|



| |
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.
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.�

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.
And he
goes on. The 23rd Chapter of Matthew, you ought to study it. Now why
do I say you ought to study it? Because I believe hypocrisy is one of our
contemporary evils. I believe that easy accommodation, robs us of a certain
virility of our own personality that allows us to be open to the religious life.
In other words, I believe, very simply, that what Jesus rails so against, in
Matthew 23, is a kind of hypocrisy that has now become for us a national norm.
It is continuous Halloween.
It is
a reverse, Halloween, however. Cover-up is the law of our culture. Cover-up: The
nation has adopted it as a new form of understanding between us, and our
leaders.
I call
reverse Halloween because the mask is not grotesque; it is a kindly face, a
smiling face. It is a face that is prepared to cover-up the grossest kind of
operative evil in public life. We have made the hypocrite acceptable. Is this a
moral issue or isn�t it?
Let me
go a step further. Watch hypocritical living. It has some salient features you
can always chart. It is pious. The hypocrite is always pious. By definition the
hypocrite covers and wears the mask of the saint! It is one thing to remember;
whenever you see super-piety, you are in the presence of some trouble. It is the
highest form of arrogance for one to reflect to another that they are so close
to God that they are of superior quality. The hypocrisy of our age numbs our
critical faculties, and we go on with it to our peril.
Jesus
was right. Hypocrisy has done its thing, and it is working its way. It is like a
worm. If we do not deal with the hypocrisy of our time, we will increasingly
learn to reflect it in our own personal life. And we will find that the mode of
the culture seems right for us, and we will cover ourselves, and we will find it
expedient to keep from revealing who we are. It is death to religious living.
There
cannot be God, who can make mutual compact with persons who will not deal with
themselves. What is Salvation other than a person becoming increasingly aware of
the fact that he or she is a representative of God on earth, and searches there
through the in-dwelling of the Spirit of God in them, to know the will of God
and to do that will. What else could it be? And how could it be that you can
have that going on when you are not foundationally honest?
A
dishonest age runs the risk of making hypocrites of us all. I am talking about
wolves in sheep�s clothing. That�s all. That is where we are. You don�t know
what to believe anymore. Your leaders are not only talking out of both sides of
their mouths, they are wearing masks.
Let�s
be very careful that we do not make too easy accommodation with a society
wherein cover-up is not only the norm, but the way that our leaders use to get
over on us. If we go along, as they say, just to get along, I think we place in
peril our own souls.
Halloween. We wear the mask too much of the time. The concept of judgment in the
Gospels says, you will be asked to take the mask off. As you stand before the
Bar, and I don�t think that is in heaven, I am talking about on earth, the
moment will come when you will be asked to remove the mask. God will say, I want
to see you as you are, because I want to check-on what you have done with what I
have given you.

This Is Our Time To �Flaunt
A Red Flower�
The reading for
today is the opening statement from a book of poetry, Color, by Countess Cullen.
It is entitled �To You Who Read My Book,� and it says about everything that
needs to be said.
Soon every sprinter,
However fleet,
Comes to a winter
Of sure
defeat:
Though he may race
Like the
hunted doe,
Time has a pace
To lay him
low.
Soon we who sing,
However
high,
Must face the Thing
We cannot
fly.
Yea, though we fling
Our notes to
the sun,
Time will outsing
Us every
one.
All things must change
As the wind
is blown;
Time will estrange
The flesh
from the bone.
The dream shall elude
The
dreamer�s clasp,
And only its hood
Shall
comfort his grasp.
A little while,
Too brief at
most,
And even my smile
Will be a
ghost.
A little space,
A Finger�s
crook,
And who shall trace
The path I
took?
Who shall declare
My
whereabouts;
Say if in the air
My being
shouts
Along light ways,
Or if in the
sea,
Or deep earth stays
The germ of
me?
Ah, none knows, none,
Save (but
too well)
The Cryptic One
Who will not
tell.
This is my hour
To wax and
climb,
Flaunt a red flower
In the face
of time.
And only an hour
Time gives,
then snap
Goes the flower,
And dried is
the sap.
Juice of the first
Grapes of my
vine,
I proffer your thirst
My own
heart�s wine.
Here of my growing
A red rose
sways,
Seed of my sowing,
And work of
my days.
(I run, but time�s
Abreast with
me;
I sing, but he climbs
With my
highest C.)
Drink while my blood
Colors the
wine,
Reach while the bud
Is still on
the vine . . .
Then. . .
When the hawks of
death
Tear at my throat
Till song and breath
Ebb note by note,
Turn to this book
Of the mellow word
For a singing look
At a stricken bird.
Say, �This is the way
He chirped
and sung,
In the sweet heyday
When his
heart was young.
Though his throat is
bare,
By death
defiled,
Song labored there
And bore a
child.�
When the dreadful Ax
Rives me
apart,
When the sharp wedge
cracks
My arid
heart,
Turn to this book
Of the
singing me
For a springtime look
At the
wintry tree.
Say, �Thus it was
weighed
With flower
and fruit,
Ere the Ax was laid
Unto its
root.
Though the blows fall
free
On a gnarled
trunk now,
Once he was a tree
With a
blossomy bough.�
�This is my
hour to wax and climb, flaunt a red flower in the face of time.� Countee Cullen
registers that the logic of life is living. And it ought to be full of the
urgency that is indicated rather graphically by the moving sequence of time.
Most people I encounter think that the logic of life is planning, preparing �
tomorrow, next month, next year. �I want to, but . . . I�ll get to it.� As a
matter of fact, it seems to me that religion itself has entered with
questionable theories that, in effect, rob us of the sense of the unrelieved
immediacy of life. And most of us were taught to prepare for some other life
beyond death. Consequently, our coming together in worship becomes a kind of
insurance against some future event, rather than a celebration of the expectancy
about living this moment.
All the while,
life continues to be a story of encounter with the living, and the persons we
remember and to whom we pay tribute, are persons who found the secret, not of
death, but the secret of living: persons in whose life we saw and see an
intensity that is uncommon, and we sense that that intensity has something to do
with a larger measure of involvement and openness to the aliveness of Creation.
If we�re not
careful, the Church itself becomes a studied ritual in the celebration of death,
and the way through the grave � and we call it the Eucharist. And then instead
of dealing with the obvious, essential mysteries that are all around us, we
create new ones. We have bells ringing, and bread that turns into flesh, and
wine that turns into blood. And even though you don�t worship at those altars,
those altars inform your religious sensibilities. And we come away from such
hocus-pocus believing that maybe death is not death.
I�m
with Countee Cullen. Death is death. And maybe it is one of the mysteries of
creation. Maybe it is the counterpart to the mystery to Life. By definition,
mysteries are not to be quickly analyzed and understood. Probably the best
statement we could make about Life is that it is lived in the midst of mystery.
We must search it beyond the obvious, apparent meanings for hidden significance.
Without that, what is Life? What is Death? The best we know is that there is
this thing we call Life, and there will come, on a schedule we�re not sure of,
something that is known as Death. If the Church could be honest it would say,
�That we know,� and we wouls not get trapped in the things that shield us from
that reality.
Death has
become something we don�t deal with at all, and don�t know much about. We think
it�s gruesome. It may be informing if we were to look at it � look at its face,
understand it, and understand that whether we like it or not, it is a part of
what God has done. The twisted body. Ugly you say? Who told you? It may be just
the way death addresses us. But we are not prepared to be that open. And,
consequently, we aren�t prepared to live very much.
If you leap to
the text, you begin to be aware of the fact that the mystery of Life is closely
related to the mystery of Death. And it�s not gruesome. It�s just a fact. We
don�t know any more than what Countee Cullen is saying. Life ought to be
explored, thoroughly, while it is alive. Because one has the sneaking suspicion
that whatever Death is, it takes care of its own exploration without our having
to program it here. If one does not explore life, thoroughly, one may not have
another chance.
It seems to me
that this is what Jesus was about. He had this crazy idea that no corner of my
life should be left unturned by me � not next week, not this afternoon � NOW!
Because time keeps reminding me as it changes guard, that, �You haven�t got
forever!� That fact has been interpreted as a morbid thought. No! It�s exciting
to know that you don�t have forever. I would hate to think that you�d have
forever to do whatever it is you�ve got on your mind. Some religion ought to
declare that the critical domain for religious living is Life � Now! Do
something that has purpose to the world while we are still able to see it and
understand it. I don�t care what you call it. It�s not worth anything if you
won�t live it. How do we get you excited about the breath you�re breathing; the
blood that�s flowing through your veins? How do you understand that it is,
indeed, your opportunity? And maybe all that we will know about you is how you
used that opportunity now. And, if we have to put it in God talk, you�ve got so
many hours to reveal what, in your best consciousness, God had in mind for you.
Undressed of all the junk and dogmatic and liturgical stuff, you are alive � an
exposition of what God had in mind � and, therefore, you should live!
It�s registered
fervently in our scriptures that you must get on with it because life is not
only brief, but to the best of our understanding, basically tragic. Is that an
exaggeration of the scriptures? Read the 90th Psalm if you don�t think that�s
there. You don�t even have to bother with Job. The best insight is that the
early Jewish community decided that the 90th Psalm�s insight was so critical,
they said that Moses knew it. Tragic, brief. Therefore, its opportunity must be
seized. The Psalmist finds the only place he can stand is on an insight that
suggests that since God did this, God understands it. God is not controlled or
conditioned by it. And he tells us that by saying, �For with you a thousand days
and nights are the same.� He says, there is a wisdom beyond this that gives it
meaning, and if I stand on that ground, then I can find the security to life.
What is being suggested here is something also that Jesus talks about when he
says, though this is a transitory place, and the moments keep moving by, this
place can have significance if one gets ahead of the moment and packs it full of
the experience of living. This won�t stop the passing of time, but time will not
pass you by. As it passes it will bear upon itself the imprint of your living.
It is a way of absorbing the time in our own intentionality, in our own
commitment, absorbing the time, filling it up, packing it full. And when that
happens, Jesus said, you discover a secret -- though time is moving in steady
pace, it has the power to contain insights and aliveness far beyond itself.
That�s what Jesus calls eternity. He says, one does not have to be victimized by
the passing moment, if one gives oneself in steady commitment to one�s best
perception of what one�s life could mean to the increase of justice, mercy,
righteousness. Then one participates in that which penetrates time � gives time
its meaning but is not contained by it � known as eternity. It has nothing to do
with death. As a matter of fact, I believe that if you do not experience that
dimension of consciousness which we call eternal, which moves you through
commitment and works behind that commitment beyond the normal cultural
assessment of what is true � if you do not experience that in this life, then
don�t you kid yourself. When you�re dead, you won�t ever experience it. Why do
you think you are going to experience it automatically when you die?
This is your
opportunity. We have an amazing opportunity now to know things far beyond
time. One of the things that we have is Life�s secret investment. The mind, the
imagination, the experience, the spirit, can penetrate the moment, and through
committed living can fill it up and own it. You can go on like you�re going,
planning for the future and knowing that that is the practical thing to do, and
maybe you won�t even know that you didn�t live. That may be the blessing of
death. What is more important than what people are going to say about me is what
I am about to say now about myself and do about it. That is the most important
thing. Difficult? Yes. But now is my hour to wax and climb, now is my
opportunity to flaunt a red flower in the face of time.
What is that about? To flaunt a red flower is to give time a testimony of the
eternity registered in me � to bloom as a flower blooms from the depths of
life�s secret; to give color and profusion to existence because I am. Now is my
time to do it. Don�t preach me into immortality, but would to God that you would
say, I think he had a little experience of it while he was here because of the
way he behaved � not because of the way he talked, but because of the way he
behaved.
That�s it! This
is your hour! This is your time to live! Make it your time. In this community we
will not only live together, we will also die in each other�s midst. And all
that we will have brought is what we did while we were here.
The Church has
you believing that you will have a great getting up, and you will get up to
heaven. That may be, but we have this time now to pack full of life as we sense
it flowing in us. It is your decision. This is the hour to wax and climb, to
flaunt a red flower in the face of time. Now.

The Root of Your Character
I would like to read two passages of scripture: one from Psalm 137 and the other
from 2nd Corinthians, the 4th Chapter, selected passages.
�By
the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and we wept when we remembered Zion. We
hung our harps on the willows, for our captors required of us a song, and our
tormentors required of us fun and mirth, saying, �Sing us one of your songs of
Zion!�
�How
shall we sing the Lord�s song in a strange land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither! Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do
not remember you; if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!�
Now I
would like to read from Paul�s second letter to the Corinthians: �Therefore,
having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. For what we
preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your
servants for Jesus� sake. For it is God who said, �Let light shine out of
darkness.� . . . But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the
transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way,
but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not
forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death
of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For
while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus� sake, so that the
life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.�
Strange words. In my mind, the two texts are about the same thing. They tell us
about the issue of character.
Let�s first discuss
Psalm 137. This was one of the first organized strikes. The Hebrews were told by
their enslavers, �It is now time for you folks to play your harps and your
lyres. It is for our enjoyment.� And what did the text say? �We sat down.� Is
that not a strike? �We hung our harps on the willows�� and refused to play.
Psalm
137 says this is a deeply religious right: The right to say, �I will not.� That
is what all strikes are based upon. The strike, therefore, is potentially a
religious event � religious in its reaffirmation of the essential character of
the person. That character is largely dependent upon the person�s right to say,
�yea,� and to say, �nay.� And when persons sign away their right to say, �No,�
they have been robbed of their character. In saying �yes,� I must not surrender
my right to say, �no.�
The
next part of this text says that they had a reason, a reason of substance, for
not doing. It left them the freedom, therefore, to take a position on things
that were critical for them. When you surrender those rights, you might as well
go somewhere and close the door, because it is over for you. So many people, in
a society like ours, surrender this right for means of security. I see people
accommodating to friends. They are making the great compromise and they know it.
They don�t understand that they are paying an awesome price, and that they have
the right, if they could know it, to hang their harps on the willow and say, �No
I will not sing the song.�
The
captors of the Hebrews knew that if they could get them to surrender this right,
they would have succeeded in getting them totally under their control. But the
enslaved also knew it. They said, �No! How can we sing the Lord�s song here? How
can we sing the Lord�s song when you don�t want to hear Zion�s song?� I think
it is one of the most amazing places in the Bible. They said, � We must
remember, so we will just keep quiet.� And then they went to the root of
character, and the foundation of religious formation, and personality formation.
They went to the core of it, and they said, �How did we get here in the first
place? We got here because we have avowed commitment to God.� That is the only
reason we are over here. And they said: �The songs you were trying to get us to
sing were the songs that we would sing as affirmation. Those were the songs that
we sang as we affirmed God�s goodness to us. Those were �inside� songs; those
were songs we sang among ourselves to God; songs that God and we knew in a
special way, because they were about what God has done with us, and for us.�
And
then they said: �If we forget that experience, we might as well not be able to
talk, or to write, or to eat, or to pick up the harp off of the willow, ever
again to play.� They said: �If I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem, let my tongue
cleave to the top of my mouth, and let my hand lose its cunning (its
articulation) and let it wither away.� They said, �I will be ruined if, for
expediency, I can forget the highway to God. It will make me palsied.�
Remember what Martin Luther said? He said the same thing when he nailed his
statements to the doors of the church. He said: �Here I stand. You have pushed
me as far as I am going to go. I can do no other.�
It is
the same thing isn�t it? Where are those people now? People today � you push
them here, and then you push them over there. When do they say: �No! No
further.� Where are those Christians? Where are those people who have any sense
of social justice, who with their own lives say: �I have taken enough.� I don�t
see many of them.
What
did the forefathers say? �Show me what measure of injustice you will acquiesce
to, and I shall show you the measure of injustice that will be visited upon
you.� Who said that? Frederick Douglass said it. He told us that a long time
ago.
Now there is another idea expressed in Paul�s
second letter to the Corinthians. He said, �We have this treasure in earthen
vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to God, and not to us. We
are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; we are perplexed, but not driven to
despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.� Paul is
talking about a magnanimous quality of character. It is a quality we see
displayed in those slaves in captivity. They are persons placed in earthen
vessels. But through their act the world will know that as those earthen vessels
break down under the brutish whip of the master�s lash, they did not act because
they were gods, or strangely different human beings. They acted because they
tied their fragile, transient bodies and spirits to the transcendent, timeless
Spirit of God. And that is why their act has meaning in history.
Paul
says, �We have this treasure.� What treasure? We have this treasure in earthen
vessels, so that the world will know. Will know what? If the average television
or newspaper writer today would write about the slaves in captivity, they would
say, �They were a special kind of people.� No. �We have this treasure in earthen
vessels, but this transcendent power does not belong to us, but to God.� They
heard like we hear, but they stood firm. Not to be tossed at any point. They dug
in, and said this is it. �We will not sing our songs.� There is a point beyond
which we will not go. And we will not defame that which yesterday was a
certainty.
There
have been witnesses to what I�m talking about. The master said to the Black
slaves: �If you don�t act right and conform, I will kill you.� Do you know what
they said? �Before I�d be a slave, I�d be buried in my grave.� They had their
strength in earthen vessels that the world might know that the transcendent
power belonged to God. They did not accommodate and compromise. They acted with
a character that reflected eternity in time, and through their acts, they
allowed the world to know of a God who could inform life with eternal
dimensions.

Seek and Ye Shall Find
There is a very simple line in the preachment of Jesus that has posed a problem
for the religious community for some time. Jesus says, �Seek and ye shall find.�
When he says that, he is quoting an insight we hear in the prophecy of Jeremiah.
In this text, it is rendered that if you search for meaning with all of your
heart and soul, you will find meaning. �If with all your heart you truly seek
me, you will every surely find me.�
In
the New Testament, the text is rendered, �Seek and you shall find,� and Jesus
implies that you ought to know what he is talking about. But the text has been
personalized to mean that whatever you want you will get, and it has become
popularly interpreted as meaning positive thinking. You just seek it and you
will have it. You will notice that in the Old Testament, it isn�t just saying,
�Seek.� It says, if you seek the Lord.
�Seek and you shall find.� What is being said? If you study the context, you
begin to understand that the insight is much larger than your personal positive
thinking and your particular need at the moment. The insight is vast. This is a
statement about the nature of Life. What is being said is: There is something
about the way Life is structured that questing is indigenous to it. The
aliveness of Life is best understood in terms of questing. We can translate that
very quickly and say, the person in whom there is no active quest is not very
alive. Questing, searching, probing, expecting, desiring, hoping � these are
indigenous to being alive. The thrust toward meaning is fundamental to all that
is living. And to the extent that a part of you is not wrestling with the
significance hidden in your life, to that extent you are not alive, even though
you might breathe and go to work, come home and take care of your family. There
is embedded in Life the thirst for expression. Our tradition says that it is
registered, even physiologically registered, and biologically understood as a
thirsting principle. It is symbolically experienced by your body as your body
celebrates its thirsting � its need for its own fulfillment, for that which is
beyond itself.
�Seek and ye shall find.� The extent to which you seek the embedded meanings of
life, to that extent you are alive. The text is about the principle of
aliveness. Jesus said, you will discover that this is a world that is so alive
that it is responsive to your aliveness, it is so alive that it awaits, as it
were, your aliveness � it quests your questing. And the religious moment is the
moment when your questing and Life�s questing find a point of encounter. That is
the basis of religious experience. This religious experience has to do with the
revelations flowing from that realization that you and all of what God has done
are thirsting and in search of that which is acceptable only in the realm beyond
the one in which you now find yourself. Any religious experience, regardless of
the name, stands on that ground.
I
would like to read from �The Prophet� by Gibran. Here is one of his insights:
�You have given me my deeper thirsting after Life. Surely there is no greater
gift than that which turns all ones aims into parched lips, and then turns all
Life into a fountain. And in this lies my honor and my reward, that whenever I
come to the fountain to drink, I find the living water itself thirsting, and it
drinks me while I drink it.�
You have given me parched
lips and you have revealed to me that all Life is a possibility to assuage my
thirst. I discovered that when I partook of the water of the fountain, it drank
me while I drank it. He is saying that I discovered that Life itself is alive.
Years before Gibran was born, the Black slaves had the insight. Here is the way
the slave said it:
�I
went to the rock to hide my face, the rock cried out, no hiding place, no hiding
place here.�
Life is alive. I went to
the rock, I assumed it was dead, and I was going to hide in my Holy terror of
God, in my shame, but the rock said, no, I�m in the same bind.
The
message is stated again by Paul. All of Life is writhing and groaning, waiting
for the revelation of God. Now the message is the same, whether it is Paul,
Gibran or the slave. Life is alive. And you know the other text: �If you don�t .
. . the rocks will.� When they came and told Jesus to stop these people from
proclaiming that he was the Messiah, he said, �If I stop them from screaming
Hosannahs, then the rocks will cry out.� When we go back and say, �Seek and ye
shall find,� Life is questing and will honor your questing because it is caught
up itself, as Paul says, in groaning and writhing � in searching for the
revelation of God.
What are we talking about? Words like �the revelation of God,� �I want to go to
Heaven.� What are we talking about? I want to know the truth about this Life,
that is all it is talking about. If you are caught in a hellish earth, then
going to heaven is a revelation about what was really intended before people
made a hell out of it. If you are talking about salvation, there is not some
tricky formula, it is simply the dawning awareness that God�s intention, hidden
in Creation, can reveal itself through the creative forms, be they flowers or
air or people.
No
wonder, then, the ancient insights come: If you search for meaning with all of
your soul, so that Life gets the message that you are for real, then you will
discover that the rest of Life is caught up in searching, too. And you will
find, in the corporateness, the depth, of the searching spirit that wanders this
earth � you will find the great mystery of Life, and behind and in that
searching spirit, you may discover the Will of Life.
Seek, if you dare, and you will find that Life is alive. How will you know it is
alive? You will discover the aliveness in the fact that your questing, your
searching, is met with searching. You will find that as you contemplate Life
thoroughly, and as you turn aside in your quest (that means you get out of your
normal level of questioning) that Life will cross-examine you.
All
Revelation is at once Summons. The first thing that happens as you are on the
edge of great religious insight is that you sense that you are being called. In
our ego-oriented life, it is easy for us to understand this if we translate it
in human terms. In the presence of one that you have great feeling for, if you
contemplate the person long enough, you have the sense that there is something
being called from you. When you get up in the morning, and the sun is
particularly clear, you have a sense that, ah, what is this! Or, as you move
along and all of a sudden the gorgeous color catches your eye. What do you mean,
it �catches your eye?� It is talking to you. You�ll stop and you will turn, and
if you turn aside long enough, you will wonder, �What does such beauty mean?�
You will discover that the aliveness of Life questions you.
Now
Biblically, that was true of the burning bush experience. Moses was out in the
field and he saw the bush and he turned aside and then he heard his name, and he
heard God saying, �I have seen oppression and I want you to do something about
it, and I need somebody to go and work for me.�
Just so you will understand the breadth of the message this morning, I will give
you another text. Isaiah is in the temple. His friend has just died � a friend
that he literally worshipped, who was a king. He goes in to pray, bereft of his
friend, and he has this amazing experience the Bible tells us about. There is
symbolically the cleansing experience where they touch lips with hot coals and
then he hears the cherubim and the seraphim and the singing, and he becomes
aware of God in a new way. And as soon as he becomes aware of God, what does he
hear? He hears a question: �Whom shall I send? Who will go for me?� That�s Life.
Seek for it, and you will find.
The
great experiences of Life are those encountering places where we meet another in
whose presence we are deeply dealt with. And we discover not only that we need,
but that we are needed. And we discover the deep interlocking question of life.
�Seek and ye shall find.� You will find that Life is thoroughly alive. With
what? It is alive with a questing reality that always wants to pull you beyond
your accommodation that you have made with Life. That is the meaning of
beyondness. It is the beyondness � that which is past what we have deemed as
possible � that is calling you. Religion is the art of the impossible. You want
some water to drink � that�s all. What does it mean when you start drinking the
water and it starts going down and you feel in it that the thirst is not
assuaged � that the water you are drinking is thirsty? Religion hints always at
the impossible � at the unending insistence of Life for full revelation.
Revelation is not just a call, it is always a call and a sending, a summons and
a response. One comes away with the encountering places of Life always compelled
to do, to be.
�Seek and ye shall find.� Yes, you will find that Life deeply cares for you
because Life needs you, because you are a part of the agonized fractured body of
Life. It cannot know its whole purpose until you engage it, so it can engage
you. Life is hungry and thirsty everywhere. There is an insistence in Life upon
fulfillment, and though it is distorted in many ways by the pressures of history
and time, it keeps breaking forth in its questing and arguing with the quest
level of those who have gone on before. To be alive is not only to seek, but to
seek with a consciousness that what you find is that which the world has labeled
impossible.
�If
with all your heart you truly seek Life, you will ever surely find it.� It is a
search for those who are bent upon establishing the impossible in history. Only
those so dedicated will make a difference in terms of justice, the increase of
mercy, and the increase of righteousness and beauty in this world. Religion
says, certainly the Christian tradition says, to use a phrase from Victor Hugo�s
writing �Les Miserable,� he says, �Salvation is to inhabit the impossible spot.�
Only those whose quest takes them to the edge of what we see as possible, only
those count, as Life counts meaning.
�Seek and you will find.� If you seek with all your heart, you will discover how
alive and seeking Life is. Your joy will be in knowing that you are a part of an
endless searching enterprise, and that you will be at the edge of one of the
great mysteries of Life, of your own life. You won�t have to tell people about
it. They will get the message when they see you.
The
church should be a group of people searching, questing, and seeking, finding,
and ecstatic because of it. It should be a group of people being pulled on to
new levels of questing, and because of it, it should be joy to the community and
to each other. Search for it, until you find it.

Labor Day
On this Labor Day Sunday,
I want to read a portion of the story of the Garden of Eden. Usually I do not
preach a Labor Day sermon. But I have been troubled by this text for a long
time, and it seems that today is a good day to think about it for a few
minutes.
The problem is, this story
comes from the mythology of our religious heritage and the Church has tried to
make it literally true � word for word � trying to suggest that God wrote the
whole thing. But this is myth. It is interesting to decipher what a myth is all
about. The kernel of the myth is true, but the actual story line, the narrative
content, is only a vehicle. It is the wagon in which the truth is brought to
you. So when we start talking about the Garden of Eden, it is not historical.
We all know that in the story, Eve
ate the fruit and then Adam ate the fruit. And because they ate from the Tree
which God commanded them not to eat, God lays a curse on the woman, and He has
one for the man. And it is that curse I want to focus on this morning.
Here is the curse. The
Lord said: �Because you have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to
eat, cursed is the ground because of you. In toil, you shall eat of it, all the
days of your life. � So the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to
till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and east of the
Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword which turned every way
to guard the way to the tree of life.�
My purpose here this
morning is to talk about the implications of that text for this weekend.
My initial reading of this
story tells me that in our religious mythos work enters our consciousness as a
curse. Isn�t that interesting? In our religious mythos, work is not a blessing;
it is a curse.
And since the Garden of
Eden is the place where Adam and Eve were in union with God, we can see that the
world in which they now have been thrown out to work is essentially the world of
evil. And indeed, you and I are now the inheritors of their work. For we went
out, and with the sweat of our brow, we built a system where the workers would
be remunerated based upon the sin the text suggests is in the world � the sin of
greed. That is what is being talked about in the text. We have built a system in
which we deal with each other based upon the knowledge that human beings have
insatiable need for more and more.
We also wisely understood
that it is important to define work in such a way that it energizes people.
Understanding their sin is one thing, but understanding how to design systems
that build upon that sin is another. And so we got busy. We put in place an
economic order that is fueled by the insatiable desires of people for more; for
control; for power � for the power which they poetically were being kept away
from when God ran them out of the Garden, the power of all knowledge.
I could critique every
economic order in the same way, but certainly capitalism got its motive force
from the emphasis it laid upon the fruits of work.
First of all the emphasis
was made upon work itself. Industry was a sign of integrity. It is interesting,
isn�t it? All of us were taught that; you must work hard! And that is very
important when human beings were being used by other human beings as beasts of
burden. It is important for them to understand that to work hard is godly. And
so the system was designed with these ideas built-in.
The Church went on, and it
then told us that work, and the fruit you got from it, the money, or whatever,
was the way that you authenticated your holiness. Did not Calvin develop the
ethic we now know as the Protestant Ethic? He said: How can you tell those among
your congregation whom God has chosen? Calvin said, you will know by
checking-out what they have. If you have $100,000 in the bank and he has got
$1,000, then you are the elect of God. The doctrine of the elect: How do
you know? You know by what their work has brought them.
That is a long way from
what we heard this morning. We built an economic order that just flipped over
the mythos that began our religious consciousness. Work has become a scheme
through which your greed, being satisfied, certifies that you are indeed of God.
But in the Bible story,
work was a curse; and what that says to me is that work was defined as a
necessary enterprise. Not an enterprise of opening to higher things, it was
something you had to do. The scripture says that work is a necessary event. It
is not a necessary route to God.
Now. Along came the
Industrial Revolution. Here again was an idea that was a flip-flop from the idea
in Genesis. They told the workers that they were making significant godly
contributions. And nobody says anything about the fact that the people who
started the enterprise were getting a lot more out of it than the workers. We
just attribute that to the nature of sin in the world after the Garden. In fact,
the conditions got so ruthless they began to misuse even children in the
factories. Why not, if work is the way you rise? And yet, it was probably that
abuse that opened-up, in the consciousness of the people, the notion that indeed
the system itself was wrong.
The point that I want to
make is, as the economic system was established, it put materialism in place as
a by-product of work. And since materialism was the offspring of work, then
materialism itself became a sign of goodness. And so for everything in life, we
developed a material object. Why? Because we had to keep the fires of
productivity moving.
And somewhere hidden in
the back of our materialistically orientated society is our understanding that
really, the more we have, the more money we can show, then the more our work is
religiously justified and holy. We don�t articulate it that way, but somehow I
have the feeling there is a sense in which we feel it.
Now something else has
happened because of this. Every one of us harbors an awful residue of guilt. Any
time we think that we are not doing everything we can in the arena of work, we
feel guilty. As a matter of fact, I have a problem if I attempt to take a day
off. I have to first get rid of the tinge of guilt. You see, this is so much a
part of our culture. You are supposed to be working! So it is difficult to steal
a day on your own schedule. Even when people take a vacation, there will come a
time when they have had enough vacation! They have to get back to something that
is character developing!
If we look at the Biblical
understanding, we might come up with some new thoughts. This coming year you are
going to hear every politician tell you they want everybody to have a job. But
the capitalistic order that we have developed is based upon everybody not having
a job! I just wonder how long we can take all of this without becoming grinning
idiots, because we act like we believe it. �Everyone a job�, and you say, I am
voting for her because she is going to get a job for everybody.
They say, �A job for every
person,� because they understand how much the goodness of work is in the minds
of people. What they will be talking about is supporting a system where you work
hard, and when you come home and fall out at the end of the day from your job,
you feel that you are doing something good. But you are supporting an increasing
number of people at the top who don�t work at all! And in our current society,
at the bottom. The only difference is that those at the bottom don�t even have
maintenance for life, and those at the top have much more than they can use in
two or three lifetimes.
I maintain that unless
work is rethought, we will continue to participate as a part of the sin-system
that we have put in place � to satisfy the few � and the masses will continue to
be taken advantage of because they think they are doing something good. That
doesn�t mean that work has to be bad, but work does not have to be understood as
that which we do for somebody else�s excessive profit.
Now, if you open this up,
you realize that people do not have to be lying in the streets on this Labor Day
weekend. But we have a system that suggests that they must lie in the street so
others, even like us, can do very well. You say: there are no jobs. I say:
create some. You say: they are unskilled, that is the reason they are in the
street. No one is unskilled. God has not created an unskilled human being. The
question is: What are their skills? What could they do in a human place like
this, fraught with confusion over a distorted Gospel? What could they do to
make this place more beautiful, more like the Garden they were kicked out of?
What could they do here, east of Eden, that would make sense in God�s design?
There are a lot of human support services they could render without going to
training school. You don�t have to be trained to support another person; to
express affection to them; to help them walk if they are weak in their limbs.
You tell me there are no
jobs, and I say the reason for that is we have confused the understanding of
work. Employment could be an activity which not only benefits you, and makes you
feel like you are good, but it could be an enterprise that reclaims and redeems
and reestablishes effective bonds between people; allows people a
self-actualization through which they express the Love of God, as they have
experienced it. You and I could sit here today and create all kinds of new jobs
that have no �skill� connected to them except to be a human person.
Think about it this Labor
Day.
Jesus didn�t have a normal
job. And more importantly, he took people away from the jobs they had. He called
them to a task which he said was a higher calling. He said, �I call you to
reclaim human life.�
When I was a little child
we used to sing, �Work for the night is coming.� That was our Labor Day song. I
have a feeling when we sang that song, we were doing a poetic transliteration of
the text where Jesus said: �Do thou diligence while it is day, for night
cometh.� And that diligence was about pursuing God�s Will, while I had time.
God cast us out of the
Garden, and in so doing made work a necessary enterprise laid upon us in this
life. But even so, we have to struggle to know more about God. That cannot be
left out of our daily activities.
The way Jesus and his
Disciples survived is they had an economic understanding that was related, not
to their individual self-aggrandizement before God, but to their
community�s welfare and to its caring. People would beg alms for them, and
that is how they would eat, or they would stay at somebody�s home and be fed.
The point is, they had a different understanding of how you organize
economically.
Think about that, as you think about work. Let us rethink
work. Let us create exciting new jobs for people to be employed at making the
world a more sane place. They may never need a traditional kind of job. Let us
create new opportunities for ourselves and for others to be employed in
enterprises that affirm that we are all important in the sight of God, and
important in making our community a more human place.

The Great Commandment
I want to read what is probably the most familiar passage in the Bible.
It is the foundation of both the Old and the New Testament literature. It is
found in the Gospels. I want to read first from Matthew, and then I will read
the same passage from Luke and then from Mark.
MATTHEW:
�Teacher, which
is the great commandment in the law?� And he said to him, �You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
mind. This is the great and first commandment.
And a second is
like it�
You shall love
your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and all
the prophesy.�
That is the
reason I say it is the most significant statement in all of the text. On these
two commandments, you hang it all.
LUKE:
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, �Teacher,
what shall I do to inherit eternal life?� Jesus said to him, �What is written in
the law? How do you read?� and he answered, �You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and
with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.� And Jesus said to him, �You
have answered right; do this, and you will live.�
MARK:
And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another,
and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, �Which commandment is the
first of all?� Jesus answered, �The first is, �Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God,
the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and
will all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.� The
second is this, �You shall love your neighbor as yourself.� There is no other
commandment greater than these.� And the scribe said to him, �You are right,
Teacher; you have truly said that God is one, and there is not other but God;
and to love God with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all
the strength, and to love one�s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole
burnt offerings and sacrifices.
�And when Jesus
saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, �You are not far from the
kingdom of God.�
The passage, �You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind
and soul, and strength; and your neighbor as yourself,� interested me. Religion,
any religion, has at its core, something to do with communication between you
and your Creator. That is what religion is about. It is not about anything else.
It is not about being nice. It is not even about being ethical. It is not about
conforming to what the culture thinks is good, so that you have a nice image
among your friends. Now it is all right for you to look nice to your friends,
there is nothing wrong with that. But that is not our business. It is not even
our business to be here trying to teach you how to behave. That is not the task
of the Church.
But the Church has made that its primary task, and made religion
prescriptive. Religion is written-up for you: You do this, and you don�t do
that, and you take this every hour on the hour, and you kneel here, and you look
holy here, and you will go to heaven. That is what I mean when I talk about
prescriptive religion. Just like when your doctor writes you a prescription, you
do this and that, and take these pills, and you think you have got it made. You
take them and you still die. Religion is about the fact that when you take all
of the pills, you still die. You see, it is not about the pills. But the Church
has become prescriptive. People think that if they go there and they look holy,
and if they pay extra dues, that they are going to get a better place in heaven.
And the Church confirms it.
The great English philosopher, Thomas Carlyle, said something once that
has registered in my mind. To paraphrase Carlyle: Our unhappiness is about the
fact that we have a greatness. That greatness is because there is an Infinite in
us, that with all of our cunning and our smartness, we cannot quite bring under
finite control. There is an Infinite in us that we are unable to put under the
control of our latest scheme. We wish we could, but we can�t. And another way to
say it is, there is a God consciousness in us. No matter how good we are, there
is a part of us that is outside of the cultural understanding of goodness. And
that outside part keeps us agonizing, and lets us know that we haven�t quite
done it yet.
Loren Eisley said it this way. The terror of our age is our concept of
ourselves. In other words, the most frightening thing about our time is the
image we have of who we are the small definition of who we are. What do we say
when we have not measured-up to that greatness that Carlyle talked about? �Oh,
you know we are just human.� �I am only a human being.� It is a lie that you are
just human. We say that all the time: �I am just a human being.� You are not!
And what is amazing is that somewhere inside you, you knew it before we told
you.
I come to the text: �Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with all Thy heart,
mind, soul, and strength.� It took me years to realize it, and then Jesus made
the connection: �Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.� And if you put those
two things together, what Jesus is really saying is: To love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart, mind, soul and strength, is a statement of self-love. He
says, and you should, �Love thy neighbor as thyself.� Which suggests he just got
through telling you how you should properly love yourself. I never understood
that. All of a sudden I realized that the text is about self-love, and that this
is a proper reading of self-love. �Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, mind, soul, and strength, and thou shalt love your neighbor as yourself.�
Well, how do you love yourself? I just told you. By loving God.
The Great Commandment is about what I maintain all of the New Testament
is about. It is about trying to get you and me, to understand that our selfhood,
our reality, our presence is rooted in a transcendent principle built within it.
Your selfhood has locked, built, structured into it a principle that is larger
than earthly, historical, time-bound existence. An adequate self-image is a
self-image that is lodged in ultimacy. You can only experience who you are, as
you make that awesome total commitment to the Source!
�Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all of thy heart� � with all of
thy desiring, that is a synonym for heart; with all of thy willing, with all of
thy deep passionate, urging and yearning � all synonyms for heart. Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God in thy most private time, with all of thy secret desires.
That shall be primary. With all of thy thoughts. Thy thinking apparatus should
be joined in, because every time a thought enters your brain, you should
recognize God and praise God you have another idea! �Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all of thy mind� � with all of thy thought apparatus. �With all of
thy soul.� What is that about? �With all of thy soul��I translate that to mean,
�With all of thy spiritual confidence.� There is a part of every one of you that
is never, never, in trouble. When that place is discovered, you find the
in-dwelling of God consciousness. It is the spiritual core that is always
confident about you. It is God�s indwelling Presence. Soul � that quiet
confidence, that spiritual confidence, where the idea is harbored that I am more
than human. It is that consciousness that connects you beyond mean definitions
of yourself. �Thou shalt love the Lord thy God� � even with God�s indwelling
Presence. �Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all soul
and with all of thy strength.� It wouldn�t be religion without that last word �
strength. With all of thy energy! With all of thy actions. With all of thy work.
With all of thy deeds. Religion is, in the last analysis, not just desiring, no;
not just an idea, no; not just a spiritual certitude, no; in the last analysis,
it is something you do for God. �Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.�
And then Jesus said, �You love your neighbor like you love yourself.�
Adequate self-love is not doing something nice for myself, no! Adequate
self-love is self-discovery. It is to discover that I live the Eternal. It is
trying to find a way to increase my love for the One who made me. That is loving
self. Loving self is not making sure that I am safe. Self-love is loving God and
trusting God for the things you think you have got under control. The love of
God is the proper love of self. �Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.� This is a
claim on the self, and it tells me that I am a potential participant in
Eternity. That is the proper love of self! To know that I am more than you see!
I could be God�s revelation in time. The proper love of self: �Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God.� God should have primary claim on me. Only then can I be a
transcendent principle, a break-through in history, of something that is larger
than history.
And any time that you happen through your heart, soul, mind, strength to
coincide and be on God�s program, you have that Principle behind you. And our
only prayer should be: �Lord, in this life, help me to make those kinds of
choices, though the world does not understand, that would allow me to
participate with You.� God, I want You on the Board. If I could have You on the
board of directors, I will just wait for Your vote.
And I say, we should lift God�s name again and say, it is under this kind
of Power, that we must struggle to do God�s bidding. It is under this kind of
Power that we must try to bring beauty, and justice, and righteousness in the
world. Lift God�s name again. And not with�you do this, and you do that..no,no.
Just lift the Name again, and say, God, I would be for Thee. Here am I! Send me!
Help me to understand the nature of the purpose.
I know now that God is not running out of power so if I can, through
religious consciousness, discern God�s purpose and God�s will and commit my life
to it, there is one thing I know: I won�t have to worry about energy, and energy
shortages. I�m reminded of Job here: �Do you know where the storehouse of the
snow is? Do you know where lightening is kept? Where do they box up the thunder,
when it�s not thundering?� Do you ever think about that? We are in the midst of
mystery and we are walking around acting as if all were known. No, it is not all
known.
To be blessed is to become aware that I am more than human. �Love the
Lord your God with all your heart and mind, soul, and strength,� and know that
in the intimacy of your person that bears your name, you are of ultimate worth,
and ultimate significance, and you should be making ultimate statement about
God. You should intend to find out, before you leave this earth, something about
God that we didn�t know, and couldn�t have known, had you not revealed it.
I am going to be on the lookout. And I hope you are, too.
God is Firmly Fixed
I read to you from Psalm
119:
�For ever, O Lord, thy word is firmly fixed in the heavens.�
Another translation says it
this way:
�For ever, O Lord, thy word is settled in the heavens.�
That word �settled� is an
old fashioned word. �Thy word is settled.� It tells of a world of religious
consciousness that we don�t know much about.
�For ever, O Lord, thy word is firmly fixed in the heavens.�
Thy word is settled. There
is a dependable architecture to the universe. In that dependability rests an
understanding of a unity of all that is synonymous with the Word.
�Thy word, O God, is firmly
fixed in the heavens.� We are not caught in helter-skelter time. There is
available to each of us a relationship with Life that is dependable. The history
of Humankind has confirmed to us that when that relationship is understood and
when it is taken seriously, it not only informs life but also saves life.
�Thy word, O God, is firmly
fixed�. The Bible says there are those who take advantage of others, but they
will not gain the pleasure of this God. It says that this God is partial to
those who bear the burden of others in humanity; and has sided with them in the
struggle. The insight is all there. This God has built a universe in which love
is the only thing that is certain to open the door to the tabernacle of God�s
presence.
Our tradition says the
future is always your opportunity to claim more understanding about what it
means to be in servant relationship to the Creative One.
The world of the Psalmist,
true though it is in the experience of many, seems strange in times like this.
�Thy Word is forever settled in the heavens.� There is a Universe that is
unified. God agonizes over the fracturing and the use and misuse of Creation.
What happens to these
concepts of fulfillment in a world like our present world? What happens to
ideas about salvation? People under the burden of the awesomeness of the
Presence of God are pushed to ask questions about the nature of the Creator who
gave us this life. It is clear from the standpoint of the Gospels that whatever
else God is, God is at least sensitive to what God has done. Therefore, we are
not jokes of Creation. We are intentional life facts in the Mind and the Spirit
of God. In fact, God is capable of knowing that we were in fact created. The
scripture says it this way: �The hairs of your head are numbered.� This was the
language of inspiration that said that whatever vastness God is, vast Principle,
vast Form, God is not so vast that we are not known.
So we develop what is known
as the personal God. The theological error is that as this idea worked itself
through the culture, the meaning of the personal God was transliterated. The
Church transmuted this to mean that God is a �buddy.� This is the foundation of
a new cultural religion. Churches have come to the conclusion that religion
exists with a God who is available at your behest, waiting for you to call with
your latest �foot-cramp�! This is not a personal God, this is a chummy God;
this is a pocket-sized buddy.
But this is not the God the
Psalmist is addressing. As we approach the God of the Psalmist, we approach the
Sense of the Presence of Awe � that Primary Force that dreamed the dream of
Creation, and we have a sense that we are known. With limited vocabulary and
cognitive mechanism, we can speak a word and we will belong to a God who knows
the ocean, who knows the storm, and knows the storehouse of the snow. When we
close our eyes in prayer, we can be sure that we are known. Yet I would not be
so presumptuous as to say: Come on, I know God, and I need this now! But that is
what our culture is telling us. Because of this error, we have no awe. �Thy
Word, O God, is fixed forever� � that is an awe-inspiring idea.
The 119th Psalm bespeaks
God�s terrible investment in Creation. Thy Word, O God, is not something held
apart. The earth is all a part of creation, and when the parts know it, they
become servant to that Unified Work. There is, therefore, a terrible
intentionality invested in the affairs of the world. God did not leave the
Creation without the clear understanding of the wholeness, and of community, of
love and affection, and the binding of the parts that were indicated in the
nature of the design.
You say then, where do we
look? Do you know what I think? Camus led me to this one. He said, you know, the
oppressed are always the natural protectors of freedom. And as I look further, I
have found that perhaps the deepest secrets of what I am trying to talk about
are surfacing. The toiling masses are vibrating with the sense that life should
be more for them. They may be tormented, struggling, but they are determined
that their dreams of a better life will not disappear in the shadows of
imperialism and massive power. Even though it may seem that their goals for
freedom are literally receding, they struggle, they fight, and they die with a
hope that pushes through the shadows of the moment, and hangs on to receding
goals with fierceness. The wretched of the earth may be the new revelation of
the Word of God that asserts that all belong � all colors, all classes, all
races and all nationalities.
Maybe the message is there.
The Church may be at the edge of becoming irrelevant to God. The Word of God
would insist in times like this that every one of us would be struggling to find
a way to contribute to the unity expression. Maybe the Church is not there.
God agonizes. God�s
statement of the Word in our time is obviously outside of the Church.
You know, there is another
secret. It is not just outside the Church. Jesus did a very interesting thing.
He taught us something that we can�t forget. He said, that the Word is lodged in
you. He didn�t say in the Church. He said, in you. Jesus said, �The Kingdom of
God is within you.�
There is a short story by
Tolstoy. There was a man who had no basic involvement in the social situation;
he was really not concerned, and he listened to a piece of music, it was by
Beethoven, it was the Kreutzer Sonata. In Tolstoy�s story, a man heard this
music and it changed his life. He became involved in a new social consciousness
about the world in which he lived. Somebody said, well, how could that be? He
experienced something akin to pure beauty. How could he then be changed? Because
there was, what the philosophers call, the point within him. I call it the soul,
where such unhampered certification of the Word is resident. A point within the
person, where truth, and the demands of truth, reign in an unfettered way, and
the moment of beauty resonates within. If this were not true, then a moment of
beauty would seem foreign to the human being.
But anyone encountering a
moment of defenseless beauty, finds an amazing tug on his or her own soul. It
haunts and indicts. It is because there is something within them that knows. How
did it get there? It is the waiting Word that is outside the culture, because
the culture has rejected it. It is hidden in your soul. And in that moment of
beauty, the more beautiful the experience, the more it speaks to you. It is
almost like I have heard it before�.I have been here before�I have seen this
before, because it is the symbol of God�s informing your personal existence;
it is the point of truth within you from which you cannot run. Truth, the
trysting place where the Love of God and the love that is the center of your
aliveness, come together.
The Word of God is in no
trouble. The promises registered in the Glory of what God has already done, not
just in the Universe, but what God has done and is doing in you, is not up for
grabs.
Thy
Word, O God, is firmly set, and when we know that, we will come and serve.

You
Are of Inestimable, Utter Worth
As we reflect upon the Easter experience, it is important to put some
things in perspective so we can better understand the dilemma of religion in our
time.
First of all, Christianity was
not the religion that filled the bosom, the life, the body, the mind and the
spirit of Jesus. Jesus was not a Christian. It is very important to get that
straight. Nobody can document the fact that Jesus ever thought he was a
Christian or ever called himself one. It is clear to me that until we get that
straight, we are going to be confused about our religion. The religion that
filled Jesus� life was not Christianity. That is step one.
And the religion that flowed from
his life that became known as Christianity both preserved his story for history
and lost his story for history. The Church has both magnified his image and
diminished it. The disciples attempted to remember and celebrate his life as
they had experienced it. And when they began to try and structure that life in
ritual and symbol and liturgy and theology, they were trapped right away because
they could not find ways of expressing what they had experienced. And thus began
the development of the mythology of Jesus.
Now that mythology cannot be
deprecated. I am not here to say it should never have been developed. All of the
doctrines and theology and mythology represent the fact that there was a truth
that men and women were attempting to preserve. And so they worked it out
theologically: very God of very God, begotten not made, he must have preexisted
with God before time, he must have been in the mind of God before God decided to
create the world; indeed he was a part of the Godhead that God decided should
come down and reveal himself to the people. And we get theories of the Trinity
that Jesus never knew about. Now I am not here to make light of the theories of
the Trinity. I am here to suggest that these were feeble vessels in which
necessarily finite and limited minds attempted to preserve their understandings
of the infinite. The fact of mythology represents the struggle of finitude to
encase infinite reality. And so it�s a precious situation we are talking about,
but we must understand that in the attempt to preserve it, we have lost a lot.
And some people have become so hung up on the Trinity and on all kinds of
special properties that are imparted to Jesus that they never know anything
about Jesus. His personality is obscured for us, and the church has obscured it.
But somewhere in the heart of the church�s intention was the desire to preserve
Him for history. But they said He was a God. As a matter of fact, not A
God, but they said he IS God. Jesus never said that. In fact, when they
called him good, he said, �None is good but God.� But we say Jesus is God. We
have obscured his personality in the special claims we have laid on Jesus, the
claims of divinity.
The human person has been lost in
much of the miraculous trimmings that we have put around the birth and the death
of Jesus. The annunciation stories of the virgin birth and so forth deprive us
of a human person. As a matter of fact, at once we are told that the incarnation
was God�s way of allowing Himself to be witness to the experience in the human
context and the next thing we are told is that indeed Jesus did not come as
other humans. It doesn�t add up, does it?
And then, as if this were not
enough, the mythology continues beyond his death and resurrection. It says that
one day he was out on a hillside preaching and after he got through preaching,
whoosh � and they call that the miracle of transfiguration. This is what you
have been taught all your life and you have been told that this is crucial unto
your salvation.
Isn�t it interesting that we have
said that God decided one day that He was going to do this thing and let a part
of His Trinitarian Being come down and the majority of the churches confess to
that. We would then have to ask a very simple question: with the world in the
mess it was in, almost from the moment of Creation, why did God act so late? The
point I am trying to get across is that the church, out of love, has helped to
obscure and has often smothered the essential life of Jesus. One of the great
arguments of history was whether he was one of the same essence with God;
whether indeed his actual flesh was the same or different. That is how
ridiculous it has become.
The fact is, there was a person
born who lived and into whose life there came the experience of focused
dedication to the perceived Will of the Creator, God. And what we do know is
that it was startling. Somehow, the Word, the Truth that would proceed from the
very mouth of God, if one could dare conceive such; the Word, the Truth that
could proceed if God looked like us and spoke the Word that would proceed from
His mouth, which would be the full embodiment of what God had in mind; that
essence came to expression in the life of this one person. The Word became
flesh, and people were startled by him. The text says he grew in wisdom and in
stature with man and with God. The commitment was so realized the he began to
demonstrate that strange phenomenon of the person who becomes what he talks
about. This was not focused embodiment that had come from the remoteness of the
intellectual life. The evidence is that this happened in a very simple life � a
life in which all the devious machinations of logic and sophistry and all the
rational processes of reason did not operate to shield him from the truth that
he had seen.
Now as I look at Jesus, I see
that what made him different was that Jesus was open � relaxed and open. And he
was prepared to deal with the life that he experienced without retreating from
it. He was open to dealing with life without insulation. Most of us have all
kinds of ways of insulating ourselves from real life forces. Most of our social
groups are insulators. They make us feel good when we shouldn�t. Love affairs
are insulators. They tell us lies about ourselves that make us feel good. We are
used to insulating ourselves from obvious truth. We have been taught to live
that way and all of our institutions come in to help us.
Jesus was defenseless before life
� and open to it. And he said that if one were to be open, one would discover
that life is full of messages from God. He said the prophetic is embedded in the
common stuff of daily living. So the men were out fishing all day and he came up
to them and said, �God is over there.� He said I know because the fish are over
there, and they came up with more fish than they could handle. He said God is
not passive but is making a statement. But you have to open your eyes and see
where the fish are, and then fish. And this is the reason that fishermen, poor
people, ignorant people, weirdoes, deviants, conniving money lenders, were all
subject matter for him. But because he was so open, so defenseless, people
started to say all kinds of things against him. Some people said he had in mind
a classless society. I am not sure that any of that is true. What he did have in
mind was that life was to be lived. And when it is lived authentically and
honestly, it is liberating.
We have laid too heavy a load on
Jesus. Jesus was a person limited in history � by the facts of his life. But the
minute you make him God, you can allow no limitations. It is clear from looking
at the text that Jesus was a rural person. At least, the highly organized,
mobile urban scene was not a part of his experience. An urban-conscious person
would never go in and take a whip to get everybody out of the temple. That isn�t
done. That is not sophisticated. But he didn�t know any better. That wasn�t a
calculated move; that was his honest, open response to the fact that the
moneychangers were using the temple as an exchange place and were taking
advantage of the poor. And a young man coming from a small village said this is
wrong.
He was simple. It is clear to me
that Jesus did not understand large organizational life. Somebody said, well
what kind of social system, economic order, did Jesus have in mind? None. You
say, is Communism Christian? Who knows? Jesus wasn�t a Christian so he couldn�t
answer that. What would Jesus do in a mess like we are in? Who knows?
But what he did know, he knew.
Jesus was a kind of working mystic. He got hold of a simple idea. As a matter of
fact, he was a one-point preacher. He had one theme: You are of inestimable,
utter worth. That fact is registered in you through the miracle of your
personality. What makes you so awfully precious is that the part of the
intricate pattern that you represent, only you can represent. That�s what makes
you so amazingly important in the scheme of God�s design. He would not make two
of you.
Have you ever put a puzzle
together? You get the whole thing put together and you find that a piece is
missing. Jesus says that is the reason you are so important, because the someone
who must be found cannot be substituted for. He said there were ninety-nine
sheep in the fold, and one was lost. So what should you do, just buy another
one? The gospel says it is not that you find any other one to make 100, but you
find the one that is lost. Leave the 99 and go look until you find it. What is
he trying to say when he talks that way? He is saying that the one wandering
sheep occupies a unique position in the completion of the design that cannot be
accomplished if I just buy another one.
There was a man, Jesus of
Nazareth, who lived and lived so thoroughly and so openly, so unencumbered, so
committed to doing what had been revealed and what was being revealed to him �
the Will of the Creator for his life � that he became a wonder in history. The
text says, �In him, life lay.� What the text means is that that life was a light
for many. In other words, Life is in all of us, but because of his own
organization of himself, the life that lay in him became a light for others. In
him life lay, and life lays in you, but because of the way he seized upon it,
the life in him became a beam, a light. And it was so startling that people
began to try to preserve it.
Jesus was not unaware of the
focusing of his own life. Out of his own knowledge of the coming together in his
life of the perceived Will of God and his own doing, he said to those who were
looking on and wondering what to do, he said, �I am the way.� Now what that
meant is: Look, I am getting it together; this is the way to do it. Life was so
organized in him that it became a light and his life symbolically lights the
path along which we could walk, should walk, for the Kingdom, toward the reign
of Justice, toward the reign of righteous Love. And when the light that emanated
from his life becomes a guide for you, then Jesus, in truth, becomes the Way.
In him life lay, and that Life is
the light of men. Paul says, �I have seen the glory of God in the face of
Jesus.� I say, let us see the glory of mankind also in his face. I say, I have
seen your potential glory in the face of Jesus. Let it be so.

Easter Sunday
I begin by reading from Thomas Merton:
�God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we
please. But the problem is this: since God alone possesses the secret of my
identity, God alone can make me who I am or rather, God alone can make me
who I will be when I at last fully begin to be.
And if I never become what I am meant to be, but always remain what I am not, I
shall spend eternity contradicting myself by being at once something and
nothing, a life that wants to live and is dead, and a death that wants to be
dead and cannot quite achieve its own death because it still has to exist.�
�Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the
person that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know
anything about that person�.
All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only
in my egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything
else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life trying to accumulate
pleasures and experiences and power and honor and knowledge�to clothe this false
self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real�.
But there is no substance under the things I have gathered together about me. I
am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation�..They
are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed.�
��And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness
and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am a mistake.�
Easter!
This morning, we arrive beautifully wrapped in the mummy cloth of our own
making. We know we are wrapped in the mummy cloth. We know the dead areas in our
own beings. They are of our own doing. And in a sense, we have entombed
ourselves.
And so, the question is, can
we find a way out of our own graves?
The whole Easter event is the answer to that
one question.
Close to the Easter season comes the celebration of the Passover on the Jewish
calendar. The Passover happened many centuries before the events that Easter
celebrates, and is a freedom story. Do you remember the story? The plagues were
visited upon Egypt and the people who were enslaved marked their houses and God
passed over them and did not destroy their houses and then allowed them to
escape across the Sea to freedom. The Passover celebrates that victory.
Easter is also about victory. It is about the victory of a group of people who
rediscovered the power and the presence of their Leader. It is about that
Presence that reinserted itself into their midst and that was so real and so
powerful, that the little band of the faithful who had become weak and
embarrassed by having followed Him became emboldened. And their own lives were
changed. They became symbols of power and imagination and determination. They
changed the world.
Fundamental to our Judeo-Christian faith then, is the issue of justice, freedom
and victory. Not justice as an idea that never wins, not freedom as a concept
that never reigns, but justice and freedom that reign and define our history and
our common life.
That is Easter, as I understand it.
Let�s look at this whole experience of God working with human beings, that takes
us through the Passover and then much later to the Resurrection. You can see
that what God has been trying to do in history is to increase the measure of
freedom in the life of people. Our religious experience has in fact been a
freedom journey. The text starts with people in bondage, physical slavery, and
God says I have got to deliver them from that. And they are delivered from
physical enslavement. And they come out and shout. And the text says �the horses
and the riders have been cast into the sea. Alleluia! God fighting for the
oppressed. It starts there, breaking them out of enslavement.
Then, what happened? It became apparent as they crossed the sea and started out
into the wilderness that once they got out of their enslavement they had no
understanding of how to deal with each other. As soon as they got loose they
started living for themselves. And the sins that arose were greed and
covetousness. And God said well these people cannot make a statement in my
behalf unless I move back and free them now from their individual sins of
covetousness and greed. And God inspired the writing of the Law. And the Law
said, �Thou shalt not kill.� And that took care of the murderous part of human
sin. �Thou shalt not mess with your neighbor�s wife.� They said �covet.� And
that took care of that. The purpose of the 10 Commandments, the Decalogue, was
to free the people from this new entrapment which was their own personal greed.
�Thou shalt not steal.� Would you think that these people just out of slavery
would be stealing from each other? Yes.
But then the people quickly made the Decalogue absolute � an iron rule with no
bending, and God knew there was trouble again. Because they started doing
everything that wasn�t listed in those ten points. And now we saw the entrapment
of law. �That is not down here.� They knew it was wrong, but it wasn�t listed as
one of the ten points. So God moved to free them from bondage to rigid
legalisms. God said, we will appoint some Judges to rule on the law. And then
God did a most amazing thing. God said, we will plant among them enlightened
leaders, sovereigns, who have the power to, not just interpret the law but to
make new law on the spot. You see the Judges couldn�t do anything but interpret
the law. They couldn�t write law. The Kings could write laws. The Kings could
decree. And God therefore increased the freedom. God moved the people beyond the
bondage of the law. God gave an enlightened leader the right to be God�s
spokesperson in their midst. And you know what happened then? It wasn�t long
before it became apparent to God that enlightened leaders yesterday, are corrupt
ones today. The leader who was enlightened . . . David . . . coveted whose wife?
One of the most enlightened rulers of all time � he saw her bathing on the roof,
sun bathing, and he forgot all of the enlightenment. This is the human
situation.
So then God decided, I cannot trust this freedom to be preserved in this manner,
so I will have to make it internal, not external � internal to the person. And
that is what is talked about in Jeremiah. God says, �I make a new covenant with
you. No longer will you have to trust a King, no longer will you have to trust
sheer, strict, constructions of the constitution, because I am going to place
the truth on your inward parts and write it upon your hearts. And I will be your
God and you will be my people, directly.� No longer, the text says will it be
necessary for one neighbor to tell another neighbor what is right�you will know!
It will be a part of your musculatory system. And God moved to create a new
level of freedom so that the person owned the truth of God as an internal event,
not available to being voted out of style by the legislature.
You would think that would be enough wouldn�t you? Do you know what happened
and is still happening today? People decided that because the truth had been
written on their hearts that they were the whole truth. They decided that truth
resided in them, exclusively. Now the minute you let that happen, then you see
that the sin of pride has enslaved the Eternal Presence. You are in a body. That
body gets shot down, run over. If we allow the me-ism of our current culture to
run rampant, when your body is destroyed then we have lost an exclusive block of
truth.
Then God had to deal with how to free a person from the limitations of the
frailty of impermanence and of bondage to flesh. If God is trapped in fleshy
definitions, then when the flesh is destroyed God is destroyed. And if each one
of you has got God and they kill all of you, then God is gone. Drop a bomb and
God vanishes. I maintain that at the present time in our culture we are just
about there in our religious understanding. And that is the reason people tell
you, �I don�t need church�.
The significance of Easter is that, in the Easter experience, God�s Presence is
defined as larger than flesh. Easter confirms that the Kingdom within you is the
point at which your flesh intersects with God�s need to be revealed in time. The
Kingdom in you does not suggest that you own the Kingdom. It confirms that there
resides in your soul a meeting place between earth and heaven, between flesh and
spirit � a place where God makes a tryst with you so that you can be a point of
revelation, and God can have a peculiar expression in history through you.
The Easter event. They went to that place and the tomb was empty. And these
little disciples had this resurgence of power and the Spirit of the Lord was
among them and with them, and they said, �We know He is here.� But even more
importantly, under the influence of that Spirit, the disciples went out and did
His bidding and changed the world.
What does this mean? It means that this is the point where we became aware that
the nature of our freedom implicates us in dual citizenship. We are citizens of
earth & flesh, and citizens of Eternity, at the same time. And the God in you is
not in your pocket as your own plaything. It is that in you which implicates you
not just beyond yourself, but implicates you beyond time! The Kingdom is that in
you which frees you from the body and implicates you into Eternity. It is the
Kingdom in you that is the foundation of your immortality. You are already
larger than life as we experience it on earth.
In the Easter experience, we learn that the grave could not stop the force and
the effect of the personality of Jesus. What does that tell me? I am properly
informed that the intricacy of my own creation is not just by chance. Easter
gives me an interesting clue that it means much more than most of us have
thought. It at least means there is something going on here that is larger than
what we see, and whose meaning is potentially larger than what is visible. Jesus
said there is this business of the Soul and of the Kingdom � that part in you
which will not rest with your complicity in the world�s compromises. All of that
is going on in every one of you.
Easter gives us a hint of what this freedom that God has been working on is
about � freeing us every time we get entrapped. The reason God has been breaking
us out of our entrapments, is so that we might be free to answer the address of
our own spirit � free to respond to the call in our own soul. In the mythic
language it says, God is lonely. What is being said is that the implantation of
the Spirit of God in my life is not just for me. The Spirit of God is in me so
that I might be in conversation with the rest of life and with God about God�s
broad design in which I am included.
And now the religious paradox, as I see it, is if I have been cut loose and made
free to deal with the voice of God from my own depths, then this experience asks
something of me. And it is symbolized by language that Jesus used. �Follow me.�
It wants me to answer, and if I answer to a call that is Eternal in dimension,
it will ask me to move out of my current understanding and be willing to commit
myself. Now, this is where we lose most people in religious life. Commitment.
Commitment is an act, not just of response, but of being bound. And that is
where most people stop. They say, �Well God freed me from slavery, and I am
saved in my soul once and for all from sin. God freed me from rulers and kings.�
What they are really saying is, �I am not about to be bound now�. The logic of
it is, if life has been a process of getting free, why then am I going to get
bound? And all I can say is this: commitment is being bound to God, to your
best understanding of the call of God as registered in your own spirit. But,
people want to be free in that, too.
Merton helps me to understand, as does the Bible and Jesus, that to be free of
God is too much freedom. To be free of the Creative Force at the foundation of
life is to be lost. Freedom is not an endless succession of options. It is an
exercise of options toward a point. If I go back to ancient Israel and they are
crossing the Red Sea, and then the Decalogue and then the Kings, and then from
the Kings to the internal parts of the person, what are the people being
prepared for? Freedom for what? Freedom to respond to God. Freedom to be bound
to God�s desiring. The poet said,
�Make me a captive Lord, and then I shall be free, force me to render up my
sword, then I will conquer Thee; I sink in life�s alarms when by myself I stand,
imprison me within thine arms, then strong will be my hand.�
That is the nature of the religious paradox. And that is the end toward which
personal freedom has been created.
People like to arrive at the conclusion that the highest form of freedom they
can experience is to have endless options. But there is a higher form of
freedom. And that is to make the choice to become a part of the Center out of
which options are born. To participate with life, in God, wherein options have
their birth. And to be therefore, with God, an option giver and definer. I think
it is a higher form � to be out trying to reveal what life would look like if it
used its freedom to get to its Source.
When this happens, then you become a functionary of God in time. You will reveal
to people the nature of the freedom awaiting them, as you do the work of
justice, beauty, truth, love. You will reveal to them that the purpose of
freedom, of personal freedom, of national freedom, of group freedom, is to be!
To be! To discover the meaning of self. To give exposition to the purpose of
life. Jesus arriving at this consciousness said, �Not my will, but Thy will.�
And when that happens, and when you understand that to be bound to the will of
God is ultimate freedom, then the body that participates in that decision
becomes as Jesus�s body became � God�s visible actor on the stage of earth. The
body becomes the center of eternity. But the amazing thing about it is, it is
recognizable to finite human eyes because it is human in form. That body then
carries into the world, through its actions of justice, love and mercy, the
intent and the purpose of the Eternal. And I think that is what we are brought
here for. And when that happens to the body, the body is already beyond history.
It has effervesced into the eternity located in the kingdom which is in its
spirit.
�This is my body.� Jesus has taught me the body ought to be a living exposition
of God�s justice, of God�s truth, of God�s beauty, of God�s love or at least it
ought to be a living exposition of a most desperate search for those things. In
Jesus, the body became God�s dwelling place. It is really no big deal that death
was confounded by God. They call it Resurrection. Call it what you will. Those
people who were over there, who had been faithful, waiting to see what would
happen, they certified for us that God is not trapped in tombs.
I have tried to tell you that those bodies you are sitting in are potentially,
wildly grand testimonies. And I hope I have gotten enough across so that every
time you look at yourself, you will realize that you are the trysting place, the
place where God meets time, the point upon which God depends for justice, and
mercy and love and beauty and truth. You! Not systems. Not bureaucracies! You!
You will not change the face of history except that you recognize the immortal
uses of these mortal forms.
�Take my life and let it be, consecrated Lord to Thee. Take my moments and my
days, let them flow in ceaseless praise. Take my will and make it Thine, it
shall be no longer mine. Take my heart, it is thine own. Take my hands and let
them move at the impulse of Thy love. Take my feet and let them be swift and
beautiful for Thee.�
And then, when worms destroy this flesh, this spirit and flesh will be so
acquainted with God that without flesh, will I see God.

Called
by Your Name
In the 4th Chapter
of Matthew there is a very familiar scene and a portion of the same scene is in
the 5th Chapter of Luke.
�As Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw
two brothers, Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother, casting a net
into the sea; for they were fishermen. And he said to them, �Follow me, and I
will make you fishers of men.� Immediately they left their nets and followed
him. And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee
and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets,
and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and
followed him.�
In Luke, Jesus had been teaching and healing. He had just finished
preaching about the forgiveness of sins. He had healed the sick man at the well,
and had said to him, ��Rise, take up your bed and go home.� And immediately the
man rose before them, and took up that on which he lay, and went home,
glorifying God. And amazement seized them all and they were filled with awe,
saying, �We have seen strange things today.��
After this he went
out, and he saw a tax collector, named Levi. Levi wasn�t shouting and glorifying
God, he was sitting in a tax office. Jesus went into the tax office and spoke to
Levi � and He said to him, �Follow me.�
This is
fascinating. Can you see a preacher who is so impassioned with the journey for
God, go into a tax office, or in any office for that matter, and say: �Follow
me.� You would say: � What is this?� And call the police.
But this is what
the text says that Jesus did. Jesus said, �Follow me.� And it is reported in
Luke that �Levi left everything. I love that phrase. That is the only place I
see that phrase. Matthew doesn�t say it. Levi left everything. The taxes must
have been left in a mess! He left the office and it doesn�t appear he planned
to return, for the text says, ��he rose and followed Him.�
The story of the
Church is lodged in a deeply personal concept. And it is the concept that
persons, diverse persons � fishermen, secretaries, tax collectors, housewives,
children, diverse human beings � are called by God to purposes which are often
dramatically at odds with what they had been doing up to that time. This repeats
itself throughout the Gospel.
I maintain that
there is, in you, residue of this knowledge. The text makes one thing clear. You
are not being called without first having experienced the demonstration of the
Life-Force that calls you. You are not being called without knowing what God can
do, has done, is doing. The text makes that clear. If you want interesting
reading, read what happens around the call in the Gospel.
The next thing that
is clear is that you are not called collectively. Did you notice that the text
said he looked out there and there were two sons of Zebedee and the father. Do
you realize that the text didn�t call the father? It didn�t say why but the
fact of life is, in that moment, the call fell on the ears of those who heard
their names. That is the meaning of this call. He didn�t say, whoever is out
there, let�s go. No. He was specific �John� Peter.�
You are trapped, as
am I, by the announcement that God is a calling God. This makes me restless with
whatever I have decided that I ought to be doing. I am always restless, because
I don�t ever want to get to doing it so well that I don�t hear my name. God is a
calling God, so whatever you think you are into, listen for God, lest you miss
your name.
But in a more
general way, I want to say that there is not a soul here who hasn�t experienced
it. I don�t think anybody here can deny that there were times, and are times,
and hopefully will be times, in your own life, when a high visioning took place,
takes place, and will take place. Where something came into your consciousness
that wasn�t about you, but was about someone else. And where if only but for a
second or two you lived in a vastly different imaginative reality of what you
might be, do, become. I can spell that out very simply and say you have had
dreams more glorious than what the reality is. Everybody has had those moments
wherein the Presence dwelling in you surfaced and you came away knowing that �I
have been visited by a great idea about what my life could mean.�
I maintain that is
indigenous to our personal existence. I find very few people who say, I�m just
so excited with my life, I never knew it could be like this and this is so
wonderful. I find very few people satisfied with what they are. Very few people
I have run into are satisfied with themselves. I have seen a lot of people who
give the facade of being self-satisfied. But don�t catch them alone and listen.
I maintain this is
because we have been touched with the fashioning of our life by the hand of God.
And there is on this mortal flesh eternal longings, yearnings � yearnings that
are larger than life on earth. They know that they are called to more than they
have been able to become. Yes. Called from the ordinary. Called personally from
where we find ourselves. I maintain that there is an intensely private dimension
to the religious consciousness. And that private dimension is about you and who
you are, and about your uniqueness. You are an altogether special, peculiar,
purposeful event. And I will say it to you this way, in church talk, there is a
latent, hidden, image of you, that is burdened by the presence of the Infinite
Spirit. You hide, as it were, a glory. Not in your bodies, but beyond your
bodies. Your name conjures up a reality, that is larger than body, larger than
sight. You hide a latent, potential glory. Every living person and thing hides
the mystery of the secret of the Hand of God on his or her own life.
Who are you? Why
are we haunted by this Beyondness: that which is other than what is apparent? I
maintain that we know that we have been called to more than we have become. And
we persist in being tempted, even when we think we have got it together. We are
teased by visits from the Spirit. Oh yes, you don�t believe in ghosts and
spirits, but ghosts and spirits are real. They keep haunting you. Even when you
appear to have put it together, you are not satisfied.
And what happens,
therefore, is you become spiritual pilgrims. What is the difference between a
pilgrim and a tourist? A pilgrim is directed to God. A pilgrim is looking for
the Holy Place, so he or she can plant their feet there. A tourist is just
looking around. But a pilgrim is one who is looking for that Holy Place where
you see yourself becoming what you think you are ordained to be. And you take
off, and nobody knows it. You don�t discuss it with your family, even your
closest friends. You go down the path of Life, which becomes a long, long road,
of potential fulfillment. And every now and then, the spirits and the ghosts
will come in, and you almost make a move. But by the time you make a move, you
have passed all of the available motels. They have closed, and you realize that
I can�t do it now, I will do it at the next stop. You get on down the road and
you find that the next stop is closed. And then you say, O Lord, I don�t know
what I am going to do. But by the time you get to the next stop, you have made
the necessary adjustments. And the pressure isn�t upon you anymore.
What I am talking
about is what a major author has called �the pressure of Glory� that is on every
life here. �The pressure of Glory� � the fact that all of us are called by our
Maker.
I maintain, that
when you hear your name (and all have heard their name) the visions that conjure
up in you about what life could be for you, will either be followed, or you will
know the deep agony of self-betrayal. And most people, unfortunately, know that
in this life. I have seen too many leaving this earthly existence who knew that
they betrayed, not me, not you, but themselves.
Jesus called them
by their names. They knew that this was serious; dangerous, yes, but serious.
Immediately they left. They knew in a flash that this was of God. Not to answer
would be to betray themselves.
I glory in that
hour. And I glory in the opportunity that is ours. Every person�s soul hides a
mystery of what the world could be. Of what men, women, and children might be.
Your soul speaks to you in your quietest, reflective moment about the vast
dreams for you. Every soul is speaking. And we will be given the opportunity
everyday. Most of us will ignore it. Most of us will say, well, if I could have
done that earlier in life. There is no time that is too late; there is no time
that is too early, to baptize the world with a new demonstration of imagination
which is the outpost of Eternity in history. Your imagination is your earthly
hold on Eternity. And all of you have imagination. To the extent that you can
imagine something different than what now is � to that extent you participate as
an Eternalizing Force in time. That is how powerful you are. And if that
imagination allows you to figure out how to respond, you will be like a baptism,
an opening, wherever you go.
That is all that
Jesus is talking about. You must become involved when you hear the words:
�Follow me.� Jesus didn�t say to them: �I just ask you to come and go with me
while I figure out where I am going.� Jesus said, �I know where I come from and
I know where I am going.�
�Follow me.�
And I say to you �
and to us who are lost: do we go? The future of the world is lodged in our
answer to those words. The future is that immediate. Do you know where it is? It
is in this room. Inescapably tied up in you. You harbor the future. It is in us.
You are called to
fulfill God�s creational design. To be partners with the Creative One, in
building a world that is One. One. A unified place where God is in charge;
where men, women, children live with justice, and righteousness, and holiness,
and peace. That is how vast is the design for your life. You are
world-changers, by virtue of your soul.
Jesus said: �I want you. Follow me.�

I open with an important idea as it was expressed
by Olive Schreiner who wrote at the turn of the 20th century:
�From the mysterious drawing together of amoeba to amoeba, their union and
increase, on through all the forms of sentient life and in the life of the very
vegetable world, the moving original power is always this stretching out,
uniting, creative force; shaping itself in the union of male and female, of
begetting with their begotten; drawing together creatures of like and unlike
kinds, bringing into all the forms of friendship and union and love, it lies at
the root of existence.
�It
shapes the petals of flowers, not for death but to call the insects to suck
their sweetness and carry fertilizings to each other; it sings in the song of
all song birds calling to their mates; it blossoms into human speech. To kill,
man might have been silent; but to communicate with and bind himself to his
fellow, child to mother, mother to child, the sexes to reach each other, man, to
reach man belonging to his social organism, man was obliged to blossom into
speech. Everywhere this binding, moving creative force moves at the very heart
of things. Men have so recognized that his creative power was the fount and core
of life in all ages they have tended to call the highest intelligence they could
conceive of, �the great Creator�.�
The idea is simply that
one of the critical factors in creation is the unitive factor � that which
searches for wholeness, that which would bind in fellowship, that which would
create order out of chaos. Not only is the unitive factor a component of
creation, but it is the dominant component. Likewise, it is the dominant line of
all the insight of Jesus. Jesus was trying to get you to understand the beauty
imbedded in your own creation that waits for expression through your particular
personality. That is all Jesus was about when he told people, �You are Light,�
�You are salt.� He was trying to get them to understand that they are of utter
worth, just by the nature of creation. Our religious tradition has many ways to
say it: �Made in the image of God.� The burden of our religious tradition is to
try to get you to understand how wildly fabulous you are in seed, at the core;
therefore, what an amazing display of God�s Life you could be. The foundation is
already there.
The unitive principle,
which makes each individual of utter worth, is the central theme of the New
Testament � the emphasis which puts the personal in a larger context. The
unitive principle suggests that all creation belongs, and that nothing that God
has created is outside of His desire that it should belong. So the flower has
sweetness not just to have sweetness, but so that bees can do their thing. There
is a uniting principle. It says that God is the equivalent of Good. After the
Creation He said, �It is Good.�
The church, however, has
taught us that we were born in sin, conceived in iniquity. But I don�t think
that is indigenous to New Testament insight. Jesus said, �Let the little
children come unto me; of such is the Kingdom.� How could the Kingdom be made up
of sinful children? He said, �Lest you become as a child.� The theologians come
out and tell you that you are born in sin and conceived in iniquity. What
nonsense. The New Testament speaks for itself.
You have been led to
believe that evil is indigenous to your world and your personality, and that
there is not much you can do about it. We are quick to say, �That�s human
nature.� What is human nature? Jesus said it is human nature to so love life
that you give your life to help others understand that it is a giving universe,
and therefore a giving enterprise. Does that sound sinful and self-seeking? No!
Jesus wouldn�t tell people who were full of original sin � �You are the Light of
the world.� If you don�t give flavor to this earth, it will have none, because,
�You are the Salt.�
We need to celebrate a
force that is among the highest and strongest forces in the universe. It is the
force I call Almighty Affection. It brings unity rather than disruption.
Almighty Affection is continuously celebrated in your life. It is so close to
you that perhaps you don�t recognize its presence and are apt to be led to
believe that the world is really an evil place that you have to get out of. As
a matter of fact, the cry of a baby as it breaks forth in light and is separated
from unity with the mother is no more than a symbolic statement about the fact
that it wants unity again. With every person the unitive principle is celebrated
constantly. When you walk up to somebody, what do you do? You either put out
your hand or you embrace them. Both are futile attempts to reestablish a sense
of wholeness in a divisive world.
Mother�s Day as an event
symbolizes something about the nature and structure of Life. When motherhood is
flushed out in terms of all of its beauty of concern and loving care it is
simply a hint, in the human situation, of what is available continuously in
Life. The problem with Mother�s Day (as we celebrate it) is that we make mother,
arbitrarily, the symbol of that love, which is not necessarily true. Mother may
not be Godly, or God fearing, but we pretend she is anyway on the day of the
great cover-up. When we cover up like this, we stab at our own consciousness and
our own awareness of what unity means.
The principle of
motherhood is what Mother�s Day ought to be talking about, and if that principle
were being celebrated, then father would get a present, and sister and brother
would get a gift. The event of motherhood argues with us about the unitive
principle of life and gives us a graphic illustration of what is going on all
the time. Every occasion we can think of should be a mother�s day, brother�s
day, sister�s day, children�s day. We should celebrate to the extent that we are
developing with these people a sense of oneness, and a sense of unity. What we
ought to have is person day, and see who would get a flower. Because what we are
talking about is celebrating those persons in whose life is reflected the will
and the loving concern of God, as we have experienced it throughout the world.
These people who so reflect God�s will would be the ones who are honored with
flowers on Person�s Day.
What I have been trying
to say is that this world, as it has been created, is essentially good. The
beauty is built in. If God had His way, there would be concord, and union, and
community, beauty and love. That is the good. This idea is so basic to the
creation that Jesus dared look at people he had never seen before and say to
them, �You�re fabulous.� �You are great!� �You are not sick, you are well.� He
had never seen these people before, but he knew they were not outside the
purview of God�s loving concern � a concern so deep that if he could turn them
on to it within their own consciousness, they would be well.
Essential goodness is so
basic that whenever it is frustrated we see violence and destruction which are
harbingers of death, not life. The breaking up of this implied unity in life is
never a neutral thing. Life, feeling itself cut off, will strike out and that
striking out is often a symbol of the love principle that has been frustrated
and thwarted.
Let�s deal with race. I
contend that you could give minorities all the houses, all the jobs, and all
other things, but if between races there remained hostility, you would have all
the preconditions for race war. Racism is really not about denying people houses
and jobs, though that is what happens. The underbelly of it is about denying
people access to each other. That stabs more at the province of God than denying
a house. Give them a house and a job and then tell them this is for us and that
is for you, and you have the conditions for destruction.
Why then don�t we love
and struggle for unity? I mean love that is vast enough to issue forth in many
strategies. I do not mean romantic love. I am not concerned about love that is
based upon how you look, what kind of hairstyle you have or how fat or how
skinny or how tall you are. I mean a love that is based upon the fact that you
are a part of the intricate handiwork of God � a love that is based upon your
knowing that Life would not have been implanted in you if it was not intended to
live through you � a love that makes you super sensitive to everywhere in the
world where lives are being used to thwart the lives of others. I believe that
an increase of righteousness, justice and love in our community is waiting for
an increase in your awareness that you are essentially grand, good and fabulous.
Jesus said it years ago. �The Kingdom is within you.� And still you sit! I
believe when you understand that, then you will know what it means to love.
The scripture says, �The
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, soul and strength, and thy
neighbor as thyself.� Then the great Teacher comes and says, but how can you
love God whom you cannot see and don�t even love your neighbor who you can see?
And then the other question, obviously implied is: How can you love God or your
neighbor, if you don�t love yourself? Because in your body, in your psyche, in
your soul - there is the place where you celebrate the unifying urge of Life.
The loving consciousness of Life is embedded deep in your spirit. At a deep
spiritual level you know you belong to the flower, to the wind, to the person,
to the neighbor, to God. But you cannot love out there if you do not experience
in the life, in the persona, in the soul, if you do not experience what it is to
love the Life that moves through you. How can you love anything out there? Jesus
said, you have got to love yourself. I say that our problem seems to be that we
don�t really love ourselves. That is the reason Jesus was always trying to get
people to understand � to come up another step, to realize that love of self is
the condition that opens a life to the love of the rest of life. How can you
love life out there, if you don�t love the life that moves in miraculous fashion
within?
I like John�s phrase
because he puts you in proper space. He says, �Little children, love one
another.� I say, learn to love what God has done that bears your name. Love
yourself, that you might love one another, for love is the basis of this life.
All of the secrets are hidden there, for God is lodged there.

�What Is Truth�
A
very familiar story in the Bible and one I�ve preached several times is the
scene of Jesus on trial before Pontius Pilot. As the scene progresses, Pilot is
quite concerned, because he has found no accusations that would hold under Roman
law, and Pilot was beginning to feel that he was being *tricked. If Jesus had
done something against the religion of Judaism, why didn�t the Jews have their
own religious trial? Why did they want Pilot, who represented the Roman State,
to take this responsibility? In fact, Pilot questioned the Jews and said, �Take
him yourself, and judge him by your own law.� And do you know what they said?
They said, �It is not lawful under our law, for us to put any man to death.�
We
have come a long way from that understanding.
The
Jews think that what Jesus has done is worthy of death. They can�t kill him, but
the Roman government can.
Now, the problem is, they had no charge. They said, we want him dead, and we
want the court that can kill him to handle it.
Pilot came in and called Jesus before him, and said: �Are you the King of the
Jews?� And Jesus answered him by saying: � Do you say this of your own accord
or are others saying this about me?� Pilot answered: �Am I a Jew? Your own
nation, and your chief priests, have handed you over to me. What have you
done?�
And
here come some very interesting words. In John�s Gospel Jesus says: �My kingship
is not of this world. If my kingship were of this world my servants would fight,
they would fight to keep me from being handed over by the Jews. But my kingship
is not from the world.�
And
Pilot said to him: �So you are a King?� This is a very poignant moment, because
Pilot doesn�t understand what Jesus is talking about. He looked at him and
said: �So you are a King?�
Jesus said: �You say I am a King.� And then he said: �For this I was born, and
for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who
is of the truth hears my voice.�
And
Pilot replies with a question that is the text of my sermon today: �What is
truth?�
Now, let me render it another way. Pilot is looking at this thing, and I can
tell by the text that he is quite intrigued with Jesus and he doesn�t understand
why the Jews are after him; and he has also decided, obviously, that Jesus is on
to something. I don�t know whether it was Jesus� presence that conveys that, or
whether it is what he has heard about him; but Pilot�s inquisitiveness is real
and he asks: �What is truth?�
That is my text. It is one of the great moments for me in all of the scripture.
And its greatness is lodged in the fact that when we read Pilot asking that
question, we are ready to devour the next sentences because we want to see what
Jesus says. But there is no response to that question. Had Jesus feigned an
answer to Pilot, Pilot may not have turned him over for crucifixion. At this
moment, if you had been on trial, you would have come up with ten answers! But
there is no response from Jesus. Pilot�s question is never answered. And it is
consistent with Jesus� understanding, that silence on the answer is the
foundation of all religious consciousness.
All
I really want to say to you this morning is that there are two approaches in
religious life, in the Judeo-Christian tradition. There are two approaches that
stand side by side. One gives an answer to Pilot that is ready packaged,
useable, definitive doctrine and dogma. This tradition would answer Pilot by
saying: Pilot, at such and so meeting of Bishops and such and so meeting of
Rabbis, don�t you know it was decided thus and so, and here it is. That is one
tradition of the Church.
I
contend this morning that Jesus was basically of another mind. He kept throwing
people back upon themselves. Look at the way he dealt with the responses to
Pilot�s other questions. Why did he do that? Jesus believed that the root to
Truth was through experience, not through tradition. That is the reason that
central to his whole preachment He kept repeating, �It has been said to you by
the Law, but I say to you.� And then the call from him was, �Try it and see what
you find out.� Even in the instruction to those close to him. The disciples
threw the fish net out and didn�t get anything, and they complained to Jesus. He
said, try over here. And then they got something. They had a primary experience.
They had two ways: tradition and the experience of truth.
The
route of the experience of a person to Truth does not have to overlook whatever
tradition can teach us. But I want to say to you, tradition is not interested in
experience. The Church will say, well, what of Jesus? Of Mary? Of the virgin
birth? Of life after death? Their answer is that in the year 325 at Nicea a
group of Bishops gathered and this is what they said; and that is it! Well, what
about the experience of people today that doesn�t seem to jive with that; people
who are faithful, and trying to be religious and seriously searching the will of
God, but they have a different experience? Tradition will not listen to these
people. It never has and it never will. By definition, it cannot. If it listens,
it loses its power. It makes concession to experience.
One
religion is forever a closed book. God wrote it all. It is all there and that is
all you need. The other religion contends that you must search everywhere,
trying to discover new understandings of God�s action in time.
One
tradition says, here are the doctrines, here are the dogmas. You join this
Church: Do you believe in such and so? If you do, and you can say you do, then
we can take you in. If you do not believe, don�t drink this communion. You can�t
have it. Only those who will say I believe in the Father Almighty, Maker of
heaven and earth; and Jesus Christ, the only Son, our Lord, born of the virgin
Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, dead and buried; and on the
third day �� Unless you believe it all, every period, and the cross of every T,
this is not your Church. That is the voice of tradition.
I
say, thank God, there is the Jesus tradition where people were turned on to a
Kingdom within them that they had to continuously struggle about and work with.
And if a Kingdom is within you, it then stands to reason that out of your own
psyche, and out of the burden of your own struggle, and out of your own soul,
life may dawn about the nature of truth of Last Things. I would say, this
experience makes the Church meaningful. As far as I am concerned, in the
doctrinal, dogmatic churches, where it is all written down, I don�t see any
reason to go to Church. I think the fellowship is about the other tradition that
is the reason we sang this morning. We didn�t sing what a fellowship those who
believe we are the elect of God, what a grouping of us. No. We didn�t sing that.
We sang what a fellowship of the pilgrims, leaning on the Everlasting Arms. That
is good theology.
Now. If you believe that experience is the way that you will know more of God,
then you take seriously your own daily activity. Every possibility to know more,
is embedded in your own day, no matter what you are doing.
You
have to be careful because anytime, anyone thinks they have clearly arrived at
something and seen something for sure about ultimate issues, they run the risk
of becoming deranged. They might take a club and beat everybody else over the
head. That is the reason you have a fellowship. You come to a fellowship of
other struggling people and you test your idea. Certainly anybody who thinks
they see anything ought to say it clearly, and somebody who doesn�t see it that
way within the fellowship can say, but Reverend, I didn�t understand it that
way. I experienced it this way. And then we have the meaning of a covenanted
fellowship, of searching and growing religious people. That is the fundamental
meaning of the Church. But what has been put into place has nothing to do with
the open and searching spirit that Jesus revealed in his own time to his own
people. The quality of his spirit, the quality of the questing spirit; the
quality of looking beyond the data, is lost, if your religion is simply saying,
yes, to something somebody wrote and said was the truth. We must look through
the turmoil of our own life, and the struggle of our own time, and look
longingly for insight about what God has in mind.
You
can tell the difference, you are not stupid. If it is a question of us sending
money to some political group so they can kill up a bunch of people in behalf of
some abstraction called democracy, you don�t have to go back to the Bible to
know that that is wrong. We are committing ourselves to more and more mass
murder in the world. You see, some things come clear. And if it is not clear to
you, other issues in your religious searching, even your private life, where you
are struggling with issues, light will dawn and you won�t know where it came
from; and yesterday�s dead end will be an open road for you today. Light has
dawned. In the midst of your struggle, if a search is real, can you trust that
light? Or do you say, oh no, nobody told me that. Can you trust it? Can you come
and say, I have had a new revelation of how I ought to be doing more or living
more deeply. The test is related not only to sharing it, but walking in it.
Whenever light has dawned in your own life about what would be the highest
contribution for you to make, I say, the religious obligation is to walk in that
light. That makes religion vital. When it is a religion of tradition, all you
have to do is go through the ritual; pay your dues; be saved. Tradition with all
of its time-bound creeds and doctrines that care nothing for the contradictions
to them that people experience in their lives; versus a questing spirit,
anointed by Creation itself, searching everywhere, to be sensitive to the hints
of God�s Presence.
You
choose what kind of a Church you want. One tradition says: If you want the
answer Pilot, I�ll give it to you. And then there is the Jesus tradition: It
steps back and it can�t tell you.
Browning says it for me. �Then did I turn my long defeated face, full to the
sun. Turned to the world with all of its turmoil, and through the clouded
warfare of the world, I saw, not a dogma, not a creed; I saw the Light.� And the
text says to me: �Walk in the Light, the little you see; and it will lead you to
a fellowship that is larger.�
It
doesn�t mean you will be lifted out, raptured and saved. It means struggle. God
is still in business in this world. And I wonder if people can be so shallow as
to believe that God has decided to have one representative. One representative?
Jesus said, no. Jesus says God has a lot of representatives; and Jesus says you
are one. That is the difference. Jesus says, the Kingdom is within you. And you
have to struggle with that, and with others who seek to know God�s Will. And
there is no person who can condemn you. There is no person who can make the
final moral judgment upon you. A person may make a passing judgment, but not a
final statement about your existence.
What is truth? Our life quest. It is our life struggle and search, knowing that
there are moments of break-through and clear vision; and knowing it is our
responsibility to live in those moments, and to grow into the understanding that
they bring.
Do you ever think how
exciting it would be if we would be true to the truth that we already know? This
would be a wild place. If every body in this room, now and next week, decided, I
am going to be true to the truth that I know. I would say that next week you
would have some more truth. Truth is ever-alive, dynamic, not absolutistic and
not a frozen code to be learned. Truth is a life to be experienced. Truth is a
God to be known.

Searching the Ground of My
Intention
Reading
from Martin Buber �The Way of Response�
�In the
unconditionality of his deed, man experiences his communion with God. God is an
unknown Being beyond this world only for the indolent, the decisionless, the
lethargic, the person enmeshed in his own desires; for the one who decides, who
is aflame with his goal, who is unconditioned, God is the closest, the most
familiar Being that man, through his own action, realizes ever anew,
experiencing thereby the mystery of mysteries. Whether God is �transcendent� or
�immanent� does not depend on Him; it depends on us. . . . Not the matter of the
deed determines its truth, but the manner in which it is carried out: in human
conditionality, or in divine unconditionality. Whether a deed will peter out in
the outer courtyard, in the realm of things, or whether it will penetrate into
the Holy of Holies is determined not by its content but by the power of decision
which brought it about, and by the sanctity of intent which dwells in it.�
Sermon:
�By the power of the decision
which brought it about and the sanctity of the intent which dwells in it.� �Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul and strength.�
That is the Great Commandment. And when you hear the Great Commandment, and when
you sit and look at your own life, with your own name on it, you know the Great
Commandment has never been attempted by you.
Suppose you
would love the Lord God with all your mind, heart, soul and strength. What would
you look like? What would your next day be like? What would this afternoon be
like? The problem of religion is the problem that is engaged in the answering of
these questions. We can have church for a million years, but there is the
problem.
Suppose you
started to love the Lord God a little bit this afternoon � not totally, just a
little. On your way to expanding the totality of your involvement in your
worship of God, in fellowship with three or four such people, we could have a
time. How can we live so that the Commandment grabs our existence in fuller
ways? There is no other reason for us to be sitting around here. Love the Lord
thy God with everything. Be utterly open, without designs, with an unconditional
love of Life. Whenever that happens, people stand and wonder and they talk of
saviors and seers and prophets. Why should I use up the energy of the body in
this pursuit? Because I know somewhere in my soul what awaits a society is a
person who would love God with everything.
You have been in churches many
years and you still haven�t even made the first step of that total love, the
love that owes everything � energy, body, mind, strength, the whole thing.
Sometimes when you contemplate the Great Commandment, you know that if that
happened to you, nothing else would matter. Everything would make sense.
Love the Lord Thy God without
conditions. Oh yeah, you have got a little love. Everybody sitting here has a
little love, a little bit, just my little bit. That is what is wrong. How could
it be, if you were utterly open, nothing extenuating, nothing spurious, open to
Life, to be and do what Life intended? Nothing else could answer what you are
looking for, nothing else.
The Great
Commandment presupposes something that we don�t take seriously anymore. A person
can clarify the presence of Light at their center, and that perfection at their
core can become the defining reality of their day. If the image of God is in
you, if as Jesus said, the Kingdom resides in you, then in you there is a point
of perfection you don�t have to wander aimlessly to find. It is locked in your
system.
The Great Commandment asserts
that point of perfection. That reality of the perfect at the center of your
spirit can become the defining substance of what you are and what you do. How
can you settle for anything else?
I want to tell you a story. This
scene takes place someplace in Heaven. Jesus, after being crucified, had gone to
God to report, and God said to him, �You failed to let them know about my ways.�
Jesus said, �No, Father, they know.� �But you failed to make them want it.� He
said, �No, they wanted it, but they were fearful of wanting it so much lest that
wanting should destroy them, so they crucified me.� �But you failed to teach
them that they could contain it, that they could live it, and you failed to
teach them that my perfection was livable.� �Yes, Father, in the moment they
crucified me, I did fail; but the manner, the manner of my Life, will haunt them
until they come to Thee.�
Wanting is nothing in this
business that we are talking about today � nothing. I want to be holy. I
want to be a Christian. Wanting is just the starting point, if even that.
Doing is the next step, and that is not even enough.
We are talking now about the
essence, not the appearances. It is very difficult to move from the way religion
is defined in our community to what we�re presently talking about. Religion as
we experience it is right desire and right action. And we feel good about that.
I have the right kind of wants and I do good things. Religion, so defined,
becomes, as our religion has become, habitual activity, force of habit. It is
nice to do this so we get in the habit of doing it.
And you also know that people do
good things for the wrong reasons all the time. And a lot of people are doing
good things for no reason. So that is not an adequate assessment of what we are
about. Some people do good things because it is popular, and they look good.
Good looks good. It eases guilt. There are all kinds of spurious reasons that we
do good so religion can�t be a question of doing good.
When religion becomes only doing good, then
the good world
becomes a world of mixed motives �
frustrated and fractured � a world cut short of deep agonies and deep joys, cut
short of its force and potency. It robs goodness of its power in the
conditionality of the good doer. Goodness with a capital �G� is unconditional.
When you condition it � do it only on certain terms � you rob the world of its
witness, because you surround it with your conditional schemes.
We experience
it every day � built-in places of reservation. Have you ever run into someone
like that? They sound very good but are ready for nothing. Their reservations
are built in. They are not going to surrender or embrace life or God. That is
the reason they love creeds so, and dogmas, because creeds and dogmas always
condition. They say exactly what they mean and you don�t have to embrace any
more than is listed in the words. When you get hold of the spirit of God, you
may not be able to tie it down with language. So you leave that alone. You say,
take me to a church where they can tell me what I am to believe, so I can say I
believe.
Now we have to go a step
further. We have to know something about the content of your involvement. The
content of your deed. Not only that you are doing, but we need to know
why. But that is not even enough. We need to know something else about a doer
for God. What is the core out of which this action comes? What is the heart?
Jesus talked about that. He said, �Blessed are those whose cores are pure.
Blessed are the pure in heart.� Is there purity of center? The willing place �
the intentional ground � is it pure?
Why do we want to know about
that? Because the power of the belief to herald to the God in history is related
to the purity of the ground out of which it is sprung. If the motives are not
pure, and a lot of ulterior things are going on, you can act all you want to
act, but Truth will have no hearing because you will have robbed the deed of the
secret stuff that it would have, had it sprung from a pure heart. As a matter of
fact, Jesus said, if a heart be pure, you sure will see God. If that be true,
then a deed springs from conversation with God, from face-to-face involvement.
The writer this morning says
more. He says, we must know a little more. We must know the �how� of the deed.
After we discover the content, then we go to the �how� of the matter. And that
doesn�t mean how you do it. What he is saying is, we must know something about
the burden that was the motivational stuff that added the force and the power to
the decision. We must get behind the decision and find out what kind of driving
power led the person to the decision. And then we will know the manner in which
they acted.
We need to know the power of the
decision that brought the individual to act. The individual may have a pure
heart now, but how much power and agony, how much of the deep places of
existence were called upon in the decision to make this action? We must know the
sanctity of intent � the sanctity of intent in which the action was formed. Was
the intent to act formed out of a sense of the agony of God, or did you just
decide to do it because you thought it was timely and nice at this juncture in
politics?
I had the vision, sometime this
week, about a laser beam. I was talking about utter sincerity � utter openness
to God. Utter openness to doing the bidding, to singleness of focus. I am told
that when the light gets so focused it cuts through steel. Whether what we do
will fizzle out in the outer courtyard or will get into the tabernacle, to the
altar of Life, will be determined by the sanctity of our intention.
We are talking now about the
motive power, the transforming power, in deeds. So many deeds are done that do
not bring with them any arresting quality. They don�t stop anything. How many of
us are involved in community activities, doing a lot of nice deeds, and they
don�t really seem to affect the consciousness of anything. When will the word be
spoken that breaks through the conditionality and allows you to sit and wonder
in awe, arrested for the moment by the efficacy of the Mystery of mysteries that
surrounds the deed?
In the Book of Hebrews, we are
told that God is not content with your wanting and with your doing � not even
with the content of the deed. But God is deeply concerned with the intention,
with the power and the sanctity of the intention. And it says that God searches
the roots of the deed. It says, the Word of God is living and active, sharper
than a two-edged sword � piercing the division of soul and spirit, of marrow,
bone and joint, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart of which the
deed comes.
The job is more complicated than
you thought, isn�t it? It is not enough to desire God, it is not enough to do
Godly things, it is not enough even to have a pure heart. But the experience
that comes from the purity of heart, the experience of communion with God � that
experience of seeing God must become the driving force behind the deed that is
done in God�s behalf. And then what you do in the world has the shock-value of
the deed done by one who has been in the company of Eternity.
Oh God, as I go on doing, check
out the power behind my decision. Whatever I know of You, let it be the caldron
out of which my intention is formed. Search me, O God; know my thoughts. Search
me and know the ground of my intention. Crush all the lingering conditions I
have put on my service to You. See if there is any remaining evil, and then lead
me in the Way of the Everlasting.

|