Author Archives: mbj

A Place for the Singing of Angels

“The Lord has set his throne in heaven, and his kingship has dominion over all. Bless the Lord, you angels of his, you mighty ones who do his bidding, and hearken to the voice of his word.” (Psalm 103:19-20)

It may be raining, but today is a day for celebration. In a few hours we will join with throngs of people to commemorate the 250^th anniversary of the Town of Amherst, and take part in the largest parade that has ever marched these streets. Today we also celebrate the founding of Grace Church, and turn our attention to another sort of throng — the throngs of angels, led by Archangel Michael, who, as today’s Collect says, “serve and worship [God] in heaven,” and “help and defend us here on earth.” Today’s feast day reminds us that we live under the protection of the archangel Michael, the spiritual warrior who does combat with the powers of evil and who stands beside us and within us in the battle for love to prevail.

I don’t know the exact history of how Grace Church came to celebrate its anniversary on the feast day of St. Michael and All Angels. Rob tells me that our building is patterned roughly after that of the Parish Church of St. Michael at the North Gate in Oxford, England, whose tower, dating back to the 11^th century, is the oldest building in Oxford. The installation of our striking St. Michael’s window must have clinched the deal, and for years now, generations of the faithful have stood and knelt and prayed in this space, setting aside one special Sunday at the end of September to honor St. Michael and all God’s angels.

Today is a good day to ask ourselves: What do I believe about angels? Are angels real? How important are angels to the Christian faith? I was intrigued to learn this week that Mortimer Adler, the well-known philosopher, educator, and author who was a long-time editor of Encyclopedia Britannica and who helped to create that enormous, 54-volume series, Great Books of the Western World, once set himself the task of identifying the 102 “great ideas” of Western civilization. It turns out that the concept of angels is — at least in his view — one of those great ideas. His so-called “Synopticon,” a gargantuan index and analysis of the Western world’s great ideas, is arranged alphabetically, and its first entry is “angels.”

Now I have to tell you that this quite surprised me. I confess it — I feel a struggle within myself when it comes to belief in angels. From speaking with some of you, I know that members of this congregation hold a range of attitudes about angels — and that is fine, for the Episcopal Church has no rules about what we are “supposed” to believe about them. But the contrasting viewpoints that I hear from you also struggle inside of me.

On the one hand, there is a voice in me, a very rational, modern, sophisticated voice, which says that belief in angels is actually not a great idea. Angels are archaic. Angels are a throwback to a more superstitious time when religious people felt a need to populate the world with imaginary beings. Just think of the elaborate speculations by medieval theologians as they classified and ranked the celestial hierarchy of heavenly beings, from seraphim, cherubim, and thrones at the top, down to dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, and finally angels at the bottom. Our Protestant sensibility may want to chuck all that as a profound distraction. Let’s keep our focus on the mystery of God — this voice within me says. Let’s keep our eyes on Jesus Christ, and not clutter our minds by piling up beliefs in a host of extra beings that add nothing to the faith. Turn the angels over to New Age folks. It would be embarrassing to admit to a childish belief in angels. We don’t need them. We have outgrown them. They are irrelevant to a mature Christian faith.

On the other hand, a voice within me argues something else. Not so fast, this voice wants to say. The idea of angels shows up across Western cultures, time periods, and religions. Angels are part of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thought. However skeptical we may be about the clear-cut hierarchies of angels in medieval thought, and however trivialized and sentimental angels may seem as portrayed in today’s culture, angels still have a central part to play in our lives as Christians.

The more I think about it and the more I listen to this inner struggle, the more that the second voice makes sense to me. Angels are messengers of God, and the idea of angels is necessary within a religious school of thought that starts with God as divine Mystery, as transcendent Source or Wellspring that can never be fathomed. The Mystery that we name “God” is hidden, forever beyond the grasp of ideas, images, or words — indeed, Jewish people do not utter the name of God aloud. It is the very transcendence of God that makes the idea of angels necessary — these spiritual beings who serve as intermediaries between God and humankind, who speak for God and are sent by God to communicate and connect with the human race. We don’t have to limit our images of angels to sweet women with long skirts and large wings, much less to those little cherubic heads with wings sticking out on either side. In Western art, the earliest depictions of angels did not even have any wings. As one of the Church Fathers, John Chrysostom, explained years ago, angels are depicted with wings not because they actually have wings, but in order to express their sublime nature, to show us “that they leave the heights and the most elevated dwelling to approach human” beings. ¹

Jacob’s dream of a ladder between earth and heaven on which angels descend and ascend gives us a powerful image of this ongoing interchange or circulation between the earthly and the heavenly realms, between the ordinary world of solid matter, reason, and logic, and the divine world that is beyond human perception and thought. Angels symbolize the way that the divine Mystery we call “God” is constantly interacting with us, constantly inviting and challenging us, protecting and accompanying us. When our eyes are opened and we glimpse the interpenetration of worlds, the interweaving of the human and the divine, then, like Jacob, we, too, awaken from sleep and we say, “Surely the Lord is in this place — and I did not know it!… How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” [Genesis 28:16-17].

Today’s Gospel reading goes even further. Jesus Christ is what we Christians might call our “ladder” to heaven, our bridge between heaven and earth. As he says to Nathaniel, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” [John 1:51]. In other words, through his incarnation, Jesus has caught up in his very body the fullness of God and the fullness of humanity. He himself is the meeting-place, the point of intersection, the place where earth and heaven, the human and the divine, are woven into one. Through his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, Christ Jesus now fills all things on heaven and earth, which means that everything we touch, everything we see and smell and taste and hear, can become for us a manifestation of God, a revelation of divine presence. Welcoming angels into our imagination is a way of welcoming Christ himself, a way of opening ourselves to the infinite ways that we receive messages from God. If angels be among us, they are completely integrated into the being of Christ.

How do you tend to notice messages from God? Maybe you tend to sense the message internally, from an intuition or vision, from a dream or sudden insight that catches your attention and speaks to you a word from God. Or maybe a friend shows up at your doorstep at just the right moment, or calls you on the phone when you were thinking about that person just moments before. Or maybe you keep noticing the same word showing up on a billboard or license plate, on a book cover or a random scrap of paper. Or maybe you are hunkered down over your steering wheel one day, agitated and impatient, lost in worry and restless thought, when suddenly a red-tailed hawk soars silently overheard with outstretched wings. Suddenly your mind grows quiet, your heart fills with wonder, and you know that a wider, deeper Reality — capital R — is touching you, and that you belong to it and are immersed within it.

You might call such moments, experiences of angels. Why not? To the logical, analytic mind, such moments may have no particular value, meaning, or usefulness, but to the soul they give a glimpse of what it means to live life in a larger way, to be awake and responsive to the holy mystery all around us, and to live with a spirit of love rather than fear.

Despite the sophisticated voice of “reason” that speaks sometimes within me, I realize that I do, in fact, cherish angels. Why? Because welcoming angels keeps us attentive to the mysterious ways in which God meets us in the daily moments of our lives. Because they keep our intuition and imagination alive in a world that tends to flatten our sensibility and to make everything drab, as if the material world is all there is. Because, as Howard Thurman once said, “There must always be remaining in [everyone’s] life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful… Despite all the crassness of life,” he writes, “despite all the hardness of life, despite all the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel, visited 9/26/09, with footnote citation: Proverbio (2007), p. 34

Healing the Senses

“Happy are they… whose hope is in the LORD their God: who made heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them.” (Psalm 146:4b-5)

I bring you greetings from Grace Church in Amherst, where I serve as Priest Associate.  Thank you for welcoming me here this morning.  I’ve been invited to focus on the Gospel call to care for Creation, and we have some good material to work with in this morning’s readings.  First I need to tell you that my husband and I have an old farmhouse in Ashfield, one of the hill-towns northwest of Amherst.   During the summer we spend as many hours as we can in Ashfield, walking in the woods or by the beaver ponds.  In those quiet interludes we look, and listen, and breathe, tuning ourselves to that buzzing, blooming, sensuous Creation of which we human creatures are so inextricably a part.

One summer day in Ashfield, as I was eating lunch on the back porch, a sparrow with a light-brown belly made a landing on a banister nearby.  I held my spoon of yogurt in mid-air, frozen in place.  Sparrow and I looked each other over, briefly taking each other in.  I tried to imagine its experience of the world.  I could see the bird’s sensitivity to every change – how it noted the tiny moth that zigzagged past, the puff of a breeze, the chirp of a robin, the shadow of a passing cloud.  Everything around the sparrow was alive and in motion.  The small creature was alert, tuning itself to every shift, cocking its head, picking up the tiniest scent, sound, and movement — and making almost perceptible decisions in response.  Should it eat the moth?  Duck from danger?  Linger a few moments longer? 

When the sparrow saw that I did not move and seemed to pose no threat, it relaxed on the railing.  It puffed its feathers and turned its head away to preen, as if to say, “I know you are there but right now I feel safe.”  It was a kind of subtle, non-verbal, and mutual communication.  My presence was affecting Bird and Bird’s presence was affecting me.  The only way that I could perceive the sparrow’s sensitivity was to become more sensitive myself, to pay closer attention.  I was not staring at the bird in some kind of fixed and rigid way.  Instead I simply let my senses open, and perceived everything I could with an open heart.  This act of perception and empathy filled me with wonder and quiet joy, for it seemed that briefly I had connected with this tiny creature whose consciousness was almost entirely foreign to mine, almost completely unknown.  In those precious moments we were in relationship.  Our two worlds overlapped.

I think of that encounter when I come to today’s readings and hear Isaiah’s exuberant poem about the transforming power of God: “The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped.”  In the fullness of time, God will heal our eyes and ears and hearts, will make the lame “leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”  The psalm picks up the theme of healing and liberation – “The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind” [bbllink]Psalm 146:7[/bbllink] – and then we get to the story in St. Mark about Jesus curing the deaf mute. 

It is a very physical healing, isn’t it?  Unlike almost every other healing story in the Gospels, in this one Jesus does not heal so much through the power of speech as through the power of touch.  The story gives every detail.  Jesus does not just “lay his hands on” the man in some kind of vague, generic way.  He puts his fingers in the man’s ears; he spits, and touches the man’s tongue.  You can imagine the care with which he makes direct, even intimate contact with the man who has appealed to him for healing.  You can imagine the tenderness in Jesus’ eyes, the clarity of his intention to set the man free.  And then Jesus looks up to heaven – seeking and gathering in the power of God – and he sighs, as if releasing that power, breathing out the ruach, the Spirit, the breath of God.  As he breathes out that power he says a single word, which the text gives in its original Aramaic, “Ephphatha” – that is, “Be opened” – and at once the man’s ears are opened, his tongue is released, and he speaks plainly.

Like every biblical story, this one can be read on many levels.  In the Church of England, the day on which this story was assigned was once popularly called “Ephphatha Sunday” and was dedicated to expressing special concern for people who have limited hearing or speech.  But on a deeper level don’t we all need to have our senses healed?  Take our ears, for instance.  How often do we listen not just with the ears, but also with the heart?  How often do we listen not just for what is being said but also for what is left unsaid, for what the person might long to say if only he or she felt safe enough to say it?  How often do we listen with patience, not in order to grab a chance to get a word in edgewise, but in order to understand the other person’s point of view?  Do we have ears like that? 

And how clearly do we speak?  Often we have something like a speech impediment when it comes to speaking words that are both loving and true, or when it comes to admitting that we blew it and that we are sorry, or when it comes to speaking out for social and environmental justice.  What a grace it would be for Jesus to come among us today, to place his hand on our ears and to touch his own tongue and then ours, so that our ears would be opened at last and so that our words would be filled with his spirit and truth! 

As our senses are healed, we begin to relate in a new way not only to other human beings, but also to the other-than-human world.  At least that has been true for me.  When I renew my conscious intention to look more clearly, to listen more patiently, to pay attention with a more finely tuned sensitivity, I discover that I am created for relationship not only with human beings, but also with everything around me – wind and stone, sparrow and maple tree.  I wonder if we are fully human only by contact with what is other-than-human.

Communion with all God’s creatures opens us to communion with God.  But the more we attune ourselves to the glory of the natural world, the more we can’t help seeing that its glory is in peril.  There are many environmental issues to be concerned about, but the gravest and most urgent is climate change.  Unless we address climate change effectively and fast, we won’t have a chance to handle any of the other pressing social and environmental issues that we presently face.  In just the last couple of years, scientists have figured out that the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million.  If we want to keep living on a habitable planet, if we want human civilization to continue flourishing has it has for the past 10,000 years, if we want to pass on to our children and their children something like the beautiful, diverse, and lively earth into which we were born, then we have to keep the global level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere no higher than 350 parts per million.  What is the level now?  Close to 390, and climbing. 

If you do nothing else today, I hope you will go to Bill McKibben’s Website, 350.org.  Click on the box that says People, and on the drop-down menu, click on the word Faith.  There you can add your name to the Interfaith Call for 350, a call to world leaders from religious people around the world to set us on a path to bring the level of carbon in the atmosphere down to 350 parts per million.  I hope that St. John’s will also do what Grace Church is doing: sign up at 350.org and join thousands of people around the world in creating a public event on October 24, the International Day of Climate Action.  At Grace Church we will hold a rally on the Amherst town common that will involve ringing our church bell 350 times and having 350 people dressed up as maple-trees do a maple tree “die-in,” since our New England maple trees, with their delicious syrup and spectacular fall foliage, are among the many living creatures that will not survive if we don’t change course fast.

In a moment we will share Eucharist together, and will receive strength and solace in the holy bread and wine that we take in our hands.  The bread is made of wheat; the wine is made of grapes, and both are made from earth and sun, from rainwater and clouds, from the labor of farmers.  In the Eucharist, Christ Jesus comes to us in bread and wine, and God gives God’s self to us through the natural world.  We take in what is natural and we take in Christ.  When Jesus, and every priest after him, gathers up and blesses the bread and wine, is not nature itself being blessed?  When we stretch out our hands to receive the bread are we not declaring, Yes, I accept that nature itself is blessed by God, that nature itself bears Christ’s presence to us, that nature’s wounds – the broken bread – disclose the wounds of Christ?   As we receive the Eucharist, Jesus is whispering in our ears, in our minds and hearts, “Ephphatha. Be opened.”  Jesus is healing our connections with each other and with all Creation, and in the strength of this bread and wine we are sent into the world to proclaim God’s love wherever we go.

Choose this day whom you will serve

“As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” (Joshua 24:15b)

This morning we reach the fifth and final Sunday of our immersion in Chapter Six of the Gospel of John, the extended discourse about Jesus as the bread of life. We have had weeks to reflect on the meaning of the Eucharist, and now comes the decision point: How will we respond? Today’s reading makes it clear that some of Jesus’ followers are shocked by what they have heard. Jesus uses vivid, visceral language as he talks about asking them to eat his body and drink his blood. If you take this literally, it sounds like cannibalism. Not only that, he promises that the one who eats this bread will live forever. To their ears that sounds patently absurd. Can this man Jesus really be the revelation of God? Some of the disciples shake their heads. “This teaching is difficult,” they complain. “Who can accept it?” Jesus turns to the twelve and asks them, “Do you also wish to go away?” So there we have it — a moment of truth, a moment of decision.

Our Gospel is paired this morning with a passage from Hebrew Scripture about a similar, decisive choice. Joshua gathers all the tribes of Israel to Shechem — a city in Canaan — and he summons the leaders, and they stand together in the presence of God. Joshua tells them, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Now therefore revere the LORD, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. Now if you are unwilling to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve…” [Joshua 24:2a, 14-15a].

On both counts — our Gospel passage and our reading from Hebrew Scripture — it is a day for decision-making, a day for clarifying what we worship and to what we want to give our ultimate allegiance.

“Put away the gods that your ancestors served…” Joshua declares. Doing that requires an act of self-examination. What are the gods that I serve? For example, what does my bank statement or my credit card statement say about my values? What does the way I spend my free time say about what matters most to me? How does the way that I treat family-members and co-workers, neighbors and friends show which gods I serve? To what do I give my best, most focused attention and care? What do I really care about? What motives really drive me? What goals really draw me forward? Are there compulsive patterns of thought or behavior to which I am excessively attached? You and I can go to church and say very sincerely that we worship God, but in the hurly-burly of daily life there are all kinds of lesser gods that tug at us and clamor for our attention and our devotion.

Half the time we may not even be aware of those other gods, which is one reason we need periods of quiet reflection and prayer. Self-awareness is essential to our life in Christ, and when we settle down in a quiet place to pray, we can begin to notice where our minds tend to go. We all have habitual preoccupations and patterns of thought, and as we sit there quietly, keeping a simple focus such as following our breath or gently repeating a sacred word, we begin to notice the obsessive patterns that make our minds contract. Maybe we suddenly notice how often our minds fill with judging thoughts — how often we occupy ourselves with having opinions about other people or comparing ourselves with them. A lot of our mental traffic consists in judging and comparing — I like it, I don’t it, I’m right, You’re wrong, That’s good, That’s bad. This kind of dualistic thinking is natural to ordinary consciousness, and we can take it for granted and give it ultimate authority and let it run our lives.

As we sit there in that open space before God, paying attention to our breath or to our sacred word, we can also begin to notice what motives really drive us — maybe a desire to win at all costs, to prove that we are right. Maybe a desire to look good and to be liked or admired. Maybe a desire to feel only pleasant feelings and to avoid discomfort at all costs. Maybe a desire to be different, to be special. Maybe a persistent desire to keep provoking a fight, or a desire to avoid conflict, no matter what. There are all kinds of drives and desires that can propel us through life, and it is important to become conscious of what they are. We can treat any of them like gods, and unwittingly find ourselves setting up secret altars and burning incense and bowing to them.

The most tempting and alluring god of all is the god of my self. I do it every day: I declare myself the measure of all things, the judge of all things, the one against which everything else finds it proper place. If such and such serves me, it is good. If such and such pleases me, or appeals to me, or makes me feel good, then it is good. If it doesn’t, it is bad. I become a little god in my own little universe, and everything revolves around Me.

That is a question to ask ourselves this morning: what are the idols or false gods that I tend to worship? Where is my energy of devotion getting stuck or constricted, channeled in the wrong direction? The challenge to identify our false gods is not just a question for personal self-reflection — it is a social question, too. To ask, “What are the gods of our ancestors?” is to ask a social question. What are the gods of the society around us? There are plenty of false gods out there — the god of consumption and materialism, the god of militarism, the god of fame and celebrity, the god of individualism. Take your pick. If we want to “put away” our false gods, we have to spot them, to recognize them for what they are, to stand up to them, to “put on the whole armor of God” [Ephesians 6:11], as we heard in the reading from Ephesians, and to repudiate their power in our lives. “Choose this day whom you will serve.” It is a fateful choice, a choice that has consequences for us both as individuals and as citizens of a nation.

In today’s story, the people answer, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the LORD to serve other gods; for it is the LORD our God who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight” [Joshua 24:16-17a]. The people look back over their salvation history and they recognize — as we do — that the living God, the true God, is a God of liberation, who sets the oppressed free, drawing us “out of the house of slavery” and into an open space in which we and everyone else are loved.

The people go on to say, “[God] protected us along the way that we went, and among all the peoples through whom we passed” [Joshua 24:17b] — which means that the living God is always with us, guiding and protecting us along the way.

The passage also says, “the LORD drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land” [Joshua 24:18]. This is a troublesome line, for like many passages in Hebrew Scripture, this sentence makes it sound as if the ancient tribes of Israel took over the land of Canaan by force, and that the LORD God endorsed and even carried out that warfare. I am glad to say that at least some historians say that the settlement of Canaan was in fact carried out much more peacefully than these passages would suggest. So this line may not be historically true. In any case, most of us would not honor a God who violently “[drives] out all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land.” I do not take this line as literal, historical truth, but rather as a way of saying that the living God will clear a path before us, that God will drive our enemies away — including the enemies within us, our own self-defeating and love-denying habits of thought and behavior.

Today we choose again the living God who sets us free, who accompanies and protects us, who opens a path before us. God comes to us today in Christ Jesus, whose indwelling presence abides within us, and who gives us life through his word and presence and bread. Whoever eats this bread will live forever — and that “forever” life is already here. Eternal life does not start beyond the grave, after we have died. It is already here, as we cast our lot with the liberating God of love whose will is to topple every empire, every idol and false god, and to set us free. Every time we take in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, we renew our commitment to the living God. We are drawn again into the risen life of Christ. And quickly or slowly our lives are changed. We begin to bear witness to what we love.

I’d like to end with a poem by Daniel Berrigan. I’m sure most of you remember or have heard of him — the Jesuit priest who engaged for years in non-violent civil disobedience against the Vietnam War, against militarism, against poverty. His brave, even heroic commitment is sustained by his faith and by his participation in the Eucharist. Dan Berrigan is 88 or 89 years old, and I read in a recent interview ¹ that he looks back with gratitude to his dear friend, Thomas Merton, the writer and Trappist monk. During the Vietnam War, Merton would gather together Roman Catholics who were passionate about the need to end war and to create a more just society. They would meet for “days of prayer and discussion of the sacramental life.” They would talk about the Eucharist and other forms of prayer, and Merton told them, “Stay with these, stay with these, these are your tools and discipline and these are your strengths.” Merton said, “You are not going to survive America unless you are faithful to your discipline and tradition.” As Berrigan points out, it is rare that a movement for social justice, or to end war, or to heal the environment, can be sustained unless it has a spiritual base.

Today we renew that spiritual base. We re-choose it. We cast our lot with the One who has the word of eternal life, the One whose bread will sustain us all our lives long.

This is Dan Berrigan’s poem entitled “Some.” ²

Some stood up once and sat down.
Some walked a mile and walked away.
Some stood up twice then sat down
I’ve had it, they said

Some walked two miles then walked away.
It’s too much, they cried

Some stood and stood and stood.
They were taken for fools
They were taken for being taken in.

Some walked and walked and walked.
They walked the earth
They walked the waters
They walked the air.

Why do you stand they were asked, and
Why do you walk?

Because of the children, they said, and
Because of the heart, and
Because of the bread.
Because

The cause
Is the heart’s beat
And the children born
And the risen bread.

1. The Living Church, Sept 7, 2003, p. 23. July 20, 1969 is the date of the moon landing and of the first Eucharist on the moon.

2. Everett Fox came up with this term, as cited by Gail Ramshaw, Christian Century, July 28, 2009, p. 20.

3. Ray Simpson, Healing the Land: Natural seasons, sacraments and special services, The Celtic Prayer Book, Volume Three, Suffolk, England: Kevin Mayhew, Ltd., 2004.

Bread of Life

Jesus said… “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” [John 6:35]

Forty years ago, America put a man on the moon. I expect that many of us read an article or two about the 40th anniversary, or watched some of the television shows that looked back at this momentous event. But as far as I know there is one fact that the media did not mention in its recent coverage of the first moon landing. Forty years ago Holy Communion was celebrated for the first time somewhere other than planet Earth. After the Apollo 11 lunar module landed safely on the moon, and “before Neil Armstrong emerged from the space capsule to become the first human to stand somewhere other than Earth, Mr. Armstrong and his fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, an Episcopalian, quietly celebrated Holy Eucharist” ¹ using bread and wine that had already been consecrated.

I find this a wonderfully evocative image. I think of these two men roaring their way up into the sky, moving beyond the pull of gravity and the blue-green sphere of our planet, passing through the silence and darkness of space, traveling to an entirely new place, and sharing Communion there — as if to say: God’s redeeming love is found here, too. God created everything that is, God’s love penetrates and sustains every part of the universe, and God in Christ will be our companion wherever we go. God is giving us bread for the journey.

Today is the second of five Sundays in which the Gospel reading is drawn from Chapter 6 of the Gospel of John, and it is all about bread. Last Sunday we heard the story of the feeding of the five thousand, and today and for the next three Sundays we will work our way through Jesus’ discourse (or extended meditation) on the Bread of Life.

I would like to focus our attention on the story that is paired with this morning’s Gospel, the Exodus story of the Hebrew people complaining — as they do many times — that they are hungry and tired and disgusted beyond endurance with their wandering in the wilderness. “[Oh,]” they cry to Moses and Aaron, “if only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger” [Exodus 16: 3].

The people are impatient and anxious and at the end of their rope. What interests me is that God doesn’t quickly tell them to quit complaining. God doesn’t instantly rebuke them and accuse them of being snivelers or whiners. God doesn’t tell them to shut up and to grow up. God listens to their angry grumbling that they are hungry, and God gives them food. Let’s think about that for a moment. We may have a notion that a good Christian never complains to God, that a good Christian always trusts God completely and never utters a word of complaint or dissatisfaction. But in fact Holy Scripture gives us plenty of permission to share with God the frustration or the grief that we may feel. The Book of Job makes that clear, as do the more than fifty psalms that express lament.

God wants to hear what is really going on in our lives, not just what looks good or sounds good. So maybe it is worth exploring for a moment our solidarity with the disgruntled and frightened Israelites. Are there any frustrations in our lives? Are there any laments that we need to express? Maybe there is a job we didn’t get or a spouse we couldn’t keep. Maybe we have college or retirement funds that vanished down a hole, or maybe there is a relationship that wakes us up at night, feeling sorrowful or scared. Are there areas of your life where you feel restless and dissatisfied, hungry for something more? Do you have any complaints? I expect that your answer is the same as mine: You bet I do!

And maybe that is a good thing. It is only when we feel and express a need that we really open ourselves to the gifts of God. We don’t need or welcome food until we know that we are hungry. In this morning’s story, God hears the people’s complaining — the passage even says it twice. God hears the complaining, and God declares, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day” [Exodus 16:4]. The food in the evening is meat — quail — and the food in the morning is a mysterious kind of bread called manna that falls during the night with the dew. Today’s psalm calls manna “the bread of angels” [Psalm 78:25], but it is not really clear what manna is. The word ‘manna’ is itself a play on words from the Hebrew mah hu — which means, ‘What is it?’ That is what the Israelites ask each other when they see the “fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground” [Exodus 16:13]. “What is it”? Mah hu. So we might call manna “Whaddyacallit” ² or maybe “Whachamacallit.” Some scholars say that manna was the sweet excretion of insects, and others say that manna is just the stuff of legend, a way of symbolizing how God fills our hunger and gives us life. But whatever manna is, it is only enough for a day, and only good for a day. As today’s passage explains later on, manna must be gathered on the spot — if it is not gathered up at once, it melts under the heat of the sun. And manna can’t be hoarded. Try to store it, and it breeds worms and becomes foul [Exodus 16:20]. And don’t even try to take more than you need, because whatever is more than your share will simply vanish into thin air [Exodus 16:18].

So God hears our complaints, and God gives us food that lasts just for one day. “Give us this day our daily bread.” It is all about trust. We can’t grab more than we need. We can’t hoard more than our day’s allotment. We can’t ask God to fill us tomorrow and tomorrow and the day after that, any more than we can save up our breaths. All we can breathe is this breath, and then this breath. All we can do is to receive in gratitude today the bread that God is giving us today, trusting that the bread we will need tomorrow will be given to us tomorrow. “Give us this day our daily bread” is the prayer that Jesus taught us — not “Give us this day a pile of bread for tomorrow” or “Give us this day a week’s worth of bread.” God will feed us only today, moment by moment. So we learn to live by trust, not ruthlessly grabbing and grasping at things, but opening our hands calmly to each moment, and saying, “This is the moment that the LORD has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.”

And the bread of God — what is the bread of God? It is Christ Jesus himself, the one who came among us to give us life to the full, to call us out of our small, worried selves and to set us on a path to exuberant love for all Creation. In the Eucharist we take in our daily bread. We let ourselves be fed in the deep places of our soul that are anxious and longing and afraid. We let God touch us in our places of bitterness or despair, and we let ourselves be deeply fed.

My son Sam is away this summer, working as a counselor in a camp in New Hampshire, and he keeps asking me to smuggle him some food. Rice cakes are what he wants most — not because they really fill him up — you can hardly fill yourself on a rice cake, and I doubt that he is really hungry, anyway! But rice cakes fill him, I think, because they remind him of home. They are a sign to him that he is loved. As the old jingle says, “Nothin’ says lovin’ like something from the oven,” even if Mother herself didn’t cook it.

To the Eucharist this morning we bring our hunger for wholeness, our hunger for hope, for meaning, and for love. Like the Israelites, we come with our longing and complaints, and with a sharp awareness that we cannot feed ourselves. We open our hands to the Eucharist in trust, daring to believe that God is giving us everything we need, and that tomorrow God will take care of us just as surely as God is taking care of us today. We take this bread as a sign of Home, as a reminder that the One who loved us into being is with us every step of the way and that God in God’s good time will guide us Home. In every Eucharist, we meet those we love who have already gone home to God. We meet Horace Boyer in the Eucharist — we meet everyone we love. Home is where we are heading, and home is what God gives us now, in every moment, in every taste of the consecrated bread and in every sip of the consecrated wine. God is with us wherever we journey, even if it is to the moon and back.

I would like to close with an invitation to the Eucharist that is based on a prayer of the Iona community in Scotland.

This is the table of Christ,
our host through all eternity.
So come, you who feel weak and unworthy,
you who come often
and you who have stayed away.
Come, you who love him
and you who wish you could.
Come, you who are hungry
for friendship or forgiveness.
Come, you who long for meaning or a just world.³

Come.

1. The Living Church, Sept 7, 2003, p. 23. July 20, 1969 is the date of the moon landing and of the first Eucharist on the moon.

2. Everett Fox came up with this term, as cited by Gail Ramshaw, Christian Century, July 28, 2009, p. 20.

3. Ray Simpson, Healing the Land: Natural seasons, sacraments and special services, The Celtic Prayer Book, Volume Three, Suffolk, England: Kevin Mayhew, Ltd., 2004.

Joy comes in the morning

You brought me up, O LORD, from the dead; you restored my life as I was going down to the grave… Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:3,6)

Healing is what we are up to today. Today we head for renewal, for fullness of life. To add to that trajectory toward abundance, we have not just one Gospel story to ponder this morning, but two. In this long section from the end of chapter 5, Mark has inserted one healing story right in the middle of another. The story of Jesus healing a woman with a hemorrhage is tucked inside the story of Jesus raising the daughter of Jairus from the dead.

Before we get into the stories, let’s set the scene. Jesus is beside the shore again, and with another large crowd. He has crossed the Sea of Galilee at least four times now — last week we heard about one of those crossings, when a sudden storm came up and nearly swamped the boat. Mark’s Gospel seems eager to underscore these crossings back and forth across the sea, for it presents Jesus ministering now on the Jewish shore and now on the Gentile shore, with equal power to heal. As the commentaries tell us, by arranging the material this way, Mark is showing that Jesus’ ministry extends to both Jews and Gentiles, that he “blesses without partiality Jew and Gentile, near and far, clean and unclean.” ¹

In today’s text Jesus is back on Jewish territory surrounded by another great crowd, when a man named Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, falls at Jesus’ feet and begs him repeatedly to heal his daughter, who is at the point of death. Jesus agrees, and sets out with him, but on the way Jesus is interrupted by a woman in the crowd who is also on a desperate search for healing.

I want to stop right here, just as Jesus stopped, and to point out that the two main characters in the story (aside from Jesus) are practically archetypal opposites in status, wealth, and power. Jairus is an important man. He’s got a name in this story, and a position in his community; he is a leader of the synagogue and the head of his family. By contrast, the woman in the crowd is given no name, and she is apparently penniless, weak, and alone. She is on the margins of society because of her gender and because of her illness: the flow of blood from which she has suffered for twelve long years has made her ritually unclean. And her impurity is contagious. Anyone who touches her, anyone who lies down a bed on which she has slept, or anyone who sits upon a chair that she has used, will also be made unclean. ²

So you have a man of social privilege and a woman at the margins, and yet both of them are in need. Both of them turn to Jesus for saving help. Contact with Jesus is what they know will save. “Lay your hands” on my daughter, Jairus asks Jesus, “so that she may be made well and live” (Mk 5:23) — and the Greek words can mean, “so that she may be saved and attain eternal life.” Similarly, the woman with the hemorrhage wants only to touch Jesus — and it doesn’t even have to be Jesus himself that she touches, it can be just the hem of his cloak. That touch is what will save her — she is convinced of it.

Despite the stark differences between these two characters, in essence their longing is the same: to make contact with Jesus, whose presence, touch, and words bring healing, whose eyes and voice and hands convey the power of God. What do you need that would lead you to Jesus? What desire would propel you, as Jairus was propelled, to throw yourself at Jesus’ feet to intercede for someone you love or for a cause you hold dear? What fierce longing for wholeness or fullness of life would send you to Jesus with the audacity of that nameless woman who refused to quit, refused give up, even after twelve years of fruitless effort?

Both Jairus and the nameless woman show that healing begins with desire, with a longing articulated in words or in the wordless reach of a hand that stretches out to touch the divine Source of healing. Prayer begins with desire. Worship begins with desire. Healing begins with desire. And our longing must be persistent, bold, brave, unflappable, unstoppable. Jairus ignores the people who tell him it’s too late, his daughter is dead; the woman with the flow of blood ignores the jostling crowd, the social taboos that exclude her, and the apparent hopelessness of her case. The two of them persistently dare to ask, dare to trust, dare to hope — it’s the same kind of stubborn, steadfast, humble, and, I dare say, holy desire that fills people who keep working for peace in the Middle East, against all odds, or working for a stable climate and a habitable world, or working to create conversations around the dinner table in which every person is listened to with kindness and respect.

And as long as we are talking about archetypes, why not allow this nameless woman to stand — for a moment — for all women? Maybe she can be every woman who has “issues” with menstruation or pregnancy, difficulties with sexuality, reproduction, menopause or aging. For us women in the room, perhaps we can allow this unnamed woman to be named with our own name for a while, to carry within herself our very particular longing as women for healing and for fullness of life. She is heading for Jesus, and she intends and seeks and hopes to be made well.

And lest you men start to think that this story is only for women, let’s remember the Jewish belief that blood is life. As one writer points out, “Blood [is] such a sacred, precious, and dangerous force in Jewish belief and practice because it [is] what God said constitutes the very life of a being.” ³ A woman who has been bleeding for twelve years has in the Jewish sense been losing her very life for twelve years. Life has been seeping out of her, slowly draining away. And isn’t that true for all of us — men and women alike? Isn’t it true that too often life slips and seeps away from us, so that day by day we are only partly alive, partly present, partly real, partly here?

Whether you are a man or a woman, I invite you to imagine the nameless woman in the crowd. I invite you to imagine her weariness, how depleted she feels after these years of suffering and loneliness, how ardently she wants to see Jesus. If she could only touch his clothes — that would be enough! She has no right to be here — she knows that. If anyone caught her, she would be chased away, or worse. So she pushes her way through the crowd, dodging, darting, hiding her face, and sneaks up on Jesus from behind. Stealthily she reaches out her hand through the crush of bodies and elbows and sleeves, and — oh, if could just touch the fabric of Jesus’ cloak with her fingertips, that would be enough! She stretches out her fingers and then — she does it! She touches Jesus’ cloak! Instantly something happens in her body — who knows what she feels? Does she feel something like an electric shock or a surge of energy? Or is she suddenly aware of a deep sense of calm, as if a fever has left her and she is finally at peace inside her skin? Whatever the sensation, the bleeding has stopped, and she knows it. Her body is intact. She is whole. And not just her body has been healed: because she is no longer bleeding, she can be restored to the community. She belongs to it again; she is welcome now to have a place.

This physical and social healing takes place in an instant, in the blink of an eye, and Jesus is immediately aware that power has gone forth from him. He turns about in the crowd, asking, “Who touched my clothes?” The disciples, as usual, are clueless, but Jesus continues to look around, and with fear and trembling, the woman comes forward, falls down before him, and tells him the whole truth.

What a lovely phrase: she tells him “the whole truth.” It is only then, after this face-to-face, honest, and personal encounter, that Jesus confirms what has happened. “Daughter,” he calls her, as if taking her under his wing and drawing her into his family, “your faith has made you well” — words in Greek that can be translated as “Your faith has brought you salvation.”

“Go in peace,” Jesus says to her, “and be healed. Go in peace, and be whole.”

Healing begins with desire, and it is completed and accomplished by a personal encounter with the God we meet in Jesus, by that startling and transforming experience of being deeply seen and known and loved. What would you feel if you were hiding in the crowd and Jesus was looking all around for you? Would you linger in the shadows, or would you approach him? If you came and stood before Jesus, or even fell at his feet, what would you say if you told the whole truth? What would happen within you if you heard him say to you, “Daughter, Son, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be whole”?

Jesus touches the untouchable — he touches the woman who is bleeding, and the corpse of the little girl who has died. “Get up!” he says. “Arise!” He liberates the outcast, cleanses the sinful, and restores the dead to life. His healing moves out in every direction — to Jew and Gentile, male and female, outcast and privileged, young and old — creating communities of love wherever he goes. In his name and sharing his Spirit, we are sent out to be like Jesus in the world, intending the best for everyone, wanting everyone to be touched by the divine love that knows no bounds, so that other people can know, as we do, that weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.

1. Fred B. Craddock et al., Preaching Through the Christian Year: Year B, Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press, p.328.

2. Mary Ann Tolbert, “Mark,” in The Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, p. 267.

3. Rick Morley, Witness, June 6, 2006, quoted in Synthesis, “Proper 8-Tradition,” June 28, 2009.

All for you

This is one of those services when every person made a free and deliberate decision to be here. We didn’t come to church tonight because it is Sunday morning and we always show up on Sunday morning. We did not come out of habit or obligation. You and I chose to be here. We wanted to be here. Maybe we even needed to be here. Something impelled each of us to step out of our daily routine and come to church and take part in this special service of healing. What brought you here tonight? What led you to come? Was it concern for a friend or loved one who needs physical healing — perhaps healing from a blood clot or a cancerous tumor, or from the ravages of Alzheimer’s? Is it for someone’s physical healing that you most yearn tonight — for healing from illness or accident, or from any of the countless ailments and infirmities that can afflict our beloved body and the bodies of those we love?

Or maybe it is emotional healing that you most seek tonight — maybe healing for a marriage that has grown stormy or cold, or resolution of a difficulty between friend and friend, or parent and child, or neighbor and neighbor. Is there a relationship in your life in which communication has broken down, or mistrust has built up, or words have been spoken and deeds have been done that you now regret? Is there a relationship in your life that needs healing?

Or maybe it is spiritual healing that you seek — for someone to be released from anxiety, or for someone to be set free from bouts of confusion or periods of depression or shame. So many people go through each day carrying a heavy weight of remorse or self-attack, consumed by bitterness or envy, or by a vague, generalized feeling of unease and dissatisfaction. So many people feel trapped by loneliness, or feel isolated and afraid. Is it a search for spiritual healing that brings you here tonight?

I invite you to take a moment to touch into what drew you here this evening. What is the healing that you most seek from God? I invite you to let yourself feel that desire for healing as clearly and in as focused a way as you can. Whatever brought you here — you are in the right place. Healing is what God loves to do. Healing would be God’s middle name, if God had a middle name. Healing is what God is always up to, for as we heard in the second reading, God is “the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation” [2 Corinthians 1:3]. Our very longing for healing is a sign that God is already alive within us, animating and propelling our search for reconciliation and wholeness and fullness of life.

You may think that you came here tonight so that someone else could be healed — because you want to lend your prayerful energy to the healing of your brother in Christ, or your sister in Christ, or because you want to pray for healing in the larger world, which God knows needs plenty of healing. That is all well and good, and those are wonderful reasons to be here. But I want to tell you something. This service is for you. This service is not just for your brother in Christ, or for your sister in Christ, or for the world at large, or for anyone else. This service is for you. It is for your healing that we are singing these hymns and praying these prayers. It is for your healing first of all that God sent you into this room tonight, whether you knew it or not. It is your body that God wants to touch with a healing touch, your mind that God wants to soothe and bless, your heart that God wants to fill with God’s peace. Maybe you came here tonight thinking that it was your brother or sister who needed to be transformed, but the truth is that you are here tonight for your own transformation.

Many of us can get codependent when it comes to healing. I’m fine, I may say to myself — she is the one who is in need; he is the one who could use some prayers. My suffering isn’t very important compared to hers. My guilt or sorrow or shame doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things — surely God has something more important to do than to waste time with the likes of me. Can you hear the way that an inner voice like that can minimize our pain and make us gloss it over and pretend it isn’t there? Can you hear how thoughts like that actually function to push God away? It is only when we truly acknowledge our own need, only when we honestly admit to ourselves and to God how deeply we need God, how much we long for and depend on God’s healing and strengthening presence in our own lives, that the Spirit of God in Christ can come to us with power, and heal what needs to be healed. It is only when we can acknowledge our own wounds — our sin and losses, weakness and grief — that God can touch us in our depths and allow healing to spring up within our souls.

So this service is a place to be ruthlessly honest. I need healing. You need healing. Each of us stands in need of God. Admitting that fact can be a great relief, for church should be one place in the world where we don’t have to look good; we don’t have to pretend to be self-sufficient and totally in control; we don’t have to make believe that we have magically transcended the human condition and are somehow invulnerable and immortal. Church is a place to face ourselves as we really are, and freely admitting our need to be healed is the first and necessary step in allowing God to heal us.

That’s not all. Confessing our need to be healed also opens us to connect with each other in an authentic way and to build a genuine community. This is where we meet, you and I: in this sacred space in which each of us acknowledges our own sinfulness and failures, our own suffering and imperfections. In this place of mutual vulnerability, we can help each other to tell the truth, and turn to the light, and take our place in a life-changing community that opens itself again and again and again to the cleansing, purifying, bracing, consoling, and strengthening love of God.

God’s healing may not take the form that you or I expect. The way in which God’s healing will come is not something that we can guide or control or predict. But we can trust with all our heart in God’s embracing love, and in whatever way our healing comes, and even before it comes, we can pray to God with the psalmist, “I put my trust in your mercy; my heart is joyful because of your saving help.” So come to the altar rail, everyone who needs healing. And then come to the table, all you who long to hear God say what God said to Hezekiah, “I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; indeed, I will heal you” [2 Kings 20:5].

Ascension and the Time of In-Between

My son Sam came home this week after his first year in college. He brought with him not just several large duffel bags, his tennis rackets, textbooks, and a great heap of dirty laundry, but also a book that he has been reading: God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchins. ¹ You may have heard of it — it is one of several bestsellers on atheism attracting readers across the country. As you can imagine, within 24 hours of Sam’s arrival, he and his father and I were engaged in a lively debate about atheism and religious faith. Can a Christian believe in evolution? Is religion to blame for most of the wars and violence in human history? Is religious faith nothing more than childish wish fulfillment? Is God man-made, just a construct of the human mind?

These are worthy questions to tackle, although it may relieve you to know that I am not going to take two hours and address them now. What I do want to say is that this morning seems a good time at least to mention the existence of such questions. Today is the last Sunday of the Easter season, the Sunday after the Ascension, and the disciples’ vivid encounters with the Risen Christ have come to an end. For forty days after that first Easter morning, the disciples have had a series of startling, joy-filled, hands-on experiences in which they touched, and talked, and ate with Jesus, who was filled with and shining with a divine life that the New Testament calls “resurrection.” And then the risen Jesus withdraws from the disciples’ sight. He no longer dwells bodily on earth with his disciples, and they have not yet received the gift and power of the Holy Spirit, whose arrival we celebrate next week at Pentecost. This ten-day period between the Ascension and Pentecost is an in-between time. The old ways of knowing God in Christ have come to an end, and the new way has not yet come.

This seems a good period to dedicate to atheists, agnostics, and seekers everywhere for whom not just Jesus has withdrawn from sight, but also many aspects of the Christian tradition, and maybe Christianity itself. The ten-day span between the Ascension and Pentecost is a gift for all of us — including devout Christians — who have come to a point in our lives when particular Christian doctrines or beliefs for one reason or another now seem opaque, confusing, remote, or completely unintelligible. A religious conviction that we once held dear; a way of imagining God that once made sense to us; an approach to prayer that we once found meaningful — suddenly no longer has any juice. We no longer find it adequate or convincing. The old way of knowing God has gone and the new way has not yet come, and we may feel lost, stranded, anxious, even bereft. “Do not leave us comfortless!” — those are the poignant, candid words of today’s Collect. What once gave us spiritual comfort and meaning has been withdrawn, and here we are on our own, casting about for what is true and lasting and real.

Is there something wrong with us if we find ourselves in this situation? Only if we think that religion requires us to march in lockstep, eyes in front, with no permission to look around and ask questions, as if we were cogs in a machine. But of course we are not cogs in a machine. We are living beings with a living faith, and a living faith behaves like everything else that is alive — it ebbs and flows, it grows and changes, it takes in and it lets go. If we believed at forty exactly the same things about God and the world that we believed at the age of ten, then we would rightly suspect that something in the development of our faith had gone awry. Being willing to bear the discomfort of letting go long-held convictions and certainties and to enter uncharted territory is a necessary part of growing into spiritual adulthood. Spiritual maturity depends as much on un-learning as on it does on learning.

So how do we move forward in faith if we find ourselves in an in-between time? How do we respond to the atheists and agnostics of the world, or to the atheist or agnostic that may be speaking in our own heart? One way is to use our heads and to read works of contemporary theology that help us to grasp and to speak about our faith in more sophisticated terms. Reason and the analytic mind can be good tools for taking our faith to the next level and to communicating it more convincingly to a skeptical world.

But sometimes our deepest knowledge of God comes not through ideas but through prayer, not through explanations of doctrine but through the felt wisdom that speaks through our whole body-self — through our feelings, intuition, and imagination, and through the silence of contemplation. We do want to think critically about our faith; we do want our faith to make sense; we do not want to be ignorant or naive. But at the same time we do not need to limit our knowledge of God to what can be grasped by the most rational little corner of the left side of our brains. As the writer and social activist Joanna Macy likes to say, we are not brains on a stick. We have our whole body-self as a resource for connecting with God.

This is where prayer comes in as way to open us to the vast mystery of God when our ideas of God have become too small. I am talking now about a particular kind of prayer — not prayer that is full of words, however useful verbal prayers can be for spelling out our relationship with God and for naming what we fear and love and long for. I am talking about the kind of prayer that takes place beyond words or below words, the kind of prayer in which not just our thinking mind is engaged but our whole embodied self as we listen intently in silence for the presence of God.

Today’s Gospel gives us a clue about how to pray in an in-between time when the old certainties have fallen away and the new has not yet come. The whole seventeenth chapter of John, from which this morning’s passage is taken, is devoted to Jesus’ final prayer before his crucifixion. In this passage he prays for his disciples and for us, and in the very first line he prays, “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world” [John 17:6]. “I have made your name known.” How has Jesus made known God’s name? By bearing the divine name himself. The most powerful disclosure of Jesus’ identity in the Gospel of John may not be how he completes his various “I am” statements — I am the good shepherd, I am the vine, I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world — but in the stark way that he names himself to the woman at the well: “I am.” That is Jesus’ name, and that is God’s name, too. I AM. That is how God names God’s self to Moses: “I AM WHO I AM” [Exodus 3:14]. The word is translated in different ways: I AM WHAT I AM. I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE. As God says to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, I AM has sent me to you” [Exodus 3:14].

I AM is a mysterious word, suggesting a dynamic, irrepressible flow of being, the very fountain and source of being itself, as if God is more like a living process than a static thing, more like a verb than a noun. The name for God in Hebrew — what we typically pronounce as Yahweh — is actually four consonants — YHWH — that cannot be pronounced at all, for in Judaism the name of God is too holy to be uttered aloud. The only way to say the divine name is to breathe it, one syllable at a time. YHWH. YHWH. Try it. YHWH. Each in-breath is an inhalation of God, and each out-breath is an exhalation of God. YHWH. YHWH. With every breath in, we breathe in God. With every breath out, we breathe out God. YHWH — God in our lungs, on our tongue, on our lips. No thoughts of God, no ideas about God, just God breathing through us, the holy Breath of Life. YHWH. YHWH. God fills each breath.

Try that sort of breath prayer for a while — maybe using the name YHWH, or the name Jesus, or any other word that expresses your intention to be with God — and before long our busy minds grow quiet. Just as Jesus left the earth when he ascended into heaven, so we leave behind our thoughts about Jesus, our thoughts about God. Whatever we think about God and Jesus is irrelevant, because we are not thinking any longer; we are simply being with God, simply breathing God.

What happens when we give some time to praying like this with a patient, innocent openness to whatever comes? Eventually we may discover that everything in us has been gathered up — our thoughts and feelings, our convictions and doubts — and all of it is has been drawn into the heart of God. Where we are, God is. Where God is, we are. It is as if we have stepped into the Trinity and are experiencing within ourselves the flow of love that is always circulating between God the Father and God the Son through God the Holy Spirit — or, to use St. Augustine’s words for the Trinity: the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love that flows between. That is the promise of contemplative prayer: that we don’t have to settle for ideas about God, or thinking about God, but can actually have an experience of God.

Maybe that is our best response to the atheists and agnostics within us and around us: to take the Ascension seriously and to know that there is a time to let everything go, to relinquish our ideas about God and to abide in the holy Mystery for a while. That is a good way to live in an in-between time, too: to pray patiently in the darkness of not-knowing, trusting that love will find us and return in unexpected power to set our hearts on fire.

1. Christopher Hitchins, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, NY: Twelve, Hachette Brooke Group/Warner, 2007.

“Lift up your eyes, and live”

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”
– John 3:14

The Fourth Sunday of Lent goes by many names. Among Roman Catholics, it is traditionally known as Laetare Sunday, from the opening words of the Latin Mass that are used on this day, “Laetare, Jerusalem” — “Rejoice, Jerusalem.” Among Anglicans, today is often called Refreshment Sunday. Whatever you call it, today marks the mid-point of Lent. We are more than halfway through this season of repentance and self-examination, and we know where we are heading — toward the joy of Easter.

So I find it interesting that on this Sunday for refreshment, this Sunday for rejoicing, our assigned readings from Hebrew Scripture and from the Gospels focus directly or indirectly on the cross. These two passages are in fact the same ones that we hear in September on Holy Cross Day. We may associate the cross with a lot of things, but I don’t expect that the first thing that springs to mind is “refreshment” or “rejoicing.” So what is that about? Can we find refreshment in the cross?

In the first reading, which is from the Book of Numbers, the people are wandering in the wilderness. They have escaped from slavery in Egypt but have not yet reached the Promised Land, and they are impatient and tired and losing trust in God. Sure, God has taken care of them again and again along the way. When they grew hungry, God gave them a mysterious kind of bread called manna that fell during the night with the dew. When they became thirsty, God made water gush out for them from a rock. But the people are fretful and rebellious, full of discontent, and now, in the last of a long series of complaint stories, the people rail not only against Moses but also against God. Later on, the Psalms will look back fondly on manna as being “the bread of angels” (Psalm 78:15), but to the people wandering in the wilderness it is wretched, boring stuff, and they announce to Moses, “we detest this miserable food” (Numbers 21:5).

At this point the Lord gets angry at their persistent complaints and sends “poisonous serpents” that bite and wound and even kill many people. The wanderers quickly repent and appeal to Moses to pray for them. Moses prays and the Lord relents – though not by making the snakes disappear, but by giving the people a practice or discipline that overcomes the power of the snake. God tells Moses what he needs to do, and Moses carries out God’s instruction: he makes a serpent of bronze and puts it up on a pole, “and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live” (Numbers 21:9). This story, by the way, is the source of the medical symbol of a snake on a pole.

You might ask, what do our ancestors see when they look up at that bronze serpent? They see what most frightens them, what most disgusts and appalls them, the thing that is hurting and killing them. They see a terrifying reminder of suffering and death. They also see a reminder of their own sin, for the reason the snakes came upon them in the first place is because the people were rebelling against God. Snakes, in fact, are a biblical image of sin. Just think of Eve, tempted by the trickster snake in the Garden of Eden, or of Jesus denouncing the scribes and Pharisees as “snakes” and a “brood of vipers” (Mt 23:33). In the Book of Revelation, the Devil himself is called “that ancient serpent” (Rev. 20:2).

So, as the people gaze on the serpent of bronze, they see an image of death. They see an image of sin. They contemplate their broken relationship with God. And they see something else, too: they see the boundless goodness and mercy of God, because they instantly understand that a power greater than snakes and sin has set this image before them. As they gaze on this fearful thing that God has lifted up before their frightened, guilty eyes, they are restored to life. They are healed and made whole.

I wonder if this act of gazing may be a kind of spiritual analogue to homeopathy, the practice in alternative medicine of treating a patient by exposing the patient to a tiny dose of a substance that in large quantities would produce the very symptoms from which the patient needs to be healed. Or maybe we can compare the story to smallpox vaccinations: doctors inoculate their patients against the disease by giving patients a dose of a live virus from the same family as smallpox. Or think of the announcement earlier this week of a small study that showed that when scientists gave children who were highly allergic to peanut butter a tiny amount of peanut flour every day, the children’s sensitivity to peanuts gradually decreased, and a few children were even healed of the allergy. Whatever your opinion of homeopathy or vaccinations or the best way to deal with peanut allergies, my point is that maybe they give something of a physical analogue to the spiritual truth that this story conveys: God lifts up for the people an image, an icon, of what frightens and could actually kill them, and in the act of what we might call contemplative gazing, the people are healed.

Now set this story beside the passage in the Gospel of John. Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, has come to Jesus by night to meet this man who has come from God. In explaining why he has come, Jesus mentions the bronze serpent that Moses lifted up in the wilderness, and declares that he, too, will be lifted up in order to show God’s boundless, steadfast love for the world. For Christians, it is Jesus lifted up on the cross that conveys our healing. When we gaze at the cross of Christ, we see everything that we are afraid of, everything that is sinful and broken and shameful and spoiled, and at the very same time we also see God’s perpetual, outpouring love for the world.

I don’t know how many of you spend time gazing at the cross, apart from Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Only some of us carry a cross in our pocket or on a necklace around our neck. Fewer still have placed a cross on a wall at home, maybe because of not wanting to look morbid or not wanting to seem embarrassingly pious. But the pair of readings this morning point to the healing power of gazing at the cross. Today’s Gospel tells us that Jesus was “lifted up [so] that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:15). And as Jesus says later in John’s Gospel: “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people (all things) to myself” (John 12:32).

So what do we see when we look at the cross? We see everything we are afraid of. Most of us want to live out a comfortable life and not suffer when we die. We want to live what we think of as our allotted fourscore years and ten – or maybe more. We want to die peacefully in our beds, with our loved ones standing by and murmuring nice things. When we look at Jesus dying an agonizing death on the cross, we look squarely at suffering and death, at violence and torture, at rejection and humiliation, at poverty and helplessness – at everything, in fact, that frightens us and does us harm. And we see that all of it has been taken up by Jesus, that all of it has been embraced by God. There is nowhere we can go, nothing that we can experience, that God in Christ does not share with us. Even our sin, even our willfulness, self-centeredness, and greed, our impatience and envy, our laziness and despair – all of that, and more, is met on the cross by the love of God, by the one who says, “Father, forgive.”

Christ came down to earth and was lifted up on the cross for our healing, so that we too could be set free from the fear of death, free from the grip of sin, and raised to new life in him. Every time we lift our eyes to the cross, we have a chance to hand over our fears, to confess our sins, and, through the grace of God, to begin to live no longer for ourselves alone, but for the one who lived and died and rose for us. That is refreshment, indeed. That is reason to rejoice. No wonder we call this Refreshment Sunday!

As we move through these last weeks of Lent, I invite us, as a spiritual practice, to turn to the cross whenever we feel afraid or overwhelmed, tempted or confused, whenever we need again to take in the healing love of God. Let me also add that there is particular power in remembering the cross just now, because we are all living in a time of extraordinary turbulence. As Rob mentioned in his sermon last week, writer Thomas Friedman recently quoted a business expert who dubbed this chaotic time as the beginning of the so-called Great Disruption. ¹ Friedman argues that historians will look back on the year 2008 as the year that a civilization based on living beyond its financial means and living beyond its ecological means finally hit the wall.

Set this crisis in the light of the cross, and we understand it as a moment of judgment, a moment of reckoning. Our society’s recent way of living – what the Episcopal bishops of this Church decry in their new pastoral letter as “unparalleled corporate greed and irresponsibility, predatory lending practices, and rampant consumerism” ² – is not a way of living that is in any way close to the cross. As a society, we are all being invited into Lent, into a season of self-examination and repentance. I hope that in prayer we will bring not only ourselves to the cross, but our country, as well, so that what needs to die can die, and what needs to be transformed, can be transformed, and that together we can find healing, and be renewed, and discover a path to new life.

1. Phrase by Paul Gilding, as quoted by Thomas L. Friedman, “The Inflection Is Near?” New York Times, March 7, 2009. [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08friedman.html]

2. “A Pastoral Letter from the Bishops of the Episcopal Church” meeting in Hendersonville, North Carolina, March 13-18, 2009 to the Church and our partners in mission throughout the world. [http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79901_106036_ENG_HTM.htm]