My sermon on July 30, 2023 at Bluegrass United Church of Christ in Lexington, Kentucky.
You can hear the audio version at kennybishop.com/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Luke 19: 37-39 (NIV)
Now as [Jesus] was going, the people were spreading their cloaks on the road. And as soon as He was approaching, near the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the miracles which they had seen, shouting: “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”
And yet some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Him, “Teacher, rebuke Your disciples!”
[Mason and I went to a poetry reading the other night. The Carnegie Center here in town hosted several Kentucky queer authors and poets who read and recited some of their writings. Since they were from Kentucky, quite a few of them had a particularly Appalachian perspective, and our friend Silas House, who has become one of the modern leading voices in defending and protecting Appalachian culture and the Appalachian way of life, was the distinguished “keynote.”
Growing up, I spent a lot of time in that part of the world. I have family there. So I connected with a lot of the words I heard from those voices, and I found myself feeling nostalgic for a part of my life that I’ve pretty much just tucked away, not on purpose, but just because I got busy with other things that took me to places other than Appalachia.
I left that event with lots of thoughts - especially about one place in particular and the person who made it so special. I wouldn’t think of myself as a poet, but I felt compelled to write about it.]
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When I was a kid, I was my mamaw’s boy. Growing up, my mamaw was my favorite person in the world, and Mamaw’s house was my favorite place in the world. Every chance I got, every long weekend, every summer, spring, and fall break from school, if I could, I’d spend it at Mamaw’s house.
It wasn’t because her house was luxurious or big. We had more channels on our TV at home than Mamaw had on hers. She lived way up in the mountains, which meant, depending on the weather, sometimes she didn’t get any TV channels at all. When that happened, we broke out the board games.
Mamaw lived pretty simple. She grew a nice garden, tended it herself, and canned or froze enough of the harvest to get through the cold months and give some away. Her deep freeze was always full of stuff that she’d either grown, picked from a patch somewhere, or a neighbor had given her. There was always a side of beef or pork in there too, packaged in white paper and labeled precisely with the cut and the date. Mamaw could work magic with lard, her homemade blackberry jam has never been copied, and I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a better biscuit - probably because of the lard.
The sheets at Mamaw’s house felt better than anywhere else. I think it’s because they were full of mountain air. Mamaw only used the dryer when it was too wet or too cold to hang things outside. The rest of the time, those sheets, the towels, and all our clothes hung swinging in the breeze that constantly blew across the ridge.
I loved snuggling up in those sheets. They felt good. They felt safe.
I loved going to bed at Mamaw’s house. The fresh sheets were one reason of course, but I think maybe it felt so good because I was always so tired at the end of the day. Mamaw and I never stopped doing things. When I wasn’t helping her in the garden, or helping feed the chickens and the ducks, or serving as the “assistant canner,” I was her sidekick on hikes through the mountains or gathering wood for the hotdog and marshmallow roast she’d planned for us that night. Sometimes she’d invite the kids who lived up the road to join us so I’d have people closer to my own age around. That was neat and all, but I’d have been just fine if it was just me and Mamaw.
Bedtime at Mamaw’s house… those sheets… that room…
Mamaw’s house was an old cinderblock church building that had been gutted and turned into a little home. It was simple and not very big, actually kinda small. My favorite room, the room where I slept, was upstairs where the attic used to be. It had been finished out and furnished with a couple of old beds - one of them a metal frame that had been painted a yellowish-cream color and the other a beautiful wood bed that had been stained dark maple. There was an old side-by-side wardrobe where Mamaw kept extra blankets and sheets and pillowcases. I also discovered that she used it to hold her jam cakes. She’d make several of them from scratch sometime around mid-fall, wrap them tight with wax paper and towels, and store them in that antique wardrobe upstairs. Every few days she’d take them out, unwrap them, and “season” them with a distilled down blackberry juice to keep them moist. They were always perfect come Thanksgiving and Christmas. I always thought they tasted a little bit like that old side-by-side wardrobe - or maybe the wardrobe smelled like jam cake.
Sinking into bed at Mamaw’s house was like disappearing. The feather mattress just swallowed you up as soon as you laid down, and crawling under those heavy handmade quilts was the most comforting thing ever!
I loved the dark and the quiet that happened come bedtime at Mamaw’s house.
Mamaw lived out in the country on a mountain ridge. It gets dark in the country at night. And what’s really neat about it is that you see things in the country dark that you can’t see in other places where the nighttime is polluted with 24-hour traffic signals, gas station signs, headlamps, and street lights. There are stars and constellations and lightning bugs and reflections that get swallowed up and hidden in those places, but not out in the country. You can see it all there. I loved the feeling of nighttime at Mamaw’s house.
It gets quiet in the country at night. Well, it gets country quiet. The crickets aren’t quiet, or the frogs, or the owls, or whatever those low-to-the-earth creatures are foraging around all night. I heard the chickens kicking up a fuss one night and saw Mamaw patching up the chicken wire the next morning. A fox or something got in I guess.
One of my favorite things to do at Mamaw’s house was to lay across the porch swing, after supper. That’s where I discovered that there’s a moment when the daytime noises start to fade and the nighttime sounds take over.
It seemed that just as the sun started to disappear there was a brief moment of nearly complete quiet. Even as a kid, it almost felt sacred. Certain birds stop singing, and certain bugs stop buzzing and clicking, and even the frogs would go silent. Then gradually, you start to hear the chirp of crickets, the croaks of the nighttime frogs would pick up, and the songs of the bats and nocturnal birds came awake for the night.
Those are the sounds I’d fall asleep to at Mamaw’s house.
Then, right on cue, as signs of dawn started working light into the eastern sky, the sounds of the night would fade and be replaced by morning bird songs and that blasted rooster that I swear had to be perched right outside my window. Then I’d hear Mamaw stirring in the kitchen, percolating the coffee and making the biscuits. Then I’d smell the coffee, the biscuits, and the bacon. She always made lots and lots of bacon so we could nibble on it all day.
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Pausing for a moment from my story, I’m reminded of a couple of things:
I know that not everyone has had the chance to have a quiet place growing up, or even someone like Mamaw in their life. Some folks have never had a place or a person like that in their life. I wish they had.
I’m realizing more and more just how much more noisy our world has become. I honestly don’t expect it to ever get quieter. It may go through calmer, less noisy moments, but I think we are just going to be living in a noisier world.
It’s not just the gadgets and the machines that are making all the noise. We humans are doing a lot of it too. As wonderful as it can be, we’ve made social media one big noisy mess of a thing. We’re either making noise, or allowing noise, or sometimes even encouraging noise with our likes and shares and retweets (or re-exes or whatever they are now) and with our loud opinions.
Let’s be honest, sometimes we are the noise. But, don’t feel all the way horrible about it. It’s not a new thing.
The scripture that we read this morning takes us back to when Jesus was making his triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Today, we celebrate it as Palm Sunday.
That’s the day we wave our palm branches and join with his followers who were joyfully shouting, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”
It feels good, doesn’t it? It feels good to join that crowd, to join all the other voices that are shouting adoration, praise, and honor to the one who has come to liberate them - to liberate us!
“Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”
That’s verse 38.
“Teacher, rebuke your people!”
That’s verse 39.
In a matter of two bible verses that are back-to-back, we see that not much has changed in the last couple of thousand years since Jesus was around on the earth.
The People who liked him liked him for their own reasons. The people who hated him hated him for their own reasons.
Jesus was not loved or hated in that moment because of who he was, it was because of who he was perceived to be. To some, he was adored because he would set them free from horrible oppression. To others, he was despised because he would remove their power to oppress.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? Voices of happiness mixed with voices of anger, all in the same crowd, all in the same place.
Not much has changed. Not really. It’s still a thing today.
I worry that some folks like the noise. I have some friends who are professional political commentators. They are paid to go on TV and make noise, stir people up. They don’t like it when it gets quiet. They get nervous when there’s no noise.
I think we do too sometimes.
There are apps on our phones that provide white noise because we can’t fall asleep when it’s quiet. I have friends who travel with a small electric fan because they have to have the noise to fall asleep. Full confession, when I drifted off to sleep last night, Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia were in the middle of a fight. I didn’t try to stay awake to see how it would turn out. I knew they’d make up, they always do. But the noise they made helped me fall asleep.
There are so many voices shouting at us all the time. When it’s not the outside voices, it’s often the voices in our heads that won’t let us rest. So we try to cover up that noise with another noise because the internal voices are loudest when it’s quiet.
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I’ll finish my “poem.”
It’s easy for me to look back on Mamaw’s house with such romanticism. As a kid, I may have “helped” around the place a little bit, but Mamaw had a lot on her shoulders. I dug a few potatoes, picked a few tomatoes, and gathered a few cucumbers, but she did most of the stooping and picking and weeding and digging in the garden. I broke some beans and shucked some corn, but she did the hot, hard, and more dangerous parts of canning and freezing.
Mamaw did most all of the work around her place on that ridge. She just let me be there to enjoy it… ‘cause she knew how much I enjoyed it.
The one scary part at Mamaw’s house was the storms, especially at night. The lightning seems a lot closer and a lot brighter when it’s really dark outside. And the thunder seems extra loud when there’s no other noise to drown it out.
I don’t ever remember Mamaw watching the weather forecast, but she always seemed to know when a storm was on the way. She’d do her best to get ahead of it with some kind of comfort. “It’s only thunder,” she’d say. “It’s not like the wind or the lightning or the rain. It’s just noise.
It can’t hurt you.
Remember that.
It’s just noise.”