2022-03-21
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text
As I sat down with Psalm 63 to begin this sermon, I realized it just might be the last sermon I ever write. I am preaching here again in a few weeks, on Palm Sunday, but to be honest, I plan to re-work an old sermon then, one with a lot of really inspiring information on the history and context of the first Palm Sunday, if I do say so myself. So while it will be majorly rewritten, it will not be from scratch like this one. So since I will enter full retirement the day after Easter, this well could be my last “from scratch” sermon. (And may I say as an aside that I am so happy to be doing this here with you. I was ordained right here back in 1986, having been formed for ministry in large part by this congregation. So it really feels like full circle to be wrapping up my ministry here. It’s a real gift from God and from you that I get to ride off into the sunset in a few weeks from here, after a thirty-five year ministry in Minnesota, Ohio and Florida. So, if you’ll permit a bit of grandiosity, this sermon really is something of my swan song in ministry, and will include more than my usual amount of personal sharing.) And may I say the lectionary served up the perfect text for it.
You see, my faith started with the kind of personal passion that we see from the Psalmist in today’s prayer from Psalm 63. It starts from the first words: “O God, you are MY God.” In other words, God as not just a vague, abstract universal God of the Bible, but my personal, intimate friend. This Psalm reads like a love letter! I meditate on you in the night from my bed! Early will I seek your face! You are like water in a dry and weary land to me! That’s who God was to me early on, too! That’s the God I fell in love with as a child! A personal Father (then) Abba- Daddy- A God who knew about and cared about me intimately and personally. A God whom the Bible told me about and I took it fairly literally and at face value. That was the God I went off to seminary to study. But you see, UCC seminaries have a way of challenging that kind of innocent faith. And well they should. If we are to offer anything like a relevant, mature faith to our parishioners, we have to have that kind of naive faith challenged and expanded.
I remember when that first God died for me, and it was very painful. Throughout that first year at my liberal, UCC seminary, I began to doubt beliefs I had always taken at face value. One by one, it felt like they were popping my cherished balloons… From a later perspective I realized those cherished balloons never would have stood up to the challenges of life which has a way of being messy and defying those easy, pat answers. I had to let the castle fall, so to speak, and then gradually rebuild it with materials that could withstand the pressures of real life, the hard questions, the challenges of science and scholarship and messy, painful human experiences. And that’s what the second and third years of seminary were about: getting to know a new and different God, a much larger, less capricious, more inclusive God. A God who is not just Father, but Mother and lover and even beyond human images, who is breath and wind and spirit of life. The Hebrew Scriptures call it “ruach, ” breath, and the King James says it listeth where it will. Jesus said that to Nicodemius and you’ll remember that Nicodemius was a pharasee! A fundamentalist who liked to have everything black and white, and all nailed down. But Jesus essentially said, “Nicodemius, you cannot tame the Spirit! It’s too big and potent and mysterious! It blows where it will and you don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going.” Yes, we must be “born of it, that is, born into a spiritual orientation toward life. But I no longer thought that was about signing off on a narrow theological formula which is too often how being “born again” is portrayed. Rather, for me it became about embracing the mystery that is the untamed, ultimately unquantifiable Spirit of Life!
Writer Felix Carion puts it this way,
" I, for one, would like to get rid of all tribal gods of our own creation. Really, they don't exist. They are a projection of human madness. Let's evolve.
But there is something that "never was born and never dies." Without it we would not be here. We existed in and with it and will exist in and with it when this form fades. This is God, the mystery, the elegant principle, I want to know and feel that God in and through the wonder of consciousness, higher intelligence, miraculous senses, boundless and daring inquiry, the wonders of creation, the communion of love and friendship, in compassionate tears, the depths of sorrow and pain, in forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption, the "glory of the flower," the dance of light and darkness, birth and death…I’m enjoying God! It just may not be your god or the one I grew up with.”
Jane Fonda, as I have mentioned before from this pulpit, late in life came to embrace the Christian faith. In trying to describe it, she said, “I could feel reverence and awe humming within me.” That’s how she found faith- reverence and awe at the magnitude of life: the hum within.
Scott Peck called it a force outside and within us, the mechanics of which we do not understand, that nurtures growth and evolution. Indeed, the primary way that I came to understand God, at base, is as that Spirit of Life. The impulse for life that works through evolution. The shoot of green plant so full of organic potency that it emerges up through a tiny crack in concrete. The twisted Cyprus Tree growing out of sheer rock. But more! Beyond just organic life itself, a sort of force-field for good that is somehow loving and wants to help us keep growing! A loving energy that knows us and loves us, and tries to lure us and guide us on, into a reality of greater love and justice for us and the planet.
Bishop John Shelby Spong put it this way: “God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me towards God.”
As a Christian, I go further than that, of course, in that I believe God, or that force-field of love for good, which is vast and mysterious, sometimes takes on a personal face, and has revealed itself in a powerful way in the person of Jesus, whose primary purpose was to embody and teach love. A vast mysterious energy for good that sometimes wears a human appearance such that people have called it Father, Mother or Jesus, which is really just love with a name.
Scripture tells us that God is love, and wherever love is, God already is, no matter what name you give it. And really, that’s what I’m talking about now when I talk about this life force or energy for good that exists not only outside and beyond, but within us…I’m talking about love, and I believe love’s other name is God, and it’s there for us whether we believe in it or not, but it works better, we start to get real traction, when we come to interact with it somehow, like Jane Fonda did, and then consciously lean into it, work with it, let it guide us and direct us and empower us to be its loving agents in the world.
And here’s the other part. And I think it is the part that the Psalmist fell in love with and spoke so passionately in our psalm for today: it’s the mystery. That’s the personal part that we come to love and from whom we feel divine love. It’s way bigger than our intellectual thoughts, and we are in touch with it any time we feel awe. If you want to grow spiritually, then in addition to reading and discussing and praying and journaling and fasting and the like, be available to awe. One moment of getting lost in the mysterium tremendum, the vast, unexplainable magnitude of it all, is more spiritually healing than just about anything else we can do.
Tom Robbins said it beautifully in his book, Still Life With Woodpecker. He was actually talking about romantic love, but I think the quote works for God’s love, too:
“If the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It's that simple. This suggests that it isn't love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstacy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it's always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror, a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us. We glimpse it when we stand still. The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and distant stars are means of making contact with the mystery.
God is the ultimate mystery, and the Psalmist pants after it! And here’s the final thing I want to say, which is that I have come back to what theologian Paul Ricoeur calls a “second naiveté” in my faith. My faith went from belief in a simple, personal God as literally described in the Bible to belief in a vast, omnipresent, mysterious Spirit of Life, But over the years, and partly as a result of what is finally a consistent, daily, prayer practice, I have indeed come full circle to believe again that that awe-inspiring, vast, Spirit of Life does love each of us individually and personally. That’s part of what makes God God- that God can be vast and untamed and beyond our limited understanding, and a tender mother that calls me by name and gathers me under her wing. I sense that God powerfully these days as I am am drawn daily to sit in his presence and let it seep into my bones. And yes, after first just opening myself to the mystery and inviting the spirit, I pray, in that I share the content of my life and our world with that Spirit, not so much to get God to change her mind about my capricious whims, but for God to change my mind, to calm it, quiet it, and compose it toward love.
And so I have indeed come to what Paul Ricouer calls “the second naiveté,” not the naivete of a child, but the openness to wonder and mystery which is also personal, but comes from having passed through the purifying waters of modern knowledge and come full circle. It’s expressed perfectly by Werner Heisenberg, German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics, and I close with his words: “the first gulp from the glass of natural sciences may turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you.” God is waiting for YOU today. Whoever you are and wherever you are on your spiritual journey, the great mystery awaits you with arms of love. Keep thirsting. Keep searching. She’s there, at the bottom of the glass.