"You Are God's Poem" | Roy Cole | March 10, 2024

Like many high schoolers, I spent my junior and senior years making plans for my life. The Franciscan brothers and Dominican sisters at St. Elizabeth all believed I was destined for the priesthood, and while there was a strong attraction to that life, I, on the other hand, had other plans. And on the day that I graduated from high School 50 years ago just this year, those plans were well in place. I had my acceptance letter to Oregon State University in Corvallis in the nuclear engineering program. I was going into the NRC and would graduate from college as an ensign in the US Navy. From there, I would be assigned to a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and begin my Naval career. You see, I'm from a multi-generational Navy family that is also Boston Irish Roman Catholic, which means we're more Catholic than the Pope. So Catholic that when my father's older sister married a Protestant in the 1950s, she was excised from the family for a good 30 years. My father would often jokingly tell me that we came from poor Irish stock, and therefore as the youngest child, there would be no inheritance that would trickle down to me. All would all go to my elder brother – what there was of it that is. Therefore, he said, it's either the military or the church. Pick one. That's how it was. I never made it to Corvallis, much less the Navy. Sixteen months after graduation, I was sitting in my first class on my first day at Shasta Bible College. The class was biblical Greek. I would learn to read the New Testament in the original language. I would be able to plumb the mysteries of God in the original languages of he Hebrew and Greek. And I would discover after two years of Greek and a year of Hebrew that more often than not, those tasked with translating the Bible into English actually do a pretty good job. I don't know, Nathan, what your experience was from your Greek background, but sometimes I think, really, however– no matter how good many English translations are of the Bible, occasionally there is a word that pops out that requires a bit more explanation to better understand what specifically the word of God is seeking to express. The translation used in today's Epistle lesson is one particular Greek word. For me, it is so lacking in precision and subtlety that the theological import of what Paul is wanting to convey is completely lost. It comes in the last sentence of today's lesson from Ephesians. There the translators write, "for we are what God has made us." Okay, true enough I suppose, and I suppose an accurate translation, but not very inspiring. The King James version, on the other hand, which is how I first learned the verse, does somewhat better. "For we are God's workmanship." Better, yes, but not quite what the Greek is saying. If you wanted to make a literal translation of the line, it would read, "For we are God's poem." As in, "We are God's poem, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do." That's right, the original Greek word translated "workmanship" in the King James and "what God has–" as "what God has made us" in the New Revised Standard is literally the Greek word for "poem." In fact, our English word is nothing more than a transliteration of the Greek word "poema" – "poem." We are God's poem, line by line, verse by verse, rhyme, rhythm, and meter all woven together in not only the narrative poem that is our life, but in the lyric poem that is our soul. You are God's poem, and that poem that is you is nowhere near complete, whether you are 60-year-old, a 6-year-old, a 90-year-old, or a 9-year-old. God is writing a new verse each and every day, sometimes even entire stanzas, and God continues to do so until that day in which we will stand as Christians in God's presence and hear the words that all faithful Christians long to hear: "Well done, my good and faithful servant. Enter now into the joy of the Lord." Now I will be the first to recognize that saying that you and I are God's poem can sound rather saccharine, if not downright Pollyanna-ish, given all that is going on not only in our world but in many of our lives. I get it, and if I didn't, a quick read of the newspaper or scanning any online news feed would certainly cure me of any latent naivete I might have about how hard, how tragic life can be often for the vast majority of the world, poem or no poem. So when I say that you and I are God's poem and that God is writing new lines of that poem each day, and I must also acknowledge that for you as well as for me, there are times when that poem is far more a lament than a celebration. At times, the poem that is our life seems much more like Psalm 22, "My God, my God why hast Thou forsaken me?" than, say, Psalm 146, "Praise the Lord oh my soul, I will praise the Lord as long as I live." When Paul wrote those words that we read in Ephesians to the Christians in Ephesus, he too knew the reality of life, and a life of following God. In his letter to the Corinthians, he gives an account of a portion of the poem God had been writing in his life, and so here in Paul's own words are some of the lines in his poem: "Five times, I received 40 stripes minus one. Three times, I was beaten with rods. Once, I was stoned. Three times, I was shipwrecked. A night and a day, I had been in the deep, in journeys often, in perils of water, in perils of robbers, in perils of my own countrymen, in perils of Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in peril in the seas, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and toil, in sleeplessness, often in hunger and thirst, in fastings, in cold and nakedness. Besides the other things which come upon me daily, my deep concern for all the church who is weak, and I am not weak, who is me made to stumble, and I do not stumble." When Paul tells us what that we are God's workmanship, that we are God's poem, he's not being naive; he's obviously speaking of what he knows from firsthand experience. He wants each of us to better understand that the life that God calls us to and the life that the world brings us, can it indeed often be difficult, sometimes overwhelming. You and I each have our own life, we each have our own poem that God is writing, and the poem God is writing is being written as we too write the poem that is our life. You see, this is a joint effort. It has to be. For God created us as co-creators with God. It is the essence of the Imago Dei that we each carry, that image of God that is inscribed upon our very soul, our very personhood. The poem God is writing is not imposed upon us. It does not drop down, as I once thought in my early Christian life, with a good, large-sized King James Bible with Scofield reference notes. Any of you Evangelicals will know about Scofield. (I still have that Bible, it's got to weigh 20 pounds.) The poem God is writing is not imposed on us, it is being written with us: line by line, word by word, as co-creators of the very life we are living. It is what it means to have free will. It is also what it means to be free to argue with God, even to complain to God about how our poem is going, as the Israelites did on that first lesson we heard this morning. And just to drive the point home that miserable food that they detested so much? Well, that food was the manna from Heaven that God had granted them in the wilderness each morning to sustain them for 40 years. Manna that was, quoting from Exodus, like white coriander seed, and tasted like wafers made with honey. So yes, we get to complain and we get to lament and we get to question even the very gifts God has granted us. As God and we write our poem. And let me just interject here, if you are not quite sure you believe what I'm saying, then I would encourage you to pick up your Book of Common Prayer, turn to the back to the Psalms, and begin reading from Psalm 1 through Psalm 150. And you will find there laments and complaints and praise and adoration and questioning, every imaginable aspect of a person's relationship with God. They are rich with the complaints and the laments of Life, the questionings of God. I have to say that as a priest and pastor, sometimes my biggest task is trying to encourage people just to be honest with what they're feeling in their relationship with God. God already knows, so we don't need to pretty it up with pious words. Just own it. And this is where faith comes in. For you see, the poem that God is writing in us is truly not a dirge, it's not a lament, it is not an elegy, but it is an epic, lyric poem of celebration. The problem that you and I have is that we can only see the verses that have been written. We don't know what the next line is going to be, much less the next stanza, and we certainly, none of us, know how the poem is going to end. Truth be told, we rarely have ever fully understood what our poem actually means. It is, I believe, as Brother John of Taizé, that ecumenical prayer community in France, writes in his book The Pilgrim God: he says, "We cannot judge the significance of our life of faith at the moment it is being lived. A human existence, to the extent that it is a response to a call from God, is necessarily on the move, and so always out of step, a little ahead of itself. We therefore have to accept the fact that we shall fully understand the present only later, and perhaps much later. Wanting to have all the answers, and right away, means forsaking the world of trust, the world of human calculation." And here's the part I most appreciate from Brother John, especially as I prepare for a new ministry, and a new home which I had no thought of just a few months ago. He goes on to write, "How many of those who seem to be wandering aimlessly one day discover that their wandering was in fact obedience to a secret call, spoken in their heart by the pilgrim God? A call so intimate it was not recognized as such even by the person concerned." Isn't that what draws us to poetry? The meaning of a poem, like the meaning of life, never lies on the surface. The true meaning of a poem is discovered bit by bit, as we return again and again to its stanzas and reach for that elusive, ephemeral, and mystic reality called life. The life that Jesus promises us, that life more abundant and free than any poem we could ever write on our own. When I think of the story of my life that I was writing as a graduating high schooler 50 years ago, I can honestly say that the poem God is writing is far more than I could ever have asked or imagined. Even those stanzas where I thought I had lost it all, even those stanzas where I thought there was no reason to even go on. It just didn't seem worth the effort. Yet the poem continued, and continues still. Perhaps that is why God chose the word "poema" in today's lesson, to tell us what life is. Life is indeed a poem, a God-created epic poem, a poem that each of us writes as co-authors with God. And so in this season of Lent, perhaps it's a good time to stop and consider what it is that we contribute to the poem that is our life. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.