Saturday, August 23, 2014

Uncaged Dogs

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas
August 24, 2014; 11 Pentecost, Proper 16, Year A, Track 2
Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Matthew 16:13-20)  When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.
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Recently I've been reading a couple of wonderful little books by Martin Laird, a contemplative theologian.  He says that when he feels "pummeled by too many thoughts" that leave him with the "punch-drunk feeling of lifelessness," he likes to go on a long walk. His normal path leads him along some open fields, and he often would see a man who walked four Kerry blue terriers in those fields. Laird says, "These were amazing dogs. Bounding energy, elastic grace, and electric speed, they coursed and leapt through open fields. It was invigorating just to watch these muscular stretches of freedom race along. Three of the four dogs did this, I should say. The fourth stayed behind and, off to the side of its owner, ran in tight circles. I could never understand why it did this; it had all the room in the world to leap and bound. One day I was bold enough to ask the owner, 'Why does your dog do that? Why does it run in little circles instead of running with the others?' He explained that before he acquired the dog, it had lived practically all its life in a cage and could only exercise by running in circles. For this dog, to run meant to run in tight circles. So instead of bounding through the open fields that surrounded it, it ran in circles."[i]

Last Tuesday night I waited in line outside the doors of the City Council meeting room as the line of speakers was too long to fit into the chambers. If you've kept up with the news, the Council was debating whether or not Fayetteville would become the first Arkansas city to adopt a civil rights ordinance protecting LGBT residents from discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations. Very good people come to different opinions about the ordinance, and the whole range of opinions was presented to the Council. I love the passion with which Fayetteville residents care about our common life and how respectfully we can engage in civil dialogue.

Outside, in the hall, a gentleman, seeing me in my clerical collar came up to me and asked, "Do you in your church marry deviants?"

"Why, no!" I answered. "Absolutely not! Everyone who is married or blessed in my church is a loving person and is committed to faithful, steadfast love."

He seemed to like that answer and relaxed into friendly conversation with me. He gave me his testimony about being saved in Vietnam when a colleague shared with him the gospel of the saving grace of Jesus Christ – all have sinned and come short of the glory of God; the wages of sin is eternal death; Jesus died on the cross for our sins; if you accept him as your Lord and confess him with your lips you will be saved. He accepted Jesus Christ that day and was saved. I could tell from his glowing demeanor how important that was to him. I told him I thought that was wonderful, and I was glad for him.

We probably would have continued to get along just fine, but my friend started to speak in a one-to-one conspiratorial way about some of these others down at City Hall that night, these unrighteous who don't know Jesus. He began to go on about unrighteousness and the wrath and the judgment of God, intended, he was certain, for many of our neighbors around us.

But think about Jesus, I said. Jesus loved everyone. He reached out to the tax collectors and sinners, the prostitutes and lepers. Jesus loved them and accepted them and welcomed them to his table and to his fellowship. Jesus wants us to be like him and to love everyone. To love our neighbor as ourselves.

Well yes, he said, I can love them, but I can't endorse what they are doing. I know the scriptures; I've studied the scriptures. "Be not deceived: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as God is righteous." (1 John 3:7)

Can you let go of the righteousness a little bit and embrace love? I asked. You know the scriptures. Galatians 5, the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and temperance. Let go of the righteousness a little and let yourself open to love, to all the fruit of the spirit – love, joy peace…

He began to shake his head. No, no. That would not do. God is a perfect God, a God of righteousness. Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees… And he continued like that on and on into the night, to my mind, running tightly round and round a little circle of sin, judgment and the salvation of the righteous few.

"Who do you say that I am?" Jesus asked. Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." …"Blessed are you, Simon…! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven." And Jesus empowered Peter with power to bind and to loose. Yet just four verses later, Peter is unable to imagine a suffering Messiah, and Jesus rebukes Peter with the stinging words, "Get behind me Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." (Mt. 16:23)

Now Peter knew his scripture. He knew the Biblical expectation of a messiah who would restore Israel, expelling the military occupiers and raising the nation to pre-eminence, creating Jerusalem as the political and religious center of the world where all nations will come to offer obeisance, as peace and prosperity reigns eternally. No room in that vision for a love that suffers unto death. Peter's dog just couldn't run that wide. And since that day, Peter's descendents in the church have often bound more than they've loosed. The church often runs in tight circles.

But Jesus' love knows no bounds. He took into himself the whole human experience, including our evil and our death, and Jesus opened his arms in suffering love, forgiving all. Then he raised our whole humanity into the heart of God and returned to be one with us in the Spirit. God has honored his prayer, "May they all be one, just as, Father, you are in me and I am in you, so that they also may be in us." We are all one with God. The field we run in our human life is infinite and eternal.

Paul puts it this way: "I have been crucified with Christ and yet I am alive; yet it is no longer I, but Christ living in me." (Gal. 2:19)

Paul looks within himself, and what does he see? He sees not himself, but Christ. "I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me." He has a sense of immediate union with the divine. He has an awareness of that union. Paul has burst out of the cage of legalism and righteousness he once lived in.

Paul also knows Christ is the universal ground of total reconciliation of all humanity. "As in Adam, all die; so also in Christ, all are made alive." He knows that in Christ all of the cages of separation are broken down: "there is no longer Jew or Gentile, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." Paul is aware of that full unitive reality at the core of his own being.

That is the unbounded truth of the infinite love of God, given to every human being and to all humanity. God is one with you. You are one with God, and thus united to all humanity. Unbounded. Uncaged. Released to run freely across the infinite field of divine love.

All we have to do us open our eyes and realize there are no cages anymore. No cages of division, condemnation, and separation, but an open field of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and temperance energized by the Spirit of God. Stretch. Look. Love. And run!
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The Mission of St. Paul's Episcopal Church is to explore and celebrate
God's infinite grace, acceptance and love.

For information about St. Paul's Episcopal Church and its life and mission, please contact us at
P.O. Box 1190, Fayetteville, AR 72702, or call 479/442-7373
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[i] Martin Laird, O.S.A. Into the Silent Land, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 19-20.

Saturday, August 09, 2014

The Calm Below the Storm

The Calm Below the Storm

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas
August 10, 2014; 9 Pentecost, Proper 14, Year A, Track 2
Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Matthew 14:22-33)  Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, "It is a ghost!" And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid."


Peter answered him, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water." He said, "Come." So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, "Lord, save me!" Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?" When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, "Truly you are the Son of God."
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St. Paul tells us today, You don't have to ascend into heaven or descend into the abyss to be in God's presence, "The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart."

Elijah, fearing for his life and hiding in a cave, experiences "a sound of sheer silence," and Elijah knows himself to be in the presence of the LORD.

After a full day of work that including the feeding of 5,000, Jesus "went up the mountain by himself to pray." When he finishes praying, he can walk across the storm.

"It hurt even to wake up in the morning."[i] That's how theologian Martin Laird begins the true story of Josh, who "looked fine, but emotionally was black and blue." Josh's depression robbed him of sleep. In the morning, "it took him twenty or thirty minutes to peel his blank stare off the wall and get off the edge of the bed. Shaving could take another half hour. [Yet] it took several years for depression's clamp to tighten its grip enough to make Josh want to see his doctor. The doctor recommended medication and then asked him, 'Have you ever thought of meditation?'"

Years before Josh had a solid practice –sitting still for a half hour, silently repeating the Jesus Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." But as happens sometimes, after a few months "his initial enthusiasm went flat. Josh replaced his regular praying of the Jesus Prayer with the TV remote; he would flip obsessively through countless satellite channels, blinking bleary-eyed at all the television programs he didn't really want to watch, yet halfhoping that the very next program would give him some sense of being alive. So he flipped around and around TV channels. Meanwhile his contemplative practice fell down somewhere behind the sofa and remained there a few years."

But he took his doctor's advice and returned to his Jesus prayer practice. A few months later, something happened. "'The Jesus Prayer quickly led me back to the monotony that had defeated me some years ago. But I stayed with it this time. One night I fell asleep praying the Jesus Prayer, then, when I awoke in the middle of the night as I usually do, I felt a cleansing warmth welling up within me. The name, 'Jesus' was a living presence streaming within me. Something inside started being freed up and I started to weep in this cleansing warmth and compassion. I wept much of the night and awoke in the morning still praying the Jesus Prayer. For the first time in many months I awoke with no anxiety but instead a reverent joy. When I went downstairs for breakfast, my sister had come over. She said, 'What's wrong with you? You look happy.' That was the first and last time anything 'spiritual' happened like that, but I'm more or less faithful to the periods of praying the Jesus Prayer. Even if there are no more experiences like this one, there is still something deeply attractive that keeps drawing me back, a sense of being just on the verge of finding life again."

It still took Josh "quite some time for medication and meditation to mop up the kicked-over bucket of a decade's despair," but Josh had found the word near to him, on his lips and in his heart, in the sound of sheer silence that is God's presence beneath his contemplative prayer.

Josh started to see dimly the trail of negative thinking that created and fed his depression. Here's some of the thinking that he began to notice.

Josh had a number of devoted friends, but inside his mind he thought he was disliked by everyone. He had these "running commentaries" in his head. If people were nice to him, a reflex commentary would whisper, They're just being nice. They don't really like me. If ever there was a conflict or a misunderstanding and Josh thought someone was angry or frustrated with him, the commentary would tell him, They're never going to speak to me again.

"By far the most crippling and subtle thought that shaped much of his lifestyle and demeanor was the thought that he didn't count. Part of that came from being a middle child" between a gifted older sibling and a younger sibling born with spina bifida. "All the family dynamics focused either on his older sibling's brilliant successes or on his younger sibling's unquestionable needs." Josh felt invisible. "He said, 'I feel cut off from people, from God, from everything, like I'm living inside a sealed envelope.' He said he knew something was wrong when he was reading the words of the Carmelite author Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, on accepting God's love: 'Let yourself be loved.' He said, 'I knew her words were meant for me, but I felt absolutely nothing.'"

As Josh practiced his contemplative prayer, an inner calm slowly came to him, letting him see into his mind. The ancient spiritual guides say that the mind is like the ocean. St. Diadochos writes, "When the sea is calm, fishermen can scan its depths and therefore hardly any creature moving in the water escapes their notice. But when the sea is disturbed by the winds it hides beneath its turbid and agitated waves what it was happy to reveal when it was smiling and calm; and then the fisherman's skill and cunning prove vain."

For Josh, contemplative prayer calmed his mind enough for him to "see the thoughts and thought-clusters that maintained [his] low mood and low energy. Being able to see the thoughts and thought-clusters in tern helped loosen the grip of depression…

"He could now see how certain thoughts would cluster together: the feeling that he did not matter to anyone caused him to withdraw, which caused him in turn to feel isolated. Feeling isolated, he lost interest in life. A depressed mood moved in on the heels of this train of thought and became a permanent resident."

In the dim light of awareness opened by his prayer, "Josh eventually became able to observe thoughts as they rise and fall. Instead of getting caught up in reactive commentary on the fact that depression is present, he can look right into the depression and say, 'Oh, look, I'm blaming again; or 'There's the thought, "Nobody likes me"'; or 'Look at how I run myself down before anyone else gets the opportunity.' Like a spider on its web, Josh is aware of anything that lands in the silk-spun web of awareness. This gets Josh out of a reactive mode and into a receptive mode of meeting inner conflict. Once Josh allows depression to be present, instead of resenting or panicking in the presence of depression, he can live in peace with the fact that depression is present, without feeling a need to comment that it should be gone if it does not happen to be gone. Josh became aware that there was something within that is untouched by depression.

"Josh had no further spiritual breakthroughs, but he still has many decades before him. While his depression has never cleared up entirely, his life definitely has more vitality and joy."

At the center of your being, you are always one with God. Below the storm of your thoughts and circumstances, God's divine presence dwells with you. Practice moving your attention from your outward circumstances and from your inward commentaries into the vast, compassionate presence which brings life and light from within. In the sound of sheer silence, the word is very near you, on your lips and in your heart. With your hand in Christ's, you too can stand still in the storm.


[i] Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence, Oxford U. Press, 2011. The quotes in this sermon come from chapter six, Creative Disintegration: Depression, Panic, and Awareness. Highly recommended book, along with his volume one, Into the Silent Land, A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation.