The Community Gathered in Jesus’ Name

Sermon for Sept. 10, 2023, Pentecost 15A, Central Presbyterian Church, Fort Smith, AR

Matthew 18:15—20

“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”                   

The text we read from Matthew’s gospel reflects a time in Matthew’s young Christian community as they tried to work out life together.  To read this in our context we will need to clear out some weeds that we will get to in a minute. But let us start with this:  Communities are made up of people, and people will never fail to step on each other’s toes, offend each other, try to control each other, and hurt each other. 

People are people; we are human, and we all have both positive characteristics and dark sides, good days, and bad days. 

So, how should a community handle the behaviors that come from those dark sides on those bad days?  Well, a principle that they knew from the Jewish Law in the Hebrew Bible was that you never convict a person on the basis of a single testimony (Dut. 19:15). 

Whenever you hear a story from one person about another, always remember that you have heard one side of the story, and every story has more than one side. So, be slow to join accusations.  

The whole point is to try to work it out. Don’t rush to judgment. Try to get to a resolution, to reconciliation. In other words, keep your ego in check. 

The goal is not punishment, but the peace that comes from honesty. In order for this to work, someone is going to have to back down. Someone is going to have to admit fault. Someone is going to have to own what they did, stop making excuses for it, and apologize. 

Then, the other one is going to have to accept the apology and move on. Otherwise, what would be the point of talking about it?  

Ego Work

Both admitting fault and forgiving require ego work. What does that mean?  We all have egos, meaning our sense of who we are and what we are entitled to. 

We all think everyone in the world owes us respect. We all want to be taken seriously. 

We all think our own perspective is right. 

We all want everyone else to give us the benefit of the doubt, to assume that we had perfect motives, and did our best, even when we didn’t. 

All those things are what we call ego. The self, or the ego, is that part of us that takes offense, and holds grudges. The ego is that part of ourselves that gets its feelings hurt when we don’t get what we think we are entitled to.  

Now, this is tricky for two reasons. We believe that Jesus taught us to live in such a way that we show respect to everyone, so, in that sense, everyone deserves respect. That is what we extend to others. But that is not what we are to demand for ourselves in the context of our community.  

The second way this teaching is tricky is that we are talking about life together in community. We are not talking about larger social issues. It is right for oppressed groups to demand justice and to be treated with respect. But inside the community, we are to turn the other cheek, and forgive “seventy times seven times.” 

Clearing Matthew’s Weeds

Now, I mentioned that there were weeds that needed to be cleared away from this text.

The following advice, I believe, is not a memory of the historical Jesus, but an expansion on that memory from Matthew’s community. It is the advice about what to do if negotiations fail and the one at fault does not own it, back down, admit it, and apologize. Matthew says, 

“if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector.”

Scholars do not believe the historical Jesus said that, because of the way he treated Gentiles and tax-collectors. In fact, Matthew’s gospel tells us that the disciple named Mathew was himself, a tax collector, and also that Jesus accepted him, and that he was compassionate to Gentiles.  

The Community Gathered in Jesus’ Name

But the final statement in this teaching is the key. Matthew says Jesus said:

“where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Two or three is the smallest community you can imagine, but it is sufficient.

When we gather, we gather in the name of Jesus. That means that Jesus is the basis for our community. The life and teachings of Jesus show us the way to live, including how to live together in community. 

We gather to remember Jesus and to let his words shape our lives. What we see, when we look at Jesus, is a person who demonstrated love at every turn. 

He loved his disciples, even when they failed. 

He loved people whom he called “lost,” whom other people wrote off as “sinners.” 

He loved people whom other people neglected, disrespected, or despised: sick people, Samaritan people, women, Gentile people, poor people, even children, which was counter-cultural at that time. 

Jesus was able to love because he had his ego under control. He did not get offended, even when he was being challenged. He did not need to be first, in fact, our tradition tells us that he washed the feet of his disciples; something only servants did. 

Jesus practiced the kind of spiritual practices, like meditation, or contemplation, that put his own ego in place. The community that gathers in his name seeks to do the same.  

Liberation from Enslavement to Ego

This is one of the forms of liberation we talk about: we can be liberated from slavery to ego when we practice the Jesus way of living. 

We can be freed from the necessity of protecting our pride and defending our right-ness. 

We can be unshackled from the need to have the last word, be recognized, and be taken seriously by everyone. 

That is what Jesus saves us from, if we let him.  

The sign we wear to the world is the sign that Jesus said would distinguish us as his followers: love.  

I cannot think of a time when we have needed this more than today. Our country is so divided; there is so much hostility, anger, arrogance, and derision — we all know it. Let us not be part of it! Let us be the solution. 

Let us be a community that models the Jesus-way of love; love for each other, and love for our enemies. 

All of our work for justice, equity, and inclusion is motivated, not by resentment and bitterness, but by love. Even when we have to confront systems of injustice and repression, we do it in love. Even when threatened, we respond with love. 

We keep doing the ego-work, keep our spiritual disciplines alive, we keep meditating, so that we can pray for those who oppose us: 

“may they be happy, may they be well, may they be filled with kindness and peace.” 

As our scriptural wisdom tradition teaches,

“love covers a multitude of sins.”

Romans 12

The Irony of High Standards

Jesus’ Questions: 4

Sermon for Oct. 2, 2022, Pentecost 17 C

Matthew 7:1—4      

 “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.  For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.  Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?  Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye?  You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

Last week we started by noting an intentional and obvious contradiction in the book of Proverbs.  One verse said we should not answer a fool according to their folly, while the very next verse says we should do the opposite.  

We noted that in wisdom literature, the wise teacher expects the student to exercise discernment to know which response is required in which situation.  

We noted that Jesus, among other things, was a teacher of wisdom.  He had that same expectation of the people who listened to his wisdom teaching.  This is important to start with today because in Matthew 7:1 Jesus said, 

“Do not judge,” 

while 14 verses later Jesus says, 

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”   

Obviously, we have to make a discerning and wise judgment to know who the false prophets are.  We therefore must know the difference between the kind of judging we must not do, and the kind we are required to do.  

It is helpful to ask what Jesus is doing here.  Matthew has arranged these teachings of Jesus together into a group that we call the Sermon on the Mount at the beginning of his version of the Jesus story, his gospel.  Scholars tell us that one of Matthew’s literary goals is to present Jesus as a new Moses.  

So, just as Moses went up Mount Sinai, according to the story, to receive the Torah, the law, from God, so Jesus is on a mountain presenting his instructions.  

By the way, “law” in Hebrew means “instruction” and “guidance” as well as “commandment.”  So Jesus is doing what Moses was doing: setting out the ideals and standards for his newly formed community.  

Jesus’ goal was to form communities in towns and villages.  He wanted people to gather around common meals — sharing food has always been significant for people; it was in the ancient world and it still is today.  You eat with people, in most circumstances, with whom you share mutual respect, tolerance, or even deeper connections.  

Normally you do not eat with strangers, enemies, or, in the ancient world, people you were not comfortable with because of various distinctions like race, gender, religion, social class, or even age.   

Jesus’ common meals were different; they were radically inclusive.  Men and women ate together.  People who were considered outcasts and impure like sex workers and Empire-collaborating tax collectors along with strictly religious people ate together.  

The inclusive nature of the common meals made a huge point: God did not have enemies, and neither should communities of followers of Jesus.  If God’s sun and rain fell on the fields of the righteous and the wicked without distinction, as Jesus taught, then there is no longer any basis for us to make those distinctions.  

This was all the more radical when you consider the Jewish laws about purity and impurity that made all kinds of distinctions and prohibited you from sharing a table with all kinds of people.   

Early Christian communities continued to meet around shared meals until several centuries later.  By the time they had become communities  of hundreds, the meal was reduced to a symbolic piece of bread and single drink.  Nevertheless, the Lord’s Supper still symbolizes that common meal tradition.

So Jesus was forming radically inclusive communities of people who, without a temple, a priest, or a sacrifice, would know that they were beloved, not judged, by God.  They would be a community of people who could trust God without anxiety, knowing that the God who cares for the flowers of the fields and the birds of the air cares all the more for them.  

But Jesus knew that even a community of people who were inclusive and shared meals together, even a community that could sing psalms of praise and pray together could become a toxic community.  

So to prevent his communities from becoming toxic, Jesus taught a number of values this community was to keep central.  For example, one of his core values was forgiveness; a community that does not know how to practice forgiveness will become toxic.  Forgiveness was central to Jesus.  

Today we are looking at another value: Jesus-communities are to be judgment-free zones.  Judgment can make a community toxic too, so Jesus-communities forswore judgmentalism.  Again, Jesus teaches by means of  questions.

“Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?  Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye?”

We are to be the opposite of the morality police.  We are not to engage in fault-finding.  We are rather to be self-critical, examining our own faults, not others’.  In typical Jesus fashion, he uses bold, graphic, hyperbolic images to make his point.  

The contrast could not be greater: a sliver in our neighbors’ eye, compared with a timber in our own.  The only logical thing is to work on the timber in our own eye.

There is an irony about living in a community with high standards.  A community that has high ideals and high standards like ours is even more vulnerable to becoming toxic, precisely because of its high standards.  

Why?  Because, a community of high standards has a tendency to become a judgmental community, as we hold one another accountable to those high standards.

We in the church have to face this squarely.  Most of the world that surrounds us believes that we are experts in being judgmental.  We have a well-earned reputation.  

We have, in the past, made people wear scarlet letters.  We have shamed people.  We have, for example, looked down our noses at tattoos and body piercings, as if they were signs of inner darkness, and we have been blind to our own pettiness and arrogance.  

We have judged people for their sexual orientation and their gender identity.  Thankfully, we have officially put those behind us, but we still have the reputation of  being judgmental.

So, this is going to be a difficult one for us to handle.   Our own high standards make being judgmental feel appropriate; being judgmental feels like we are holding the moral high ground.

The key, according to Jesus, is that our high standards should be the standards we hold ourselves to, and only ourselves.  We must take the log out of our own eyes.  Our attitude towards others has to be tolerance, compassion, and forgiveness, as Jesus has taught.

But it is not easy to live non-judgmentally in community.  People do things we wish they didn’t.  People say things they shouldn’t.  People fail to do things they should.  Some have habits that irritate us.

But we can do better.  Heather King has recently written about a nineteenth-century French Catholic Carmelite nun named Thérèse of Lisieux who can teach us a lot here.  

Thérèse wanted to be a non-judgmental person of love, but some of the other nuns irritated her.  Heather said that Thérèse  had 

“an almost compulsive desire to turn around and glare at the nun behind her in choir who made a clicking noise (apparently by tapping her rosary against her teeth), realizing that the more charitable act would be to pretend that the sound was music to Christ’s ears and endure the annoyance in silence.”  She made the irritation her teacher.

here

And there was more. 

“Every evening at dinnertime Thérèse took it upon herself to usher a particularly vexatious elderly nun from chapel to her place at table in the refectory, even going the extra mile to lovingly cut the crabapple’s bread.”  

Again, she turned the irritation into a teaching.  The irritation gave her an opportunity to learn patience, forbearance, and tolerance; the irritation taught her to accept others as they were, and to accept the situation she could not change.  

We could call her irritations “irriteachings.”  Every situation in which people do not live up to our expectations can be turned from irritations to irriteachings if we are willing to learn from them.  

I want to get practical.  This is hard.  We need help.  When irritations happen scientists tell us that a part of our brain fires and we want to react with anger.  It’s automatic.  

And while the fact that our brains respond that way is true, it is also true that we can teach our brains not to react so fast, not to be so automatically triggered.  

There is no practice I have found more helpful in turning down that auto-anger response than silent contemplative prayer, or meditation.  

Brain studies have repeatedly shown that the reactive part of our brains can be calmed down when we practice silent meditation. Nuns like Thérèse of Lisieux practiced just such meditation.  

It isn’t magic.  Change does not happen immediately; it is a cumulative effect of repeated regular practice.   But it does work, as I have found in my own life. 

We believe Jesus too, practiced meditation.  The gospels tell us that he would spend long nights in prayer as a regular practice.  

He lived a short life and so never got around to telling us about his techniques, but meditation was most likely one of them. 

Being non-judgmental is not trivial; it is fundamental for several reasons. For the sake of our reputation in the watching world, a community of followers of Jesus must be a non-judgmental community.  

For the sake of our relationships with each other, a community of followers of Jesus must be a non-judgmental community.  

For the sake of our own personal spirituality, a community of followers of Jesus must be a non-judgmental community. 

We know that we are all on a journey; none of us has arrived.  We are all growing towards spiritual maturity, not claiming we have achieved it already.  We are all imperfect.  We have good days and bad days.  

But we always begin again, even after failures, reaffirming our values, and re-committing ourselves to be authentic non-judgmental followers of Jesus who work on the log in our own eyes, and forget bout the slivers in our neighbors’ eyes.

Following Jesus into Mystical Union

Sermon for January 2, 2022, Season of Christmas, week 2, year C

Video can be found at the YouTube Channel of the Central Presbyterian Church, Fort Smith, AR. after the service, on the Traditional Services playlist.

John 1:1-18

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was 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 has come 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 was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who trusted in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

We are going to be talking about experiences that defy logical or scientific explanations as a way to begin to understand what the text we read from the Gospel of John is all about, and why it matters to us today.

The first kind of experience is the following: In a TED talk, an emergency room doctor, Thomas Fleischmann described something that startled me.  

I have heard descriptions of near-death experiences by people who have been brought back. They often say that while they were being resuscitated, they could see their room from a place above the bed, as if they were floating out of their bodies.  

Afterward, they remembered what the doctors and nurses who were working so hard to bring them back had said to each other.  

That much, I had heard before.  What I was startled by was that Dr. Fleischmann said that these memories were made and reported on by people who had no brain wave activity at all.  He went on to say that we have no scientific explanation for this at all.

There are other kinds of odd experiences as well.  As we discussed that TED talk in a group recently, several members described experiences they had for which there was no good explanation from a scientific perspective.  

Often, soon after the death of a loved one, their presence is experienced in powerful but odd ways.  Perhaps you have had experiences of the presence of a person who has died.

Spiritual Experiences

Many people have another kind of uncanny experience: spiritual experiences.  Many of you have had powerful experiences that you understand as spiritual.  You have felt the presence of God with you at crucial moments, or sometimes random ones. 

When you stop to consider it, there are numerous descriptions in the Bible of people having experiences of the presence of God.  Jacob had the dream of wrestling with the mysterious man who changed his name to Israel.  He also had the dream of the ladder up to heaven with angels ascending and descending it.  

Elijah encountered God in the paradoxical “sound” of “sheer silence,” after the earthquake and the storm.  

Moses encountered God at the burning bush and on the smoking, quaking Mt. Sinai.  

Isaiah had a vision of God seated on a throne in the temple surrounded by angels calling “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty.”  

Ezekiel had a vision of God on a mobile chariot-throne with wheels within wheels.  

We call these powerful experiences of God’s presence “mystical” experiences.   There has been a whole history of people who have written about their own mystical experiences in the Christian tradition and in many other faith traditions.  

In our tradition, we call them saints, like Saints. Theresa, Hildegard, Francis, John of the cross, and many others. 

While experiences that come with visions, like angelic beings, or bright lights or intense sounds, or instructional messages seem to be infrequent, far more common are the milder impressions of the nearness of God that probably most devout people of faith experience from time to time.  

Like the writer of the 23rd Psalm, we can all say that we have felt the Lord as our Shepherd who is with us, even when we are in “the valley of the shadow of death.”  We should not be ashamed to call these mystical experiences.  We feel one with God in those moments.

In the Gospel of John, when Jesus and the disciples were in the upper room on the night of his arrest, Jesus describes his experience with God mystically.  He told them that he was one with God, and, going further,  that they were one with him, and so also one with God.  

Mystical union with God, according to Jesus, was a present reality, not just some distant spiritual goal.  

I believe that Jesus was uniquely aware of his mystical union with God. He taught about God from the perspective of someone intimately acquainted with the Divine. 

People in large numbers were attracted to Jesus and felt the presence of God when he was present. He prayed direct, sincere prayers, as if God were as available as his own father, bringing home the daily bread from the earnings of his carpentry work.   

And he taught us to pray in those same direct sincere ways as well.  We did not need mountain-top temples, he told the Samaritan woman at the well, because God was Spirit, always and everywhere present offering spiritual, living water for thirsty souls.  We can have mystical union with God.

Where did Jesus get this view of God?  In the Hebrew Bible, most often God is pictured as a far-off divinity, with overwhelming power and a strict moral code, accessible only to the few. This is a view of God as punitive and threatening. 

But there was also a counter-testimony about the divine that taught that God could be encountered by normal people in the everyday world.  

They wrote about God in the form of lady Wisdom by whom God created the physical world. In the book of Proverbs, Lady Wisdom says that in the beginning, at the creation of the world, she was beside God, 

“rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”

Proverbs 8:30-31

Rejoicing in the physical creation, and not angry with us, but “delighting in the human race.”  This is key to understanding the text from John we have just read.

John, Wisdom, and Jesus

The text we just read about the Divine Word as the source of creation is a direct echo of those teachings about Lady Wisdom.  

This text, this prologue to the Gospel of John, is based on that wisdom teaching, in order to present Jesus as one who could lead us to encounter God directly, mystically.  John Shelby Spong has written, 

“The author of John’s gospel, in his prologue, is either using or creating an early Christian hymn based on a hymn to wisdom in the book of Proverbs to express the mystical unity that human life can have with God and asserting that this was, in fact, the unique thing about Jesus of Nazareth. It is that life-expanding oneness with God to which the author of the Fourth Gospel believed that Jesus was calling us.”

Spong, John Shelby. The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic

John says that the Word that was with God and by whom all things came into being, became flesh.  God became one with humanity.  

John says, “and we beheld his glory” which is something only a mystic could say, since “glory” means the shining radiance of God that no human eye could see.  

And yet Jesus’ oneness with God was so complete,  even if it is self-contradictory to talk about seeing it, glory is the only way to describe it.

And it was that very oneness with God that Jesus was calling us to experience also.  Jesus called it “eternal life.”  

Of course, Jesus believed in life after death with God, but he believed also that a new kind of consciousness could start now, in this life.  Eternal life, a quality of life lived at one with God could be a present reality.   

Later in John’s gospel, Jesus will say, awkwardly referring to himself in the third person, 

“And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”. 

John 17:3

 Eternal life is knowing God and Jesus.

When we trust that God is here, presently, at one with us, we know ourselves as God’s children.  John writes that 

“to all who received him, who trusted in [him], he gave power to become children of God.”  

First Principles

As we begin this new year, 2022, we begin with first principles.  The most essential starting point for the spiritual life is not with the idea that we are sinful and separated from God, but that we are beloved children of God, and one with God already.   

It is sadly true that we come from a long Christian tradition that started with sin and alienation; that was the starting point of the great theologian Augustin, whose early life as a playboy left him forever feeling guilty.  

But the creation story does not start with Adam and Eve sinfully biting the forbidden fruit.  The creation story starts with humans, created in the image and likeness of God, and pronounced “very good” and even blessed by God.  That is where we begin.

Our problem is that we get in the way of knowing that basic truth.  So we need the spiritual practices of mysticism to get ourselves out of the way.  We need the practice of meditation in order to silence the voices in our heads that distract us from our unity with God.  

We need tools like the Enneagram to help us deconstruct the powerful pull of our personalities and help us learn to recognize our own ego issues.  We need not be ashamed to consider ourselves mystics.  

You may be wondering, can a Presbyterian in the Reformed tradition be a mystic?  I want to end with a quotation from none other than John Calvin who, in this passage, describes his own mysticism. If John Calvin can be a mystic, I think we can too. 

Speaking of his own ignorance, when it comes to understanding God, Calvin says, 

“Ignorance that believes is better than rash knowledge.”  

Then, reflecting on the unknowable depth of God, he says, 

“‘O depth!’ Peter denies; the thief believes. ‘O depth!’ Do you seek reason? I tremble at the depth.  Do you want to use reason? I will marvel. Do you want a theological argument? I will believe. I see the depth; I do not reach the bottom.”  

Institutes, XXIII.5

There is no bottom to see.  God remains an unfathomable mystery.  But we can experience oneness with God as we regularly engage in intentional spiritual practices.   

Preparation: Removing Obstacles

Sermon for Dec. 5, 2021, Advent 2C

Audio is here.

Video will be available at the YouTube channel of the Central Presbyterian Church, Fort Smith, AR, after the Sunday Service. Click on the Tradtional Services playlist.

Luke 3:1-6

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,

“The voice of one crying out in
the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill
shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;

Everyone knows that if you load a tall statue onto an oxcart, you better have a level road under its wheels or the statue will tumble off.  

For that reason, every year, in the ancient city of Babylon, they had to repair the road that led from the city out to the New Year’s festival grounds.  They had to fill in potholes and level out bumps that had developed since last year, or else the statue of their patron deity, Marduk could be humiliated by a fall.   

Marduk had to be present at the festival where each year, the Babylonian king would be ritually humbled, and then re-invested with regal power to reign in the name of, and for the glory of Marduk, their god.  

Witnessing Road Repair

The Jewish refugees, exiled in Babylon, would have witnessed this road-repair infrastructure effort annually.  After the generation passed away that had departed Judea, chained to their captors, and a new generation of Babylonian-born Judeans succeeded then, the idea that they would ever again return grew fainter.  

There were some big obstacles in the way of wanting that return.  For many who had established lives, married, built homes, and had children in Babylon, even the will to return diminished.  

So the prophets, like the author of second Isaiah, the Isaiah of the sixth century period of exile, felt inspired to call his compatriots to return.  Second Isaiah used the annual road preparation as the perfect image to call for the return to Judea.  

When the Babylonians fell to the Persians, their king, Cyrus opened the door for the return.  Isaiah took that as a sign that God was calling the people back to the Promised Land so he said, remove the obstacles. 

“In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level.” 

Isaiah 40

Required Preparation

The return required preparation.  The new thing that God was doing required the people’s faithful response.  The obstacles had to be removed. So in the New Testament, the way Luke tells the story of Jesus, that same image is perfect.  

Jesus came announcing that God’s Kingdom was a reality; it was among them, even within them.  That was the new thing God was doing.  So the people had to be prepared for the message.  Preparation had to be made for the announcement of such Good News.  

So, Luke tells us that John was the one to make those preparations.  Out in the wilderness on the banks of the Jordan River, like the voice crying out so long ago, John stood calling out the same message: 

“Prepare the way of the Lord.”

How should the people prepare?  By removing the obstacles.  

“Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth”

Our Obstacles

In Advent, we hear again the call to prepare the way for the new thing that God is doing in our lives, in our church community, and in our world.  We hear the call to prepare the way as a call to remove the obstacles.  

So, the questions for us today are “What are the obstacles I face to embracing the new thing that God wants for me?”  And “What are the obstacles we face to embracing the new thing that God wants for us?”  “We,” meaning our congregation, our community, our nation.  

In the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, Luke sets his story in a political context.  First Isaiah, for example, had said that when he saw a vision of the Lord high and lifted up in the temple, it was in the year of the death of King Uzziah.  

In that political context he heard the voice asking “whom shall I send?” And he answered, “Here am I, send me.”  The personal call was embedded in the political context.  (Isaiah 6)

Similarly, Luke lists for us the public names of the Emperor, the nearby Governors, and the local priestly elites running the temple-bank, before he tells of John the Baptist, who called for personal repentance as preparation.  The personal call comes in the context of public politics.  

Why?  Because the obstacles to the new thing that God is doing are always multiple: personal and political.  Some are valleys that need to be filled in, others are mountains and hills that need to come down. There is crookedness that needs to be straightened out and rough circumstances that require smoothing.  

So we ask ourselves, what are the obstacles in me and in us that need to be removed?  We might identify them by first asking, “What is the new thing that God wants to do in me and in us?   

How could we know?  How could we understand the mind of God?

What does God Want?

Let’s start with what we know.  Our human concepts of God are always inadequate.  But there are some things we can say. Our faith is that God is always and everywhere present to us.  As our lives and our universe unfolds in an ever-evolving process, so God is involved in that process with us, moment by moment.  

We can never adequately grasp the nature of the Divine, but there are some more things we can say with confidence.  God, we believe, is Love.  

The New Testament also teaches us also that God is Spirit.  God is spiritually present to us.   We all have this inner urge to goodness.  Where does that come from?  The Spirit is that powerful lure to the next right thing, towards the goal of love.  

The Spirit is active in each circumstance, coaxing us to take the next step into a future of beautiful loving possibilities.  

Even in horrible and evil circumstances, the Spirit is both suffering as we suffer, and at the same time, drawing us to a better future, of healing and restoration.  The Spirit is always offering us to come aboard, to get in sync with the new loving thing that God is doing in us, and in the world. 

But there are obstacles. We are like those exiles in Babylon.  The call to the new thing God is doing may seem difficult. The Spirit can be resisted.  The lure to love may not be listened to.  

There are always reasons for not wanting the new thing that God offers. Let us examine some of them. In their book, “The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas” the authors identify four obstacles: Inertia, Energy,  Emotion, and Reactance.   (Nordgren, Schonthal. The Human Element).

They explain them this way: Inertia is 

“the powerful desire to stick with what we know, despite the limitations.” 

The more a change deviates from the familiar, the  status quo, the more inertia it will create. It is easier to stay in Babylon, even though they were foreigners there. 

All of us who have had to help aging parents move out of a house they can no longer keep up and into assisted living knows how inertia makes the right decision difficult.   

The second obstacle, Effort is 

“the energy (real and perceived) needed to make change happen.” 

The greater the change being asked for, the more energy it may take, and so the greater the effort it will require. The effort of leaving Babylon and making that long journey must have seemed enormous; too much for many.   And they probably imagined that rebuilding in the promised land would also require enormous effort.  It is simply easier to stay put, even in a bad situation.  

The third obstacle Emotion refers to 

“the unintended negative emotions created by the very change we seek to make.” 

The more threatening the change, the greater the emotional response. Fear of the unknown is always present when change is coming. What if we get attacked on the road from Babylon to the Promised Land?  What if there are already people living there?  What if…what if?  Emotions can be powerful obstacles.

Reactance is the fourth Obstacle.  Reactance is 

“the impulse to resist being changed.” 

The doctor says leave out the salt; we do not want to.  We resist.  When the pressure to change increases, so does the reaction against it.  

Think about vaccine mandates, for example. The more people felt pressured, the stronger their resistance became.  So, Inertia, Energy, Emotion and Reactance are powerful obstacles.  They are the mountains and valleys of the road, the crooked and rough places.

But what if the new thing that God wants to lure us towards does mean that we cannot cling to the way things are, the familiar? 

What if God’s future does require real effort? 

What if the changes that following God’s will demands feel threatening?  

What if there is real pressure to change because of circumstances we cannot control?  

Will we allow these obstacles to impede the way?  Or will we do the preparation necessary, personally and collectively to 

“make the paths straight… and the rough ways… smooth”?  

Some of the Judeans in Babylon overcame the obstacles and made the journey back home, some stayed in Babylon.  

On the personal level, the call to prepare the way comes as a summons to personal spiritual practices that together, over time, overcome our personal obstacles to openness to God’s new future.  

Contemplative prayer, or meditation, because of its power to help us with our ego-issues is probably the most effective spiritual tool in the bag.  Spiritual practices help us overcome our inertia.  

They give us the spiritual energy we need to do the right thing. They enable us to have more emotional maturity.  Spiritual practices help us to see our own reactance, and identify its source, which is so often wrapped up with our ego-issues.

On a collective level, we are called, as the affirmation of faith we will use today says, 

“to unmask idolatries in church and culture, to hear the voices of peoples long silenced, and to work with others for justice, freedom, and peace.”

  And this call comes with full knowledge of the fact that we will encounter resistance.  People will find it more appealing to stick with the way things have been, even if they have included racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination; even if the climate’s temperature increases.  

We know that great effort will be required of us to make the changes Love requires.  We understand that people will feel threatened and get emotional, even shrill when, for example, gender identity is being discussed.  

We get it, that the more pressure people feel they are under, the more resistant they will be.  Nevertheless, the Spirit of the God of love lures us to the next right thing.  

The call to prepare the way is a call, not to remain in place, but a call to a journey.  

It is a call to leave the comforts of Babylon, and head off into a wilderness between where we are, and where we are called to be, both personally and collectively.  

It is a call to be Reformed and always reforming.  

But the assurance we have is that the Spirit of God is with us, and will be there for us, every step of the way toward love. 

Nevertheless, Hope

Audio is here.

Video will be available here at the YouTube channel of the Central Presbyterian Church, Fort Smith, AR. after the Sunday service on the Traditional Services playlist.

Luke 21:25-36

[Jesus said:] “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”

There were a number of puzzling questions that the early Christians felt the burden of answering after Jesus was no longer physically present.  They included these: 

If Jesus was Messiah, why did he die?  Messiah was, many believed, supposed to lead the nation to victory over the Romans.  So, why did the Romans kill the Messiah?  

Second, how did Jesus relate to God?  Was he a god?  Just a man full of God?  Some combination of God and man?  Diverse Christian communities believed in different answers. 

Third, what is going to happen in the future?  This is all the more difficult to answer because, by the time Matthew, Luke and John were written, there had been a Jewish war against Rome.  

It started as a Jewish civil war but when the Roman army came to quell the fight, the Jews united and it became an all-out war with Rome.  Rome won.  

In reprisal, the Roman army left the Jewish temple a smoking pile of rubble. They carted off its treasures to Rome as spoils of war.  Roman general Titus’ Arch of Triumph, still standing today, sports a relief depicting the looting of the temple treasures, like the golden menorah lampstand. 

Telling the Story Afterwards

The gospel of Mark was probably written just before the war, but New Testament scholars believe that the experience of that war had a major impact on the way in which Matthew, Luke, and John tell the story of Jesus.  

How could it not?  Jesus clearly had issues with the temple; things he objected to about it and how it was being operated.  He even enacted a public demonstration against it.  It would be hard to write about Jesus’ opposition to the temple without being influenced by its subsequent destruction.  

It would be like telling the story of an anti-Communist political figure from the 1950s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break up of the Soviet Union.   

If you lived back in Jesus’ day, you would not have had to have been a prophet with supernatural gifts to predict that if the nation continued hurtling towards war, there would be a disaster.  

And if it did come to blows,  you would not have to have been a genius to predict that Rome would win.  So it was not remarkable that Jesus foresaw the coming violence.  

Neither was it remarkable or unusual to describe the looming catastrophe with bold, bizarre apocalyptic images like 

“signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.”  

In those days apocalyptic stories were popular.  They often predicted the future coming with calamities and violence, described metaphorically with images such as the heavenly bodies being shaken, stars falling from the sky, the sun going dark and the moon turning to blood.  

Some of that kind of language still remains today when we speak of major events like 9/11 as “earthshaking.”  We all know what we mean.  So did they.  

The Temple as Symbol

In fact the memory of 9/11 may help us understand the impact that the destruction of the temple had on Jews of that day.  On 9/11, it was not just that America was attacked and many lives were lost, it was also that they attacked the very symbols of our country.  The Twin Towers were icons of our prosperity.  The Pentagon symbolized our military power.  The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was likely headed for the Capitol with its obvious symbolic importance.  On 9/11 the symbols of our nation were attacked.   

Similarly, the temple was the icon of the Jewish people.  Its destruction was both a military and political defeat plus a major religious crisis.  

No longer could priests offer sacrifices for sin.  There could be no more Day of Atonement liturgy.  On Passover, the celebration of Jewish independence from Egyptian slavery, there was now no temple to make a pilgrimage to.  Everything had changed. 

A Practice for Our Times of Religious Change

In this time of Advent, so many years later,  it is interesting to notice the similarities we share with the experience of those gospel writers.  We have not gone through anything as horrific as the Jewish War, but we have experienced a great tidal wave of change in our religious culture.  

The church used to be the center of gravity for a community. Now it is at the periphery.  Religious participation, especially among the young, has plummeted.  

The future is uncertain and scary.  Whatever it will look like, clearly it will not look like it did in the 1950s when this sanctuary was built and this church was full.   That ship has sailed. 

So, how do we live into this uncertain future?  Traditionally, Advent has been a time of anticipation, of waiting.  In the literal sense, we are waiting for the celebration of the birth of Jesus at Christmas.  

But we also take time out in Advent for spiritual reflection, anticipating the new thing that God will do in our lives and in our community, as we seek God’s future.  

In this text, we hear Jesus telling his disciples, in their time of upset and change, what to do.  This is the right text for us.

First, Jesus says, “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down…”. Be on guard against resignation, against despair, against cynicism, against pessimism.  Those are not the habits of the heart of faith.  

There is no question that things we never wished to happen have happened, but we are not people of despair.  We are nevertheless people of hope.  We do not have to turn to “dissipation and drunkenness,” the vain hopes for self-soothing remedies that simply constitute denial.  We do not have to be overwhelmed by 

“the worries of this life,” as Jesus said.

So those are the end states to avoid, but how do we avoid them?  Next, Jesus teaches the positive practices that can keep us from ending up in the wrong place. Jesus says,

“Be alert at all times, praying…”.  

You do not need a temple to go to, which is good news when there is no long one available.  You do not need a priest to do your praying for you.  You have unmediated access to God.  So use it, Jesus says.  Pray.

What could it mean to pray at all times?  It cannot mean walking around constantly muttering prayers under our breath.  In fact, if you are working or even working at a hobby, your attention is required.  So what is meant by “at all times praying?”  

I believe it means living with a non-anxious sense of well-being that comes from a life consciously oriented toward the Divine.  It is the sense of peace that comes from believing that you are in God’s hands, even as the temple burns and the culture changes.  

It is the settled conviction that whatever is happening, you will get through it because you know that this world exists in God, and you exist in God, and that God is with you.  

I believe this kind of sense of wellbeing, this sense of the presence of God is the fruit of spiritual practices, prayer being chief among them.  In fact, contemplative prayer, or meditation is especially effective in producing this kind of calm or equanimity.  

Contemplative prayer, that is wordless, silent prayer, done with the intention to be present to the Divine Presence has the effect, over time, of calming down our spirits.  We become less stressed, less triggered by threats, especially threats to our egos.  We become less reactive, less resistant to experiences of inconvenience or frustration.  

Contemplative prayer, as Jesus practiced it, creates a sense that even though there is massive change happening, even though the future is uncertain, we do not have to be weighed down by worries.  We can, nevertheless, hope.

The past cannot be changed, but if I could, I would love to go back in time and fix something that I believe was broken in those early days after Jesus was no longer physically present.  

As Christian communities started devoting time to those vexing questions: “Why did Jesus die at the hands of the Romans?  How did Jesus relate to God?  What was going to happen in the future?”,  I would have loved to have been in a position to say something like, “Hey guys, all of those theological questions are interesting, but none of them are what Jesus told us to concentrate on.  

Rather, Jesus told us to be on guard, because there is a real danger to our souls and to our communities that the worries of this life could weigh us down.  The changes and uncertainty could make us lose hope.  

So instead of getting into theological arguments, do what is yours to do, so that that doesn’t happen.  Develop a practice of prayer, and especially contemplative prayer.  Orient your life towards the Divine.  Then you will be able to stand up to whatever is coming with hope.  

I believe that if the early church had been teaching her children, her youth and her young adults to practice contemplative prayer, instead of fighting over creeds, we would have had a different history.  

We could have had our own theological convictions, but we would have been generous, allowing other people to differ without calling them heretics and excommunicating them.  

We could have admitted that many of our doctrines are merely human attempts at defining an unfathomable God, and so we could have held our opinions with humility instead of stridency.  We would have never dreamed of inquisitions, book banning, and heresy trials.  Crusades would have been unthinkable.  Violence itself would have seemed absurd.   

Nevertheless, Hope

Of course, history is what it is, not what we might have wished it to be.  But we have an opportunity now, in our generation, to get back on track.  

We do that by turning our attention to Jesus and learning from him.  He knew there would be difficulties, but he believed we could nevertheless, be people of hope.  

Make this Advent season be a time of spiritual renewal.  Set aside some time every day to pray.  If you have not yet, then consider starting to practice contemplative, wordless prayer.   Let it orient your spirit toward the Divine.  Let it make you a person of hope.  

Servant Style

Sermon for Oct. 17, 2021, Pentecost 21B

Audio is here.

Video will be available at the YouTube channel of the Central Presbyterian Church in Fort Smith, AR. after the Sunday service under the Traditional Services playlist.

Mark 10:35-45

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”

When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

I do not believe that any of us would be as shameless as James and John.  We live in different times.  In our culture, we democratize power.  We do not use titles like Mister or Misses much anymore.  We address our doctors by their first names.  Even professors invite students to use first names.    

In the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, one of the issues was power and the abuse of power, which is why we, in the Reformed tradition do not have bishops.  

But power still plays a huge role among us.  Everyone has an ego, and that is where it starts.  From there it grows to include the collective egos of institutions, organizations, and systems.

Power Matters to God

Power matters to God.  Richard Rohr says “A [primary] idea of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is its very straightforward critique of misuses of power.”  Specifically, power as domination.  

The central narrative of the Hebrew Bible is the exodus story which begins as  God hears the cries of the suffering Hebrew people.  They have been bearing the weight of the empire’s pretentious ambitions, but God calls Moses to lead them to freedom.  

Domination systems are antithetical to human flourishing, and therefore, contrary to God’s good will for humanity.  

Power is Seductive

But that lesson is hard to learn.  Power is seductive.  People like being in control.  Even Jesus had a frustratingly difficult time convincing his own inner circle of disciples to relinquish aspirations of power.  

We will focus on the story we read from Mark 10, but we have to remember that this is the second time Jesus has tried to teach the same thing.  In Mark 9, Jesus questioned the disciples about the subject of their recent argument and learned that it was about which one of them was the greatest.  

That was when he asked a child to come and stand before them and said, 

“Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”  

The words “servant” and “child” have a common root, so Jesus was making a play on words, which, combined with a live object lesson should have made the teaching memorable.  

But it is one thing to remember a lesson and quite another to internalize it. Clearly, the disciples did not yet internalize the teaching that in the community formed around following Jesus, power was not to be used for domination.  

The Shameless Request

In our text, we read that James and John come to Jesus with a request; they want to sit on Jesus’ left and right in his “glory.”  They want to be in the second and third positions of power behind Jesus when his kingdom finally arrives in full.  

Not only do they completely fail to grasp the nature of the kingdom of God that Jesus has been teaching, they also fail to understand the values of the kingdom.  The nature of the kingdom of God is that it is not like an earthly kingdom.  The kingdom of God is not hierarchical.   It does not center power at the top, so that it flows downward in decreasing degrees as hierarchies do.  

The values of the kingdom are different too.  The kingdom of God does not center the voices of the elite, but of the marginal.  

Children are the icons of the kingdom because greatness and domination are not their concerns.  James and John are way off track at this point in the story.

It is remarkable that the Gospels recorded this scene.  James and John have completely misconstrued Jesus’ ethical vision of a kingdom of equals in which leaders use their positions for service instead of domination.  

But the early Christian communities finally got the message and considered it of such importance that this story was transmitted, even at the expense of the reputations of the community’s leaders.  

It is such an embarrassing story that when Matthew re-told it, he had James and John’s mother make the request on their behalf, as if to shift responsibility away from them. 

But it was not only James and John whose reputations were sullied by this story.  The other disciples stumble into the same ego-pit.  When they heard of James and John’s request, they became angry with them.  

Why?  The only reason could be that they believed James and John had jumped the gun, grasping for something they all wanted as well. 

Jesus’ Responses

Jesus had two responses; first to James and John, then to the whole group.  To James and John Jesus asked if they were going to be able to drink the cup he had to drink, or be baptized with his baptism.  

Both cup and baptism are metaphors for suffering.  The cup of suffering Jesus can see coming is so excruciating that later,  in the garden, on the night of his arrest,  even Jesus himself will ask God to remove  it from him.  

The baptism is a baptism of fire, a full submersion into agony.  That is the path Jesus is facing, not the path that leads to a glorious throne of power.  

Jesus’ mission included a direct confrontation with the domination system that was oppressing his people.  He was on his way to Jerusalem where he was going to perform a publicly provocative action.  He was going to shut down the center of power, the very location where the records of debts were stored, the temple.  

In his day, many peasants, which comprised the majority of the population, were being forced off of their land and into virtual debt-slavery.   The aristocratic families that controlled the high priesthood were becoming wealthier and wealthier at their expense. 

Jesus, like Moses before him, was called by God to confront that domination system, even at the cost of his life.   

How absurd then, for the people who were his front line staff to be quibbling about power, greatness, and thrones.  And yet, at that point, they had not awakened to Jesus’ vision.  

Exposing Cultural Values

Why not?  They had absorbed the values of the dominant culture.  

This is what humans do.   We take on the attitudes, the norms, the perspectives of our culture.  We do not even think to question our culture’s values.  

We are blind to our cultural assumptions until someone enlightened holds up a mirror to us and we see them from another perspective.  

That is what Jesus did.  He held up a mirror to the disciples and said, in effect, look at yourselves; you have pagan values.  You have the values of people who never heard the Genesis creation story.  

They do not understand that God created everyone in God’s image so that every person has dignity and value equally.  If you had internalized that story you would understand that there is no justification for domination.  So he said, 

“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.”

Jesus is saying, in effect, yes, that is the dominant culture; but look how that works out; you yourselves have suffered under this domination; how could you possibly want to turn around and dominate others?  He said flatly,

“But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.”

Then he used himself as the example to follow.  Using the title for himself that literally means “The human one” he said, 

 “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  

A ransom here means the price you pay to release someone from debt slavery.  Jesus was willing to put his life on the line on behalf of many, to oppose the structures of domination.  

The Work Continues

That is why we who seek to follow Jesus believe it is our duty to continue his work.  We know that our culture has been blind to how systems of domination have oppressed people, but now, more and more are being exposed. 

We can see ourselves in the mirror when we hear the voices of those who have suffered.  

We listen to women’s stories and come to understand the role that sexism and patriarchy has played in our society, from the home and family to the world of business and politics.  

We listen to the voices of people of color and come to understand how racism has infected our society since the first white people arrived here four hundred years ago.

We listen to the voices of people who are in the LGBTQ+ community and we have a whole new set of reasons to have sympathetic concern, knowing that there was never a time when we cis-gendered heterosexuals ever chose to be what we are.

This is why leadership in the church only makes sense if it is servant leadership.  As followers of Jesus, we demonstrate an alternative value system; the values of the kingdom of God.  

Our officers take vows to “serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.”  Leadership is servant-style.  It is for the flourishing of our community of faith, so that we can make a difference in the world, doing what Jesus did: exposing oppressive systems of domination which cause suffering to the people made in God’s image.  

Today we will finish the process of installing officers for our church.  They will repeat the same vows we ministers make.  The only difference is the specific roles we play in the community.  

None of us is perfect.  The standards we affirm are high  standards.  The call to be servant-leaders is aspirational.  None of us reaches them perfectly.  

That is why the call to these high standards must be accompanied by disciplined spiritual practices that help us along the journey.  Specifically, practices that help us with our ego issues are essential.  

Meditation is a powerful spiritual technology that, over time, helps a great deal with ego.  The Enneagram is also a powerful tool to help us see ourselves as we are so that we can grow towards transformation.  

So, we engage these and other practices so that we can be as authentic in our quest to follow Jesus as we are able to be, as we seek to emulate  the one who came, “not to be served, but to serve.”

Conversations in the Dark: mysticism and transformation

Sermon for May 30, 2021, Trinity Sunday year B

Video is here at the Central Presbyterian Church YouTube channel, on the Traditional Services playlist. A new episode is uploaded after the Sunday service. Check out our other videos too, like Circle of Friends Gathering and Thoughts for the Day.

Podcast is at Steven Kurtz’s Podcast

John 3:1-17

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

There was a tradition of mysticism in ancient Israel that included rich, almost psychedelic visionary experiences. Isaiah’s vision of God on the throne included fiery angelic creatures, and coals of fire. 

Ezekiel’s vision of God on a mobile throne with wheels within wheels and multiple animal-like faces is even stranger. God, as king, was often described as sitting on a throne. In fact, the arc of the covenant in the holy of holies is itself a throne on which God is invisibly seated between the outstretched wings of two facing angels. 

So they call this ancient mystical practice “Throne Mysticism.” The practice included silent meditation, or contemplative prayer.  

John’s Gospel is the most mystical of our four canonical gospels. It is quite different in many ways from the others. Only in John does Jesus make long speeches and speaks of the mystical unity of himself with God the Father, the Spirit, and the disciples. John embellished the Jesus stories to reflect the growing faith of his Christian community in the second century. He loved metaphor, wordplay, and symbolism.

The Nicodemus Character

If you are watching a film in which it starts to rain, you know something bad is happening to the characters. Rain is a symbol. Similarly, in John’s Gospel, if it’s dark, then someone is in the dark, in desperate need of enlightenment. 

That is the case with the character Nicodemus whom John describes as coming to see Jesus at night.  

John loves to write characters that make the mistake of taking Jesus’ words literally when he means them figuratively. The woman at the well thinks he is talking about literal water when he says he can give living water. 

Jesus says that he will rebuild the temple in three days after it is destroyed, speaking of his body as a temple, but they take him literally and argue that the temple has been under construction for 46 years.  

So, Nicodemus falls into the same mistake. Jesus speaks of spiritual rebirth but Nicodemus thinks he means literally being born all over again. 

I do not think anyone would be that dense, but I believe Nicodemus, like many of the characters in John’s Gospel, are fictional. Nicodemus stands for a way of thinking about God and the spiritual life that is cluelessly in the dark. In this story, Jesus attempts to enlighten him.

Un-transforming Religion: A Conundrum

There is a conundrum about religion and religious people that Nicodemus illustrates. It is possible — maybe even likely — to be active in a religion without being transformed by it. 

In fact, as Richard Rohr likes to point out, religion, at immature levels, can impede transformation. If people use religious acts, even prayer, as a way of bolstering their egos, by thinking their acts make them good, or even “better than” others, then they remain spiritually immature. 

Being in religious leadership, as Nicodemus is, can be an even greater obstacle to spiritual growth because of the way being in leadership strokes the ego.  

Here is the problem: when religion is reduced to a set of moral rules or practices to perform plus a set of ideas to believe in, no transformation of the ego happens. 

Keeping moral rules and performing rituals have their place, but they do nothing to transform the ego. Believing in the right doctrines does not transform the ego. 

If attending church is only a duty to be performed, the positive benefits of it dissipate at the door. Every religion is full of unenlightened Nicodemus-es that have never been reborn spiritually. Just look at how easy it is to get religious people whipped into a violent mob. 

If you think Christians or even Reformed people like us are an exception, read some church history; we are not. Protestants and Catholics burned each other’s churches to the ground in the post-Reformation conflicts. It was ugly.

Flesh and Blood and the Ego

The problem is the human ego. We are all born as our flesh-and-blood selves. This comes with all kinds of complications. We start life totally ego-centric. As infants, we cried when we needed food, and expected to receive it. As children, we experienced frustration and failures. People disappointed us. Even the perfect parent could not always meet every need. Nor could she prevent nightmares or school bullies.  

So we learned strategies to defend ourselves from hurt. These defense strategies become our personalities. At some level, they worked for us, but they also deceived us, because we came to believe that they are our essential selves. “I am my personality.” 

But that is not true. In your essence, you are a beloved child of God. And so is everyone else. Understanding that insight is like a re-birth; it changes everything. It is transformative. 

Our essential beloved-ness is an insight common to mystics who, by the practice of meditation, have been able to deconstruct their ego-fixations.

Salvation as Transformation 

In this text from John’s gospel, we learn that God, according to Jesus, loves the world so much that he wants everyone in it to experience that kind of transformation. That is salvation. John also calls it “eternal life.” Most people think eternal life means heaven. It does include life beyond this world, but eternal life is meant to be a quality of life that starts now. 

John’s Gospel says that eternal life is to know Jesus. To be saved by Jesus. Being saved means being rescued from the self-absorbed life, the ego-obsessed life, the self-focused life. Living that kind of ego-based life is best described as “perishing.”  

This is not to be judgmental; Jesus did not come to condemn us for being ego-driven, but to save us from perishing that way. He came to save us from all the conflicts and catastrophes that accompany an ego-driven life.

Facing What’s Killing Us

There is an odd story that Jesus alludes to in his conversation with Nicodemus. It is from Numbers in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew people are in the wilderness. Poisonous snakes are attacking them; people are dying. So Moses makes a bronze pole with a bronze serpent on it. When people look at it, they are saved from the venomous bites. 

Looking at what is killing you somehow heals you. Looking at our little defensive egos and understanding them as little defensive egos sets us free from their power over us. But it often requires the mystical practice of meditation over time to figure this out.

John uses that allusion to that story of the serpent on the pole as a foreshadowing of Jesus being lifted up on a cross. For John, Jesus is enthroned, not in a temple, but on that cross. That cross-moment becomes, in John’s Gospel, Jesus’ moment of glorification. 

Why? Because Jesus was so non-ego centered he would rather die than kill. He accepted suffering and sacrifice because he was, as theologians have said, completely “a man for others.”  

That is how Jesus can be, as John’s Gospel reports him saying he is: “the light of the world, the door, the way, the truth, and the life.” The Jesus-shaped life is a life born again, born anew, born from above (all of those are implied in the original meaning of being born again) because it is a life in the Spirit. 

The Spirit, like the wind, is invisible, but it is known by its effects. The effect of the Spirit is spiritual transformation from selfishness to selflessness.  

Our challenge is to put ourselves in this story in Nicodemus’ shoes. We are religious people, but we know that there is more than moral rules and rituals. 

We are invited to know in our bones that we are beloved children of a loving God who made us for connection. 

We are invited to know ourselves as a beloved community on a mission of compassion. 

We are invited to be mystics whose practices help us to be, like Jesus, people for others.  

Beautiful Freedom

Video is here.

Mark 8:31-38

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

What would you be willing to do, to get your way? Would you lie? Some would. Would you file lawsuits? Some would. Would you go on social media to take down people who you think are in keeping you from getting your way? Some would. Would you be willing to use violence, even lethal violence? Again, we have witnessed such things in our country recently. Some people are willing to bring down our whole democracy to get their way. 

I have spoken previously about the fact that those who did some of these things, cloaked them in supposed religious respectability by public signs and symbols of Christianity. Texts like the one before us from the Gospel according to Mark show just how absurd that is.  

But let us not begin by being smugly superior to those people. The truth is that no one enjoys it when our hopes, our dreams, our goals, or even our trivial plans are stymied. We don’t even like being the second car at the red light. We certainly don’t like it when someone cuts in the line we are waiting in. 

In each of us is a dark side; a self that wants to assert itself, in competition with other selves. The difference between us and the Capitol insurrectionists may be more of degree, than kind, though the degree be huge. We will be considering those issues today as we look at the text from Mark.

The Russian author Dostoevsky wrote a novel entitled “Notes from the Underground.” I thought of that title as I was reflecting on this text from Mark’s gospel. In many ways, Mark’s gospel is written from the underground. 

Many scholars believe that Mark wrote in the tumultuous days leading up to or perhaps even during the Jewish revolt against Rome that ended in 70 CE.  

So, when Mark was telling the story of Jesus in those days, he was both recording what he had been told about Jesus and applying the meaning of Jesus’ message to his community.  So his gospel was like “Notes from the Underground” – something written to people in a tough situation in dangerous times.  

Mark’s Community’s Context

What would it have been like to be in Mark’s community? It would have meant trouble. In the early years, Christians in Palestine were mostly Jewish and thought of themselves as Jews who believed in Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah. 

But the closer they got to a Jewish revolution, the more dangerous it was to be a Jewish person in the Roman Empire. Their situation was made even more dangerous because the central message of Jesus was about a kingdom – and it wasn’t the kingdom of Caesar or Rome, it was the kingdom of God — dangerous words.  

The Romans were not reluctant to crucify people who were suspected of treason. They believed in group punishment. They believed in making public examples out of insurgents. They believed that the more brutal they were, the less likely it was that there would be organized opposition. 

So they crucified people publicly, in huge numbers. They crucified them naked, which was meant to shame them. It was meant as a deterrent.

To make it even worse, they normally let the bodies remain on the crosses long after death – not even giving a chance for a decent burial.  

This is difficult to hear, but I think it is absolutely necessary to be reminded of what it must have been like to hear someone say, as in this story Jesus said:

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

That would have been a startling and sobering, even horrifying thought. 

Hearing it in Our Context

But we do not live in revolutionary times. We do not fear dying a violent death. We are not being targeted by the authorities. We are not living in the underground. So how do we read these texts from those days? How do they speak to us, in our context? Do we need “notes from the underground” anymore?

I believe we do need Mark’s version of Jesus’ message today – in fact, that it is crucial for us, in ways that are as deep and challenging for us as they were for Mark’s community.  

If we step back from the specifics of the context — the revolutionary times — and look into the deep meaning, we will see that we too need to hear this call in our context. Jesus’ words call us to consider our response – and it is a serious and sobering call. But it is not just that; I believe it is a deeply liberating call as well.

Life and Survival

Let us start by reflecting a bit about life. If we humans want anything, it is to survive. The survival instinct is hardwired into our brains. It is tenacious. When life is threatened, people can endure extreme suffering in the effort to survive. 

I have been to the Nazi death camps in Auschwitz and Birkenau, and I have read the accounts of survivors like Viktor Frankl of what they were subjected to; millions died. But not without valiant efforts to survive.  

So when someone says, “this is worth risking your life for” they are saying something that goes to our core human motivations and instincts.  

Jesus: an Inescapable Truth

When Jesus said, 

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” 

he was aware that he was asking people to look deeply into their hearts and reflect on what their lives meant. Jesus is teaching an inescapably true principle:

“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

The very effort to protect your life will lead to losing it. The act of losing your life for the highest possible good will save it.  

The problem we all face is that our lives, no matter what we do, are impermanent. John McQuiston, in his book “Always We Begin Again” said it as well as I have ever heard it:

“… in the vast reaches and endless memory of the universe, our most profound idea is the merest fantasy; our greatest triumphs and our [smallest] actions are as lasting as footprints in sand.”  

Always We Begin Again

We all know that. Is that a sad, depressing, ugly thought? Or is it the kind of truth that makes us free? Our lives are not our own to keep indefinitely. We will all lose our lives as we know them now, in this plane of existence.  

How Should We Live?

So, how should we then live? The alternative seems to be either a lifestyle of desperately clutching and protecting this fragile life; trying to deny and forestall the inevitable end, or taking up the cross, by relinquishing the idea that life is all about the self and its insatiable desires and needs. 

In other words, the alternative is either a self-focused life or a life oriented to the highest possible good; a non-self-oriented life.  

The fact that life is impermanent as footprints in the sand does not make it meaningless or insignificant. Just the opposite. It means that every moment is unrepeatable and important. Everything matters. Again from McQuiston:

“Everything we think, everything we do, everything we feel, is cast in time forever. Every moment that we live is irreplaceable, therefore each moment is hallowed.”

Always We Begin Again

In every moment we can choose to live for ourselves or to lose ourselves for the sake of the highest good. I believe that is what Jesus means when he says “for my sake and the sake of the gospel.”  

The gospel is the announcement that the kingdom of God is here, now, present, among us, and within us, calling us to a life in God, which of course, calls us to a life oriented to the highest possible good. The kind of life that Jesus demonstrated.

We could put it this way: losing life, by denying the self and its vain quest for security and the avoidance of all suffering, in other words, denying the ego of its pretensions and self-focus, is actually the way to find our true selves. 

Our truest selves are who we are in God: beloved, blessed, and treasured. In the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, we are we are “immortal diamonds.” Quoted in Rohr, Richard. Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self . Wiley.

Jesus said, 

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

The selfish self does not like to be denied. The voice of the ego that we all hear every day, that voice that narrates our lives to ourselves, making judgments about whether things suit us or not, whether things are as we want them to be or not, pleasing to us or not, good or bad concerning ourselves, that voice is relentless and insistent.  

 That voice is the ego-self, calling us to concern ourselves with ourselves — even when it is the voice of condemnation and judgment. That ego voice carries our shame. It tells us how we have failed already, and predicts our future failures.

Ego manifests itself in anger, in jealousy, in contempt, in un-forgiveness, in despising, and even in neglect of the needs of others. It is toxic to relationships and toxic to our souls.

Meditation and Ego

If there is to be any freedom from the soul-killing self, that ego-self must be denied; it must take up its cross and die. This is why the practice of regular meditation or contemplative prayer is so crucial. I know of no other spiritual practice that is more effective in turning down the ego voice than meditation.  

In meditation, we learn that our thoughts are not ourselves. Some of our thoughts are just random – we have no idea where they come from. We can let them go. In meditation, we learn to become centered and still. 

Meditation requires non-judgmental awareness of the present moment — whatever it is, so it teaches us to become non-judgmental in every aspect of life. 

Just like physical exercise, the hardest part of meditation is the start: sitting down and saying, “For the next 20 minutes I will be silent.” So the practice itself demands a kind of self-denial. But the results are amazingly helpful.  

There is beautiful freedom here. To be free from the constant need to justify ourselves and defend ourselves is true freedom. To be free of the anxiety that one day I will be completely forgotten is to know that this moment matters. 

To be free to relinquish the vain attempt to “gain the whole world” is to be free from the prospect of ending up with the world in exchange for the soul.  

To live a life oriented to the highest possible good, a life lived not for the self, but for others, life in which our highest quest is that God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven, is to live as a full and free human. 

It is the life lived for peace and reconciliation, for goodness and courage; the life lived for justice, the life of wisdom, the life of generosity and compassion. It is the Jesus way of living. It is to live in God.  

Incarnation and Why it Matters So Much

Sermon for Jan. 3, 2021. Christmas 2B

Video is here.

John 1:1-18

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was 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 has come 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 was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

I saw a film in which William Hurt played a Jewish man in Europe. He survived the holocaust and joined the Communist Party, becoming a military officer. Then, Stalin started purging Jews. Hurt’s character says, “There are no new ideas.”

In seminary, when we were learning about the early Christian heresies, my professor said something similar. He said these ancient heresies keep coming back in new forms, that nevertheless express the same old mistakes. It’s still happening today.

Gnostic Dualism

One of those mistakes that is in full bloom in our day bears a lot of resemblance to the ancient heresy called Gnosticism. The Gnostics were dualists.  They believed in two gods that ruled the world: a good one and a bad one. The good one lived in the realm of pure spirit. Spirit is good, they said. The bad one lived in the realm of matter. The material world is bad for them. So this spirit vs. matter dualism was essential to Gnosticism.  

Today almost everyone believes in some version of this ancient mistake. Some religious people believe that God is good, but is constantly fighting a bad god called Satan. God is Spirit, but Satan keeps tempting people with the desires of the flesh. It’s the same spirit vs. matter dualism.

Non-religious people often believe in a similar dualism too. Matter is what we can see and measure. The material world is the concern of science and medicine. But perhaps there is room for a spiritual world as well, or at least a moral world. Science can tell you what you need to know about how to make a bomb, but only morality can tell you whether or not to blow it up.  

That kind of dualism almost sounds reasonable, but Christians have always said that thinking in dualistic categories of matter and spirit is a mistake. From the beginning, our Jewish ancestors in the faith told a mythological story to make profoundly important theological assertions about Creation that made that dualism impossible. The Creation myth teaches that one God is all there is, and that one God is good. That one good God is the source of the world of matter that we experience, and that earthly material existence is also good. In fact, Genesis says, the physical world is “very good.” The idea that the material world could be bad by nature is about as opposite a Jewish world view as you can get. God is the single source of a very good material world. We, humans, are blessed to live in this world, to experience its material, physical beauty, and to enjoy its abundant bounty.  

Why it Matters

Is this important to us? Yes! There is no essential disconnect between spirit and matter. There are not two parallel universes out there, one comprised of atoms, molecules and the other of spiritual entities, morals, and values. The world is one. Some of it is seen, some of it is unseen, but the world in both aspects is God, expressing Godself. As some theologians have said, the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago, was the first incarnation of God; the first time God’s being was expressed in matter that can be seen.  

This is one of many big ideas being expressed in the text we read from the prologue to the Gospel of John. In the beginning was the Word, the life-force, the ultimate logic and energy of all the universe. And that that world-energy-word is the creative source of everything. John says, in deeply mystical language, 

“All things came into being through [the Word, personal the life force], and without [that Word] not one thing came into being.”

John then tells us why this matters:

“What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”  

That brings up all kinds of questions, but the first one is: could that life that enlightens everyone be purely spiritual life? The Gnostics might be inclined to think so. No, John says. Rather, 

“And the Word became flesh”

The Divine Word Became Flesh

This idea would have knocked the Gnostics off their chairs. Pure spirit, God’s life-force, God’s creative energy, the Word, became flesh and blood; human.  There is no chasm between matter and spirit. There is no dichotomy between flesh and spirit. Everything is spiritual. The world and all it contains, including every human being has its source in God.  

Peter Rollins likes to use the metaphor of a shipwreck in the ocean to help explain this concept: the ship is in the ocean, and the ocean is in the ship. So, we exist in God, and God exists in us. God is in everything; without God, there would not be anything.  

The Omni-Relational God

But how do we relate to this Divine Word that incarnates as flesh? Is it an impersonal power in the world, like gravity?  Does it have a will? Can it have emotion? Does it feel emotion or is it more like the impersonal force in Star Wars? 

John’s gospel uses the language of intimate relationship to teach that this Divine Word which has become manifest in the physical world is completely personal and relational. The bond between the Divine and human can only be described metaphorically in the language of family. John says,

“to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the power to become children of God”

“Children of God” is the only way you can describe our relationship with the Divine.  We are part of God’s family. Scholars point out that this relationship is even more intense than this English translation can express. John actually never says, “believe in” but always says, “believe into”. It is active, not passive. It is not believing a set of facts about God, but committing oneself to God, believing into God’s purposes and will for ourselves, each other, and all of creation.

The Implications for Us

At this moment, at the start of a new year, let us reflect on just a few of the implications of this amazing text.  

If all of creation is good, and is God, expressing Godself in physical forms, what can that mean but that every way in which we relate to every aspect of the physical world matters to God? Let us consider several.

First, our bodies, ourselves, our health matters to God. I believe that out of respect for our physical bodies as gifts of God to us, we can both celebrate and care for ourselves. We celebrate the wonder of being able to see beauty, to hear music, to taste amazing flavors, to smell everything from pine needles to baking bread, to being able to touch and to feel touch; when we delight in all of these delights, we are celebrating God’s good gift of the physical world. So, let us take care of ourselves. Let us attend to our body’s needs, its limits, and do those things that we know lead to healthiness.  

If our own bodies and their needs matter, so do all human bodies. All suffering is our concern, because it is God’s concern. It is this love for all the people God has made, all of whom God is not ashamed to call “children,” that motivates us as we respond to the people who are suffering. So we care about hungry bodies, we care about homeless bodies, we care about health care and all of the elements of healthiness. We care about mental health, about all the ways things can go wrong because of trauma, or addiction, or simply faulty wiring in the brain.  

Our care for physical bodies has no racial nor ethnic boundaries, as if God only created Caucasian bodies. In fact, there are no exceptions; no borders we accept as legitimate. People around the world and in our own community differ from us in countless ways, visible and invisible, but none of those differences diminishes our essential connection to and concern for all of them. Gay, straight, or trans, able-bodied, or living with disabilities, all of us are equally children of God. Citizens and non-citizens, immigrants, and incarcerated people are all children of God.  

So, when we become aware that some of God’s children have been subjected to discrimination or oppression, we join in solidarity with them, lifting up their voices, making sure that their concerns are addressed with justice and equity. How could we be satisfied with anything less, on behalf of God’s children?  

Our Christian understanding that this world and all that we can see is a creation of God and has its source in God, leads us to care for our planet as a matter of spiritual importance. Our air, our water, the content of our soils, all are manifestations of God’s creative Word. Every animal, every fish, and bird are God’s concern.  The needless suffering of any creature is a scandal. The loss of any species is tragic. The way our planet is heating up because of the way we are using energy is only leading to more, massive suffering. Hurricanes in growing ferocity and flooding like we have never seen before, massive forest fires, and changing weather patterns are putting the lives of both animals and humans at risk.  

This is not, for us, about politics. This is about theology. This is about our relationship with our Creator, our heavenly parent, and about our relationship with the generations that will follow us on this fragile planet.  

I have heard some of our Evangelical friends say that the planet does not need to be our concern because Jesus is coming back soon and will make a new heaven and new earth. Well, even if you take that so literally, (which I do not) it is important to notice that it has already been two thousand years of waiting. If it is only one thousand more — and remember, “no one knows the day or the hour” — then we must protect our planet for future generations.   

Another way to look at it is to imagine our planet like a priceless Stradivarius violin. It is intricately beautiful. Its design is impeccable. The music it can make is heavenly. Would you use it as a kindling wood, just because the creator promised to produce another?  Would that not be to despise the Creator’s talent and care? This planet is God’s precious masterpiece, gently given into our care and custody, to bring forth all the bounty that sustains life.  

Jesus taught us that the Kingdom of God was at hand; that the kingdom was within us and among us. But he also said that only people with eyes to see it would see it. Only people with ears open to the message would get the message. In the same way, the truth that this whole world is an incarnation of God, the idea that everything is spiritual, the concept that there is no real division between matter and spirit is not obvious at first glance. To live as a non-dual Christian, seeing God in all things and in everyone takes attending to regular spiritual practices like meditation and prayer. 

This is the start of a new year. Let it be a moment of self-assessment and evaluation. How were my spiritual practices in 2020? Did they sustain me? Is there anything I would like to include in my regular spiritual practices this year so that I can be a person who is more often able to see God in everything and in everyone?  If 2021 begins the way 2020 ended, as a time of a kind of exile for us, before we all get vaccinated and can get back together, we can ask ourselves, “how do I want to use my time of exile to its fullest?  May this be a year of spiritual growth for us and even delight in knowing in our bones that we are children of a good God, who has made us, loves us, and will be with us every moment of 2021.

Because Darkness is Coming

Sermon for Nov. 8, 2020, Pentecost 23A

Video is here.

Matthew 25:1-13

[Jesus – according to Matthew – said:] “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

How old are we when we figure out that every day comes to an end? Nightfall always follows the day.  So too, morning always follows the darkness of night.  

How old are we when we figure out that this is how life goes too? No matter how well things are going, no stretch of good luck lasts forever. Something is going to happen. The darkness is coming. 

We all know that. If for no other reason, we know it because we know we are mortal. All our friends and family are mortal too.  And besides being mortal, before our final end of life on earth, we all are fragile. 

Things break, we break down, get sick, need medicine, and good health care. This is not news. Most of the time we recover; morning follows night. But not always, and we know that.  

Time to Prepare

This all sounds negative and depressing, but it is not. To know that darkness is coming is to have the chance to prepare for it. To recognize that there is trouble ahead is to be able to plan. 

I remember living on the Gulf Coast with hurricanes approaching. First, we stockpile water and non-perishable food. Then batteries and propane fuel for the camp stove. Then plywood for the windows. Finally, we pack up and head out of town ahead of the storm.  

Of course, the worst storms are the ones no one predicted. The bad diagnosis that no one saw coming. The sudden death of a loved one. Like tornadoes, you barely have enough time to head to the basement (if you even have a basement) when the house starts shaking. Accidents are like that; who could plan for them?  

More than “Be Prepared”

So where is the good news in all of this? We just read a text from Matthew’s gospel, a parable, about ten bridesmaids, headed for a wedding. The bridegroom has been delayed, which nobody expected. Night is coming, as it always does. Five are prepared for it with plenty of oil for their lamps, and five are not.  

The message of this parable cannot be as banal as “be prepared” — the Boy Scout motto. So what are we to learn from this parable, beyond that obvious truism?

Just this week, I read this poem by Mary Oliver, entitled, “We Should Be Well Prepared”.  By the way, if you are as unfamiliar with bird names as I am, it will help you to know that there is a species called plovers. I had to look it up. Anyway, the poem “We Should Be Well Prepared” says:

“The way the plovers cry goodbye.
The way the dead fox keeps on looking down the hill with open eye.
The way the leaves fall, and then there’s the long wait.
The way someone says we must never meet again.
The way mold spots the cake,
The way sourness overtakes the cream.
The way the river water rushes by, never to return.
The way the days go by, never to return.
The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.”

Our experience of life, she is saying, should make us “well prepared.” We all know that night is coming, and with it, darkness. In the dark, it is hard to know where you are. It is hard to know where you are going. It is dangerous in the dark. Life itself should prepare us to know that such times are ahead. Everyone knows that the oil runs out.  

So, how do we prepare for the dark days coming if we do not know when or how they will arrive? We don’t know if the coming darkness will be medical, or about relationships, or political, or economic, or geopolitical, or some combination, so how can we prepare?

I believe that the way we prepare for any of them, and all of them is the same. We prepare to be the kind of people who can handle sundown and nightfall. We prepare for whatever is coming in the dark by the kind of people we have become when it happens.

The Two Halves of Life

Richard Rohr talks about a concept that he credits Thomas Merton with teaching him: that there are essentially two halves of life. Not necessarily chronologically dividing our years in half, but rather two ways of understanding the lives we are living. 

In the first half of life, we work on acquiring a sense of who we are. To do this we start defining ourselves by characteristics that seem essential to who we are. Most of us identify with the gender we were called on our birth certificates. This is quite complicated for some of us, but most of us are content to know ourselves as male or female, and we see ourselves in the world that way. 

We do the same thing with our family name. Being from this particular family is who we believe we are. From there the circle widens out to include the country we are born into, the langue we learned from birth, the education we receive, the job we have, and the level of income we enjoy. 

Our identity includes the groups we belong to; sports teams, clubs, our religion, and our political affiliation. 

Nowadays, a large part of people’s identity comes from what category of victim they are in, or what combination of victim categories. This is not to disparage any victim, because the world is full of real victims who have suffered greatly, but just to point out that we use group classifications as building blocks in the construction of the home of our identity.  

These identity building blocks are at risk of the coming night. Calamities can threaten each of them. Jobs can end, relationships end, sickness, accidents, economic downturns, wars, all kinds of things can tear down the well-built homes our egos inhabit.  

Ego Attachment

And that is just the point. It is because our egos get attached to these identity blocks that the loss of any of them feels so devastating. 

This is why some take refuge in such stringent fundamentalisms, and why others wave the flag so hard; take away the support structures and the ego feels that the world is coming to an end.  

What can keep this from happening? What can help us face calamities with equanimity? What can move us from the first half of life in which we are building these blocks, to the second half of life, in which realize that the truth of who we are is deeper than any of them? 

Rohr says that normally, people move from the first to the second half of life only after great love, or great suffering. Something happens that turns the lights on. Something happens that wakes us up from our slumber.  

Most people I know have, at some point, encountered great love. Everyone I know suffers. So everyone has the opportunity to move from the first to the second half of life. Everyone, in other words, has the chance to be one of the bridesmaids on whom darkness falls, with a lamp with enough oil in it to see her through to the banquet.  

Our Deeper Identity

Great love, or great suffering, can do two things; it can reveal the truth of the insubstantiality of the blocks we were using to construct our identity in the first half of life, on the one hand, and it can reveal to us a deeper truth. 

There is an essence to us that lies deeper. There is a truth about who we are that cannot be removed by the failure of our political party or an economic depression. There is a rock-solid foundational fact about us that cannot be dislodged by cancer, nor grief, nor bankruptcy. 

It is that we are all creations of a loving God. We are beloved. We are, as Paul says, “the body of Christ.” This deeper self is what some have called the soul, others call it the spirit. It is deeper than our personality, deeper than our allegiances, deeper even than our gender identity. Our truest selves are who we are in God, and that is the point: that we live and move and have our being in God. 

So, Richard Rohr, Thomas Merton, and many others have written and spoken about this at great length. But you cannot simply read a book or hear a talk and get it. It doesn’t work like that. The ego is too attached to those small self-identity blocks to let go by deciding to.  

The process is like everything else that contributes to a healthy and well-formed life; it is daily. Some call this the habit of spiritual disciplines. “Discipline” sounds difficult, so I have noticed that people are calling them spiritual practices. 

Just like the habits of getting enough sleep, keeping to a healthy diet, and getting regular physical exercise, it is the cumulative effect, over time, of regular spiritual practices that produces the long term effect. The effect is weakening our ego’s attachment to those small self-identities.  

Spiritual Practices

For me, by far the most effective spiritual practice is one of the ones that Jesus practiced, meditation. We only get glimpses of Jesus’ practice in the New Testament, but they are sufficient to show us that Jesus meditated. 

This practice has been discovered and taught by many diverse religious traditions all over the world for many centuries. Jesus never taught a specific method; perhaps because his life on earth was so short. 

But the method is not the point; the point is the practice. Meditation works because, during the silence, we keep saying “no” to the anxieties and ruminations that our ego-fixated minds keep throwing up to us. Each “no” is a little ego-death. 

After a while, we find we are more able to let go of ego, not just in the meditation practice, but in daily life. We do not feel so threatened. We do not get so angry. We do not need to be proven right, or seen as great.  We do not get so easily offended.  

Meditation is only one spiritual practice. Other practices are of great help. A regular gratitude journal helps. Daily reading of spiritual masters helps. Daily prayer for our concerns helps. Coming together for worship, when it is safe to do so, helps. 

In fact, Richard Rohr says that the point of religion is to keep reminding us of our truest selves, of our oneness with God.

The mistake of the foolish bridesmaids was to be unprepared for something everyone knows is coming. Darkness is coming. Darkness is always coming. That’s not the question. 

The only question is: when it comes, will we be prepared?  Will we have: kept track of our oil supply, put it on the shopping list when it got low, taken the time to go to the store and get it, filled up the travel flask, and make sure it is with us when we head out the door for the wedding?  

The Kind of People, Prepared

 Will we be the kind of people who know, when the calamity hits us, that nothing can destroy the immortal diamond that we truly are in God. We are loved more than the bridesmaids; we are, as the New Testament calls us, the brides. We are the temples in which God’s Spirit lives. 

When we practice the spiritual practices that help us to know that in our bones, then we are prepared to face the long nights.  

We do not believe that the darkness can have the last word. There is a banquet ahead. It is a wedding banquet when, at the last, we will walk through the doors of this life into Love, where we will truly be who we are, in God forever.