“Good fences make good neighbors?”

Exodus 20:1-17 and Matthew 22:36-40

Sunday, June 11, 2023

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

My husband’s birthday and Father’s Day fall just a few weeks apart each year. Some year’s it’s challenging to come up with ideas for gifts for TWO holidays so close together. But THIS year it has been simple because all he wants in the world are sturdy structures. So far he’s received a new tent for camping, another tent-like thing that attaches to the back of our minivan, and I think he still has some kind of pole contraption on his list. STRUCTURE is what he wants. 

This is a direct result of ONE bad night of camping. Our older son is a part of a mountain biking team and they have 5-6 races throughout Kansas each spring. Because the races start early on Sunday morning and the riders need to create and pre-ride the course, families typically go out on Saturday and then camp together that night.

I am extremely grateful my husband has been willing to go on these weekend excursions because, otherwise, our kid wouldn’t get to participate. And he’s diligent about sending me lots of photos and videos, which I also very much appreciate. 

The first race of the season was out in western Kansas. The updates I got via text said they were doing great but it was “really windy.” We all bedded down for the night - they in their tent on the plains and I in my comfy bed with a roof over my head here in Manhattan. 

“Goodnight. Love you,” said the blue bubbles on glowing screens. 

The next morning, I checked in as I rushed around getting ready for church. The photos and videos arrived: their tent, which appeared to be flattened to the ground, and a video of the pitch-black with the sound of intense, loud rushing wind. David said it was a *little* hard to get a good night’s rest with the cacophony and roof of his tent smacking him in the face all night long. 

One bad night of sleep will make you OBSESSED with upgrading your outdoor gear. He immediately came home and started looking for a sturdier tent, stronger poles, more wind-resistance.

We who live on the wind-swept prairie know the importance of good boundaries. A sturdy roof or tarp over our heads. Barriers to block the water rushing out of our neighbor’s yard before it turns our yard into soup. Fences to catch the recycling and trash when it blows out of our bins and across the neighborhood. 

You have a poem by Robert Frost printed in your bulletin this morning. Perhaps you’ve had a chance to look at it. Perhaps you already know it. When Isabel sent it to Melissa and me a few months ago, it rang in my head right away. The part I remembered most clearly was the line, “Good fences make good neighbors.” The rest of it was murky. I’m not sure if I had ever paid much attention to it before. 

When I did finally sit down and read it through, I found myself chuckling a bit. “Good fences make good neighbors,” is NOT the point of the poem. Despite the refrain, Frost is not arguing the absolute ethical good of fences. The reality of the poem is more nuanced. After all, the author may chide his neighbor about the stone wall between them but he still meets him there year after year to mend it. 

The other line that was familiar to me was the opening: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” As much as we humans appreciate boundaries (and tent poles and sturdy roofs) we also chafe at them. “Rules are made to be broken,” etc. One of the things I love about driving across western Kansas is the vastness of the wide open prairie. Nary a boundary to be seen, save the roads. You can almost start to feel what it was like years ago before settlers came and divided the land into plots. 

Is it elves that cause us to chafe at the constriction of walls? Or something else? My sense is that most of us, deep down, are conflicted when it comes to boundaries. A bit of structure and expectations frees us up to make choices within a limited set of acceptable options. But too much structure and we start to lose our sense of inherent freedom. It’s a delicate balance, to be sure. 

Frost gets this. He may say “something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” but as we watch the narrator and his neighbor plod along next to their shared wall we can’t help but notice, “something there is that DOES love a wall,” right?

The narrator is not anti-wall, per se. He just wants his neighbor to think it through a bit. 

“Why do [fences] make good neighbors?” [he wonders.] Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

It’s not the WALL that Frost’s narrator takes issue with, it’s the unthinking automaticity of his neighbor: “he will not go beyond his father’s saying.” As we gather within these walls (and beyond these walls) today, we bring a wealth of different experiences, values, and norms. How often do we pass along our own religious/cultural/familial values without thinking - just reciting pithy sayings or customs passed down from our ancestors without thinking? Are we more like the narrator or neighbor in this story? My guess is, most of us are a little bit of both. 

The scripture texts we heard today show that these are not new questions. When the Israelites were newly freed from the yoke of slavery in Egypt, they found themselves a bit uncomfortable out there with no walls at all. Absolute freedom can be unmooring. And so their God sent walls in the form of two clay tables. Ten easy-to-remember rules for living. The ten words of YHWH appear both in Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy 5. The passages are nearly identical, suggesting that our faith ancestors knew them and passed them along with great consistency. These words provided guidance, structure, shared expectations for living in community. 

Centuries later, people were still wondering about walls. So many of the stories in the gospels are about transgressing boundaries and expectations. Jesus’s genealogy includes unexpected ancestors like Rahab, Ruth, Tamar, and Bathsheba. There was something boundary-breaking about the circumstances surrounding Jesus’s conception and birth. And as Jesus grows into adulthood he begins to teach stories that make it clear he wants his followers to do just what Frost was advocating for in his poem: be very intentional about how and why and where you build walls. Who are you keeping out? Who are you constraining? And do the walls need to exist at all? 

Jesus, a faithful Jew, continued to teach the boundaries handed down to him by his faith ancestors. And, like all wise Jews, he wasn’t afraid to ask hard questions about why those guidelines existed. So it’s no surprise that he has a quick and easy answer to the question posed by the nameless lawyer in today’s passage. I’m sure he’d already given the question a lot of thought. 

‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”’

Jesus had clarity around what mattered most. Sturdy tent poles to withstand the buffeting winds of life. 

I hope and wish clarity for you, too. It might be the words of Jesus or it might be something else. But when the winds of change threaten to unmoor you, may your boat be tied to a sturdy wall that will keep you safely docked in the harbor of Love. 

I want to close with a story that’s not mine. This story comes from Thomas Oles, who is a scholar of landscape architecture. He wrote a book called Walls: Enclosure and Ethics in the Modern Landscape. Isabel was kind enough to turn Melissa and me on to this book. Thanks, friend. 

In the prologue he reflects on his experience studying landscape architecture in Denmark. 

I expected to find a socialist utopia of solidarity and fairness….Yet when I arrived, the news was bad. I found a safe, modern, prosperous society in the throes of xenophobia. 

A right-wing government had come to power and nearly halted all immigration to Denmark. The new politics was couched in the language of cultural triumphalism, the sense that Denmark was a special precinct reserved for the elect, who did not include people with dark skin or thin wallets. 

These changes in the political landscape came to shape the way I looked at the physical landscape. As I walked through cities, towns, and fields, a stranger in a strange land, I began to notice something distinctive about the Danish environment, something that at first had eluded my attention. This was the great variety of physical enclosures in the landscape. From traditional churchyards where each plot was surrounded by its own miniature hedge, to the hollowed-out perimeter blocks of Copenhagen, to the endless suburbs made up of one hedge-enclosed lot after another, each concealing a comfortable modern house, enclosure seemed to be everywhere including, ultimately, in the islands and peninsulas of Denmark itself.

I began to wonder about the convergence of the political and the material. On the one hand, it seemed that all this enclosure symbolized some kind of cultural closure; on the other, the ubiquitous walls and fences seemed to express the egalitarian and democratic character of Danish society, with each resident allotted a small, calm place of refuge and peace. The designer in me could not help admiring the results in the landscape, which was extremely legible and orderly, but the liberal in me wondered how they related to the nascent atmosphere in the country….I learned from talking to people on my many walks…that what I was seeing was almost invisible to the Danes themselves. When I asked about all this enclosure, people would often look at me as if I were mad. Later I would learn that these habits of enclosure were not somehow endemic to Danish culture but had been taught and learned in the 1960s, when home and garden magazines encouraged readers to enclose yards with high hedges and fences. The lesson had been absorbed so well that it was no longer subject to critical reflection. In Denmark a landscape of enclosure simply "was"…

Friends, as we move about in the world, may we carry with us the keen observational skills of landscape architects, poets, farmers, and ranchers. May we never be afraid to look at a wall - even a very old one - and wonder about its purpose. May we seek balance and wisdom when we choose to erect walls. May we tend to the walls that need to be repaired. And may we dismantle the walls that do not move us toward mutual flourishing. 

“Good fences make good neighbors,” the neighbor said. And, you know, it turns out he’s at least a bit right. But it’s not the boundary itself that makes these two men good neighbors to one another. 

Instead, it’s the shared stewardship, the coming together to care and tend, the conversation that flows in the shared labor. And the intentionality of mending. 

May it be so.