Dying to Live

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

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

September 16, 2012; 16 Pentecost, Proper 19, Year B

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Mark 8:27-38)  Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" And they answered him, "John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets." He asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah." And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."

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My church in Jackson, Mississippi had a school to give specialized instruction for kids with specific learning disabilities.  One of my favorite students was Joey.  In Joey’s universe, it was necessary for everyone and everything to be in a category.  He had two categories – good and bad.  Good tree, bad tree.  Good dog, bad dog.  His mother said that as she drove him to school each day, he would look out the window and make his judgment about each person they passed – “That’s a good guy, Mama.  That’s a bad guy.”  Joey lived in a dualistic universe.

                                                                                                                                   

I think Joey was just doing something that the rest of us have done, but we do it more subtly.  We all grow up in an ego-centered world.  We interpret our reality from our own self-centered perspectives. 

Now, I promise not to have a grandchild illustration every week, but last Thursday my darling granddaughter Laura went her first class of Linda Kelly’s Music for Babies and Toddlers.  Laura thought every toy, every musical instrument, should be hers.  She thought that all of Linda’s attention should be hers also. 

That’s the mindset, the consciousness, the worldview and paradigm we all grow up with.  Pretty soon we all learn, of course, that every toy can’t be ours – we learn to share.  But most of us make it into adulthood experiencing the world fundamentally from a self-centered perspective – self and other; a dualistic universe.  We say, “I am a fixed point, an identity with certain qualities and certain experiences that shape my perspective.  From this center, I experience the universe.  There is me, and there is the other.”

We even do this dualistic subject/object thing with God.  Look at the statement, “I love God.”  If you diagram the sentence:  “I” am the subject; “love” is the verb; and “God” is the object.  But that’s bad theology and bad reality.  God made it clear to Moses at the burning bush, God is no object.  “I am who I am.”  “God is the subject of all subjects, the I at the heart of every I.”  Yet we are so enmeshed into our egoic system, that we even draw God into it, making God an object.  Spiritual growth is the activity of getting unstuck from this egoic consciousness. [i]

Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” 

Jim Marion is a pretty unusual person.  He is a Christian mystic and a public policy lawyer.  He has a book titled Putting on the Mind of Christ, recalling St. Paul’s instruction in the letter to the Philippians, “Let this same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”  To follow Jesus is not just to believe certain things about Jesus.  It’s not just to admire Jesus’ example.  It is to put on the consciousness of Jesus – to see through his eyes, hear with his ears, and think with his heart. 

The mind of Christ is essentially a compassionate mind, a non-egoic mind.  A mind at peace, which is so coherent and forgiving that his coherence helps others to be more whole. 

Jim Marion speaks of the central focus of Jesus’ attention and teaching – the Kingdom of God.  The Kingdom of God is present reality:  The Kingdom of God has “drawn near”; the Kingdom of God is “at hand”; the Kingdom of God is “within you.”  The Kingdom of God is not a place you go to, but a place you are coming from. 

To put on the mind of Christ is a new way of looking at the world, a new way of being in the world, a shift in consciousness.  It is our vocation to be transformed by having our hearts awakened to “make the eternal qualities of God’s mercy, God’s grace, God’s glory and God’s love visible in time and in the world” through us.  That’s what life is all about. [ii]

I realize that what I’ve just said is awfully abstract, so let me see if I can offer an example.  I want to tell you about a nun named Petra, who is a mature example, but she can give us a picture of where we are going.

First, Petra speaks of her old life, the life of the ego.  “Looking back I see that nearly all my life, and with growing intensity, I have suffered from profound anxiety.”  Her worry, a fairly sophisticated one, was that time was passing away, and she didn’t know whether she was near to God.  We might translate that differently in our lives.  Time is passing away, and I don’t know that I’m making any difference.  I don’t know if my life matters.  I don’t know if I’m getting any better.  I don’t know if I’m becoming the person I can be.  All of that is the same issue as not knowing you are near to God.

Petra tells of an experience that changed her, and gave her “an extraordinary sense of peace, as though nothing could ever touch me again.”  She had a day when she could just stop everything; it was completely free.  “I was in the garden, and for a moment I seemed to be looking within and I saw that I was not there.  There was no ‘I’.  I can’t say more than that.  I had gone.  It wasn’t that I saw or felt God, but it was as if I were in a vast and lonely plain far removed from everything.” 

Her friend, another nun called Claire, responded about that experience:  “This is really what joy means, isn’t it?  Nothing but God – and God apparently not there . . . so that the whole soul is gift, is surrender, …your experience is of what you are, that is, an emptiness God has filled.”

Another friend of Petra’s (Ruth Barrows) writes what that looks like:

Petra is aware, more at some times than others, that all save a tiny portion of herself is absorbed elsewhere.  She is not aware of what she is absorbed in, what she is knowing or loving…  She is content just to be; life passes by, passes over her; she feels, reacts, can be hurt, cast down, groan under the pressure of life, but in another sense be ‘away,’ almost with a sense of nonbeing which can frighten at times.  Below the level of superficial questionings and doubts is an assurance, an inability to worry or be anxious; no temptation ‘to do something about it’ by way of rousing the attention, applying the mind, making an effort . . . there is only sufficient attention and room for what she has to do in her daily round. [iii]

Here’s another image for these two states of consciousness – our ego-centered perspective of being emotionally tangled in the problems and complexities of our life and this transcendent perspective of seeing with the mind of Christ.  Have you ever heard of “The Weaver’s Prayer”?  It’s an anonymous prayer, that goes like this:  “Dear Lord, my life looks like a mess of tangled threads and knots.  But that’s because I only see the underside.” 

When we look at life, our life, from our ego-centered perspective, we only see the underside – a mess of tangled problems and anxieties.  But imagine a divine perspective from the “topside,” where God is weaving simultaneously a beautiful and coherent pattern of wholeness.

We know about life on the horizontal axis:  We are born <-------> We die.  And along this timeline we have our particular experience of life. 

But Jesus reminds us that there is also a vertical axis – “a spiritual dimension of life where there are “many mansions,” many realms, and from which the energies of God and the qualities of divine life may flow into and transform this linear realm of time.”  Our horizontal axis of human, linear time is intersected by a vertical axis.  At the point of intersection it forms a cross, the symbol of God’s incarnation.  “It is precisely at this point the intersection – of time and eternity, of human and divine love, life of the material world and that spiritual realm from which flow the life, love, gifts and energies of God – it is at this point of intersection that Jesus calls those who would follow him to live their lives each and every day. 

So, every time you make the sign of the cross, you can remind yourself – here is where God touches my life.  Here and now – which is the only place where God can touch us, the only place where life happens – here and now.

The ego lives elsewhere – anxiously worrying about the future; fitfully regretting or replaying what has already happened in the past.  “By nature, the ego is never really here.  It is the heart that can live fully in the present moment.”  The heart gives us access to the transcendent realm from which flows the energies and qualities of God. 

One of the reasons we come to church is to reawaken our hearts.  To realign our perspective – orienting ourselves toward God, awakening our hearts to God’s presence, to God’s life, God’s spirit, God’s love flowing into us as compassion, forgiveness, generous acceptance, peace, hope and calling.

So I invite you today, let the mind of Christ so fill your heart, that there is no I left.  Simply be.  Relaxed.  Present.  All is gift.  Surrender to what is.  You are an emptiness that God has filled; your experience is who you are.  So die to the egoic consciousness, and let everything be received as the gift of God’s presence, here and now.  For those who lose their life will gain it.  Lose your egoic life.  See beyond the mess of tangled threads and knots, and observe everything from a new perspective – from the transcendent vertical axis, the beautiful , coherent pattern of wholeness that is the Kingdom of God – here, at hand, drawn near, within you.

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[i]  the quote, and much of the content and thought in this sermon is from my friend Tim Patterson, Rector of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Greensboro, NC.  This is from a sermon he preached September 7, 2008, which is part of our Servant Leadership curriculum.    In turn, Tim’s sermon was an attempt to condense words and ideas of Cynthia Bourgeault, adapting and paraphrasing from a summer conference and her book The Wisdom Jesus. Tim is the author of much of the program we use.

[ii] Ibid

[iii] Correspondence between Petra and Claire, as quoted in Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, Ruth Burrows, Dimension Books, Denville, NJ, 1980.  I am quoting from Jim Marion, Putting on the Mind of Christ, Hampton Roads, Charlottesville, VA, 2000, p. 206, 203, 206-7

 

How 'bout them Dogs?

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

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

September 9, 2012; 152 Pentecost, Proper 18, Year B

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Mark 7:24-37)  Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go-- the demon has left your daughter." So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. 

Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, "Ephphatha," that is, "Be opened." And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, "He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak."

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Several years ago I was in a bible study at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church.  We read this story about the Gentile woman who comes to Jesus seeking help.  She’s an outsider.  A foreign dog, as everyone in Jesus’ hometown would have called her.  I think we were reading the version of this story from Matthew’s gospel, because the disciples are involved, urging Jesus, saying, “Send her away.” 

I noticed a somewhat stricken look on the face of a woman across the table from me.  I recognized the name on her nametag.  She was one of the “Philadelphia Eleven.”  Some of you remember the Philadelphia Eleven.  On July 29, 1974 – thirty-eight years ago – eleven women were ordained priests in the Episcopal Church even though the church had not explicitly stated that women could be priests.  She was one of the first, illegally ordained women.  Eventually their ordinations were recognized as “valid but irregular,” but at the time, theirs was an act that scandalized many.  Their names were familiar to me.

Years later, at the church’s legislative gathering, the General Convention, I was meeting this woman, who introduced herself as the Canon to the Ordinary of her diocese, the Bishop’s right-hand person.  I looked across the Bible study table and saw her stricken face, this woman whose name I knew, and I heard her say, almost in a whisper, as if she spoke only to herself.  “I used to be that woman, but now, I’m one of the disciples who says, ‘Send them away.’”

I have a hunch.  I think that all of us have experienced both sides of this conversation in the gospel story today. 

I’ll bet we’ve each experienced being the outsider, the misunderstood one.  Maybe we’ve felt the sting of being judged unfairly.  In last Sunday’s 10:00 class I told a story about how stupid my teachers thought I must be when I started seminary.  I went to school in New York City, and when they heard my Mississippi accent, I just sounded stupid to their ears.  And they treated me that way for awhile.  Some people live their entire lives with people making judgments about them for no good reason.

And that’s the other part of my hunch.  I’ll bet each one of us in here has judged another unfairly.  All of us interiorize the cultural values of our environment, including the values and world views of our parents and peers and teachers, the cultural values of our region, our religion and our nation.  Sometimes those are very nearsighted values, incomplete and occasionally cruel worldviews.

When I read this story, and I hear Jesus say, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” I have an instant connection.  I remember growing up in the segregated South during the Civil Rights days.  I remember my 5^th grade teacher defending our States Rights and vilifying the “integrationists.”  I remember the fear of the other that infected my childhood. 

I think that one of the things this gospel story tells us is that it is not a personal sin to grow up with prejudice.  We all do.  Jesus inherited the prejudice of his own culture, where Gentiles were called “dogs.”  Dogs were scavenger animals, unclean and dangerous.  That’s the language he heard from his family and peers and community.  It’s all he knew.  We’ve all heard dog language.

So I think it was with innocence that Jesus said, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  But then she surprises him.  The dog speaks.  Speaks cleverly, even wisely.  Jesus opens his ears and hears her, and instantly he discards a lifetime of cultural conditioning.  Immediately he treats her like a fellow human being, with respect and compassion.  He heals her daughter. 

From this moment in Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ gives to the Gentiles the same healing and feeding and teaching as he gives to his own people.  Jesus immediately goes all the way from the northwestern seacoast of Phoenicia to the Gentile region of the Decapolis, southwest of Galilee.  There he heals another foreigner, saying “Ephphatha,” “Be opened.”  Ears are opened and tongues released. 

It is as if Jesus enacts what he has experienced.  His ears were opened to hear the grace and humanity of a woman his culture had told him was a dog.  And Jesus immediately released his tongue to speak compassion and healing to her and to other Gentiles. 

He is our model.  We all grow up near sighted and hard of hearing.  We all grow up with prejudice and bias.  And we do so in a state of naïve innocence.  But as soon as we have the opportunity to see the humanity of one whom we had thought to be a dog, instantly it’s time for us to change.  Jesus shows us how to change.  And there is so much that we need to change.

How many cultural messages of unworthiness torment so many people in this world and haunt them like demons. 

Today’s reading from James indicts an economic pecking order that shames the poor and feeds the false pride of the wealthy:  For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, "Have a seat here, please," while to the one who is poor you say, "Stand there," or, "Sit at my feet," have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

Our reading from Proverbs echoes quite a few other passages of scripture that say that God has a cultural bias.  Do not rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate; for the LORD pleads their cause and despoils of life those who despoil them.  There are so many places in the Bible where God takes up the cause of the weak and impoverished that theologians have coined a phrase for it.  They speak of “God’s preferential option for the poor.”  They say that God takes sides, and that God stands up for the poor.

James actively accuses his fellow Christians.  If another person lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?  So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. 

These are calls to change.  Calls to ministry.  Calls to action.  Calls to advocacy. 

One of the things that pleases me about this church is that we have taken action, created ministry, and exercised advocacy on behalf of the hungry and poor.  There are tables in the Parish Hall today witnessing to these activities.  We also have responded with compassion and advocacy on behalf of many of those whom some treat as dogs in our culture.  We have been a church that has acknowledged the full humanity of our GLBT neighbors, and we are working to extend hospitality toward our immigrant neighbors.  These things are not without controversy.  But I think they are faithful to the example of Jesus; they embrace the appeal from James’ epistle:  “mercy triumphs over judgment.” 

We are all still hard of hearing; we all still have our blind spots.  We are always in process.  But we can experience “Ephphatha.”  When we feel like we are the victim – when we are treated like a dog – we can let Jesus’ compassion drive out the demons of insecurity and hurt.  And when we stand in judgment or seek to “send them away,” we can be open to Jesus’ inspiration to give us courage to change.  For Jesus is still doing everything well; he is still making the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.

“Ephphatha!”  “Be opened!”