Stories to Repent By

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

February 26, 2012, 1 Lent, Year B

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Mark 1:9-15) – In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."

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Today’s Gospel reading is almost like a novel in three paragraphs, or maybe a play or opera in three acts. 

Jesus comes to John the Baptist and is baptized.  We could create the first dozen chapters of the novel or a set of moving arias about how Jesus came to this moment.

John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance.  Did Jesus have something to repent?  Repent means “turn around.”  Did Jesus anguish about a decision to turn away from something?  Maybe he did.  Maybe he wanted to repent, to turn away from the conventional course of the life he was born into.  He was an eldest son.  He was expected to work in the family craft and take over the family leadership.  Did Jesus feel a call to leave Nazareth and to leave his family?  – an act that might have been interpreted as scandalous, rebellious, even disrespectful.  Elsewhere in the Gospels we hear hints of a simmering conflict.  Some thought he had lost his mind and urged him to leave his ministry and return to his family responsibilities. 

Did Jesus anguish over the direction of his life?  Did John’s preaching galvanize Jesus’ unconventional calling to do something else?  The Gospels record that in his baptism, Jesus experienced a profound sense of identity.  “He saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’”

In his baptism, Jesus knows who and whose he is.  He senses deep affirmation and blessing.  What a profound experience that must have been.  He will not return to Nazareth as the family patriarch.  From that point he turns away from the call of earthy father and family.  He embraces a broader obligation to his heavenly Father, and a new familial identity with all of God’s children.  How exhilarating it must have been to experience that mystical sense of identity and calling.

Act II.  Jesus is immediately driven into the wilderness.  The same Spirit of God that so surely gave him blessing and identity, immediately drives him into a place of testing.  Dryness, chaos, and threat.  Aridity, loneliness, and wild beasts.  Maybe it was the desolate, rocky geography nearby that they still call “the Wilderness” in Israel.  Or maybe it was even more so an inner geography – a mental and emotional landscape of not knowing, of feeling lost, drained, disoriented, even depressed.  Maybe the wild beasts were his own thoughts and doubts and uncertainties.  Did I make the right decision?  Even if I did, what does it mean?  What am I to do?  Where do I go from here?  Who am I to become?  Is this sense of calling real, and if it is, is it something I am capable of living into?  Big questions.  Hard questions.

Forty days is Biblical language for a long time.  Jesus was in the wilderness for a long time.  Maybe you’ve been in the wilderness before.  I know I have.  Maybe you’ve been there a long time.  Maybe you are there now.  Sometimes we drive ourselves into the wilderness.  Sometimes the Spirit drives us there.  But there are angels in the wilderness.  They minister to us.  We can persevere in the dryness.  We can keep breathing in the darkness.

Act III.  It takes a crisis, a tragedy to propel Jesus from the wilderness.  His friend and cousin John is arrested.  Jesus realizes, this is his call.  John is gone.  Now Jesus must emerge and pick up the task.  He walks out of his wilderness and returns to his home region.  Now he knows what to say.  He has found his voice.  “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”  Crescendo.  End of Volume One.  The story will continue in thrilling sequels. 

There is another story, credited to Arthur Gordon and popularized by Steven Covey, about a man going through his own wilderness.   I’ve tweaked the story a bit.  It’s a story about a man who felt listless, lost, perpetually tired.  He went to his doctor, who could find nothing physically wrong.  The doctor asked the man if he could follow the doctor’s directions for one day.  “Yes,” he said.  The doctor wrote him four prescriptions and told him to spend the following day outside somewhere that has made him happy.  “Take these,” said the doctor, and he handed him four prescriptions in four envelopes labeled “9 a.m.”, “Noon”, “3 p.m.”, and “6 p.m.”

The next morning the man went to a beautiful Ozark river where he had canoed, fished, hiked and camped.  At 9 a.m. he opened the first prescription and read the words, “Listen carefully.”  So he began to listen.  At first he was distracted by the odd instructions, but then the sounds of the gurgling water began to soothe him.  He heard the birds singing from every direction.  The wind rustling the limbs and trees.  Three hours is a long time to listen.  He began to listen to the lessons the river and woods had taught him.  Go with the current.  Anticipate the boulders ahead.  Be patient for the fish to bite.  Don’t keep throwing in the same place when they won’t bite.  Be aware of your surroundings.  Watch with respectful awe.  Check the grounding of the rock before you put your weight on it.  Leap boldly when you must cross something.  Feel the spaciousness.  The silence.  There is peace.

At noon, he opened the second prescription and read the words, “Try reaching back.”  Try reaching back to what?  He thought of his childhood.  Playing in the woods.  Playing, sometimes fighting, with his friends.  He thought of those days and re-lived some of the happiness.  He recalled some of the hard and even bitter times, but seeing them now less threateningly from his adult perspective here in the midst of such natural beauty.  He sensed a presence with him throughout his past.  He sent his own adult Spirit back into those memories, to awaken or to comfort the little boy he used to be.  And in remembering, he felt a sense of security for having made it through everything so far.  He felt warmth, gratefulness. 

At three o’clock he read the third prescription.  “Examine your motives.”  This one was different.  This was harder.  He started looking back with some defensiveness over things from his past.  At first he justified his actions, they were means to an end.  But he realized, often his motives actually weren’t good enough – motives of power, desires for success or for the affirmation of others.  Maybe this was why he had been feeling so stagnant.  In a flash of insight, he realized, it’s all about motivation.  Whenever my motivation is self-centered, I’m always a bit off.  But whenever I’ve tried to serve others and to do the right thing, there seems to be something self-authenticating present.  He found himself reorienting himself toward the meaningful, toward being of service to others.

When six o’clock came it didn’t take him long to follow the final prescription.  “Write your worries upon the ground.”  He took a shard of rock fallen from the nearby bluff.  He found a sandbar, and there he knelt and wrote a few words that symbolized his worries.  He turned to walk back home.  No need to look back.  The next rain would wash the words away. [i]

It is Lent.  And the Church drives us into the wilderness.  The Church invites us into introspection – to “Listen carefully.”  We are asked to try to reach back, and to remember.  We are invited to examine our motives.  We are asked to take our worries and to give them to Christ, and then to turn around – to repent – and to walk toward our own identity and calling. 

And what is that identity and calling?  It was given to us at our baptism too, when the heavens split apart and the Spirit of God descended upon you saying, “You are my child, the beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”  What do you want to do about that?

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[i] Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Free Press, 2004 p.292.  I took considerable liberties with Gordon’s The Turn of the Tide story, including placing it in the Ozarks rather than at the ocean.

Transfiguration

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

February 19, 2012; Last Epiphany, Year B

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Mark 9:2-9) – Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!" Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

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Peter, James and John were with their friend Jesus on a mountain.  Something happened, and it seemed like Jesus glowed with a dazzling light.  What we know now, that they didn’t know then, is that for a moment, these friends saw more deeply into the spiritual reality of Jesus than they had before.  And then it passed, and they weren't sure what to do with what they had experienced.  Except to remember it.

I have an acquaintance, Earl, who takes hikes with his wife.  She is an amateur botanist and a rather outgoing extrovert.  On their hikes, she likes to point out things to Earl and tell him their botanical Latin names.  They were walking along a mountain path one day, she a couple of steps in front, when suddenly Earl was grasped by a small violet blooming by the side of the trail.  For a moment, everything stopped.  It was as though the little flower had seized all of Earl's attention.  He saw its velvet texture, the complex network of veins feeding the earth's nurture into every molecule of the plant, the rich variation of colors.  It seemed like nearly every shade of the color wheel was present in the subtle hues of this small flower.  All was silent.  All was still.  It was like everything in creation had been concentrated in the beauty and being of this little plant. 

Then, like a blink it was over.  His wife was several yards ahead of him on the path, still talking and pointing things out to him.  The violet had shrunk into its place as a small, inconspicuous flower on the side of a large mountain.  "Honey, what's this flower?"  "Oh, that's a..." and she gave the Latin name for it.  "It's a common variety of mountain violet."  But for Earl, the air fairly tingled with new and alive possibilities for some time.

There are these moments when our attention is grasped.  We all have these moments.  I think they are moments when we see more deeply into reality itself.  I believe it is important not to dismiss these moments, but rather to treasure them.  To let them be more real than other moments.  To let them shape our sense of reality itself.  Things may be more wonderful than we could ever imagine.

I wonder if I might cultivate a more open awareness, to be more available to the possibilities of transfiguration.  Artists see deeply because they are looking.  Poets hear deeply because they are listening.  The rest of us typically see and hear whatever we expect to see and hear, don’t we?  Except every once in a while, when we get surprised by transfiguration.

I remember watching my daughter Allison play soccer during those early years when kids play "herd-ball."  You know how it is, when all of the players crowd around the ball trying to kick it, little legs and feet all in one big jumble.  Away from the herd and the ball and the action of the game, on the far side, Allison ran across the field with joyful abandon, her hair flying behind her, running as though she were filled with delight at the simple freedom to run.  To me, she looked so happy, so beautiful, so free.  The image is permanently fixed in my emotional memory.  Several times when the complications of growing up left her appearing not so beautiful and not so free to my eyes, that memory could remind me of who she really is.

It seems to me that edge moments are times when the veil is sometimes opened, and we see or feel something more deeply.  Those moments when we are outside our comfort zone, when we are on an edge – when life is on an edge.  One of those memories for me was the day when our parishioner John Harrison died. 

Earlier in the afternoon, John was down here at the church delivering Christmas cards and gifts, and at least one exuberant kiss on the cheek.  His Christmas card was his own creation.  On the back side was a quote he had picked up from a recent Thomas Merton class he had been taking from Lynne Spellman.  The quote was from Merton's journals, a moment when Merton is looking out over some ordinary, familiar terrain:

The same hills as always, but now catching the light in a totally new way...in mist so that it seemed to be a tropical shore, a newly discovered continent.  A voice in me seemed to be crying, "Look!  Look!"  For these are the discoveries, and it is for this that I am high on the mast of my ship...and I know that we are on the right course, [and this line was underlined in John's light blue ink] for all around us is the sea of paradise.

"And I know that we are on the right course, for all around is the sea of paradise."  As I stood by John in the emergency room that afternoon, praying with my hand laid upon his head, the medical team working hard to bring his heart back to life, I felt a gentle and profound peace.  The sounds of machines and technicians receded away, the place became deeply still.  I looked up as if to see something, but there was nothing, except a quiet intuition that all was well.  This clamor – and even this death – had around it the gentle quality of a smiling serenity.  John’s leaving was bathed in love, and seemed to anticipate a reunion with a deep joy.  His death was for me and experience of transfiguration, even in my grief and sense of loss.  All around us was the sea of paradise.

More often there are those smaller moments, those ordinary moments of transfiguration.  I often have them here in this holy place, in this church.  When water is poured over someone, and I can almost see the heavens open and the Spirit alight and a voice speak, "This is my beloved child."  When bread is broken and the words repeated, "The gifts of God for the people of God" – bringing divine life to us.  When the sounds of feet walking toward communion or the words of a hymn touch something so deeply real.  There is gratitude.  And peace.  Deep gladness.  Wonder.

There are moments when the veil is lifted, and we see below the ordinary surface into the wondrous depths of unseen realities around us.  It is seeing with the eyes of the artist, the poet or the saint.  Life is glorious.  Or as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, "And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things."  (from God's Grandeur) 

It is possible to open our awareness of this "dearest freshness deep down things."  It takes a bit of willingness and expectation.  Artists see deeply because they are looking.  Poets hear deeply because they are listening.  What are your expectations?  What might it take to suspend your expectations just a bit? 

Look around you.  Every person here is a glorious, beloved child of God, filled with the Holy Spirit, and grafted into the Body of the Transfigured Christ.  You are simply glowing with the fire of divine life.  Can you see it?  Just under the surface, there is something dazzling.  Divine life is being expressed in us, God’s beloved.  Can you see the glory?  …the dearest freshness deep down things?  For all around us is the sea of paradise.

[I didn’t have time to write a sermon this week, so I pieced this together from older sermons of mine on the Transfiguration.  So if some of these illustrations sound familiar, well, maybe they are.]
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