Course Correction

Jonah 3: 1-5 & Mark 1: 14-20

Third Sunday after Epiphany/ 22^nd January 2012

 The Revised Common Lectionary for this Sunday intentionally links these two texts, primarily because each has something to say about what happens when God calls us.  God’s call to Jonah in chapter three is actually the second call.  You’ll recall that after the first time God called him, to go to Nineveh and preach against the city, he fled.  The text reads, “But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD” (Jonah 1:3).  He fled.  He ran away.  He sailed away – or tried to.  God hurled a “great wind storm upon the sea” (Jonah 1:4) and then he was eventually hurled into the sea and into the belly of “a large fish” (not a whale, Jonah 1:17). In Mark, we find Jesus preaching, announcing the kingdom of God, inviting people to repent and then follow him along the way into the kingdom.  Two call stories.

            Now when we hear the word "called,” it’s often assumed that it refers to a "religious" calling, to be a minister or priest or rabbi.  In order to be clergy one has to have a call, we know; clergy therefore are the only ones called, it’s believed.  I often hear my Roman Catholic friends, especially priests, refer to the priestly life as having a vocation, a calling, suggesting that the word is used only for religious work. 

            But why do we assume that God is only concerned with so-called “religious” tasks or professions?  Are we saying that God only extends a call to people to do a religious task? As if God is only concerned with religious or holy professions.  Psalm 24:1, however, offers a different take on the matter; it’s very clear: “The earth and all it contains belongs to the LORD.”  God’s sovereign care and concern is not for only a portion of the world, the religious bit, but for all of creation.  God doesn’t divide up the world into that which is sacred and that which is secular.  These are our ways of dividing up reality, especially since the eighteenth century Enlightenment.  Our own separation of church and state doesn’t help matters and only adds to the confusion.  I’m not criticizing this – let me be clear; our own Presbyterian forbears were instrumental in making sure that there was a strong wall separating church and state.  However, we shouldn’t assume that that’s how God views the situation.  Reality is one.  Sacred and secular – it’s all one and God has concerned for all of it and all of us.  In God’s sovereign care for the world, God is concerned about people and how people live, and cares for us by calling people to do God’s work and God’s work means working for things that ultimately matter, things that provide the care and welfare of all people, things that call us to life. 

            We won't find such a dualistic view in the Bible; not in these stories.  Yes, it’s God calling, calling to a particular task, to do the work of God in the world.  But this is not the call for just some, for the “religious professionals,” its God’s call to all of us.

            Since the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, the Reformed tradition – the Calvinist-Presbyterian tradition – has strongly affirmed that everyone who is baptized also has a vocation.  To be baptized is to have a vocation, from the Latin vocatus, meaning, “called.”  We remember and honor our baptism by answering that call.  Everyone baptized has a particular calling (and callings) from God.  This doesn’t mean everyone is called to be a minister or a preacher – it might be for some – but it does mean that to be set apart in the waters of our baptism means that we have been set apart by God to love and serve God, which is what it means to be called.

            And it’s important to lift up that from a Reformed perspective, we do not have a hierarchy of callings.  One call is not higher or better than another – and being clergy is not the highest calling.  In fact, if pressed to privilege one profession over another, John Calvin (1509-1564) said, at the end of his Institutes (1559), that perhaps the most important profession is not the minister, but the public servant – a king or queen or magistrate, an elected official, those who are entrusted with the support and care for the common good.  Why?   Because it’s the civil servant’s responsibility to seek and maintain the welfare of the people in the community.  Just imagine what the world would be like if more public servants – including politicians – saw their professions as a calling from God, instead of a job, or a game of party politics or personal aggrandizement. Many of our public servants are serving the public because they do feel it’s a call, but not everyone, as we know.  Calvin also said, more than two hundred years before our own Declaration of Independence, that if the monarch or the public magistrate is not caring for the needs of all the people, then he or she should be removed from office.[1]

            The perennial question, though, is how do we discern what God is calling us to do with our lives?  Discernment is a skill, even an art.  It requires considerable prayer and listening – listening to the community around us, listening to our hearts, paying attention to our passions. 

            And there isn’t one calling for a lifetime. We should probably talk about callings, because the content and the direction of God’s call changes.  What matters most is that we acknowledge that we are called and are being called. Yes, it could be called to parish ministry (when was the last time someone from this church was called to preach and teach or go to seminary?), or it could be a call to social work or engineering or teaching or science or economics or to be a stay-at-home mother or father.  Every profession has the potential of being viewed as a calling if it is done to the glory of God – and the work of God is not limited to the church, as Jesus himself showed us; it’s both here, in the church, but “out there” in the wider world.

            You see God never ceases in calling, inviting us to live lives worthy of the God who created and continues to recreate us; God never ceases enticing and imploring us to give our lives to something bigger than our egos or self-interests.  We were not created and endowed with the image of God to make lots of money.  We were not created for the pursuit of our own happiness, despite what our Declaration of Independence might say. This universe was not created simply to satisfy our own selfish, egocentric needs.  Teenagers and college students are often asked the question, “What do you plan to do with your life?”  On the surface the question appears innocent enough. It’s a question that assumes, however, that our lives belong to us, which from a theological perspective we know is seriously misguided and wrong. 

            Our lives do not belong to ourselves.  At some level that’s what baptism means, that we don’t belong to ourselves, or to our parents, or to our families, or to our community, but that we belong ultimately to God.  Perhaps we should ask, of teenagers and young adults, any adult, including ourselves: “What do you sense God calling you to do with your life or in your life?”  or “Where is God leading you, calling you?  What is God calling you to do?” 

            The Presbyterian minister and writer, Eugene Peterson, who once served in Baltimore Presbytery for many years at in Bel Air, MD, remembers the day his life was changed, when he realized the purpose of his life as a minister, when he was called, as it were, within his call.  One day he went to hear the novelist Chaim Potok (1929-2002) – author of The Chosen, The Gift of Asher Lev, and The Promise – give a lecture downtown at Johns Hopkins University in the Shriver Hall. 

            Potok shared “that when he went to college his mother took him aside and said, ‘Chaim, I know you want to be a writer, but I have a better idea.  Why don’t you be a brain surgeon.  You’ll keep a lot of people from dying; you’ll make a lot of money.’  Chaim replied, ‘No, mama.  I want to be a writer.

           

            He returned home from vacation, and his mother got him off alone.  ‘Chaim, I know you want to be a writer, but listen to your mamma.  Be a brain surgeon.  You’ll keep a lot of people from dying; you’ll make a lot of money.’  Chaim replied, ‘No, mama.  I want to be a writer.’ 

            This conversation was repeated every vacation break, every summer, every meeting:  ‘Chaim, I know you want to be a writer, but listen to your mama.  Be a brain surgeon.  You’ll keep a lot of people from dying; you’ll make a lot of money.’ Each time Chaim replied, ‘No, mama. I want to be a writer.’  The exchanged accumulated.  The pressure intensified.  Finally there was an explosion.  ‘Chaim, you’re wasting your time. Be a brain surgeon.  You’ll keep a lot of people from dying; you’ll make a lot of money.’  The explosion detonated a counter-explosion:  ‘Mama, I don’t want to keep people from dying; I want to show them how to live!’”[2]

            We were created to participate in something larger than our egos and self-interests. We were created to experience something more profound than the meeting of our narcissistic needs or obtaining financial security. Our lives are precious and short.  They are precious because we are endowed with God’s own image.  We were created to give our lives, called to place our lives in service to something larger than ourselves, a higher purpose than personal satisfaction.

            Jesus' word for that larger life was kingdom, the kingdom or realm of God is that larger life, the vast realm of God and life in such a world fosters life and growth and healing and justice and love, it seeks the welfare of all God’s people and is not afraid to fight for it.  That’s what Jesus discovered about his own calling – after he was baptized, after he went into the wilderness to discern his call, he arrives on the scene in the Galilee proclaiming the “good news of God,” inviting people to repent – that is, change the direction of their lives away from other lesser, competing concerns – and give their lives to God’s work in the world.  And note the order here, it’s very important.  Jesus didn’t say, “Repent. Then receive the good news of the kingdom of God.” Jesus said the kingdom of God has come near, therefore repent, change direction, and follow.   Embrace the good news and follow, live!  Jonah discovered the same thing, although reluctantly, after his own baptism of sorts.  Baptism – or spending three days in the belly of a fish – has a way of wrenching us from the orbit of our egos and then re-aligns us within the orbital pull of a larger planet, as it were, a larger body that has pull and sway over us, a larger world, a larger reality, the kingdom, the life, the vast realm of God, which continually beckons all of us. 

            The kingdom of God is always calling out and inviting us to enter it.  That was what Jesus was called to do in his life.  That’s what a life is for.  And by God’s grace, Jesus calls us to join him, as he shows us how to live with compassion and mercy, with love and with justice. 

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[1] See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), IV.xx.1-32.

[2] Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant:  An Exploration in Vocational Holiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 46-47.  Emphasis mine.

New Beginnings

Mark 1: 4-11

Baptism of the Lord/ 8^th January 2012

The beginning of Mark’s gospel–his account of God’s good news–s situated near water, along the River Jordan.  We’re not sure where.  Today, there are not one, but two “official” sites, pilgrimage places, where you can go down into the water. For one U.S. dollar you can buy a little vials or for a couple of bucks a larger container to bottle the water, bring it home as a souvenir, maybe mix the water with ordinary tap water used in most baptismal fonts.   One site is in Galilee, in modern-day Israel; the other is in Jordan. 

The exact location is not important, of course.  What’s significant is that Jesus begins his ministry in and around water and that he was baptized.  Luke and Matthew’s story of Jesus’ life and ministry start with his birth in Bethlehem.  For Mark, Jesus is “born” as it were here in the water, in the act of baptism. There are probably good historical reasons for this.  Mark’s gospel was probably written first, early, around 70 AD scholars suspect.  Mark was probably not aware of the birth narratives; he didn’t know the tradition rendered by Matthew and Luke.  For Mark, Jesus’ origins start not with a virginal conception or as a baby in a manger.  Jesus is “born” here in the waters of the River Jordan.  He is conceived by the Holy Spirit who rests upon him when he comes up out of the water, after having gone down into the depths of the flowing river and rising up a new person.  It all begins here, according to Mark.

This is worth noting as it provides an important insight into the meaning of baptism.  We need to remember that the Christian church didn’t come up with the ritual of baptism, although the two–church and baptism–are now inextricably linked in our consciousness.  Baptism literally means to wash or to bathe.  It’s a ceremonial washing, an act of purification.  Jews practiced different forms of ritual cleansing, which were commonplace during Jesus’ lifetime.  This was especially true for the Jewish apocalyptic sect, the Essenes, who lived out in the wilderness, primarily along the Dead Sea, near Qumran, away from the Romans and the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem.  John the Baptist was probably associated with the Essenes and perhaps even Jesus. 

Baptism emerges from within a radical religious sect of Judaism.  This, too, is worth remembering because John didn’t baptize Jesus because Jesus decided he was ready to become a Christian.  And he certainly wasn’t baptized because he wanted to become a member of a church.  The church didn’t exist when he was baptized.  The early church modified the original understanding and turned it into an act, a ritual, a sacrament of incorporation, incorporation into the church. 

A simple surface reading of this text, however, would lead us to see that it has very little to do with the church.  We could say it’s an act of incorporation, but incorporation not into the church, but into something, dare I say it, more important than the church, incorporation into the mission of God, the missio Dei. 

Baptism here is really more about initiation into the mystery of God, into the knowledge of God, and then, once initiated, one’s life and the life of the world are forever changed.  Baptism here is really more about participation, of Jesus participating in the life of the Spirit of God flowing through him and the world and then getting caught up in the Spirit’s flow, the Spirit’s movement in the world fulfilling the purpose and work and mission of God.  Baptism here is really more about identification, through this act Jesus’ identity is firmly rooted in his relationship to and with God.  He is identified, associated with God.  And he discovers his name:  the Beloved.  He discovers who he is: the Son in whom God takes immense delight, the object of all God’s love and joy.  And when Jesus discovers that his life is not his own, he’s places his life in service to the one who loves him and now sends him on a mission–the missio Dei, the mission of God–first into the wilderness for further training and then into the Galilee to proclaim the good news of God. 

The way I’m characterizing baptism here has very little, if anything, to do with the church. Yes, Mark wrote his gospel for his community, his church.  But the emphasis was and is not on the church as church.  The church is not an end itself and has value and importance only when it is being pressed into service to something far more profound and meaningful than itself:  the mission of God, or, as Jesus called it–the kingdom of God.  If the masculine, royal image doesn’t speak to us, we could also translate kingdom as the realm of God, or the kin-dom of God, or even the Empire of God.  All would be correct.  All point to God’s generosity, healing justice, redemptive power, and love governing our lives and the world.  Jesus is called to serve this mission, to embody it with his life, and he invites us to join him, to be “born” like him in the waters of baptism, to allow the Spirit of God to conceive within us something of God’s mission, to begin something new for the sake of the kingdom. 

The way I characterize Jesus’ baptism here can also be applied to everyone willing to go down into the waters.  On some level, Jesus’ experience was entirely his own.  But his experience, when we pay attention to it, tells us something of what we can all expect when we encounter the Living God.   Baptism is about our initiation into the mystery and knowledge of God and once initiated our eyes are opened and how we view ourselves and our neighbor and the world are forever changed. Baptism is about our participation, you and me participating in the life of the Spirit of God flowing through us and the world, getting caught up in the Spirit’s flow, the Spirit’s movement in the world fulfilling the purpose and work and mission of God.  Baptism is about our identification, through this act we discover our identities firmly rooted in our relationship to and with God.  We are identified; we are associated with God.  And we discover our true name:  the Beloved.  We discover who we are in God’s eyes: children of God, beloved daughters and sons of God in whom God takes immense delight, the object of all God’s love and joy.  And when you and I discover that our lives are not our own—and when we rediscover this time and again because, unlike Jesus, we forget who we are, we forget that our lives are not our own—when we know this and remember it, we then by grace can place our lives in service to the one who loves us through and through and in love now sends us on a mission—the missio Dei, the mission of God.  It will require going into the wilderness for further training—always required—but then we, too, are sent to embody the mission with our lives, to proclaim God’s good news.

Jesus had to go into the wilderness to discover what his special mission was.  So, too, we have to discover our purpose, what God is asking of us, whether we’re 18 or 88.  We are called to follow Jesus, yes, but not necessarily become exactly like him.  His journey belonged to him.  But he leads the way in showing us that we, too, need to discover what God is asking of our lives, on our journeys.  What are the unique things that you and only you have to offer the world?  What are the gifts that are unique to you that are being asked of God?  What are the passions, the hope, the dreams, the hungers that make you you, and how are these, too, being asked of God?  For this life does not belong to us, “you are not your own,” as Paul said (1 Corinthians 6:19), and as John the Baptist knew, and his parents, and Mary and Joseph, and Jesus, and every other character in the Bible.

            As we explored this morning in adult education, the Christian life has often been described as a journey.  We are all pilgrims walking to the place where we might discover our resurrection.  Across Europe in the middle ages there were pilgrimage routes to holy shrines and cathedrals.  To go off on pilgrimage—like one day making a pilgrimage to Mecca for Muslims—was a special opportunity to grow in one’s faith.  Dante’s journey in the Divine Comedy—through the Inferno, Purgatory, and finally Paradise—expressed such a view of the Christian life.  John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is another example.  The Hero’s Journey, reflected in the story of King Arthur and the search for the Holy Grail, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and even J. K. Rowling’s adventures of Harry Potter, are all rooted in the Christian narrative of journey.   Pilgrimage is becoming very popular in Europe these days.  In 2005, 93,921 pilgrims completed the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the Way of St. James of Compostela that begins in Southern France and cuts across northern Spain ending at the cathedral of St. James in Galicia.    Many of the old routes are being restored, such as the 402-mile route to Nidaros, to the shrine of St. Olav in Norway, or the 71-mile St. Andrew’s Way, following the ancient pilgrimage route from Edinburgh to the great cathedral (now in ruins) in St. Andrews.[1]  We don’t have pilgrimage routes in this country, unfortunately.  But we are still called to venture forth on the journey, to begin and begin again and again.

            In T. S. Eliot’s (1888-1965) stunning poem Four Quartets this theme of the Christian journey is central.  I’m a huge Eliot fan.  He has been a wise and faithful companion to me along my way.  For Eliot, the Christian life is a journey, it’s an adventure, a quest that requires courage and most of all, love.   Eliot wrote at the end of Four Quartets:

           

            With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

            We shall not cease from exploration…[2]

In “East Coker,” the second poem of four in Four Quartets, named for the village in England where his ancestors once lived before immigrating to the New World in 1669, he writes: 

           

            Home is where one starts from. 

Home matters, but it’s the starting point. We can’t stay there.  We have to leave home and venture forth.  It’s in the venturing forth that we discover who we are and whose we are.  For Eliot, the goal of the journey is a deeper connection with God, of discovering our purpose in life through the depth of that relationship.  The journey will take us through some difficult places, dangerous places, life-threatening places, but it’s the journey toward God and discovering our lives in relation to God that was central for Eliot, probably because it was also central for Jesus. Because it was so for Jesus, it’s the way for all of us too. 

            Eliot wrote:

            We must be still and still moving

            Into another intensity

            For a further union, a deeper communion

            Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

            The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

            Of the petrel and the porpoise.      In my end is my beginning.[3] 

This last sentence, “In my end is my beginning,” a quote of the English mystic and anchorite Julian of Norwich  (1342-c.1416), sums up the poem.[4]  “In my end” refers to death, but also end as in purpose, or as the Westminster Catechism asks in the first question, “What is the chief end of man?  To glorify God and enjoy God forever.” 

            When we know our end or purpose, that’s the place where life begins, that’s the place of new beginnings, that’s where we are conceived, that’s where we are born.  We are born with our calling.  And that end, because it is always love, will move us, as it moved Jesus,

            Into another intensity

            For a further union, a deeper communion.

            Drawn by love and the voice of this calling.  Isn’t that what Jesus discovered along the River Jordan?  Isn’t this, too, the purpose of our journey, “a further union, a deeper communion” with God, with one another, with ourselves? 

            Drawn by love and the voice of this calling the journey takes us “through the vast waters,” down into the depths, through the dark cold and empty desolation of human suffering and sorrow, down into the depths of the waters, down, down, down, then through and up and out of the waters—not unlike baptism itself!    For, “With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling/  We shall not cease from exploration.”

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[1] See Ian Bradly, Pilgrimage:  A Spiritual and Cultural Legacy (Oxford:  Lion Hudson, 2009).

[2] T. S. Eliot, The  Complete Poems and Playa, 1909-1950 (New York:  Harcout, Brace & World, 1962), 145.

[3] Eliot, 129.

[4] Probably taken from Revelation of Divine Love (1413).  It was also the motto of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1587), “En ma fin est mon commencement.”

Image:  "Baptism" by Nina Lagervall, member of Catonsville Presbyterian Church. 

Here to Kneel

Luke 2: 1-20

Christmas Eve/ 24^th December 2011

Several weeks ago a friend posted a picture on his facebook page.  It was an image of a manger scene.  The figures appeared to be made of clay.  There’s a donkey, a cow, several sheep.  Mary and Joseph are there on either side of the manger full of hay holding the baby Jesus.  Conventional enough. But if you look closely at the figure of Jesus he is being held firmly in place with a white, plastic strip—a cable tie—that wraps around the belly of the baby Jesus and the manger.  The facefook caption read, “This baby Jesus isn’t going anywhere.” My friend is a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, a venerable theological institution celebrating its bicentennial next year, one of the seminaries of the Presbyterian Church (USA), and (if I may say) one of the finest seminaries in the world.  I asked him, “Where is this crèche?”  “Mackay,” he replied.  “Mackay at Princeton Seminary?” I asked, surprised. Mackay is the name of the student center on the seminary campus.  “Oh yeah,” he replied.  Now, seminarians are known for their many pranks.  I was involved in several.  So I can appreciate that the administration took precautions that seminarians wouldn’t steal the baby Jesus. 

         The more I thought about the image I wondered, isn’t this what we love to do, both in the church and in the academy:  keep Jesus fully secured in his crib, locked in one location in space and time, fearful that he might be “stolen” from us?  The inane debates in our culture about whether there’s a war on Christmas, which seems to be an annual event like Black Friday, is also based on a fear of stealing Christ from Christmas, as if Jesus Christ was an “object” that we could hold on to, define, and defend. 

         Tonight and tomorrow we are here to celebrate the most distinctive theological claim of Christianity, the incarnation – in-carnatio, literally, “going into flesh” – “the Word made flesh” (John 1: 1-14), a theological claim which sets us apart from every other religion on this earth.  The history of what took place long ago is important.  But we are about more here tonight than recalling and remembering what took place. We are not here to commemorate.  History doesn’t save us, it doesn’t renew us, it doesn’t allow us to participate in the ongoing presence of the Spirit who moves through creation.  Yes, we can celebrate what took place in the past, but tonight is about claiming and celebrating Christ’s ongoing incarnating presence in our lives, in our flesh, in you and me.

         What if Jesus is not stuck in a remote past, but is present with us here, in this space and time, in us? What if the crèche is empty, what if the Christ child is waiting to be birthed anew in us, “in birth after birth, ever fresh and fresh”?

         That’s how the poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) put it in one poem.  He gets it right:

But God’s own descent

Into flesh was meant

As a demonstration

That the supreme merit

Lay in risking spirit

In substantiation.

Spirit enters flesh

And for all it’s worth

Charges into earth

In birth after birth

ever fresh and fresh.[1]

         Frost gets it because he knows something that many in the church have forgotten or never got, that the incarnation is not a one-time occurrence but something that has fundamentally changed and is changing the very structure of our existence.  In the incarnation we discover a “demonstration” that God is forever “risking spirit” by being active in the world and our lives.  The Spirit enters and for all it’s worth charges into earth – where?  Yes, in Jesus, absolutely, but also in birth after birth, ever fresh and fresh.  In your birth and my birth ever fresh and fresh, doing something new.

         Why don’t we get this? Because all of this is tough to get our heads wrapped around.  How can this be?  God and humanity in one place?  God in diapers in a smelly manger? Savior?  A baby born King?  Christ in us? Sure, you can just accept it on faith, I guess, believe anything is possible with God.  Take that leap.  “Just believe,” you say.  Maybe that’s what you believe.  The problem, though, is that when we move the discussion toward belief, then beliefs need to be argued, proved, defended. When we’re wrestling in the world of beliefs we’re really dealing with our egos, and with reason, how we use our intellects to “explain” something to be true. The world has grown tired of beliefs.  The world, once again, knows the costly price of dogmatic assertions, of fundamentalisms of every kind.  The world has lost trust in what we say we believe as a church because it’s not embodied – incarnated – in how people live their lives. 


     I, too, have grown tired of beliefs.  That might sound odd coming from a preacher.  Maybe.  That is until we remember that the first Jesus followers did not have a “belief system.” The way Jesus called us to follow was and is more than something we are merely asked to believe in, more than confessing certain theological ideas, more than intellectual assent (maybe blindly) that we offer, more than devotion to historical figures, and certainly more than an anemic ethical do-goodism.  What they had was an experience of the holy, an encounter with the divine, and they participated in the power and grace and awesomeness of the Spirit of God unleashed upon the world, gospeling the world in the flesh, calling us to follow on a heroic journey of divine dimensions.  That journey begins with the shepherds.  They show us the way.

         We can’t reason our way into any of this.  We can’t set reason aside, but we can’t allow it to lead the way.  Luke’s description of what the shepherds encountered was really a mystical experience, it was an encounter with mystery – and mystery, because it’s a mystery (not a puzzle) is not completely knowable.  It can’t be measured.  It can’t be analyzed.  It can’t be verified.  It can only be experienced.  Despite the presence of stories like these in scripture, the church has never done well with the mystical.  It’s actually been repressed.  Cultural historian José Argüelles (1939-2011) sees a “dictatorship of reason” in the modern era of Western culture that “banished mysticism as a branch of the insane.”[2]  We need to admit that there are other ways of knowing in addition to reason.  Albert Einstein (1879-1955) insisted that, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.  Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead.”[3]  The psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961) warned, “…only the mystic brings what is creative to religion itself….  The creative mystic was ever a cross for the Church, but it is to him [and her] that we owe what is best in humanity.”[4]

         Maybe we need to see the shepherds as mystics.  When the King James Version says, “and they were sore afraid,” the Greek actually reads kai ephobethesan phoban megan (Luke 2:9), literally, “and they became afraid with very much great fear.”  They were terrified, but with a holy terror, a holy awe. Language is pushed to the limits to express the awe, the fear, the terror that comes with encountering the mystery of what the shepherds experienced that night.  Yes, the angels said, “Fear not,” but only after they experienced holy awe.  The theologian Rudolph Otto (1869-1937), back in 1917, described such moments as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans:  a terrifying and fascinating mystery that seizes us and overwhelms us in love.[5] 

         The Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel (1907-1972) defined mysticism as “radical amazement.”  Wasn’t that Mary’s response to what the shepherds’ experience?  Maybe she, too, was a mystic.   Radical awe.  “Awe is the beginning of wisdom,” Heschel claimed.  “Awe precedes faith.”  Not belief, not reason, but awe.  And praise too “precedes faith.”[6]  Awe is the beginning of wisdom.  The fear experienced in awe and terror “is not the fear of guilt” or of being attacked, but “a fear of WOW! – a reverential fear based on a realization of the greatness of our existence, of our being included in the amazing twenty-billion-year drama that is the universe,”[7] the realization that the Creator of this universe and the source of existence encounters us, overwhelms us with love, and faces us – literally – in the flesh, in the birth of a Son who came for us to know once and for all that we are deeply loved, that we are the beloved sons and daughters of God, the objects of God’s joy and passion!

         So how do we respond to this kind of awe? What do we “do” with it?  We don’t “do” anything with it. It “does” us. And shapes us. And loves us.  As the ancients knew, there is only one proper response to mystery – and that is to kneel.  As the poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) told us in his Four Quartets, this is what the journey of life is about, this is what faith is about, this how we respond to the mystery of the incarnation, he said,

                  You are not here to verify,

                  Instruct yourself, inform curiosity

                  Or carry report.  You are here to kneel….[8]

We are here to kneel.

---

[1] Robert Frost, “But God’s own descent,” In the Clearing (New York:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 7. I’m grateful to my good friend, the Reverend Alex “Chuck” Coblentz for first sharing this poem with me.

[2] José Argüelles, The Transformative Vision (1975), cited in Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ:  The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance (New York:  HarperOne, 1988), 42.  Fox cites Gregory Bateson’s view that the repression of the mystical is “pathological”

[3] Albert Einstein, “The World As I See It,” in A. Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (based on Mein Weltbild), Carl Seeling, ed. (New York:  Bonanza Books, 1954), 8-11.

[4] Jolande Jocobi and R. f. C. Hull, eds., C. G. Jung:  Psychological Reflections (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1978), 206, 340.

[5] Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1923, 2^nd ed. 1950, [Das Heilige, 1917]).

[6] Abraham Heschel, quoted in John C. Merkle, The Genesis of Faith:  The Depth Theology of Abraham Heschel (New York:  Macmillan & Co., 1985), 170, 172, cited in Fox, 51.

[7] Fox, 51.

[8] T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (1942).

An Advent Series: The Way Toward Birth - IV. Dawning Light

Isaiah 11: 1-10 & Luke 1: 67-79

Fourth Sunday in Advent/ 18^th December 2011

Come with me to the place of birth and rebirth

Come, beloved of God, to the place of renewal and new beginnings.

Come, Holy ones, to the place of your resurrection, the place of life.

Come with me down the narrow way that leads to the broad fields of salvation.

For the road is before us.  

The journey beckons.  

The path calls out your name.  

Venture toward the place of light and illumination.  Step out.  Trust it.  Follow. 

Yes, Advent means “coming.”   In this season we remember the original coming of Jesus, his birth in Bethlehem, the place of God’s incarnation and prepare for his future coming again. Yes, advent is about arrival.  In this season we remember the arrival of God and the promised future arrival of Christ. 

            But as I’ve tried to convey the last three weeks, Advent is also about another “coming,” another “arrival.”  It’s about our arrival at the place of birth, the place of God’s incarnation in us.  It’s about Jesus’ coming into our lives, his arrival, in our flesh.  It’s about Jesus being born in us.  There’s a 15^th century poem that goes like this: 

Lo, in the silent night

A child to God is born

And all is brought again

That ere was lost or lorn.

Could but thy soul

Become a silent night!

God would be born in thee

And set all things right. (Anonymous)

            Where is the place of Bethlehem in you?  Yes, the incarnation is about Jesus.  “For in him,” Paul wrote, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Co. 1:19-20).  Yes, it’s about Jesus, but the significance of his birth is not merely the mystery of God enfleshing humanity – that’s significant, don’t get me wrong.  But now follow-through with this insight, what does it really mean? Bring it closer home still, “in here,” within.  As Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) urged us to recall, the very core of Christ’s being is always related to the self, pro me, for me.[1] What does it mean pro me, for me?

We come to see that what God did in Jesus reveals to us something of who God is and how God acts and what God loves to do in us.  The incarnation—in-carnatio—means, literally, “going into flesh.”  That’s what God does:  always has, always will.  Christmas calls us to see the way of God in us, in creation.  Once we see it at work in Jesus, we can see the pattern at work all around us, in the world, in our lives.[2]  God is in the birthing business, as it were, and delights in bringing universes and things and, most of all, people to life.  God has this uncanny habit of taking delight in novelty, in making all things new, extending horizons of hope where there’s only despair and darkness, of breaking forth light in the night and dazzling us with the dawn.

            The poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) gets it right, here in this poem:

But God’s own descent

Into flesh was meant

As a demonstration

That the supreme merit

Lay in risking spirit

In substantiation.

Spirit enters flesh

And for all it’s worth

Charges into earth

In birth after birth

ever fresh and fresh.[3]

            I think Frost gets it right because he realizes that the incarnation is not a one-time occurrence but something that has fundamentally changed and is changing the very structure of our existence.  In the incarnation we discover a “demonstration” that God is forever “risking spirit” by being active in the world and our lives.  The Spirit enters and for all it’s worth charges into earth – where?  Yes, in Jesus, but in birth after birth, ever fresh and fresh.  In your birth and my birth ever fresh and fresh, doing something new.

            You see this view takes Christianity away from being a belief system that we merely believe in, of theological ideas that we subscribe to, of intellectual assent that we offer, devotion to historical figures, and an weak inane do-goodism, take us away from these views of Christianity and moves us toward something that we participate in, to an experience, a human journey of divine dimensions.  It’s the journey that counts:  your journey, my journey, individually and together.  Yes, Mary can say, “My soul magnifies, glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior (Luke 1:46-47).” but she, too, demonstrates something for us.  What will it take for us, for you and me, to be able to say that our souls are magnifying and glorifying, intensifying and reflecting the love of God and therefpre we rejoice?  The journey to that point, to that kind of realization, to that confession is the way toward birth; it’s the journey of faith.  It can happen in a moment or it can take a lifetime, but it’s the journey that counts.  Advent, Christmas Epiphany – the Incarnation – add the Transfiguration, Lent, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost are all about God making this journey toward us and then inviting us to make the journey toward God and showing us the way.

            Yes, the journey will take us through dark places.  Yes, we will get lost.  Yes, it will seem like there’s no hope.  Yes, there will be hardship and loss.  That’s what Judah knew in its own journey with Yahweh.  Life will be tough and difficult, full of pain and suffering, sometimes because of the faith we hold (or that holds us).  But – hear the good news – Isaiah tells us, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.  The spirit of Yahweh shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD” (Isaiah 11:1).  A shoot shall come out from what appeared to be a dead tree cut to its roots. Life will emerge from apparent death.  Something new is about to take place. 

            Now, from our Christian perspective, we hear these words and immediately think of Jesus.  We hear “spirit” and think of the Holy Spirit.  But these were not Isaiah’s reference points.  He’s not necessarily taking about a future Messiah.  But what he is talking about is the generative power of God.  “The tradition of Isaiah,” Walter Brueggemann reminds us, “never ceases to be astonished at the newness and never fails to summon God’s people to hope and expectation in the face of discouraging circumstance.”[4]  Yahweh will come and do a new thing, because Yahweh delights in creation, in newness.  The coming of Yahweh is generative, irresistible, an authorizing “wind,” a spirit as force that “enlivens, gives power, energy and courage,” so that the bear or this spirit “is recognized as one designated, who has the capacity to do what the world believes is impossible.”5]  That’s what Yahweh will do in and through “him,” whoever “him” will be.  Whoever is the bearer of the spirit of Yahweh generates a new historical possibility where none was available.  He – she – will do something new. Again, Bruggemann, makes the point that Isaiah’s poem here in chapter eleven is essentially about transformation, the kind of change that takes place when the spirit is guiding us.  This vision of the wolf living with the lamb, this “peaceable kingdom,” “is one of the most remarkable assertions in the Bible that there will be ‘all things new’ in creation when God fully authorizes the right human agents.”[6] 

            The first followers of Jesus saw in him one such “agent” fully authorized by the spirit of Yahweh.  They saw within Jesus God doing something new.  In him they witnessed “the tender mercy of God.”  For in him, as Zechariah said, they saw the dawn breaking forth in dazzling brilliance, giving light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1: 78-79).

To guide our feet into the way of peace.  

To guide our feet into the way. 

To guide our feet. 

To guide.

            God’s own descent

Into flesh was meant

As a demonstration

That the supreme merit

Lay in risking spirit

In substantiation.

Spirit enters flesh

And for all its worth

Charges into earth

In birth after birth

ever fresh and fresh.

            This week we will celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, celebrating with friends and family the most distinctive theological claim of Christianity, the incarnation, which sets us apart from every other religion on this earth.  The history is important.  But history doesn’t save us, it doesn’t renew us, it doesn’t allow us to participate in the ongoing presence of the Spirit who moves through creation.  Yes, we can celebrate what took place in the past, but what about celebrating the ongoing realization of Christ’s incarnating presence in our lives?  Is Christ stuck in the past or is he an ongoing presence being born again and again in humanity? 

            Last week, a friend posted a photograph on his facebook page.  It was an image of a manger scene.  The figures appeared to be made of clay or ceramic.  You can see a donkey, a cow, some sheep.  Mary and Joseph are there on either side of the manger full of hay holding the baby Jesus.  But if you look closely at the figure of Jesus he is being held firmly in place with a white, plastic strip—a cable tie—that wraps around the belly of the baby Jesus and manger.  “This baby Jesus isn’t going anywhere,” the facebook caption read.  (Oddly enough, this morning I found a cable tie on the ground, on the driveway between the church and the church house.)  My friend is a student at Princeton Seminary.  I asked him, “Where is this crèche?”  “Mackay,” he replied.  “Mackay at Princeton Seminary?” I asked, surprised? Mackay is the name of the student center on the Princeton Seminary campus.  “Oh yeah,” he replied.  Now, seminarians are known for their many pranks.  I was involved in several.  So I can appreciate that the administration took precautions that seminarians wouldn't steal the baby Jesus. 

            I felt there was a good sermon illustration in there somewhere. The more I thought about it I wondered, isn’t this what we love to do, both in the church and in the academy:  keep Jesus fully secured in his crib, locked in one location in space and time, fearful that he might be “stolen” from us.  What if he is present with us here, in this space and time, in us?  What if the crèche is empty, what if the Christ child is waiting to be birthed anew in us, “in birth after birth, ever fresh and fresh”?

            This is what the wise and, some might say, dangerous Dominican theologian Meister Eckhart (c.1260-c.1327) said centuries ago, this was what he trying to get across in his teaching and preaching back in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  “The Creator is constantly creating and the universe is constantly being created.”[7]  Eckhart wrote, “It is given to every person to become the child of God, substantially indeed in Christ, but in himself or herself by adoption through grace.”[8]  The incarnation calls us, again and again, to discover our identities as sons and daughters of God.  For “what good is it to me,” Eckhart asked, “if the son of God was born to Mary 1400 years ago, but is not born in my person and in my culture and in my time?”  That’s our question, too.  Just add 600 years.  He asked this question confident in the answer that God continues to create in us. We can have the same confidence.  “God is here—in this very place­—” Eckhart insisted, “just as much incarnate as in a human being long ago.  And this is why God has become a human being:  that Divinity might give birth to you as its only begotten Son [and Daughter], and as no less….  The Creator gives birth to the divine child in the innermost part of the soul and gives birth to you with its only begotten Son as no less.”[9] 

Risking spirit in flesh – in birth after birth after birth. Ever fresh and fresh. 

Amazing.

---

[1] See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, trans. Edwin H. Robertson (New York:  Harper & row, 1978), 47-48.

[2] I am grateful to Fr. Richard Rohr for this insight/comment.

[3] Robert Frost, “But God’s own descent,” In the Clearing (New York:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 7. I’m grateful to my good friend, the Reverend Alex “Chuck” Coblentz for first sharing this poem with me.

[4] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 1998),  98.

[5] Brueggemann, 99.

[6] Brueggemann, 102.

[7] Matthew Fox on Meister Eckhart in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ:  The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance (San Francisco:  HarperOne, 1988), 122.

[8] Eckhart cited in Fox, 121-123.

[9] Eckhart cited in Fox, 121-123.