Author Archives: mbj

The Word became flesh

To the world at large, Christmas has come and gone.  December 25th is behind us, we have finished with the shopping and the exchange of gifts, so presumably now is the time to be done with the season, to take down the lights, to pack away the crèche, set the tree on the curb, and move on to thinking about something else.  Christmas is behind us – that’s what the world would say.  But for Christians, Christmas has only just begun.  We have only just begun to explore the incarnation and to savor the gift that God is giving us in the birth of Christ.  Here on the first Sunday after Christmas we are right at the center of the Twelve Days of Christmas, with plenty of time to relish the mystery of the Word made flesh and to do what Mary did at the manger: to treasure this birth and to ponder it in our heart (Luke 2:19).  As a priest told me years ago, over these twelve days we should take our time and soak ourselves in the message of God’s love as patiently as tea bags in a cup of tea.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth… No one has ever seen God.  It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (John 1:1, 14, 18).  These lines, culled from the first eighteen verses of the Gospel of John, often called the Prologue of John, express the same mysterious truth that the other Gospel writers evoke in the stories of shepherds and angels, of a birth in a stable, of a visit by wise men bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  The hidden God, the mysterious, ungraspable, unseen and unseeable divine Presence who is the ground of all things, and who infuses, embraces, and constitutes all things, has become seen and known in Jesus Christ.  Through an act of creative self-giving, the hidden, unknown God has been born as one of us.  The formless has taken form; the hidden has been revealed; the ungraspable can now be picked up and rocked as a baby in its mother’s arms.  The Word has become flesh and has lived among us. 

What does this mean, and why does it matter?  I grew up thinking that Christ’s birth was something that took place just once, long ago, in a far away place, to a person I would never know.  Jesus of Nazareth was somehow both fully human and fully divine, and the rest of us lowly human beings could only marvel and worship from afar.  But if we imagine that the incarnation is something that happens only once, and only to someone else, then what meaning can it have for us, and what power does it have to change our lives?  How astonished I was when I first heard about the teachings of the so-called Church Fathers – teachers and writers in the early Church, such as Ireneaus and Clement of Alexandria and Athanasius – who spoke about “divinization,” the process by which human beings are so transformed by the grace of God that we share in God’s nature; we participate in God’s very being, and become in a sense divine.  These early Christians were convinced that God became human so that humans might become divine.  Reading them, I began to see that maybe the incarnation was not only for Jesus Christ.  Maybe the incarnation was in fact our human destiny, the very purpose for which we were created.

As I was writing my little book of Advent and Christmas meditations, each one based on a reading from the Daily Office – the services of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer – I was struck by a passage from Second Peter: “Become participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).  There it was again, right there in the Bible – the notion that human beings can evolve to a point, or mature to a point, where we consciously participate in God.  “Become participants of the divine nature.”  That is an amazing invitation! 

So – what if at Christmas we are celebrating not only Jesus’ birth, but our own birth, too, the possibility that we, too, can share in the divine life, that we, too, can become bearers of the eternal Word?  What if it turns out that our own being is filled with the infinite, creative, and mysterious presence that we call “God”?  What if our own deepest self is in God, and in fact is God, since we have been created in God’s image and likeness?  What if, as the Quakers would say, there is that of God in us?

In a world filled with so much unhappiness, with so much ugliness, confusion, agitation, and violence, what would it be like if more and more of us came to understand that our call in life is to become divine, to allow the divine life to flow more and more freely through us, so that less and less of ourselves is getting in the way, less and less of ourselves is blocking and obstructing that flow?  What would it be like, moment by moment, to remember who we are and whose we are, and to speak and act and choose accordingly?  What would it be like to remember how much goodness we human beings carry within us, how much holiness and beauty?

This may sound like an ego trip, but of course it’s not.  As the contemporary spiritual teacher James Finley often says, mystics don’t take pride in their visions or religious experiences; instead, the mystics say: look at what Love has done in my life.  When we practice incarnation – when day by day we try to open ourselves to God and to participate consciously in the divine nature – we allow God’s love to affect us, to change us, to flow into us and through us.  It is a humbling practice.  Day by day we open to love and try to get out of the way. 

I came across a short video on YouTube¹ that shows how this works.  The clip was made by a Buddhist teacher in the Shambhala lineage, not by a Christian, and it never mentions God – yet it gives everyone, whatever our beliefs, a way to awaken to the truth of who we are.  The video starts with black and white images of urban life – we see crowds, traffic, the hustle and bustle of people hurrying off to work.  We see an alarm clock go off, and someone turning on the stove to make morning coffee.  We hear a man saying, “What about me?  That’s my first thought every morning.  What happened to me? is the last thought every night.  Has this got me anywhere?  Any more friends?  Any more love?  Any more joy?  It should have, by now!  In fact, by now I should be a bundle of joy!  Because I say this mantra every day: What about me? What about me?  In fact, it’s embarrassing: I say this mantra all day long, like the beating of my heart: What. About. Me?”

We see images of a man driving, shopping for groceries, and going through all the routines of daily life.  And the narrator presses on, saying, “When I take a shower, I think: What about me?  I hope this shower makes me feel happy.  I hope this kiss makes me feel happy.  I hope this lunch makes me feel happy.  I hope these clothes make me feel happy.  I hope this donut, this cup of coffee, this new affair, this new job — What about me? What about me?”

We see a man in dark glasses standing motionless on a city street, looking baffled and lost, staring glumly at nothing, and finally the narrator says, “You know what?  None of it will make you happy unless you do one simple thing: change ‘me’ for ‘you,’ ‘me’ for ‘you.’”  The black and white images suddenly turn to color.  We see a man lying on his back on a field of grass, eyes open, fully awake, and the narrator exclaims, “Let’s wake up in the morning and try something wild.  Let’s break up the monotony and say: May you be happy.  May you be happy.”  What about you?  That question gives so much more love, so much more joy!  And the narrator continues, “When I give you a big fat kiss, when I take a shower, when I make my bed, when I dance, may it make you happy!  When I give you the remote control, may it make you happy!  When I sit on a park bench by myself, when I feel the sun and the breeze, may it make you happy!  When I just look at you…may it make you happy.”  The video concludes, “You know what? When you’re happy, I’m happy.  That’s the formula: first you, then me.  That’s what happiness is.  It’s just the heart being free.”

That’s what happiness is, and that’s the incarnation, too: when we share in the divine life of joyful self-giving.  I’m not talking about co-dependence, about ignoring our own needs, but rather about opening our eyes and minds and hearts to the God-given preciousness of other people and the whole creation.  God is constantly pouring out God’s self into the world and as the world, giving God’s self to us, right here, and now, and now, in this very moment.  “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”  And the Word becomes flesh and lives again and again among us whenever we open to the love that is hidden in each moment, whenever we allow ourselves to be pulled by love out of the enclosure of our self-absorption and to be freed from self-concern. 

Yes, we have only just begun to explore the incarnation and to savor the gift that God is giving us in the birth of Christ.  Day by day, God willing, Christ will be born a little more fully into our thoughts, into our intentions, into the very cells of our bodies, and the light that is enkindled in our hearts will shine forth more fully in our lives.  

1. Mipham – What About Me, by film producer/director Chewyguru: youtu.be/FDSAAlrqAHM.

Rejoicing even in darkness

We gather this morning with shocked and troubled hearts as we absorb news of the massacre in Connecticut.  Here in this sacred space I invite you to join me in a moment of silence as we lift up before God those who perished in the gunfire and those who awoke in Newtown this morning deeply grieving, traumatized, angry, or afraid.

(Silence)

Ever-living God, Father and Mother of all mercies, we pray to you for those who died in Newtown: grant them your peace, and may light perpetual shine upon them.  Deal graciously, we pray, with those who mourn, that, casting all their care on you, they may know the consolation of your love and the peace which surpasses all understanding; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

I am glad to say that some of Scripture’s most consoling passages are reserved for today, the Third Sunday of Advent.  Words of comfort begin with the prophet Zephaniah, who urges us to sing aloud, to rejoice and exult with all our heart.  Why?  Because God is in our midst, renewing us in love, exulting over us with singing as on a day of festival.  Then comes Canticle 9, the First Song of Isaiah, which begins with that wonderful cry of confidence: “Surely it is God who saves me; I will trust in him and not be afraid.”  Then we hear those unexpectedly jubilant words from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, a letter written from within a Roman prison and yet filled with joy, “Rejoice in the Lord always: again I will say, Rejoice.  Let your gentleness be known to everyone.  The Lord is near” (Philippians 4:4-5).  The first word of this passage – Rejoice – gives the Third Sunday of Advent its traditional name, Gaudete Sunday, the Latin word for “Rejoice.”  

Rejoice Sunday?  It may sound strange, even jarring, to speak today about rejoicing.  Many of us are reeling, not rejoicing.  This week we’ve been experiencing heartbreak and horror, not exultation and joy.  We need to make room in our hearts, room in our prayers, to explore what has been stirred up in us as we feel our way through this tragedy.  There is wisdom in bringing our anguish into this holy space and in opening it up to God, for the One whose coming we await during Advent is the very One who shares our suffering, the One who enters the darkest places of our lives and the darkest places of the human heart, the One who shines God’s light and brings God’s peace. 

That is why, even in the midst of the world’s darkness, even in the midst of anguish and pain, deep within we do rejoice this morning.  We rejoice even in the midst of death, because God is with us.  We rejoice because we so clearly need God’s healing and need God’s light, and because the God we so love and long for is close to us, as close as our tears, as close as our breath.

I led a Quiet Day yesterday in the Parish Hall, and as we prayed and talked about the events in Connecticut, someone said, “What’s that passage in Habakkuk about trust and joy in the midst of trouble?”  And I’m thinking to myself, “Whoa! Who knew that anyone here reads Habbakuk, much less can quote him?”  I couldn’t even begin to identify the passage that they were talking about.  So I hand over my Bible, and someone flips to the right page, and sure enough, there it is, the prophet Habbakuk proclaiming a divine reality that does not depend on things going well, a divine reality that endures and persists and abides no matter what, no matter what.  The prophet writes, “Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vine; though the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will exult in the God of my salvation.  GOD, the Lord, is my strength…” (Habbakuk 3:17-19a). 

God, the Lord, is our strength, too.  It is when we feel most lost and broken-hearted, most defeated and helpless, that we realize how much we depend on God, how much we need God’s help.  And we rejoice, because as we head toward Christmas we’re preparing for a good deal more than Frosty the Snowman or “a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer.”  We’re preparing for the One who binds up the brokenhearted and sets the prisoner free, for the One who brings good news to the poor and recovery of sight to the blind.  

We rejoice as we prepare, but we do not only rejoice.  God’s steadfast love not only comforts and consoles – it also purifies.  So I must say a word about John the Baptist.  His prickly, impatient presence practically roars through the Gospel passage that we’re given this morning.  He starts with insults, accusing the crowds who follow him of being a “brood of vipers,” fleeing like snakes from the oncoming fire of the wrath of God.  “Bear fruits worthy of repentance,” he rails, for “even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Luke 3:7-8, 9). 

To tell the truth, I cringe when I hear these words.  My mind goes back to a sermon on this text that I heard twenty-five-plus years ago, when I was working as a seminary student at an Episcopal parish north of Boston.  The preacher practically had smoke coming from his nostrils as he leaned over the pulpit and yelled down that we’d better bear fruit or else be cut down by the ax of God.  I remember leaning back and shaking my head: No way.  I’m not interested in a bullying God; I want nothing to do with a Christianity that’s all about laying guilt-trips, about making other people feel wrong and worthless and small.  We make ourselves small when we try to make others feel small.  I dislike the game of “Gotcha,” when people take malicious delight in catching others in the wrong and pointing out their faults.  It’s no wonder that folks flee the Church when Christianity is reduced to nothing more than a moralistic code of laws and rules, to an enterprise based on shame, blame, and fear, and the certainty that we’ll get it wrong.  Given what we’ve been through this week, I’m also not drawn to imagery that makes God out to be brutal and violent. 

So I look at this passage and I wonder: how is it that the voice of John the Baptist heralds the birth of Christ, the advent of love?  How can we hear his words without getting trapped in that deadly paradigm of accuser and accused, of harsh, overbearing judge and cowering, shame-filled penitent?  Somehow I want to purge his words of what sounds like violence and rage and simply to hear in them the energizing, bracing voice of truth that confronts everything in us and in the world around us that leads away from love.  For John the Baptist has an important message: to prepare for God’s coming, we must come clean.  To prepare for God’s coming, we must relinquish behaviors that are unloving and unjust.  Christianity is obviously not just some feel-good religion; it makes ethical demands. 

“What then should we do?” ask the crowds (Luke 3:10), and, as one commentator explains, the answers that John gives each group “address the inequities and injustice of that society: food and clothing are to be shared with those who have none; taxes are not to be based on the insatiable greed of the powerful; and the military must stop victimizing the public by threats, intimidation, and blackmail.”¹  The holy love that wants to draw the world to itself will always contradict the forces of injustice, intolerance, and greed.  If we as a society were to ask John the same question, “What should we do?,” I imagine that one of his answers would be to try to stop gun violence.

And you, as an individual – what should you do?  If God’s love is like a deep, clear river that wants to flow through you without impediment, where are you blocking the flow?  Where are you creating logjams and whirlpools?  For the river wants to flow through you!  The poet Rumi puts it like this: “Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”  It takes patient and earnest exploring to discover the barriers we build within ourselves that hold us back from giving and receiving love.  Maybe we hide out in self-doubt and harsh self-criticism, always putting ourselves down.  Maybe we’re caught up in addictive behavior.  Maybe we settle for a second-hand life, just go through the motions and refuse to throw ourselves into the risks and adventure of being fully alive.  Maybe we’re locked up in envy or jealousy or regret.  Maybe we’re so absorbed in worry that we never get curious about the people around us, never make real contact.  Maybe we live inside a bubble of a world, never reaching out to connect with people who are poorer or younger or older or of a different race or ethnicity than we are.  There are a million ways to hold love at bay, a million ways not to let our selves bear fruit.  And there are a million things we can do to open up the logjam and to let the river flow. 

So here comes John Baptist, that irascible, impatient soul, urging us to wake up and repent – and to get going and do it now, for the Lord is near.  Jesus will come not just with the sweetness of a baby, but also with power to break things open and to set things right.  In his baptism of fire and the Holy Spirit, everything less than love will be revealed and burned away.  As John the Baptist declares, the one who comes after him will take “his winnowing fork in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:17-18).  A winnowing fork is what a farmer uses to toss a mix of wheat and chaff into the air.  The wind blows the chaff away, and the heavy grain falls to the ground so that it can be gathered into the granary.  That’s what happens in God’s presence: when we stand in the Spirit, in the wind of God’s love, we are stripped clean.  Everything less than love is scattered and blown away.  In the fire of God’s love, everything less than love dissolves – all our lying, selfishness, and deceit – all of that disappears; it is gone; it is burned away.  We come home to ourselves.  We become at last the love that we were made for. 

So we rejoice in the Lord this morning, even if our hearts are heavy.  We rejoice, even if John the Baptist is pushing us to examine ourselves and come clean.  We rejoice because the One who loved us into being is drawing near, to heal a broken world and to bring us peace.

1. Fred B. Craddock et al, Preaching through the Christian Year: Year C, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994, p. 18.

The marriage beyond marriage

Today’s readings were evidently chosen to turn our thoughts toward marriage.  The story from Genesis is like one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories, which are designed to answer questions such as: How did the elephant get its trunk? Or: How did the leopard get its spots?  The story in Genesis is an answer to the question: How do you account for the passionate attraction between a man and a woman who adore each other and are irresistibly drawn to each other, who leave their home of origin to cling to each other (Genesis 2:24), and who feel, when they look at each other, that somehow the other person is “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23)?  The Genesis story imagines one possibility: maybe God created the woman from out of the man’s rib. Maybe there is some kind of original, primal unity between men and women, some deep, visceral kinship between them, so that when a man and a woman fall in love and are united in marriage, it is a reunion of sorts, a homecoming with real cause for delight.

It’s a wonderful mythic story, but it’s been troublesome, too, and over the years progressive Christians have felt a need to clarify or correct its interpretation.  For starters, the story could imply that because woman was made from a man’s rib, women by nature are derivative of men, that by nature we are secondary and subordinate.   This interpretation has lost whatever traction it once had, thanks to the women’s movement that took off in the 1960’s and ‘70’s.  I remember grinning back then at the graffiti that we often found secretly scribbled on the walls of women’s bathrooms: Adam was just a rough draft.  Today’s feminist theologians would reject just as decisively any interpretation of the Genesis story that tries to justify women’s unequal status as somehow God-given. 

The story has been troublesome in another way, too: it has been, and too often still is, interpreted as restricting marriage only to a man and a woman.  For decades now, natural scientists, social scientists, and progressive theologians have been struggling to help the dominant culture understand that a woman can feel “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh” attraction for another woman, and a man for another man, and that this visceral, irresistible mutual attraction is just as God-given, just as good, just as built-into-the-nature-of-things, as the passionate love between male and female.  We need to hold the Genesis story not as the exclusive possession of heterosexual men and women, but as a story about how human beings are created for relationship, how we all find our full humanity only in community, and how many of us – whatever our gender orientation – are called to intimate, passionate, faithful connection with another person in the covenant of marriage.

The Genesis story gives a vision of marriage at its best and in its ideal form: the two partners delight in each other and recognize each other as best friend, as soul friend, as “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.”  This is marriage as God envisions it, the kind of marriage that God desires for us, the kind of marriage that married people aspire to and that with grace, patience, and hard work we may be blessed to experience for ourselves.  But marriage has its ordinary moments, too, its periods of struggle and stress.  There’s the garbage to haul outside, the milk to pick up, the leaves to rake, the endless demands of work, children, and email, the pressure of finances, the strain of illness or the in-laws.  Communication can break down; angry words can be spoken; doors can slam shut; and sometimes, despite our prayers and best efforts, a marriage can irrevocably fall apart.

Generations of the faithful have wrestled with the question: What then?  Under what circumstances is divorce legitimate, even desirable?  That’s the question that the Pharisees take up with Jesus in today’s Gospel passage from Mark.  Jesus’ answer tells a paradoxical truth: God’s intention is that marriage be lifelong, and on this point Jesus quotes the passage from Genesis.  Yet Jesus also acknowledges that, going all the way back to Moses, concessions have always been granted, provisions have always been made, so that in certain situations two people who are trapped in a desperately difficult marriage can be allowed to divorce.  Those concessions and those provisions have changed and grown more liberal over the years, and I notice that today’s Gospel reading stops right before Jesus makes what we would consider a very strict statement about the very limited circumstances under which a married couple may divorce.  Still, as one commentary puts it, perhaps the point “is not that the particular concessions made in the New Testament, and these only, are valid for all time, but that the New Testament grants to the Church [community] the authority to make concessions that are pastorally necessary.”¹  Whether or not Jesus himself was a married – a topic that recently roared back into the news with divinity professor Karen King’s announcement² that she is in possession of an ancient fragment of papyrus that purportedly quotes Jesus talking about his wife – whether or not Jesus was married – and there are many reasons to doubt that he was – it is clear that Jesus cherished the covenant of marriage and that he hoped to protect it. 

Marriage is our theme this morning, and I must say a word about the marriage that applies to everyone, whether we happen to be married, partnered, or single, whether we happen to be engaged or separated, widowed or divorced.  I want to speak about the marriage that has nothing to do with our marital status, about the marriage beyond marriage, the marriage within marriage, the marriage that is the origin and ground and fulfillment of all human relationships – and that is the marriage between God and the soul.  That is actually what interests me most: the marriage into which you and I and every person is called.

It may sound strange to imagine our relationship with God as being like a marriage, and of course the marriage metaphor is just one of many that describe the relationship between the soul and its Maker.  But the Bible often uses wedding imagery as a way to express the complete and intimate union of God and God’s people, and of God and the individual soul.

For many years I’ve served as a spiritual director, sitting down with individuals who want to reflect on their relationship with God and to go deeper in their life of prayer, and I often feel as if I’m rather like a marriage counselor when I ask the person about his or her relationship with God.  Do you and God spend quality time together, just the two of you?  Do you share with God the things that really matter to you?  Is your relationship formal, distant, and polite?  Is it catch-as-catch-can, a quick How-do-you-do, gotta go-gotta run?  Or do you feel comfortable taking time to share honestly and openly what is really going on in you and how things really are?  What parts of yourself and your life do you try to hide or hold back from God?  How often do you consciously do things together?  Do you play together?  Do you laugh together?  Do you weep together?  Do you spend quiet time together?  Do you actually listen to God or do you do all the talking?  What needs to happen in your relationship with God so that that relationship becomes as real and precious and intimate as the most intimate and lively union between two human beings?

God is always courting us, always beckoning us into relationship, always luring us to fall in love.  It can happen in so many ways, that moment when our heart quickens and we suddenly see what is going on and what God is up to.  Maybe you go to a concert one day, in which the orchestra will perform a piece that is particularly dear to you – in my case, it might be Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto.  The concert hall falls silent, the French horn plays the haunting opening notes, the strings enter, the pianist sets his fingers to the keyboard.  As the music flows into us, at first we may want to be the piano player.  We want that music to be streaming through our own hands and body, to be singing through our fingertips.  As we listen intently, absorbed in the music, maybe eventually we say, No, I want to be the conductor: I want to stand with open arms, listening with such pure attention that I hear the whole of it, every note and every space between the notes, receiving it all into my body and guiding and responding to it as it takes shape around me.  And then as your listening deepens, you give yourself even more fully to the moment.  You become very silent, very still, as you listen.  You forget yourself, and you become the music.  Moment by moment the music is giving itself to you, and moment by moment you are giving yourself to the music.  You’ve relinquished all sense of who you are, and yet in that self-surrender you’ve never felt more fully yourself or more fully alive.  If someone asked you afterward who you are, you’d have to answer, “I don’t know.  I am Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto.” 

It’s the ecstatic experience that T.S. Eliot speaks of in Four Quartets:³

…music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

In moments like these, we experience the marriage, the union between God and the soul.  We taste for a moment in our own bodies what it is like to give ourselves fully to the present moment, in all sincerity and with an open heart, and to realize that moment by moment God is giving God’s self to us, in and as each moment.   

Maybe it’s not music that grants you this experience, but wandering outside on one of these glorious autumn days, looking at the leaves.  Here I must quote again from St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast day we celebrate this afternoon with a blessing of the animals.  You’ve heard me read this poem before, and I want to read it again:⁴

Such love does
the sky now pour,
that whenever I stand in a field,

I have to wring out the light
when I get
home.

St. Francis understood the marriage into which we are called, every one of us: that intimate, ongoing, lifelong and longer-than-life, very personal relationship with the One who loved us into being.  The more surely our life is founded on that bedrock union with God, the more open-hearted and patient and generous we will learn to be in all our human relationships, including our spouse, if we have one.  For when we look with love into our loved one’s eyes, we will know that he or she is conveying to us something of God’s infinite love for us, and we can be grateful.  And if our loved one fails or disappoints us – when we run into the inevitable miscommunications and conflicts that are part of married life and part of human life – we can forgive our beloved for not being God.  We can remind ourselves: Oh, right, my beloved partner or spouse is not my ultimate source of love – that source is God, and God alone!  From the deep springs of our love relationship with God, perhaps we will receive the strength to forgive our human partner, to be kind, to quit having to be right, to let the other person be.  And if our loved one dies, as will happen at some point in even the happiest of marriages, we can grieve in the presence of the God who loves us without reserve, who invincibly sustains us, and whose loving arms will embrace us at the last.

I invite you in the silence to speak to God about your own relationship with the lover of your soul.  What is God inviting you to see?  Do you already sense the marriage into which you are being invited?  How will you respond?

1. Reginald H. Fuller, Preaching the Lectionary: The Word of God for the Church Today, rev. ed. (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1984), p. 356.

2. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/us/papyrus-fragment-that-refers-to-jesus-wife-stirs-debate.html

3. T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1943, p. 44.

4. St. Francis of Assisi, “Wring Out My Clothes,” in Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, translated by Daniel Ladinsky, New York, Penguin Compass, 2002, p. 48

Purifying the heart

“There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” (Mark 7:15)

I am back from nearly a week in Maine, where I reveled in the company of wind and waves, basalt and barnicles, shorebirds and seaweed.  My brother moved to Maine several years ago, and he has just finished building a small house beside the sea.  I visited his house for the first time, and what interested me most about it – besides its being wonderfully energy-efficient – is that the house maintains a kind of flow between inside and out.  I am not an architect, so I’ll put this in simple terms, but an exposed steel beam runs across the living room ceiling and holds the weight of the floor above.  The steel beam extends from the inside of the house all the way outside, where it holds up an outside roof – so you can see that the beam is at work on both the inside and the outside of the house at once, and that it connects the house horizontally, inside and out.  In a similar way, when you walk up to the house you notice that the wood posts that hold up the entryway roof are tree trunks shorn of bark; when you walk inside the house, similar tree trunks serve as pillars inside the first-floor living area.  So the tree posts outside the house are the same as the tree posts inside – again there is a flow between inside and out, outside and in.

I mention this today because our Gospel is all about that flow.  The Pharisees and scribes seem to be focused only on the outside, on what is external: on washing their hands before they eat, on washing the produce that they buy in the marketplace, on washing the cups and pots that they use when preparing their food.  Let me hasten to say that there is nothing wrong with washing our hands before we eat.  I’m not about to tell you to stop asking your children to wash their hands before supper.  Nor am I about to tell you to stop washing your lettuce or apples or mangoes before you put them in your mouth — just ask anyone who’s been to India what can happen if you don’t.  And of course there’s nothing wrong with washing the dishes or with keeping our pots and pans clean.  In fact, ordinary tasks such as washing dishes, harvesting a garden, or packing a school lunch can be mindful, holy experiences. But the Pharisees seem to be so intent on, so attached to outward cleanliness and purity that they have forgotten about inner intention, about the purity of the heart.  Jesus rebukes them for their hypocrisy, quoting from Isaiah, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Mark 7:6, citing Isaiah 29:13).

Let’s pause for a moment to think about how much emphasis we place on outward things.  Like some of you, I’m sure, I grew up in a family that was all about looking good to the outside world – we put our best foot forward, kept our socks pulled up and our shirts tucked in, and put on a happy face.  Never mind the conflict and craziness that was going on in private, behind the scenes – what mattered was to look good on the outside, to achieve, accomplish, and keep up appearances, and to have a spotless house when guests came in. 

Focusing on externals can be expressed in different ways.  Maybe we focus on the grades we get in school, not on how much we are learning.  Maybe we focus on how much money we can make, even if we’ve got plenty already.  Maybe we focus on piling up accomplishments and reaching for accolades, rather than on serving God and neighbor.  Maybe we focus on polishing our reputation and looking good in other people’s eyes, rather than on honoring our own integrity and limits, and doing what we truly feel called to do, even if that sometimes means disappointing the people around us. 

Religion itself can end up being about nothing but externals.  That’s one reason that so many people these days are leaving church, and calling themselves “spiritual but not religious.”  They associate religion with outward things like following rules and repeating rituals that have no meaning, with empty legalism and pompous moralism, rather than with the inner work of purifying and transforming the heart.

The fact is, Jesus was all about purifying and transforming the heart.  And, friends, I hope I’m not saying anything new when I say that our Grace Church community is all about transformation and transfiguration.  If you hang out here a while, you will change.  I am changing and you are changing.  Together, we are going with the flow of the Holy Spirit.  So Jesus reminds us today not to look to externals, but to the transformation of the heart.  As he tells the crowd in today’s Gospel, “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile… For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.” And then he lays out this terrible list of things that can flow out of our heart: “fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.  All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person” (Mark 7:15, 21-23).

What emerges from our heart can be evil; it can defile us; it can degrade or debase us.  I don’t have to tell you that these are strong words.  I can imagine two opposite reactions to what Jesus is saying.  One is to feel hopeless — When I look inside, I’m going to see nothing but a flow of filth.  The other is to feel angry, defensive, or simply bewildered — Hey, I’m a nice person; I don’t recognize any of that! None of that applies to me!  To both these reactions, I want to make one thing clear: our faith tells us that we are not essentially evil.  Scripture tells us that we are created in the image and likeness of God.  That likeness to God may be sullied, even deeply sullied, deep down some part of ourselves, made in the image of God, is already in union with God.  Deep down our soul is already shining with God’s light, though we may have a long way to go and a lot of work to do before that light can shine out through our words and deeds, through our thoughts and choices and everyday behavior.  It is a lifetime’s work to become who we really are, an expression of God’s love, to let ourselves become not just the image of God, but God’s likeness, as well. 

So how aware are we of what is flowing out of our heart?  If we put all our attention on outward show – if we are busy looking good and behaving correctly, busy following rules and keeping up appearances, busy thinking that church membership is like belonging to a social club – then we may be only vaguely aware of what is going on inside us, and how what is inside us is expressing itself in everything we do. 

Take, for instance, lying. In today’s Gospel, Jesus warns against “deceit,” and our second reading, from the Letter of James, cautions that “If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless” (James 1:26).  So how are we doing with avoiding deceit and with bridling our tongues?  Do we consistently tell the truth?  To put it another way, on a typical day, how many times do we lie?  Never?  Once?  Twice?  Only when pressed, such as when someone asks, “Does this dress make me look fat?”?

As part of my light summer reading I read a book entitled Spy the Lie.  It was written by some former CIA officers who were trained to interview suspected terrorists and to spot the signs that indicate whether or not a person is telling the truth.  I was interested to learn that “Some behavioral research suggests that on average, we lie at least ten times in a twenty-four-hour period, including the so-called ‘white lies’ that we tell in order to avoid hurt or conflict.”¹  Ten times a day!

I suspect that most of us have no idea that we lie that much.  It is easy to get desensitized to lies, for we live in a world in which lying is almost taken for granted.  Without realizing it, we become attached to a certain image of ourselves and then we present stories about ourselves to other people that reinforce and prove the image that we intend to portray.  But that image is not who we really are.  And we are surrounded by these kinds of deceptions.  Day by day we are bombarded by advertisements making claims that everyone knows are not true, and right now we are in the midst of a fierce election season, when the words thrown about so ardently by politicans and commentators can have only a casual connection to actual fact. 

Yet if we want the light of God’s truth to shine out from within us, we need to resist the cultural pressures to lie.  A way to do that is to start paying closer attention to the words that come out of our mouths.  Are they truthful?  Are they loving? Are they necessary?  That is a good triplet of qualities for defining right speech: whether or not it is truthful, loving, and necessary.  And we can reflect on why we said what we said.  When I said that sharp word, what was going on inside me?  When I boasted just then and inflated the truth, what was that about?  When I kept silent and ducked, rather than speak the truth that the situation required, what was I afraid of?  Jesus is inviting us today to grow in self-awareness, and deceit and lying is just one example of what we may notice when we look within.

By now we may be asking ourselves why in the world we should bother to turn our attention away from external things and do the much harder work of inner exploration.  The answer is simple. 

Because there is a divine love that wants to flow through us without impediment. 

Because the Spirit of God longs to transform and bring into harmony what is inside us and what is outside us, so that we are all of a piece like that little house in Maine, no longer pretending to be someone other than who we really are.

Because the world needs people who are self-aware and awake, open to the flow of God’s love, and intending from moment to moment to let that love be expressed in everything they say and do. 

We may have some distance to go before we become people like that, but the path before us is trustworthy, and we have a loving companion and savior who is walking at our side. 

1. Phil Houston, Michael Floy, and Susan Carcinero, with Don Tennant, Spy the Lie (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), p. 17.