Rev. Dr. W. Hazaiah Williams, Preaching

We have posted 21 sermons for your spiritual reading.
Click on the name of the Sermon you desire to read.

Easter

Wait On The Lord

To Be Known by God  (A Lenten Sermon)

Be Still and Know that I Am God

The End of the Year

Christmas

Thanksgiving

Moses at Burning Bush

Halloween

Flaunt A Red Flower

The Root of Your Character

Seek and Ye Shall Find

Labor Day

Searching the Ground of My Intention

What is Truth

The Great Commandment

God is Firmly Fixed

Easter Sunday

Called by Your Name

You Are of Inestimable, Utter Worth

Almighty Affection

Easter 

This Easter morning, we come to consider the most critical question of our life. It is a question posed by Job, and it is the Easter question: Shall we live again? 

I see it as THE question of existence. Nobody escapes interest in it. It says, "how alive is life?" It cannot be ignored.

This question grows out of a deep insistence embedded in the human consciousness, that wants to know the why, the when, the wherefore of Life. What does this space, this time, this fleeting moment called earthly existence mean?

Now, there is one thing I want to try to put in perspective. This is not an issue that begins with Christianity. It is pre-Christian. It is pre-Judaism. The mystery-religions of ancient Egypt first raised the question about immortality. In the pyramids we saw the issue graphically portrayed in the way the leader was buried. They prepared the King for a long journey. He had provisions and fabulous jewels even suggesting that he or she was going to have to do some bargaining somewhere. He had money and perfume. They were wrapped in linens that were specially prepared…why?  So they would have a better chance of arriving with their bodies intact. And their portrait was painted on the winding cloth, so if their bodies were disintegrated before they got there, those at the other end would know what the person looked like.  But this was an Eternal Life that was reserved for the gods, the kings and the upper classes.

What is critical about Easter is not the FACT of resurrection. The resurrection idea did not start with Christianity. But what is critical about Easter is the peculiar content of Jesus’ resurrection – not the fact of immortality, but the content of Jesus’ immortal life.

In the context of Jesus’ preaching, we find what is critical to understand the power of His resurrection. He declared that what, up to that point, had been the special province and privilege of Kings and the upper classes belongs to everyone. He declared that in the mind of God, you are ultimate, you are eternally precious. “Ye are the light of the world…Ye are the salt of the earth…The Kingdom is locked up in you.” YOU are God’s ultimate hope for this earth. Jesus robbed the elite of their exclusive entrance to the Holy of Holies. He broke the hold on Eternity of the statused and the upper classes. He democratized Heaven!

Jesus said the Life that had been reserved only for the privileged is available to you; to everyone! 

When this happened, human life broke through the limitations of finitude. Jesus said: You are ultimate. Your life is forged for more than time and space. And when people began to hear this, they began to believe that within their finite form, there was the in dwelling of ultimacy. There is that in you, Jesus said, that by definition, by God’s intention, is destined to outlive your earthly time. The Kingdom, he said, is not of this world but is locatable in you, which means that there is a part of each created person that is larger than this world. And so in this understanding, the idea that “dust thou art, and to dust thou returneth,” is not spoken of “all” of you. “Dust thou art, and to dust thou returneth” is about the chemical part of your body. It does not speak to the soul. 

There is one critical idea in the four Gospels, and that is: You are of ultimate significance to God. That was a radical idea in a world that had all of ultimacy tied up with status and class.

Now. The people heard it, but they were indifferent. They said, that is interesting; it would be nice if it were true. And then after they killed him do you know what they said? They said, well, he sounded good… yeah, he was a good preacher…

When he died, it was like a dream gone flat, and they were wandering, hiding from friends. They didn’t want the newsmen to catch them, and interview them. But, then it says, they had a sense of Presence, and it was real to them. It was almost like what he said, and what he was now, was declaring itself to be the continuing truth. For indeed, if he believed us to be ultimate, we would expect that he, himself, would know ultimacy. And if He was ultimate, then the Force of his person should reappear continuously in history, if we were to believe that it could even be true for us.  And they said, there was something strange happening to them. They said, we had better take another look at this thing.  He told us we are ultimate. He told us we are forged for claims larger than historical time, and they killed him last week, and here he is!  The Force of his person among us. He told us that wherever two or three are gathered, there He will be, and indeed, we FEEL the Presence, we SEE him here. It is real.  But even with that, the death dealing forces were also there.

Death dogged the people. It was like a hound of hell gnawing at the heels of those whose sense of Divinity would surface, and would push them to strive to walk the high places of time. Death would be there grabbing at them, to bring them back. Death was always there to lay low and to waste their larger-than-life claim. Death would admonish them and to prove its case, it would take them with it, before they fulfilled their commitment. It would take them while they were still unfulfilled, and it would make its case against this Jesus ideology. And death was confirmed by the philosophic mind that said, “You had better, eat, drink, and be merry now, for tomorrow you die.”

You hear a story about a few little disciples who were on the road one day, and they had something happen to them, but they don’t tell you about the hundreds of thousands of people who thought they had “done it” to Jesus, who thought maybe the disciples would learn, and stop being so ridiculous, and fanatical. 

And the fear of death had the effect of paralyzing the committed. Death evidenced its ability, as it continues to do, to cut people off from a sense of their own destiny, and make them take low estimate of themselves….oh, you know, I have only got a little while and I am just human and I can’t do it all. That is what I am talking about – taking shortsighted analysis of oneself. Death trapped, and traps people, in defining life in its own terms, and death terms are diametrically opposed to the Jesus-conscious terms. Death terms are what you can see. But, do you remember what Paul said?  What is real is what is invisible. 

Now, today not many people are interested in carrying the Jesus consciousness forth very much. I don’t run into too many people who are on fire with the ultimate preciousness of their existence; who are burdened and intentioned with the fact that though caught on this earth, they indeed, are now a citizen of two worlds, here and heaven, here and eternity; here and that world larger that this one; here and the Spiritual One. I don’t run into too many people who are wasting too much time with that. I run into a lot more people who say, this is real, and what they are busy doing is trying to secure this illusory self that is consistent with Death’s message. And therefore, we buy a new suit and look into the mirror and say, this is it. You get a new hair-do, a new automobile, things to add to this illusory self, as you attempt to make it real. And the dilemma is, you are trying to take nothing and make it be something!

Jesus’ life was so locked up with the mystery of the Creative One, that at one point, he said, I and my Father, (he was talking about the Source of Life), are One. He said, I am One with God. It is no wonder then, that a week or so after they had wiped him away on Golgotha, as the disciples were walking down the road, something grabbed them.

The definition of life that was fulfilled in and through Jesus was powerful. That is the reason that Resurrection, in our tradition, is important – not the fact of it, but the strange power of this particular Resurrection. The power of it had not been experienced before. They knew that as he talked they listened to a revolutionary idea about life. They sensed the possibility that if He prevailed, he would break the boundaries of normal society; because he talked like a world-changer. Well, they said, as they watched him, certainly he is a boundary breaker. He died, and yet he is with us, with all of the force of his presence as we remembered it. It is not diminished. As a matter of fact, the text goes on and says, it not only was not diminished, they said, THIS IS THE MAN. And one said, I will check him out, I will put my finger in his side so I will know! 

What I am trying to tell you is that this Presence hit them, and having come on the other side of death don’t you understand how you would feel if indeed, it had happened to you?  You saw the man die. So if indeed, on down the road, someone tapped you on the shoulder and you said, IT IS THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD! What would you think? This Presence has now been informed by the grave. Whatever has happened, He has passed through death, and still lays hold of me, still claims my life.

It happened. He continued to impact them, he whispered into their consciousness…boundary breaker…and he whispers down through time. There need not be an end. You do not have to relinquish eternity to the powerful and the moneyed. Jesus said no, and the thought caught on; and I am told that galley slaves on ships heard the message. Slaves looking at ruthless masters heard Him saying, “One fold have I, only one,” “One fold and one sheep.”  I am told that the Black slaves said to their master: “Before I’d be a slave I’d be buried in my grave, and go home to my God and be free.” And Jesus consciousness broke the back of the onslaught of death. The slave said, “I can take death, if you want, because I know I can be free beyond you. Jesus made clear that I am of ultimate worth in the sight of God.” If that is not cause for revolution, I would like to know what is. If anybody holds me back from full participation in the beatific vision, which is God’s creation in all of its fullness, I have a right to move on him. 

When one touches the sense of ultimacy in their own existence, in a sense they are already beyond the social control of the time. They are already participating beyond history. The life of Jesus makes it clear that this is not something that happens totally as a gift from God; nor does it happen as an achievement of your own religiosity. Jesus makes it clear by example that you do not arrive at this freedom that he talks about and this ultimacy that he preached about from your own little regularities, praying, fasting, paying dues and being nice. It may have something to do with it, but not much. Nor do you sit around and wait for it to drop out of the sky. But what happens is a part of the mystery of rendezvous – of joint venturing. It is a divine/human encounter, and your life on this earth becomes the nexus, the meeting place, and the trysting place, where divinity and humanity are fused. 

And in the life of Jesus, God unleashed an unrelenting, agonizing love, first visited on history in his own agony and love on Calvary.  And the power and the force of His Life, exhibited in the focusing of his will on God’s desire, forged a personality of such potency that through Him his own disciples, and thousands of people since, have discovered the basic ultimacy of themselves. And so He is a continuing Presence, breaking through the jaws of death, and moving with fierce aggressiveness, and with a frightening patience; moving with a bewildering attractiveness – moving on to lay hold of people, to seize them, and save them from self-defined illusion and destruction and sin. 

It is the power of the Resurrection of Jesus that makes Easter a peculiar event in history. Not the fact of it. There had been others. But the Power, that is related to the fusion that took place in His own life, between God’s will and His own action. It became a saving power. As he made contact with the Creator, the Creator laid on that Life, all of its agonized concern, care and longing, for the creature that it had participated in making. He laid that concern, that undying Love, on the person of Jesus, and Jesus brought that agonized love back into the world and it is so powerful that death itself is confounded by it. Death is confounded by God’s intention and God’s insistence that we become aware of the magnificence of our own creation – that we become aware of the awesome hand that is laid on the intricacy of our very form. 

The poet says: “Rescue the perishing, care for the dying, Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save.” 

It is a saving mission…not search and destroy.  A search and save mission. “I sought the Lord, and afterwards I knew, he moved my soul to seek him, seeking me. It was not I that found, O Savior true, no, I was found of Thee.” 

I have preached to you today about the awesome power of the Continuing Presence of Jesus in history. To those of you who ache, who know the message has truth in it, I want to tell you that he is the author of salvation. He is the way for you to deal with the injustice, the mercilessness, the unrighteousness, the corruption, the mediocrity, the dullness, the blandness, the agony, and the ache of your own life. 

The author of salvation continues to confound the author of destruction. I entreat you, if you think, in your consciousness, that you encounter the continuing Presence; stop awhile.

I know that one who is capable of saving me – the Force and Presence in history that is capable of infusing my life with grandeur – I know He is alive. The text says:  “I know that my Redeemer liveth”.  And a good translation of the redeemer word is “avenger.” What does an avenger do? The avenger goes to court and argues for you when the accuser shows up, and we have translated that into redeemer. I know that my avenger is alive! And to use the Psalmist understanding: I know that I have surety, standing at the Bar of Life, pleading my case for me. I know that my Redeemer liveth! And though worms destroy this body, yet without flesh, shall I see God!

Wait on the Lord 

Every Sunday, we gather around the Great Secrets of life. We call it “worship.”  But we don’t spend much time agonizing about why we don’t experience the joy and the fruit of those Great Secrets in our daily lives. I contend that this is because we have no discipline with reference to them.   

How do we uncover a sense of discontent in the spirit? How do we become aware of the poverty of the spirit in our own lives? How do we wait upon Life with all of the expectancy that comes from waiting outside a door or listening for a car to arrive? How do we add that excitement as an ongoing expectancy that undergirds all of our activity, that adds a new dimension to what we do and plan? Until we discover the answers to those questions, we should not expect much growth in the spirit, sufficient strength for the battle, or depth of fulfillment in our religious life.

     Jesus said, “Blessed are those who understand the poverty of the Spirit, for they are the ones who will receive the joy of the Kingdom.” The Beatitudes suggest that those who know, and whose lives are shot through with an awareness of what they do not have, and are waiting on Life for it, will receive it.

Most of the time we are running – keeping up with our schedules and the agendas that must be met – and it becomes difficult to talk about waiting. When the agenda is already made up, then what you are waiting for is the next item that you have already planned. And so when you pick up the Bible and read the words, “Wait upon the Lord,” you don’t really know what they mean. The kind of waiting that you have been doing is devoid of expectancy. It is just the space between now and the next thing you have on your program. And thus, there is no risk in it. As a matter of fact, none of us are prepared to do much waiting around that which we think we do not have any control. So much of the waiting we do is empty waiting.

The flower waits upon the rain and the sun, and there it is. The waiting is a natural part of its fulfillment. When we translate that to our own religious consciousness, waiting is a quality of spirit. It is a quality of the spirit that might be called unhurried, unperturbed, watching. Just in case some of you feel that waiting is meaningless or inactive, the word “watching” is very important. And the kind of waiting that is implied in the language of our faith is waiting that is watching. The idea is that no matter what you are doing at the moment, there is a part of you that is waiting at the edge of your insight, of the breaking through of things you have never known before that supports all that you do. You have an idea or two, and it is together in your brain, but you don’t move too quickly because there is a waiting principle in the spirit that is always literally looking and watching. For it knows that much that it ought to know, much that it could know, much that would be known, has been lost in the process of living.

As T.S. Eliot said, “Where is the life we have lost in living?” Waiting is interested in that life. And it only takes a flower to remind me of this quality of the spirit – unperturbed, steady, unrelenting, watching. And then I realize that life has been too expensive for me, and occasionally I must go looking for that which I once knew as utter, unrestricted hope and expectancy.

The amazing thing about the spirit of waiting is that it is a depth experience. It probes beyond the present. That may be the problem we have with it. I have watched in airport lounges what happens when we have ten or fifteen minutes to wait for the plane. Many people read a book or work with their computer.  You have ten minutes when you could wait, and probe some of the reality that you don’t find time for in your scheduled life. And then occasionally I go around and look over shoulders to see what in the world is being read. When you discover that, then you know what is happening. We are making sure that every space is programmed.

        You have had experiences in waiting for people. Waiting, in other words, is one of the great experiences. Isn’t that amazing?  Have you have forgotten it.  We used to sit on the porch in the summertime waiting for someone to come visit us. Those were some great moments.

       As I try to reflect on those moments when I have been waiting for someone to arrive, I realize that waiting is always full of the past. This is potentially what makes it an experience full of content. If you say inchurch, let us now wait upon the Lord, and then you sit down and bow your heads, some of you will recall doing it before without result. Others will recall times when certain things were communicated that they weren’t prepared for. Memory moves in upon the waiting moment to reflect upon the past. And the past floods in and memory goes to work, and the waiting moment allows you to own as living enrichment, the ground over which you have walked. That is foundational to religious living.

But the experience of waiting is a very focused moment. For a scattered people, it becomes an experience of intentionality. If you are going to wait for someone at the station, you don’t run all over the city. You go to the station and sit down or go somewhere close to the place you expect them to arrive. And that itself is a religious experience for us. Then there are a few moments where nothing else matters. And you understand what Jesus meant when he talked about the necessity for a singleness of eye. There are a few moments when people start coming through the gate when you forget how focused you are. You, who claim you cannot have singleness of purpose, have experienced it. The intention of the moment defines even your body’s space and its responses. In the present waiting is literally full of presence – both yours and the anticipated one.

There is a searching quality to the waiting moment, and so it is in searching that all of your awareness system comes alive. You are looking for somebody, and they haven’t shown up. There is the noise of a car door; you hear it. Some footsteps mean different things now. Literally, all of your awareness is peaked by the experience of waiting.

       If the waiting experience is full of the past and defining to the present, probably its most exciting principle is that it has a way of catapulting you into the future. The experience for which you are waiting is a literal claim against a coming time. Waiting is hope being lived. But it is not only a claim against a coming time. That time is already present in the act of waiting. Waiting owns the future in a very strange way. It pulls and tugs at the future and literally drags it into the present by active participation.

What if you so owned the future and so anticipated anything, any event, any change, with such comprehensive anticipation that it almost breathed in the now? Talk about personal growth, spiritual depth, and social change. That is the secret of growth itself. Show me a man, woman or child, living in absolute anticipation, and you will show me a claim upon my own life.

        Now as you hope and work under the burden of that hope, and as you expect, because of that hope, to see something new, then what you do is move beyond the surface level of the world, and in your lived hope, expressed in your work and in your action, you literally pay tribute to a world that is not yet.

        One of our problems is that because we do not nurture within ourselves the quality of waiting, we lose the depth that could be ours. For if waiting was alive in our life – body and spirit – it would move the life beyond its entrapment in the historical-event-sequence reality, and the life would at least have peaks and glimpses of that for which it waited. And that would inform the life always with that which threatened the arrangement that had your name upon it now.

        I believe that we haven’t begun to touch the resources that are ours. The joy of my day, day after day, is that I have discovered and am discovering daily, more fabulous resources of mind, and body and spirit, than I ever knew I had. The mind is sharper, the spirit is more buoyant than I ever have experienced, and it hasn’t just happened. I didn’t just wake up one day and have it happen. It was a result of agony, struggle, waiting, learning, discipline, trying to find ways in the midst of a busy day to wait, to anticipate, to expect.

        Your whole identity, and your dignity is locked up with this experience of waiting. I sit in that station. I hear the train. It is already in the station, but I haven’t seen it yet. But there is the clear awareness that what I am going to encounter, the person who is coming, for whom I am waiting, is him or herself full of waiting. And all of a sudden I am joyed by the fact that the watcher is also the watched for. And in that fact, I discover anew the literal aliveness and the concern-ridden, love-ridden, universe. And I meet one who has also been waiting to meet me.

       They that wait upon the Lord will have an amazingly exciting time. They that wait upon the Lord will discover that there are sources of strength and renewal that they have never known before. They that wait upon the Lord will discover in the moment of embrace that they have been waited for, and oh, if that will not do it . . . They that wait upon the Lord will find their strength renewed, their imagination fired, their commitment confirmed.

“To Be Known By God”  (A Lenten Sermon)

It is suggested that the reader first read Psalm 139 as a part of your reading of this sermon.  

          Rabindranath Tagore from “Gitanjali” 

My king was unknown to me, therefore when he claimed his tribute I was bold to think I would hide myself, leaving my debts unpaid. 

I fled and fled behind my day’s work and my night’s dreams. 

But his claim followed me at every breath I drew. This I came to know that I am known to him and no place left which is mine. 

Now I wish to lay my all before his feet, and gain the right to my place in his kingdom. 

          “Am I a God close by,” says the Lord, “And not a God afar off? Can a person hide himself in secret places and I shall not see him?” says the Lord. “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” says the Lord.

          It seems appropriate, at the beginning of Lent, to understand that we are known. And not only are we known, but we are exposed. Much of our energy is spent trying to hide – trying to find anonymity. “Thou knowest my down sitting and my up rising. Thou art acquainted with all, all my ways.” That is itself a religious experience. One of the most freeing things in life is not anonymity, but being known. Being known allows us to own ourselves in a new way. When you begin to realize that every thought, every action, every feeling is known by God; when you realize that there is no way for you to hide; when the consciousness dawns on you that the urgency that moves through life, in living concern about you, will never give you a place of hiding, then you have made a significant step toward understanding Life’s insistence on exposure. For all of Life knows you, and you are all of life’s urgings. You are not a disconnected phenomenon. Kahlil Gibran says it this way, “I went in my thirst to the fountain and I found that, as I began to drink the water, the water itself was thirsting and it drew me. It drank me while I drank it.” The Black Spiritual says it yet another way: “There is no hiding place down here; I went to the rock to hide my face; the rock cried out, no hiding place; the rock cried out, ‘I’m burning, too.’”

          If you recognize that all of your devious ways are known, that the poverty of your spirit is known, that the emptiness of your life is known, that even the quiet aches of your soul are known by God, then you might almost be prepared to speak a word of truth.

          The consciousness that you are known is the primary ground of preparation for you to be able to speak the unpolluted Word. To understand that, “I’m not just loose here on my own, doing my own thing.” That is the essential primary ground of preparation to speak the unpolluted word. The Psalmist says, “If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, Thou art there.” If I have a moment of free joy, call it heaven if you want to, God is there asking me: “What does this mean? What do you do about it?” If I attempt to get away by doing my ‘own thing’ and find the hellishness of the emptiness of my ‘own thing,’ God is there! When I get through fooling around in the slop of life with the swine, God is still there. The knowledge that I am known is relieving to me.

          Oh, when I think about the incarnational mystery that brought me to this place, my arms and my fingers that now articulate with such normalcy, a mind that works, a voice that speaks, a body that breathes, and realize that at one time, it was an idea in the mind of God, I am embarrassed by such purpose! What more, oh God, is essential to get a people on the scent of Thy presence? What more is needed for us to lay claim on such a consciousness? Every replenishing breath I breathe tells me I am not only known, but owned. It is too much for me to think about. Thy thoughts about me are so vast and unending. How do I know? Because some of them float into my own consciousness, and I know they are not my thoughts alone. I see them in the face of another person. I know when I have wronged. I know that I am called upon to respond to oppression with an increasing sense of the unity that is in me. How unending and unfathomable are Thy thoughts, oh God!

          When I awake, I am still with Thee! A rest did come, and I attempt to find repose in Thee, to sleep and sleep, but the night is broken with agony. I awaken in the middle of the night with all kinds of urgencies flooding my brain, but they are not my thoughts. Often your best thoughts, your most critical thoughts about yourself come when biological realities have laid your sense of arrogance to rest for a few minutes, and you lay in that very strange zone where your body knows that it belongs to a stream of life that is beyond that which is controlled by your own thought process. It is in that moment, when the ego has its weakest hold on you, that you hear the voice of Life speaking to you. That is the Voice of God. How long shall you ignore Life’s revelations?

          They are the polluters who move without a sense of awe and wonder through this world. They are the wicked who reduce to cultural acceptability the essential writhing, urging surge in Life for fulfillment, for unity, for a sense of Oneness. They are the wicked, who deny their own responsibility for the Brokenness of the time. Good words, clever talk, sophistication devoid of commitment are therefore empty of Spirit. And our talk betrays the depth of our own experience! We know more than we tell!

          “Do I not hate them who hate Thee?” Then the grand and climactic line: “I hate them with a perfect hatred.” Perfect hatred, what in the world is that? I hate them because they did such and such. That is not what the Psalmist is talking about. So many people have taken that text and said, “I have a right to hate. It says so right here in the Bible.” What is the difference between perfect hatred and imperfect hatred?

          Imperfect hatred is a response to the negation of your own little scheme. It is a response to the interference of your little plan. “I hate you because you did something to me.” Well, so what? He or she who does something to Life’s own will not be forgotten. Life knows it. It is not really my responsibility to get everything straightened out with everybody who has wronged me. I must be so caught up with trying to do the will of Life, fighting for justice and mercy, that I am not retarded by what happens to me. What happens to me, in the last analysis, is not critical. What I do for Life is critical. As you struggle for a new world, give your body, your mind, your energy, your money, whatever you have; give it to see that Life has a chance. You will find that the little scheme that comes out of your brain is not the ultimate answer. It does not solve the whole problem. If you find out that somebody has moved against you and has thwarted your plans, don’t get upset. That is the way the demonic moves in on you, trying to frustrate your understanding of Life’s claim on your life and energy. Try to find another way to keep moving. Don’t waste too much time arguing with that force.

Job helps me in my understanding here. I don’t have to fight

every little battle all the way through, because I know that if I have been on the case for God, for justice, for mercy, for love, for beauty, I have an avenger, an avenger who lives. “I know,” says Job,” that my redeemer is alive.” Do you believe it? Stop wasting your own little energy; get on, press on. Nothing happens outside of God’s overarching concern.

Perfect hatred is hatred that understands that it is not its job to do the ultimate setting straight of the record with every little event and person. Perfect hatred releases the ‘hatred’ to the care of God’s unending justice, mercy and love. Perfect hatred is a momentary response which gives way to the larger knowledge of God’s ultimate governance.

     Now, a little bit of awareness that God is intimately involved with me, could be a dangerous thought. Even though it might be the beginning of a step toward a new consciousness, it is such a powerful insight that it always runs the risk of becoming a new arrogance. That is the arrogance of the oppressor who says that he has God with him. The arrogance of the oppressor says, “I’m going to do what I’m going to do because I want to, and I know I am right.”

          I cannot say that. I say I think I see something. It becomes clearer to me that it is not enough to know that we are known. There is also the fact that I have the freedom to thumb my nose at God. The very hallmark of my integrity is the freedom I have to choose to work for God’s cause. The 139th Psalm opens with, “Thou hast searched me and known me.” The end of the Psalm underscores the basic integrity of every person, when the Psalmist says, “Search me, oh God, and try me.” There is a part of your searching and your need that cannot be complete until you release the hold on the hidden fortresses of your own self-interest. Until you harmonize with God’s searching, you prevent the possibility of a fully resonant expression taking place. Search me, oh God, search me, oh God, and look at my heart, not my words. Try me after I have made my easy commitment statement. Try me, after I’ve said that I was going to do this or that. Try me and let all hell rain down on me; let people desert me; let friends and loved ones go astray; try me, oh Lord, and see my thoughts. Check me out and see whether I’m jiving. When you are tried, will you not think, “Oh Lord, why did this happen to me?” Try me and see if my thoughts are grand enough.

          A whole society of people, trapped in their oppression, must be reminded that the evil is working to destroy their sense of grandeur about their purpose of being in the world: poor people, oppressed people around the world must understand that even under the burden of the struggle, they must not change their thoughts about the ultimate significance of their own creation.

          Try me, oh God, and see what I’m thinking, and see if, perhaps some of the wrong in the world is hidden in me – reflected through me. See if there be any wicked way in me. But lead me also into the way that is everlasting.

Be Still, and Know that I Am God 

    “Be still, and know that I am God.

    I am exalted among the nations,

    I am exalted in the earth!”

                    Psalm 46:10 

          The struggle to believe that God lives in this world becomes increasingly arduous, and our lack of devotion and the unsteady commitment is probably not without cause.  The sheer pace of our lives is sufficient to justify their shallowness.  Also, if we add to the confusion and sense of detachment, the tension that has become normal, we can explain our duplicity, our waywardness, and our emptiness. There is so much going on, why shouldn’t everything compete? And if God be God, then let God compete, too. 

Of course, God IS competing, if we would just open our eyes.  But by the time we stop to look, we’re on our way to another meeting, another diversion. T.S. Eliot used an interesting phrase when he said, ‘We are distracted from distraction by distraction.” To sophisticate that understanding, let me suggest that we are children of an age that has an interesting understanding of relativity. We go to a movie and pay, not just to see, but also to experience an earthquake, and then we move on from the earthquake to a climax. Now how are we to discover God in a world that starts with an earthquake and looks for something more climactic? 

          And if you add to that the swirling sense of rip tide about all values, or the things we thought valuable, the erosion of psyche and spirit, the rampant injustice and oppression, and the seeming impotence of people like you and me in the face of it all, it is not so strange.

And to this mood, the scripture adds a very interesting idea. We find it in the Psalms. It is the same Psalm that suggests that in the midst of all that is wrong, there is a river that flows to gladden the City of God.  But the phrase that follows is critical – “Be still and know that I am God.” Be still and know that I am God. Find some center of focus in the midst of all the motion and know that God is not confused about God’s being. The great “I AM” is not threatened by the events, and if we would center down, we would discover that indeed God is still God. Be still and not wonder, but KNOW.

And immediately, my mind goes to an experience that Elijah had which was, in many ways, in a mood similar to ours. He had to deal with the absence of the Presence of God. This is the scene where there is to be a test between God and Baal on Mount Carmel. That test took place and people were crying for Baal. The scripture says Baal never answered. And Elijah cried out and said to them, “Holler louder! Either he is musing, or he has gone aside, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” Now Elijah then gets his turn, and he calls on God, and this passage says that when God showed up, he showed up in fire and he consumed the burnt offering, he consumed the wood and the stones of the altar, licked up the water that was in the trenches, and consumed even the dust. And they knew God had been there!

          Then Elijah had all the prophets of Baal killed because he was victorious. And Jezebel, the ruler’s wife and a priestess in the Baal tradition, sent word that she was getting ready to kill Elijah for his unmerciful acts against the priests and prophets of Baal. Elijah moved away to the wilderness to protect himself. He took a nap and woke up hungry and a little food was provided, not much. And some miracles took place. But the thing that is amazing is that for forty days, on the strength of that little supper, he wandered on toward Mount Horab from Mount Sinai. And there he entered a cave to protect himself from the troops he thought had been sent for him.  Listen.

“And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him, and said, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’  Elijah said, ‘I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the people of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thy altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.’ And the Lord said to him, ‘Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; and when you arrive, you shall appoint a king over Syria, and you shall anoint a king over Israel; and you shall anoint a prophet in your place.’ And then the Lord said, ‘Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.’ 

Now, God had moved in the experience of Mount Carmel forty some odd days before, but everything that had happened between had been enough, it seems, to confuse the mind of Elijah. There is evidence that he was forlorn and despairing when he went to the mountain. It was not a triumphant march. As a matter of fact, he prayed that he might die, and he expressed his fear of Jezebel’s promise being fulfilled. 

          It is an interesting insight here. Elijah’s understanding of God was totally different from the nature deities that were rampant in Baalism. Had God been totally revealed in nature, and understood as an expression or an extension of nature, he would have been likened to and reflective of the gods of Baal. And so, Elijah’s encounter with God underscored the fact that this was something qualitatively, totally different – too great to be contained in nature; too great to be contained in the wind and the earthquake and the fire. Only the gentle stillness could express His vastness.

          And it says that in the quietness, the stillness was so full of majesty that Elijah covered his face with his mantle. The stillness revealed a Presence that no cataclysmic event had disclosed – a Presence more searing and more arresting than even the Presence that had destroyed the altars – more arresting than demonstrated power. And Elijah discovered something that the Psalmist talks about – ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ Know that God is, in fact, the silence that broods over, around and under the chaos. It is the silence that is not consumed in the chaos – the arena of life wherein the chaos exists. And we experience God at once dramatically ultimate, intensely intimate.

          Be still. In times like these God speaks the personal language of quietness to our waiting spirit. And one knows that God has not absented himself.  Spirit speaks to spirit. Elijah heard a voice, and in the midst of such Presence, he did what we probably would have done – he began to pity himself, to whimper and cry. But he also patted himself on the back: “I am the only one who is left, Lord, and they are after me. I have been faithful when no other people around have been, and the reason I am up here is that they are after me because I have been so good.” Now you see, you get the root of what we do with stillness. Here is an attempt to reduce the stillness to something petty. “Let me just be up here with you in retreat and let me die.” To the ending glory of the spirit comes the insight that this intimate moment of ultimacy was not to be tucked away as something insipidly personal and private and removed from the world, because, in this instance, God demanded something. Elijah says the stillness, the silence, was demanding. It was defining. It says, in the silence he hears that God had a plan. Elijah says, “Let me just stay here,” and God said, “No, go return, I have a plan for you.” God, in the stillness, has things on His mind. God is about to do something, and so the quality of silence has been changed. The stillness was informed – full of meaning and would not allow the self-pity to take over. In the middle of silence, the silence corrected the false understanding of reality. Elijah said, ‘Lord, I am the only one here. Nobody else survived.’ If that were true, God would not be God. The arrogance of people who retreat to their silence and say, ‘Lord, you know I am the only one. They are beating on me, and I am trying to do good, but it looks like I am the only one around.’ The Lord said, “No, no, Elijah. I have seven thousand more whose mouths have not kissed and whose knees have not bowed to Baal. You are not by yourself. You may not be able to find them right away, but they are around. So get yourself together and be still, and know ME!”

It happens, you know, if you take the religious life seriously. There comes a time when you wonder. You say, ‘I am weary Lord, tired, and it looks like I am the only one around, you know.’  But calm down and know Me. Even though the chaos seems to be threatening everything, and the sense of brokenness is incredible – swirling torrents seem to be ruling the day – you listen to silence as it broods over the noise.

          God says: “I am God,” even when it appears that everybody has forgotten. The mystery of earth and death and love and hate and commitment remains. God is present. And it seems to me that our problem then is to search through the debris of the moment to try to discover the Presence of God and, in discovering it, listen to it. To discern God in the midst of the turmoil – the holy dimension of it calls for a more profound humanity than we presently know. It calls for a level of awareness and sensitivity that we have forgotten. But in this kind of world, it becomes important somewhere, sometime, to sit and wait and listen. And know that such stillness is not uninformed by Life and Life’s urgency and Life’s design. It does not usher forth in a piety that knows no commitment to the world, but ushers forth in a new consciousness of a God that plans and wills to work in the world that He has created.

          Be still and know that I am God. It will not be easy for us, for the times are fearsome. Indeed the very demand of staying alive, abreast of things, is such that it seems strange to be talking about being still. And if we attempt to listen and lose some ground, these are the kind of times when it will be very easy to desert the voice. Memories, nostalgia, hopes, fears, all of this will tempt the weary spirit. But I say to you – Wait – and if in the break-up and the drama of the moment, God is not there, Wait, for God may appear with a message and a plan in the quietness that surrounds the noise of the hour.

          Be still, therefore, and know that I am God. Be still and know that if I be God, I am still in control. Be still and know, therefore, that your quick righteousness may indeed be too selfish. Be still and know that I am alive – not just in you. And if you are faithful, thousands more are around to join you. Life is literally full of my Presence. Be still and know that your strength lies in this quietness and confidence.

The End of the Year

Before you,

There is a clear road laid:

To you,

A new sky has been opened:

The timepiece of history

Has just tolled out a memorable hour!

Go off, off, master of your fate

Over the twilight pathways

Over the humble pathways of the Ancients.

A poem from Negritude

There is something very stark about the end of the year. You know you are undeniably one year older and you are one year closer to the end of your earthly existence. That is an interesting idea and it does have significance. However, the significance it has may be confusing to us. For we have no real philosophy of time even though we have been trying all year, all of our lives to create one. Two major ways of interpreting time continue to add to our confusion, and a third understanding does not get listened to very much. The first two ways of interpreting time you learned in school, but the third interpretation you did not.

The first way of understanding time is the Hellenistic/Greek way known as the cyclical interpretation of history or often referred to as the “wheel of time”. It is the understanding that we move from birth, to growth, to decay and death and the process repeats itself over and over again. There is a springtime of wild and unbridled dreams; a summer testing period; a fall time of repose; and the death in winter. That is the cycle. It is a death dealing idea of time.

It really does not make much of a place for you as a person. The race is saved, but you as an individual are not. For instance, your mother and father raise and support you and they die. It is rather theoretical to suspect that you know they are literally alive in you. It makes of time an unfulfilling reality and a frustrating cycle. If you press this, you will find that there are other thinkers who used other words, one of which is “cosmic time”. This is what you learn if we look at the universe and what you learn if you look at nature. However, it is looking at nature with an undiscerning eye. This time never supposes that there is any ultimate significance to what you would call the aroma of a flower. All we see are the stems that are beautiful and dropped, turned to dust. We see the cycle only. What happened to the flavor --- the scent? Does that mean anything? You can’t account for it here. As a matter of fact it is an interesting understanding because it puts us in a kind of relationship where we look at time. Time bespeaks the malady of us, and, therefore, maybe is a projection of our problem as developed in the Greek mind. We cannot own the present because in order to do so we annihilate the past. In this perspective the present must kill the past and then as soon as it is established it must be annihilated by the future. Does this mean anything to you?

Let us turn to the Bible for an illustration. In Ecclesiastes it says, “there is nothing new under the sun. What has been is what will be.” How many of you find comfort in that? If that is true, there is no need to struggle unduly. What if a Beethoven had taken that seriously? What if Malcolm and King had taken that seriously? That is one understanding of time.

The second understanding of time is what we call historical or linear time. It is that realm wherein we are on the pursuit of something and new things break into history, new ways of doing things. It is very conscious, unlike the other of the past and of the future, and always runs the risk of illusion as it attempts to live in one or the other. You know the people who always hearken back to the “golden years” when things were better? This understanding of time does help us at the point that it creates a sense of history. We are not just going around in circles. Time is moving along because there is a past, present and a future. This helps to give meaning to this understanding of time.

Now it is to this understanding of time that we have added a new dimension. I believe that it was Merton who called it “collective obsession”.  This may be peculiar to mass man – man whose linear motion through history is bombarded by mass delusions and obsessions, so much so, that he begins to believe that there is really nothing meaningful and the linear motion through this life and through history is simply a flight away from the awfulness and the absurdity of our world. Many people that I encounter are living in the historical time perspective as they attempt to flee from the absurdity that is their own existence. They think it is possible because collectively we all act like we can move away from the awful reality which our lives have engendered. That may just make life a farce.

It is around these two ideas of time that I think most of us spend our days. Also, there is something about them that is a part of most of our lives during this time of the year. It is a time of year where there seems to be a futility of life. We don’t make resolutions anymore. Why? Because we made some last year and we did not keep them. It comes from what will be is what has been, so it is no use. In addition, we feel we are trapped by the facts. Many people have used the past to serve their own spurious purposes. They lock into their memory all that has been done to them over the past 12 months and “vow” to get even. If you encounter them during the year, they will spew out all of the venom which has built up as they remember what has happened to them.

Many of us have allowed this kind of thinking about time to categorize or conceptualize us. We look at our past failures and begin to think they are indicators of what is really possible for us. If we have had successive failures, we then begin to take stock of ourselves within the context of that failure pattern and decide perhaps we should not get too carried away with this linear stuff because the cyclical thing is still turning. It is written in our fingers there is a limitation in our lives. So, we do not try anything too different or dare anything new. We design our life on the basis of what we have not been able to do. In so doing we never deal with the dimension of what might be, of what could be, or what shall be. And all of the time the Gospel stands over and against this reading of history as it talks about the infinite expandability and possibility for every human spirit.  

Equally as dangerous is another great temptation to stake ourselves upon our successes. Some of us may have had a good year and we are proud of it. Have you ever run into someone who is living on his or her successes?  It is perhaps more tragic to run into this type of person. For this person is locked between these two conceptions of time because they really do not believe nor do they dare believe that maybe yesterday’s success pales in contrast to what could be today’s success. Someone once said that there is no defeat quite as defeating as the defeat of success that forgets the dream that gave its birth.

Most of us are within one of these places. Either I have had a good year and I’ll live on that for another year or had a bad year and I’m really not going to put myself out too much this coming year. I am more mature now. We say, “I know what I can do and I am not going to let even you get to me to do something I can’t do. I have it all figured out.”

 But do you know what you can do? Are you sure you know who you are in terms of what you can do? The very notion of “passing” suggests to us something that is very awesome and that is whatever we are going to do, we ought to get to doing it. It may be a simple idea, but it allows for a basic integrity to be built into life. The minute we have a tomorrow, a yesterday, and a next week, we get caught within the frame from which some character can be built.

My father gave the commencement address at my high school graduation and the title was “Tomorrow and the Next Day”. I now recognize the importance of that theme. He was saying this was your opportunity to do something in time. It is the basis out of which integrity is built. You actually do have a judgment based in the motion and if you don’t do it, it may be too late. “The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on…” and all your tears can’t erase a line of it. We have an opportunity and then it is gone. Sometimes we act as if we have continuous, unending opportunities, but the passage of time suggest that there is a judgment in your dilly-dallying around. That judgment is based in life as it reflects itself in our own erosion.

The apostle Paul tried to deal with this as he sat as an old man of 70 in a prison. He said, “This one thing I do, forgetting what was past, I press on to the mark for the prize.” He was trying to suggest a break with some of the models that have us caught. He is saying we must act and not just dream. Over and against all of this, there is another kind of time that needs to be added. I refer to it as the scripture calls it, “the fullness of time”. Tillich calls it “Kyros”. Berdyaev calls it existential time. For me it is easier to call it the “mystery of eternity in time”. All religions posit that there is a norm of time that also judges us that is neither cyclical nor linear. It is an understanding that the eternal is available now. This understanding posits there is an order of existence that we don’t live in.

Oppenheimer used to talk that when he was in the laboratory he became sensitive to a world backing up into his world. And it was over in that world that he went for his insight. He talked about a time that is neither on a wheel nor on a line. It is best characterized by that which breaks through upon our present involvements and opens them up to the possible deeper meanings. It is to participate in a fleeting moment of the old world about what is human, what is beautiful and what is good. Some of you may have had moments during which you said, “Time stood still”. What you meant was that for an instance all the cyclical/linear time was suspended and something different in character and tone was real to you. That is the other time that breaks through to inform you and in the break through gives you a glimpse of what possibly could be. It is the realm of all prophets and seers. It is the realm of all aspiration, of all promise, and of all life which then puts death in its place. It is in the realm of the resurrection. The disciples did not know how to say it, but after Jesus died they knew that the old time was thwarted and suspended by his life. There was let loose that which defied all time and space.

One thing is clear. We have all experienced these moments. Did you ever have a time in your life when things were so good that you forgot what time it was? You did not check your watch? Things were so good that you did not check the calendar? At that moment you were outside this time range. Most of the time in this world we are checking to see what time it is.

Of course, these moments will not happen on any meaningful level unless you are involved. You must be involved in life’s paradoxes and contradictions to be sensitive to the broad design. When you are involved in the struggle for life, peace, and justice you increase your awareness of who you are. Also the struggle will open up to you new dimensions of the dilemma of existence when your back is up against the wall. You will see more when the break through comes. Melville says that what is grand in me, must be plucked from the sky, dived for in the deep, and featured on the unbodied air. You cannot understand that by sitting on the sidelines – a spectator to life. When you get involved in some issue of justice or deal with some of the oppression in this world, then you will know what it means to go alone at night and leave a little of your blood behind. From a point of involvement you get a response from life, because life knows you by name. And whether it is joy or tragedy you will have something to report back to those who are sitting on the sideline. You will be able to tell them not just something about the past or the present, but you will be able to tell them you have stood on the edge of life and had an idea bout what could be, of what will be.

Therefore, I call you to desert the illusionary lostness in the past and the future and to give your life to the problems which would destroy life in such a way that you will know the insight that breaks through in transcendent awareness to those so devoted who call upon life for a response. I call you to live not in the future, but to live the future to celebrate the new found awareness and to be a vehicle for the continuous celebration of the new vistas, the new time, the new norms with renewed dedication. Allow the vision of tomorrow to walk the earth in the form of your body. That is the opportunity. Live that the very neighborhood that develops around your being will underscore the possibility and the potential for a humane and just world.

Christmas – The Season for the One Who Is Lost 

“What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of the them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray.”                             
                                                                                                                Matthew 18:12-13 

As we come to this Christmas season, we are aware that the facts of disillusionment, hatred and war are really more real to most of us than any ethereal message of the Christmas season. Joy, yes, but mostly smothered by fear – a fear that is fed by our own guilt in what is – a fear built upon the fact that what we have been doing we probably won’t stop doing, and what we haven’t been doing, we probably will continue not to do. Thus it is for us, for a lot of you this season.

You can exit this sermon if you identify with the ninety-nine who are comfortably in the fold, because we are not talking about the safe, nice, ninety-nine who obey all the rules, and come in at night on time. We are talking about the one who is wandering. We are talking about the growing concern of the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to go searching for the one. It is for that one who is lost that this season is – for the one who has, for some reason or another, lost his or her sense of belongingness.

The message first dawned to a people in exile – a people who had been given all the resources and the insight essential to the fulfillment of life, and then turned their backs upon the Giver, the Source. People whose lostness is a factor of their own action – not in terms of some theological notion about Adam. No. We don’t need Adam and Eve to do the thing for you. Most of us have done it and are doing it to ourselves. It is for us, in exile: “Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel. Save us from our captivity.” And as you think of those words, and the plaintive cry in those words, and then as you put that over and against the prophetic vision, it is almost as if there is some strand based in life that keeps people dreaming dreams that are never fulfilled. And so as you hear and experience vision, you wonder why it never happens. But what I want you to understand this morning is that the prophecy is really for you.

          Religion as you have known it has stood between you and your ability to understand the meaning of prophecy in your own life. Prophecy is really an illustration of God’s ultimate hope for you, in you. When there floats over your consciousness the language of the prophets who talk about justice and quality of life and even dream of a remote possibility of brotherhood, what you are hearing is the dream that life has embedded in you, for you.  It is the language which talks about the fact that you recognize that the relationships between life forms is not right, and that the only  hope that life can be life is that the wrong be righted. And what is wrong has been articulated. Not by angels. Their glory of music floating on the wind just reminds us that something is wrong. But what is wrong is known by you. You can tell us what is wrong because you’re living it.

          Prophecy. Visions of a better world. “Comfort ye my people; speak comfort to Jerusalem, tell her that God is going to give her another chance, that her iniquity is forgiven.” And what do the people say? Here comes the classic argument: “Surely the people are as grass.” You know what grass does. It withers and fades. The people are just like that, so you can’t really expect anything from them. They are people in exile.

          But I hear a trumpet blowing to awaken a nation. Surely the people are as grass, but then the voice of God speaks: “Prepare ye the way . . . every valley shall be exalted.” Surely the people are as grass. What are we talking about? How do they get that kind of encouragement, that kind of power? How do they sustain it? They wither and fade, you know. “Prepare a way in the desert.” Surely the people are as grass. But God, the word of God, is not grass. The word of our Lord standeth forever, and there is, in the midst of the people, a clear guide, a plumb-line dropped in their community. They know, “You were made for this. You in fact are prophecy’s instrument. It depends upon you – hearing it, owning it, and being encouraged by its vision in the midst of a troubled community.”

          Now this is not easy, because I’m not talking now about a prophetic vision that develops no reality. I’m not talking about the Word of God in some heavenly context. I’m talking about Truth – the sense of wrong that continues to argue with your silence and your uninvolvement. That’s the Word of God that we are talking about.

          That little baby wallowing around there in the straw one day grew up and said, “This is my body.” That’s the Word. That’s why we are here today. The world has never been able to know what to do with a life that becomes an authentic instrument of prophetic vision. Don’t think you can write it off and say, oh that was two thousand years ago. You can live the centuries in your own lifetime. Two thousand years becomes two hours when you are talking about eternity.

          It is so easy to get a cheap hope going at Christmas – a cheap hope that is no more than the lure of our giddy desires. The kind of hope that I’m talking about is based on an intelligent assessment of the situation. It is no wishful thinking, but it is, as Doctor Chalmers said, directed and practiced desires. Don’t own any hope this Christmas that you are not prepared to practice. Don’t slip in to anything that you are not prepared to own. I’m talking about hope that you are prepared to pay the price for with discipline of body, mind and spirit. I tell you this Christmas, before you get too ethereal about it, when you look at the hellish condition of the world, recognize that it does not have to be this way, and remember that every time a person has caught a glimpse of this and lived it,

lived it, through directed and practiced desire, it has been such a rare event that one of the major religions of the world has been born.

          Oh come, oh come Emmanuel, and make us know what has to happen to us. Make us guilty that prophecy goes so unfulfilled. Make us restless with the mess that we are feeding by our inaction.

          I close with the wife of the Innkeeper in Benet’s “A Child is Born.”

 “We are his earth, the mortal and the dying,

Led by no star – the sullen and the slut,

The thief, the selfish man, the barren woman,

Who have betrayed him once and will betray him,

Forget his words, be great a moment’s space

Under the strokes of chance,

And then sink back into our small affairs.

And yet, unless we go, his message fails.”

Thanksgiving 

Read Psalm 146 

          I want to talk about Praise. Praise is the way we affirm, “I am alive!” It is the way the human person celebrates. Celebrates what? Celebrates appreciation. Celebrates reverence. Celebrates thanks. I read the scripture, “Praise the Lord!” What is happening? I am celebrating the fact that I appreciate. I revere. I have awe for the significant meaning I have discovered hidden in the moment.

          But by what process do we find that meaning? How do we find a new sense of the mystery implicit in our own existence? The Black scholar, Nathan Scott, says to a consuming age: You cannot consume all of human experience. If you begin to live deeply enough in the experiences you are having, even the negative ones, you will discover that when you get through consuming your anger and your response, there will be meaning left over. He calls it “surplussage” and it is that surplussage which tells you that there are depth dimensions here that you haven’t probed. It underscores that you are more than you know. It points you beyond the level where you normally operate to a level that seems to intrude upon you, but that is actually grounded in you. Through it, you become aware of the transcendent principle that connects you with Life – that is larger than you at any given time. And therefore any event, even this event, is full of hidden meanings the implications of which go far beyond me talking to you at the Church For Today this morning. And it is that potential in the event that bespeaks the eternal quality of your existence. It is the awareness of the possibility in you which is the foundation of a deep appreciation that life is alive and that allows you to say, “Praise the Lord! Thanks be to God!”

          Now, in reality, most of the time, people feel less than expectant about life – less grand, less significant. And life which, by definition, is a series of opportunities stretching out in front of us, has dried up, and the moments which make up the days have gone flat. They have lost their expectancy. Our moments are stillborn. In the book entitled The Diary of a Country Priest, the priest comments on the people of his parish. He says there is boredom, a fierce boredom. He says it is like, ‘useless kneading of  bread in which there is hidden no yeast.’ There is no mystery anymore. People have lost a sense of expectancy and the moments have gone dead.

My concern is that we are moving further and further away from experiencing moments of expectancy. The process I see in our society de-escalates the significance of the person, and escalates the significance of the system. What I see happening is that, in the last analysis, we feel limited. We feel we have limitations. And we end up feeling like we’re glad to at least have what we have. And in the end, our sense of adventure, our sense of grandeur, is destroyed. And we are no longer able to celebrate who we really are.

          In such a society where the sense of grandeur that people have available to their daily moments is reduced, because the options in life that seem apparent to them are reduced, you stab at religious consciousness at its core. If there is no awe about your own existence, there can be no foundation for praise. How can you have praise when you are not stricken with awe about the mystery of your own existence? There is no foundation for anything. There is therefore no foundation for religious life.

When the mystery about existence is stolen from you while you are just fighting to hang on, you lose the sense of what life can be. Therefore, there is no celebration, no praise, no thanks being given. Then in our churches and religious establishments, there is really no belief. And where there is no belief there can be no faith. Where there is no faith, there is no action, and where there is no action (and I will use a religious term here) there can be no redemption. Where there is no action, there can be no revolution. There can be no revolutionary action in history and there can be no redemptive action in time, if there is no faith. And that faith must be rooted in one’s sense of awe. When awe is destroyed, the root of belief is destroyed – the foundation of faith is destroyed and people who are under the pressure of these events draw smaller and smaller circles of definition for themselves.

In the Christian tradition, persons should draw larger and larger definitions of their own significance -- even eternal definitions -- as large as being children of God. We are meant to be open-ended, far-flung in definition, unending in possibility, precious beyond measurement.

          How then out of this do we get Thanksgiving?

First of all, people can take hope in the fact that what they are experiencing does not have to be. And maybe they can begin to get a new picture of the moment and the possibilities of the next moment. We must argue with what we are looking at. We need to find ways to become participants again in our own lives. We are going to have to move from the beginning again, and we discover that those opportunities to participate are opportunities to begin to celebrate once again.

That is the foundation out of which Thanksgiving comes. It is to participate at such a level that we become awe-stricken with the Presence. It is to call forth God, whom we are concealing, in the absence which is visible in our presence. I can back that up another way and make it clearer. When you are present, it is apparent that there is absence. That sense of absence in your presence tells of something being concealed that is critical to your presence. It is the far-flung part of you that is waiting to be born again – to free life in righteousness and justice and merciful action.

In this absence, God waits. And when you begin to celebrate your participation, that absence will become transcendence – that is, transporting to persons who touch your presence. It will become a source of living, witnessing power.

The Psalmist says, “Praise the Lord.” I would say, praise the Lord, and praise that which is inextricably structured into life. Praise that which the poet says structures life intricately with his own hand. Praise God. Praise the Presence. Praise the God, who in our own scripture, said, “I will put my life and my will clearly in them, and if they won’t accept it on tablets, I will write it on the fleshy part of their own hearts, so they will know it for sure.”

Praise the Lord, the Psalmist says. Praise the Lord. The Psalmist says, I will. And I am saying, that is our call this morning: to re-articulate our participation so that we can retouch again the well-springs of awe, which are the foundation of celebration – which precede faith, which is necessary for action.

The Psalmist says, I will praise the Lord as long as I live. I will praise God as long as I have strength, as long as there is life in me. One rendition says, as long as I have being; the other one says, as long as I live; another one says, as long as there is life in me; another one says as long as there is a word left in my mouth, the world will hear His name!

Praise the Lord! Hallelujah! 

Moses at Burning Bush

           This church should always be searching for ways to break through everything you have organized as your religious understanding – to try to see if, in fact, we can build a window on your world and allow you to have a fresh encounter with the Mystery of Life. Religion is only valid to the extent that it comments on the Truth. And the bodies of organized religious thought must always understand that the moment it is organized, it has hints of the Truth, leases on the Truth, but it is always less than the Truth.

          I am not really interested in how you state your understanding of God. You as a person have to continue to struggle to know the Presence, the Nature of God. It may mean one thing this week; next week it ought to mean another. This place should be the place where we attempt, not to indoctrinate you, but to free you from indoctrination.

          First of all, when we hear the words of Jesus, we arrive at a simple conclusion that to really understand what He was talking about, one has to be involved. Jesus wasn’t talking to the passerby. He said there are some secrets here. One of the ways to get on to them is to make some primary statement of commitment to searching out the intention of life, or what we call in Christian language, the Will of God. And to the extent that we have been attempting to do it, maybe we can understand what the Psalmist said: “I know that you know. You have kept account of my tossing.” I don’t think this is language for the outsider. This is language for those who have been struggling with the doing of their perception of what is the Will of Life. The Psalmist says, ‘I have discovered that Life has deeply embedded in it caring, and a record of my tossing is registered there; indeed my tears have been stored in a bottle.’

          Then you remember the other interesting text: “When I think of Thy ways …” He didn’t say, ‘When I go to church / when I feel good, that all may happen.’ He says, “When I set my foot to do Thy bidding.”

          And so, this morning’s invitation is to figure out how your life can begin to reflect your attempt to give witness to your perception of what God’s Will is. And when you do that, you are struggling to give utterance and exposition to what you believe to be the reason for your being here. That is a beginning step in religious consciousness. For there is hidden, always, in the mind of the religious spirit, the hope and the promise that, “If with all your heart you truly seek Me, ye shall ever surely find Me” – the promise of encounter – of a meeting place. And the discipline of commitment and work in this world is preparation, is the opening place, so that if Life meets you face to face, you at least might recognize It.

          A part of every religion that I have ever heard of is that these opening places of your life into Life are everywhere. That is what is meant by our doctrine of Omnipresence. The opening places, the windows, are everywhere. Why then do we seem so distant from God? It probably has very little to do with God and a lot to do with us.

          I would like to read a familiar story from Exodus: 

“Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian; and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.’ When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ Then God said, ‘Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy.’ And He said, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. Then the Lord said, ‘I have seen the affliction of my people …’” 

          Let’s start with the end of the text first. A precondition for religious experience is something that is not popular to talk about today. It is not popular to talk about the fear of God. This text said Moses hid his face. He was fearful.

          So perhaps part of our problem is that we have become so psychologically secure, so analytical of all things, that there is nothing before which our little lives stand with fear and trembling. We have become successful in reducing the whole religious province to our own size and we have arrived at the conclusion that, indeed, if God did look at us, we would look back and say, “Hi.” It is a mood that keeps us from acknowledging that there is a mystery in life. We have spoken before about the fact that awe of the Holy is a healthy psychological stance. But we are children of an age that says you should have awe of nothing.

          It seems to me that this attitude of awe is necessary as we attempt to probe behind what appears to be, and gain some sense of deep respect for that which we don’t yet thoroughly understand.

          And so it was that this precondition was met by Moses in the wilderness. Moses looked and he saw something he hadn’t seen before: a bush on fire but not being burned.

          Here was a strange contradiction. It made Moses raise questions beyond the event. Why? And then he became arrested by the very power and force of Life, and the genius of Life. He almost said to himself as it were, ‘You know, Life can do just about anything it gets ready to do. Look at this. One thing becomes clear. What I thought were the ground rules don’t appear to be the ground rules. The way that bushes have behaved through all of history seems not to square with the way this bush is behaving.’ That much is true. He saw that. He was just like you and me – a person out there taking care of business, trying to make some money, and he saw something, contradictory on its face; a paradox, a dilemma.

          And it became clear to him that he had cause for alarm. Terror. And it is not the terror of the Holy yet, it is the terror of the unknown, of that which seems inconsistent with Life – something that doesn’t seem to conform to the laws of nature. The bush was burning but something beyond his own imagination, beyond his own knowledge was going on.

          Then he said to himself, ‘I had better stop and examine this thing.’ There is no record that when he said, ‘I think I had better stop,’ that anything happened. But the minute he actually stopped… (You see, that is the commitment step. It is one thing to talk about, ‘I think we had better look at this.’ The minute he stopped. The minute you stop and look at those contradictory realities of life, even your own, you stand in a moment of commitment, you stand in candidacy for something new. The trouble with most of us is that we never stop around the contradictions of our own existence long enough.)

          The scripture says, “When he turned aside,” what happened? “When he turned aside, God decided then to talk to him.” When he made the stop, God said, ‘He is ready.’ For God saw that he was stricken with awe and wonder and terror of the Holy. For God knew that it was Holiness that Moses perceived. It was the Holiness of Life that made him wonder, for wondering is a province of the Holy. It always and always causes awe. And whenever, for any moment, tragedy or beauty or ugliness or whatever causes you to stop a moment in awe, you are at the edge of the Holy Place. And Life was aware that he stopped at Its threshold, and Life respected this. Let’s translate the text. If, at the apparent contradictions of existence, you stop in wonder, Life will respect your stopping.

          What I am trying to say is this: Just look at our own selves – the most beautiful contradiction that Creation could issue forth – embedded with splendor and endlessness – like timelessness itself. You are fighting like everything to keep it in a manageable unit called ‘yourself’ – under control, so that it won’t ride you off into anything that you haven’t decided to get involved in.

Where is the burning bush? Moses’ story is a story that affects all of us. Moses wasn’t planning on getting involved in strange things, but Moses said, ‘I am going to stop here. Something mysterious is happening.’

          Now, what did he hear? What did God first say? “Moses, Moses.” Moses heard his name. At the moment when the awe-arresting phenomenon of the Presence of Life issues forth in ways that are contradictory to what had become the normal expectation of the culture; in the middle of that which was capable of arresting the normative mind, there is called the name of any who would stop.

In other words, the key to your personality is not what you put together. It is locked in the abiding mystery of Life, and in all that that mystery would spill upon history. That is where the key to your self is. And if around that mystery you stop long enough, you will hear your name like you have never heard it before. And it will not necessarily be the name your mother and father gave you. But it will be one you know, because it will be your essence speaking to you in most intimate terms. “Moses.” Moses heard Life speaking.

          Here was Life issuing forth in ways that were totally inconsistent with the ways it had always been done before. The vastness of the creative energy of God was doing a new thing because it was trying to make a new statement about its Presence. It is always doing new things trying to make a new statement about its Presence, and it is always searching for new statements to be made about its Presence. That, perhaps, is the definition of beingness. It is the search of the creative energy in Life for new possibilities of the expression of the Presence.

          And here it was. And when Moses heard his name – you talk about being accepted and respected! You are talking about being known. There is no significance like that which comes from understanding that in the middle of a mysterious surfacing of the Presence of God, when you get close enough you hear your own name. That is about being known and accepted.

What religion ought to be about is to try to get you to stop long enough at the mysteries of existence in which you participate every day, long enough to hear your name – sounded from the very center of Life itself – so that you might know who you are and know that you are, indeed, known by the vast purposes of history and Life itself. Life that goes beyond all that you can conceptualize. Life whose purposes are printed beyond earth, even into eternity – into futures yet undreamed of. You are known. They can fly a ship to Mars if they please, but in the mystery of the soil of Mars, your name is registered.

          Nothing has been made in isolation. It is not the nature of Creation to create isolated items. All of you belong to all that is, and at the core of that Creational Intelligence, all are known by their real name.

          He called Moses. And what did God say? He didn’t say, “You know, Moses, you killed a man and you know I let you off, but Moses I want you to serve me.” No, He didn’t say that. After He called his name, He simply said to Moses, “You know Moses, I am God.” That is amazing. “I am the God of your father; I am the God who brought them over; I am the God who was with them. I am God.” He identified himself. It is an ecstatic moment – that moment when you become aware that there is connective tissue between you and the Creator. You are lodged in Life itself. But God said, “Wait a minute. That is not all I want to say.” “Moses, I have seen the affliction of my people. I have heard their groans by reason of their taskmaster’s whips. I have come to deliver them. Whom shall I send? Who will go for me?”

          He asked Moses for commitment to what he had experienced. I have arrived at an interesting conclusion that most of our life is spent keeping ourselves from grand experiences to which we might have to commit ourselves. And I think if we had been Moses, we would have just gone on home and said we saw something out there in the field that didn’t make any sense. It was strange and interesting but we had to get away from it in a hurry because it had nothing to do with us.

          He heard the Voice, and then he heard his real name, and then he was told about a problem. God said, “There is a problem.” He said, “There is slavery in Egypt and I want somebody to help me with it.”

          The great issues of life are locked up with your identity. There was Moses standing before a bush and because of his response to it, and his commitment in searching out its meaning, he was there, literally stripped of everything he had brought to that place, but knowing for the first time, his true identity.

          The events are endless. The bushes are burning and the mystery is reciting itself over and over again. And hidden in your response is your identity, your call, your sense of mission.

          I told Jesus it’d be all right if He changed my name. Jesus said if you change your name, your mother, your sister, your brother, your wife, your lover won’t like it. That’s all right. I want to change my name.

          “When I think of Thy ways, I put my feet in the way of Thy testimonies. I put my feet in the way of Thy testimonies. I hasten, I do not delay, to do Thy commandments.”

Halloween

Masks 

I wonder how many of you know what Halloween is about? Halloween is a night when all the restless souls that had died and hadn’t found a place outside of Hell, wander around on the air trying to find rest. They had lived such a rugged life, that their rest is being denied. And it is a night when those restless spirits, cut off from Eternal fellowship with God, are roaming the earth, scaring the likes of us. And it is said that this is a night when they are so real, when you walk down the street you will see one coming toward you. You will see a face, and there may not be a body attached to it. The spirits are restless.

I like Halloween as a concept because it sends the message that you can’t raise hell on earth all of your life, and go somewhere to heaven just because you die. Halloween tells me that there is a whole working out of this thing that has to take place, and a lot of Spirits are restless on the wind. And in our own time, we still like to put on the mask and see somebody frightened.

The case I am making this morning is very simple. Our society doesn’t need a Halloween. We already wear a mask, so we really don’t need to buy any. If we just study our face in the mirror and think about the journey that the face we look at has come, we begin to see the awful onslaught of living, and the extent to which we have had to struggle with the mask that would take over the true countenance that would shine forth, revealing the indwelling Presence of God.

Halloween is a time of masks. Gibran said this morning in the reading that Jesus was more searing against mask wearers than anybody else in the New Testament. He called them hypocrites, a word that seems very out of date to us. If you look in Matthew at the 23rd Chapter, you will find an amazing scripture that seldom gets preached.  It is what they used to call “the seven deadly woes”. 

        “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

        Because you shut the kingdom of heaven against

        men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow

        those who would enter to go in.”

What is he talking about? You know who the scribes and Pharisees were, they were Church folk. He said they were not going into the kingdom and they were blocking others. That is a strange message to the Church. This was Jesus preaching to the people he knew about.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”

We have gone all over Africa and Asia, coverting others to Christianity, to join a hellish Church; a Church that condoned racism; a Church that condoned classism; and a Church that condoned all of the evils of the time. We asked them to convert and join with us. A Church that condones anesthetizing sweet niceness, that wants nothing to do with any of the problems that confront human beings, while people save their own little souls and feel holy. It would be better that they would be what they were, and what do we call them – pagans. A true pagan is much more exciting. A good sinner, much more exciting than a compromising Christian. 

        “Woe to you, blind guides, who say,  ‘If any one swears

        by the temple, it is nothing; but if any one swears by the

        gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.’  You blind

        fools!  For which is greater, the gold or the temple that

        has made the gold sacred?  And you say, ‘If any one

        swears by the altar, it is nothing; but if anyone swears

        by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath.’

You blind fools!  For which is greater, the gift or the altar  that makes the gift sacred?’’

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy, and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and

swallowing a camel!”

This is Jesus. He says you ought to do tithing but you have neglected the weightier matters after the tithe. These are the weightier matters according to Jesus: Justice, Mercy, Faith. These should be done without neglecting the tithing.