Texts: Isaiah 51: 1-3; Acts 17: 22-28

The Deeper the Wound, the Sweeter My Song[1]

            The place to start is in a grove of trees, deep in the Cuban countryside.  We walked across a rutted track in a field, and as we walked, the sounds of drumming and singing could be heard drifting from among the trees.  As we made our way into the grove, the drumming stopped, and we were greeted warmly by several residents of a nearby village.  They were pleased to see us, and lopped off the tops of coconuts with machetes, serving us the sweet water found inside the fruit.  As we drank, three drums were warmed by a fire, in order to tune them to their proper pitch.

            Soon, the drumming began.  Over the course of the next several hours, there were sung prayers to ancestors and to spiritual entities called orishas.  There were visitations from those orishas, who took over the bodies of their worshipers in order to bless and minister to all of us gathered in that grove of trees.  One woman, possessed by a water spirit named Yemaya, hugged and blessed each of us as the drums encouraged her movements.  Another became possessed by a spirit called Babaluaye, who had been inflicted by ailments, and now roams the earth as a consoler, and a healer.  Another became possessed by an unnamed spirit of the dead, one of the ancestors, and called for something sweet on her tongue, a reminder of the pleasures found among the living.  It was all a wonder to behold.

            I was there as a member of a journey led by Ned Sublette, who spoke from this pulpit earlier in the year, and who has done remarkable work on the music and cultural legacy of the black Atlantic world.  Though it was a journey meant to expose travelers to the religious practices of Cubans, I was the sole minister in the group, and I was often greeted with a kind of bemused curiosity, and not a little wariness, at least initially, when I shared what I do for a living.  But that went away when I told my fellow travelers about you, and about the kind of things we tend to get into around here.  Even if there was a broad reluctance about institutional forms of religion like the church, what I sensed among my fellow travelers was a hunger for spiritual experience, and an openness to the mysteries we were encountering in places like that sacred grove of trees.  It’s a hunger I share.

            But let me back up, and explain just how I got to Cuba, and why those sounds, those rituals, and those ceremonies have begun to mean so much to me.  As most of you know, I’m taking a kind of staggered sabbatical leave throughout 2020, chasing some of the spiritual leads and intuitions I’ve had over the previous seven years as your minister.  Throughout that time, I’ve become interested in how human beings, in all of our multiplicity and complexity, touch the sacred, which is to say, how we remain in touch with the deepest and truest parts of ourselves during moments of crisis, or pressure, or worse.  I want to know how joy, and how festivity, are cultivated as strategic healing practices amidst those conditions.  I want to know how certain groups of people have managed not only to survive, but to thrive under conditions of immense struggle.  But I also wish to know how those life sustaining resources translate into wider visions of social flourishing.  I wish to know how all of those elements combine to manifest the sacred, because I believe they possess wisdom that we can all of us use in our lives.

            That’s part of a wider project that this church has pursued for nearly forty years now, if not longer, opening ourselves to the rituals, practices and perspectives of those on the underside of history – in South Dakota and South Africa, in Palestine and in Haiti, and more recently in our refugee and immigration work.  It’s a way of being in the world that I’ve called “stretch theology.”

            For those who haven’t heard me talk about it, “stretch theology” is a phrase borrowed from a jazz trumpeter named Christian Scott aTunde Ajuah, who released an album called Stretch Music a few years ago.  In his liner notes to that album, aTunde Ajuah says: “We are attempting to stretch—not replace—jazz’s rhythmic, melodic and harmonic conventions to encompass as many musical forms/languages/cultures as we can.”

            Replace “jazz” with “theology” in Scott’s quote, and you have a marvelous formulation for how the life of faith might function in the 21^st century – stretching, not replacing, theology’s conventions with as many forms, languages, and cultures as we can.  It’s an alluring way to configure the practices that we call church.  We remain firmly grounded in the stories and teachings of Jesus.  We remain grounded in the wisdom of the Apostle Paul, just as the words of the prophets continue to guide us.  For us, it is as the prophet Isaiah wrote: “Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and the quarry from which you were dug.”  That’s counsel we keep around here.  We’re not replacing the historic conventions of our faith.  But we are stretching it. 

If our foundation can be glimpsed in that line from the prophet Isaiah, the stretch can be found in the restless movements of the Apostle Paul, who spent his life criss-crossing the Mediterranean, and making connections among the people who lived in that part of the world.  Stretch theology is born from a similar impulse, though we’re not interested in making converts.  We do it in a spirit of reverence and humility, the same reverence with which Paul greeted the Athenians in our morning passage.  Paul observes among their worship an altar to an unknown god, and he uses that altar as a bridge, as a means of connecting two disparate ways of being.  It’s true, many have used Paul’s journeys to justify a program of cultural and religious chauvinism, but I would have us treat his affirmation of the altar to the unknown god, one in whom we live and move and have our being, as an early instance of stretch theology, a mode of faith fitting for the 21^st century.

            That’s something of why I went to Cuba.  But there were other reasons as well.  On previous trips to that island, I’ve been transfixed by the complex system of music and worship that continues to animate many people in that country.  The polyrhythms practiced by the drums and the visual beauty of altars composed for the orishas moved me deeply, and I wished to know more.  It all comprises a hidden form of modernity, what I’d like to call an alter-modernity, forged in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade.  It continues to inform the lives of people living throughout the Americas, in the US, in Cuba, in Haiti, in Brazil, and many other places.  Traces of it can be found in popular culture, like in Beyonce’s Lemonade, or in the young adult novels my daughter Sabina is reading by Tomi Adeyemi.  Learning to read these traditions is a part of what it means to be religiously literate in our pluralized world.  But it’s also what it means to become a better neighbor, as we learn to love the people with whom we share that world. In any event, if you want to understand African religions as they’ve developed in the Americas, the place to go is Cuba.

            Let me return to that scene in the sacred grove.  It would be easy to misunderstand it all, given the ways those expressions have been mischaracterized by colonialists and fundamentalists alike as a part of the occult.  Please.  These are world historical faiths, every bit as rich and as narratively complex as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.  They deserve to be treated as such.  Most of what transpired in that grove came from two ancient sources: the Kongo tradition, the oldest of the African traditions in Cuba, with practices that originated in parts of the present day Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as parts of Angola; and the Yoruba tradition, with practices that originated in what is now Nigeria and parts of Benin, arriving in Cuba mostly in the 19^th century.  Those traditions now overlap, and are often practiced side by side, by the same people, the way some of you sometimes move back and forth between FCCOL and some other Christian expressions.  The Kongo tradition is practiced under the name of Palo, and it attempts to stay connected to the world of one’s ancestors through a deep attention to the natural world.  By contrast, the Yoruba tradition is practiced under the name of Santeria, and it attempts to connect to a dynamic pantheon of divinities called orishas, spirits brought to the new world by the enslaved, who continue to provide strength and wisdom to those who revere them.

Used together, both Palo and Santeria can be understood as creating liturgies that provide instruction for generous, thoughtful, and wise living.  Like our own services, they begin with a call to worship, an invitation to the spirits, and then they move into the singing of praise.  They include moments of offering, and if the ceremony goes well, they culminate in a visitation from one of the orishas, who, it is said “speaks in the voice of Africa.”  For all the outward differences, as a minister, I couldn’t help but feel a close kinship with the structure of each ceremony.  And though this is a world that feels relatively far from our lives here in Old Lyme,