Of Monks and Mystics

The following is a sermon preached on the Day of Pentecost.

Thanks to Netflix, my kids have discovered the X-Files, the longest running science fiction horror drama on television. The show’s success rested largely on the tension that existed between the two main characters, FBI Special Agents Mulder and Scully; and the tension that always exists between belief and unbelief.  The show is based on the experiences of two agents who work in a highly classified sector of the agency. They investigate the unexplainable: UFO sightings, suspicious deaths, reports of alien abductions and 97 other unsolved cases of involving paranormal phenomena that presses us to ponder the limits of our reality and the seemingly silent borders of our universe. Agent Mulder works from a position of complete belief in extraterrestrial life claiming that his own sister was a victim of alien abduction. His life’s work is to discover a greater truth; hence, the show’s motto:  The truth is out there.  Agent Scully however is a trained forensic scientist. For her there is no truth that cannot be gleaned by scientific deduction, reason and logic. Her role is, at best, to explain all the things Mulder believes to be inexplicable, and at worst, to undermine and debunk his work.  Their tension pulls in people like you and I who are fascinated by the idea of a life force outside our perceptions and who self-identify as either Mulder or Scully.  The stories themselves are merely a backdrop upon which we watch the two agents struggle against their own biases.  So strong is the magnetic bond that sometimes draws them closer together and sometimes caused them to repel one another, that after the show was finally cancelled after nine seasons – 202 shows, two full length movies were made to satisfy fans.

I totally self-identify as Mulder. I’m an ordained Christian minister after all.  The supernatural is the world I inhabit: a world in which the God we pray to and depend on reveals it’s self and purposes in ways that are not exactly straight forward. In fact, everything we know about God is shrouded in mystery and otherworldliness, including angels and archangels, clouds ascending and descending to earth, the otherworldly strength of Samson, a plague that turns rivers to blood, manna falling from heaven, the existence of a dark force of evil, the expulsion of demons, the blind see, the crippled walk, the dead live, Jesus walking on water and passing through locked doors; and this just scratches the surface.  In today’s lessons from Acts Christians around the world recall the sound of rushing wind, fire, and gift of tongues: the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that envelope the disciples who have gathered together on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem. The author of Acts, Luke, describes the scene:  “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filed the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.  All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, and the Spirit gave them ability.”  The crowds were bewildered, of course, because each of those gathered there could hear of God’s deeds of power in their native tongues, about 15 different languages by my count.

And so I’m amused when I’m asked if I believed in the supernatural.  It seems somehow surprising when I express my openness to such phenomenon.  And yet, how could it be otherwise, for me or for you?  God calls us to gradually move closer to Mulder’s understanding of life as complete mystery, to be open to possibilities far beyond our understanding, working ourselves free from Scully’s earthbound securities and limitations.  Commentator, David Gushee  notes that “the semi-collapse of Enlightment orthodoxy, with its elevation of reason and science as the only paths to true knowledge of the world, has opened the door to a recovery of a kind of pre/post Enlightenment religiosity in which once again people are open to, and therefore experience, “signs and wonders.”  This being the case, it should be no surprise to us that the fastest growing expression of Christianity in the global church is Pentecostalism.  I saw this for myself on my two trips to Brazil, where Pentecostal churches set up in busy shopping districts are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Worship services run all day and late into the night: ecstatic preaching, praying in tongues, the slaying of the spirit, teaching and healing without ceasing, and crowds whose songs of praise pour out ino the streets.  It bears no comparison to the tranquil, cerebral, ordered worship we understand in the Anglican Church.  And yet my personal understanding of the events recorded in Acts are made all the more real having witnessed the Pentecostal expression of our common faith in a place very far from here. 

This week I had the opportunity to hear one of my colleagues speak of her former life in a charismatic church.  While now an Episcopal priest she said that she continues to speak and to pray in tongues.  And I learned that there is a difference between praying and speaking in tongues; apparently they serve two different purposes, though I admit I could not follow the explanation for this.  Regardless, for them and for us, it all comes down to that one, singular question raised from the bewildered crowd in Jerusalem: What does this mean?

To get at the answer, we must understand the Christian life as a journey. And as we move through this journey, at any given time we can locate ourselves on certain points of the Mulder/Scully spectrum.  While as religious people we are, by definition, open to the mysteries of faith, that is, the work of the divine broadly, or the work of the Spirit in particular, how we engage this belief is where the rubber hits the road, as it were. 

The Feast of Pentecost, with its emphasis on the supernatural aspects of the divine invite believers to understand that a sustainable relationship with God requires a certain degree of withdrawal from things worldly.  For example, when Jesus speaks against the rich, I do not believe it is money in itself he finds objectionable, but the way in which money and all that can be bought with it tend to keep people strongly attached to those things. 

In Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics, author Marsha Sinetar examines the lives of hundreds of people in our own time who have responded to their spiritual experiences in two distinct expressions.  Explaining how she identifies the many people she has interviewed as either monk or mystic, she writes: "... I call the monk one who had detached emotionally from a known, familiar and comfortable way of life in order to embark on an uncharted inner journey. The monk responds to an inner call, reinterprets his/her basic way of being in the world - which might include reinterpreting the way s/he relates to others, work, marriage, Church or other organizational status, and even includes a renewed definition of self and his/her basic place in the scheme of things….

Of those who tend to identify as monks she says:  “In the silence and simplicity of their lives, monks learn to learn to their persistent, interior voice of discontent.  By abandoning worldly distractions, by assuming a conversion of manners, their newly structured life forces them into intimate and growing relationship with their inner ‘voice.’ Their absorption with this voice, their heightened listening powers, is not usually possible in the distracting environment of the world.  Thus various vows cultivate and strengthen a deep posture of inner awareness….[But] anyone who develops this critical, objective and conceptual sense in relation to society can, in the broadest sense, be called a monk.” 

Likewise, Sinetare identifies a life that tends toward the mystic in this way:  The mystic’s life-altering path always results in a radical dropping away of the former self and a restructuring of self in the discernment of God.  Gradually or suddenly the mystic relates differently to others, abandons social and material interests in favor of another realm, the Transcendent…. Alteration might range from the seemingly minor ego-bruising choices to the complete surrender of key comforts, securities or even life itself.  Consider Gandhi, who time and again put himself into harm’s way in order to express the Truth or Julian of Norwich, a Christian contemplative who lived and wrote in a tiny cell over the course of her adult life. … Mystics are the ones who hunger and thirst after righteousness, as the Bible puts it, the ones who yearn for continued or increased union with the Divine they themselves feel is real -- the Reality that heals and makes all things new again.... Unlike those I call monks, who wouldn't call themselves that, the mystics always knows that's what they are." 

Sinetar’s work provides ordinary people like you and I a venue in which to identify our tendencies toward monk or mystic in our own very personal spiritual journeys.  This is the work of the Holy Spirit within us, evermore calling us deeper into the mystery of the divine and pulling us farther away from the things of this world that are fleeting and temporary, dull and ultimately meaningless.  Do you feel that in your own life you are moving to one of these places?  Does silence and contemplation appeal far more than even the best of companionship?  Do you feel yourself increasingly longing to know God fully and completely and have contemplated sacrifices of material security in order to pursue this persistent calling?  Have you found that for all you have achieved or gain or earned that all is meaningless without God to give it purpose?  Do you secretly dream of the simplicity of the monk’s life and consciously work to claim a piece of that for yourself?  Are you like a sponge that perpetually drinks in all things spiritual and recognize that you are moving farther and farther into an understanding of life that no longer allows you to see even the minutest aspects apart from the divine?  Do you find yourself often asking, “What does this mean?”

I believe that regardless of how we experience it, the spirit of God is alive and at work both in us and in the world around us, in ways seen and unseen.  And I believe that it is the Holy Spirit that speaks wisdom to us as we navigate a world of foolishness.  I believe that on that Pentecost Day the world, in all its languages, heard that Jesus is Lord, and that God is Love.  I believe that we are called into a life that is more mysterious than obvious; that our various gifts and vocations call us deeper into that mystery; that prayer and contemplation, and degrees of sacrifice and separation are the ways and means by which we get to that place we are going.  And I am certain that at the end of our journey we will finally know what all this means.

High Expectations: Ascension and Angelou

Today the church celebrates the feast of the Ascension. As the disciples gathered around Jesus that final time, as recorded in the book of Acts, they placed at his feet their expectation:  Aren't you now going to restore the kingdom to Israel? They were thinking of things temporal of course, things based on ages of traditional religious teaching, but it was a narrow and limited expectation.  

Jesus points them and us to a larger picture of how things will be restored and directs them and us as to the part we will play:  "You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."  Peter, and John, James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James, son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, Judas, son of James, and the women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, and you and I and the millions set between them us proclaim our witness still.

Through this powerful witness we proclaim that all things earthly ultimately belong to heaven; that God so earthbound in Jesus was on the fortieth day of the resurrection returned to the heavenly realm.  It is on this collective body of testimony that we have laid our faith and based all our expectations, present and future. 

Christian faith is nothing if not an expectant faith. That is to say, we do not merely hope for things but see the world through eyes of hopeful expectation.  We expect that God's promises to us will be realized.  We expect that God is now and will be ever present to us, never more so then in our own hour of need.  We expect that our prayers will be and in fact are being answered. We expect that when we die that life will not be ended, but merely changed. We expect to be reunited one day with the ones we love who have gone on before us.  We expect miracles: the healing of the sick, the raising of the death, the life everlasting.  We expect that God is acting for good.  We expect to know God just as God has been revealed in Jesus.  We expect to share with other Christians in the sacredness of life and its preservation.  We expect to share with one another our common commitment to promote peace over war. We expect to share with one another in the building up of the body of Christ. We expect to share with one another in our love of neighbor.  We expect that our shared faith can change the world. And those expectations bind us together into one people despite our individual differences.  These expectations promote action and the breaking of silence, they make the unseen seen - justice and injustice alike, they shed light in the darkness and assure us that the light has had victory over the darkness, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Some might say these are high expectations and lofty ideals.  But for Christians they are foundational; they are the place from which we begin when we say, "I believe," and are at the same time the place where we end up. Our expectations give us eyes to see the world as it really is, and eyes to see how it could be, should be. Our expectations lend to us a vision of a path that cuts straight through injustice and leads right into the heart of God's own hope for the world. It is our expectations that make us a prophetic people. It is the prophets, ancient and recent, who have and continue to articulate the realization of our collective expectations.

Maya Angelou is one of our prophets.  She died this week and was preceded in death by another prophetic agent, Vincent Harding, who passed on earlier this month.  Coincidentally, both were influential acquaintances of Martin Luther King, Jr. whose prophetic voice cannot be overstated. Harding was a close adviser to King and wrote his anti-war speech, Beyond Vietnam: A time to break silence.  In this speech, which was delivered in April 1967, King said the following as he explained each of his reasons for opposition to the war: 

"My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."  

In the same way, Maya Angelou's poetry stands as a living and timely testament to the power of the prophetic witness of Christian expectation. Let us now pause for a moment from our busy lives on this first day of June, as we observe the feast of the Ascension, in the quiet of this house of God of which Jesus Christ himself is the head and hear words of great expectation delivered in Angelou’s poem, A Brave and Startling Truth.

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it. 

I ask myself:  How did these people come to do what they did? What moved them to what they wrote? What formed them, influenced them, spoke to them, inspired them?  How did they get from ordinary like me, to the extraordinary people they became?  But I know the answer. They were possessed. They were possessed by the expectations they held for God and for us.  They expected God to act. They expected us to act. They expected hardened hearts to change.  They expected justice.  They expected righteousness.  They expected peace to reign over war.  They were possessed by their love for Jesus. They were possessed by the Holy Spirit, and molded, formed and shaped by an expectant faith.  

What do you expect?