Michael Zuckerman at Morning Prayers
Michael Zuckerman
Remarks at Morning Prayers
Memorial Church, Harvard University
Saturday, February 18, 2012
“Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10)
Good morning, and thank you for being here on, of all mornings, a Saturday morning. When I was still an undergraduate at the College, my attendance record at Saturday Morning Prayers was not exactly something to write home about. (Unless you were writing home to say, “Dear Mrs. Zuckerman, your son needs to start waking up earlier than noon on Saturdays, he’s become a real degenerate.”) So, as we pray this morning, I am thrilled to see each of you, and to be reminded that, through the mercy of God, we occasionally are let off the hook from what Luke 6:38 promises, and find that the measure we give is actually exceeded by the measure we get back.
I am also blessed, this morning, to have a few old friends visiting here in the pews and so, even though they were kind enough to wake up early this morning and come join in this 375-year-old tradition of worship, I am going to take this opportunity to go ahead and embarrass them and pray a little bit about friendship.
My text this morning comes from the Old Testament, from the Book of Ecclesiastes:
“Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10)
I chose this text because it calls to mind a story that’s extremely important to me.
The story is my own story, and it begins with a 13-year-old kid who’s pretty angry at the world, who’s lost his father just a year before and who has started spending his time outside of school in less than productive ways. Actually, you’d have to call them criminal ways.
And eventually, without getting into any of the details here in a place of worship, it leads to this 13-year-old kid having to do community service after school. And this kid is still pretty angry at the world, he’s not so optimistic about the future, he feels knocked down and he feels knocked out.
But this kid has a friend – actually he has a few friends. Thanks to one of the friends – and the friend’s mom – he gets set up with this terrific community service partnership between two local organizations, a program that’s going to have him doing art projects and mentoring every week with homeless children who live in the strip motels on Route 1 outside Trenton, NJ.
And another friend – who didn’t get in trouble and didn’t have to do the community service in the first place – tells him, completely unprompted, that he’s going to start volunteering alongside him, that he’s going to accompany him every week, to spend hours with these younger kids on these art projects, just so he doesn’t have to go it alone.
And that’s what the friend does, and every week they meet up and walk into town together, where they’re doing the art projects with the homeless children, and before long it’s the highlight of the week and something they find themselves looking forward to.
And actually those friends are in the pews this morning – Eddie, whose mom helped found the community service program, and Dimitri who volunteered alongside every week – and that experience ends up being such a transformational one for everyone involved – including the 13-year-old kid, who I can now start referring to as myself, because this is the point in the story where I start to fully recognize him again – that it lifted all of us up. It lifted me up, lifted my friend up, hopefully lifted the kids living in the motels up, and lifted us all up, I think, to be helping lift each other up.
And what this story has to do with faith is simply this:
That one of the great mysteries of faith – one of the great joys of faith for many of us here who love the life of the mind – is the effort to try to conceive of the inconceivable, to try to comprehend the incomprehensible, to try to summon up the unsummonable, which is the majesty of God Almighty.
And although we know that we, in this City of Man, are still restricted to seeing only through a glass darkly, for my money, when we think of what God is, of what it is we can do to be most like God, it’s not to try to seize the commanding heights of societal power and influence, or to try to decipher the formulas of the cosmos, or to try to engineer the scientific mechanisms of life and death.
In all those things, we are pretty poor imitators of the God who made this universe with its crashing waves and roaring winds and animals that graze the fields and man himself, whom God is so mindful of (Psalm 8:4) for reasons that pass understanding.
For my money, it is these simple acts of friendship, this walking alongside one another that we hear of in Ecclesiastes, in which we most approach the true majesty of God, in which we come closest to being vessels of His grace, just as we know, from Exodus, that “The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11).
And we hear the same, from our dearly beloved brother the Rev. Peter Gomes, who responded to all those who asked, “Where is God?” by saying that “God is where God is always – by the side of those who need him. He is not in front to lead, not behind to push, not above to protect, but beside us to get us through: ‘Beside us to guide us / Our God with us joining.’”
So as we go forth from here on this Saturday morning, let us go forth full of thanks for those who have walked beside us; let us go forth full of hope for a world that God blesses with His and each other’s companionship; and let us go forth full of joy to be able walk alongside those we meet who, just before we come upon them, still walk alone.
And so let us pray:
Dear Lord our God, our rock and our redeemer,
Our friend in troubled and still waters alike,
Continue to stand beside us and guide us,
That we may lift up our brothers and sisters,
As you lift each of us up, in our own times of falling.
Amen.
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Michael Zuckerman serves as David Gergen’s research assistant.
3 Responses to Guest Post: Remarks at Harvard’s Morning Prayers by Research Assistant Michael Zuckerman
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Sasha says:
I came across this quite randomly when looking for professors’ addresses at CPL. This was so moving – on what has become a Beautiful saturDAY (following a Dismal, gray morn) – it almost made me cry. You are an inspirational writer, please use your gift and know that the good friends with whom you surround yourself make you a better person as you do the same service for them. In gifting one another this way, you celebrate G*d or whatever power you believe in in the most beautiful, purest way. Success – David is a very kind person to work with; I knew his asst years ago, Colleen.
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Michael,
This is beautiful. “We gather together” is one of my favorite hymns. And when I try to explain to people why I am religious, the answer always comes back to things that are inconceivable.
Thank you for bringing me to this. It will go up on the Social Studies “Wall of Fame.” All best, Anya