January 06, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
Every single one of us here has had an encounter with God… or the holy… or the mystical… or whatever doggone thing you want to call it. But even though we have all encountered God, few of us are willing to talk about it; few of us will even acknowledge it to ourselves.
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December 27, 2009 (10:30 a.m.)
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
Good morning.
When I was 27 years old, a month or two ago…
I graduated from seminary
in Cambridge, Massachusetts and returned to Indiana.
I had been a philosophy major in college,
a passionate Existentialist and social activist,
and a renegade in the seminary just barely able
to tolerate the intellectual and social confines
of the church.
In short, I was leaving the most liberal and progressive seminary in The Episcopal Church,
and returning to one of the more conservative regions
of a very conservative state…
although The Episcopal Church there
actually has a far more liberal history than WNY.
As soon as I arrived
the tired rector who I was to work for,
took off for a month.
It was the sink-or-swim method.
All I can say, looking back,
is there were some incredibly gracious people
in that congregation.
One of them was Sally
Sally is only a few years older than me
and has eight children today –
and more grandchildren than I could count
on their Christmas card this year.
Sally gave birth to four kids
and then adopted four bi-racial children,
each with a significant physical disability.
When I left there at the end of my two-year internship, newly married and becoming the rector
of congregation in Indianapolis,
Sally said that her prayer for me
was that I would have a lot of children.
“But I don’t want kids” I told her.
“You need a lot of kids,” she replied,
“they’ll stretch you.”
I met Sally on my very first day in the office.
I was unpacking my meager office items,
mostly mementos from seminary when she arrived.
I can still see her leaning against a table
and talking all about her family
and the thoughts racing through my brain about
running away before it was too late.
At the time Sally was emerging from a sojourn among evangelical and charismatic Episcopalians,
something that seemed like the moon to me.
She was inclined to swallow the words of Scripture whole and literally,
and apply them to her own situation in life
as if there was no difference between herself
and the marginalized first century Jewish peasants
of Jesus’ day.
So on this day, Sally was very enthusiastic about all the things God was doing in her life.
Now realize please, I was literally days out of the seminary womb –
feathered as it is by overly-rational scholasticism
and academic arrogance.
As I listened to her,
but not really listened as I have learned to do since,
I was flabbergasted to hear her speak unself-consciously about God answering her prayers,
in the same tone of voice that she would describe grocery shopping.
When she talked about her prayers for a microwave oven – which was a relatively new consumer item at the time – I blurted our with indignation:
“Do you think God cares if you have a microwave? Why would God give you a microwave and allow children in the Horn of Africa to starve?”
I think I may have actually used an expletive.
Sally looked at me,
she appeared totally unaffected by what I thought
was the incongruity of her prayer for a microwave
and another mother’s starving baby,
and she responded,
“Well yes, I do think God cares…”
Then she told me exactly how God does such things.
In my outrage I was blinded to my own arrogance,
and unable to see that my assertions about
what God could or could not do
were just as ridiculous as Sally’s – maybe more.
In spite of our differences,
which over my time there came to seem less severe,
we became friends and worked together quite a bit for the growth of that congregation.
Today Sally and I both own microwaves.
In 2008 I began raising money for work that one of Trinity’s Salvadoran friends, named Gloria,
does in the area of health education and self-esteem with teenage girls and young women
in rural El Salvador.
I decided not to solicit among the Trinity community
because we already ask the congregation to support the medical efforts in El Salvador.
So I made a list of friends and others from former congregations I had served,
and sent them a description of Gloria’s work.
In three days I had a check from Sally
for five thousand dollars,
even though we had not seen one another
in at least a decade.
I don’t know if Sally still imagines that God
answers prayers for microwaves,
but I see her – and others like her –
as one of the answers to God’s prayers to us.
I want to tell you about one more person
before we figure out together
what this sermon is about.
Her name was Theoda,
and I know some of you have heard me talk about her from time to time,
which is the way with people who make a big impression.
Theoda was in her eighties by the time I knew her.
She was an unfortunate looking person
and I suspect that was as true when she
was 20 years old as it was when I knew here
in her 80’s.
She was the daughter of a Seventh Day Adventist minister who, by her account,
was quite a severe and austere father.
She had been married three times and used to
say the only husband who lived
was the one that left.
Theoda had a colorful and checkered religious history that included Spiritualism, Unity Church,
and charismatic Episcopalians.
She never had a bad word to say about any of the religious traditions she tried and left,
and she seemed to have taken what she wanted or needed from each of her Church stops
along the denominational conveyor.
From all the churches she tried,
she formed a conglomerate all her own,
which is the type of thing
that drives most clergy crazy.
She taught me early on…
that Name Brand is far more important to Church professionals than it is to most practitioners.
Theoda and I had very little in common
in our beliefs and values,
or in many of the ways
that often make a difference between friends.
Yet my affection for Theoda remains strong
even eighteen years after her death.
She is a precious gem in my heart and
among the voices that guides me.
But it was not a natural or easy fit at first.
I used to drive Theoda around town
or pick her up for a meeting or program,
and we would find just the right parking space to suit a physically impaired older woman
who expected as much.
I never once attributed our luck to divine intervention but, to my constant irritation,
Theoda always did.
As I completed a beautifully snug parallel parking job in downtown Indianapolis…
Theoda delighted in giving effusive thanks to God
for answering her prayer.
It just irked the heck out of me.
You won’t be surprised to hear that I continue to
disregard the idea that God provides parking spaces
and microwave ovens but…
but, I do believe that God
is intimately connected and influential in the world;
in your life and in mine.
Sometimes I believe it
and see it
more than at others,
and at no time do I have a clue as to HOW
God is in our midst.
I am no longer apologetic or sheepish about acknowledging the gap in our knowledge
regarding what God does
or does not do.
Nor will I take it upon myself,
as I once did,
to correct what someone else believes about
how and where and why God is influential –
although I still will challenge the idea
that any of us actually knows.
Today, years of humbling experience later,
and years of befuddling life in between,
my sense is that God is an absolute mystery;
and all of us are condemned to being mystics
in search of an encounter with that mystery.
We get an encounter not knowledge.
We get an experience not theory.
We get a bump in the dark not a how-to manual.
And we get those, when we’re fortunate
not because we are “good.”
These days,
I don’t theorize about God much at all;
it is enough to simply encounter the holy in some way and let those moment influence which direction
I put one foot in front of the next.
Every single one of us here has had
an encounter with God…
or the holy…
or the mystical…
or whatever doggone thing you want to call it.
But even though we have all encountered God,
few of us are willing to talk about it;
few of us will even acknowledge it to ourselves.
I know that when I talk like this
it makes some people uncomfortable,
and other’s simply pooh-pooh the idea.
Still, I want to insist there is no scarcity of
encounters with God,
only definitions of an encounter
that are so narrow as to be dysfunctional.
We can have an intellectual encounter with God,
you know?
We can arrive at a moment of assent
when we say to ourselves
“Huh, there must be a God!”
An intellectual encounter with God
can arrive in response to our sudden glimpse
of the complex eloquence of Creation,
or simply as a desperate hope
that seeks to make sense of the chaos.
An encounter with God
can take place in a quiet, intuitive inkling
that tells us there is a power greater than ourselves.
An encounter with God
may be only a quiet and surprising sense of peace at our core when everything else is swirling
madly around us.
An encounter with God
can be as small as a still-small-voice
whispering within us.
An encounter with God
can feel as gentle and indistinct
as the warmth of a child’s breath on your cheek.
An encounter with God
can also be dramatic of course,
like a vision of someone who is dead
or a dream with Jesus, Mary or Chief Leather Lips in it.
An encounter with God
can also be an experience far beyond
the boundaries of rational thought
that we cannot explain or prove or even utter.
An encounter with God
can be communal more than personal,
as with the intense high emotion and physicality of
Pentecostal worship or the less intense liturgical form of prayer or communion.
An encounter with God can be sacramental and ritualistic, evoked by our presence in a sacred space.
Intellectual
Intuitive
Visionary
Communal
Sacramental
Tactile…
there are all kinds of encounters with the holy.
They are not measurable, predictable, definable,
or subject to anyone else’s definition.
They are utterly subjective
and more often subtle than dramatic,
quiet than awesome,
and within the ordinary more than extraordinary.
Let me leave you with an example of an ordinary
encounter with the Holy…with God.
It is an encounter that most of us here have had.
You may never have thought of it
as an encounter with God,
but you could…
you might…
I would even recommend it.
Think about baptism for a moment.
Think about your baptism,
which you may not even remember.
In baptism we held hands
with a first century Ethiopian Eunuch,
a Roman Senator’s wife,
a 6th century French peasant,
a 12th century South Indian farmer,
a 17th century West African slave,
a 19th century American Robber Baron,
a 20th century Russian Pentecostal,
and a 21st century Chinese Episcopalian…
By this massive circle of hand-holding
across time,
and over continents and through cultures,
we have infused history, and our very own lives,
with the presence of Jesus of Nazareth.
Through baptism,
our own and those to whom we commit ourselves,
we become the body
that God can use to walk around the world
and to be involved in life as we live it –
to actually influence things now and again.
Now that’s just an idea,
but it happens to be an idea
that you may have had an experience of –
an idea that you encountered with your shoes on,
so to speak.
Nor would it be the first idea
to ever lead someone into an actual encounter…
with God.
I think,
if we will deepen
and broaden
and de-magicalize our notions of what an
encounter with God consists of,
we will begin to see the presence of small encounters
in the past,
and in the present,
and not be surprised to stumble over them in the future.
Today, on this quiet Sunday after the big bang of
Christmas, I give thanks for Sally & Theoda
who loosened me up and taught me that I was encountering God…all the time.
