Sermon on November 16, 2025
“Life Doesn’t Rhyme“
By: The Rev. Mike Kinman
Hear the Gospel according to Rainer Maria Rilke
God speaks to each of us as she makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
I have three images for you this morning.
Three snapshots or vignettes to rest on your heart.
Three images, some poetry and a question.
Here is the first.
I just came back from Rwanda where I spent time with Nicholas. Nicholas is perhaps both the most centered and the most humble person I have ever met. He is also a brilliant botanist who has spent the past 20 years of his life working with survivors of the Rwandan genocide as together they heal and gain economic agency through distilling and producing essential oils that come from eucalyptus, geranium, rosemary and more.
Nicholas and our group from Thistle Farms Global traveled more than 16 hours through rural Rwanda over two days visiting these sites of resurrection healing.
I felt a deep disconnect traveling those roads. Roads that led us through some of the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen were also roads where thousands of slaughtered bodies had once lay..
It was on a road like that that Nicholas and his wife, Elsie, were fleeing during the genocide toward the DR Congo. It was perhaps on the very road we traveled that they were stopped at a checkpoint by the Interhamwe militia, one of the military arms of the Hutu power movement that rose up against the Tutsi in 1994.
In a real sense, there are no Hutu and Tutsi. Hutu and Tutsi were designations invented by colonial rulers to divide and control the people. They were socio-economic and not ethnic labels. Tutsi were wealthy pastoralists, they owned cattle. Hutus were poorer farmers.
The Belgians later layered eugenics on top of that, part of which was saying that Tutsi were tall, slender and aristocratic and Hutu were shorter, stockier and indigenous. It was not scientific and very often not true.
But the imprint remained, so that late in the 20th century when a Hutu power group used mass media to turn one group of citizens of their nation against the other for their own political and monetary profit, height was just as easy a way to make the distinction.
And so one of the calls that went out over that radio as the genocide began was:
“Cut down the tall trees.”
And so, as they were fleeing for their lives, Nicholas and Elsie, both of medium height, found themselves at a checkpoint, taken out of their car, while men with machetes and guns argued what to do with them.
Argued about whether they would live or die.
It could have gone either way. And they will never know because before the decision was made, another car full of people pulled up behind them and, now having bigger fish to fry, they waived Nicholas and Elsie through, and they continued on their way.
Nicholas knows it is God’s blessing that he still draws breath on this earth. And … he also knows that he is no more or less worthy of that blessing of breath and no more or less the recipient of God’s love and favor than those, maybe in the car behind him, whose blood and bones lie beneath the landscape I stared out at on those long van journeys.
Why he is alive and so many others are not … makes no sense.
Why we are alive and so many others are not … makes no sense.
Life doesn’t neatly rhyme.
I cannot imagine what was on Nicholas and Elsie’s minds and hearts as they drove away from that checkpoint or from the countless other incidents that happened to them as they escaped.
I only know that they kept driving.
I only know that they are alive.
I only know that they do not shy from telling the tale.
Or shedding the tears.
Or holding the hand of the one who, like them, still hears voices in the night.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.Just keep going.No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nicholas and Elsie eventually came back to Rwanda. Having experienced the deepest inhumanity imaginable, they knew the only answer was to do what God does in Jesus… to lean into humanity as deeply and profoundly as possible.
For Nicholas that was meeting love of land and love of people in an incarnation of love that became Ikirezi Natural Products. And thousands of lives have been improved and saved in the 20 years since.
You, sent out beyond your recall,go to the limits of your longing.Embody me.
Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in.
And love, that most powerful force for healing and change in the universe, has flowered in a place, not as unlike our own land as we might think.
over a way that with tears has been watered,
treading a path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out of a world gone crazy into a world where craziness does not end but just hits the road on tour, they have found a way of love and healing.
For Nicholas that was meeting love of land and love of people in an incarnation of love that became Ikirezi Natural Products. And thousands of lives have been improved and saved in the 20 years since.
You, sent out beyond your recall,go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.
Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in.
And love, that most powerful force for healing and change in the universe, has flowered in a place, not as unlike our own land as we might think.
over a way that with tears has been watered,
treading a path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out of a world gone crazy into a world where craziness does not end but just hits the road on tour, they have found a way of love and healing.
Hear the Gospel According to Andrea Gibson
Life doesn’t rhyme
It’s bullets…and wind chimes
It’s lynchings … and birthday parties.
It’s the rope that ties the noose
And the rope that hangs the backyard swing
It’s wanting tonight to speak the most honest poem I’ve ever spoken in my life
Not knowing if that poem should bring you closer to living or dying
Last night I prayed myself to sleep
Woke this morning to find god’s obituary
Scrolled in tears on my sheets
Then walked outside to hear my neighbor
Erasing ten thousand years of hard labor
With a single note of his violin
And the sound of the traffic rang like a hymn as the holiest leaf of autumn
Fell from a plastic tree limb, beautiful
And ugly
Like right now I’m needing nothing more than for you to hug me and if you do I’m gonna scream like a caged bird.
Life doesn’t rhyme.
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You can open your eyes
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The second image.
There was a build-up. This is an escalating situation.
The religious leaders are arguing with Jesus, trying to trap him.
First, they ask him where he gets his authority and Jesus tells the parable of the wicked tenants … about a landlord who sends servants—and finally his beloved son—to collect fruit from tenant farmers. They beat the servants and kill the son.
A parable that ends with Jesus saying:
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”
Next, they ask him about paying taxes to Caesar, and he asks whose head is on the coin and tells them to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God … the wisdom being that while the coin has the emperor’s image, God’s image is on every one of us.
So let the world have the things of the world … and let us have God and God have us.
They asked questions about the resurrection and the Messiah and each time Jesus has responses on the same theme … yes, be in this world, be in this world deeply, and … do not be tricked into believing that you are of this world.
Finally, he looks up and sees rich people giving gifts to the temple treasury and then a widow gives two coins, and Jesus says
“Honestly, this widow gave more than all the rest.
They’re giving what’s comfortable.
She put in everything she had.”
It is only then that Jesus utters the words we hear this morning.
Words that feel like they are coming to life right around us.
Words shouted at us over our own Interhamwe militia radio.
Wars and insurrections.
Huge weather events.
Persecutions and arrests.
Betrayals by family and friends.
Division upon division upon division.
And yet the world is always more than that.
The world is always a kiss of beauty and terror.
The world is just like the land over which I rode in Rwanda.
The world is just like the land upon which this church was built, which used to be lovingly tended by the Patwin people until many of our ancestors gave them disease, forced them into enslavement and genocidal extermination and yet has also been the site of some of the most beautiful and meaningful and hope-filled moments of your lives, beauty and terror breathe together.
Life doesn’t rhyme
It’s bullets…and wind chimes
It’s lynchings … and birthday parties.
It’s the rope that ties the noose
And the rope that hangs the backyard swing
Every generation has lived in a time of profound beauty.
Every generation has lived in a world gone mad.
It doesn’t mean that none of it matters … on the contrary, all of it matters so deeply, so profoundly.
All of it matters because real people, real images of God, are the ones swinging from those nooses and backyard swings. Where billions toil for the benefit of the few and yet sometimes it feels like ten thousand years of hard labor can be erased with a single note of the violin.
And there are times where raging against the machine is not only permitted, not only deeply appropriate but is a deeply necessary part of God’s work of resurrection.
Feelings demand to be felt.
We have to feel to heal.
And yet sometimes we can spend so much time trying to bring rhyme and sense to a life that mostly seems that the very forces that prey on us, the very forces that wake us up in the middle of the night and try to convince us god’s obituary is scrolled in tears on our sheets, that those very forces leave us too exhausted from fighting them to mount a coherent defense much less be a part of God’s dreaming resurrection life into being.
And yet this morning, Jesus stands in our midst calmly with words like this.
Do not go after them.
Do not be terrified.
I will give you words and a wisdom.
By your endurance you will gain your souls.
I promised you a question, so here it is.
Ok, Jesus … but how?
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If you wish, close your eyes.
Take a slow deep breath in.
Slowly let it out.
And listen some more
Andrea continues:
I’ve heard saints preaching truths
That would have burned me at the stake
I’ve heard poets telling lies that made me believe in heaven.
Sometimes I imagine Hitler at seven years old, a paint brush in his hand at school thinking, “what color should I paint my soul?”
Sometimes I remember myself
With track marks on my tongue
From shooting up convictions
That would have hung innocent men from trees
Have you ever seen a mother falling to her knees the day her son dies in a war she voted for?
Can you imagine how many gay teenagers were saved the day Matthew Shepard died?
Could there have been anything louder than the noise inside his father’s head
When he begged the jury, “Please, don’t take the lives of the men who turned my son’s skull to powder.”
And I know nothing would make my family prouder than if I gave up everything I believe in
But nothing keeps my believing
Like the sound of my mother’s breathing.
Life doesn’t rhyme.
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You can open your eyes
A final image
The glider in the hurricane.
In her beautiful book, Nothing Special: Living Zen, Buddhist teacher Charlotte Joko Beck paints this picture.
Sometimes pilots are accidentally caught in hurricanes, subjecting the plane and themselves to terrible stresses. When this happens, they often try to fly into the center, the eye of the hurricane, to give themselves a little chance to recover.
Most of us are like the pilot in the plane, just holding on, hoping we’ll make it out of the storm. We feel ourselves caught up in the buffetings of life. These may be natural occurrences, such as severe illness. They may be difficulties in relationships, which can seem quite unfair. From birth to death, we’re caught in this swirling of winds, which is really what life is: an enormous energy, moving and changing.
Our aim is like that of the pilot: to protect ourselves and our plane. We don’t want to stay where we are. So we do everything possible to preserve our own lives and the structure of our plane so that we can escape the hurricane. There is this enormously powerful thing we call our life, and we’re somewhere sitting in the middle of it in our little plane, hoping to make our way through without being hurt.
Suppose that instead of being in a plane, we were in a glider in the middle of the hurricane, without the control and power that an engine provides. We’re caught in the sweeping winds. If we have any idea that we’re going to get out alive, we’re foolish. Still, as long as we live within that enormous mass of wind, we have a good ride. Even with the fear and terror, it can be exhilarating and joyful—like riding a roller coaster.
This mind that thinks, pictures, gets excited, gets emotional, blames other people, and feels like a victim is like the pilot in the airplane who’s trying desperately to make his way through the hurricane. In such a life of tension and constriction, it takes everything we have just to survive.
All of our attention is on ourselves and our control panel; in trying to save ourselves, we don’t notice anything else. But the (person) in the glider can experience everything—the lightning, the warm rain, the scream of the wind. … The more intent we are upon protecting ourselves from the buffeting of our current situation, the more stress we feel, the more miserable we are, and the less we truly experience our lives.
The Gospel Jesus brings us this morning is an unexpected word and an inconvenient truth. It does not fit neatly into concepts of right and wrong. It is fully satisfying neither for activist nor aesthetic.
It is the Gospel the author of Philippians preaches when she sings
“let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who did not see equality with God as something to be grasped but emptied the divine self, becoming a fully vulnerable human being.”
God calls us all to different roles in all times and for such a time as this. And the roles can shift and change.
Some are called to march. Some are called to strategize.
Some are called to lead large movements and some are called to hold the tiniest of trembling hands.
Some are called to paint and dance and sing and some are called to keep the water coming out of the pipes and the lessons coming out of the classrooms.
Some are called to storm the gates of the castle, demanding the Epstein files be released, and some are called to put their bodies between the abuser and the traffic child and then to turn to the child, however old she is now, and say
“I believe you.”
And some are called to do bits of each.
And more.
And less.
The algorythymic news cycle is just a different version of the Interhamwe radio station … trying to divide us against each other and keep us in endless cycles of trauma that imprison us all … even those who stoke the flames.
And yet Jesus, still, comes in as a glider in a hurricane. Bidding us to render to Caesar what is Caesar and to God what is God’s.
Bidding us somehow to trust that not a hair on our head will perish when we have seen so many lying lifeless on the ground.
Bidding us to believe not only the powerful Gospel truth that if it’s about God it’s about love … and also the flip side which is if it’s all about love, and God’s love is what we will never lose, we can give ourselves fully and fearlessly to and for each other in that love.
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who did not see equality with God as something to be grasped but emptied the divine self, becoming a fully vulnerable human being…
“And being found in human likeness, Christ humbled the divine self further, choosing the path of love even to the point of death.”
I’ve heard saints preaching truths
That would have burned me at the stake
I’ve heard poets telling lies that made me believe in heaven.
But I have never heard anything more powerful than the Holy Breath of Love sounding through a thousand different tongues in a thousand different places.
I’m 57 years old, and it’s finally occurring to me that maybe life doesn’t rhyme … and so I’m trying to stop make fetch happen.
I am thinking as the interhamwe radio blares through my doomscrolling, maybe it’s time to try being that glider in the hurricane. With the same mind as Christ Jesus, taking the hand of the one whose eyes have seen too much and as best I can, opening up my heart to receive the gift of theirs.
I can’t do good people or bad people anymore. I can’t stand at the side of the road with the machete of my judgment ripped tightly in the hand of my heart.
We’re all made in God’s image and good. We all fall short and can embody the most twisted evil. That’s not a false equivalency but an invitation to compassion and mercy, love without or at least before judgment.
An acknowledgment that the line between our own goodness and evil is almost always not so much what is right or wrong with us, but what has happened to us.
I can’t do good people or bad people anymore.
I can only try my best to stand with vulnerable, wounded people not only because that’s what Jesus does but because that’s where I have seen love conquer the great divide.
I can only try my best to stand with vulnerable, wounded people, because that is the only place of truth and healing I’ve ever found.
I can only try my best to stand with vulnerable, wounded people because I am so tired of pretending I’m not one of them.
Andrea Gibson takes us home:
It’s not eating meat for the last ten years
Then seeing the kindest eyes I’ve ever seen in my life on the face of a man with a branding iron in his hand and a beat-down baby calf wailing at his feet.
It’s choking on your beliefs.
It’s your worst sin saving your life
It’s the devil’s knife carving holes into your soul so angels will have a place to make their way inside.
Life doesn’t rhyme
Life is poetry, not math.
All the world’s a stage
But the stage is a meditation mat
You tilt your head back
You breathe.
When your heart is broken you plant seeds in the cracks and you pray for rain.
And you teach your sons and daughters
There are sharks in the water
But the only way to survive
Is to breath deep
And dive.
Amen
[1] Fleming James, “Personalities of the Old Testament”
[2] Cornelius Plantinga, “NOT The Way It’s Supposed To Be”
[i] This quote and the other references to Rowan Williams’ theology of baptism are from his book Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer (Eerdmans, 2014).
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