That Summer Feeling, Andy’s Last Sermon and Other Thoughts

 

That Summer Feeling, Andy’s Last Sermon and Other Thoughts

Jonathan Richman sings about “that Summer feeling.”

Protests in the air. 

Classes ending. 

Judson kids day was around the corner, with a Southern drawl, which always kept things interesting and vaguely familiar, my friend Andy engaged us in a distinct West Village theology of living, peppered with questions of faith and meaning, references to Mary Oliver’s poetry and Ruby Rims’ drag shows. He was our kids Sunday school teacher for years and years, greeting us all with a smile through the years, as class after class grew up. Our kids finished grade school, high school, and entered college. Some came back. Others never returned. It wasn’t always easy getting everyone there. Old ghosts of parents past, flaws, memories of when they dragged there, often accompanied us. Sunday was a time to think about it. The teenager joined me for a bike ride to Judson. 

June 8th.

Andy gave his last sermon at Judson. 

The most important story you will find here is what you do with your own life, said Andy on his 32nd and last Judson Kids day, offering the kids bibles with their names on them. Whatever you do with the Bible, try not to hurt anyone.  Thank you for looking out for us through the years Andy.

The following were words from his last sermon:

“We Need the Eggs 

Out on the ocean sailing away

I can hardly wait to see you come of age

But I guess we’ll both just have to be patient

It’s a long way to go

A hard row to hoe

But in the meantime

Before you cross the street

Take my hand

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans

 

– from “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” by John Lennon

 

 

In the closing scene from the 1977 Academy Award-winning film Annie Hall, Woody Allen – I know, I know, Woody Allen.  And on my last Kids Day!  Once again, we find ourselves standing at the intersection of art and the artist.  Whaddayagonnado?

 

Anyway, in the closing scene, Woody Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, having said goodbye to Annie Hall, played by the fabulous Diane Keaton, tells an old joke:  “This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, my brother’s crazy.  He thinks he’s a chicken.’  And the doctor says, ‘Well, why don’t you turn him in?’  And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’”  And then Alvy Singer says, “I guess that’s pretty much how I feel about relationships.  You know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd but I guess we keep goin’ through it because most of us need the eggs.”  Well, that’s pretty much how I feel about the Bible.  You know, Bible stories are totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but I guess we keep reading them because most of us need the eggs.

 

That may seem like an odd confession coming from someone who has spent the past 32 years trafficking in Bible stories, among many other things, and watching Judson Sunday Schoolers try to make sense of it all.  Talking snakes, talking bushes, 969-year-old geezers like Methuselah, 90-year-old senior citizen Sarah giving birth to her son Isaac, voices coming out of the ether, angels popping up all over the place, Mary’s virgin birth, Jesus’ resurrection - Judson Sunday Schoolers are no strangers to the irrational.  It could be a story about a woman famous for taking a bath who just happens to be named Bathsheba, or as this year’s crop of Judson kids prefer, BATHsheba.  Or it might be the story of Jacob wrestling a man who turns out to be an angel who come to find out later in the story was actually God.  Jacob and God wrestle all through the night, and Jacob has God in a pretty good “one-leg-over-the shoulder-Jerry Ford,” as Monty Python might describe that wrestling hold, forcing God to tap out, protesting “Let me go, for it is daybreak,” leading multiple generations of Judson Sunday Schoolers to wonder “was Jacob wrestling God or Dracula?”

 

Of course, no stories lend themselves to the irrational quite like the stories involving Moses.

 

One year, after several weeks spent teaching our “Elementals,” as I like to call our elementary schoolers, all about Moses, everything from basket baby to the Promised Land, I decided to stage a contest – “Stump the Chump,” I called it – to see how much of this Moses mess the kids had retained.  Cleo Turrentine, Lee Crawford and Jeff Turrentine’s youngest daughter, who was in attendance that Sunday but had not been present for any of the Moses lessons and, casting no aspersions on Lee and Jeff, had clearly never even heard of Moses before, watched with a somewhat bewildered look on her face as her classmates answered one question after another.  “How did baby Moses escape the ‘death to all Hebrew boys’ decree?” I asked.  “His sister Miriam placed him in a basket and hid it among the reeds of the Nile River where he was discovered by the Pharoah’s daughter who had come to the river to bathe, and she took him home to the palace, decided to adopt him, and raised Moses as royalty,” the class answered matter-of-factly.  Cleo became more and more agitated with each new question and response.  When I asked what drew Moses’ attention one day while watching over his sheep, and the kids answered, “God talking out of a burning bush,” Cleo reacted as if we were all nuts.  “A talking bush?” she asked, in her best you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me voice.  By the time the kids were naming the plagues, Cleo could contain herself no more:  “Frogs? she said.  Frogs?!”

 

Speaking of frogs, not too long ago, in a lesson on the Passover, I asked Jenny Selig and Dan Funderburgh’s son Sebastian to name some of the plagues Moses called down upon Pharoah and the Egyptians.  Sebastian rattled off “hail, frogs, gnats,” and what I thought he said, “salmon.”  Turns out I misheard him.  He actually said “famine,” but I ask you, would the story have made any less sense if it had been salmon?

 

Many years ago, I was teaching an earlier generation of Elementals yet another lesson about Moses and the Ten Commandments.  When we got to commandment number seven, the one about adultery, I explained to the children that adultery is when a married person sleeps with someone other than their spouse.  I was thisclose to moving on to commandment number eight – and be honest, you have no idea which one that is, do you?  “Thou shalt not steal.”  Where’ve you been the last 32 years?  Like I was saying, I was thisclose to moving on when one of the children said, “Andy, I don't get it.  Jesus was the son of Mary and Joseph, and yet God is supposed to be Jesus’ real dad.  How is that possible?”  Did I mention I was thisclose, and now you are asking me to explain who’s the adulterer within the context of the immaculate conception.  But never fear.  Just as I was about to come up with something – God only knows what – a young Satchel Beer, Cheri Kroon and Ken Beer’s son, answered the question for me.  Raising both hands, he said, “I know how it happened.  Sperm from heaven!”  “Sounds good to me,” I said.  “Who wants to go play in the gym?”

 

Sperm from heaven!  I thought seriously about using that as the title of my Kids Day speech that year, but back in those days, they used to post the title of each week’s sermon on Judson’s message board outside the church.  You put “Sperm from Heaven!” on the message board, there aren’t enough chairs in the world for everyone who would want to attend that service.

 

Sperm from heaven, salmon from heaven, it all begs the question, why?  Why do we keep returning to these crazy stories?

 

Annie Dillard might have an answer for us.  I have always been such a huge fan of Annie Dillard - An American Childhood, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - I’ve relied on her insights for many a Kids Day speech through the years, no less so today.  In this morning’s New Testimony, Ms. Dillard reminds us that one of the reasons we are drawn to these “Sunday school watercolor figures,” as she calls them, so wonderfully imagined by those ancient storytellers, is that even today we can find our story in theirs.  In her book, For the Time Being, Ms. Dillard points out:  “[T]he absolute is available to everyone in every age.  There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.  There is no less holiness at this time . . . than there was the day the Red Sea parted[.]  In any instant the bush may flare[.]

 

One would be hard pressed indeed to find a more imaginative watercolor figure than Jonah.  I chose “Jonah” for today’s Ancient Testimony for several reasons.  One, I have been trying to squeeze Dan Albergotti’s beautiful poem, “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale,” into a Kids Day service for ages now.  The poem speaks to finding ourselves in the unexpected time, the desperate time, even the horrific time – a breakup, a divorce, cancer, the death of a loved one, COVID, Trump – and how we might mark our days, perhaps even discover our purpose if given another chance.

 

Another reason I chose this morning’s particular Ancient Testimony is because when it comes to the totally irrational, it doesn’t get any more absurd than the story of Jonah and the whale.  The original Hebrew went with “great fish,” but the Greeks would later translate it as “huge whale.”  I prefer the Greeks.  Who doesn’t love a great whale tale, from Jonah to Herman Melville to everyone’s favorite fake marine biologist, George Costanza, and the story of his rescuing a beached whale by pulling a Titleist golf ball out of its blow hole.  “The sea was angry that day, my friends, like an old man trying to return soup at a deli.”

 

The story of Jonah is the story of a man called by God, who instead chose to run away.  It’s a sailor’s tale of a storm at sea, a man sacrificed to appease an angry god, and best of all a sea monster!  It’s a story of reassessment, but in the end, the story of Jonah is the story of unexpected mercy, both for the Assyrians and for Jonah, which like all acts of mercy, becomes a teachable moment.

 

As far as Judson Sunday School is concerned, when it comes to the story of Jonah and the whale, or for that matter, any Bible story, what I’ve always told your children is to look for the truth within the story rather than the truth of the story.  Don’t get caught up in all the bells and whistles and all of the Bible’s fireworks.  Don’t let the craziness turn you around.  It’s not about the whale.  It’s never about the whale, or the talking bush, or frogs falling from the sky, or even virgins giving birth.  The point of the story, the point of every one of these stories – the egg we need, to borrow a metaphor from Annie Hall – is the call.  The call into relationship.  The call to service.  At the heart of all our stories lies the hope that somehow in the face of life’s mystery, we are known, and we are needed.

 

If you are looking for yet another reason why I chose the story of Jonah for today’s service, then how about this:  when it comes to a “calling” story, I think I can give Jonah a run for his money.

 

I grew up in the church.  I was raised a Southern Baptist.  I was licensed to preach when I was only 16 years old.  I was a ministerial student in college, Samford University, in Birmingham, Alabama, where I majored in religion, and would spend my college years preaching in numerous churches, working as a youth director in several more, and even serving as an interim pastor at a little church out in the country, Oakdale Baptist, in Ramer, Alabama.  Y’all know where Ramer is, don’t you?

 

Sometime around my junior year of college, I began to have a lot of questions about my faith.  Intellectually, Southern Baptists – well, how would you finish that sentence?  Exactly, bless their hearts.  And, to be honest, even Christianity was making less and less sense to me.  As the late comedian Bill Hicks used to joke, the great message of Christianity is “eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God’s infinite love.”

 

So, like I was saying, I had a lot of questions, and the church wasn’t exactly providing any answers.  Every week, it was the same old hymns, the same old sermons, everything designed for your life in the next world, not this one.  By the end of my junior year, I’d had enough, and upon graduation, I boarded, not a ship bound for Tarshish, but a Trailways bus bound for New York City.

 

Now in those days abiding in the same city lived an old college buddy of mine, better known to you as Abigail Hastings.  One day, Abigail invited me to Judson Memorial Church.  She went on and on about how Judson was a different kind of church.  For one thing, it was American Baptist, not Southern Baptist, and it was extremely liberal.  Extremely liberal, she said.  And while the idea of church still held no appeal for me, the idea of brunch afterwards at El Coyote – y’all remember that old Tex-Mex joint on the corner of Broadway and Ninth?  Well, that tempted me greatly.  Thus, it came to pass that on October 30th, 1983, Halloween Sunday, I visited Judson for the first time.

 

Let me just say that as first impressions go, I found Judson to be rather . . . wanting, for even the good people of Judson chose not to sing a new song unto the Lord but the same damn hymns I’d grown up singing all my life:  “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” two songs I could sing with my eyes closed and not miss a word.  The liturgist for that Sunday was the Reverend Howard Moody, a sixty-something-year-old ex-Marine and former Southern Baptist, sporting a flattop.  Sister, please.  If I had a nickel for every time I’d had to listen to a Southern Baptist with a flat top, I’d be rich as Rockefeller.  Howard read something by some feminist poet, and it was pretty good, I guess, but that was immediately followed by yet another congregational hymn, “Just as I Am.”  Are you kidding me, Hastings?  “Just As I Am” was the altar call of just about every church service I attended growing up.  It is six verses long and bitterly despised by anyone hoping to get a decent table among the after-church lunch crowd.  I tell you what, when Judson sang “Just as I Am” that Sunday, if looks could kill, Abigail Hastings would not be alive and sitting here with you today.

 

After we finished singing and Howard had read the scripture, a rather matronly looking woman came forward to sing the special music, but by then, I had lost complete interest in all things Judson, paying no attention to the singer until the darndest thing happened – she began to undress.  Hello!  Slowly unbuttoning her blouse and unzipping her skirt, she continued to sing.  Now granted, the singer was no centerfold, but necked is necked, and in church, no less!  The more she sang, the more clothes she took off and the more excited I became.  But then it got weird.  When the woman got down to nothing but her underwear, it slowly began to dawn on me that this was not a woman at all.  It was a man!  Of course, if I had bothered to look at the bulletin, I could have read the name of the soloist, “Mr. Ruby Rims.”

 

Now some of you are probably looking at me and thinking to yourself, how gullible can a person be?  Or how long had it been since you’d seen a necked woman?  Well, not to brag, I’d seen my share of necked women – I was even married to one at the time.  And, not for nothing, but in my defense, there weren’t a lot of drag queens at Oakdale Baptist Church in Ramer, Alabama – that I knew of anyway.  Ruby was my first.  And so, to all you skeptics, let me simply say this:  I don’t know what you looked like back in 1983, but I do know one thing for certain - the person that began singing the solo that Sunday morning was a woman.

 

Down to his underwear, Ruby began to dress himself again, this time in men’s clothing, as he continued to sing Charles Aznavour’s “What Makes a Man a Man.”  It was a remarkable performance and come to find out later that it was Ruby’s first Sunday at Judson as well.

 

After Ruby finished singing, the Reverend Lee Hancock gave a meditation on Halloween and the masks we hide behind in life and the importance of accepting each other for who we truly are.  It was intelligent and challenging, and once I was able to stop giggling any time someone mentioned Judson by name – It was a man! – I began attending services here.

 

Judson would reinvent church for me.  It taught me that church can be anything we want it to be.  Judson gave me the space to redefine what faith could mean for me.  Why should we be confined to the restrictions of the small-minded?  If God is anything, then surely, she is greater than all the limitations placed on her.  Talk about unexpected mercy.

 

Ten years after that Halloween Sunday, when Judson’s Religious Education Coordinator job opened up, Judson called me, and I gladly accepted – just as long as we change that title.  Religious Education Coordinator, ugh.  Grand Poobah, now that’s got style.

 

In her signature poem, “Wild Geese,” my favorite poet and patron saint, Mary Oliver, writes:

 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. . . .

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.  

 

However, you choose to characterize the call – the call of God, the call of the world - it is the same call heard by Jonah and all those watercolor figures we’ve been reading about in Judson Sunday School for the past 32 years.  It is a call into relationship, a call to service – and that call can lead each of us to the most unexpected of places, to the most unimaginable delights.  Just look at me:  by the grace of God, the power of enduring friendship, and the mysterious allure of a drag queen, it led me here to you.  And I thank you.”

Thank you for all the stories Andy. 

The stories were many all summer long. 

Saturday June 7th.

Drove through the rain with Al, chatting about Howard Zinn and the world, history and road trips, C Train and a 1969  journey West, Blood Sweat and Tears, out for lunch with mom, sharing oysters, talking about Charlotte's Web, Velveteen Rabbit, old movies, orchids, the garden, Shannon's journey to Berlin, and memories, back home in the rain, back to holy brooklyn, bond street, a bend in the river, the royal tennenbaums, time passing.

"You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.

But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand."

Margery Williams -The Velveteen Rabbit, 1922.

Earlier in the day, I biked over to Federal Plaza and the Tesla dealership on Washington Street to join actup!!! See my friends and scream.

WHAT: AIDS Blood On Their Hands

WHEN: Sat 6/7. 12pm sharp  to 1pm

WHERE: Tesla Showroom. 860 Washington St. at W13th St.

WHO: ACT UP/NY, Housing Works, and friends

ACT UP returns to Tesla to say goodbye (or not) to Elon Musk.

With Musk pretending to step back after setting in motion the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, it's more important than ever to remind him, Trump, Rubio and RFK Jr that they will be responsible for the projected deaths of 4.8 million by 2028 if funding is not restored to PEPFAR and US AID.

ACT UP! Fight Back! Fight AIDS!

Thanks for the great last pics, Ellen Neipris and Eric Sawyer.

June 6th

Rode up to 96th Street to interview Irwin about his life. 

Back to Brooklyn, through the rain, for 

Book Launch: Motion Detector by Drew Gardner

“Setting things right / takes the example of a unifying contradiction.” —Drew Gardner, Motion Detect

Baby C stood when Drew invited up other poets to read on a magic night.

June 3

To DC and Back for demos.

June 2

Family outing to see the Phoenician Scheme

June 1

Woke up on a delicious, lazy Sunday reading Satanic  Verses for hours. Biked to Judson for the Gospel According to Sex Workers, the place is popping with faaabulous people, offering modern and ancient testimony on bodies as temples, to be worshipped and violated, as consent and desire dictate. Ancient Testimony I Song of Songs 4:7 You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you. Ancient Testimony II from various versions of The Gospel of Matthew 21:31-32

[Jesus said:] “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the sex workers are going into the Kin-dom of God ahead of you.” Biked east to Tompkins, where Dana was holding court, talking about his old buddy Abby Hoffman and the drug war with Colin and me. Some kids came to talk with us. Dana's greatest line. That young kid sitting to my left joined the conversation and asked Dana's what he thought about AI. Dana replied: "AI = Average Idiot." Haha. Walked to visit Ally and the Village Works  crew.  And off for a modern take on Othello and its existentialist questions about love, sex and jealousy.  "No way but this, Killing myself, to die upon a kiss. It is silliness to live when to live is torment, and then have we a prescription to die when death is our physician." I walked out into the summer air. 

Back home to Wild Strawberries, Bergman's 1957 masterpiece with the crew. No regrets, just reflection on a day in the life, a holy road through memories about it all:

"Marianne Borg: Sleep well?

Professor Isak Borg: Yes, but recently I've had the weirdest dreams, as if I must tell myself something I won't listen to when I'm awake.

Marianne Borg: What's that?

Professor Isak Borg: That I'm dead. Although I'm alive."

June 1

The whole neighborhood was out. There was a fur free protest of one of my neighbors who works fir conde naste. Mom and I had lunch at Shanghai Bun.

"Dim sum & other traditional Chinese classics are prepared at this unassuming outfit in a strip mall." Converged for stoop drinks and the Knicks raged into the long dark night.

May 26

Dana pontificating... nothing like meeting the Yippee legend, chatting in the park, offering insights into the problems of the world. As he said last year. “It was no January 6 Capitol Riot,” he fumed. “It was the January 6 Putsch — and it came unglued, just like the Beer Hall Putsch,” he said, referring to Hitler’s failed 1923 coup." 

A few notes of they summer. 

Next stop Los Angeles for graduation. I remember the riots in LA when i graduated from college. Looks like the circle will be unbroken.