Forever gone, a huge loss by my way of thinking, is the Native American Wintu language. The Wintu language defined a people who were wholly connected with their environment. There was not right nor left when speaking about their hand or foot. They used cardinal directions. When the Wintu would be walking alongside the river, the hills would be west, the river to the east, and a mosquito bite on their west arm. When they would return back alongside the same path, the hills to the east, the river to the west, and now the mosquito bite on their east arm. It was a way of tracking their relationship to the wider world—the trail, the river, the hills, the horizon, the stars. God’s good earth is stable. It is we who are contingent. We are always moving through a part of a wider ecosystem—a wider part of God’s economy on this good earth.[1]
In Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, she describes the “getting lost” as the unknown appearing before you. It is not that the unknown itself was lost. Indeed but that we are risking, learning, and growing as we experience that which is undiscovered to us, that which is new. And so it is incumbent on all of us to “get lost.” For, glory hallelujah, the universe is larger than our knowledge of it.
Although it was the great explorer, Daniel Boone, who said, “I never was lost in the woods in my whole life, though once I was confused for three days.”[2] Boone was saying that he knew how to even map the unfamiliar and the new, the terra incognita, to get back to sources of life and direction. Boone knew that being in new, unfamiliar territory was not necessarily a scary thing or without resource.
There is the Hawaiian biologist who intentionally gets lost in the rain forest as a way of discovering new species.[3]
I asked the question from Meno, the philosopher, at the start of this sermon series, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” We find delight and joy being on that aporetic journey, full of perplexities, unknowns, and questions that is walking in the wilderness, to know the newness of landscape, God, and ourselves.
By walking in the wilderness and hiking up the mountain, we experience a God who is more wild than we could have imagined. The wilderness is the soul’s journey of leaving behind the baggage that does not serve us, dropping what is not Divine, and of learning of the new sustenance, the wandering that makes us aware of the need for ascent. The mountain is the soul’s journey of ascent to values that serve ourselves, our community, and the world, of knowing that we are more hardy and stronger than we ever could have contemplated without the journey. This is the journey we have been on. We learn of a love that is more fierce than we could have imagined. We find that both God and we, as a community of faith, are more free than we could have ever imagined.
Our Jewish sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins, just celebrated this past September the start of the Jewish New Year and the High Holy Days beginning with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur. As a backdrop to all Jewish story and theology, is the seminal story we are studying—the Exodus, the birth story of the Jewish people. With Rosh Hashanah the Jewish people declare, “Today we celebrate the birthday, the creation of the world.” In the Exodus story, the Jewish people celebrate coming into being, their birth as a people, when they were delivered and saved from bondage, slavery, and oppression in Egypt to becoming the free people that God intended. In celebrating the birthday of the world, each Jew partners and participates with God every single day in the creation of the world. That partnership and participation begins when a Jewish person chooses how they are to live in the world.[4]
The creation, the birth of the world, happens in a grand collaboration with God as the Jewish people choose not to live as enslaved but free people. In contrast to how our tradition has seen sin and forgiveness, as too often grace for a fallen morality, the original sin coming out of the Exodus story is to live like Egypt or slaves in Egypt and not as those unique and peculiar co-collaborators with God in the creation of the world. The Jewish people are sinful lose sight of what delivers and saves them—so that they might live as free.
What does deliver and save us? After having walked in the wilderness for some time, The Children of Israel have been waiting at the base of the mountain for forty days. Forty of anything is the way the Bible says a good, long time. Moses has been gone a good, long time. And not unlike the loss of a leader from many movements, once Moses begins to fade from memory the movement's vision begins to fade as well. The values for this new movement have been delivered in the form of the Ten Commandments, but God has not been delivered to them. This God remains full of awe, wonder, mystery, and freedom. God commands the Children of Israel not to make any graven image or idol, anything which might suggest you can control the Living God and make the Living God do your bidding.
But the absence of Moses, leads to the loss of the vision. The people grow impatient and want God to act on their timetable and at their will. They then turn away from the leader to the clergy and ask Aaron to give them a god not so full of mystery, awe, wonder, and freedom. The clergyperson, as always, more worried about keeping the congregation happy and being liked, rather than leading the congregation down the difficult path God is calling them, acquiesces. Aaron tells them to bring all of their gold, all of their wealth, so that it can be melted down and made into a golden calf. Aaron is bullish on the future of Israel.
Understand. This is not a competing god Aaron offers the Children of Israel. Aaron tells the people that this golden calf is the god or gods who delivered and saved you from Egypt. The golden calf, a symbol of wealth, male strength and virility, is the thing that saved you from Egypt. This, this thing, is Yahweh.
Theologian Dan Clendenin writes, “Idols lure us with powerful illusions and misplaced hopes. They make seductive promises. These false gods come in all sizes and shapes. They promise much but deliver little. Our personal gods are so petty and pathetic that they would be laughable if they weren't so insidious and corrosive.”[5] But national idols. National idols. “Personal idols are child's play compared to national idols,” Clendenin states. “[National idols] wreak far more violence upon humanity than our household gods.”[6] They screw up our priorities and displace our devotion.
God knows. God knows that this misplaced devotion will only chain the people to illusory idols and unhealthy relationships with “things.” And God is ticked. God interrupts the conversation with Moses to send him back down the mountain knowing, like a passionate lover, that the people have betrayed the relationship. God is hot with intense passion. The people have been found in bed with their own gold.
This Exodus narrative foreshadows the relationship God will have with the nation of Israel throughout the Biblical story. The mysterious and living and free God wants to keep the Children of Israel delivered and saved and free. In response, the Jewish people and their kings vacillate between this alternative vision of how they shall live in collaboration with the God of mystery, awe, wonder, and freedom or the values and vision of every other nation that seeks to save itself with idols of wealth and war.
Who and what delivers and saves us? Are we free enough that whatever wealth or money we have is a tool for mission and ministry in collaboration with God in creating the world? Or are we enslaved to our wealth and money in such a way that we are not the peculiar and unique people God intended us to be? Are we free?
Again, that journey always begins with the word, “remember.” Thirty-six times in the Torah, the Jewish people are enjoined to remember the Creator of the Universe and how that Creator acted. “Remember, you were once immigrants, strangers, slaves in Egypt.” This is how you should be in relationship with the world.
In Jewish tradition and mythology, remembrance is a spiritual practice which leads to action. Several different Jewish rites and traditions are about providing cues, mnemonics, prompts to remember God’s acts of awe and wonder as a way of then determining how one should act in the world. Among many practicing Jews, strings are found at the end of their garments as one of those prompts. In ancient times, one string, signaled a particular prompt. That string is the color of blue, the shade, the rabbis say, that would lead the Jewish people to recall the sea and the sky. Remember the sea and the sky and how they move you in the world.
When we look at the vast expanse of the sea, perhaps when we are lucky enough to sit on a cliff overlooking the Pacific as the water crashes into the rock, spraying everywhere, our bodies tell us what our reaction is. We catch our breath as we say, “Ahh.” We breathe in awe at the enormity, the expansiveness, and the utter possibilities that come with the sea—tides totally unbidden by human beings. We cannot control the way that there will always be rogue waves. There will always be water that will torment and torture human beings because we cannot contain the power of the sea. We look at the sea and we remember to live in awe.
The blue string also prompts us to remember sky. What does the sky remind us of? What does our body say when we have been locked up inside for far too long? When we finally are released to look up for the first time at the great expanse of the sky, we look up and say, “Wow.”
The sea which is the great inhale, awe. The sky which is the great exhale, wonder. An inhale and exhale of breath like the name of the Jewish God—Yahweh. So the ancient Jews would wear blue strings at the end of their garments to remember how to live life—in awe and wonder.[7] It says that the possibilities, the aspirations of life are limitless. And we use that in our language. “Let’s blue sky this. Let’s imagine what is possible if there was nothing to contain us.” We are laborers on a project that we will not see completed in our lifetime. We live in the midst of a half-done project, a project in which we are collaborators with awe and wonder. We remember the world in awe and wonder.
And in remembering to look at the world in awe and wonder, we are moved to gratitude, knowing that we have been blessed. We remember that we are blessed by the Creator of the Universe, the Living God, and are called to act in blessing ourselves. We are blessed by the mysterious, awesome, wondrous, and free God. In freedom, we co-create the world by extending blessing back out into creation.
What the stories from Exodus and Wilderness teach, however, is that though right relationship with God and the world is found in awe and wonder, we find ourselves forever fearful of living in a world so undefined, uncontrollable, and uncontained. We want a God or a symbol of God that is easily manipulated, at our bidding, contained, and controlled. We narrow the possibilities. Gold and wealth no longer become tools for mission and ministry. Gold and wealth become an idol, an end to themselves. We turn from the sea and sky to worship what is of our own creation.
As we come to a close of this sermon series, I know very well that St. John’s United Church of Christ must learn the love of God as it walks in this wilderness of pandemic and loss. We say that we will seek to be a people of God that affirms the blessings of a God who is not to be manipulated and controlled but full of mystery, awe, wonder, and freedom so that we might be free to be a blessing to the world.
I have heard the generation that holds the wealth and gold of churches referred to as “the builders”, the ones who invested in the church building and have historically provided for the annual budget of the church. As members of a Christian community, however, author Paulo Coelho has said that the term “builder” is inappropriate. “Builders” are those who act in a way that construct edifices to their own glory, to capture and concretize the Divine. Builders, Coelho writes, build and are done in their creating and collaboration. Coelho urges us to be gardeners. Gardeners are never released from the demands of the garden. By the constant demands of the garden, the gardener’s life becomes a great adventure.[8]
While God invited the Children of Israel to collaborate in the creation of the world, as gardeners in a great adventure, the Children of Israel, long in the wilderness, long awaiting Moses at the bottom of the mountain, choose to become builders of the golden calf to contain and control a God who remains, to this day, mysterious and free. Stewardship begins with that single string of blue, calling us to live in such a way that we remember the awe (“Ahh”) and wonder (“Wow!”) of God and live and give in gratitude.
We are moving to that time when we move to that time of Advent, when John the Baptist begins the movement of God’s Beloved Community out in the wilderness eating locusts and wild hone.. He tells them that they, as people made in the image of God, are not to be contained and controlled. May we all hear the call, in awe and wonder, to receive the vast, limitless, uncontainable blessings of God so that we as a community once again return to the demands of the garden of downtown Jackson, the State of Michigan, and the world God forever seeks to garden with us. So that we may know a God who is more wild and free and fiercely loving. So that we may be known as a people and congregation who are more wild and free and fiercely loving. Amen.
[1] Rebecca Solnit, A Field
Guide to Getting Lost (New York:
Penguin Books, 2005), p. 17
[2]Ibid, p. 13.
[3] Ibid, p. 21.
[4] “Interview with Rabbi
Sharon Brous,” On Being with Krista
Tippett, September 2, 2010
[5] Professor Daniel
Clendenin, “Journey with Jesus: Weekly Notes to Myself.” October 12, 2008. http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20081006JJ.shtml.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Rabbi Sharon Brous,
“Like Waves and Wind,” IKAR LA Podcast,
June 26, 2014.
[8] “Interview with Paulo Coelho,” On Being with Krista Tippett, August 14,
2014.
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