September 04, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
The goal of humanly created environments is constant comfort, merciless equilibrium, utter protection from too little warmth or too much heat. Constantly regulated environments that guard us from discomfort, protect us from insects, delight our nostrils with only yummy aromas, calm our fears, wrap us in safety and lull us to…a kind of waking sleep. That is why we like storms, even though they scare us and threaten us, because they wake us up!
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SERMONS AT TRINITY
Sunday, August 30, 2009
“Storms, and other things that awaken”
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
I want to begin by asking us
to take a moment and listen…
more than that,
to feel.
Just listen to the sounds around us –
close your eyes even, if that helps you to listen.
Let’s listen to the sounds of life around us.
As you may know,
I have been back in the Midwest –
Indiana specifically,
and it is green and luscious from all the rain.
Corn and soybean fields flatten the horizon
in every direction.
Being around farming culture again,
passing through the land
and being near where I walked and fished and worked
as a child and youth,
seeing the darker, richer soil;
looking out on the longer, flatter, endlessness of fields;
crossing the greater distances;
all of it…
can open you up inside,
in the same way eucalyptus awakens your nostrils and expands your sinuses.
As you may also know,
I was attending the death of my father.
Holding vigil through the storms of life
as it passes away into the unknown,
also opens us up inside
like a violent thunderstorm breaks open the night.
So returning to the Song of Solomon
and A heart that can race with swift horses
and It’s not about soap…is just about perfect.
Or to put it another way,
and bring the metaphor closer to home,
let me invite you to remember a storm.
Remember a storm coming across Lake Erie.
It may have been a summer storm
carried by wicked winds
and spectacular lightening
that filled the sky with varicose veins of glaring light.
Or it may be a winter storm;
a wall of clouds so black and thick
you could believe it was sent by some dark wizard.
Slowly, slowly it creeps in from the lake
as the air around us grows damp and heavy.
Only then does it release the snow.
Now, remember what it feels like…
to be in a Mall.
Remember what it is like to walk through Galleria.
Or recall how if feels to sit in a movie theater.
The goal of humanly created environments
is constant comfort,
merciless equilibrium,
utter protection from too little warmth or too much heat.
Constantly regulated environments
that guard us from discomfort,
protect us from insects,
delight our nostrils with only yummy aromas,
calm our fears,
wrap us in safety
and lull us to…a kind of waking sleep.
That is why we like storms, even though they scare us
and threaten us, because they wake us up!
That’s why we can’t help being one of those idiots
doing the rubber-necked stare
as we pass by mangled steel on the highway
where medics and troopers solemnly do their sad work.
It wakes us up!
There we are in our car,
the most embryonic of all human environments:
the temperature perfectly regulated
to our own particular desire;
the sound-system better than we have at home
and playing whatever we want to hear;
the soft seats conformed to our own body;
and only with company of our own choosing.
Suddenly death appears.
Broken glass, gnarled steel, tattered plastic,
and even if we cannot see it,
blood aplenty for our imagination.
It wakes us up!
You see,
our ancients who write to us from across time
about the spiritual wisdom encountered
in the tiny folds of life,
did not have our problem.
They lived up close to the earth, wind and fire,
and the veil between life and death
was exceedingly thin.
Their notion of comfort would seem rustic to us.
Heck, even King Henry VIII
did not live in as much comfort as the poorest among us.
Think about that.
Every image in those first two readings
derives from the passion of living large
in the Garden of Earth.
There is no hint of control.
There is no sense of safety.
There is no modulation of tactile sensation.
There is no uniform environment that sculpts us down
into comfortable and well-protected critters
who then fall asleep
even as they walk through their day.
Now you might well ask
what this has to do with religion and spirituality?
And if you did ask such a question,
I might go off on an even longer diatribe
than the one I have planned.
But you didn’t ask…so I will limit to this.
The gospel story reveals a deep fissure in religion.
It is a conflict that extends
at least 3000 years into the past.
It is a bitter argument that has hardened
into a kind of Hatfield’s and McCoy’s divide
witnessed in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
I know that Buddhism has the split too,
but I know it is less well.
In every religion I know anything about
there is a deep division between
Purity and Prophecy.
Those are the words I use for them,
but they go by many names and represent many traditions.
In ancient Israel it was the struggle between
religionist’s that emphasized personal moral purity
practiced through ritual, worship
and rules of personal morality,
verses those who were fierce champions of prophetic demands for more equitable distributions of wealth and resources.
To over simplify it,
do you get right with God
by going to the Temple and sacrificing a pigeon or lamb,
and never eating shellfish or pork?
Or, do you get right with God
by sharing your resources with those in need,
and agitating those with power
to use their power
to create a human community
that more nearly reflects the love of God?
While I was on study leave this summer
I went to a variety of churches
to steal any good ideas I could find.
At one church I heard the preacher say,
and this is an exact quote,
“Our God washes filthy hearts to be perfectly clean.”
At another church,
I heard a sermon about how the Church
needs to do right by Gay and Lesbian issues.
The conflict between purity and justice is alive and well
3000 years later.
The hand washing and pot washing referred to in Mark’s story is not about whether you use Dawn or Joy,
wash by hand or dishwasher,
or use antibacterial soap or not.
It is about ritual hand washing
and separating pots and pans that cook dairy products
from those that cook meat products.
They didn’t know about bacteria and microbes back then,
it had to do with maintaining ancient purity laws.
Clearly Jesus isn’t big on regulating his disciples,
perhaps he didn’t keep those rituals himself –
although it is impossible to say from the story.
But ritual purity was not a priority for Jesus.
Social purity was much more important.
“Fornication” in his day,
among Judeans of the first century,
referred to engaging in prostitution –
the social effects upon women would likely have concerned him far more than personal sexual behavior.
But what he is saying is this:
What we do with our body,
how we engage other people in relationship,
the way in which we conduct business,
the means by which we make our money,
how we treat others…
all of our external behavior
flows from the condition of our internal life.
The landscape of our lives,
what others see about us,
is shaped by the inscape of our mind or soul,
in which we live alone with God.
It is true that what we do
begins to shape who we are,
inside over time;
but what we do
begins with who we are inside.
But here is a paradoxical little twist for Jesus,
one that Jesus could not have articulated
since the world in which he lived
was dramatically different from ours.
The environment around us
has the power to shape who and what we are inside.
The environment around us
has the power to shape who and what we are inside.
If we live our lives completely in protected environments,
whether it is a human climate zone
like the Mall or an air conditioned house,
or it is gated community that protects us from diversity
or an encounter with those who are forced to live in extremely unprotected communities,
then we will begin to fall asleep…inside.
I am not saying it is impossible to stay morally awake
in a protected environment, but it is much more difficult.
The more protected we are from the storms,
and I mean that literally and metaphorically,
the sleepier our inner-mind becomes.
The sleepier our inner-mind becomes
the more diminished our senses become –
and I am speaking here of our spiritual senses:
compassion,
imagination,
intuition,
and reverence.
Just as our perception is diminished
when we lose the acuity of
taste, smell, hearing, sight or speech,
when we lose acuity of
compassion, imagination, intuition and reverence…
we have greater difficulty experiencing the holy.
I am not suggesting we all go live in a shack
or pitch a tent tonight on the beach,
but I am warning us
that all of us,
to some degree or another,
have fallen asleep inside
because of the extreme comfort and equilibrium
derived from living
in our humanly conceived and created environments.
You do not need me
to tell you how to awaken inside,
nor am I an expert on how to do it.
All we need do
is take a few steps out of our comfort zones,
wherever we have encircled ourselves in them.
All we need do
is practice shutting off the grid of humanly regulated environments from time to time.
All we need do
is engage in relationship with people who are not like us,
or who we imagine are not like us,
and it won’t be long before we get uncomfortable.
Actually,
and I will end with this,
we do not really have to go looking for weapons
to poke through our comfort zones,
all we need to do is acknowledge and focus
on the discomforts we already have within and around us.
Health problems,
emotional turmoil,
identity issues,
work or vocational concerns,
relationship struggles,
neighborhood problems or squabbles,
and just about any issue or dimension
of Buffalo’s public life…
will all awaken us inside.
We are seduced by so many offers to ignore or deaden
what lives within and around us,
but if we simply allow ourselves
to see and hear and feel,
I guarantee you,
we will awake.
So for this week,
I invite us to allow Wang Weifan’s verse
to echo in our thoughts and prayers and dreams:
The boundaries of the Spirit depend on the narrowness or breadth of the heart.
Leave the protected environments
that keep us comfortably asleep,
get uncomfortable this week
and grow the breadth of your heart.
Amen.
