Temple Talk - Chris Sweet
A message on stewardship - October 29
When Joyce and I moved here sixteen years ago, it was natural that we found our way to Ebenezer. Until we married in our forties, I had carried my spirituality around in my backpack. But it always showed. When I was an undergraduate, my teachers told me, “We’re offering you a place in the seminar on Religion in Literature. You cannot refuse.” So I pumped out my little thesis on Bob Dylan’s spiritual quest. Then in 1986 when I attended Medill, my teacher Bob McClory told me, “I’m offering you the religion beat: Go interview the Imam.” Imagine that! And when I got married in 1991, Joyce said we had to find a church.
We moved to Andersonville to be close to the Goodman, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Symphony, the Lyric Opera, and Steppenwolf. Andersonville is an old Swedish neighborhood, but in recent years was called “Old Boys Town,” because it’s where the older boys who found lifetime partners would settle down and make their gardens grow. I had two
fathers: my dad and my brother. Dad loved his garden. My brother lived in the closet all his life. Dad didn’t understand fatherhood beyond weeding and watering, so my brother provided the emotional fathering. You can say I was raised halfway by a gay guy.
This is the place where we worship. You’ll notice the Scandinavian angels looking down at you from the columns. They look exactly like our three daughters, Ashley, Shelley, and Nikki Anderson. And over the door to my left, you can see a model of a sailing vessel, called a votive ship. While the ship model you see is a recent addition, you will find similar votive ships in Lutheran churches all over the world. The earliest were probably carved by sailors praying for safe voyages.
The modern word “worship” comes from an Old English word “werthe-scipe,” meaning worthy ship or worthy character, as in the expression “Your Ladyship.” However, the Old English word “scipe” leads back to a much word in the Proto-Indo-European language that means to “cut, scrape, carve, rub, grind:” in short, something called “scipe” suggests it originally referred to shaping something found in nature: cutting a tree, scraping off the bark, and scraping or gouging the center to make a vessel – like a cup or a bowl to hold water; or in case it’s going to rain for 30 days and 30 nights, a big bowl to float us on top of the water. Worthy carvings like these have saved many lives over the millennia.
When I was a boy, I told my dad that I wanted to carve a sailing ship out of a block of wood. He was furious. He didn’t want any child of his to grow up to be a whittler, like the Civil War veterans he’d seen on their front stoops, whittling one stick after another into a pile of shavings and looking for a handout instead of getting a job. His own grandfather had been a whittler, damaged beyond repair by a year spent in a Confederate prison. Today, we know enough to forgive my great-grandfather’s PTSD, but in my boyhood, whittling was a moral shortcoming.
Worship in this place at this time is an act of creation. To worship here is to cut, scrape, shape, and hone a vessel that will carry the spirit across the flood, a vessel that is fit and watertight.
This church is full of “scipe.” Jesus was a carpenter’s son. The cross he died on was cut, scraped, smoothed, joined to a crossbar, and built to last, honed to perfection by some other carpenter’s son. The stone around us was cut and scraped and smoothed before being set into place. The glass, the lead, the roof…the whole cathedral is built like a ship’s hull turned upside down.
I came and stayed at Ebenezer because it’s a good place to do werthe-scipe. If I occasionally leak wood shavings and limestone dust, well, now you understand why.
My generation is in its late autumn. Ebenezer is being handed to a new generation. I’m determined to leave it in ship shape. I invite you to sit down and see what you can make of it. Or if you need practice, just pick up a stick of wood and start whittling.
Thank you.