So, we strike out again this year with hope and anticipation in quest for a more perfect yeast roll despite our distances and differences.
 
When we gather here each week, we do much of the same things to bring constancy and steadiness to the vicissitudes of our lives.  We tell connected parts of God’s story in relationship to all of us through time and space.  And today we opened with a peculiar and odd ancient tale: back in the second year of King Darius, in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, when the word of the Lord came through the prophet Haggai.  Haggai is not a prophet we know so well.  His book is really short and stuck near the end of the Old Testament.  For context: the great and glorious Temple had been destroyed, they had been carried off into slavery and exile in Babylon, and generations later, they have been allowed to return to their land and have sought to rebuild and reshape their common lives and faith.  It would be like coming home after years to find your old home place in ashes and rubble with only a few charred objects to remember former greatness.
 
In this setting, Haggai delivers an important pep talk.  He them that God is still their God and that same God of their remembered glory is on the move among them.  Haggai tells them not to dwell on the past with mournful regret, but to expect God to do a powerful new thing among them.  In hindsight, we cannot help but hear this as foreshadowing the living God in Jesus Christ who is to come, and will transform the power and presence of God from being confined and located in a particular time and place, like a Temple, to a living and powerful force of love and grace that transcends time and space.  That is a lot for an ancient Israelite to get their minds around, but there it is.  The lesson is paired with a psalm of praise and hope, again, envisioning God acting in ways we cannot predict, contain, or, even, comprehend fully. 
 
The clear message is that we are not completely and fully equipped to understand God and God’s ways of constant and persistent creation.  All we can do is watch and wonder.  When the Psalmist tells us that God’s ways are not our ways and our ways are not God’s ways, it is an understatement.  And while we would like to understand and know as God knows, that was never part of the guarantee. 
 
It is often said that life is lived looking forward, but better understood looking backward.  The lessons for today from Haggai, from St. Paul, and in Luke’s gospel are all about that.  When the Sadducees challenge Jesus about the woman who was married seven times and ask whose husband she will be in heaven, they are trying to play the game of applying earthly standards to a completely different plane of existence.  Their literal demand is a trick question and stands in the way of their embrace of mystery and promise.  Naturally, Jesus points to God being a God of the living: a living that extends beyond what we see and experience in the here and now, into what ancient Christian mystics called “the cloud of unknowing.[1]”
 
All of these texts are the stuff of memory.  They represent encounters with big questions at key moments, none of which make sense to those standing at the edges of something completely new and different.  When we look back on them, we see a bit more clearly, but not completely.  As we consider our own place and circumstance in history, it helps to look back to help make sense of what might be and what is to be revealed in time.
 
Remembering is at the heart of sacramental living.  As faithful people, we gather around the table of the Lord and affirm the feast of life.  We tell the story of sacrificial, self-giving love that unites us in the ongoing life of Jesus among us.  What we do is more than memory, though.  In holding on to the essentials, the biggest of the big picture is affirmed.  It is impossible for us to know completely what the present means and what God will do with what is happening now, but we know from looking back that God is always making things new, and God is always at work in God’s faithful people.  Once again, we remember.  We get around the table.  We break the bread.  We pass the cup.  We do this to affirm the present presence of God, to quiet our fears of unknowing, and lift up our lives to hope.  Amen.


[1] Thomas Aquinas has a lot to say about this in his Summa Theologica and I commend his exploration of embracing what we cannot know as a lens to deeper relationship with God.