That Extraordinary Preoccupation With Innocence
That Extraordinary Preoccupation With Innocence
October 26, 2025
Guest Minister: The Reverend Dr. Donald Mackenzie
Readings: Psalm 23; Philippians 2:5-7
Texts: How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday still in me? Leonard Cohen. God will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in their hearts. Holy Qur’an 13:11
Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.
It is a great honor to be asked to preach in one’s home church. Especially in a time such as this. I want to thank JT for the invitation and thank also the entire church staff, the members of the Leadership Council and the Deacons for keeping all of us on the road to tomorrow.
Sometimes I think the deepest yearning of our souls is to be moved, to be inspired. When was the last time you were moved to tears? I don’t mean tears of sorrow. I mean tears of awakening to that larger awareness of who we are and what we are supposed to be doing. Sunday, October 5th was such a time for me when four of our youth gave testimony to their own experiences with mental health, guided by Nina [Jonson]! Why am I asking this? Because most of the time there are things standing in the way of such revelations, such times of really being moved. Those things are the things of our egos, our little selves which we cannot live without, but which also can get in the way of what it means to be truly human, truly alive! Finding ways to open our hearts and step aside from our egos is a huge challenge but opening our hearts is what worship is about. Today’s readings from scripture offer us guidance.
Most of us can recite the twenty-third psalm from memory. But do we know what it is trying to tell us—this truly ancient wisdom? Here is my take: We have everything we need. Green pastures and still waters point to spiritual practices that truly help us to step aside, to empty ourselves of our ordinary human nature concerns. And then what comes next? Those practices restore our souls, the soul, that vast uncharted territory that constitutes the larger part of who we are. Again, access to our souls is most of the time blocked by our ordinary concerns, coping with life’s problems, being responsible, being thoughtful. But it does not stop there. We are led in paths of righteousness meaning paths of justice and this is not “by-the-way.” This is what it is all about. The rest of the psalm is a reassurance that the first part is true. When the passage from Philippians says that Jesus emptied himself, that is one of the most important lines in scripture. It tells us that he stepped aside from the center of his own being. The Christian life is not about personal salvation. It is about loving God and loving our neighbors, trying to help each other. To connect to the wisdom of our tradition, we have to permit eternity to break in, open our hearts, eclipse our egos, stop us from being full of ourselves, and empty us and make us ready, once again to be filled and to act.
The theme for this sermon is this: we need to be emptied to be filled, and we need to be filled in order to act using unconditional love to make real the values that flow from unconditional love: cooperation, compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation and justice. Empty, fill, act. We do well on filling and are getting better on acting. But emptying? We do not like that. The culture doesn’t like it. And yet, without emptying and its many forms including letting go, compromising and even sacrificing, we can be stuck and not able to be open to the new. Emptying does not mean forgetting. It means stepping aside from our egos, our little selves.
One of the gifts of our past comes from the ministry of Howard Conn who did not include a confession of sin in our liturgy. That rightfully separated us from the medieval church’s salvation industry, the obsession with personal salvation, something most protestant churches adopted which often led and leads to shame and guilt—neither productive. So at least we have not had to contend with that. But what he did left a space in the place where emptying would be. We have a call to worship and opening hymn of praise and we light a peace candle, but even so our emptying is not complete. We are lacking a prayer that confesses the realty of our beings as Christian people. Today’s liturgy contains such a prayer. Emptying, filling, acting.
We must be moved to be emptied. We must be moved even for a split second. I return now to the title of today’s sermon: “That Extraordinary Preoccupation with Innocence.” That is the first half of a sentence from a novel by the 20th century writer John Cheever. “That extraordinary preoccupation with innocence that absorbs people on a beach before the fall of darkness.” The word innocence points to the emptying when eternity breaks into ordinary time and if you think of the time between the moment when the sun touches the horizon and the time it disappears—it is that split second of emptying. The sentence suggests the calm that envelopes people in community experiencing such a split second. Emptying. But we, in community, believe that the sun will rise again. We are filled by that, but how?
Join me in a moment of imaginative reflection. Watching a sunset can be a kind of spiritual experience. When it happens on a beach, especially in the company of other people, there is a sense of communal emptying. Innocence by itself suggests a kind of absence, even a kind of emptiness. Coupled with the emptying of light from the world, it can be powerful if we are paying attention. When we lived in Hanover, NH, we had the good fortune of renting a house on Martha’s Vineyard for a couple of weeks every summer. During those weeks we sometimes went to the fishing village of Menemsha where people would gather to watch the sunset. Menemsha was a place known for the power of that moment of the sun setting. Before the sunset, people would be visiting, maybe having a glass of wine. There was an air of centering congeniality. But when the sun reached the horizon, all noise ceased until the orange ball disappeared. Then, in the darkness, people would quietly gather their belongings and head home.
Yes, between the sunset and the sunrise, there is darkness. Darkness, innocence and confessing truth are all aspects of emptying. That is why it is so important that we light the peace candle, a flame burning at the center of our life together lighting the way forward. The flame also reminds us of where we are. On March 15, 1965, a time different from and not so different from our own, Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of congress with a speech designed to support the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The speech began, “At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in the unending search for freedom.” At Plymouth Congregational Church here in Minneapolis, we are at such a place and time. But ours is not a search for freedom. It is a search for increasing wisdom and awareness in the practice of Christian ministry in a time when what used to seem certain and steady is no longer. We are no longer what we used to be here at Plymouth, but we do not yet know what we are to become. The light of yesterday is fading. But, as a congregation, we believe that the light will come again. Our emptiness will be filled. The great Roman Catholic mystic Thomas Merton said “the most wonderful moment of the day is that when creation, in its innocence, asks permission to be once again.” Emptying, filling, acting.
The flame also points to the reassurance of God’s steadfastness. God will carry us through the darkness. There is part of a poem that, for me, says it best. The poem is Happiness by Jane Kenyon. The word happiness points, for Jane Kenyon, to her understanding of God. The middle stanza reads “No, happiness is the uncle you never knew who flies a single engine plane onto a grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town and enquires at every door until he finds you asleep midafternoon as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair.” The persistence of God to hold us in the great cloud of mystery that we so blythely call the Holy Spirit, especially in our most desperate moments, is the reassurance we need. When visiting patients in the hospital, I always used the same prayer because I felt that, in those circumstances, there was only one prayer. “We thank you for each other, for your holy presence with us and for the reassurance that you are always with us, that you love us and that you never ever leave us alone.” Extraordinary. Amen.