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?

Finding God in Interruptions

The following is the Easter sermon preached at St. James Episcopal Church:

The sermon has already been preached.  If you paid close attention to the Gospel reading from John then you’ve already heard the message.  It was short and sweet and all that really needed be said.  It was so short that maybe you missed it.  So I’ll give it to you again, just to be sure you don’t leave the church today without hearing the Easter proclamation.  Here it is: “Mary Magdalene went and announced to his disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord.’”  There is no stronger or more powerful sermon then the one preached by Mary Magdalene some 2000 years ago in a record five simple words: "I have seen the Lord."

It isn’t clear at all that the disciples believe Mary.  Perhaps they thought her hysterical or overly dramatic, or just a bit high strung.  So just to make sure they should believe her, the risen Jesus appeared to the disciples in the upper room while they were hiding from the authorities.  He passed right through the locked door and spoke to them. They were apparently speechless, but John tells us they rejoiced when they saw the Lord. They, in turn, preached to Thomas but he did not believe either them, or Mary, apparently.  So a week later, Jesus came to them again and invited Thomas puts his hand in the wound. Thomas proclaimed: “My Lord and my God!” Which, I’m sure earned him at least one, “Amen, Brother!”  Shortly thereafter, Jesus appeared again to the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias and there they shared a breakfast of fish and bread. And no one dared to ask, Who are you? because they knew who it was. There they received the Holy Spirit from which hundreds of sermons would be preached. And for thousands upon thousands, then millions upon millions of people through these 2000 years, again and again and again joy would interrupt sorrow and lives would be changes in ways no one could have foreseen. Perhaps even for you?      Who could have imagined it?

For Mary and the other women, and for the disciples, things were turning out quite differently than any of them had imagined. The resurrection had upset all expectations.  Mary Magdalene and the other women expected to continue in their roles, to care for the body, and to mourn and to pick up the pieces of their lives. But joy interrupted sorrow and everything changed.  The disciples had expected to return to the lives they had before they abandoned them to follow Jesus all around the Judean countryside.  It didn’t take long for Peter to say, “I’m going fishing.”  There was nothing left to do.  But even the fishing was off.  Or at least until Jesus showed up on the beach that morning. From the shore he yelled, “…you don’t have any fish do you?” They yelled back, “No.” So he told them to throw the net to the right side of the boat and there they would find some.  Peter recognized who it was and unable to contain himself, and jumped into the water and swam to shore.  Joy interrupted sorrow and now nothing would be the same. 

This isn’t the usual ordering of things. It’s usually the other way around, isn’t it?:  Isn’t is usually that sorrow interrupts joy and everything changes?  But that isn’t God ordering of things. The Easter proclamation is that God delivers unexpected joy that interrupts everything else.  It was this kind of unexpected joy that made it impossible for anyone who saw the risen Jesus to return to the life they had before and the same is true for us. Louis L’Amour captured this paradoxical truth of the gospel when he wrote, “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.” 

Everybody hopes for a happy ending; that unexpected twist that turns a plot of his head. It’s why we love classic stories that satisfy our longing for things to turn out differently than one expects; stories like Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre, and Mansfield Park. Last week I watched for the second time another favorite, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.  It’s the story about Margaret Hale, a young women who has moved with her parents to an industrial town in Northern England, far in every way, from the lovely, picturesque southern countryside. From a great house with lovely lawns and rose gardens she must adjust to a modest urban home in the mill district of the dark and dirty little town of Milton.  The family have had to relocate because Margaret’s father, an Anglican priest, has chosen not to sign a declaration of allegiance to the Book of Common Prayer, saying that he could not, because he could not in good conscious swear to a belief in doctrines to which he did subscribe. His wife is inconsolable, believing that he has left the priesthood based on a mere formality.  She simply can’t fathom why he would not just sign the document and go on with his life as it was before. Having left behind everything she holds dear for reasons that are beyond her understanding, she dies brokenhearted.  Though Ms. Margaret longs for the life and friends she knew in the south, she tries to make the best of her new circumstances.  Even so, she rejects much of what she encounters including the gruff, but very handsome mill owner, John Thornton, as she compares her new life with what she knew before.  After losing her father as well, Margaret returns to the South where she finds that it is not quite as she remembered.  Things have changed and there is no longer a role for her to play there.  We, of course, know what she has learned: Try as we might, we can never go home again.  Even with an unexpected windfall following the death of her father, Ms. Margaret finds herself feeling alone and quite displaced.  As the story concludes Mr. Thornton also finds himself feeling alone and displaced, facing financial ruin and the loss his cotton mill.

But this is a period romance after all, so rest assured, things will turn out well for Ms. Margaret and for Mr Thornton.  In the final scene, he is on a train returning to the north, and she is on an opposite train heading south.  The trains have both reached a station somewhere in the middle, and from their coaches they see one another across the platform.  Quite unexpectedly, in a single moment, joy interrupts sorrow, and everything changes.

We love these kinds of stories! even though we tend to dismiss them as fairytales that bear no resemblance to real life. But in truth, these stories would not work if there was not some possibility that life can turn out for the better in ways we could not have planned through our manipulations.  The possibility can only exists if this was not, at least some of the time, the way life really does turn out.   Sometimes people who long for love find it, despite the fact they are convinced they will not.  Sometimes, the events of life, as difficult as they might truly be, present us with opportunities that would not have otherwise been afforded.  Yes, sometimes, sorrow interrupts joy. But many times, in a thousand different ways, joy interrupts sorrow, and our lives are altered.

In either case is the interruption that changes everything.  Sometimes, perhaps even often, we wonder, Where is God in this?  God is in the interruptions. Interruptions make it so we can’t go home again.  They makes us grow beyond our edges, adapt to our ever changing lives, prompt us to change the things we can, and to accept the things we can’t. Interruptions press us to think about how we want to live and the decisions we make. They make it impossible to predict what to expect when even our expectations may be met with unexpected joy. Most importantly, they make us less dependent on our own abilities and far more dependent on God’s mysterious workings.  The stories we tell about our lives are nearly always based on some interruption; some place in time where sorrow interrupted joy or joy interrupted sorrow.  The stories we tell about our God are these kinds of stories too. Mary went to tomb and Jesus was not there. He appeared to her and she proclaimed the impossible: I have seen the Lord.  Joy interrupts sorrow. This is our story, our Easter story. This is the way we see the world, through resurrection eyes.  These are the kinds of stories we tell and this is the truth we preach.  

Gone: The Confession of the Passion

The theme of the Good Friday reading of the Passion can be summed up in single word: Gone.  He’s gone.

In his recent hit, country music singer, Montgomery Gentry sings about the certainty of loss with these words:

This ain't no temporary, typical, tearful good-bye,

This ain't no breakin' up and wakin' up and makin' up one more time

This is gone. Gone like a freight-train, gone like yesterday,

gone like a soldier in the civil war, bang, bang,

gone like a '59 Cadillac, like all the good things that ain't never coming back. 

No, no never, no never coming back.

If I were to rewrite Gentry's song to fit the events of today, it'd go something like this:

This ain't no hopin' for the best, hidin' out ‘till the coast is clear then I'll rest day,

This ain't no waitin' for the fall, runnin' down the hall, whew that was a close call.

This is gone. Gone like a ship in the perfect storm, gone like that decision that leaves ya torn, 

Gone like the trust we had in the dollar and the reverence for the collar, 

and all the other things that ain't never coming back.   

There are a lot of things in life that are final; final sales, final deadlines, final exams, and that final chance to finally set things right.  But there is a finality to death that is like no other kind of ending. There is deep lament when in our world every song ends with, "no, no never, no never coming back."   The reality of being gone, and the emptiness it translates, lies at the heart of the Christian confession of faith. Christ died. For three days he was gone. Really gone, no, no never, no never coming back kind of gone. We capture the finality of these dark days when we recite the Nicene creed, or whatever variation of a declaration of faith your tradition tenders.  In Christian unity we confess that we believe that, "For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried."  While we know that the grave was not, in fact, the end; we confess it, nonetheless, as if we did not.  We confess it because to dismiss the finality of Jesus’ death would be to completely undermine the power of the resurrection.  And so, for today, we make our common confession: he suffered death and was buried. On this point we do not disagree. On this point there is no theological deadlock. And it is on this point that the playing ground is level. Jesus, while fully divine, was just as much fully human; he was born as one of us, and he died as one of us, and we confess it without question.  The author of Hebrews directs us to do as much.  

He, or she, as the case may be, speaking of the Passion of Christ writes: Hold fast to your confession. And so we do. Throughout the seasons we confess it; from Advent into Christmas we confess it.  Throughout Lent into Holy Week and especially on Easter day we confess it. And again on Trinity Sunday and the day of Pentecost and all through ordinary time, we confess: "For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried."  

We who are gathered here to witness the crucifixion find ourselves at a loss of words, a loss of halleluias, a loss of all things we have perceived as holy, and are stripped of things religiously consequential. The sanctuary lies empty, without adornment. On this day there is no triumphant cross to lead us. In the sobriety of these days while yet we cannot see beyond the victory of death, we do have a rare and precious opportunity to see what remains. Because as dark and uncertain as it may appear, this time is not without grace. 

Aside from Jesus’ life, something else ended on the cross; Jesus' obedience to the Father reached its final destination. There at Golgotha, Jesus fully met his obligation. He obeyed God to the end and the strength of that obedience stands firm. While Mary and the other women wept at the cross, his obedience survived. While his lifeless body was taken from the cross, his obedience was transferred onto that empty cross. While he was placed in the tomb, his obedience persisted.  While the apostles shrank away from the scene and went into hiding, his obedience remained.   It is the constancy of Jesus’ unwavering obedience that hangs still on the cross; and it is that which today we offer our adoration as we reverence the cross.  

The Latin root word for obedience is oedire, which simply means to listen deeply. This opens a door for us as we contemplate our own obedience to God.  We perceive obedience to mean that we are to act as directed. But to be directed requires listening for a command. And so perhaps a more theologically correct way of thinking about obedience begins with simply listening. Listening deeply for God to speak.  Listening to our own inner voice as it responds to God’s call to and for us.  Listening for the voice of God in those who speak to us, or about us, or with us.  To listen is to obey.

The psalter directs us to, "Be still, and know that I am God.”  It is a call to obedience.  When we are still we can only listen.  Jesus is gone, night has fallen, and everything in the land is standing still. In the stillness, the empty vessel of these three days, listen to the steady beat of your own heart, and in your obedience you will know God.  Listen to your breath, or tend to your breathlessness, and in your obedience you will know God.  Listen, to the birds of spring that do not know and have no concern that Jesus has died, and in your obedience you will know God.  Listen to the wind, which you cannot see, but see how it sways the branches high above you, and how it pushes against you, and in your obedience you will know God. Listen to the overflowing waters of a nearby creek, filled by snow and ice and rain which carries with it the promise of a bountiful harvest, and in your obedience you will know God.  Listen to the warmth of the sun on your face, accept the assurance that surely tomorrow will follow this day, and in your obedience you will know God.  Listen deeply to all the life that surrounds you; let it fill these three empty days as we make our confession, and we wait, and the world groans, and the people cry out for God to act.   

Mary: She who thinks

The following Lenten reflection is based on Luke 2:8-20 

It may seem odd to pull into Lent what Christians now universally hear as a Christmas text.  But keep in mind that the writers of Luke’s Gospel did not write this text so that we might have Christmas plays of the Nativity.  Luke would not have recognized the word “Christmas” because there was no such thing and wouldn’t be so for at least another 300 years.  

It had been an ordinary day into which the most extraordinary events had occurred.  A child was born and shortly thereafter a host of angels had appeared to reassure some very frightened shepherds to put away their fear, for God, God’s own self, had come into the world, born of a woman.  Luke, himself, seems reflective as he writes, “But Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.”

In the whole of the bible this is somehow a very unique statement.  It tells us that Mary thought long and hard about what had occurred.  She thought about it.  Well, who wouldn’t think about it?  In fact, it is so obvious that a great deal of reflection was done, and not just by Mary, that one wonders why this line was even included in the text.  Or we might wonder, why was the act of thoughtfulness so important here but not included in the events of the crucifixion or in the three days that followed?  Mary is there too, watching from the distance.  But this time there is no host of angels there to quell her fear. Instead she is confronted by the realized potential for human suffering; not the least of which is her own.  

It has been the pondering of her heart that has carried her through the whole of the events of the gospels and into the finality of Good Friday. And it is her pondering of all these things, things seen and unseen, known and unknown, that will sustain her for the rest of her days. It is Mary’s wonderment of the heavenly display of Godly triumph in the threat of deadly evil that sustains us still.

We Protestants have historically rejected the reverence and adoration of Mary given by our Roman brothers and sisters. For many denominations such observances went the way of altars and candles and incense and bells as Christianity shed its skin of anything reminiscent of Roman Catholicism. Even in the Episcopal Church, a Protestant body that retained a strong Catholic identity even while it rejected the papacy and its hierarchal structure, Mary’s role in Christian faith and belief is largely a mystery.  In the last several years, however, there has been an effort among Protestants to reclaim Mary’s rightful and universal place as the mother of God.   A few years ago the leading Christian magazine The Christian Century ran an article on the Protestant reconsideration of Marian theology.  In the article named, What about Mary? Jason Byassee  wrote: “[R]ecently there has been a flurry of publications by Protestants on Mary, works that suggest she could be an ecumenical bridge—or at least that the Protestant aversion to Marian devotion is eroding…. Church historians of all stripes have long granted that Marian teaching and devotion dates from the earliest days of the church. And they grant that devotion to Mary was not discarded even by the leading Reformation figures Luther, Calvin and Zwingli. The fruit of ecumenical labor on this topic can be seen in such balanced and helpful resources as Mary in the Plan of God and in the Communion of the Saints(1999), a product of years of dialogue between French Catholics and Protestants that calls for both Catholic and Protestant 'conversions' on the subject.”

Such efforts of reconciliation are not isolated to the pages of publications.  A couple of years ago an unusual thing happened at St. James (Episcopal Church); a large portrait of Mary appeared in the back of the sanctuary. Some say it had been in the under-croft for years. Others couldn’t remember ever seeing it before and were stymied as to how she came to suddenly appear, resting on the floor, leaning against the wall, half hidden by the end of a pew.  She went largely unnoticed for months.  No doubt many thought it likely I had brought her in.  But for the record, I am as mystified as the rest.  Over time a small group devoted an area of the sanctuary as a Mary Chapel.  Her portrait now hangs high on the wall surrounded by items of prayer and devotion.  Quite honestly, I’ve been amazed at how warmly she has been received. Each week at worship many pause to light the devotional candles set just below her portrait. The collective lights from those candles and their prayers rise up to her in reverence and with great respect for her place in our life of faith, even if we, Protestants cannot articulate the fullness of her role there.  Each week as I look out into the congregation from my place at the altar, I am greeted by Mary there at the back of the church looking at me.  For me there is a sense of completeness with her presence. She reminds me each week as she looks out over all of us that it was she who bore the savior to whom we owe our redeemed lives.  She is not the center of attention but rather an onlooker; gazing upon our weekly celebrations of her son’s life and his place within the mystery of the triune God.  She is for me a firm foundation upon which to build a thoughtful and reflective faith.  She is not one who acts but one who thinks.  

Mary is the one who gives us permission to ponder the depths of our beliefs.  In some circles the encouragement of the faithful to think about what they are asked to believe is not permissible.  Many of the faithful, on their own accord, chose not to reflect too long or too hard about the holy mysteries, fearing that too much pondering will somehow lead to doubt and faithlessness.  Others still treasure their beliefs as if they were pieces of a museum exhibit, leaving them undisturbed and unchallenged even while the trials of life call out for deeper reflection.  I do not think Mary had such a luxury.  I believe that as her son was arrested and tried, tortured and crucified, she held up before her the words of the angels and wondered if those words still rang true.  It is one thing to be reassured not to fear, it is quite another not be afraid.  Perhaps she wondered, Where is the angelic host now? or even, Where is the Lord God now?  Mary paves the way for us to ask such difficult questions.  She invites us to think and to question and to test so that we might not bear our conclusions lightly but that they might be borne not out of ease but out of struggle, not out of the casual assurances of others but out of God’s own promises.  A thinking faith is a living faith.

For our purposes this day in Lent, the message of the angels that Mary ponders so deeply is especially instructive as we approach the events of the crucifixion. It is good for us to remember that we can’t get to the resurrection but by way of the manger.  It is good to remember that this story begins with a humble birth and an angelic host revealed to lowly shepherds.  In a time of great fear and anxiety the Lord proclaimed an end to fear.  It stands firm.  So that if you listen very closely, even at the cross you can hear the angels’ proclaim:  “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all people.”

John's Cosmic Prologue: A Grander Design

This week I watched the first part of Stephen Hawking’s documentary, The Universe: The Grand Design.  In the documentary we travel from the wide expanse of the universe with its infinite possibilities to the reasoned elimination of nearly all random events in life. Within the span of just 45 minutes, with the rules of cosmic physics setting the parameters, we are led to conclude that all of life is simply influenced by a set of predictable variables and that everything we perceive about reality is based solely on our own individual interpretation of those variables. Even the decisions we make are predetermined by a catalog of past events stored in our memory which effectively creates the illusion of free will. We are left with what amounts to being a single-planed matrix.  But because this is not a perfect system we can only see a partial picture of how reality appears at any one time, and so our minds fill in the blanks.  It is a if we are all fish in a our own small fishbowl, completely dependent on the set of variables we have access to and are at the mercy of the constantly firing synopses in our brains that supply our minds with the missing information so seamlessly that we do not even notice.  For instance, we see color because our eye and brain functions work together as part of our excellent machinery. We do not see color because objects actually have color, it is only how we are hardwired to perceive and interpret our surroundings. This is hardly new science. It first began with Descartes who first made the clear distinction between what constitutes the mind and what constitutes the body; and made a distinction between the two; an idea not disputed to this day.  If you are not up on your Descartes, does the phrase, “I think, therefore I am, ” ring a bell?  Hawkins and a whole body of other scientists have been building on this theory over many decades. But Hawkins goes on to ask that if all human life can be reduced to cosmic physics, is there meaning to life?

If you haven’t guessed, I’m not a big Stephen Hawkins fan. But I am hardly the first religious advocate to clash with such grand schemes that seem so offhandedly eliminate God by way of scientific reasoning. In fact, by scientific reason alone, God does not even merit a mention. God is not even on the radar or a part of the equation.  On the other end of the spectrum, it is the popular tendency to associate Christianity with anti-intellectualism and opposition to scientific knowledge. Given the Episcopal Church’s encouragement of critical thought I do not find our little corner on the religious market guilty of such charges.  But given today Gospel reading: John’s reasoned treatise on the God, the Word, and Jesus’ part in this universally grand theological statement regarding all of creation, the passage of time and the roles of light and darkness, it seems only fair that a thinking faith community should find its voice in such discussions.

The majority of our Christian forebears could not have fathomed such diversity of thought, much less a stand-off between scientific intellectuals and religious fundamentalists, which leaves both parties the poorer for it.   Far more broadly, our theological forebears left us with a way of thinking about the human capacity to reason; as opposed to reason itself being the topic of debate. They referred to reason in three ways: created reason, fallen reason and regenerative reason. Created reason is the human mind working for good, as was intended – in the beginning, as it were.  Some literalist would liken this to the Garden of Eden experience.  Others would simply say, having the capacity to reason made us human, it separates us from all other animals on this planet. But to reason alone was good enough for only a time. Eventually, some would say as we evolved, our ability to reason was fashioned into a tool for pushing us to extend beyond our means; coaxing us to believe that if we can dream it, we can do it, independent of either the help of, or the advice of, our creator. Another word for this is sin.  Which leads us to fallen reason, which is corrupt and corrupting, a distortion of a created good; but not a criticism of reason itself.  And finally there is regenerative reason, or reason reborn.  This is where a thinking person can find some refuge in the scientific/religious standoff.  It is regenerative reason that gives John such a powerful voice; a voice that has propelled the Gospel of Jesus Christ in to every nation on earth, and found a home in millions of hearts of soundly reasoned, faithful people, including scientists and intellectuals.  When reason is reborn, the boundaries of what is and what is not real or possible become impossible to declare, much less define.   

But to go where John wants us to go, "to go where no man has gone before", as it were, it will be of some use to us to revisit Stephen Hawkins.  Among his theorems, based in physics and cosmic science, is the idea that there are limits to what we are able to perceive.  Hawkins suggests that even as complex as human beings are we are only able to process a fraction of what actually makes up the world in which we exists.  Our version of reality is only defined by that single plane matrix after all.  Hawkins points out that this is one of the basic constants of the universe; the limits of each system’s ability to relate to another system; regardless of how interconnected it might be.  Imagine, if you can, the end of this universe, and the one it merges into and where that one ends.  We cannot imagine it; that’s the point. It’s not that an ever-expanding universe doesn’t exists, it’s just that we humans are limited as to what knowledge we will ever be able to acquire; it is far beyond us.  Our creator, the one we call God, or who John refers to as The Word, is in that category; the more than we can fathom category.   

We think and therefore we are, in fact does not make us rulers of the universe, or lords of our own creations (as Hawkins suggests), but very clearly points out that we are subjects bent to the will of forces far greater that even our wildest imaginings. It is in that place, the place beyond our wildest imaginings of a super complex matrix that is not single-planed but of multiple dimensions, it is there that God resides.  It is from that place that God spoke the Word, the Word that was with God. “He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What came into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” There is a undeniably cosmic element to John’s reasoning.  This cosmic understanding of the divine and the world as part of that otherworldly reality is expressed similarly in Isaiah 55, “so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose.”   

 It is within the expansive understanding that religious people have of the world we live in that we find meaning for life.  I do not dispute this science nor do I think it the church’s place to do so, but I cannot find meaning in life so narrowly defined by single-planed matrices; free will that is predetermined by predictable variables, and a reality that has been largely filled in by a data bank of memories and prior experiences.  For me, for the church, for all religious people, it is God’s purpose that gives our life meaning. God’s purpose that intends for us to have life and have it abundantly. 

As we travel through this life, and we have explored for ourselves the consequences of creative and fallen reason within our own lives, we purposely redirect our energy toward regenerative reason; that is, employing our God-given ability to think through the complex issues that face humanity for the common good.   In this way our purpose may more closely align itself with God’s purpose. We do this with the three tools of Christian thought passed down to us by the aforementioned theological forebears; also known in the Anglican world as the three legged stool: scripture, tradition and reason.  We appreciate and greatly benefit daily for the strides made by science that have transformed our lives of toil into lives of ease; and we reason that there has been a great cost in doing so. We go to Holy Scripture not for comfort and solace but for strength and resolve to align our purpose with God’s purpose; to make right our common wrongs; to admit the damage we inflict on one another and resolve to cease in doing it.  And we look to a long tradition, about 4000 years of religious communities who centered their lives on the single purpose of knowing and obeying God and making God known in the world. And in doing these things we are not shaken by the stark theorems of cosmic physicists but we embrace them as part of the greater mystery of life. It is after all our most complex scientific attempts to explain life that ultimately reveal how severely limited is our understanding of things truly cosmic and fantastic.