January 27, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
Instead, I recommend a few small, practical weapons of spiritual guerrilla warfare as an intervention; little things to cause friction, stimulate, and rattle us awake now and again – or at least alert us to our slumber.
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Preached@Trinity Church Buffalo
Sunday morning, January 22, 2012
Texts: Jonah 3:1-5,10; Mark 1:14-20
and, “Life With” by Frederick Buechner
You are wanted…
dead or alive!
I don’t think anyone here
will freak out
if I say these two Biblical stories are, well,
stories.
For all we know
they may have actually happened,
but we know
from our own stories
that there was a whole lot
more going on than
what gets transmitted in the story.
One night a few weeks ago,
after Christmas,
my four kids
and a bunch of their friends
were sitting around our dinning room table
laughing,
playing games
and telling stories.
I started to tell a story about
when I was in high school.
Then, like an air bubble breaking for the surface,
in the privacy of my own head
I realized WHAT
I would have to tell them
in order to complete the story,
so I stopped, dead in my tracks,
and said, “Never mind.”
Our stories,
even the long ones,
leave out a lot of details.
The content of a story is also shaped by
what is happening
when we tell the story, and
who we tell the story to.
For the first hundred years
of the modern era,
the church did theology from biblical stories,
as if the stories
reflected enough of actual life
to build an adequate theology around.
No way!
Let’s take just one,
tiny example. Zebedee.
He had to have been incredibly honked off!
He was a businessperson
with a business to run;
a family business to run.
In the space of two stutters,
his two go-to employees,
his sons,
run off with a stranger –
and just because the stranger says,
“Follow me”? I don’t think so.
Zebedee would have been hopping mad
and all kinds of hell would have broken out.
And besides all the family dynamics
ricocheting in between the sentences
but not actually included in the story,
nobody but an idiot walks off
to follow someone
just because they say, “Follow me.
If we don’t want to assume
Jesus was a cult leader
seducing the easily manipulated,
then we must acknowledge a whole history
of conversation and experiences
behind that, “Follow me.”
So let’s not do theology
from abbreviated and
romanticized stories.
Let’s not make Simon and Andrew
our spiritual standard,
because they responded at the drop of a hat
to a crystal clear
and unambiguous command.
Few, if any of us
ever get such direct action
from God.
If that is our model of faithfulness
we’re just setting ourselves up
for a sense of failure,
or resentment.
Jonah is more interesting
because he is an example
of running away from God;
of going to great lengths
and taking great risks
avoid God.
But again,
most of us cannot easily or directly
relate our own experience of God
with the Jonah story either –
even though it
is wonderfully dramatic
and even cinemagraphic.
So let’s take these two stories –
one about the call of a prophet
and the other about the call of two lay leaders
(as we might say today) –
and recognize them for what they are:
Waking up stories.
Sometimes we wake up,
or are woken up,
and either immediately
or in a slow and evolving way,
we see ourselves,
and the world around us
with new eyes.
We awaken.
Often, if
we are spiritual people to begin with,
waking up starts with
seeing, in retrospect,
that God may
have had something to do with our waking up:
Unexplained serendipity,
marvelous synergies,
coincidences that strain credulity;
such things begin to make us suspect divine
mischief in our lives.
As we awaken
to see things differently,
we start to understand
that our previous vision
was not only unfortunate
but dim,
narrow,
deluded,
ignorant even.
When that happens
we get our taste back
and can smell again,
and soon
we can once again
feel the freshness of the day
upon our skin.
Low and behold,
the very miraculousness of life itself
seeps into our every pore
and cavity
and we can
breathe again.
Where were we before we “woke up”?
We were in our same old body,
and with the same old mind,
and we were walking through the same old day,
but where were we
before we woke up?
It is not that we are zombies – the walking dead;
but we sleepwalk through life.
Even though we are conscious,
can feel hurts,
happiness,
pain and pleasure
we nonetheless
fall into a culvert of consciousness.
We fall into a sleeping wakefulness.
Before we awaken,
we slumber into our work
or whatever squeaky wheel
nabs our attention.
We get one thing done
and go onto the next.
Even the things we supposedly do for ourselves
become rote and routinized.
We end the day,
our eyes and our brain at half-mast
shuffling through
what we have to do tomorrow.
We wouldn’t hear God calling to us
even if it was through
Jiminy Cricket and Tinkerbelle
dancing and singing on each shoulder.
Maybe I have over-reached here,
and I am only describing the fog where I live,
but maybe you live there too
at least some of the time.
But I do think there is a kind
of cattle-chute-of-days
that we get herded into;
and not only does our
peripheral vision get blocked,
it also feels like
if we stop
we may get trampled by the momentum
building up behind us.
It is near impossible
even to hear our own voice
in the midst of the waking slumber
let alone someone else’s voice
or God’s thin whisper.
The waking slumber
is exacerbated by the prayer-talk
we were taught.
As children, we learned
to talk to God
as if we were sending up notes in a balloon
that the invisible genie-in-the-sky
might open in the clouds.
And then we were told
that God actually
“Calls” some people back.
Prophets,
priests,
nuns and monks;
bishops,
popes,
and messiahs
get a special “Call.”
Think about that word, “Call.”
To talk about getting a call
is like that old joke
about the pope answering
his special “God-phone” one day –
you know,
like the red Armageddon phone
the President has within reach 24/7.
Anyway, God tells the pope
that there is good news and bad news,
and asks which he wants first.
“The good news, please” the pope responds.
“That would be,
that Jesus is returning,” God tells him.
“And the bad news,” the pope asks timidly.
“He’ll be returning to Salt Lake City.”
The idea that God “calls” us
is kind of silly
in our world.
When “call” referred
to a whisper on the wind
or a voice in the crowd
or yelling in order to be heard from a distance
above the sound of waves, gulls and breeze,
maybe “call” was descriptive.
But in our world,
one in which digital clarity
is as available when
your kid is calling on the phone
from the second floor
as from El Salvador,
to talk about God “calling” us
is a misnomer.
It is not that clear,
it is not that direct,
it is not that personal.
God calls us,
not to be prophets
or disciples
or priests and ministers
or anything else.
God calls us to WAKE UP.
And once awakened,
what we are to do
becomes more obvious.
God’s call
is not narrow
and to a particular profession
or relationship,
or job.
God calls us to wake up
and to live awakened:
to see
and know
and feel
the miraculousness
of every moment,
and of every life
and of every day.
When we live awakened,
we will do
the things God
invites us to do
because they seem so obvious;
even when unpleasant
or difficult;
even when dangerous
and against our own self-interest.
And isn’t that why we come here,
to a place like this?
TO WAKE UP,
or be awakened
and enabled to live awakened?
“Have you wept at anything lately?
Has your heart beat faster at the sight of beauty?
Have you thought seriously about your own death?
Do you actually listen when people speak to you?
Is there anyone you care so much about
that you would suffer great pain for them if you could?
If the answer to any of these is ‘yes’
then you are at least partially awake!”
(Paraphrase of excerpt from “Life With” by Frederick Buechner)
Honestly, I don’t know how to
live an awakened life,
at least not all the time.
Every time I awaken,
I end up back in a waking slumber again.
But I do know how
we can make interventions
that help wake us up
when we are asleep and don’t even know it;
or when we have no idea
how to wake up
but are willing to try anything
just to shake things up a bit
and see what happens.
Guerrilla warfare.
That’s right,
a kind of spiritual guerrilla warfare
against waking slumber.
Lob spiritual Molotov cocktails
to ignite the frayed edges
of the cattle chute
and cause a stampede.
Poke a finger in the blind eye to give it vision.
Let off a stink bomb or sit on a whoopee cushion
in the most constricted mental opera.
Don’t set the alarm
and miss the management meeting.
Take your caffeine with chocolate
instead of coffee.
These are metaphors of course,
images for breaking up
the ice jam in our lives.
I could suggest adding daily prayers,
twice-daily meditations,
or saying the Daily Office in the Prayer Book…
but those things can
just expand the routine
that already holds our consciousness hostage.
Instead, I recommend
a few small, practical weapons of
spiritual guerrilla warfare as an intervention;
little things
to cause friction, stimulate, and rattle
us awake now and again –
or at least alert us to our slumber.
Drive home a different route than usual.
The next time you can, walk instead of drive.
Go a week without music or the radio in the car.
Give yourself two days
without the email activated on your smart phone.
Switch sides of the bed.
Keep a pad by the bed and record your dreams.
Write a long letter to a friend…by hand.
Have an extended conversation over coffee or tea,
in the middle of the day
with someone you trust.
Do not do
what you feel you should,
and see what happens.
Take that word home with you,
the one you picked from the font;
and write about it
every day until next week…
Just write about it,
without a plan
and don’t read through what you wrote
until next Saturday night.
Little things can do a lot.
Little things that wake us up
or alert us to our slumber
can really make a difference if,
when we do them
we listen and observe
what’s going on in and around us.
Observe
and listen
to our thoughts and feelings,
and especially
to our reflexes and reactions.
I know I have told this story before on Sunday night
but if I have turned the corner
on senility
and told it here already,
please humor me.
When I was a kid,
in the summers following 5th and 6th grades,
I attended a camp in Brown County, Indiana.
It is a beautiful part of the world –
hilly, forested,
carved by creeks and rivers
and a patchwork
of small family farms.
One of the people associated
with the camp
was a Native American named, Tom.
He would take us into the woods
and deposit us
one at a time,
all alone,
hundreds of yards apart.
Our task was to squat…and listen.
We’re talking 11 and 12 year old boys!
We were to squat and listen.
Each time we did it,
we would be left alone
a little bit longer
so that our capacity for listening increased.
When we got back together,
we would talk about
what we heard.
At first, we heard nothing.
Maybe we were aware of a stray bird song or two,
but not very much.
After a few more times
of squatting in the woods
and just listening,
we heard all kinds of sounds
as close as insects and as distant as a train.
Tom taught us to be awake in the woods
and to hear the orchestra of sounds
swirling in every moment.
Then we learned to see.
It does not take that much
to live awake
instead of living unconscious.
It only takes practice,
the practice of small acts of listening
and watching,
and allowing ourselves
to see
and hear
and feel
what is inside
and what is outside
and what is all around.
I know it’s not a new car,
but maybe this idea of listening
and of guerilla warfare against waking slumber,
will get you
where you need to go.
Amen.
