One of the most convincing aspects of Christianity, if we try to see it in terms of our own day, is the contrast between its homely and inconspicuous beginnings and the holy powers it brought into the world. It keeps us in perpetual dread of despising small things, humble people, little groups. The Incarnation means that the Eternal God enters our common human life with all the energy of His creative love, to transform it, to exhibit to us its richness, its unguessed significance, speaking our language, and showing us His secret beauty on our own scale.”
-Evelyn Underhill, The School of Charity, pp.40-41
Category: Uncategorized
My Little Eye
I spy, with my little eye,
a future agitator
structure-breaker
name-taker
bread baker
hate un-maker.
She is rising with healing
for people she has never met.
She is leavening
for a great measure.
Should we place these hopes
on her small shoulders?
Should we gamble our freedom
on the depth of her faith?
on the depth of her faith?
We must.
She will respond.
She will respond.
Poem by my daughter’s pastor, the Rev. Nathan Dannison
Photo retrieved from http://image.mlive.com/home/mlive-media/width960/img/kalamazoogazette/photo/2016/11/15/-4b43013555460f43.JPG on November 16, 2016.
“As the Waters Cover the Sea”
This is an odd turn of phrase that appears in today’s first reading from the Daily Lectionary.
The full sentence is:
But the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.
It strikes me as odd because it is the very nature of the sea to be covered with water. Without water, the sea would simply be a valley or a large hole in the ground.
In the same way, God is the very nature of the universe itself. Theologian Paul Tillich referred to God as “the Ground of Being”. St. Thomas Aquinas similarly wrote that it is more appropriate to say that God is “existence” than that God is an object that “exists”.
As a self-described panentheist (not to be confused with pantheism), I would agree with Tillich and Aquinas. Here is how I would say it: God is in all things because, more accurately, all things exist in God.
One of my favorite images of God is the pregnant mother. God creates the universe, distinct but not entirely separate from God. The universe is growing within the divine womb.
When a baby grows inside of her mother, it would not be inaccurate to say that her mother is her whole world. Ask a fetus, “Where is Mom?” And the child would answer (if she could), “Mom is everywhere.”
Does this mean that the mother only exists within the child or the womb that carries her? No, that would be an incomplete statement (although it is certainly reflective of the child’s limited experience). It would be more accurate to say the opposite: That the child exists within her mother, who loves her and sustains her growth.
I believe the same to be true of our relationship to God.
We are not wrong to say that “God is everywhere.” In a sense, we are also justified, based on our limited experience, in saying that “God is in all things.” But I tend to believe the opposite, that “All things exist in God,” just as a fetus grows in her mother’s womb.
This, I think, is at the root of Habakkuk’s vision that the divine shekhinah covers the earth “as the waters cover the sea.” This is the fetus waxing eloquent about the mother.
Even more interesting is the context in which this revelation arises.
If the universe exists within the Divine womb, then it must certainly be a troubled pregnancy. The prophet describes a world gone awry, rife with social stratification where the rich have isolated themselves from the poverty they create by their indulgence:
Alas for you who get evil gain for your houses, setting your nest on high to be safe from the reach of harm! You have devised shame for your house by cutting off many peoples; you have forfeited your life.
The entire economic system is founded on violence and indulgence:
Alas for you who build a town by bloodshed, and found a city on iniquity!
He describes it as an act of rape:
Alas for you who make your neighbors drink, pouring out your wrath until they are drunk, in order to gaze on their nakedness!
The destruction extends even to the earth itself. The prophet warns of mass extinction emerging from human exploitation of the environment:
For the violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm you; the destruction of the animals will terrify you– because of human bloodshed and violence to the earth, to cities and all who live in them.
Yet, the central truth remains: That the universe exists within the Divine womb.
We have only forgotten it. Unable to see the mother’s face directly, we have decided that we homo sapiens are the be-all, end-all of existence. We have decided that this womb, the amniotic fluid, the umbilical cord, and our magnificent selves are the product of some unknown, random accident.
Believing ourselves to be the only intelligence in the cosmos, we try to set ourselves in the place of God, and quickly discover that we are bad at the job. Destruction ensues.
Habakkuk invites us to return to our roots by way of contemplation. He writes:
I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint.
Again:
For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.
And finally:
But the LORD is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him!
The prophet interrupts his descriptions of violence with repeated calls to “watch” and “wait” in silence. The dual-practice of prayer and meditation empowers us to disconnect from the mindless flow of chaos around us and see reality more clearly.
A fighting couple stop their arguing momentarily to take a deep breath, and suddenly the situation becomes clearer.
Gandhi famously said that, if only one percent of the world’s population would meditate, there would be peace on earth.
The practice of contemplative spirituality might not change the world directly, but it does change those who practice it. It changes our perspective and relationship to the world. It frees us from the endless cycles of violence so that we (as Gandhi also said) can “be the change we wish to see in the world.”
Contemplation reconnects us to the Ground of Being. It increases our conscious awareness of the Divine presence, which “covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.”
This deepened relationship with God is the fruit of contemplative prayer. It is what the prophet refers to as “the knowledge of the glory of the Lord.”
“The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him!”
The Word of the Lord
From the Epistle of Bernstein’s Mass:
“So we wait in silent treason until reason is restored,
and we await the season of the Word of the Lord.”
Use Your Disillusion
Today’s sermon from North Presbyterian Church, Kalamazoo.
Click here to read the bulletin, including the biblical text.
Sermon Outline:
I. There are moments in life when the things we depend upon let us down
A. Economy, church, country, relationships: spouse/family/friends, self: body/soul
1. “What the heck just happened?”
B. We get disillusioned
1. Actually a good thing: “Dis-illusion”
2. In these moments, we get to find out where our faith really lies
Today’s gospel
II. “temple” “adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God”
A. Center of Jewish life: national/ethnic/religious
B. Literally “House of God”
1. “God (Ultimate Good) lives in this place”
III. Jesus: “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”
A. Offensive: Unpatriotic, sacrilegious, blasphemous
B. Unthinkable: “How would all of this work without it?”
IV. Jesus elaborates
A. To the optimists: “Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.”
1. Don’t be tricked by big personalities, making promises they can’t fulfill
B. To the pessimists: “When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.”
1. It’s not the end of the world
C. “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.”
1. Not an apocalyptic vision
2. Just the way things are in this world: war, natural disaster, poverty, disease
3. Don’t freak out!
D. The believer’s place in all this: “But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name.”
1. Expect to be hated
2. Faith in God is always a threat to the status quo
a) Calls into question all the other little idols we are tempted to put our faith in
b) God is the only absolute; everything else is relative
V. “This will give you an opportunity to testify.”
A. Learn to see disillusionment as an opportunity
B. Testify (like a witness in a courtroom)
1. Speak the truth about what really matters (the way it really is)
VI. Testify how? “So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance”
A. Counterintuitive: Should pastors and lawyers really do this?
VII. Why not? “for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.”
A. Because the truth you speak does not come from you yourself
1. You didn’t make this up
B. Grounded in reality itself
1. Comes from God, who needs no defender
2. Truth is truth, whether they choose to believe it or not
a) Constant, like the Law of Gravity
VIII. Will they listen? “You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name.”
A. No. People are selfish/sinful; choose to hear/believe what they want to hear/believe
B. In this broken world, all truth is an “inconvenient truth”
C. God’s truth has no ideology/party affiliation
IX. “But not a hair of your head will perish.”
A. In spite of being “put to death”
1. Interesting dichotomy: physical death/spiritual perishing
B. Matthew 10:28: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
1. Fear a meaningless life, based on lies
C. Mark 8:36: “For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”
X. “By your endurance you will gain your souls.”
A. Spiritually alive, meaningful life, have the life that really counts
B. John 11:25: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live”
C. Romero: “If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.”
D. Romans 8:35-39: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? …No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
1. Why: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
XI. If you are feeling disillusioned today, do not fear/despair
A. All we have lost is our illusions
B. Christ id inviting you today to “use your disillusion”
C. Disillusionment is an opportunity
1. To find out for ourselves what it is that we really believe in
2. Knowing what we really believe in frees us speak truth to the powerful in the world
XII. Jesus Christ came into this world to show humanity the heart of God
A. But we could not bear to listen
1. When we failed to silence him, we killed him
2. But God raised Jesus from the tomb, demonstrating once and for all (in the words of Desmond Tutu) that “Goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, life is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death. Victory is ours, through God who loves us.”
XIII. All of the lies in the world cannot falsify the truth of God, and all the powers of death in the world cannot overcome the power of God’s love, which has been poured out so abundantly for us in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord.
XIV. This is how I am able to stand before you today, disillusioned but unafraid
XV. This is how we are able to stand before the dark powers of the world and proclaim the truth, with St. Paul:
A. “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Beauty in a Hard Life
Incredible entries from the Siena International Photo Awards, as reported on NPR.
This one is my favorite, of an Iraqi fisherman on the River Euphrates:
Click here to read the full article and see other entries on NPR.
![By No machine-readable author provided. Enslin assumed (based on copyright claims). [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://hoppinghadrianswall.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/st-martin-beuron.jpg?w=900)
November 11 – Feast of St. Martin of Tours, Bishop (d.397)
First reading at Vigils from Benedictine Daily Prayer.
From The Life of St. Martin by Sulpicius Severus
ACCORDINGLY, at a certain period, when [Martin] had nothing except his arms and his simple military dress, in the middle of winter, a winter which had shown itself more severe than ordinary, so that the extreme cold was proving fatal to many, he happened to meet at the gate of the city of Amiens a poor man destitute of clothing. He was entreating those that passed by to have compassion upon him, but all passed the wretched man without notice, when Martin, that man full of God, recognized that a being to whom others showed no pity, was, in that respect, left to him. Yet, what should he do? He had nothing except the cloak in which he was clad, for he had already parted with the rest of his garments for similar purposes. Taking, therefore, his sword with which he was girt, he divided his cloak into two equal parts, and gave one part to the poor man, while he again clothed himself with the remainder. Upon this, some of the by-standers laughed, because he was now an unsightly object, and stood out as but partly dressed. Many, however, who were of sounder understanding, groaned deeply because they themselves had done nothing similar. They especially felt this, because, being possessed of more than Martin, they could have clothed the poor man without reducing themselves to nakedness. In the following night, when Martin had resigned himself to sleep, he had a vision of Christ arrayed in that part of his cloak with which he had clothed the poor man. He contemplated the Lord with the greatest attention, and was told to own as his the robe which he had given. Ere long, he heard Jesus saying with a clear voice to the multitude of angels standing round — “Martin, who is still but a catechumen, clothed me with this robe.” The Lord, truly mindful of his own words (who had said when on earth — “Inasmuch as ye have done these things to one of the least of these, ye have done them unto me”), declared that he himself had been clothed in that poor man; and to confirm the testimony he bore to so good a deed, he condescended to show him himself in that very dress which the poor man had received.
Excerpted from http://www.users.csbsju.edu/~eknuth/npnf2-11/sulpitiu/lifeofst.html on November 11, 2016.
Missed Opportunities
“There are many things the Spirit could do through us, for the healing and redeeming of the world, if it were not for our cowardice, slackness, fastidiousness, or self-centered concentration on our own jobs. Individual Christians cannot attain to their full stature till they throw in their hand with the saints and the angels: more, with the broken, the struggling, and the meek. But most of us are too prudent, too careful to do that.”
-Evelyn Underhill, The School of Charity, p.96
Sorrow
Initial thoughts post-election:
“The sweet smell of a great sorrow lies over the land
as plumes of smoke rise and merge into the leaden skies.
A man lies and dreams of green fields and rivers,
but wakes to a morning with no reason for waking.”
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 