Sermons

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 preparedï¿½why? 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 Jesusï¿½ resurrection ï¿½ not the fact of immortality, but the content of Jesusï¿½ immortal life.

In the context of Jesusï¿½ 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. ï¿½Ye are the light of the worldï¿½Ye are the salt of the earthï¿½The Kingdom is locked up in you.ï¿½ YOU are Godï¿½s 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 Godï¿½s 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 ï¿½dust thou art, and to dust thou returneth,ï¿½ is not spoken of ï¿½allï¿½ of you. ï¿½Dust thou art, and to dust thou returnethï¿½ 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 goodï¿½ yeah, he was a good preacherï¿½

When he died, it was like a dream gone flat, and they were wandering, hiding from friends. They didnï¿½t 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, ï¿½You had better, eat, drink, and be merry now, for tomorrow you die.ï¿½

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 donï¿½t tell you about the hundreds of thousands of people who thought they had ï¿½done itï¿½ 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 themselvesï¿½.oh, you know, I have only got a little while and I am just human and I canï¿½t do it all. That is what I am talking about ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t 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 donï¿½t 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 Deathï¿½s 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!

Jesusï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t 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 consciousnessï¿½boundary breakerï¿½and 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, ï¿½One fold have I, only one,ï¿½ ï¿½One fold and one sheep.ï¿½ I am told that the Black slaves said to their master: ï¿½Before Iï¿½d be a slave Iï¿½d be buried in my grave, and go home to my God and be free.ï¿½ And Jesus consciousness broke the back of the onslaught of death. The slave said, ï¿½I 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.ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s 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 ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s 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 ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s 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 Godï¿½s intention and Godï¿½s insistence that we become aware of the magnificence of our own creation ï¿½ that we become aware of the awesome hand that is laid on the intricacy of our very form.

The poet says: ï¿½Rescue the perishing, care for the dying, Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save.ï¿½

It is a saving missionï¿½not search and destroy. A search and save mission. ï¿½I 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.ï¿½

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 ï¿½ the Force and Presence in history that is capable of infusing my life with grandeur ï¿½ I know He is alive. The text says: ï¿½I know that my Redeemer livethï¿½. And a good translation of the redeemer word is ï¿½avenger.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½worship.ï¿½ But we donï¿½t spend much time agonizing about why we donï¿½t 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, ï¿½Blessed are those who understand the poverty of the Spirit, for they are the ones who will receive the joy of the Kingdom.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ keeping up with our schedules and the agendas that must be met ï¿½ 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, ï¿½Wait upon the Lord,ï¿½ you donï¿½t 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 ï¿½watchingï¿½ 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 donï¿½t 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, ï¿½Where is the life we have lost in living?ï¿½ Waiting is interested in that life. And it only takes a flower to remind me of this quality of the spirit ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t 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. Isnï¿½t 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 werenï¿½t 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 donï¿½t 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 bodyï¿½s space and its responses. In the present waiting is literally full of presence ï¿½ 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 havenï¿½t 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 ï¿½ body and spirit ï¿½ 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 havenï¿½t 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 hasnï¿½t just happened. I didnï¿½t 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 havenï¿½t 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.

ï¿½To Be Known By Godï¿½ (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 ï¿½Gitanjaliï¿½

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 dayï¿½s work and my nightï¿½s 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.

ï¿½Am I a God close by,ï¿½ says the Lord, ï¿½And not a God afar off? Can a person hide himself in secret places and I shall not see him?ï¿½ says the Lord. ï¿½Do I not fill heaven and earth?ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ trying to find anonymity. ï¿½Thou knowest my down sitting and my up rising. Thou art acquainted with all, all my ways.ï¿½ 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 Lifeï¿½s insistence on exposure. For all of Life knows you, and you are all of lifeï¿½s urgings. You are not a disconnected phenomenon. Kahlil Gibran says it this way, ï¿½I 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.ï¿½ The Black Spiritual says it yet another way: ï¿½There 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, ï¿½Iï¿½m burning, too.ï¿½ï¿½

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, ï¿½Iï¿½m not just loose here on my own, doing my own thing.ï¿½ That is the essential primary ground of preparation to speak the unpolluted word. The Psalmist says, ï¿½If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, Thou art there.ï¿½ If I have a moment of free joy, call it heaven if you want to, God is there asking me: ï¿½What does this mean? What do you do about it?ï¿½ If I attempt to get away by doing my ï¿½own thingï¿½ and find the hellishness of the emptiness of my ï¿½own thing,ï¿½ 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 Lifeï¿½s 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!

ï¿½Do I not hate them who hate Thee?ï¿½ Then the grand and climactic line: ï¿½I hate them with a perfect hatred.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½I have a right to hate. It says so right here in the Bible.ï¿½ 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. ï¿½I hate you because you did something to me.ï¿½ Well, so what? He or she who does something to Lifeï¿½s 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, donï¿½t get upset. That is the way the demonic moves in on you, trying to frustrate your understanding of Lifeï¿½s claim on your life and energy. Try to find another way to keep moving. Donï¿½t waste too much time arguing with that force.

Job helps me in my understanding here. I donï¿½t 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. ï¿½I know,ï¿½ says Job,ï¿½ that my redeemer is alive.ï¿½ Do you believe it? Stop wasting your own little energy; get on, press on. Nothing happens outside of Godï¿½s 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 ï¿½hatredï¿½ to the care of Godï¿½s unending justice, mercy and love. Perfect hatred is a momentary response which gives way to the larger knowledge of Godï¿½s 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, ï¿½Iï¿½m going to do what Iï¿½m going to do because I want to, and I know I am right.ï¿½

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 Godï¿½s cause. The 139th Psalm opens with, ï¿½Thou hast searched me and known me.ï¿½ The end of the Psalm underscores the basic integrity of every person, when the Psalmist says, ï¿½Search me, oh God, and try me.ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s 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 Iï¿½ve 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 Iï¿½m jiving. When you are tried, will you not think, ï¿½Oh Lord, why did this happen to me?ï¿½ 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 Iï¿½m thinking, and see if, perhaps some of the wrong in the world is hidden in me ï¿½ 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

ï¿½Be still, and know that I am God.

I am exalted among the nations,

I am exalted in the earth!ï¿½

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 shouldnï¿½t 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, weï¿½re on our way to another meeting, another diversion. T.S. Eliot used an interesting phrase when he said, ï¿½We are distracted from distraction by distraction.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ ï¿½Be still and know that I am God.ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s being. The great ï¿½I AMï¿½ 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, ï¿½Holler 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.ï¿½ 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 rulerï¿½s 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.

ï¿½And 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, ï¿½What are you doing here, Elijah?ï¿½ Elijah said, ï¿½I 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.ï¿½ And the Lord said to him, ï¿½Go, 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.ï¿½ And then the Lord said, ï¿½Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.ï¿½

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 Jezebelï¿½s promise being fulfilled.

It is an interesting insight here. Elijahï¿½s 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, Elijahï¿½s encounter with God underscored the fact that this was something qualitatively, totally different ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ a Presence more searing and more arresting than even the Presence that had destroyed the altars ï¿½ more arresting than demonstrated power. And Elijah discovered something that the Psalmist talks about ï¿½ ï¿½Be still and know that I am God.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ he began to pity himself, to whimper and cry. But he also patted himself on the back: ï¿½I 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.ï¿½ Now you see, you get the root of what we do with stillness. Here is an attempt to reduce the stillness to something petty. ï¿½Let me just be up here with you in retreat and let me die.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½Let me just stay here,ï¿½ and God said, ï¿½No, go return, I have a plan for you.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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, ï¿½Lord, I am the only one here. Nobody else survived.ï¿½ If that were true, God would not be God. The arrogance of people who retreat to their silence and say, ï¿½Lord, 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.ï¿½ The Lord said, ï¿½No, 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!ï¿½

It happens, you know, if you take the religious life seriously. There comes a time when you wonder. You say, ï¿½I am weary Lord, tired, and it looks like I am the only one around, you know.ï¿½ But calm down and know Me. Even though the chaos seems to be threatening everything, and the sense of brokenness is incredible ï¿½ swirling torrents seem to be ruling the day ï¿½ you listen to silence as it broods over the noise.

God says: ï¿½I am God,ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 Lifeï¿½s urgency and Lifeï¿½s 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 ï¿½ Wait ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½wheel of timeï¿½. 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 ï¿½cosmic timeï¿½. 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 canï¿½t 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, ï¿½there is nothing new under the sun. What has been is what will be.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½golden yearsï¿½ 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 ï¿½collective obsessionï¿½. This may be peculiar to mass man ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t 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 ï¿½vowï¿½ 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 yesterdayï¿½s success pales in contrast to what could be todayï¿½s 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 Iï¿½ll live on that for another year or had a bad year and Iï¿½m really not going to put myself out too much this coming year. I am more mature now. We say, ï¿½I know what I can do and I am not going to let even you get to me to do something I canï¿½t do. I have it all figured out.ï¿½

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 ï¿½passingï¿½ 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 ï¿½Tomorrow and the Next Dayï¿½. 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 donï¿½t do it, it may be too late. ï¿½The moving finger writes and having writ, moves onï¿½ï¿½ and all your tears canï¿½t 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, ï¿½This one thing I do, forgetting what was past, I press on to the mark for the prize.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½the fullness of timeï¿½. Tillich calls it ï¿½Kyrosï¿½. Berdyaev calls it existential time. For me it is easier to call it the ï¿½mystery of eternity in timeï¿½. 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 donï¿½t 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, ï¿½Time stood stillï¿½. 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 lifeï¿½s 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ The Season for the One Who Is Lost

ï¿½What 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.ï¿½
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 ï¿½ a fear that is fed by our own guilt in what is ï¿½ a fear built upon the fact that what we have been doing we probably wonï¿½t stop doing, and what we havenï¿½t 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ not in terms of some theological notion about Adam. No. We donï¿½t 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: ï¿½Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel. Save us from our captivity.ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s 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 youï¿½re living it.

Prophecy. Visions of a better world. ï¿½Comfort ye my people; speak comfort to Jerusalem, tell her that God is going to give her another chance, that her iniquity is forgiven.ï¿½ And what do the people say? Here comes the classic argument: ï¿½Surely the people are as grass.ï¿½ You know what grass does. It withers and fades. The people are just like that, so you canï¿½t 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: ï¿½Prepare ye the way . . . every valley shall be exalted.ï¿½ 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. ï¿½Prepare a way in the desert.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½You were made for this. You in fact are prophecyï¿½s instrument. It depends upon you ï¿½ hearing it, owning it, and being encouraged by its vision in the midst of a troubled community.ï¿½

Now this is not easy, because Iï¿½m not talking now about a prophetic vision that develops no reality. Iï¿½m not talking about the Word of God in some heavenly context. Iï¿½m talking about Truth ï¿½ the sense of wrong that continues to argue with your silence and your uninvolvement. Thatï¿½s the Word of God that we are talking about.

That little baby wallowing around there in the straw one day grew up and said, ï¿½This is my body.ï¿½ Thatï¿½s the Word. Thatï¿½s 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. Donï¿½t 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 ï¿½ a cheap hope that is no more than the lure of our giddy desires. The kind of hope that Iï¿½m 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. Donï¿½t own any hope this Christmas that you are not prepared to practice. Donï¿½t slip in to anything that you are not prepared to own. Iï¿½m 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 Benetï¿½s ï¿½A Child is Born.ï¿½

ï¿½We are his earth, the mortal and the dying,

Led by no star ï¿½ 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 momentï¿½s space

Under the strokes of chance,

And then sink back into our small affairs.

And yet, unless we go, his message fails.ï¿½

Thanksgiving

Read Psalm 146

I want to talk about Praise. Praise is the way we affirm, ï¿½I am alive!ï¿½ It is the way the human person celebrates. Celebrates what? Celebrates appreciation. Celebrates reverence. Celebrates thanks. I read the scripture, ï¿½Praise the Lord!ï¿½ 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 ï¿½surplussageï¿½ and it is that surplussage which tells you that there are depth dimensions here that you havenï¿½t 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 ï¿½ 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, ï¿½Praise the Lord! Thanks be to God!ï¿½

Now, in reality, most of the time, people feel less than expectant about life ï¿½ 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, ï¿½useless kneading of bread in which there is hidden no yeast.ï¿½ 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 weï¿½re 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 oneï¿½s sense of awe. When awe is destroyed, the root of belief is destroyed ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ that is, transporting to persons who touch your presence. It will become a source of living, witnessing power.

The Psalmist says, ï¿½Praise the Lord.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½I will put my life and my will clearly in them, and if they wonï¿½t accept it on tablets, I will write it on the fleshy part of their own hearts, so they will know it for sure.ï¿½

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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 wasnï¿½t 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: ï¿½I know that you know. You have kept account of my tossing.ï¿½ I donï¿½t 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, ï¿½I 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.ï¿½

Then you remember the other interesting text: ï¿½When I think of Thy ways ï¿½ï¿½ He didnï¿½t say, ï¿½When I go to church / when I feel good, that all may happen.ï¿½ He says, ï¿½When I set my foot to do Thy bidding.ï¿½

And so, this morningï¿½s invitation is to figure out how your life can begin to reflect your attempt to give witness to your perception of what Godï¿½s 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, ï¿½If with all your heart you truly seek Me, ye shall ever surely find Meï¿½ ï¿½ the promise of encounter ï¿½ 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:

ï¿½Now 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, ï¿½I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.ï¿½ When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ï¿½Moses, Moses!ï¿½ And he said, ï¿½Here am I.ï¿½ Then God said, ï¿½Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy.ï¿½ And He said, ï¿½I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.ï¿½ And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. Then the Lord said, ï¿½I have seen the affliction of my people ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½

Letï¿½s 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, ï¿½Hi.ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t yet thoroughly understand.

And so it was that this precondition was met by Moses in the wilderness. Moses looked and he saw something he hadnï¿½t 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, ï¿½You 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 donï¿½t 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.ï¿½ That much is true. He saw that. He was just like you and me ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ something that doesnï¿½t 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, ï¿½I had better stop and examine this thing.ï¿½ There is no record that when he said, ï¿½I think I had better stop,ï¿½ that anything happened. But the minute he actually stoppedï¿½ (You see, that is the commitment step. It is one thing to talk about, ï¿½I think we had better look at this.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½When he turned aside,ï¿½ what happened? ï¿½When he turned aside, God decided then to talk to him.ï¿½ When he made the stop, God said, ï¿½He is ready.ï¿½ 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. Letï¿½s 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 ï¿½ the most beautiful contradiction that Creation could issue forth ï¿½ embedded with splendor and endlessness ï¿½ like timelessness itself. You are fighting like everything to keep it in a manageable unit called ï¿½yourselfï¿½ ï¿½ under control, so that it wonï¿½t ride you off into anything that you havenï¿½t decided to get involved in.

Where is the burning bush? Mosesï¿½ story is a story that affects all of us. Moses wasnï¿½t planning on getting involved in strange things, but Moses said, ï¿½I am going to stop here. Something mysterious is happening.ï¿½

Now, what did he hear? What did God first say? ï¿½Moses, Moses.ï¿½ 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. ï¿½Moses.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ sounded from the very center of Life itself ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 didnï¿½t say, ï¿½You know, Moses, you killed a man and you know I let you off, but Moses I want you to serve me.ï¿½ No, He didnï¿½t say that. After He called his name, He simply said to Moses, ï¿½You know Moses, I am God.ï¿½ That is amazing. ï¿½I 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.ï¿½ He identified himself. It is an ecstatic moment ï¿½ 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, ï¿½Wait a minute. That is not all I want to say.ï¿½ ï¿½Moses, I have seen the affliction of my people. I have heard their groans by reason of their taskmasterï¿½s whips. I have come to deliver them. Whom shall I send? Who will go for me?ï¿½

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 didnï¿½t 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, ï¿½There is a problem.ï¿½ He said, ï¿½There is slavery in Egypt and I want somebody to help me with it.ï¿½

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 itï¿½d 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 wonï¿½t like it. Thatï¿½s all right. I want to change my name.

ï¿½When 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.ï¿½

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 hadnï¿½t 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 canï¿½t 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 doesnï¿½t need a Halloween. We already wear a mask, so we really donï¿½t 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 ï¿½the seven deadly woesï¿½.

ï¿½Woe 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.ï¿½

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.

ï¿½Woe 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.ï¿½

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 ï¿½ pagans. A true pagan is much more exciting. A good sinner, much more exciting than a compromising Christian.

ï¿½Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ï¿½If 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.ï¿½ You blind

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

has made the gold sacred? And you say, ï¿½If 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.ï¿½

You blind fools! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred?ï¿½ï¿½

ï¿½Woe 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!ï¿½

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 23^rd 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 isnï¿½t 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 sheepï¿½s clothing. Thatï¿½s all. That is where we are. You donï¿½t know what to believe anymore. Your leaders are not only talking out of both sides of their mouths, they are wearing masks.

Letï¿½s 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 donï¿½t 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 ï¿½Flaunt A Red Flowerï¿½

The reading for today is the opening statement from a book of poetry, Color, by Countess Cullen. It is entitled ï¿½To You Who Read My Book,ï¿½ 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 dreamerï¿½s 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 Fingerï¿½s 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 heartï¿½s wine.

Here of my growing

A red rose sways,

Seed of my sowing,

And work of my days.

(I run, but timeï¿½s

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, ï¿½This 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.ï¿½

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, ï¿½Thus 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.ï¿½

ï¿½This is my hour to wax and climb, flaunt a red flower in the face of time.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ tomorrow, next month, next year. ï¿½I want to, but . . . Iï¿½ll get to it.ï¿½ 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 weï¿½re not careful, the Church itself becomes a studied ritual in the celebration of death, and the way through the grave ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t 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.

Iï¿½m 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 weï¿½re not sure of, something that is known as Death. If the Church could be honest it would say, ï¿½That we know,ï¿½ and we wouls not get trapped in the things that shield us from that reality.

Death has become something we donï¿½t deal with at all, and donï¿½t know much about. We think itï¿½s gruesome. It may be informing if we were to look at it ï¿½ 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 arenï¿½t 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 itï¿½s not gruesome. Itï¿½s just a fact. We donï¿½t 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 ï¿½ not next week, not this afternoon ï¿½ NOW! Because time keeps reminding me as it changes guard, that, ï¿½You havenï¿½t got forever!ï¿½ That fact has been interpreted as a morbid thought. No! Itï¿½s exciting to know that you donï¿½t have forever. I would hate to think that youï¿½d have forever to do whatever it is youï¿½ve got on your mind. Some religion ought to declare that the critical domain for religious living is Life ï¿½ Now! Do something that has purpose to the world while we are still able to see it and understand it. I donï¿½t care what you call it. Itï¿½s not worth anything if you wonï¿½t live it. How do we get you excited about the breath youï¿½re breathing; the blood thatï¿½s 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, youï¿½ve 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 ï¿½ an exposition of what God had in mind ï¿½ and, therefore, you should live!

Itï¿½s 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 donï¿½t think thatï¿½s there. You donï¿½t even have to bother with Job. The best insight is that the early Jewish community decided that the 90th Psalmï¿½s 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, ï¿½For with you a thousand days and nights are the same.ï¿½ 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 wonï¿½t 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. Thatï¿½s 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 oneï¿½s best perception of what oneï¿½s life could mean to the increase of justice, mercy, righteousness. Then one participates in that which penetrates time ï¿½ gives time its meaning but is not contained by it ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ if you do not experience that in this life, then donï¿½t you kid yourself. When youï¿½re dead, you wonï¿½t 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 Lifeï¿½s 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 youï¿½re going, planning for the future and knowing that that is the practical thing to do, and maybe you wonï¿½t even know that you didnï¿½t 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 ï¿½ to bloom as a flower blooms from the depths of lifeï¿½s secret; to give color and profusion to existence because I am. Now is my time to do it. Donï¿½t 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 ï¿½ not because of the way he talked, but because of the way he behaved.

Thatï¿½s 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 otherï¿½s 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.

ï¿½By 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, ï¿½Sing us one of your songs of Zion!ï¿½

ï¿½How shall we sing the Lordï¿½s 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!ï¿½

Now I would like to read from Paulï¿½s second letter to the Corinthians: ï¿½Therefore, 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 Jesusï¿½ sake. For it is God who said, ï¿½Let light shine out of darkness.ï¿½ . . . 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 Jesusï¿½ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.ï¿½

Strange words. In my mind, the two texts are about the same thing. They tell us about the issue of character.

Letï¿½s first discuss Psalm 137. This was one of the first organized strikes. The Hebrews were told by their enslavers, ï¿½It is now time for you folks to play your harps and your lyres. It is for our enjoyment.ï¿½ And what did the text say? ï¿½We sat down.ï¿½ Is that not a strike? ï¿½We hung our harps on the willowsï¿½ï¿½ and refused to play.

Psalm 137 says this is a deeply religious right: The right to say, ï¿½I will not.ï¿½ That is what all strikes are based upon. The strike, therefore, is potentially a religious event ï¿½ religious in its reaffirmation of the essential character of the person. That character is largely dependent upon the personï¿½s right to say, ï¿½yea,ï¿½ and to say, ï¿½nay.ï¿½ And when persons sign away their right to say, ï¿½No,ï¿½ they have been robbed of their character. In saying ï¿½yes,ï¿½ I must not surrender my right to say, ï¿½no.ï¿½

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 donï¿½t 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, ï¿½No I will not sing the song.ï¿½

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, ï¿½No! How can we sing the Lordï¿½s song here? How can we sing the Lordï¿½s song when you donï¿½t want to hear Zionï¿½s song?ï¿½ I think it is one of the most amazing places in the Bible. They said, ï¿½ We must remember, so we will just keep quiet.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½How did we get here in the first place? We got here because we have avowed commitment to God.ï¿½ That is the only reason we are over here. And they said: ï¿½The 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 Godï¿½s goodness to us. Those were ï¿½insideï¿½ 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.ï¿½

And then they said: ï¿½If 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.ï¿½ They said: ï¿½If 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.ï¿½ They said, ï¿½I will be ruined if, for expediency, I can forget the highway to God. It will make me palsied.ï¿½

Remember what Martin Luther said? He said the same thing when he nailed his statements to the doors of the church. He said: ï¿½Here I stand. You have pushed me as far as I am going to go. I can do no other.ï¿½

It is the same thing isnï¿½t it? Where are those people now? People today ï¿½ you push them here, and then you push them over there. When do they say: ï¿½No! No further.ï¿½ Where are those Christians? Where are those people who have any sense of social justice, who with their own lives say: ï¿½I have taken enough.ï¿½ I donï¿½t see many of them.

What did the forefathers say? ï¿½Show me what measure of injustice you will acquiesce to, and I shall show you the measure of injustice that will be visited upon you.ï¿½ Who said that? Frederick Douglass said it. He told us that a long time ago.

Now there is another idea expressed in Paulï¿½s second letter to the Corinthians. He said, ï¿½We 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.ï¿½ 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 masterï¿½s 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, ï¿½We have this treasure.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½They were a special kind of people.ï¿½ No. ï¿½We have this treasure in earthen vessels, but this transcendent power does not belong to us, but to God.ï¿½ They heard like we hear, but they stood firm. Not to be tossed at any point. They dug in, and said this is it. ï¿½We will not sing our songs.ï¿½ 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 Iï¿½m talking about. The master said to the Black slaves: ï¿½If you donï¿½t act right and conform, I will kill you.ï¿½ Do you know what they said? ï¿½Before Iï¿½d be a slave, Iï¿½d be buried in my grave.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½Seek and ye shall find.ï¿½ 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. ï¿½If with all your heart you truly seek me, you will every surely find me.ï¿½

In the New Testament, the text is rendered, ï¿½Seek and you shall find,ï¿½ 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 isnï¿½t just saying, ï¿½Seek.ï¿½ It says, if you seek the Lord.

ï¿½Seek and you shall find.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ its need for its own fulfillment, for that which is beyond itself.

ï¿½Seek and ye shall find.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ it quests your questing. And the religious moment is the moment when your questing and Lifeï¿½s 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 ï¿½The Prophetï¿½ by Gibran. Here is one of his insights:

ï¿½You 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.ï¿½

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:

ï¿½I went to the rock to hide my face, the rock cried out, no hiding place, no hiding place here.ï¿½

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, Iï¿½m 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: ï¿½If you donï¿½t . . . the rocks will.ï¿½ When they came and told Jesus to stop these people from proclaiming that he was the Messiah, he said, ï¿½If I stop them from screaming Hosannahs, then the rocks will cry out.ï¿½ When we go back and say, ï¿½Seek and ye shall find,ï¿½ Life is questing and will honor your questing because it is caught up itself, as Paul says, in groaning and writhing ï¿½ in searching for the revelation of God.

What are we talking about? Words like ï¿½the revelation of God,ï¿½ ï¿½I want to go to Heaven.ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½catches your eye?ï¿½ It is talking to you. Youï¿½ll stop and you will turn, and if you turn aside long enough, you will wonder, ï¿½What does such beauty mean?ï¿½ 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, ï¿½I have seen oppression and I want you to do something about it, and I need somebody to go and work for me.ï¿½

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 ï¿½ 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: ï¿½Whom shall I send? Who will go for me?ï¿½ Thatï¿½s 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.

ï¿½Seek and ye shall find.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ that which is past what we have deemed as possible ï¿½ that is calling you. Religion is the art of the impossible. You want some water to drink ï¿½ thatï¿½s 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 ï¿½ that the water you are drinking is thirsty? Religion hints always at the impossible ï¿½ 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.

ï¿½Seek and ye shall find.ï¿½ 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.

ï¿½If with all your heart you truly seek Life, you will ever surely find it.ï¿½ 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 Hugoï¿½s writing ï¿½Les Miserable,ï¿½ he says, ï¿½Salvation is to inhabit the impossible spot.ï¿½ Only those whose quest takes them to the edge of what we see as possible, only those count, as Life counts meaning.

ï¿½Seek and you will find.ï¿½ 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 wonï¿½t 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 ï¿½ word for word ï¿½ 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: ï¿½Because 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. ï¿½ 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.ï¿½

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. Isnï¿½t 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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, isnï¿½t 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 donï¿½t 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. ï¿½Everyone a jobï¿½, and you say, I am voting for her because she is going to get a job for everybody.

They say, ï¿½A job for every person,ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t work at all! And in our current society, at the bottom. The only difference is that those at the bottom donï¿½t 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 ï¿½ to satisfy the few ï¿½ and the masses will continue to be taken advantage of because they think they are doing something good. That doesnï¿½t mean that work has to be bad, but work does not have to be understood as that which we do for somebody elseï¿½s 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 Godï¿½s design? There are a lot of human support services they could render without going to training school. You donï¿½t 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 ï¿½skillï¿½ connected to them except to be a human person.

Think about it this Labor Day.

Jesus didnï¿½t 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, ï¿½I call you to reclaim human life.ï¿½

When I was a little child we used to sing, ï¿½Work for the night is coming.ï¿½ 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: ï¿½Do thou diligence while it is day, for night cometh.ï¿½ And that diligence was about pursuing Godï¿½s 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 communityï¿½s welfare and to its caring. People would beg alms for them, and that is how they would eat, or they would stay at somebodyï¿½s 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:

ï¿½Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?ï¿½ And he said to him, ï¿½You 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 itï¿½

You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and all the prophesy.ï¿½

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, ï¿½Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?ï¿½ Jesus said to him, ï¿½What is written in the law? How do you read?ï¿½ and he answered, ï¿½You 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.ï¿½ And Jesus said to him, ï¿½You have answered right; do this, and you will live.ï¿½

MARK:

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, ï¿½Which commandment is the first of all?ï¿½ Jesus answered, ï¿½The first is, ï¿½Hear, 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.ï¿½ The second is this, ï¿½You shall love your neighbor as yourself.ï¿½ There is no other commandment greater than these.ï¿½ And the scribe said to him, ï¿½You 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 oneï¿½s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.

ï¿½And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, ï¿½You are not far from the kingdom of God.ï¿½

The passage, ï¿½You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul, and strength; and your neighbor as yourself,ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t 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 canï¿½t. 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 havenï¿½t 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? ï¿½Oh, you know we are just human.ï¿½ ï¿½I am only a human being.ï¿½ It is a lie that you are just human. We say that all the time: ï¿½I am just a human being.ï¿½ You are not! And what is amazing is that somewhere inside you, you knew it before we told you.

I come to the text: ï¿½Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with all Thy heart, mind, soul, and strength.ï¿½ It took me years to realize it, and then Jesus made the connection: ï¿½Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½Love thy neighbor as thyself.ï¿½ 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. ï¿½Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, soul, and strength, and thou shalt love your neighbor as yourself.ï¿½ 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!

ï¿½Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all of thy heartï¿½ ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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! ï¿½Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all of thy mindï¿½ ï¿½ with all of thy thought apparatus. ï¿½With all of thy soul.ï¿½ What is that about? ï¿½With all of thy soulï¿½ï¿½I translate that to mean, ï¿½With all of thy spiritual confidence.ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s indwelling Presence. Soul ï¿½ 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. ï¿½Thou shalt love the Lord thy Godï¿½ ï¿½ even with Godï¿½s indwelling Presence. ï¿½Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all soul and with all of thy strength.ï¿½ It wouldnï¿½t be religion without that last word ï¿½ 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. ï¿½Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.ï¿½

And then Jesus said, ï¿½You love your neighbor like you love yourself.ï¿½ 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. ï¿½Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s revelation in time. The proper love of self: ï¿½Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s program, you have that Principle behind you. And our only prayer should be: ï¿½Lord, 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.ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s name again and say, it is under this kind of Power, that we must struggle to do Godï¿½s bidding. It is under this kind of Power that we must try to bring beauty, and justice, and righteousness in the world. Lift Godï¿½s name again. And not withï¿½you 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 Godï¿½s purpose and Godï¿½s will and commit my life to it, there is one thing I know: I wonï¿½t have to worry about energy, and energy shortages. Iï¿½m reminded of Job here: ï¿½Do you know where the storehouse of the snow is? Do you know where lightening is kept? Where do they box up the thunder, when itï¿½s not thundering?ï¿½ 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. ï¿½Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind, soul, and strength,ï¿½ 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 didnï¿½t know, and couldnï¿½t 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:
ï¿½For ever, O Lord, thy word is firmly fixed in the heavens.ï¿½

Another translation says it this way:
ï¿½For ever, O Lord, thy word is settled in the heavens.ï¿½

That word ï¿½settledï¿½ is an old fashioned word. ï¿½Thy word is settled.ï¿½ It tells of a world of religious consciousness that we donï¿½t know much about.
ï¿½For ever, O Lord, thy word is firmly fixed in the heavens.ï¿½

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.

ï¿½Thy word, O God, is firmly fixed in the heavens.ï¿½ 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.

ï¿½Thy word, O God, is firmly fixedï¿½. 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 Godï¿½s 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. ï¿½Thy Word is forever settled in the heavens.ï¿½ 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: ï¿½The hairs of your head are numbered.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½buddy.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½foot-crampï¿½! 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 ï¿½ 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. ï¿½Thy Word, O God, is fixed foreverï¿½ ï¿½ that is an awe-inspiring idea.

The 119th Psalm bespeaks Godï¿½s 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 ï¿½ 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. Godï¿½s 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 canï¿½t forget. He said, that the Word is lodged in you. He didnï¿½t say in the Church. He said, in you. Jesus said, ï¿½The Kingdom of God is within you.ï¿½

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 Tolstoyï¿½s 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 beforeï¿½.I have been here beforeï¿½I have seen this before, because it is the symbol of Godï¿½s 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 Jesusï¿½ 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 itï¿½s 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 churchï¿½s 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, ï¿½None is good but God.ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s 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 doesnï¿½t 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 ï¿½ 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.

Isnï¿½t 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 shouldnï¿½t. 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 ï¿½ 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, ï¿½God is over there.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 isnï¿½t done. That is not sophisticated. But he didnï¿½t know any better. That wasnï¿½t 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 wasnï¿½t a Christian so he couldnï¿½t 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. Thatï¿½s what makes you so amazingly important in the scheme of Godï¿½s 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 ï¿½ the Will of the Creator for his life ï¿½ that he became a wonder in history. The text says, ï¿½In him, life lay.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½I am the way.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½I have seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus.ï¿½ 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:

ï¿½God 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.ï¿½

ï¿½Every 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 personï¿½.

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 knowledgeï¿½to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively realï¿½.

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 foundationï¿½..They are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed.ï¿½

ï¿½ï¿½And 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.ï¿½

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.

Letï¿½s 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 ï¿½the 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, ï¿½Thou shalt not kill.ï¿½ And that took care of the murderous part of human sin. ï¿½Thou shalt not mess with your neighborï¿½s wife.ï¿½ They said ï¿½covet.ï¿½ 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. ï¿½Thou shalt not steal.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ an iron rule with no bending, and God knew there was trouble again. Because they started doing everything that wasnï¿½t listed in those ten points. And now we saw the entrapment of law. ï¿½That is not down here.ï¿½ They knew it was wrong, but it wasnï¿½t 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 couldnï¿½t do anything but interpret the law. They couldnï¿½t 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 Godï¿½s spokesperson in their midst. And you know what happened then? It wasnï¿½t 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ internal to the person. And that is what is talked about in Jeremiah. God says, ï¿½I 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.ï¿½ No longer, the text says will it be necessary for one neighbor to tell another neighbor what is rightï¿½you 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 wouldnï¿½t 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, ï¿½I donï¿½t need churchï¿½.

The significance of Easter is that, in the Easter experience, Godï¿½s Presence is defined as larger than flesh. Easter confirms that the Kingdom within you is the point at which your flesh intersects with Godï¿½s 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 ï¿½ 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, ï¿½We know He is here.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ that part in you which will not rest with your complicity in the worldï¿½s 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s 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. ï¿½Follow me.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½Well 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.ï¿½ What they are really saying is, ï¿½I am not about to be bound nowï¿½. 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 Godï¿½s desiring. The poet said,

ï¿½Make 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 lifeï¿½s alarms when by myself I stand, imprison me within thine arms, then strong will be my hand.ï¿½

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 ï¿½ 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, ï¿½Not my will, but Thy will.ï¿½ 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 Jesusï¿½s body became ï¿½ Godï¿½s 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.

ï¿½This is my body.ï¿½ Jesus has taught me the body ought to be a living exposition of Godï¿½s justice, of Godï¿½s truth, of Godï¿½s beauty, of Godï¿½s love or at least it ought to be a living exposition of a most desperate search for those things. In Jesus, the body became Godï¿½s 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.

ï¿½Take 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.ï¿½

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.

ï¿½As 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, ï¿½Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.ï¿½ 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.ï¿½

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, ï¿½ï¿½Rise, take up your bed and go home.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½We have seen strange things today.ï¿½ï¿½

After this he went out, and he saw a tax collector, named Levi. Levi wasnï¿½t shouting and glorifying God, he was sitting in a tax office. Jesus went into the tax office and spoke to Levi ï¿½ and He said to him, ï¿½Follow me.ï¿½

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: ï¿½Follow me.ï¿½ You would say: ï¿½ What is this?ï¿½ And call the police.

But this is what the text says that Jesus did. Jesus said, ï¿½Follow me.ï¿½ And it is reported in Luke that ï¿½Levi left everything. I love that phrase. That is the only place I see that phrase. Matthew doesnï¿½t say it. Levi left everything. The taxes must have been left in a mess! He left the office and it doesnï¿½t appear he planned to return, for the text says, ï¿½ï¿½he rose and followed Him.ï¿½

The story of the Church is lodged in a deeply personal concept. And it is the concept that persons, diverse persons ï¿½ fishermen, secretaries, tax collectors, housewives, children, diverse human beings ï¿½ 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 didnï¿½t call the father? It didnï¿½t 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 didnï¿½t say, whoever is out there, letï¿½s go. No. He was specific ï¿½Johnï¿½ Peter.ï¿½

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 donï¿½t ever want to get to doing it so well that I donï¿½t 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 hasnï¿½t experienced it. I donï¿½t 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 wasnï¿½t 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 ï¿½I have been visited by a great idea about what my life could mean.ï¿½

I maintain that is indigenous to our personal existence. I find very few people who say, Iï¿½m 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 donï¿½t 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 ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t 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 donï¿½t 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 canï¿½t 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 donï¿½t 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 isnï¿½t upon you anymore.

What I am talking about is what a major author has called ï¿½the pressure of Gloryï¿½ that is on every life here. ï¿½The pressure of Gloryï¿½ ï¿½ 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 personï¿½s 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 ï¿½ 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: ï¿½Follow me.ï¿½ Jesus didnï¿½t say to them: ï¿½I just ask you to come and go with me while I figure out where I am going.ï¿½ Jesus said, ï¿½I know where I come from and I know where I am going.ï¿½

ï¿½Follow me.ï¿½

And I say to you ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s 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: ï¿½I want you. Follow me.ï¿½

Almighty Affection

I open with an important idea as it was expressed by Olive Schreiner who wrote at the turn of the 20th century:

ï¿½From 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.

ï¿½It 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, ï¿½the great Creatorï¿½.ï¿½

The idea is simply that one of the critical factors in creation is the unitive factor ï¿½ 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, ï¿½You are Light,ï¿½ ï¿½You are salt.ï¿½ 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: ï¿½Made in the image of God.ï¿½ 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 Godï¿½s 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 ï¿½ 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, ï¿½It is Good.ï¿½

The church, however, has taught us that we were born in sin, conceived in iniquity. But I donï¿½t think that is indigenous to New Testament insight. Jesus said, ï¿½Let the little children come unto me; of such is the Kingdom.ï¿½ How could the Kingdom be made up of sinful children? He said, ï¿½Lest you become as a child.ï¿½ 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, ï¿½Thatï¿½s human nature.ï¿½ 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 wouldnï¿½t tell people who were full of original sin ï¿½ ï¿½You are the Light of the world.ï¿½ If you donï¿½t give flavor to this earth, it will have none, because, ï¿½You are the Salt.ï¿½

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 donï¿½t 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.

Motherï¿½s 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 Motherï¿½s 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 Motherï¿½s 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 motherï¿½s day, brotherï¿½s day, sisterï¿½s day, childrenï¿½s 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 Godï¿½s will would be the ones who are honored with flowers on Personï¿½s 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, ï¿½Youï¿½re fabulous.ï¿½ ï¿½You are great!ï¿½ ï¿½You are not sick, you are well.ï¿½ He had never seen these people before, but he knew they were not outside the purview of Godï¿½s loving concern ï¿½ 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.

Letï¿½s 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 donï¿½t 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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. ï¿½The Kingdom is within you.ï¿½ And still you sit! I believe when you understand that, then you will know what it means to love.

The scripture says, ï¿½The shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, soul and strength, and thy neighbor as thyself.ï¿½ Then the great Teacher comes and says, but how can you love God whom you cannot see and donï¿½t 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 donï¿½t 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 donï¿½t really love ourselves. That is the reason Jesus was always trying to get people to understand ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t love the life that moves in miraculous fashion within?

I like Johnï¿½s phrase because he puts you in proper space. He says, ï¿½Little children, love one another.ï¿½ 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.

ï¿½What Is Truthï¿½

A very familiar story in the Bible and one Iï¿½ve 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 didnï¿½t 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, ï¿½Take him yourself, and judge him by your own law.ï¿½ And do you know what they said? They said, ï¿½It is not lawful under our law, for us to put any man to death.ï¿½

We have come a long way from that understanding.

The Jews think that what Jesus has done is worthy of death. They canï¿½t 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: ï¿½Are you the King of the Jews?ï¿½ And Jesus answered him by saying: ï¿½ Do you say this of your own accord or are others saying this about me?ï¿½ Pilot answered: ï¿½Am I a Jew? Your own nation, and your chief priests, have handed you over to me. What have you done?ï¿½

And here come some very interesting words. In Johnï¿½s Gospel Jesus says: ï¿½My 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.ï¿½

And Pilot said to him: ï¿½So you are a King?ï¿½ This is a very poignant moment, because Pilot doesnï¿½t understand what Jesus is talking about. He looked at him and said: ï¿½So you are a King?ï¿½

Jesus said: ï¿½You say I am a King.ï¿½ And then he said: ï¿½For 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.ï¿½

And Pilot replies with a question that is the text of my sermon today: ï¿½What is truth?ï¿½

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 doesnï¿½t understand why the Jews are after him; and he has also decided, obviously, that Jesus is on to something. I donï¿½t know whether it was Jesusï¿½ presence that conveys that, or whether it is what he has heard about him; but Pilotï¿½s inquisitiveness is real and he asks: ï¿½What is truth?ï¿½

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. Pilotï¿½s question is never answered. And it is consistent with Jesusï¿½ 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, donï¿½t 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 Pilotï¿½s 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, ï¿½It has been said to you by the Law, but I say to you.ï¿½ And then the call from him was, ï¿½Try it and see what you find out.ï¿½ Even in the instruction to those close to him. The disciples threw the fish net out and didnï¿½t 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 doesnï¿½t 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 Godï¿½s 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, donï¿½t drink this communion. You canï¿½t 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 ï¿½ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t 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 didnï¿½t sing what a fellowship those who believe we are the elect of God, what a grouping of us. No. We didnï¿½t 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 doesnï¿½t see it that way within the fellowship can say, but Reverend, I didnï¿½t 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 donï¿½t 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 wonï¿½t know where it came from; and yesterdayï¿½s 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 Godï¿½s Presence.

You choose what kind of a Church you want. One tradition says: If you want the answer Pilot, Iï¿½ll give it to you. And then there is the Jesus tradition: It steps back and it canï¿½t tell you.

Browning says it for me. ï¿½Then 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.ï¿½ And the text says to me: ï¿½Walk in the Light, the little you see; and it will lead you to a fellowship that is larger.ï¿½

It doesnï¿½t 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 Godï¿½s 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 ï¿½The Way of Responseï¿½

ï¿½In 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 ï¿½transcendentï¿½ or ï¿½immanentï¿½ 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.ï¿½

Sermon:

ï¿½By the power of the decision which brought it about and the sanctity of the intent which dwells in it.ï¿½ ï¿½Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul and strength.ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 havenï¿½t even made the first step of that total love, the love that owes everything ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t 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 donï¿½t 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, ï¿½You failed to let them know about my ways.ï¿½ Jesus said, ï¿½No, Father, they know.ï¿½ ï¿½But you failed to make them want it.ï¿½ He said, ï¿½No, they wanted it, but they were fearful of wanting it so much lest that wanting should destroy them, so they crucified me.ï¿½ ï¿½But 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.ï¿½ ï¿½Yes, 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.ï¿½

Wanting is nothing in this business that we are talking about today ï¿½ 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 weï¿½re 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 canï¿½t be a question of doing good.

When religion becomes only doing good, then the good world

becomes a world of mixed motives ï¿½ frustrated and fractured ï¿½ 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 ï¿½Gï¿½ is unconditional. When you condition it ï¿½ do it only on certain terms ï¿½ you rob the world of its witness, because you surround it with your conditional schemes.

We experience it every day ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t 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, ï¿½Blessed are those whose cores are pure. Blessed are the pure in heart.ï¿½ Is there purity of center? The willing place ï¿½ the intentional ground ï¿½ 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 ï¿½howï¿½ of the deed. After we discover the content, then we go to the ï¿½howï¿½ of the matter. And that doesnï¿½t 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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 donï¿½t stop anything. How many of us are involved in community activities, doing a lot of nice deeds, and they donï¿½t 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 ï¿½ 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 ï¿½ 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, isnï¿½t 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 ï¿½ that experience of seeing God must become the driving force behind the deed that is done in Godï¿½s 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.