God's Presence to Each Other
[i]
By Charles Rush
April 18, 2010
Lk. 24: 13-25
[ Audio
(mp3, 5.6Mb) ]
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 later joined 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. 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.[ii]
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 Maurice
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 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, unbelieveing, 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, the headlines revolve
around the new level of conflict brewing in Israel and the Israeli's have
approved building another settlement in the Arab side of the Old City in
Jerusalem. And the Palestinians have secured more SCUD missiles from the Syrians…
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.
[i] Rev.
Rush preached a version of this sermon on April 7, 2002
[ii] Gurvis,
Sandra. Way Station to Heaven (New York: NY, Sicom and Schuster
MacMillan, Inc., 1996), pp. 177-179.
© 2010
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
