B
Creation 4 Mountain BFC 2015
Isaiah
65:17-25
October
4, 2015
 |
| Photo taken by congregational member, Edward Barta |
Our tradition begins with a shepherd
who turns aside from his regular shepherding duties, to investigate fire on the
mountain. Moses makes what must have
been a difficult journey, filled with danger and struggle, up the mountain to
have an encounter with God. He is
transformed by the experience. This fire
on the mountain is at the heart of religious mystical experience and may be why
many of you are here. Benedictine monk,
David Steindl-Rast explains, “’Religion,’ he says, ‘is like an erupting
volcano: the lava flowing down the sides of the mountain – fiery, powerful,
dangerous, gushing forth red hot from the depths of mystical consciousness.’
But the stream of lava quickly cools off. A couple hundred years pass, and what
was once alive is now dead rock, devoid of all traces of life. ‘Doctrine
becomes doctrinaire. Morals become moralistic. Ritual becomes ritualistic . . .
All are layers of ash deposits and volcanic rock that separate us from the fiery
magma deep down below.’”[1]
Steindl-Rast claims that every
religion begins with a powerful mystical insight—a deep connection or communion
with the Ultimate Reality. In this time
when the Pew Research study report tells us that more and more people are
identifying with no religion at all, Rabbi Sharon Brous believes that we are
called to a holy climb and excavation to recapture that fire. As I know
it to be true of this historic, prophetic, and courageous congregation, Rabbi
Brous knows that those fire on the mountain experiences can be found in her
congregation:
I know that many of you
have had such an experience – maybe at Yosemite. Perhaps in labor and delivery,
or the ICU or even at the breakfast table. I hope at least a few have had one here,
at some point in our davening together, [in this Jewish Ikar congregation] . .
. . When the moment comes - pure and unexpected and powerful – you desperately
want to hold onto the feeling. You want to find a way to feel its
reverberations, its power, even long afterward. So you create a container –
call it a religious system - that you hope will hold the sacred experience.[2]
What
has happened, Rabbi Brous believes, is that too often the container becomes an
obstacle to our way back to the fire on the mountain. It becomes no longer a journey, no longer a
pilgrimage, no longer a climb, but coated with layer after layer of hard, dead
rock. The lava cools. The container is no longer a vehicle toward
surprise and spiritual power and soul.
Religion becomes rote and perfunctory, unwilling to climb, scratching
the surface of ash—no life, no passion, no spiritual challenge. We intone the ritual without the climbing,
and danger, and sacrifice.
Rev.
Scotty McLennan, the Tufts University chaplain who inspired Doonesbury
cartoonist Gary Trudeau’s character, Scotty Sloan, wrote about the spiritual
journey as a pilgrimage up a spiritual mountain. McLennan suggests that, for the most part,
all spiritual journeys end up at the same summit of the spiritual mountain. McLennan believes though that spirituality
these days has us spending quite a bit of time at the base of the mountain
deciding which path we will take. Few of
us reach the summit, ever reach any spiritual depth, McLennan suggests, because
we want to explore each and every path at the base of the mountain. We do not plumb the depth or scale the
heights of our own tradition, rather we sample at the snot shields of what I
call the “progressive buffet.” Afraid
something of ourselves might become a part of the buffet, we sample at a safe
distance, rarely investing, rarely scaling the heights of our own
tradition. We become intrigued by a
little of this and a little of that.
I pastored a UCC church several years ago that
wanted to teach their children one week about Tibetan prayer flags, the next
week the Islamic hajj, and perhaps
the following week the Bahai want to recognize the prophet God gives us in each
age. “Pick a path and start walking,”
McLennan advises, whether that path be Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, pagan,
Bahai, or any other great tradition.[3] Get up the mountain! Stop sampling the “progressive buffet” around
the base of the mountain! Like the
generations who are abandoning traditions that are cold and hard and ash, we
should all recognize that faith is to be abandoned when it offers nothing but
dead rock. “Religion left to itself,”
writes Steindl-Rast, “turns irreligious.”
Mythologically,
mountains are those places of ascent and aspiration. Much like the Scripture verse Shametrius read
to us from the book of Isaiah, the mountain represents the community’s, the
nation’s, ascent and aspiration to not only the God who is transcendent and
beyond but to the character of God which is transcendent and beyond. In the passage before us, carnivorous
animals, wolf and lion, predators, often symbolizing the appetite of advancing
empires in Scripture now lay down with prey.
Meanwhile, an oppressed people who for so long worked for the
advancement and enrichment of others in the Babylonian Exile, now experience
God’s shalom as they build homes they themselves inhabit, grow food they
themselves eat, raise children they themselves get to see prosper and mature in
the world. That is the mountain the
Living God now invites them to climb, to return to the fire on the mountain
experienced by Moses and the Children of Israel.
In the
sentimentalized, "feel good" spirituality of current North America,
the rigor and grit and sacrifice to find that fire on the top of the mountain
are often forfeited for a dabbling around the base of the mountain. Sometimes the sentimentalized, "feel
good" spirituality has us trying everything under the sun so as to avoid
walking the hard road up. We practice a little Buddhism, try a little Native
American theology, and join in celebrations of other faiths and cultures to
satisfy our intellectual curiosity. All of these traditions are deep and carry
with them deep meaning, but we never go much further than "a little of
this and a little of that" to avoid the deep soul longings required of any
soul journey.
I agree with many Christian historians that the decision by
Constantine to make Christianity the official religion of Rome and turn our
faith from a movement to an imperial institution, the Way of Christianity to
the creed of Christendom, Rome to the Holy Roman Empire, was a transformative
moment. When Constantine made that
declaration, many wise and courageous people of faith began the monastic
movement by turning away from imperial power to fierce landscapes like the
desert, the island, and the mountain. These faithful people knew that Christianity
could not be Christianity without the rigor, grit, and struggle which revealed
the wild love of God.
In writing about the way of these monastics, their spiritual
path, Laura Swan writes of a word that I had never before heard of in all my
reading about spiritual practice, apatheia.[4] A word
with such length and breadth cannot be easily defined. Apatheia has been interpreted as
"purity of heart", "detachment and solidarity", "freedom",
"indifference", "disinterested love", "love without
seeking reward", and, finally, "apathetic love."
As Laura Swan shares, apatheia is about developing a listening
ear to hear God voice speak below and around the din of so many voices in our
culture. Apatheia recognizes that we will need freedom from that din so that
we may have freedom for the voice of God.
The early monastics looked at the geography of the mountain and saw that
spiritual geography. The aspiration toward and the ascent up the mountain had
incredible gifts, a fire, to bring as a fierce landscape. For those gifts to
appear, however, one had to stay with the rugged geography of the mountain for
a time. Though we may entreat this fierce landscape, it will remain. The
mountain does not move because we bargain with it. Its fire is indifferent to our pleas. Its
love, its gifts, are offered in struggle and sacrifice as we leave all the
unnecessary attachments and baggage behind. The mountain or desert is not
moving as we might in a co-dependent relationship.
Love is this way. It does not offer its gifts quickly. Love
gently and slowly reveals its nature over time. Time must be spent with love.
And the height of God’s love will not jump or shout or move in an effort to
appease. Through our spiritual practice we move, and live, and
love because that is who we have become down to our last red blood cell. We do
not practice to move God. We practice to hollow out our core, empty ourselves
of excess baggage and attachment to the things that distract and delay us, so
that we become meditation, prayer, fasting, and finally, love. And as we become
those things, in our freedom, we not only ascend to and aspire to the fire on
the mountain. That fire gets in us and
becomes who we are.
Rev. Henry Delaney, who was responsible for transforming
boarded up crack houses in Savannah, Georgia, would often say, “I want to get
people involved in what we’re doing.
It’s like putting a poker in the fire.
After a while, the fire gets in the poker too.”[5] Hear within that quote a willingness to risk,
work hard, to scale the mountain in struggle.
In her book, The
Silent Cry, Dorothee Soelle writes about Rabi’a al-Adawiya, a female
Sufi mystic from Basra, in what is modern day Iraq in the 8th
Century. Soelle shared how Rabi'a practiced apatheia. She once walked along a street in Basra,
holding a torch in one hand and a pail of water in the other. Asked why,
she replied, “I want to put fire to paradise and pour water over hell so that
these two veils disappear and it becomes plain who venerates God for love and
not for fear of hell or hope for paradise.”[6]
In the end,
that is what apatheia is all about. It is the sum of
solidarity and detachment, prayer and fasting, that leads to a freedom to love
for love's own sake. We love God not for return or reward but because, in
our climb, we have fallen in love with the character, the very essence of God. In our ascent and aspiration, we become the
very fire on the mountain we seek. Love
becomes who we are down to our last, red blood cell. As with Rabi'a, love is
disinterested, seeking to neither purchase heaven nor avoid hell.
Aldous
Huxley, humanist, spiritualist, author, pacifist, once wrote: “God, if I worship Thee in fear of hell,
burn me in hell. And if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me
from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine
everlasting Beauty.”[7] This is what the ascent
up the mountain does. It brings texture
and depth to our faith, and strips us of all false pretenses for our attempts
to make the climb. The rewards appear to
be so slowly and ingloriously given that those who are in it only to dabble
quit the climb and are not able to train their eyes on revealed beauty.
With both
this investment to the climb and our lack of attachment to the reward, our
hands now become open to the world God
is co-creating with us. Our hunger and
passion strains for the very character and integrity of God. And our hope is found in looking around, on
this World Communion Sunday, to find that there are others who are climbing
this same mountain: struggling,
sometimes suffering, to live authentic religious lives. Our climbs give hope to other climbers. And their climb gives hope to ours. And we find that there some who are willing
to mark the ledges. There are others who
are willing to give us a leg up. And
still more people, who in their creativity and ingenuity, make the climb joyful
and thrilling. We, as a people, as
Steindl-Rast wrote, help to make religion religious again.
From the
fire on the mountain, God calls out to Moses and the Children of Israel. We hear that God cares deeply about human
suffering and that the cries of the most vulnerable are heard. We hear that God wills our journey from
suffering and bondage to freedom and liberation, from degradation to
dignity. We hear that God enters human
history to collaborate with humankind, in humankind’s commitment and
dedication, to bring about freedom, liberation, and dignity. And finally, what we hear in that fire on the
mountain, is that though there may be times of incredible struggle and
suffering, God will be present with us.[8] We will not be left alone.
So let us,
together on this World Communion Sunday, begin to excavate, to find our
mystical core. Let us chip away at the
hard, dead rock as we make our climb to find the fire on the mountain and make
our religion religious again. Together,
it is time for us to stop circling the base of the mountain and time for us to
make the climb to recognize the fire on the mountain that is at our mystical
core. Let us no longer stand for a
Christianity that values container over the core, the rock and ash over the
sacred fire. Let us dig beneath the
edifice and artifice to rediscover and then live out the greatest part of our
tradition, born out of fire on the mountain.[9] It is time for us to get up the mountain.
Amen.
[1] Rabbi Sharon Brous, “Fire on the Mountain,” IKAR Sermons, October 4, 2014, https://www.ikar-la.org/podcastyk5775/ , quoting
David Steindl Rast, The Mystical Core of Organized Religion and Lunch With
Bokara.
[2] Brous, “Fire on the Mountain.”
[3] Rev. Scotty McLennan, Finding Your Religion: When the
Faith You Grew Up with Has Lost Its Meaning (San Francisco
[4] Laura Swan, O.S.B., "Wise Elders
and the Desert Traditions," Obsculta!
[6] Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2001), p. 35, quoting Annemarie Schimmel, Mystiche
Dimensionen des Islam: Die Geschichte des Sufismus [Munich, 1992], pp.
65-66.
[7] Ibid, p. 36,
quoting Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New
York: Harper & Row, 1945), p. 102.
[8] Brous, “Fire.”
[9] Ibid, quoting almost word for beautiful word from
Rabbi Sharon Brous.
No comments:
Post a Comment