Don’t we tend to see life falling along two lines: getting ready for action and then doing the action – cleaning the counter, then making the cake; clearing the runway, then flying the plane? Scripture is no different. Part of it shows how to clear the way to spiritual growth, and part of it shows that growth in action. Take the reading from Proverbs. Today’s passage selects out a particular obstacle to spiritual growth and warns us against it: “Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity.” We are so used to this we take it for granted: the Bible helps us see where certain things we do work against us.

In the reading from Mark we have an example of making the cake or flying the plane. The people describe it this way: “Jesus even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.” We take this for granted – that Jesus shows us again and again what it looks like to be spiritually alive – healing, teaching, comforting, listening, and generally giving himself for others. So Scripture leads us forth into life, cleaning the glass then lighting the lantern.

I tend to identify John the Baptist with the cleaning and clearing and removing of obstacles. At the River Jordan he cried out, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” “Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.” He himself identified Jesus as the one who would teach us to fly, so to speak. He said, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me…. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” I don’t mean to suggest a clear division, just a tendency for one figure, John, to be identified with the preparation and Jesus with the realization.

At another point John went on to say, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” This too rings true. While we never outgrow the need to clear away obstacles, that need diminishes as our growth increases. We become more focused on serving and less focused on our own needs and imperfections.

I think you can see where I am going with this. This past year has been a getting ready year. I have focused your attention on obstacles, especially distortions of the faith – beliefs that throw up barriers between us and God. Beliefs that we must constantly be dodging when we want to run to follow Jesus. I have tried to show how God is not capricious, never punishes, never judges, never withdraws or turns away. False beliefs such as these keep us focused on ourselves and our own shortcomings – on our own, individual spiritual survival. They keep us focused on John the Baptist instead of shifting our allegiance to Jesus and to the well-being of the whole community.

Let me tell you a story that illustrates what I am talking about in an amazing way. Recently Allan Duane, our parish administrator, began a search into our deepest archives, looking for baptismal records from the early days of the church. He went into cabinets that may not have been opened in years, into boxes that had lain buried for decades, and at the bottom of one of these boxes he came upon the diary of Fredericka Milne.

When St. Gregory’s first stopped meeting in people’s homes and had a worship place of its own, that place was located just across Route 212 on Mrs. Milne’s farm. She had a building that had been a corn crib and that she had converted to a guest house and storage space. In the first entry, from early in 1952, Mrs. Milne wrote, “Rev. Harald Sweze called today, and I offered the Corn Crib for use as a chapel. He is to let me know. This has been on my conscience for some time…. There are not many Episcopalians in Woodstock, but enough to make it worth while. I so often think, “When one or two are gathered together in my name….

“The corncrib has been my storage and work room, and upon occasions a guest house. It is filled to the ceiling. I hope from the bottom of my heart that my offer is not accepted by Father Swezy. Then my conscience will be clear, and I will have my hard fought-for privacy that I crave more and more on my Little Farm.”

A later entry goes on, “Weeks passed. No word from Mr. Swezy, but I’ve heard in the village that they are coming. A group of three or four moved nearly everything out of the corn crib into the kitchen, which looks as though the Collier brothers had lived there. Little more than a tunnel to walk thru! The blue homemade sideboard in the kitchen is to be covered with a table cloth and used as the altar below the Japanese tapestry…. My cot and piano are pulled to the west and near the door and the leak. Had the piano tuned for $10.”

That is all on page one of Allan’s typed transcript. The rest of the manuscript – or at least of the 14 pages that Allan has copied so far – goes on to tell in detail how Fredericka Milne devoted most of her waking hours to working on the chapel. It was she who got up hours before the service to lay the fire and keep it stoked. She laid the bluestone path to the chapel door. Mrs. Milne’s journal covers the first four years of St. Gregory’s. I have not seen the rest yet, but what I have read to you is the self-told story of a woman who started out in a John the Baptist way, focusing on her own needs – in this case for privacy and peace – and ended up focusing on the needs of the community. It gives St. Gregory’s a beautiful, profoundly real, foundational metaphor.

I told the story to illustrate the turning point we have reached today. I feel as if I have an insight into John the Baptist’s mind and heart as I never did before. He must have looked at Jesus and wept tears of gratitude. I know I have shed such tears a lot lately. You may remember how I wrote you a letter a year ago, and in that letter I said, “I believe that God never blesses one party at the expense of another; and since God has blessed Charlie so abundantly with his new church, God will surely bless St. Gregory’s in equal abundance.” I wrote that with my fingers crossed, oh me of little faith! Little did I know how true that would be!

If I may return to the image of clearing obstacles from the runway and taking off in flight, then let me say that, in the Rev’d Gigi Conner, God has sent us a pilot who can really teach us to fly and help us to soar. Or let me put it in terms of our foundational story: under Gigi’s leadership I see St. Gregory’s laying a fire and keeping it stoked it for our Woodstock community, for the region and for the world. The size of our church will have nothing to do with the size of our vision. The numbers in our pews will have nothing to do with the number of lives we touch. And today’s collect will be answered in abundance where it says, “Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts. Amen.

Preparing for today’s sermon, I made an exciting discovery: there is such a thing as evolution. What is more, it is happening within the church. Rather than telling you what is evolving, though; let me share with you my process of discovery. Then let’s see if some of us don’t leave here this morning, powdered all over with a new pollen of hope.

A process of discovery often starts with suspicion. Where, I asked myself, did that reading from the Song of Songs come from? I had never seen a reading assigned from the Song of Songs before, and that is after twenty five years of preaching. I went to the Episcopal lectionary to check my memory. Sure enough! In the entire lectionary – that is, fifty two Sundays in three year cycles, plus some Feast Days and Holy Days; so in other words, well over 156 readings from the Hebrew Bible – in that entire lectionary not once did the Song of Songs turn up. What changed? A few years ago the Church switched to a new lectionary.

If you go by today’s reading, you might be tempted to say so what? What’s the big deal about adding a reading from the Song of Songs? First, it tells us there is such a book. We might never know of it otherwise. It is not only among the shortest books in the Bible, but it is tucked away between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah – two giants. Second, the Song of Songs is not just biblical Hallmark, as you might think from today’s reading. Listen to this, for instance, from Chapter Seven where God says, “How graceful are your feet in sandals, O queenly maiden! Your rounded thighs are like jewels, the work of a master hand. Your navel is a rounded bowl that never lacks mixed wine. Your belly is a heap of wheat, encircled with lilies. Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle…. You are stately as a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its branches.” What’s this? Erotic poetry in the Bible! Who knew?

That’s just it. Many of us know the Bible only through the Sunday readings. Until this change of lectionaries, few of us would have heard of the Song of Songs – except perhaps at weddings. Once we have heard of it, we might seek it out. Then we might start asking questions. The Church had no answers, and so she turned her back on the whole matter. What changed? The Church is beginning to have answers, and that, it seems to me, is evolution.

When I say evolution, I mean just what the dictionary says: the gradual development of something from a simple to a more complex form. The Church’s faith is evolving. Perhaps at the most primitive level we saw God as Law-giver and then added God as Parent, then God as Healer, then God as Friend. With each addition, the gap between us and God grew narrower. Of course, we never outgrow the need for all of these facets of God. For instance, at that ethical line where avoiding taxes can shade over into evading taxes, I need to remember God as law-giver. When my bid to join a club meets with rejection, I turn to God as parent to regain a sense of belonging and worth. Or if I feel sick and my energy fails me, I turn to God as healer, knowing that God answers prayers for healing. And finally, when I just want to share my soul, I turn to God as Friend, as we contemplate a sunset together, or a piece of music or an insight.

For many of us God also comes in a fifth guise, God as Victim. This fifth ‘face’, so to speak, was scarcely allowable until after the Holocaust. But then people looked at horrors that numbed their minds and asked, “Where was God?” Only one answer met their need. God cried out from behind the chain link fence. Not everyone can encompass the thought of God as Victim; yet for those who can, when we hear the cries of the suffering or see the plight of the oppressed our hearts goes out to them as to God. So however we may define the faces of God, the truth is this: God meets our need for God at every point.

Can we take this further? Clearly we can, and individuals have been doing this for thousands of years; that is, finding God as lover, as the Song of Songs so beautifully shows. Wouldn’t it be strange to have a place for God in every room in our house, and then close the door on God as we enter the bedroom? Wouldn’t it be strange not to have a place for God when we enter into our tenderest and fiercest emotions and our most intimate imagination? That would be strange, but perhaps not strange that we speak of it so seldom.

Some writers compare the Song of Songs to the Holy of Holies in the Temple. You may remember how the Temple was constructed in the form of one courtyard within another. The largest and outermost, called the Court of the Gentiles, was open to everyone. Within it lay the Court of the Women, where only Jews might enter. Within that lay the Court of the Israelites, exclusively for Jewish men. Within that lay the court of the Priests; and within that, the smallest in terms of square feet, lay the Holy of Holies, to be entered only by the Hight Priest and then only once a year. God as Lover, by its very nature, must be the most sacred face of God.

When we do enter the Holy of Holies, however, we encounter a paradox. The further in we penetrate, the less exclusive we become. Here, in this innermost sanctum, we may discover and mix with people of different faiths. Jews familiar with the Song of Songs might encounter St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, whom Christians remember, at least in part, for their love poetry. Here is a poem of St. Teresa’s:

Just these two words He spoke changed my life, “Enjoy Me.”

What a burden I thought I was to carry – a crucifix, as did He.

Love once said to me, “I know a song, would you like to hear it?”

And laughter came from every brick on the street and from every pore in the sky.

After a night of prayer, He changed my life when He sang, “Enjoy Me.”

Muslims, too, can be found there, such as the Sufi poet, Rumi. Listen to what he calls his first love story:

When I heard my first love story, I started looking for you,

Not knowing how wrong that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere; they’re in each other all along.

People of all faiths speak erotic love poetry. It is our one common language.

Where else should we look if we want to heal the divisions and dissension between faiths? We won’t find it through endlessly seeking justice or through mutually agreeable theologies. But perhaps we could begin where our voices blend in singing, at the Song of Songs. The church, at last, seems ready to move in this direction. We have acknowledged, formally and officially, through the new lectionary, what many individuals have known all along: that this dimension of faith exists, that it is a valid form of practice. This evolution holds great hope; for when have human beings ever conducted hostilities from within their lover’s arms? Who has ever made war in the midst of hearing this intimate whisper, “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away… the time of singing has come… the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”?

The readings from Joshua and John share a common setting. In both, people are being tested. Whom will they follow? Joshua puts the choice to the people of Israel bluntly, saying, “Choose this day whom you will serve.” Jesus does not demand a choice in so many words, but his teaching has reached a point where his disciples can no longer follow with their rational minds. What should they do? Go ahead with Jesus on faith, or leave him and turn back to familiar ground? This morning I want to focus on the issue of testing, because I want to clear up a common misunderstanding in the Lord’s Prayer; that is, the final supplication which says, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

The prayer works poetically, but it does not work theologically. It leaves the clear implication that God might lead us into temptation if God had a mind to. That raises questions about God’s reliability, which in turn can undercut our wholehearted trust in God. Before I go on, though, I want to acknowledge that this will not so much be a sermon as a teaching; but I think the topic is too important not to tackle it head-on.

The Lord’s Prayer, as we typically say it, comes to us from the King James Bible of 1611. Since that time translators have improved their understanding of Hellenistic Greek, both vocabulary and grammar. Not only that, but scholars now take into account the earlier translations, namely those from the original Aramaic or Hebrew into Greek – translations from the earliest days of the Christian church. Jesus, of course, probably spoke Aramaic, and if not that then Hebrew, which is closely related. This point matters particularly when we come to discuss the meaning of “lead us not into temptation.”

The semitic languages work with great economy. For instance, to say ‘lead’ they would not need to invent a whole new word, they would take the pre-existing word ‘enter’ and, by adding one or two characters to the verb, change its meaning. It would then read ‘make-to-enter’ – in other words, lead. So “do not make-to-enter us into temptation” became in the minds of those early Greek translators, “do not lead us into temptation.” But suppose they misplaced the word ‘not’? Suppose the way Jesus actually meant it would have translated the ‘not’ like this: “Make-us-not-enter into temptation.” In other words, “keep us from entering into temptation.”

The first translation sees us as helpless victims of God’s whim: “do not lead us into temptation.” The second puts the responsibility on us, saying in effect: we are prone to enter into temptation; please, save us from ourselves. The second translation puts the Lord’s Prayer in accord with Jesus’ other teachings. In fact it is almost identical with his parting words to his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Pray, so that you do not enter into testing.” For Jesus, God was an ever-present loving, responsive Presence, and he gave his life so that we might come to that same realization.

What does this have to do with our two readings? We see that in both cases the people were being asked to make a significant choice – one that would affect their whole lives. It was a moment of testing. We trivialize moments such as these if we call them temptations. I could say I was tempted if I wanted to pick a flower in a park near a sign that read, “Do not pick the flowers.” If I succumbed to the temptation, I would acknowledge my fault and resolve to do better. No big deal. Besides, another person might not be tempted at all. In the Greek the word we translate temptation comes from a root word that could equally well be translated as ‘test’ or ‘assay’, as when a miner brings his ore into the assayer’s office to test if it really contains gold. The difference between temptation and testing is one of degree. A testing affects everyone present, for better or for worse, with lasting implications. The people in our readings were not being tempted, they were being tested.

Joseph Conrad captures the terrible consequences of a wrong choice in a time of testing. His Lord Jim chose to join the other officers and abandon their ship in the middle of the night when it appeared to be in immanent danger of sinking. With only one life boat they saw no point in alerting the 800 passengers to their peril, much less see them through to safety. Unfortunately for Jim and the other officers, the ship did not sink, but got towed into port. Shame and the pain of being an outcast followed Jim the rest of his life. In a more real way, in my own life I have imagined being a German citizen in Hitler’s day. Would the testing have been to much for me? Would I have sold my soul and gone along with the regime? I seriously do not know. I can pray with all my heart that I never face such a choice, such a testing.

What makes these times of testing so terrifying? The sheer magnitude of the forces arrayed against us. In Lord Jim’s case the hull had been breached below the water line, and the bulkhead that kept the water from flooding the entire ship appeared to be giving way. In the case of Germany, the whole power of the state stood prepared to crush a protester. In the case of Jesus’ followers, they felt their very sanity was at stake, their entire worldview. Choosing to follow Jesus, under conditions such as these, would test us to the limit.

John’s Gospel addresses just these situations in the first chapter. He invites us to contemplate a light shining in the darkness. Picture yourself out in a night so dark you cannot see your feet. Imagine lighting a candle. Compare the vast extent of the darkness – it could feel like the whole universe – to that one tiny flame. Astonishing as it seems, all that darkness cannot overcome the one little light. The trick for us, as we face a time of testing, is to keep our eye on the light, not the darkness.

Easier said than done, you say. Yet today’s passage from the letter to the Ephesians is about just that. He calls the forces arrayed against us “the cosmic powers of this present darkness.” No doubt their sheer magnitude could mesmerize us. So how do we keep our eyes focused on the point of light? He lists a number of spiritual practices that will stand us in good stead. I will reword them. Seek truth. Act without guile. Be eager to share the Gospel. Practice your faith. Remember that you have been saved. Steep yourself in the Word of God. These he calls metaphorically the whole armor of God. The image works well, because a warrior cannot start to assemble protective clothing when the enemy is in sight; the armor needs to be ready to hand at any time. So, too, with these practices.

One final point needs to be made about temptation and testing. We do not pray not to be tested; testing is a given for a person of faith. However, a person without faith cannot be tested. I’ll give an image. Imagine that you are following someone who has learned their way through a vast bog. It matters absolutely if you follow in that person’s footsteps, because quicksand abounds. But suppose you decide to take your chances and forget the leader; then you can wander where you please and follow your own convenience; no one can say you are “off the track.” If the trail leads up too steep a hill, you can go around. You may suffer, but you won’t be tested.

Let me sum this up. We are among the people who believe that life is like a bog. It holds places that can suck us down. We further believe that Jesus has learned the way through the bog. We have chosen to follow him, even when to do so seems to make no sense. We realize that we shall surely face testings, from minor temptations to major commitments and all in between. We do not pray for the testing to be taken away; we pray not to fall away as we make our way through the testing. If we want to continue as people of faith we cannot avoid testing, but with God’s help we can keep it from sweeping us off the track laid down by Jesus. Jesus says pray for that help; the writer to the Ephesians says keep up your spiritual skills with steady practice. The unspoken promise is this: testings and temptations have the happy side-effect of bringing us closer to God.

]]> http://skeinsoffaith.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/joshua-241-2a-14-18-ephesians-610-20-john-656-69/feed/ 0 skeinsoffaith http://skeinsoffaith.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/proverbs-91-6-john-651-58/ http://skeinsoffaith.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/proverbs-91-6-john-651-58/#comments Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:47:22 +0000 skeinsoffaith http://skeinsoffaith.wordpress.com/?p=161 ]]>

In a college psychology class our professor once quipped, “We all know the mind and the body are one. The question is, which one?” I’m recalling this humorous quip now, because it leads into the topic of today’s sermon. That is, “How does the Bible work?” And, “How can I make it work for me?”

If we say, “The mind and the body are one,” we speak from a certain level of our mind; and when we add, “but which one?” we jump up to a different level. Let me sketch out a few of the differences between these two levels of consciousness, and then give an example of how they interact. The first level – the level that sees the body and mind as one – lies deep, and for the sake of making the distinction I’ll call it the level of wisdom. The second level lies at the surface, and I’ll call it the level of thoughts, meaning all mental activity, including perceptions and feelings.

At the level of wisdom our minds are passive, simply aware. Wisdom deals in wholes. It does not so much perceive the whole picture, it participates in the whole picture. Wisdom is what it beholds. This drives the thinking mind crazy. The thinking mind depends, as it must, on clear boundaries, definite definitions. It deals in logical connections; and in contrast to the passivity of wisdom, the thinking mind goes out questing for action.

This story will illustrate the difference. It comes from the book, Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen. The doctor who told this story directed a neonatal unit in a large hospital. For several weeks this doctor had struggled to save a tiny, premature baby. Finally, despite all the resources of the hospital’s state-of-the-art, intensive care nursery, the doctor had to acknowledge that the baby was dying. She phoned the parents to come quickly so that they would have time to say good-bye. After she hung up, all the beeping and the bustle of the unit got on her nerves. She wanted to compose herself and marshall her thoughts for when the parents arrived. The chapel offered the kind of quiet she sought, so she went there to try to find the words she would need when she looked into the eyes of the parents and told them their son was not going to make it.

After fifteen minutes she went to meet the parents. As she walked along the corridor, the thought came to her to try a certain drug. Irritated, she dismissed the thought. The drug in question had no relevance to the baby’s condition. Still, the thought persisted. She met the parents and explained that everything had been done to save the baby’s life. Then together they walked to the baby’s isolette so that the mother and father could say good-bye. The sadness on the parents’ faces tore at the doctor’s heart, and she found herself blurting out, against all reason, that there was one further drug they could try. They gave their permission, though the baby appeared moribund.

The doctor administered the injection herself. As they stood there, the baby continued gasping for breath and remained quite blue. Minutes passed; no change. Giving the parents time alone with the baby to make their good-byes, the doctor went to her office and busied herself with paper work. A few hours later she was astonished to see that they were still there. In fact, the baby’s breathing was normal and the baby was no longer blue.

Afterwards the doctor felt deeply disturbed. Why? Because she could not account for what had happened, and it threatened to upset her entire worldview. So she dismissed the whole thing, though she remained troubled. A few years later she read in a medical journal about a team of physicians who had used this same drug for the same condition. Relieved, the doctor assumed that somewhere she had read about the unorthodox use of that drug before she tried it. She simply had not remembered reading it. So she contacted the authors of the article to ask where they had learned about this unusual use of the drug. Stunned, she learned that they had no precedent; they had, as they thought, tried it for the first time.

The doctor had developed her upper-level mind, her logical, sense-making mind to the full. However, not only had she not developed the lower level of her mind, the level of wisdom, she did not know of its existence. This is where many people find themselves today when it comes to reading the Bible. We expect it to make sense to our upper-level mind; and of course to a degree it does; but much of it, perhaps most, addresses our deeper mind, our basic awareness. With the Bible, we are meant to read between the lines, as it were, to adopt an attitude of expectant listening. We let it impregnate us and then wait, as if we were awaiting a birth, for the meaning and wisdom to emerge.

Let’s look at today’s readings as a case in point. The first reading from the Hebrew Bible introduces a female figure called Wisdom. If we read the whole of the Book of Proverbs we find this figure developed amazingly. For instance, at one point she speaks as if she were God. At another point we learn that she had a role in creation. She says, “Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth…. When [God] established the heavens I was there… when [God] marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside [God] like a master worker.” We even hear her say, “Who ever finds me finds life.” Our sense-seeking minds want to cry out in frustration. “So, is God male or female?”

The Gospel of John solves the problem by calling this figure the Logos, the Word, and making her male. As such she becomes Jesus the Christ. The Gospel begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Again our logical minds rebel at such slippery use of language. Let’s get our definitions straight! Stop the shapeshifting! Yet wisdom makes sense of this morphing of genders. It says, “You cannot limit God to being male or female.”

Take another example. Wisdom says, “Come eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity and live, and walk in the way of insight.” This is more than poetry. If we want Wisdom she has to become our food and drink; we must make her a part of us at the cellular level. Friends, Jesus knew the Hebrew Bible! His action at the last supper would have recalled this image. It makes no sense at the level of our logical minds – “This is my body, given for you.” What, are we cannibals? But taken in at the level of basic awareness, we accept that, as Jesus said, he is “the living bread that came down from heaven.” To have eternal life we must make him part of us – not only as a thought, not only as a body of beliefs, not only at the level of our logical minds, but at what we can only call the cellular level, the level of wisdom. We not only perceive Jesus Christ, we participate in Jesus Christ.

Yesterday the church celebrated the feast of St. Mary the Virgin. Here again, the story of Mary’s virginity challenges our logical minds. Like the doctor, we want to reject the idea and stick with what makes sense. Yet if we go apart, to some hospital chapel of the heart, and wait, the story turns out to be life-giving. We begin to see that what happened to Mary can happen to us. And it does not depend on some external agent.

I want to close with a different image. We have stood on the shore of the ocean and watched as the waves rolled in. Paradoxically, while the waves roll in, the tide may be flowing out. In a similar way, whatever may be happening at the level of our thinking minds, there is a tide that always flows in one direction, toward wholeness and healing. We could call that tide God or the Holy Spirit or Wisdom. It takes practice to align ourselves with the tide as well as the waves. We get that practice every time we seek refuge, as the neonatologist did. It may be a physical chapel, but it can equally well be a chapel of the mind, a moment of prayer, a brief period of centering ourselves in the house with seven pillars. Amen.

If we were part of this group that is peppering Jesus with questions, we could be pardoned if we felt frustration. Does he never answer a question straight? We ask about time: “When did you come here?” He replies, in effect, “You are here for the wrong reason.” Then we ask, “What shall we do?” Jesus replies enigmatically, “Believe.” Next, we ask for a sign. He replies with a little dissertation on bread. Finally, we ask for bread; and he replies, “I am the bread.” If I read this passage out of a psychology textbook, you would say, “Right! That must be the chapter on dysfunctional communication.”

Is it dysfunctional communication or is it something deeper? We all know this to be something deeper, but what? Perhaps this is it. The summer after my sophomore year in high school, one of my friends broke ranks with us, and spent the summer in Mexico. Her church was sponsoring a work camp. She went with others from her church to build a community center for a village in the Sonoran desert. At the end of the summer she came home, but as far as we could see, she had left her old self behind. We were all mad for “Rock Around the Clock” with Bill Haley and His Comets. She didn’t seem that excited. We were scandalized by Elvis Presley. Elvis didn’t get a rise out of her. And when the captain of our high school football team broke up with his girl friend, stunning the rest of us, she scarcely cared. In all the ways that counted with us, she was living in a different world.

We could say that Jesus lives in one world, his questioners in another. What tells them apart? Beliefs and assumptions. Jesus uses the word, believe, but don’t let it mislead you. It goes deeper than thoughts. Jesus meant – we could put it this way – “Come to live and work in the Sonoran desert.” Believe, as Jesus intended it, meant to enter a different world and become part of it. Let the alkaline air fill your lungs, so to speak; let the dust fill your pores; let the sun bake your skin and the sun-baked clay bricks strengthen your hands. So when Jesus called believing work – “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” – he did not mean simply take on a new idea.

How can we make this practical? Suppose we are seriously interested in doing the work of God; how do we enter that other world that Jesus calls believing? We start by untangling the confusion over the word bread. The questioners are after the bakery item, plus all that goes with it for the well-being of the body. Jesus could have led them to a new way of thinking. He could have said, “Good, but you should also seek the spiritual food that endures for eternal life.” Instead, he tried to shift their whole being from one world to another, from their habitat to his. He wanted to turn their relationship to bread upside down.

A plant from the world of the Sonoran desert, as we all know, could not survive in the arctic, and vice versa. So also, with these two, inner habitats. We cannot acclimatize to both. I will describe them in a moment; but first let me acknowledge that in what follows I am indebted to a book, The Soul of Money, by Lynne Twist. She suggests the terms sufficiency and scarcity. Jesus’ questioners dwelt in a scarcity habitat. Jesus, himself, dwelt in a sufficiency habitat. No one can straddle the two; and in fact they scarcely speak the same language. No wonder the exchanges between Jesus and his questioners sounded like dysfunctional communication.

What sustains the scarcity habitat? A system of three basic assumptions – all unexamined – that work together like climate, soil, and typography. The first assumption says, “There is not enough.” In other words, someone is bound to end up holding the short end of the stick. It jolly well won’t be me. The second says, “More is better.” That ends up meaning: those who have more count for more; so those on the financial margin can be discounted. This second assumption also means that “even too much is not enough.” The chase for ‘more is better’ usurps our attention, saps our energy, and closes down opportunities for fulfillment. We can never arrive! The third assumption says, “That’s just the way it is.” In other words, scarcity is a given, so we might as well resign ourselves to the status quo. Put these three assumptions together and they create a joyless habitat of resignation. In it we feel small and disconnected. If you are like me, we can grow greedy, selfish, petty and fearful. We judge ourselves as winners or losers. We lose our sense of the possibilities in life; we become wary, afraid to share. It’s all about holding on to what is mine. A lack of money becomes an excuse for holding back from commitment and contributing what we do have.

Oddly enough, it matters not at all how much money one has; the scarcity mentality oppresses the wealthy no less than those on the margin. Mother Teresa once said, “We have heard of the vicious cycle of poverty; there is also a vicious cycle of wealth.” Speaking for myself, I can easily focus on what I do not have enough of and what I want to get. “I didn’t get enough sleep last night.” “I don’t have enough time.” “I don’t get enough exercise, or have enough work.” “I am not thin enough, or smart enough.” It almost goes without saying, “I do not have enough money.”

Sufficiency, on the other hand, is not an amount. It is not a state just short of abundance, or just above poverty – more than enough or barely enough. Sufficiency is an experience, an ecosystem we generate, a knowing based on believing. Dwelling in the sufficiency habitat, we can be thoughtful and generous, courageous and committed. We value friendship and love and an open heart. We can respond with awe to nature. We can risk being vulnerable and express ourselves truly and honestly. We trust and can be trusted; we feel connected to the whole world and we feel the peace that can bring. Living in the realm of sufficiency, we use our money to express our soul’s values. Sufficiency is being conscious of the power and presence of our resources – inner and outer. ‘Better’ comes not from more, but from deepening our experience of what is already here. We still strive and aspire, but not out of fear. In sufficiency we live in a sense of our own wholeness in Christ.

How do we move from one ecosystem to the other? Step one: we uncover the lie of scarcity. Step two: we note how the two systems are sustained. Assumptions sustain the habitat of scarcity; thanks to these false assumptions, we think we are living in a world where we are in constant danger of having our needs unmet. Not only are these assumptions false, but they come to us passively. Twist comments that we often speak of the “great unanswered questions of life.” We could equally ask about the “great unquestioned answers”. So then, what sustains the habitat of sufficiency? Believing. Sufficiency is the truth, yet it has been buried under a snowpack of assumptions. It takes work to shovel ourselves out from under that layer of lies; and Jesus called that work believing.

We ‘believe’ by practicing the truth of sufficiency. This is not counsel against prudent money management; we need to invest and save and spend our resources wisely. It is, however, introducing the concept of personal transformation through money. For each of us, money in any amount acts as a carrier of energy and intent. We do not need a fortune to funnel our money into the world with the force of our commitments and integrity. As we practice the truth of sufficiency, money becomes more and more a way to express the longing and fulfillment of our souls. We express our soul’s integrity through the medium of money, time and energy. Our watch word becomes, not ‘accumulate’ but ‘allocate’.

We ‘believe’ by practicing the truth of sufficiency, yes; but something drives that practice and that driving force is prayer, especially meditation. Meditation has the effect of taking us back to 1969 and standing us beside the astronauts in the first human lunar landing. For the first time, humans saw the earth from the moon. We saw, as Buckminster Fuller put it, “Spaceship Earth.” We went from being part of the system to being outside of it. Prayer, and especially meditation, takes us outside of that scarcity habitat with its sleet storm of lies; it gives us distance and a chance for truth to wipe clear our vision. Friends, Jesus was not trying to change our thinking about bread; he was trying to change the whole context we think within. He wanted to change our spiritual habitat.

This morning I simply want to tell you a true story. It arises out of today’s Gospel reading of the feeding of the 5,000. This is perhaps Jesus’ greatest miracle.  Some try to explain it away, saying the Gospel writers wrote symbolically, to foreshadow the Eucharist. Others say that Jesus’ act of generosity with the five loaves and two fish inspired all the rest to pull out their own hidden stores of food. Others accept it at face value. In any case, Jesus said of this and his other miraculous deeds, “Truly, truly, I say to you, those who believe in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will they do, because I go to the Father.” I used to think, “Who has ever healed people with the consistency of Jesus? Or fed multitudes? Or driven out demons?” Then I thought, “Yes, but he worked at the end point, so to speak, like the Good Samaritan. Since then we, Jesus’ followers, have worked our way up stream to cut off the flow of wounded people at the source, before they are wounded, or sick or needy. This story is an instance of “doing the works that I do and greater works than these will they do….”

Two years ago I visited an Episcopal school in Dorchester, Massachusetts, which is the most disadvantaged section of Boston. It takes children from fifth grade through eighth, and costs nothing. You need only one thing to be accepted: your family must be on food stamps. Unlike other private schools, applicants are not accepted on the basis of merit. Instead, Epiphany chooses students on a lottery basis – every applicant has an equal chance to get in, regardless of faith, race, culture, or cognitive profile. As they say, “We believe in the Episcopal tradition that we find God in and through each other’s presence.” There is no tuition, so every family can afford to send a child. There is a cost, however: every parent must volunteer two hours a week at the school.

The school day begins at 7:00 in the morning and lasts until 7:00 at night, with breakfast, lunch and dinner provided. Parents and siblings may join the students for dinner, and many do so. The school year lasts eleven months, six days a week, so effectively, the students are removed from their neighborhoods. In addition, the school helps families connect with health, prevention, and social services. This makes sense, since an academic program, however strong, cannot succeed if poor health prevents the child from learning. For the same reason, the school will also assist parents looking for work or housing.

When the students arrive at school at 7:00 a.m. the headmaster stands at the door to greet them. They must shake his hand, look him in the eye, and say, “Good morning, Mr. Findley.” I experienced the fruits of this training when I visited the school. In the front hall I met a boy of about twelve, who in the most natural, unselfconscious way, veered over to me, put out his hand, smiled, looked me in the eye and said, “Welcome to Epiphany School.”

Class sizes are small, usually ten to a class; and individual instruction is given as well. Though behavioral standards are high, students are never expelled from the school unless they endanger the safety of others. Even then – for that or any other reason – the child’s desk remains unoccupied. It reminds the other children that their classmate always has a place to return to if and when they are able. In this tangible way the school manifests its commitment never to give up on a child.

The students come from neighborhoods blighted with drugs, high crime, and early pregnancy rates. Many children from these neighborhoods drop out of school at eighth grade, others fall away during high school, and only a small number ever graduate. Virtually none go on to college. At Epiphany the classes are small, and some children have an individual learning program. They do their homework at school with faculty present to help them. In addition to academics, every child learns to swim and ice skate, goes to summer camp, and generally learns those skills that advantaged children take for granted. After they graduate from eighth grade Epiphany finds a place for them in a school suited to them. About one third go on to parochial schools; one third to boarding schools or one of the competitive Boston day schools; and one third to charter schools. In other words, given Epiphany’s culture of hard work, respect, and individual appreciation, these children become skilled learners. I had a taste of this when I joined a table full of students for lunch. Mr. Findley, the school head, asked them what they thought they might do in life, and one replied thoughtfully that he intended to become a medical doctor.

Epiphany continues to support its graduates after they go on to high school. A special room is reserved for them at the school, where they can come after classes, hang out, and get help from faculty on their homework. At the time of my visit the first class of Epiphany graduates had gone on to graduate from high school and all but one were going on to college. That one had chosen to enter the merchant marines.

Epiphany first started in a church basement. Soon they were able to buy a building in one of the most run-down sections of Dorchester. The building stood next to a T-stop that had been boarded up and closed because of the violence of the neighborhood. An alley bordered the building on one side, which served as home base for drug dealers and other forms of low life. By the time of my visit all that had changed. The T-stop was not only open and running, but was beautifully landscaped. The alley behind the school had been closed and sold to the school, so that it now served as a grassy play ground. Shops in the neighborhood looked prosperous. This happened, because under Epiphany’s leadership, the residents of the neighborhood organized and put political pressure on the city to respond to their needs.

Eighty students are enrolled in the four grades at a cost of $20,000 per student. To meet this cost the school relies on private, foundation, and corporate support. Volunteers also play a big part. Many of the volunteers come from area churches. The school employs nine master teachers at competitive salaries and full benefits. These in turn oversee and mentor Teaching Interns, who are young teachers, typically recent college graduates, who commit to a year (or more) of service in exchange for room, board, health care, and a modest stipend of $400/month.

The mission statement puts it this way. “Epiphany challenges students to discover and develop the fullness of their individual gifts. We seek to prepare graduates who will contribute intelligently, morally, and actively to the society they will inherit.”

I have told the story of Epiphany School at length, because it offers just one example of doing, as Jesus said, “greater works than [his own].” In other words, the school has cut off a host of ills before healing would ever need to be called for. In a less dramatic way, do we not do the same, though we offer healing of a more profound sort? We come to St. Gregory’s battered by life. We find that we are not only admitted, but welcomed regardless of merit, faith, race, culture, or cognitive profile… though perhaps we do need to be on spiritual food stamps! Moreover, we know that our place here is secure, regardless of how often we come or how much we contribute of our time and our money. Like Epiphany we, too, offer practical support. We pray for each other, we help each other with food and rides. If we can help one other find work or housing we do our best. Most important, though, we offer healing for the soul. This goes beyond acceptance into a club or community, which is good as far as it goes. But we offer tuition-free acceptance into a living body, an eternal body, with the spirit of Christ as its life blood. Nothing goes beyond such loving, total acceptance when it comes to healing; yet we offer more. For souls famished for purpose and meaning we offer a commitment to the practice of prayer. It seems to me that these words are meant for us, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you who believe in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will you do, because I go to the Father.”

These are sobering readings for a person in my position.  Anyone who aspires to be a spiritual leader gets fair warning in today’s first reading.  God expects us to nourish his flock and keep it together.  I can’t help but ask myself, am I doing that?  When I first went to Hawaii I marveled at the lush green pastures, and commented on the cattle, how well fed they were.  “If the cattle had only this grass,” I was told, “they would starve to death.”  It turned out, that grass was all water.  So I worry: am I preaching truth or am I watering it down to where God’s flock is being starved?  This morning I want to share my thinking about being a faithful shepherd.

First, I looked at the Gospel reading.  The twelve have just returned from their first missionary journey.  Although the Gospel does not name the place, we may assume that they went to Capernaum, a small village on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.  Seeing how drained they were, and knowing they would get no peace in the village, Jesus told them to pile into one of the fishing boats.  He thought they could sail to a secluded cove and enjoy some solitude.  But that part of the Sea of Galilee lies in a bowl of hills.  From anywhere on the hillside you can see a boat and guess where it is going.  Throngs of people saw the boat, recognized who was in it, and ran for that cove.  Imagine being in that boat, rounding a headland, and finding – not an isolated beach as you expected, but an early day Coney Island.

I asked myself, what drew that crowd?  Why did so many run to where they knew Jesus would be?  It seems to me that only a basic need could have drawn them – a basic need that was not being met.  We are told that food and shelter come first among our drives, but I wonder.  Perhaps we really hunger and thirst for meaning in our lives even more than we hunger for food and drink.  For instance, later in this same chapter Mark tells us that 5,000 people lingered in that deserted place long past the time they should have been heading home for food and shelter.  They ran and they stayed, because Jesus was feeding their souls – filling their spiritual bellies.

What was he telling them?  Certainly it was something different from what God complained about through Jeremiah.  Jesus drew the people; those shepherds scattered the people.  What pasture, so to speak, did Jesus lead them to, that satisfied the hunger of their souls?  What did he teach them that answered those aching questions, “Who am I?”  “Why am I here?”  Whatever he said, it seemed to me that the answer would hold good 2,000 years later, or even 20,000 years.  I’ll get to that in a moment, but first let me guess what the pseudo shepherds in Jeremiah might have been saying.

Their answers probably ran along three basic lines, focusing on the body, the mind or the emotions.  What would these answers sound like translated into today’s idiom?  First, they suggest we turn to our bodies for meaning; that is, our physical activities.  Take self care: some people become vegans, or locavors – that is, those who eat foods grown locally.  Some take up a healthful body practice, such as Yoga or Tai Chi.  It could also be the care of others.  Mother Theresa springs to mind, a tireless giver of her physical strength to help the poorest of the poor.  Whether we do these things to care for our own health or for the well-being of others, these are acts of compassion, and they truly count as basic values, not to be despised.

As another source of meaning, they suggest we turn to our minds.  Most of us feel stagnant if we are not learning and growing intellectually.  We hear about life-long learning, as if it were something novel, brought on by the pace of technological advances; but isn’t the quest for understanding innate in us?  Don’t we seek truth for its own sake, quite apart from any sense of security it gives or power?  I think of Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winner in two fields, doing research and publishing scientific papers into his 90’s.  Seeking knowledge, insight, understanding and truth also count as basic values, and not to be scorned.

Finally, they suggest we turn to emotion to find meaning.  Many of us immerse ourselves in one of the arts, either as a creator or an appreciator.  Music, for instance, can take us beyond words and thoughts.  Think of art’s power to lay bare injustices and make us feel their ugliness.  Or its power to instill hope, compassion, or sometimes, fear.  A friend of mine is an Episcopal nun, now in her 80’s, who holds a PhD in composition from Julliard.  She told me that she had to study the compositions of Bach in small doses, because she found the sheer beauty of them almost unbearable.  So immersing ourselves in art and aesthetics makes a third basic value.

These three areas of our being – body, mind, and emotion – interlock and make up the stuff of life.  They do not, however, make life worth living.  In our quest for meaning, the three answers I just gave do not add up to what Jesus must have been telling the people.  They are modern-day examples of what Jeremiah’s priests might have said.  You get a sense of how these answers fall short by asking yourself a variation on this question.  Do I live to eat or eat to live?  If I live to eat I am living with only a fraction of my whole self.  So, too, with answers centered on the body: do I live to serve or serve to live?  Doesn’t it feel somehow inadequate to say I live to serve?  To say I serve to live, on the other hand, implies something larger than my serving.  Likewise with the mind: do I live in order to learn, or learn in order to live?  Again, the second answer implies that living is larger than learning.  So too with the emotional life.  I dance in order to live; I paint in order to live; I go to the opera in order to live.  Okay.   Is there anything we live to do?  What do we live to do?

We live to pray.  We live to worship.  Let me quote Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel from his book, Quest for God.  “Prayer is not a need but an ontological necessity, an act that constitutes the very essence of [humankind].  [The one] who has never prayed is not fully human.”  In other words we pray in order to become whole.  We pray in order to realize the fullness of who we are, and that fullness goes beyond everything we do, think or feel – beyond anything we may accomplish.  Through prayer we become aware of the life of Christ in us – not an alien life, not an added life, but the real depth and breadth of our own true life.

For example, I read recently that as a young man, the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, had allied himself with the rising socialist movement in Russia, and scorned religion.  In 1849 the secret police rounded up the group of student radicals to which he belonged, and caught Dostoevsky among them.  He was sentenced to five years’ hard labor in Siberia.  In 1854 he returned to St. Petersburg, now a devout Christian.  What had turned him around?  As he told it, it was the simple faith in Jesus Christ of the people he lived among in the gulag.  Privation, illness and exhaustion kept them from almost any accomplishment other than bare survival; yet they retained their dignity thanks to their devotion.

Devotion to God, however we express it, answers the question, “Who am I?”  “Why am I here?”  Once we have that in place the rest can follow – all our activities and accomplishments in the realms of doing, thinking and feeling.  As long as none of them are being asked to carry the full burden of meaning, they become the substance of our lives, but not the goal.  They are like love letters.  Suppose I compose the most beautiful love letter I know how to write, but I do it simply for the sake of the letter itself; won’t my soul wither in time?  I need the beloved.  In all we do we need the beloved.  Not any beloved, but the beloved.  Prayer, we could say, sends the love letter.

That, it seems to me, is what Jesus was teaching the people: the proper ordering of our devotion.  He was teaching the secret of being fully human.  The secret of that strange peace and joy that stand up to any gulag.  The secret that meets God’s criteria for spiritual leadership; that is, to nourish God’s flock and keep it together, and not only outwardly as a parish community, but inwardly, also, in our soul’s integrity.  The secret is prayer.

Does prayer have the power to heal?  I believe it does; but I have lots of questions.  For instance, did Jesus heal every person, every condition, that came to him – I mean apart from this group of skeptics in his home town?  Did no one have Type I diabetes in his day?  Or pancreatic cancer?  Or clinical depression?  Even today’s reading suggests that, except for their doubt, he could have cured any disease they brought to him.  In his home town, where everyone thought they knew him, he could not overcome the power of their negative expectations.  In every other case, however, the Gospels report uniform success.  Are we meant to take that at face value, or is there perhaps something deeper going on here?

We may feel a bit scornful toward the people of Jesus’ home town.  After all, if Jesus came to Woodstock we would welcome him at least as enthusiastically as we welcomed the Dalai Lama.  We would hang on his every word; we would expect miracles; we would bring our sick to him and be open to his healing; we would be full of faith.  But is that a true comparison?  Perhaps not.  Suppose one of our town characters went away for a few months and then returned.  Picture that person teaching on the village green.  Our familiarity with him or her would water down all we heard with doubt.  Imagine going to that person for healing.  Wouldn’t skepticism outweigh faith?  Let’s be fair to Jesus’ home town neighbors; they were no different from you or me.  To overcome the numbing power of the ordinary challenges all of us.

Let me suggest an image from my recent trip to Russia to illustrate that challenge.  The churches astonished me.  I expected to see perhaps one or two here and there, but they capped the flat landscape everywhere with their unmistakable golden onion domes.  From what I experienced, though, they were sparsely attended.  So what real purpose do they serve?  Remember the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves?  Ali Baba had been cutting wood in the forest when he heard a troop of horsemen approaching.  Fearful, he climbed into a tree above a rock and hid himself.  The band of horsemen came to that very rock.  Their leader dismounted, faced the rock and said, “Open sesame.”  To Ali Baba’s astonishment, the rock opened and the men went inside.  He remained hidden until they emerged and rode away.  Then he tried it: “Open sesame!”  It opened for him and he went inside to find himself in the midst of a treasure trove – gold, silver, jewels, all sparkling in rich array.  You know the story so I won’t go on; but that moment when the ordinary rock opens onto unspeakable wealth describes the function of those churches.  Those onion domes stand as reminders to the people that this world is not all there is.  They challenge us to seek, in the midst of ordinary reality, points of entry to another realm.

The point of entry need not be a church.  Think of your daily routine, your everyday haunts.  Who expects to lean over a sink of dirty dishes and find it opening onto the unspeakable wealth of eternity?  Or pulling weeds or stacking firewood?  Could these routine activities actually be golden domes?  Points of entry?  Or must we go some place special, to a cathedral for instance, in order to experience that other realm?  How can we learn to see the golden domes right in front of us?

Learn is actually the right word.  We do not have to discover these points of entry.  That work has been done for us.  Numerous methods exist and they go by different names, but I will just speak of one of them, centering prayer.  Centering prayer is a method for entering into eternal life; and by that I mean that larger life that each of us is living right now, but for the most part, all unaware.  I want to take a moment and give you a sense of how to do centering prayer.

To practice centering prayer one sits, alert and yet relaxed, feet flat on the floor, and hands at rest in the lap.  A definite length of time is set, at least 20 minutes.  Breathing is deep but unforced.  One lets go of words, even thoughts and emotions, just dwelling in the present moment.  Naturally, thoughts arise and they can carry us away from the present moment, as if we had boarded a train.  You might find yourself in the midst of a heated argument with a neighbor, for instance, or reliving last night’s dinner conversation.  Distractions like this occur to everyone, and it may be quite a while before we are aware that we have gone off in our minds.  To help bring ourselves back, centering prayer suggests that we use a sacred word, almost like a punctuation point, to end the train of thought and reorient ourselves to the present moment.  A simple, impersonal word works best, and it need not be religious.  It could be Yes, or Peace, or Holy, or Still.  We say it silently.  The instruction is simply to sit in stillness, enjoying being present in the present moment.  Whether we sense it or not, this amounts to nothing less than soaking in the presence of God.  As much as possible, we try not to say the sacred word with a self-critical tone, as if chastising ourselves for drifting off.  Centering prayer is an exercise in loving self-acceptance, just as we are.  Even when the whole period has been marked by repeated distraction, we simply repeat the word and center ourselves again in the present moment, peacefully and without frustration.  The key instruction, however, is this: be faithful.  Make up your mind to a set period of time, perhaps 20 minutes, and practice the prayer every day.  If at all possible, do it two times a day.

Does it sound daunting?  If you can stick with it, the prayer will become its own reward.  Over time you will become aware of what Jesus called “the peace that passeth understanding;” in other words, a deep peace that makes no sense in the midst of global tensions and personal troubles.  It makes no sense, and yet there it is, a foretaste of eternal life.  At the risk of sounding too glib, let me put it this way: centering prayer is a way of saying, “Open sesame!”  Some form of prayer of this nature must have been Jesus’ practice when he went off alone on the mountain to pray.  It can be helpful to remember this when we accuse ourselves of naval gazing.  He did it for hours on end, and it seemed only to add energy to his ministry to the world.

I have gone into some detail about centering prayer, because it may explain the seemingly unbroken record of Jesus’ successful healing ministry.  Jesus, himself, was a point of entry.  I am reluctant to make the next comparison, because in most ways it is false, yet I shall.  During a period when I was hospitalized, I received morphine for pain.  The painful conditions had not changed, but I did not feel them; in fact, I felt only deep, delightful peace.  To be centered in the present moment one can feel something similar; and to be with Jesus is to be centered in the present moment most powerfully.  Perhaps Jesus could not cure every condition; but he could heal in every case.  That is, by his presence he surrounded the pain with the vastly more immediate reality of eternal life, like an ocean of cool water on a burn.

What about our own case?  Centering prayer can help in two ways, first when we pray for others and second when we pray for ourselves.  Many of us hold back from praying for healing; and we do that for the best of reasons: it undercuts our faith.  Too often we pray and nothing seems to change.  I have prayed for years for my granddaughter who has diabetes, yet she still has to take insulin every day.  I start to question God’s love and God’s power.  I can easily slip into feeling rejected.  A practice of centering prayer shifts my attention from the outcome of my prayer – its apparent success or failure –  to the process: that is, just being faithful and trusting that whether I can see it or not, God is working God’s purpose out and my prayers are a part of it.

Second, we can help ourselves with it.  Centering prayer helps, not so much by healing the condition, though that may happen.  Centering prayer helps by healing our relation to the condition, putting it in a vastly new context.  I will close with a quote from Barbara Crafton’s new book, Jesus Wept: When Faith and Depression Meet. A woman who had suffered almost her whole life from depression wrote to Barbara as follows.  “Contemplative spirituality taught me that the Holy One is never absent.  He is, however, silent.  Eventually I learned that while I may want a God who hugs me, who protects me from pain, who delivers what I need at any given moment, what I get is a silent God who turns things upside down, transforms pain, and can redeem even the worst situations.  God is not going to fix my depression.  But he didn’t cause it, either.  And he stays with me through it, loving me anyway.  I have learned that even when I feel empty, even when I can’t sense it, Love is there.  And it’s not up to me.  He is there no matter what I do or how I feel.”

Mark 5:21-43

For the past two weeks Stuart and I have been on a trip through Russia with an alumnae group from my college.  Our leader was a retired professor of economics, Marshall Goldman, whose special field of interest has been the USSR and now Russia.  In addition to his lectures he introduced us to several Russian leaders along the way, including Gregory Yavlinsky, the leader of one of the opposition parties.  If you asked me what made the deepest impression on me, though, I would have to say the people – not the special people, such as Yavlinsky, but the ordinary people we passed on the street.  I thought to myself: they look like victims; not a glimmer of joy.

You will say to me: what would you expect?  In St. Petersburg some of the older people survived the 900 day siege in World War II, forced to watch while so many starved to death.  Across the country people remember Stalin’s purges, and even afterwards, ever-present repression.  Still today they have a lot to worry about with corruption running rampant.  I agree, and yet the question remains: must human beings be the victims of history?  Must events over which we have no control force us into mental states we would not choose?  Chronic bitterness?  Resentment?  Suspicion?  Cynicism?  Are we here in the United States also at risk, given our current economic crisis, of becoming victims of history?  I cannot speak to you about any economic strategy for turning history toward a happier outcome, but I can do something better.  I can show you that we need not become victims as history rolls over us.

A brief vignette that I heard on the trip illustrates this point.  As you know, Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 with the greater part of his army, and successfully pushed through to Moscow.  When he arrived victorious in the Kremlin he found no one.  The Czar and the government had decamped into the countryside, leaving behind a burned and empty city.  Napoleon had to march back to Europe, and in the process he lost most of his army to starvation and winter’s fierce cold.  In his memoirs he wrote of that campaign, “I was victorious, but Russia was invincible.”  I’d like to turn that paradox around.  History, it seems to me, will always be victorious, but we can be invincible.  In other words, world events, large and small – what I am calling history –  may bludgeon us, and we cannot help but feel the pain and grief, and yet it need not touch our joy.  Religion exists to show us the way.

Jesus did this time and again, not only in his teachings but in the way he lived.  Today, for instance, we heard how Jesus handled a real dilemma.  To put the story in context, we have to realize that the religious and social authorities despised Jesus and his followers.  So when a man in the inner circle of power, Jairus, comes to Jesus for help, Jesus’ disciples feel vindicated.  At last!  Some recognition from the people that count!  Jesus responds at once and they set off to Jairus’s home, with the riff raff that usually accompany Jesus jostling around him as he goes.  In the midst of this hullabaloo a sick and impoverished widow sees her chance.  I am not sure how many religious and social taboos she was breaking.  Certainly a woman does not touch a man.  Possibly a sick person does not touch the healthy.  In any case, she was out of line and she knew it.  She must have thought that Jesus would not notice in such a crowd, or that the urgency of his mission would force him to ignore her breach of the law.  She was wrong on both counts.  Jesus did notice and he did care.  He cared enough to stop.

The Gospel, as usual, glides over the details; but we may imagine that Jesus did not just pause.  He really stopped and took time with this widow.  He wanted to hear her story.  He needed to know who she was in order to say the healing words, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your disease.”  Her symptoms were cured, yes, but Jesus gave her more than that; he gave healing of mind, body and soul.  As I said, all of this took time.

Imagine the disciples’ impatience!  Here was Jesus, spending precious moments with this no-account widow, and keeping a truly important man waiting.  Not only that, but every second might count if the man’s daughter was at the point of death.  And sure enough, they were right.  Word came that Jairus’s daughter had died.  If Jesus had hurried right along he might have prevented her death.  What could Jesus have been thinking?  Or maybe he was not thinking at all!

I suggest that they were right: Jesus was not thinking.  He did not have to think at that point.  Jesus dwelt in the present moment, and the present moment presented him with a human need.  Suppose he had done the kind of calculus his disciples were doing: weighing alternatives, imagining possible outcomes, asking himself, who could he least afford to offend?  Whatever he did then, he would have done with a sense of compulsion.  Doesn’t that describe a victim?  Someone driven by circumstances?  A scapegoat of history?

You may remember the so-called Good Samaritan psychology experiment conducted back in 1978.  The psychologists were testing for altruistic behavior, using divinity students for their subjects.  In the experiment the students were given some religious instruction and then, one by one, they were sent to a near-by building where each was to give a lecture.  As she or he went between the buildings, the student came across a man lying injured and in desperate need of assistance.  The man was a plant, of course.  Some of the students had been told that time was of the essence in getting to the other building; others had been told they could take their time.  Of the latter, unhurried group, two thirds stopped to help the injured man.  Only one tenth stopped to help among those who were told to hurry.  As I see it, the experiment showed how easily history – that is, outside circumstances – can make us its victims.  Can there be an alternative?  Yes.  Those who operate in the present moment – responding to what is here and now – master circumstance.  To operate outside of the present moment, which is to say, in our imaginations, our fears, and our cravings, makes us victims.

To live in the present moment, as Jesus did, depends on a well-established faith.  I am not speaking of our beliefs, but of a conviction that God has the whole world in God’s hands.  Jesus did not stop to help the widow because he knew he could always bring Jairus’s daughter back to life if she should die before he got there.  No.  He stopped because he dwelt in certainty that always and everywhere God is working God’s purpose out.  So when he, Jesus, got to Jairus’s house God would fill that present moment as well; and God would use him, then as now.  The outcome would be according to God’s will, not his.

If only we could reach such a place of conviction!  To live in the certainty that all will be well.  Not that all will turn out to our liking.  It often does not.  But if we really held the conviction that God has the whole world in God’s hands, then we could live, fully alive, in the present moment.  No matter if circumstances threaten and the tide of history goes against us.  History, like Napoleon, may be victorious, but we, like Russia, are invincible.

Friends, we do not know what the future may bring; and I do not have any bright ideas for dodging around whatever comes.  I do know this.  Our faces need not be set in chronic lines of  bitterness or resentment or suspicion or cynicism.  We can radiate joy, even in the midst of suffering.  The secret lies, as Jesus showed us time and again, in living in the present moment, not as victims of history, but as masters in the present moment.

This is simply said, and at the same time it is the whole goal of the spiritual life.  Try to stay in the present moment and it slips away faster than a greased eel.  Yet it makes all the difference to know it is possible.  I’ll close with one last image from our trip that speaks to the power of this possibility.  We visited the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.  One large canvas by the landscape artist, Isaac Levitan,  drew me strongly.  It showed a dark sky, roiled by leaden clouds.  Below it, sullen, stretched an arm of the sea.  A barren peninsula reached into the sea from the lower left corner of the frame, and out on the tip of the peninsula, grey in the dull evening light, clustered a little group of weather-beaten buildings.  I could scarcely tolerate the sense of oppression until I saw a tiny point of light: a dot of glowing orange, scarcely bigger than the head of a pin, in a window of one of the buildings.  That one tiny dot transformed the entire landscape.  So too, one tiny dot of possibility can transform our inner landscape.

Today we celebrate the Trinity.  Right off the bat you might not see a connection between Pygmy people and the Trinity.   Nevertheless, I want to tell you a vignette about a group of Pygmies.  It is meant to serve as a kind of angelus bell for the Trinity.  About forty years ago Jean-Pierre Hallet, a Belgian anthropologist, gave a lecture on the Pygmies, which I attended.  From that lecture I now remember only one curious fact.  When Hallet took a group of Pigmies out of the rain forest one day, and pointed to a human figure in the distance, they hooted with delight.  Tom Thumb!  No, no, Hallet assured them; this was a full size person, but distance made him seem small.  The Pygmies would not be convinced.  He proved his point, of course, by walking toward the person; but he in turn realized that for those who have never been able to see further than a few feet, reality appears warped.  We’ll come back to this in a few moments.

The doctrine of the Trinity gives us a paradox: God is one, it says; yet God is also three.  Where did we learn this?  Not in the Bible, though it does hint at a tripartite God.  Not in basic theology, for how could we assert anything about that which is beyond our knowing or telling?  In fact, the Hebrew Bible tells us not even to attach a name to God, let alone a description.  So, in short, why has the doctrine of the Trinity not been exposed as sheer, arrogant fantasy?  The answer is: human consciousness.

Again and again we find our consciousness structured in threes.  We identify ourselves as mind, body, and soul.  In grammar we divide verbs into first person, second person, and third person.  We name our core values as truth, beauty and love.  And in human development we move from dependence to independence to interdependence.  Trinities such as these cannot be separated, but they can be distinguished.

Take the trinity of mind, body, and soul.  Mind corresponds to God the Father; body to God the Son; and soul to God the Holy Spirit.  Leave any one of the three out and we are left with a two-legged tripod – a defective foundation for faith.  Think of a night when you found yourself under a clear, starry sky.  However preoccupied you may have been, you cannot help but stop and look up, transfixed.  How small you feel, insignificant even!  Our minds cannot grasp such astronomical distances, much less the concept of infinity.  These are God the Father moments, moments when we approach God with the mind – third person moments, when we look on God as an impersonal ‘It’ in the terrain of truth.  Speaking developmentally, this corresponds to the dependent phase of our growth: God is Other, I feel the distance between us, and how totally I depend on God for my existence.

We are more than mind, however, more than truth seekers.  Think of the friend who was there for you when the bottom fell out.  When I had the accident to my hand I did not realize people really cared for me.  Yet to this day, when I remember how many, many friends turned up with casseroles or sent cards, or visited, or phoned, I can start to cry all over again.  It went on for months!  These are God the Son moments, moments when we find ourselves heart to heart with God, encircled in God’s arms of mercy.  These are second person moments, taking place in the terrain of love and compassion.  We no longer feel dependent, but independent, able to relate to God the Son from our own base of self, person to person, in a dance of mutual embrace.

Finally, we are more than mind and body.  Few would disagree with me about mind and body, but soul?  What evidence do we have of a human soul?  I read once that scientists had carefully weighed a body at the time of death to see if they could detect any change, indicating that the soul had departed.  As you can guess, the experiment “proved” what they expected – no soul.  But what is the weight of joy?  Of meaning?  Of integrity?  The soul ties us to eternity.  Think of those fleeting moments when an uncanny awareness creeps over you – not a thought, but a bedrock certainty – that you are one with all that is.  These are Holy Spirit moments, when deep peace claims you and it has nothing to do with your current circumstances.  I call these first person moments.  We say, “I”, yet it is not ego speaking, but a self that knows no boundaries.  If mind lives in the terrain of truth and body in the terrain of love, soul lives in the terrain of beauty.  Developmentally we have reached a stage of interdependence.

When it comes to the Trinity we are not so much making a claim about God, but about ourselves as trinitarian beings.  We require the Trinity in order to worship with the whole of ourselves.  Sounds reasonable, you say, but how do we make this practical?  Remember the Pygmies.  We can scarcely imagine life in so dense a jungle that our eyesight never reaches beyond, say, a ten yard line.  Yet isn’t that typically the extent of our interior vision?  Not leaves, vines, and tree trunks, of course, but plans, worries, lists, hopes, fears, and sometimes regrets flutter in front of our eyes.  They cut off the long view, the view of God.

We could say that religion exists to bring us back to the long view.  Coming to church for Sunday worship opens up a clearing in the jungle.   It gives us space and time to draw breath and pay attention to what has lain hidden behind the mental foliage.  The liturgy leads us into the clearing in a trinitarian way.  We enter the church and face the altar, the symbol of sacrifice to God the Father.  The opening hymn is likely to have a triumphal, magisterial tone, as if God were distant.  “God the Omnipotent!  King who ordainest thunder thy clarion, the lightening thy sword….”  The readings follow, also speaking to the mind, as does the Creed.

With the Prayers of the People we shift to the body, and to the second person.  God becomes You.  Our relationship comes to the fore.  We pray for every bodily concern: help for sickness, hunger, peace and justice, or any kind of need, remembering Jesus’ words, “Whatever you do unto the least of these you do unto me.”  The confession then takes us into deep intimacy in the I-Thou relationship.  Exchanging the peace is all about the you-dimension of worship, loving Christ in each other.

The offertory marks the turning point from you to I, from the body to the soul, from love to beauty.  In the Great Thanksgiving Prayer we relive the last supper, not as observers, but as participants.  We become Christ, we become the bread, we become the wine.  Being one with Christ,  we offer ourselves to God.  In the communion we enter that mystery where there is no longer an I and a You, no longer an I and an It; no longer even an I.  We let go and allow ourselves to be swept up in the mystic presence.  The music has a contemplative tone: “Breathe on me breath of God, fill me with life anew….”

The prayer after communion brings us back to our heads and our hearts, as we try to frame with words what just happened, and we give thanks for it.  The final hymn has a tone of renewal and rejoicing.  It goes without saying that all sides of the Trinity make themselves felt in all parts of the liturgy.  If it were otherwise, liturgical worship would turn sterile.  Also, it scarcely needs saying that coming to church is not the only way to worship, though it does remind us that worship needs to be balanced, like a tripod on three legs.

Let me bring this all together now.  First, we may take it as given that human beings are made to worship.  Without worship we become less than human.  Next, the doctrine of the Trinity exists to help us worship with the whole of our being – mind, body, and soul.  Finally, the detail about the Pygmies is meant, like an angelus bell, to remind us that preoccupations can conceal the long view; or to put it another way, keep us from remembering our context – that in God “we live and move and have our being.”  In addition, the Pygmies remind us that unless we do take the long view, and a three-way view, God can become a Tom Thumb god for us: quaint, perhaps, endearing even, but nothing to build a faith around, nothing to build a life around, nothing to turn to when lightening strikes.

Let us not end on a cautionary note.  Let us rejoice, instead, that in the doctrine of the Trinity we have a treasure.  It may not be spelled out in so many words in the Bible, and yet the Bible does give us hints.  Take the prophet Isaiah, whom we heard just now.  Surely it was no mere rhetorical device when he wrote, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Hosts.”  We could make that our mantra: holy, holy, holy.