Sermon: Boundaries and an Orange Dress

 This sermon was preached at St. Lydia’s on Sunday, January 31.  The text is Matthew 8:23-34.  Read it here.

I’ve been using the word boundaries a lot lately.  I’ve been using the word boundaries with my choir students at First Presbyterian where I teach singing each week.  We’ve been having some…trouble with discipline, and that word, boundaries keeps coming up.  The teachers and I are discussing how the good boundaries can help our children get more out of their time in Church School. 

When you work in a church, you talk about boundaries a lot.  Good boundaries are important to help congregants and pastors understand their roles and relationships to one another.  At Divinity School, we spend class time discussing how to create healthy boundaries.  And all of this talk about boundaries is important.  Because boundaries keep us from going too far.  They help keep us safe.

Jesus spends a lot of time time pushing boundaries.  He spends a lot of time pushing the limits.  

Throughout the gospels, people keep saying to him, by who’s authority are you doing these things?  What gives you the right?  In these two related stories tonight, he’s literally and symbolically pushing his luck.  Pushing the boundaries.

We talked a little bit about chaos, and the sea as symbol of chaos.  Jesus heads right out into the sea.  Then there’s the story of the two demoniacs.  The text tells us that they’re so fierce that they live in a graveyard, which to Jews was ritually unclean territory.  Jesus didn’t just happen by, he went to the graveyard on purpose, playing with that boundary between clean and unclean.  And when he gets there and encounters these two demoniacs, he plays a trick, and it’s a little bit of a nasty trick too.  He sends out the demons, but into these pigs that then go over a cliff which means that somebody, the Gentile who owns the herd (because Jews don’t eat pigs, remember) looses a whole bunch of money.  And he makes an entire town mad at him.

In fact, Jesus does stuff like this all the time.  He loves to walk right up to the edge of chaos, of destruction, of sickness, of death, and just get right in there.  Healing people, stilling storms, eating with women, casting out demons, these things are not nice things to do.  They’re dangerous.  They’re liminal.  They transgress all the boundaries.  To use the phrase of Aidan Kavanaugh, they flirt with chaos, flirt with doom.

I want you to think for a moment about boundaries.  Maybe you have a story to share about liminal, in-between places, pushing boundaries in a way that felt dangerous. 

I’ll tell you one.

Before I went to Divinity School, I was a musician.  I played the trombone.  And all my life I had felt this strange discomfort with being a female trombonist.  I chose the instrument in the fourth grade, and I have a clear memory of telling my friend Caroline, who played the flute, that I had chosen trombone.  Really? she queried.  Don’t you think you should have chosen something more…feminine? 

This response stuck with me, and was reinforced by many of the folks I met as I grew older.  It became clear that I had a certain amount of talent as a musician, and in highschool I began taking lessons from a female player named Cathy.  She recommended that, when competing, I wear a suit rather than a dress.  So as not to distract the judges from my playing.

In college I took lessons with a professional player in the city.  Like many brass players before him, he had been trained to be a rigorous, aggressive teacher.  We did drills.  I practiced.  A lot.  He yelled.  He berated.  I was encouraged to not to play with interpretation, but to mimic the performances of great orchestral players.  And I hated it.  Everything I loved about music seemed silenced in my teacher’s studio. 

Until finally I pushed a boundary.  My sophomore year in college I won a concerto concert.  My teacher asked me a few weeks before the big concert what I was planning on wearing.  I told him I was wearing a dress.  His brow furrowed.  In fact, the dress had been hanging in my closet for over a month.  It was strapless.  It had a train.  It was made of this gorgeous raw silk material.  And it was bright, fire-y orange. 

When I walked on stage wearing that dress, I could almost feel the shock and…yes…something like rage palpitating from my teacher.  More than anything else, I felt exposed.  I felt girly and sexy and yes, empowered, but it was tinged with something more ambiguous.  It wasn’t triumphant, but it was dangerous.  I certainly felt like I had crossed a line.

I stopped taking lessons with my teacher at the end of the year, and, for the most part, gave up on a career in classical music.  The dress hadn't shown me who I was, but it had pushed me away from who I wasn't.

We share our sermons at St. Lydia’s.  What stories do you have this evening, inspired by our texts and the words I’ve shared, about pushing boundaries?

Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=570764777]

Oooo, this is a yummy story! You look killer in orange, too.

One of the reasons I'm in theater is that I'm frequently being invited or pushed across my own personal boundaries. I've played psychotic killers, teenage boy rockstars, weak and feeble women, people who fall in love on the spot in front of everybody. It remains a wobbly and frightening experience.

It's also given me new images for God. One of my new favourites is a picture of God as a sort of dark, subterranian ooze, like raw oil, that moves mysteriously in the dark under the ground and then bubbles up messily, catching fire and engulfing everything around it in flames. Usually this happens in an unexpected and inconvenient way. That's the God I try to pray to before I go on stage.

[Emily Scott]

Lord, Lizzie, that's gorgeous! I love how these images of God take different forms in different seasons of our lives...keep telling us what images you're playing with!