![The steeple of the Memorial Church](/sites/g/files/omnuum7126/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-02/160725ChurchCalArt4.jpg?itok=rG9ZvXzh) # Seventh Sunday after Epiphany March 04, 2025 - [ Blog ](/news-categories/blog) *By the Rev. Dr. Luke Powery* *Dean of Duke University Chapel* *Professor of Homiletics and African and African American Studies* *(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Feb. 23, 2025)* I bring you greetings from the land of Blue Devils, Duke University. It is such a delight to be back with you. It's been several years, but I am grateful to the Reverend Potts and Jones for the invitation to be with you and to serve in this way. For so many years, this dates predates my time, but there was a close relationship between Peter Gomes and Will Willimon, who was the dean of Duke Chapel, and they would exchange pulpits for many years. And so I'm grateful for the continued connection with you. Let us pray. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us. Speak Lord, for your servants are listening. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And all of God's people said Amen. I want to share with you briefly from a title: Poetry in Motion. Poetry in Motion. From the ancient days to our modern times, poets have played an important part in human civilizations. As Edward Hirsch says in his book, A Poet's Glossary, poetry is a human fundamental like music. Others call poetry stored magic or a room of marvels. One of my favorite poets, Emily Dickinson, says in an 1870 letter, if I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold, no fire can ever warm me. I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways ... I know what she says. Is there any other way? I love Dickinson. To me, one of her greatest poetic lines rivaling Kendrick Lamar, is "I felt a funeral in my brain." Yet one line like that with an economy of words can speak a whole cosmos of experience. Sometimes all it takes is one word to rescue or heal you. That's what poetry can do. Poems do things and mean things with words that flattened prose just can't do. I actually turned to writing poetry during the COVID pandemic and to be sure I'm no Robert Browning or Langston Hughes or even Mother Goose and some may think poetry during a pandemic. What a waste of time. And especially even now, look at the plight and suffering of the world with threats against democracy, poetry? Oh, poets are dreamers, unrealistic linguists out of touch with reality, some say. Former US poet laureate, Billy Collins describes writing poetry as an attempt at discovery. And he said in an interview with the Paris Review: "In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You're trying to discover something that you don't know exists, maybe something of value. While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in a window pane." Poets may be viewed as out of touch, but historically, poets are the ones who've been in touch with what is truly real. They're in a relationship with the muse and make music for the good of the whole. Poets like the psalmists know something about the real. "I look to the hills. From whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth." Poets like hymn writers know something about the real praise to the Lord the almighty, the king of creation. Oh, my soul, praise Him for He is thy health and salvation. Oh, you hear ... Poets. It's all around us in the church. We pray it, we sing it, we dance it. "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want." The trees of the fields clap their hands. Poets know what is truly real. Why do you think nations and states have poet laureates? Why do you think poets still grace the stages of presidential inaugurations? We need them because we need those who have an ear and eye and sense for what is real and possible and will tell the truth even in a slanted way with courage and wisdom. --- Harvard Memorial Church ยท The Rev. Dr. Luke Powery - Feb. 23, 2025 | Sunday Sermon --- Do you know that God is a poet too? God was a maker, which is what the word poet means. God made worlds through words and according to James, if you were listening closely in the fulfillment of his purpose, the father of lights gave us birth by the word of truth so that we might become a kind of first fruits of his creatures. Creation was a poetic act through words. When God spoke, something was made, a poem was created, and there was a pattern and meter and symmetry and rhythm and a sense of delight. Poetry in Genesis, "And there was evening and there was morning and there was evening, and there was morning and there was evening and there was morning." Poetry. "And it was good," we hear. The poetic act of God wasn't a waste of time for God, the maker, the poet, and because God is a poet, that means we are poems. Actually, in Ephesians 2, we hear, "For we are God's handiwork." Poiema, poem. Created in Christ Jesus. We are God's poem. God does things with words. Yet we are more than words. We are poems. And because of that, poetry is more than words. It's in fleshed. Billy Collins, like others, has a traditional understanding of poetry. When he says gasoline comes in gallons, cigarettes comes in packs, and poetry comes in lines and stanzas. I mean, that's how we normally think about poetry. But I'm suggesting that poetry comes not just in lines, but in human lives too. This is what James is after. James stresses being doers of the word and not merely hearers. The Greek word for doers is poetes. That is poets or makers. Be poets of the word. Doers of the word, makers of the word. Poets are doers. I mean, traditionally we may think poetry is only about the words or the lines and stanzas, but poetry means more than words. It means your life. It takes on your flesh. And according to James, it's action in plain sight. The Greeks that poesis was conceived as bringing something from concealment into the full light. So, poetry reveals the word in plain sight. Poetry has to be more than the words. If we take seriously when we're told, be slow to speak and to even bridle our tongues, and if we don't, it's a worthless religion. We need to watch our tongues. And remember the proverb that says "A still tongue makes for a wise head." Remember, as our grandmothers perhaps used to remind us, we have one mouth and two ears for a reason. So be slow to speak, be quick to listen, and be doers, not just speakers. Be poets who make meaning with your lives and action. Just as words and poems do something to readers, our poetry literally should do something in the world. For James and all throughout the scriptures, the poetic action that Christians are called to do is to care for orphans and widows and those who are the most vulnerable. Welcome the stranger and refugee and immigrant. Heal the sick, feed the hungry, visit the prisoner, clothe the naked. Make poetry in plain sight. Become poetry in motion because poetry is doing in the life of faith. Be makers of the word who make it by living it out. Because poets live the word, not solely write the word. Some may want to tie our poem to a chair with rope as Billy Collins says. And so we're not free to act, but if this happens, the word will be dead because faith without works is dead. Why? Because there's no poetry. A life without poetry is dead. If the word is not in flesh, incarnated, it is dead. If we don't make poetry by doing the word, our faith is worthless. But when we match our hearing of the Word with the doing of it, this is poetry in motion. When you don't forget what you look like after looking in a mirror and walking away, as James mentions, you are a poet of the word because poets remember the word in public. Put it back together again and remember the mission of the poet, God. That's what poets do as they do the word. Your action has poetic traction. Therefore, the poet is a poem people see. So the question for us this morning is, what kind of poet will you be? What type of poetry will you make on campus or in the community? Will your poem only be about a written line or an embodied life in Christ? We need some poets of the Word in the world. Oh, we surely need some poets to prophesy with their lives. There was an unnamed woman in the Gospel of Luke, and if it wasn't bad enough to be a woman in that day in her town, thus a second-class citizen, imagine what it was like to have your nickname be "sinner woman." She was untouchable and outcast. No one called her for a girl's night out. No one called her for the family get-together. She received no handshakes, no hugs, no pat on the backs, no passing of the piece, no high-fives, and no one to wipe her weeping eyes. She was deemed a nobody. Not only did she have no name, she had no voice. She wasn't just slow to speak, she never says a word in that story. Only the men speak. But little did they know that she was a poet in the making. She was soon to be a poet of the word in the presence of the word. And so she heard the rumor mill that Jesus was in town eating at the Pharisee Simon's house and Jesus was her last hope. And so what did she do? She put on her fanciest dress and her finest jewelry, and she fixes her hair and pours priceless oil in a jar and carries some hope in the chest of her heart and sets out to go to Simon's house knowing full well that the Pharisee will not welcome her presence. But people will do whatever they have to do in order to get peace. She arrives at Simon's house and she takes advantage of the social custom that allows needy people to visit such a meal to receive the leftovers. But she's not interested in breadcrumbs. She wants to meet the bread of life. When she spots Jesus, she rushes towards him, stands behind him, weeping before him, bathes his feet with her tears and dries them with her hair and kisses his feet, and anoints them with refreshing oil. She doesn't speak a word, but she is a poet of the Word. Poetry in motion. Her action was her speech. She preached with her mouth shut. She was poetry in the plain sight of Jesus. We need some poets who will preach with their mouth shut. And don't worry, you won't be alone because the gospel of God in Christ is poetry for the life of the world in the plain sight of the powers that be. Christ's whole life was poetic love and action. And if you don't believe me, it takes an actual poem in Philippians 2 to remind us of what life-giving poetry and motion truly is. "Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave and being born in human likeness and being found in human form, He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." Now that's a poem worth learning and living and loving. When Billy Collins was asked, "When you look back at your old poems, do you see any similarities or find things in the poems that you hadn't noticed before?" He responded: "Only one thing. I have a lot of mice in my poems." But my question to you is when you look back over the poetry you've made with your life, what will you see? ## Full Sunday Service See also:- [ Sunday Service ](/blog-categories/sunday-service) - [ Sunday Service ](/archive/sunday-service) - [ Sermon ](/archive/sermons) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)