God's Presence to Each Other
By Charles Rush
7 April 2002
Lk. 24: 13-25
ars ago, I was reading “The Three Little Pigs to my children, back when I could get the older three all under the covers, and my son who will shortly join the Army was still working his thumb and his blankey at the same time.
I
got to the part in the story where the first little pig was building his house
and he goes to ask the man for some straw to build his house out of straw. And
the pig said to the man, ‘Sir may I buy some straw so I can build my house.” I
stopped and said, “Now what do you think that man said to the pig?” My
youngest, still working his thumb and blankey said, “Holy Cow, a talking pig.”
A talking pig indeed.
In the stories
that follow Easter, we have an ironic juxtaposition between form and content,
the extraordinary, miraculous form and the humane, ordinary direction that it
points us. On the one hand, you have this miraculous encounter between these
despairing disciples and the risen Christ, who recognize him in the breaking of
the bread. On the other hand, there is a direction to the story that is
remarkably human and humane. The disciples that were leaving Jerusalem isolated
and dejected are filled with the Spirit after this encounter to return to
Jerusalem and join together with the other disciples in community.
I'm
not surprised that we have been confused on the spiritual front. I presume that
it is something of a natural human desire to want to have a direct encounter
with some extraordinary reality, to find out that there is so much more to the
world than the ordinary mundane stuff that makes up the banal part of our
existence. That is part of the appeal of E.T. it seems to me, an ordinary kid,
going through an ordinary day, who bumps into an alien in his bedroom. And
through that encounter his friends have to hide and run, ride their bikes in
the night. The F.B.I. get called in the A.T. F. get called in. Spaceships
appear. Holy Cow, who would have guessed.
We
want the miraculous in our lives truth be told. It has given rise to this whole
great tradition of searching for the God of the exception. You may have read
about the priest, an Eastern Orthodox monk named Father Pangratios, who was
cleaning the Chapel of the Christ of the Hills in the monastery in Blanco,
Texas. Yes, there really is a town ‘Blanco, Texas.' As Father Pangratios was
cleaning the chapel he dusted off all of the icons in the chapel, the small
mosaic two dimensional paintings of the saints that the Orthodox faithful
believe serve as a window between us and God. One of the icons of the Virgin
Mary had some moisture on it and he wiped it off. As soon as he did, he smelled
the scent of myrrh, one of the fragrances that was brought to the infant Jesus,
and is still popular in the Middle East today for anointing. Being a priest, he
said a prayer of thanksgiving and went on about his work. Later in the day, he
was back in the chapel when he noticed the same icon was again moist and it
looked to him as if the icon itself was actually weeping. This continued for
quite a period of time, whereupon officials from the Russian Orthodox Church
were brought in for observation, and the icon was eventually deemed an official
miracle, and the ‘weeping Mary' was presented to the faithful.
Since
the icon was weeping, Church officials assumed that the message she was trying
to communicate to us was one of repentance. Father Pangratios himself said,
“God is saddened by our sins. He wants us to change our lives through fasting
and prayer, love of God and neighbor.”
Shortly
afterwards, a steady stream of devotees flocked to see the icon. And the range
of reported miracles is indeed rather spectacular. Among other things, twins
that were both blind were anointed with some of this oil and had their sight
restored. Several cases of people suffering from depression were healed. A
woman that had been diagnosed with cancer was spontaneously healed. Another
man, who was in need of a serious surgery, had it checked after a visit to the
icon to discover that the surgery was no longer necessary.[1]
I
have no comment to make on these accounts, one way or the other. Over the
years, I have heard many reports like these, which I put into, what the
Philosopher Jean Luc Merleau Ponty used to call, brackets. By that he meant,
events, which can neither be exhaustively confirmed, nor dismissed out of hand.
What
I would lift up this morning is the sheer popularity of these events in every
generation. It points to a deep human desire for the extraordinary, the
miraculous, the transcendent, and other-worldly.
Of
course, what makes the miracles in this tradition of piety problematic is the
wide variation of quality that it includes. I call to mind another article,
this one from People magazine, that carried the report of one Arlene
Gardner from Estill Springs, Tennessee. Ms. Gardner had called the local news
media to inform them that she had been able to clearly distinguish the face of
Jesus on the front of the General Electric freezer that sat on the front porch
of her double wide mobile home. Once again, people streamed from all around to
witness the epiphany. In this case, the
report attracted not only the faithful but also some skeptics. I was amused by
the comment of the Mayor of Estill Springs, Mr. John Gaul, an outspoken
skeptic. Said Mayor Gaul, “If Jesus were coming to this town, he would
have come somewhere different than on a [blankety blank] freezer.”
In
many of these cases, just as it is clear that something dramatic has happened
to people, so it is difficult to determine just how much of that is because God
did something from without or people in great need were able to generate the
extraordinary in the mundane.
I
certainly understand our desire to experience what Rudolf Otto called the Mysterium
Tremendum et Fascinans, that is the overwhelming power of a direct
epiphany of the Almighty. My family thinks I am crazy- a thesis which has some
obvious merit- but I have always wanted to stay on the Outer Banks in North
Carolina during one of the Hurricanes that come in the early fall that deluge
the whole island in two feet of water with winds over 100 miles per hour. I
just want to feel for myself the overpowering force of nature. I understand
that.
Who
among us would not like to have some spiritual clarity like the movie from my
childhood that I watched again Easter night, The Ten Commandments, with
Charlton Heston as Moses and Yule Brenner as the bad Pharaoh. Charlton Heston
goes up to Mount Sinai and it is covered with Lightening, wind, and Thunder. He
comes back down with the Ten Commandments. So overwhelming… So direct… So
clear.
Who
wouldn't want something unambiguous like that? Or the wonderful conclusion to
the Raiders of the Lost Ark with Harrison Ford. The evil Nazi's find the
Lost Ark of the Covenant that the Jews used to carry into battle and Hitler
wants to use it to beat all the good guys into submission. They Nazi's find the
Ark, the good guys steal it back, the Nazi's get it again, on and on it goes,
until finally the Evil, unbelieving, atheistic, cruel Nazi's look like they
have it for good. And Nazi's decide, stupid them, to open the Ark and have a
secret look see. Bad idea, bad idea- and the good guys know it because they
read the Bible and know that you can't look on the sacred objects without
encountering God directly and no one can see God and live. Sure enough, the
Spirit of the Good God is released, it flies around, and the evil, atheistic
Nazi's just melt before your eyes. Great movie, great conclusion, and I might
add, an excellent idea. Something bold, something unambiguous, bad guys just
melting.
Of
course, I have friends who say that what they want is a religious experience of
this order of magnitude, they want some direct encounter with God… but then
they go to the Church and… air out of the balloon, it is so pedestrian, so
ordinary, so boring.
They want what we get in the
form of these stories, a dramatic encounter with Jesus post-resurrection… a
miracle. But then the content. The content brings us back down to earth, I
suspect because that is where God wants us.
These disciples have some
kind of epiphanic experience. They remember ‘how their hearts burned.' They
recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread and he disappears and the Spirit
drives them back to Jerusalem, back to the other disciples, empowered and
confident, to be sure. But it is back to other people.
That is good news/bad news.
I have a colleague who is older than me and more acerbic, who once remarked, “I
love the Church is Church people that drive me up a wall.” I know exactly
what he means, don't you? It is hard to be spiritual when you have to sit in
the same pew with narrow minded Fred Wigglesworth. How true, how true. How can
you get deep and spiritual when one of the ushers taking up the collection is
that vain, autocratic soccer coach for your kids, you can't stand? It's kind of
hard to focus on being spiritual.
I wish that the problem were
only the sheer size and anonymity of the Church but it is not. Several years
ago, now, several Fathers and I decided we would take our boys camping and
impart to them some of the spiritual nutrient that had sustained us lo these
many years. We were going to develop some leadership and talk about what it
means to be spiritual and men in our world. And we did have an important time together. But the boys were about 9
years old and half of the time when we would get to a serious moment, gathered
around the camp fire, just about to make an important point, and one of
the boys would fart. I had no idea just how much gas 5 fourth grade
boys could generate over the course of a weekend. And in some way, spiritual
truth was communicated but it was not the Zen master speaking to a peaceful
Grasshopper on the old TV show Kung Fu.
And isn't life like that? A
couple I knew got away for a long weekend, left their four children behind, had
this great time together, remembered why they got married in the first place,
talked about all of their hopes and dreams for their children, identified
growth areas and strategies they would work on together. They got home and walked
into a house full of kids that were screaming, some fighting with the
neighbors, some bringing three days worth of justice issues for Mom to
adjudicate. Chaos… melt down… All that calm from a little retreat, all those
plans, overridden in half an hour. We have to go back into the maelstrom.
So much for the form of some
miraculous, transcendent experience because God is going to point us back in
the direction of these other people, the ones who live right around us- these
needy, sometimes obnoxious, sometimes short-tempered, sometimes half-baked
people. It is messy work. They live in a context of ambiguity that occasionally
borders on controlled chaos. Some have conflicting agendas. Some don't seem to
be able to listen. Some seem to think that God has given them alone all the
answers to most any problem that arises. It calls to mind a saying from Jesus,
when the religious leaders of his day asked why he hung around with tax
collectors, prostitutes and other sinners, he said, “The physician comes for
the sick, not the healthy.” The sick, my brothers, that would be you and
me.
I remember asking a
denominational leader about Christ Church before I came here to be a Minister,
a wizened leader, and he said, “They have solid worship, a great sense of
mission, and there aren't many dysfunctional people in positions of power.” That is a gritty spiritual realism. Turns
out to be about right.
This week, a fresh round of diplomatic negotiations
were begun in the Middle East. Even while there are suicide bombers attacking
Tel Aviv, even while there are tanks crushing down walls, firing at whoever is
in the way in Ramallah, sometime, somewhere after the overt fighting is done,
we still have to find a way to get along, we still have to learn how to
negotiate with each other and live near each other, with a modicum of respect
and tolerance. I think it is a metaphor for the authentic spiritual life that
Jesus came to point us towards. Miraculous? perhaps, perhaps not. But one way
or another, the whole point of the resurrected life is that it drives us back
towards each other, in all our compromise, all our quirkiness, our anger, our
hatred. It has to get to us there- at home, with our neighbors, in our
community, with our foes. If it doesn't, we missed the point, not just of the
Christian life, but of the Spiritual life altogether.
Amen.
[1] Gurvis,
Sandra. Way Station to Heaven (New York: NY, Sicom and Schuster
MacMillan, Inc., 1996), pp. 177-179.
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