Sermon, Exodus/Wilderness Series, "Integrating what we learn in the Wilderness," November 8, 2020

A Exodus 9 SJUCC 2020 

Exodus 20 

November 8, 2020

You may remember last week I shared with you teaching that accompanies the Exodus story—the Wilderness.  The Wilderness story is a Wisdom tale, relates not how life is to be, but how life is when we have lost our familiar landmarks, forsaken our familiar food, and left behind our familiar roles.  Freedom is no easy path, the Children of Israel learn.  The Wilderness leaves them whining and complaining, “Moses, we want to go back to Egypt.”

What we learn from the Wilderness story today, however, is one of those big life lessons.  More times than not, God does not teach us how to live in liberation and freedom when we remain in slavery in Egypt or after we have crossed over the Jordan River into the promised land.  We learn how to live in the promised land, in the inbetween, when we walk in the wilderness. 

There is something about being dislocated and having to depend on O/others for our well-being that offers us a change in perspective, an opportunity to see the world in a different way.  I have seen this reality on any number of youth group mission delegations I have taken.  Leaving home, the dislocation, is important because we realize that we are much freer than we ever imagined possible--to be who we want to be, to be who God wants us to be--to incorporate a broader vision that would not have been possible just by staying home.  As any of you who have been on youth mission trips may have learned or taken trips to places like Back Bay Mission, the border at Nogales, or my favorite place, Chiapas, Mexico, dislocation and walking in a new place can transform your life.  You return home to see the everyday and the most mundane of your life at home differently.  Your whole value system is up for grabs.  Your return home leaves you disoriented and trying to figure out how you will incorporate your new knowledge and wisdom with your old life.  You may have shed your skin seeking something deeper, more integrated with the rest of the world.

Folks in the mission field refer to this as re-entry.  Those who have been on mission delegations to places like Haiti, Zaire, Zimbabwe, or stay for lengths of time on a Native American reservation in our own country, probably know what I am saying.  When you have been to a place with such basic need, such gut-wrenching poverty, walking into a grocery store with the almost obscene choices we have threatens to rip the fabric of your soul.  And we have to decide whether the ethical code we learned in the Wilderness, the life rules, the deeper truths, will hold in the homeland, a place of abundant milk and honey and . . . potato chips.  Can we integrate, the deep truths of life and liberation,  how we might maintain our freedom, what we learned in the Wilderness, or do we let it pass like it was a dream?

I have seen members of a youth group go to seminary because of such mission delegations, a work camp, or church camp experience.  At the same time, I have also seen youth try to distance themselves from such experiences, even the church.  So that they can return to their “normal” lives?  They exchange depth of soul for potato chips. 

Sometimes those mission delegations, for the first time in our lives, integrate us into the real world, into a world where we really see the world as God sees it . . . with poor and hurting people who are also strong and resilient.  For the first time, we might actually see ourselves connected to them.  And we return back to our homes, do re-entry, trying to remain integrated.  As we move further and further from that mission experience, it becomes tougher and tougher to integrate it into our lives.   Strong and resilient poor fade from our memory and we begin to dis-integrate.

Do we remember, remain integrated with our new experiences and new relationships, or conveniently leave those experiences and relationships behind because the culture or peer pressure makes it easier to forget?  Do we dis-integrate? 

In the same manner, do the Ten Commandments, given to the Children of Israel in the Wilderness, hold sway when David and Solomon reign over the greatest Empire on earth, when Israel is the most powerful nation? Can the Children of Israel continue to live integrated, with integrity, depth of soul, when they are the world’s number one super-power?  The whole David and Bathsheba story asks that very question.   Shall David, the King of Israel, be exempted from coveting his neighbor’s property?  The very person David is supposed to remember and protect as king, Uriah, the stranger, the immigrant, the alien, even more so his wife Bathsheba are the people David has raped and killed.

Remember, you were once strangers or slaves in Egypt.  Said 36 times.  And David forgets the lessons of the Wilderness.  He loses his integrity.  He dis-integrates.   In later Biblical story,  prophets believe that Israel was conquered and forced into Exile because what God gave the people in the Wilderness, that depth of soul, the rules for living the promised land, the Law, the Ten Commandments were forgotten.

We do that forgetting from a very young age, don’t we?  “God, I promise, God, if you just get me to the promised land,  help me make the junior high basketball team, the cheerleading squad, have that boy go out with me, cure my aunt, let my uncle live, spare ME!, I promise, I will be devoted, I will stop, I will do . . .”  And maybe, by chance, God as fairy godmother works this once, and the glass slipper fits, and once we are safely perusing our silver, we forget what life was like when we were sweeping cinders in the wilderness and miss out on what God would teach us.   We forget at a huge cost.  For the Wilderness is about shaping us for life in the promised land.

Some time ago, Nelson Mandela, the same person who went from political prisoner of South Africa to president of South Africa, wrote his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, with help from author Richard Stengel.   Stengel shared in a Time magazine article about Mandela: 

 

Ultimately, the key to understanding Mandela is those 27 years in prison. The man who walked onto Robben Island in 1964 was emotional, headstrong, easily stung. The man who emerged was balanced and disciplined. He is not and never has been introspective. I often asked him how the man who emerged from prison differed from the willful young man who had entered it. He hated this question. Finally, in exasperation one day, he said, "I came out mature."[1]

 

I came out mature.  Though the Wilderness may be more about just real life than what God wills, what we learn from this story over and over again is how we are to live our lives in the promised land by walking through the Wilderness.  The Ten Commandments, the Law, are given in the Wilderness.  We come out mature.

That is why I bristle a little bit when someone tells me they like the God of the New Testament better than the God of the Old Testament.  To me, the God of the New Testament seems almost unattainable while the God of the Old Testament seems much more real, seems about some of the true life grit I experience. 

And the Ten Commandments passage, here in Exodus 20, is one of those Hebrew Scripture passages folks hold up to say that the Old Testament God is much more scolding and vindictive than the New Testament God or Jesus.  But such a statement ignores the context of the Ten Commandments, does not recognize that the Law is received by the Children of Israel as they come out of slavery in Egypt to walk to the promised land in Canaan.  Slaves live by the whim and fancy of their taskmasters, more broadly, by the whim and fancy of Pharaoh, King of Egypt.  So how are these newly freed slaves to live in the promised land without the death-giving edicts of Pharaoh?  What will be their values?  Their code?  How shall they distinguish themselves from not only Egypt but the peoples who surround them?

Along with seeing that Hebrew Scripture God as much more scolding and vindictive, I have heard a few sermons upset about the fact that the Ten Commandments are about “Thou shalt nots!” 

(valley girl voice) I mean, like, God is so negative.  If God in the Ten Commandments would just chill.  I mean, like, be positive. 

But again, remember the context.  And the context of the Ten Commandments is to, “Remember, remember that you are not to be like Egypt.”  We could sum up the Ten Commandments in that way.  “Thou shalt not be like Egypt.” 

“Do not build up for me,” God declares, “these huge monuments or graven images, or chase after gold to build statues in my honor--pyramids, temples, palaces and pretend that is what I want.”  Thou shalt not be like Egypt.  Do not become enslaved by these behaviors.  To live free in the land, this is how you shall live.[2]  Thou shalt not be trapped by such pursuits as the Egyptians were.

Do not work the land, or yourselves, or your slaves, or your animals, or your immigrants 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  To do so is to return or force someone else or some other part of creation to return to the very existence you left as slaves in Egypt.  Do not go back.  Thou shalt not become slaves like you were in Egypt.

Do not covet, the word “covet” used again and again in the Ten Commandments.  The Hebrew word literally means “to seize” or to steal using position or power or influence to get what really belongs to someone else or community at large. Hebrew Scripture scholar Robert Gnuse writes that “Property and land were given to be used for the glory of Yahweh and the good of all.  The command not to steal spoke against those who sought to appropriate communal possessions for their own private use.”[3]  The latter meaning of the commandment was ’do not reduce a person to slavery by monopolizing the wealth.’” At a time, during pandemic, when we have witnessed the devastation of so many families and the explosion of wealth for the uber wealthy, we should ask if we are continuing to promote a slave economy.[4]  At a time when we have  a rent crisis spurred on the by the pandemic, where Wall Street investment firms have turned eviction into their new billion dollar baby, landlords find it easier to evict than get rent, and housing courts are designed for people to fail,[5]we should ask if we are continuing to promote a slave economy. 

The purpose of the commandment not to covet was to curb those who steal from society at large by amassing great wealth, for such theft will ultimately break down that society.[6]  Society will begin to dis-integrate and relationships will unravel.  Why would former slaves, seeking to keep their integrity, foster an economic system that would lead people into economic slavery?  Thou shalt not use your riches or your royalty or your power over someone else like the Egyptians did.

Thou shalt not!  This is not a scolding, vindictive God.  When you hear the Ten Commandments in their context, this God sounds like a mother lion defending Her people from the dangers of the world--willing, desiring that they become more than what they left in Egypt.  She will defend the freedom of Her people. 

And once we know this to be the character of our God, the Ten Commandments then become self-evident for how we should treat our neighbor.  As Jewish Law becomes further and further elaborated on, the major concern becomes how the Jewish people shall prevent their neighbors from falling into debt slavery—that injunction still resounding in the heart of Christ:  “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

One of my favorite theologians, Dorothy Soelle, puts it best, describes the desire of God within the Ten Commandments, “God dreams for us today. Today, at this moment, God has an image and hope for what we are becoming. We should not let God dream alone.” 

God’s desire is that the Children of Israel would truly become a free people through the Ten Commandments—to not worship God through gold and pretend that this was what the Living God required of them, to not work and be anxious or force others to work and be anxious all their days, and to not seize what each person needed for the bases of life.  God had an image and hope, an image and hope for a legacy that they would leave their children and grandchildren of what they, as a people, could become. 

So let us remember our story so that we do not lose our integrity.  So that we do not dis-integrate. On this Stewardship and Legacy Sunday, may we remember that God dreams for us today. Today, at this moment, God has an image and hope for what the congregation of St. John’s United Church of Christ  is becoming. We should not let God dream alone.  Amen.

---

[1] Robert Stengel, “Mandela: His Eight Lessons of Leadership,” Time (Wednesday, July 9, 2008).

[2] David Gill, “Ten Words on Life, Love, and Justice,” The Journey with Jesus:  Notes to Myself  http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20080929JJ.shtml .

[3] The Hebrew word for “covet” is hmd.  Robert Gnuse, You Shall Not Steal:  Community and Property in the Biblical Tradition (New York:  Orbis Books, 1985), p 6.

[4] “Wealth and Income Inequality and Covid-19,” https://inequality.org/facts/inequality-and-covid-19/.  As ordinary people around the world suffer from the health and economic impacts of the pandemic, billionaires have actually seen their fortunes expand. According to Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Forbes data, the combined wealth of all U.S. billionaires increased by $821 billion (28 percent) between March 18, 2020 and September 10, 2020, from approximately $2.947 trillion to $3.768 trillion. Of the more than 600 U.S. billionaires, the richest five (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Elon Musk) saw a 59 percent increase in their combined wealth during this period, from $358 billion to $569 billion. 

[5] Megh Wright, “Patriot Act Returns to Terrify You about an Eviction Crisis,” May 18, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/05/patriot-act-netflix-hasan-minhaj-rent-eviction-crisis.html.

[6] Gnuse, “You Shall Not,” pp. 7-8.

Baptism of Christ, January 13, 2019, "Becoming toast"

C Baptism of Christ BFC 2019

Galatians 3:26-28; Luke 3:1-6, 21-23a

January 13, 2019

Remember answering machines?  Before Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter, day was when individuals and families would reveal a piece of their identity with a fun, pithy, or just plain entertaining message on their answering machine.    Some of my best friends from the church I served in New Hampshire, a senior couple, would record a new, original poem from the husband Grant, for every season.  My sense of humor, twisted and sick, in a former time of course, had me threatening to kill a small, beagle puppy unless people left a message (whining of the puppy).  Yes, I know.  Jesus saved me. 

My all-time favorite answering machine messages came from a family that had a deep-thinking teenage son.  Every so often he would have some profound, philosophical thought that was funny at first but really made you think as your day went on.  Causing the listener to ponder, one of those messages really stood out to me.  After the fourth ring, one would hear:  “Once bread has become toast, it cannot be bread again.”

I laughed and laughed the first time I heard that message.  After a while, I realized how, in one turn of phrase, this teenage boy had summed up what believer’s baptism means in the Christian tradition.  For once we know we are loved and cherished and that God is active in our lives, we cannot possibly be the same again.  Our world, or at least the perspective on our world, must change.  The transformation does not have to be an earth-shattering moment with doves, wind, and fire.  The transformation can be a way of slowly burning or becoming into being—an evolution that leads to a new way of existence.  But it is a transformation. 

We have treated baptism as a cosmetic, like roll-on or spray can deodorant, instead of as a commitment.[1]  Episcopal priest, Grant Gallup writes, “Baptism will wash the world itself into the Wetback Liberation Movement, wherein we are all swimming to the Other Side of Jordan. . . . Your Baptism means that you are committed to God's brand of justice, it means you've accepted appointment as an agent and an asset to revolutionary change, and it means you've accepted immersion in, solidarity with, all the changes necessary to create a truly human future.”  Water no longer becomes a privatized commodity and instead is understood as a sister or brother, sibling or cousin in our movement to restore the world of Creator.[2]

In pointing to the pivotal moments which led her to ordained ministry, author, pastor, and teacher, Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor writes of her Grandma Lucy, who ran a boarding house in College Park, Georgia.  Taylor continues:

           Grandma Lucy was known both for her considerable shrewd business 

           sense and her bad temper, a combination that earned her a fair 

           measure of respect in the community.  In her later years she was an                       awesome presence, especially to a child.  Having lost both legs to a 

           case of diabetes she refused to treat, she presided from a stainless steel                   wheelchair, her two wooden legs propped in front of her like buttresses.  

          She wore black aviator sunglasses to shield her failing eyes from the 

          light, which gave her face all the openness of a vault.  In old 

          photographs, she looks most like a handicapped bomber pilot.

But with her three grandchildren, this woman was as gentle as a breeze.  She loved us like nothing else in the world and we knew it.  Whenever we came to visit, there were closetsful of wrapped presents, one for each day of the week; trips to town for new dresses with net petticoats, and favorite desserts for dinner; baby chicks from the feed store and long afternoons on the porch swing in her arms.  But her best gifts were her baths.  When my night came she treated me like long lost royalty, filling the tub with suds and then beckoning me in, where she washed each of my limbs in turn and polished my skin with her great, soft sponge.  After she had dried me off, I lay down for the next part of the ritual.  First, she anointed me with Jergen’s Lotion, starting with my neck and finishing up with the soles of my feet.  Then she reached for her dusting powder—Evening in Paris—and tickled me all lover with the pale, blue puff.  When she was done, I knew I was precious.  I was absolutely convinced I was loved, and nothing that has happened since, not even her death, has shaken that conviction.

Can there be any doubt that what Grandma Lucy was doing to her granddaughter was baptizing her time and time again, taking a little girl who hears all kinds of messages in her world about how she is second class, how she is supposed to look or act like a lady, how she is a privatized commodity, how her body is an object for male gaze and not a subject of her own pleasure, and Grandma Lucy saying counter-culturally to her, “You are nothing but precious in the sight of God?”

            As we learned back in Verse 3:1, Luke pinpoints the date of this event as "the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius." Which would be 28-29 A.D. Which would make John and Jesus about 33. Which in their day was about the average life span of the poor. Which was about 80% of the population. And which were the people both John and Jesus belonged to. Jesus and John were not young men in the prime of their life. They were elders. And if they had not escaped the usual life of the poor, they also suffered from long hours of hard work, poor diets, and lack of sanitation.  Jesus' baptism is not about repentance. It is about his identity being publicly, ritually re-rooted into Creator. [3]

John the Baptist told the crowds they had abandoned God.  They had abandoned God by not remembering they were the people God delivered from Egypt.  They had abandoned God by not remembering that the land was God’s given to them for the benefit of the whole community.  Bread, and goods, and services were shared for the benefit of the whole community.  As Jesus related his Jewish tradition, all these gifts of God were meant to flow back and forth across the table in mutuality.  The Jordan River had once been the place the Children of God crossed to remember that God wanted them to be a free, liberated, promised, and mutual people.  

Rome wanted people to remember that they were a subject, beaten, and occupied people.  As long as one remembered that, everything would be just fine.  Caesar was the only actor in life’s play.  As long as one remembers that all bread, and goods, and taxes, and services flow upwards toward Caesar, the Roman peace will be kept.  

But once bread becomes toast it can never be toast again.

Through commercials, the wider culture, messages we receive every day, we are told that we are an audience, consumers, only being acted upon and enslaved to this way of being. Creator wills that we know ourselves to be subjects in God’s story.   No matter what Caesars calls us, we shall be known as the Children of God.

There is also a social dimension to baptism as related by the earliest baptismal creed we have in Paul’s letter to the communities in Galatia.  In Christ Jesus, there is neither Jew nor Greek, a designation relating ethnic and religious difference.  In Christ Jesus, there is neither slave nor free, a designation relating socio-economic and caste status.  In Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor free, a designation relating differences in sexuality and gender. 

The German theologian Dorothee Sollee quotes the 14^th Century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart to say that if God is really God, then God is that which is most communicable.  Sollee goes on to write that “God desperately desires to be shared—that is part of who God is.”  All bread, and goods, and services and love should be shared.

What a wonderful possibility that lays at our feet.  Sollee continues, “To embrace God means to embrace a process—a process of going forward, a process of infusing everything.  Only with our partnership can that love become incarnate in our world every day.  God dreams for us.”

Sollee believes, “Today, at this moment, God has an image and hope for what we are becoming.  We should not let God dream alone.”

I have told Lisa I think we are a baptism church.  There is something happening here where we have a whole bunch of people who have decided to be baptized.  I believe that is happening because the character of baptism lends itself to what is needed in a world where our identities are mixed and varied and unique. And . . .  because we also long for connection that allows for our diverse identity.  Many of us are looking for an identity that affirms our diverse, beautifully unique, journeys in a profound multicultural mix.  But we also long for connection that allows us retain our unique identity and reaches across the great divide to learn from each other, enjoy one another, and find solidarity with one another.  Our culture is trying to tell us who we are.  And baptism offers a path, a road, that is open to a creative and connected future.      

For once we know we are precious and loved, we can never, ever be bread again.  We are on fire.  We are becoming toast, set out into a world that needs to hear that good news.  Once baptism is done, we are truly becoming toast—set on fire by the idea that God wants us to be known as a free, liberated, and promised people, uniquely diverse and connected to begin the sometimes gritty, sometimes joyous inauguration into the revolution of love that heals, shares, and struggles across the great divide of religion, ethnicity, and culture; socioeconomic status and caste; gender and sexuality.  It is time to tell the world the same dream.  Amen.

---

[1] Grant Mauricio Gallup, “Epiphany IC,” Homily Grits, January 6, 2007, https://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits/msg00002.html.

[2] Ibid.

[3] David Ewart, “Year C, Epiphany 1, Baptism of the Lord, January 13, 2019,” Holy Textures, https://www.holytextures.com/2009/12/luke-3-15-17-21-22-year-c-epiphany-1-january-7-january-13-baptism-sermon.html. 

A Ash Wednesday BFC 2017

March 1, 2017

Henry Ward Beecher said, “A world without a Sabbath would be like a person without a smile, like a summer without flowers, and like a homestead without a garden.”

“Burn out” has become a regular part of our vernacular.  We used to just think of business executives who ran their companies 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or parents who ran their children from place to place, put dinner on the table, and also had a full-time job.  But today, we are even being warned of our children suffering from “burn out.”  We are caught up in a culture that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  Information inundates our every decision.  Many of us go through our days at or near total exhaustion.

          Sometimes we may feel like a boxer who picks themselves up off the canvas to foolishly say, “Surely I can’t take much more punishment.”  And then we see that boxing glove heading toward us in slow motion.

          So many of us are walking that thin line between the need to be invested and the need to pull away altogether.  I am concerned that slowing down, planning for rest is not considered an option.  To keep up and keep our priorities, we have to stretch ourselves so thin.

          Weariness (burnout) and the need for renewal were recognized in the early Christian church.  The observance of “Ember Days” was a practice to counter the weariness and renew the spirit.  Ember Days were seasonal times of rest and prayer both for the laborer in the field and ministers in the church.  Four times a year, days were set aside to encourage depleted helpers and healers to refuel.  Setting time aside, setting aside space, for God.  This is essentially the call of Lent which we will begin this evening with Ash Wednesday. 

What are the barriers in our life which keep us from making time or making space for God?  Today we fan the flames that are deep within our hearts.  We breathe deeply so that the flames may burn brightly.

          Ember Days may not appear on our modern liturgical calendars, but there are many ways we, all of us, as ministers in the church, can keep the fires burning underneath the ash of our hearts and souls.  Merrill Ware Carrigan offers four ideas.  Perhaps you can find yourself hungering for the renewal, rest, and refreshment through these ideas.

          First, take time for conversation with elders, mentors, heroes, soul friends.  In conversation or prayer, keep in touch with those who nourish you.

          Second, reconnect with the earth with attention and enjoyment.  Be conscious of the elements and the feel the sensuality of the earth—its beauty, its fragrance, its song, and its texture.  For example, brace into what’s left of the winter wind, feel and smell the early spring rain as it comes later in March, get your hands in the summer soil in April and May, and pay attention to the growth which comes in June, July, and August.

          Third, in a support group of colleagues or friends step aside from problem-solving for a time and enjoy the simple availability of each one to the others, and the sense of the divine presence.

          Fourth, take advantage of real silence that allows you to rest.  Savor stillness.

          Remember, throughout all of this Lenten season, we stoke the embers not only for our own well-being, but to regain the strength and capacity to warm the lives of those we touch.  The fire from such embers within our souls and hearts will give us the strength we need to be participants and leaders in our organizations, activities, schools, communities, and churches. 

          Set aside time—set aside space for God to move in our lives.  Amen.

Ashes and Oil

German scholar, Dorothee Soelle, believes that knowing we are all mystics, is the grounding for knowing we were also created in the image of God.  She writes, “The greatest sin of humans is to forget that we are royal children.  ‘Rabbi Bunam said to his disciples:  Everyone must have two pockets, so that [they] can reach into the one or the other, according to [their] needs.  In the right pocket are to be the words:  “For my sake was the world created,” and in [their] left:  “I am earth and ashes.”’” 

In the book of Genesis, there are two creation stories.  Each has a different view of what it means to be human.  One was told when the people were proud and mighty and conquerors.  That story said, “You were made out of the dust of the ground, and to the dust you shall return.”  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  For that reason we apply the ash.

The other was told to the people when they were broken and despairing and conquered—living in Exile.  That story said, “You were made in the image of God.”  For that reason we apply the oil, a sign of God’s blessing and messianic choice.

We need to tell and hear both stories, for we must always know our “humus”, our humility and connection to the earth and our “imago Dei”, our divinity and connection to God. 

So for those who wish to receive the ashes and oil, I will say to you, “From ashes and dust you were made—to ashes and dust you shall return.”  I invite you to respond with “I was made in the image of God.”

Please come forward at this time.

Benediction

Know that God begins a fire in you that burns but does not consume.  Fan the flames.  Amen.

Sacred Place Worship Series 7, September 25, 2016, "The Solace of Fierce Landscapes".

Sacred Place 7 Exodus 17.1-7, Isaiah 35:1-2, Isaiah 2,2 BFC 2016

Exodus 17:1-7, Isaiah 35:1-2, Isaiah 2:2

September 25, 2016[1]

          We just emerged from the summer months, each named to convey that Rome was the center of the world, the arbiter of time:  June after the Roman goddess Juno who was the protector of all Rome; July after Julius Caesar, posthumously identified as divine, a god, resurrected in the form of a comet, the Roman politician perhaps most responsible for the demise of the Roman republic and the rise of the Roman empire; and finally, August, named after Julius’ adopted son, Augustus Caesar, referred to as the son of god.  When I candidated at this church, a little more than two years ago, I shared liturgy that spoke of Caesars and their time-keeping, offered an alternative to an imperial clock. I tried to juxtapose the marking of time done by Native American people, referencing the strawberry moon—the calendar worked out in according to relationship with the earth and the living and growing—with one that lauded the violence, oppression, and death of empire.    

          It is one of the reasons I mention the time in the liturgical year every Sunday when I welcome you to worship and teach the liturgical calendar to our children during my time with them in worship.  Abiding by that liturgical calendar is a small, simple way that I remind us of being called to live in alternative time, a countercultural calendar that is not marked by Rome. 

          As a young pup in Christianity, I was very critical of those who chose to live a monastic or cloistered life.  I saw it as cowardice, a retreat from the real world.  I was critical, that is, until I learned the origin story of monasticism.  That origin story begins with the Roman Emperor Constantine who looks out over his vast and diverse empire and sees that diversity as a problem to be rectified under his rule.  Recognizing that religion can be a great unifier, Constantine asked himself whether he should make the Mithras, the religion of the Roman military and the rural areas, the official religion of Rome.   Or should he choose this burgeoning religion in Rome’s urban centers, Christianity, the official religion?  He chooses Christianity, uniting the empire under one God.  And the Roman Empire becomes the Holy Roman Empire. 

As we learned last year during the Jesus Seminar, Constantine found the diversity of Christian beliefs to be antithetical to his program and plan.  So he convened a Council at the city of Nicaea that this Christian faith could be assimilated under a singular banner of belief.  Just to push the unity program a bit, Constantine slowly removed the food supply of the gathered scholars and theologians at Nicaea.  They, in turn, produced the Nicaean Creed.  Let the burning of the heretics begin!  I thought about doing that with our visioning dinners, but Tracy thought it might be a little heavy-handed.  And besides, I don’t have an imperial army at my disposal. 

Not all Christians in the 4^th Century greeted the news that Christianity had now become Christendom with great joy.  Some of them thought that a Christianity which rose to partner with the domination systems and structures of the day could no longer retain Christianity’s central identity.  This religious faith, that had once disagreed over whether the military could be included under the tent of Christian faith, now became the faith that conquered and dominated other peoples and lands.  Bishops appointed by Constantine ruled over what were effectively military districts.  The religion of Christ crucified became the crucifier. 

So there were Christians who left their newly found status of being the “winners” in history to the obscure and forgotten fierce landscapes of the desert, the wilderness, the mountain, and the island.  Life would not be easy in these places.  But here monastic communities were founded to provide an alternative to Roman power and opulence, Roman brutality and militarism, and the Roman clock and calendar.

As some Christians walked away from Rome into these fierce landscapes of desert, wilderness, island, and mountain, they experienced a simplicity, a bare-boned honesty that did not allow them to forget who they were.  The early monastics were thus reminded of their heritage as people of faith, the Children of Israel walking hand in hand out into the wilderness to begin their love story with God.  In that fierce landscape, the Children of Israel were stripped of the values, practices, and habits of Egypt and what it means to Egyptian slaves so they could, in all humility, remember who they were and are as The Children of God. 

There is an indifference to the wilderness or desert that does not get us caught up in striving for wealth, power, and influence.  It just does not care and is not caught up in our spiritual games.  As writer and environmental activist, Edward Abbey wrote, the desert, “Would as soon kill ya as look at ya.”[2]  Fierce landscapes leave us bare, allow nothing to get in the way of our relationship with the wild and free God, strip us of all pretense.

Montana cowboy poet Wallace McRae writes out of the desert of the western plains a poem called, “Reincarnation” which reveals the rugged indifference fierce landscapes have to the anxiousness of our egos.  He writes: 

What does reincarnation mean?
A cowpoke ast his friend.
His pal replied, "It happens when
Yer life has reached its end.
They comb yer hair, and warsh yer neck,
And clean yer fingernails,
And lay you in a padded box
Away from life's travails.

The box and you goes in a hole,
That's been dug into the ground.
Reincarnation starts in when
Yore planted 'neath a mound.
Them clods melt down, just like yer box,
And you who is inside
And then yore just beginnin' on
Yer transformation ride.

In a while the grass'll grow
Upon yer rendered mound.
Till some day on yer moldered grave
A lovely flower is found.
And say a horse should wander by
And graze upon this flower
That once wuz you, but now's become
Yer vegetative bower.

The posey that the hoss done ate
Up, with his other feed,
Makes bone, and fat, and muscle
Essential to the steed.
But some is left that he can't use
And so it passes through,
And finally lay upon the ground.
This thing, that once wuz you.

Then say, by chance, I wanders by
And sees this upon the ground,
And I ponders, and I wonders at,
This object that I found.
I thinks of reincarnation,
Of life, and death, and such,
And come away concludin': Slim,
You ain't changed all that much.[3]

The desert simply won’t allow us to take ourselves too seriously.  We come to fierce landscapes with all of our self-importance and anxious needs, and they could care less.  The wilderness ignores us.  British explorer Andrew Harvey says, "We often are saved in the end by the things that ignore us."[4]

In writing about the way of the desert monastics, their spiritual path, Laura Swan shares that apatheia is "the goal of the desert journey."[5]   In all of the great Christian spiritual tradition which advances the values of balance and freedom, practices of prayer, solidarity, fasting, and detachment, apatheia is the word that captures the length and breadth of the spiritual journey. A word with such length and breadth cannot be easily defined. Apatheia has been translated as "purity of heart", "detachment and solidarity", "freedom", "indifference", "disinterested love", "love without seeking reward", and, finally, "apathetic love."  Apatheia is the opposite of passive-aggressive.  It does not bargain or put on a show. 

As Laura Swan shares, apatheia is about developing a listening ear to hear God’s voice speak below and around the din of so many voices in our culture. The early monastics looked at the geography of the mountain or the desert and saw a spiritual geography. The desert or mountain had incredible gifts to bring as fierce landscapes. For those gifts to appear, however, one had to stay with the mountain or desert for a time. The landscape had to get under your skin and into your blood.  One had to develop an attentiveness and a listening ear that may have been blunted by the onslaught of messages within the empire.  And though we may entreat fierce landscapes, they will not change. They are indifferent to our pleas. Their love, their gifts, is (are) offered out of who they are at their core. 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 love will not jump or shout or move in an effort to appease.  In learning to ignore the unimportant, to be stripped bare of priorities which only act as hurdles and hedges against a direct encounter with the Living God, we find that we are then also loved more fiercely than we could ever imagine.  And lo and behold, the path is made straight and the desert begins to bloom in ways we just begin to notice.

Rabi’a al-Adawiya, female Muslim Sufi mystic from Basra (ca. 713-801 C.E.), in what is modern day Iraq, invited people to the practice of 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 we have fallen in love with the character, the very essence of God.

This is the solace of fierce landscapes, so necessary in our time, so important while there is so much that requires our attention, seeks to distract us, and bargains for something less than the essential.  As teacher and author, Belden C. Lane writes,

People who pay attention to what matters most in their lives, and who learn to ignore everything else, assume a freedom that is highly creative as well as potentially dangerous in contemporary society. Having abandoned everything of insignificance, they have nothing to lose. Apart from being faithful to their God, they no longer care what happens to them.[7]

That freedom is dangerous to those in the world who believe they control the world’s calendar and believe we can be controlled through our anxiousness and fear and our attention to baubles and trinkets.  Rather, our sacred spaces have shaped us, and we have become fierce lovers of the Divine and the world that God loves with an intensity we are just beginning to know.

             May our fierce landscapes mold and shape us so that we develop alternative rhythms and calendars, countercultural lives so we stop sucking on the tailpipe of Empire, and an attentiveness which begins to make us aware of the wild and free and fierce love of God.  Amen.

---

[1]The book by Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes:  Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), is really the basis for this sermon.  I find it to be the most spiritually compelling book I have ever read.

[2] Belden C. Lane, “Desert Indifference, Desert Love,”  30 Good Minutes:  Chicago Sunday Evening Club, April 21, 1996.  http://www.30goodminutes.org/index.php/archives/23-member-archives/450-belden-c-lane-program-3928.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Laura Swan, O.S.B., "Wise Elders and the Desert Traditions," Obsculta!

[6] Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry:  Mysticism and Resistance (Minneapolis:  Augsburg Fortress, 2001), p. 35, quoting Annemarie Schimmel, Mystiche Dimensionen des Islam: Die Geschichte des Sufismus [Munich, 1992], pp. 65-66.

[7] Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes:  Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 193.