God's Presence to Each Other
By Charles Rush
April 15, 2007
Lk. 24: 13-25
[ Audio
(mp3, 5.7Mb) ]
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, Tennesseee. 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 Pharoah. 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 Nazis 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 Nazis find the Ark, the good
guys steal it back, the Nazis get it again, on and on it goes, until finally
the Evil, unbelieveing, atheistic, cruel Nazis look
like they have it for good. And Nazis 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 Nazis
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 break wind. 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, we
have a fresh round of problems – Iraq, Iran, we continue to have situations in
the Middle East, in the Sudan – and somehow
brothers and sister 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, develop 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. 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 here – 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.
© 2007
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.