Sermon, 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, "We make the road by walking"

 

Proper B 16 21 Ord 2021

Psalm 84

August 22, 2021

           When actor and activist Ossie Davis eulogized Malcolm X at Faith Temple Church of God in Harlem on February 27, 1965, he referred to Malcolm as a champion, an Afro-American who cared about the meaning of words, one who sought to unify black America, a black, shining prince.  Davis quoted a letter Malcolm had sent to a friend from Africa, writing, “My journey is almost ended, and I have a broader scope than when I started out.”[1]

           Indeed, Malcolm X returned from one of his trips overseas transformed by one of the rich spiritual practices of the Muslim faith.  He had taken part in a Islamic practice required at least once in the lifetime of every able-bodied Muslim who can afford to travel to make pilgrimage to Mecca.  The spiritual practice is called, “The Hajj”[2] and The Hajj itself has specific things one is to do within the pilgrimage to Mecca that are to shape and call the Islamic people.                     

           In preparation for The Hajj, all Muslims must enter into ihram, a time when they agree to purify themselves by refraining from violence, quarrelling, or sexual activity.  It is a way of saying, though we are social beings, I must manage my own stuff, be responsible for the ways I manage my own behavior.  All pilgrims dress in simple, white clothing to symbolize human equality and unity before God.[3]  Though color and variation are a gift, the pilgrimage is not about affirming our external choices as much as remembering who Allah created us to be.  Such a pilgrimage, such a practice,  changed what Malcolm X thought was possible for humankind.  There was a time when Malcolm referred to whites as white devils.  After Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Mecca, he said:

 

“In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I will never be guilty of that again — as I know now that some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of being brotherly toward a black man. The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.

 

Since I learned the truth in Mecca my dearest friends have come to include all kinds — some Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and even atheists! I have friends who are called capitalists, socialists, and communists! Some of my friends are moderates, conservatives, extremists — some are even Uncle Toms! My friends today are black, brown, red, yellow, and white!

 

While in Mecca, for the first time in my life, I could call a man with blond hair and blue eyes my brother.[4]

 

            For Malcolm X, the Islamic practice of pilgrimage to Mecca, The Hajj,  transformed and shaped his everyday perspective and life. 

           Pilgrimage is also a Christian practice.  Echoes of the Islamic ihram, the purification marked by changing clothes, can be heard in this excerpt from John Bunyan’s 17^th Century Christian classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the pilgrim, of course, named “Christian”: 

 

Thus they went along toward the Gate.  Now you must note that the City stood upon a mighty Hill, but the Pilgrims went up that Hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead them up by the arms; also they had left their mortal Garments behind them in the River; for though they went in with them, they came out without them.[5]

 

            As I have stated before, worship is a Christian practice—much like pilgrimage.  What we do here today is practice for life out in the real world.  We collectively sing, pray, study the authoritative stories of our faith ancestors, and pass the peace as practice for doing those things when we step out into the real world.  Malcolm X practiced the universality of humankind through the Hajj, and the Hajj became a part of his being, the texture of his skin, marked on every one of his red blood cells. 

           The Psalm we have before us this day is a psalm of pilgrimage.  The pilgrims are on their way to the Temple in Jerusalem, the place where the Living God makes a home.  As the pilgrims make their way to this place where the presence of God is more real and palpable than any other place on earth, the pilgrims begin to understand God’s home as their home.  The pilgrims travel through a desert area, the desert of Baca[6], and in practicing their pilgrimage, springs and pools of water drip from the hand of God.  By traveling on a path worthy of them, through their holy practice, the pilgrims make and leave a path that sustains creation.  It is as in the poem from Spanish poet Antonio Machado:

 

Pilgrim, your footsteps are

the road, and nothing more;

pilgrim, there is no road,

the road is made by walking.

By walking one makes the road,

and upon glancing behind

one sees the path

that never will be trod again.

Pilgrim, there is no road--

Only wakes upon the sea.[7]

 

Pilgrim, there is no road, the road is made by walking, faithfully walking the path given to us even though that path takes us through Baca, the desert.  We transform the path by our willingness to walk through it, to plumb its depths within the deepest valleys, to be willing to walk far enough to lose our way, as the psalm says. 

           Too often, as progressive, North American Christians, we are unwilling to walk into those deep valleys or show a willingness to walk far enough to lose our way, to change our garments, to affirm our common journey.  We listen to someone describe the wonders of Buddhist meditation and so we want to sample a little bit of that and wonder if Buddhism is the way.  We see someone over there sharing how much more wonderful their pagan based faith is, and so we dabble in a little bit of nature-centered theology.  We are a little here and a little there never walking through any tradition with any great depth.  We never build our endurance by walking long in any tradition.  Each tradition has its foibles and freaks but we use the imperfections, radicals, and wrong-doers within a tradition to abandon a historical tradition, a particular path.  We wonder why we never experience faith as deeply as the Buddhist teacher, the Christian mystic, the orthodox Jew, or the practicing Muslim when we are unwilling to walk very far in any of those traditions.

           Rev. Scotty McLennan, the Tufts University chaplain who inspired Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau’s character, Scotty Sloan, wrote a book a few years back that talked about the entire spiritual journey as a pilgrimage up a spiritual mountain.[8]  In the book, McLennan suggests that, for the most part, all spiritual journeys end up at the same summit of that spiritual mountain.  Unfortunately, the trend in spirituality these days, McLennan wrote,  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.  “Pick a path and start walking,” McLennan advises, whether that path be Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, pagan, Bahai, or any other great tradition.[9] 

           I think this trend is found especially in progressive faith communities.  I reference it as “sampling at the progressive buffet.”  We take a little of this, or a little of that, and never really experience the full flavor and texture of anything.

           Within Psalm 84 is a depth, a sense that the pilgrims have been traveling a long time.  The pilgrims in Psalm 84 have deep longing and a hunger to be at home with God.  Too often, I see us trying to sate our hunger with a sampling of appetizers that never really fill us.  We spend our time cautiously trying paths at the base of the mountain.  I am not suggesting we should put down critical or rigorous thought as we begin walking our path, but we should also be aware that needing everything to be “just perfect” before we start walking and/or expecting depth of meaning without commitment to the path provide easy excuses to abandon the path when the pilgrimage becomes difficult.

           Christian pilgrimages are never walked alone.  And faith pilgrimage is sometimes hard.  So, as we stand at the beginning of another school year, we should choose a faith pilgrimage that is worthy of our walking and worthy walking with a company of people.  We should not be so worried about having the right path but deciding where the great desire or hunger is in our community and world that requires complex faith answers.  Within our pilgrimage should also be practices which we want to become a part of our being, the texture of our skin, marked on every one of our red blood cells.  Those practices will be necessary as we make our way to the home of the Living God, because there will be times that are referenced as the “dark nights of the soul.” 

Dark nights of the soul are when we will have only the practices.  The way will not be clear or the way will take us through the desert.  It will be night  We will not experience being affirmed.  We may even experience God as being absent or gone.  We will have to love our way through the darkness during those times to just keep walking and make the road, transform creation, through our walking.  During this time, we will be creating within our own souls an ever-deeper hunger for God.

           Pick a path where we see great hunger and desire in our world and begin walking with others.  Transform the path you walk with practices along the way that construct systems and structures which give life to all of creation.  When the pilgrimage gets tough, and hard, and long and dark, love your way through that darkness.  Love your way through that darkness.   You will make the path by walking.

           Malcolm X chose a path out of a love for African-American people.  As a part of that path, he was given to a spiritual form that is a concrete path, a spiritual form, The Hajj, that intentionally broadens the hearts and minds of its practitioners.  Before his pilgrimage to Mecca, his Hajj, Malcolm saw absolutely no path to race reconciliation.   But the practices of his pilgrimage transformed him.  After plumbing the depths of his own faith tradition, he said,

 

I am not a racist.... In the past I permitted myself to be used...to make sweeping indictments of all white people, the entire white race and these generalizations have caused injuries to some whites who perhaps did not deserve to be hurt. Because of the spiritual enlightenment which I was blessed to receive as a result of my recent pilgrimage to the Holy city of Mecca, I no longer subscribe to sweeping indictments of any one race. I am now striving to live the life of a true...Muslim. I must repeat that I am not a racist nor do I subscribe to the tenants of racism. I can state in all sincerity that I wish nothing but freedom, justice and equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all people.[10] 

           

Pick a path.  Develop practices.  Walk.  Go deep.  Psalm 84 reads, “Happy are those who find a hiding place in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrim roads.  As they pass through the Baca valley, they find spring water to drink.  Also from pools the Ruler of Creation provides water for those who lose their way.”  As we walk, we will not be alone.  We are to walk that path in the company of faithful to broaden and deepen our hearts and minds.  As we make the road by walking, we will not be alone.  Even when we experience the Divine as absent or hidden, God will be with us.  Amen.

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[1] http://www.cmgww.com/historic/malcolm/about/eulogy.htm

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajj; Malcolm X came to refer to himself as a Sunni Muslim after this pilgrimage experience.  Within Sunni Islam, the Hajj is the fifth in the Five Pillars of Islam.  In Shi’a Islam the Hajj is one of the ten Branches of Religion. 

[3] http://www.religioustolerance.org/isla1.htm

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X

[5] John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (Westwood, NJ:  Barbour and Company, Inc.), p. 183.

[6] Baca means literally “drip.”

[7] Antonio Machado, "Proverbios y cantares XXIX,”Campos de Castilla.

[8] Scotty McLennan, Finding Your Religion:  When the Faith You Grew Up with Has Lost Its Meaning, (San Francisco:  HarperSanFrancisco, 1999).

[9] Rev. Scotty McLennan, Finding Your Religion:  When the Faith You Grew Up with Has Lost Its Meaning (San Francisco:  HarperSanFrancisco, 2000).

[10] http://www.malcolm-x.org/quotes.htm

Fourth Sunday in Creation Lectionary, World Communion Sunday, Mountain, October 4, 2015

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 8^th 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. 

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[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:  HarperSanFrancisco, 2000).

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

[5] http://articles.latimes.com/2000/mar/12/books/bk-7843

[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.