Natural Consequences
December 28, 2008
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Luke 2:22-40, Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Psalm 148
Three days ago I read the story again with which we are all so familiar “And there were in that same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night...” And we went on to hear “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will to all.” The world had changed, God had entered human history, the incarnation experiment had begun – an experiment that would cause us to renumber the years, beginning the new count from the time of Christ’s birth. Since the first Christmas, we have lived in a new age. Most of us grew up calling the two eras BC and AD – for before Christ and Anno Domini – the year of our Lord. These days, many of us refer to these eras as BCE and CE for Before the Common Era and Common Era – recognizing that not all peoples recognize Jesus as Lord.
Most of the time I have been studying theology, I have understood the incarnation as something exceptional – the inbreaking of God into human history, a supernatural event. Christmas is the miracle by which God enters creation on our level, as a human. God coming among us as one of us so that we might know God’s love in a way we never understood it before, and so that we might know that God knows. God knows our experience, from walking along a hot, dusty road to being jostled on a storm-tossed sea, from hunger to fear, from laughter to touch – God knows the human experience inside-out, and we know God knows.
So our human experience is different because of the incarnation, our human experience is different because God has entered our space and time as one of us. Except that all too often, our experience is not transformed at all.
The day after Christmas, I turned on the news and heard about the church usher from California who had killed nine members of his ex-wife's family before burning down their home – and then killed himself. His divorce had been finalized recently, but there was nothing particularly notable in the settlement – neither his attorney nor his wife's had sensed any particular anger – it was not an extraordinary divorce, although divorce is always painful. Somehow the loss of the marriage and the loss of his job combined to create a rage that enabled him to plan a murder spree, even as he volunteered to usher at church Christmas Eve.
Obviously, this story is unusual – if it weren't, it wouldn't be drawing so much attention. But in many ways, it's only unusual in its scope – the violent death of ten people is horrific – but many of us had an argument on the way to church or experienced some other brokenness at Christmas. Church-going people are not immune to weakness or worry, to addiction or anger, to divorce or depression – although we say that Christmas has transformed the world, our own lives seem pretty remarkably unredeemed.
I don’t know about you, but when I heard the story of this man who had murdered so many people and who had planned to usher at church on Christmas Eve, I wondered how it was that his faith had not been more of a resource to him. I know what it’s like to be divorced – it’s hard and painful and dislocating. It changes your understanding of your past, and takes away the future you had planned on. I know what it’s like to lose a job, too – on many levels it takes away your sense of self, and it creates financial challenges as well. But still, I found myself deeply sad that for this man who was in some way a man of faith – his faith was not an adequate resource for these events.
And yet, if I am completely honest with myself, I have to admit that there are times when my faith is not the resource I wish it were – I struggle with circumstances, or relationships, or myself in ways that I feel I ought to be able to rise above, or work through in some kind of transcendent way, being a person of faith. And yes, there are times that such experiences lead me to doubt – to doubt either my own sufficiency as a faithful person, or my own understanding of God, or God’s existence.
We all doubt. In the spiritual direction studies I have done, I’ve learned that deep doubt in one of the great commonalities among people we regard as giants in faith. I truly believe that if we never doubt, if we never wrestle with our understanding or our experience of faith, then our faith will never be able to support us through the really tough times.
Some people are afraid to doubt, and others are afraid to believe, and either path leaves us unwilling to think about our faith. There is a temptation to never think about faith – and that temptation can leave us with an immature faith that can not carry us through adult challenges.
But there are other dimensions to faith than thought – there are other temptations besides being afraid to think about faith. And that is the unwillingness to experience faith, to feel faith, to let faith be more than thought. If God is real, if there is a greater reality to which we all belong, then why are we unwilling to believe we might be able to experience that larger reality? While Christmas is supernatural, that larger reality of life is utterly natural – if God is Being itself, the source of all life, the loving pulse at the center of reality, then why should we not assume that our experience can connect with God, that our reality can include experiencing God? This is the essence of spirituality – an openness to experiencing a larger reality. Some people experience that larger reality in nature, others in prayer, still others have both experiences.
I was so struck in reading this week’s selections at the natural connection between natural rhythms and spiritual rhythms, between the life of faith and the joy that flows in the natural world. And this natural interrelationship between a life of faith and joy and the created world was all the more notable today’s readings following immediately upon the supernatural event of Christmas.
In the three years that we have been celebrating a Season of Creation each fall, I’ve become aware of how green the Bible is, how many readings connect to the earth. One of today’s readings, the psalm we all read together, celebrates God’s creation and the connections between humans and the natural world. The Isaiah reading, like much of Isaiah, connects the dreams of God with the abundance and natural cycles within nature. This reading in particular caught my eye, for it compares the response of praising God to the emerging of plants from the earth – it is a natural consequence of planting that shoots should grow, and for the prophet, it is a natural consequence of the relationship with God that we should be full of praise: I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation…for as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations. For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest…. For Isaiah, praising God will be a natural consequence of faithfully experiencing God.
And in the Luke passage, we see the same connection between faithfulness and praise – in this case, it is with two people who have developed a lifetime of grounding themselves in God. The man Simeon, who was described as righteous and devout, and who is led by the Holy Spirit to come to the temple on the day that Mary has come to undertake the purification that was required after childbirth. An interesting aside, by the way, is that she has come with a pair of turtledoves – the law in Leviticus prescribed that a woman should bring a lamb for a burnt offering…but if the woman was too poor, she could bring a pair of turtledoves or pigeons. Luke is telling us that Mary is quite poor. So at this point in the gospel of Luke, God is revealing God’s self to Mary, a poor young woman, to Simeon – a very elderly man, and to Anna – a widow who is described as a prophet. All three are people of deep faith, people who are willing to trust God, people who are open to experiencing God. These are not powerful people – the very elderly man, the poor young girl, and the widow. The others who experience the holy in the Christmas story are the shepherds, people at the lowest rung of society, who live and work in close proximity to the natural world – later, Jesus will approach fishermen, people as dependent on the sea as the shepherds are on the land.
One of the results of the secularization of our culture is that we do not assume that God is interwoven with our everyday life – we seek special places and experiences for God or we assume that people cannot experience God. Part of that is a result of urbanization, I think, as we are also more removed from the natural world. And it’s also a result of rationalism – our reliance on the human mind as the only source of understanding. While we shouldn’t be afraid of thinking, as I said earlier, we also shouldn’t assume that it is the only way to understand – we know from our relationships with other people that we also learn relationally, through our connections with others. We know from our self-understanding that emotions can be sources of understanding. As Descartes said, “The heart has its reason that reason doesn’t know.”
We learn from this chapter that Mary was an observant Jewish woman. Judaism is woven through with praise of God in all dimensions of life, with rituals marking the changes of the seasons, the harvest, the Sabbath….the Celtic tradition is also one that recognized the holy in all dimensions of life, and marked the movements of the day with prayer. Our focus on the supernatural events of Christmas and Easter as the primary revelations of our faith have also served to distance us from the sense of ordinary life being infused with holiness – this is ironic, because one of the theological implications of the incarnation, of God entering the life of the world as Jesus, is that God so values our ordinary experienced life, that God chose to participate in it with us.
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, in his recent book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, discusses the French Jesuit, Henri de Lubac, who describes what he calls two mediocrities in Biblical interpretation. The first is what he calls the “hackneyed moralisms and pieties of those who have never studied the historical and anthropological setting” – it is the conservative temptation, he says, and is more about feelings than thinking. This faith won’t transform history, he says, and won’t impact anyone who is oriented to thinking, and can be the source for all kinds of prejudice.
The other mediocrity he describes is the “narrow historical critical interpretation of those who have never had any God experience [or the progressive temptation].” He describes this as the enlightened perspective of those who “…have no inner experience to awaken the reality of the spiritual world. They do not really love God as much as talk about God.” This is the narrowness to which we are most susceptible, I suspect. We are afraid of the sentimentality and prejudice of the conservative tradition, and so we reject experience as irrational, when it is only non-rational. So is the love we experience, or the way a beautiful view takes our breath away – those are non-rational experiences, and they help us to be fully human. Jesus came to show us what it means to be fully human, to remind us that the life of faith means loving God with our mind, heart and soul. As I think about the ways that many people of faith fail to experience in their faith the joy, the resilience, and the grounded hope that seems to flow through today’s readings, I suspect it is because we have approached faith in a lopsided and non-holistic way, that is not an adequate reflection of the incarnate One who came to make us whole.
The world is all connected – and the joy of experiencing God is a natural consequence of participating in creation and in the life of prayer. I am reminded that our hunger for God is only partly our own curiosity, and is also the echo of God’s desire for us. Let us experience the natural consequences of the God-breathed life, let us experience God. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Luke 2:22-40, Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Psalm 148
Three days ago I read the story again with which we are all so familiar “And there were in that same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night...” And we went on to hear “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will to all.” The world had changed, God had entered human history, the incarnation experiment had begun – an experiment that would cause us to renumber the years, beginning the new count from the time of Christ’s birth. Since the first Christmas, we have lived in a new age. Most of us grew up calling the two eras BC and AD – for before Christ and Anno Domini – the year of our Lord. These days, many of us refer to these eras as BCE and CE for Before the Common Era and Common Era – recognizing that not all peoples recognize Jesus as Lord.
Most of the time I have been studying theology, I have understood the incarnation as something exceptional – the inbreaking of God into human history, a supernatural event. Christmas is the miracle by which God enters creation on our level, as a human. God coming among us as one of us so that we might know God’s love in a way we never understood it before, and so that we might know that God knows. God knows our experience, from walking along a hot, dusty road to being jostled on a storm-tossed sea, from hunger to fear, from laughter to touch – God knows the human experience inside-out, and we know God knows.
So our human experience is different because of the incarnation, our human experience is different because God has entered our space and time as one of us. Except that all too often, our experience is not transformed at all.
The day after Christmas, I turned on the news and heard about the church usher from California who had killed nine members of his ex-wife's family before burning down their home – and then killed himself. His divorce had been finalized recently, but there was nothing particularly notable in the settlement – neither his attorney nor his wife's had sensed any particular anger – it was not an extraordinary divorce, although divorce is always painful. Somehow the loss of the marriage and the loss of his job combined to create a rage that enabled him to plan a murder spree, even as he volunteered to usher at church Christmas Eve.
Obviously, this story is unusual – if it weren't, it wouldn't be drawing so much attention. But in many ways, it's only unusual in its scope – the violent death of ten people is horrific – but many of us had an argument on the way to church or experienced some other brokenness at Christmas. Church-going people are not immune to weakness or worry, to addiction or anger, to divorce or depression – although we say that Christmas has transformed the world, our own lives seem pretty remarkably unredeemed.
I don’t know about you, but when I heard the story of this man who had murdered so many people and who had planned to usher at church on Christmas Eve, I wondered how it was that his faith had not been more of a resource to him. I know what it’s like to be divorced – it’s hard and painful and dislocating. It changes your understanding of your past, and takes away the future you had planned on. I know what it’s like to lose a job, too – on many levels it takes away your sense of self, and it creates financial challenges as well. But still, I found myself deeply sad that for this man who was in some way a man of faith – his faith was not an adequate resource for these events.
And yet, if I am completely honest with myself, I have to admit that there are times when my faith is not the resource I wish it were – I struggle with circumstances, or relationships, or myself in ways that I feel I ought to be able to rise above, or work through in some kind of transcendent way, being a person of faith. And yes, there are times that such experiences lead me to doubt – to doubt either my own sufficiency as a faithful person, or my own understanding of God, or God’s existence.
We all doubt. In the spiritual direction studies I have done, I’ve learned that deep doubt in one of the great commonalities among people we regard as giants in faith. I truly believe that if we never doubt, if we never wrestle with our understanding or our experience of faith, then our faith will never be able to support us through the really tough times.
Some people are afraid to doubt, and others are afraid to believe, and either path leaves us unwilling to think about our faith. There is a temptation to never think about faith – and that temptation can leave us with an immature faith that can not carry us through adult challenges.
But there are other dimensions to faith than thought – there are other temptations besides being afraid to think about faith. And that is the unwillingness to experience faith, to feel faith, to let faith be more than thought. If God is real, if there is a greater reality to which we all belong, then why are we unwilling to believe we might be able to experience that larger reality? While Christmas is supernatural, that larger reality of life is utterly natural – if God is Being itself, the source of all life, the loving pulse at the center of reality, then why should we not assume that our experience can connect with God, that our reality can include experiencing God? This is the essence of spirituality – an openness to experiencing a larger reality. Some people experience that larger reality in nature, others in prayer, still others have both experiences.
I was so struck in reading this week’s selections at the natural connection between natural rhythms and spiritual rhythms, between the life of faith and the joy that flows in the natural world. And this natural interrelationship between a life of faith and joy and the created world was all the more notable today’s readings following immediately upon the supernatural event of Christmas.
In the three years that we have been celebrating a Season of Creation each fall, I’ve become aware of how green the Bible is, how many readings connect to the earth. One of today’s readings, the psalm we all read together, celebrates God’s creation and the connections between humans and the natural world. The Isaiah reading, like much of Isaiah, connects the dreams of God with the abundance and natural cycles within nature. This reading in particular caught my eye, for it compares the response of praising God to the emerging of plants from the earth – it is a natural consequence of planting that shoots should grow, and for the prophet, it is a natural consequence of the relationship with God that we should be full of praise: I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation…for as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations. For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest…. For Isaiah, praising God will be a natural consequence of faithfully experiencing God.
And in the Luke passage, we see the same connection between faithfulness and praise – in this case, it is with two people who have developed a lifetime of grounding themselves in God. The man Simeon, who was described as righteous and devout, and who is led by the Holy Spirit to come to the temple on the day that Mary has come to undertake the purification that was required after childbirth. An interesting aside, by the way, is that she has come with a pair of turtledoves – the law in Leviticus prescribed that a woman should bring a lamb for a burnt offering…but if the woman was too poor, she could bring a pair of turtledoves or pigeons. Luke is telling us that Mary is quite poor. So at this point in the gospel of Luke, God is revealing God’s self to Mary, a poor young woman, to Simeon – a very elderly man, and to Anna – a widow who is described as a prophet. All three are people of deep faith, people who are willing to trust God, people who are open to experiencing God. These are not powerful people – the very elderly man, the poor young girl, and the widow. The others who experience the holy in the Christmas story are the shepherds, people at the lowest rung of society, who live and work in close proximity to the natural world – later, Jesus will approach fishermen, people as dependent on the sea as the shepherds are on the land.
One of the results of the secularization of our culture is that we do not assume that God is interwoven with our everyday life – we seek special places and experiences for God or we assume that people cannot experience God. Part of that is a result of urbanization, I think, as we are also more removed from the natural world. And it’s also a result of rationalism – our reliance on the human mind as the only source of understanding. While we shouldn’t be afraid of thinking, as I said earlier, we also shouldn’t assume that it is the only way to understand – we know from our relationships with other people that we also learn relationally, through our connections with others. We know from our self-understanding that emotions can be sources of understanding. As Descartes said, “The heart has its reason that reason doesn’t know.”
We learn from this chapter that Mary was an observant Jewish woman. Judaism is woven through with praise of God in all dimensions of life, with rituals marking the changes of the seasons, the harvest, the Sabbath….the Celtic tradition is also one that recognized the holy in all dimensions of life, and marked the movements of the day with prayer. Our focus on the supernatural events of Christmas and Easter as the primary revelations of our faith have also served to distance us from the sense of ordinary life being infused with holiness – this is ironic, because one of the theological implications of the incarnation, of God entering the life of the world as Jesus, is that God so values our ordinary experienced life, that God chose to participate in it with us.
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, in his recent book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, discusses the French Jesuit, Henri de Lubac, who describes what he calls two mediocrities in Biblical interpretation. The first is what he calls the “hackneyed moralisms and pieties of those who have never studied the historical and anthropological setting” – it is the conservative temptation, he says, and is more about feelings than thinking. This faith won’t transform history, he says, and won’t impact anyone who is oriented to thinking, and can be the source for all kinds of prejudice.
The other mediocrity he describes is the “narrow historical critical interpretation of those who have never had any God experience [or the progressive temptation].” He describes this as the enlightened perspective of those who “…have no inner experience to awaken the reality of the spiritual world. They do not really love God as much as talk about God.” This is the narrowness to which we are most susceptible, I suspect. We are afraid of the sentimentality and prejudice of the conservative tradition, and so we reject experience as irrational, when it is only non-rational. So is the love we experience, or the way a beautiful view takes our breath away – those are non-rational experiences, and they help us to be fully human. Jesus came to show us what it means to be fully human, to remind us that the life of faith means loving God with our mind, heart and soul. As I think about the ways that many people of faith fail to experience in their faith the joy, the resilience, and the grounded hope that seems to flow through today’s readings, I suspect it is because we have approached faith in a lopsided and non-holistic way, that is not an adequate reflection of the incarnate One who came to make us whole.
The world is all connected – and the joy of experiencing God is a natural consequence of participating in creation and in the life of prayer. I am reminded that our hunger for God is only partly our own curiosity, and is also the echo of God’s desire for us. Let us experience the natural consequences of the God-breathed life, let us experience God. Amen.