[Propertalk] Proper 22 b rcl

[Robert P Morrison]

The "ink" is still wet on this, but here's what I'm using as the basis for this Sunday's sermon. I commend Karen Armstrong's book as thought provoking. Of course, I've only read the first chapter! 8 - )

Bob


THE EPISCOPAL PARISH OF ST. JAMES, LINCOLN CITY      THE EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
JOB 1:1; 2:1-10               	         PROPER 22 B RCL
HEBREWS 1:1-4; 2:5-12   	        4th OCTOBER, 2009
MARK 10:2-16                            PSALM 26

	“When the guide switches off his flashlight in the underground caverns of Lascaux in the Dordogne, the effect is overwhelming. ‘The senses suddenly are wiped out,’ one visitor recalled, ‘the millennia drop away. . . . You were never in darker darkness in your life. It was—I don’t know, just a complete knockout. You don’t know whether you are looking north, south, east, or west. All orientation is gone, and you are in a darkness that never saw the sun.’ Normal daylight consciousness extinguished, you feel a ‘timeless dissociation from every concern and requirement of the upper world that you have left behind.’” 1
	That’s how Karen Armstrong begins her latest book. It sounds like an incredible way to experience reorientation in life. There are so many stimuli all around. Even in the darkest night, no matter how deep one is in the country, there’s always a glow that seems to come from somewhere. Even away from other humans and animals and all mechanical devices, there seems to be some noise – whether externally from what some describe as the music of the spheres, or, internally, of one’s own heartbeat.
	Maybe in these, though, an ordinary human being engages in the process of discovering who he or she is and how one relates to what’s around us. What Karen Armstrong seems to be implying is that it’s often when one does something to heighten one’s senses that one becomes aware of what’s beyond us. For the next three hundred and eighty some pages she explores how the human spirit has tried to discover glimpses into Being and the origin of Life. From time to time, suggests the author, little flashes of insight cross human history, both collectively and individually, and Whom we call “God” impacts us.
	I wouldn’t say that we “know” God in those moments. Nor does Armstrong. She talks instead of experience – something indescribable, yet something which seems to appear out of some great depth with which we become conjoined. As the description continues, “Then the guide suddenly turns the beam of his flashlight onto the ceiling, and the painted animals seem to emerge from the depths of the rock. A strange beast with gravid belly and long pointed horns walks behind a line of wild cattle, horses, deer, and bulls that seem simultaneously in motion and at rest.  …..
	“Like art, the truths of religion require the disciplined cultivation of a different mode of consciousness. The cave experience always began with the disorientation of utter darkness, which annihilated normal habits of mind. Human beings are so constituted that periodically they seek out ekstasis, (from which we get our word ‘Ecstasy’) a ‘stepping outside’ the norm.” Armstrong seems to express regret in admitting that people today may no longer find this experience through religious ritual of whatever sort, and turn “to other outlets: music, dance, art, sex, drugs, or sport.” One way or another, though, we all “make a point of seeking out these experiences that touch us deeply within and lift us momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, we feel that we inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and experience an enhancement of being.” Which, I believe, is Armstrong’s way of saying that we all try in our own different ways, indeed we all NEED, as part of our human make-up, to reach out and touch the face of God.
	As incredible as that discovery may be, as we experience the ecstasy, as we live through the longing for that moment and as we hold our breath in awe of what seems for ever afterwards, out of our Christian experience I think we look at that moment as being a synapse, a junction, between our humanity and however we choose to describe and define God.
	And this is, for me, what lies behind each of the three Scripture passages this morning. The various authors are struggling to come up with some sort of a way of expressing first, who God is, and second, how God is. At the same time there’s that constant, very human, element of how to deal with things when intentional and unintentional challenges threaten to tear us apart.
	Go back to that image of the group in the caverns of Lascaux. Close your eyes, if that helps. Putting out the lights in her might do something, but there’s so much light streaming inside from the outside that it’s extraordinarily difficult to conceive what Lascaux darkness is like.	 Perhaps remembrance of night during one of the recent storm-inducing power failures may be as close as we can come in our own memories.
	Imagine such blackness that you don’t know if there’s anyone else there. Imagine such blackness that you don’t trust yourself to accept that the slight sound you hear is that of someone else in the room breathing, Imagine how it must feel to be all alone – even with that breath sound.
	That’s how Job must have felt. Without knowing the extent of it, he was just entering the most intensely painful and debilitating period of his life. The one thing that had sustained him up to that point was his faith. Now his wife, who’d borne him children and labored with him to establish a prosperous farm, now his wife told him that he might as well pack that in, such was the darkness which enveloped him.
	THAT’S darkness. But even as the darkness became more and more oppressive, somehow, Job was able to resist popular opinion and to find that, through some inexplicable mystery, he was still in the mind of God. God still cared.
	Bring this up to this very morning. Pick any headline from last night or this morning’s TV news or papers. Darkness persists: Earthquakes; tsunamis; flooding; high winds; torture; greed; arrogance. On the level of society as a whole, there IS much to suggest despair. AND on the personal level it’s not much better: the denial of humanity; the abuse that attacks the being of an individual – belittling someone or making them so insecure that self-doubt takes over. Darkness abounds.
	And yet – as that marvelous psalm verse at the opening of Evening Prayer reminds us, “Darkness is NOT dark to you, O God.” 2 Even in what can be incredibly isolating, with the appearance of being destructive, even there it’s possible to sense that Wonderful Being and to find a sense of peace, calm and love in the midst of everything that’s going on around us.
	And, really, that’s all most of us want – to know that we’re loved so intensely and completely that no matter what’s happening, no matter what we do, we’re understood, and our pain and brokenness is never a barrier to become at one with God. That’s what enables us to pray, as we did at the opening of this liturgy, “Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask…” 3
	If we were buried in darkness, with no suggestion of the Presence of God, then there would be no sense whatsoever to seeking God’s companionship which brings mercy, forgiveness and comfort. Not only that, though, there would be absolutely no sense in seeking each other’s forgiveness, of seeking ways in which, despite our differences, we can find sufficient points of light, if you will, on which we can co-operate so that we may bring a sense of companionable journeying to that we can tolerate all the things that can make life such a tiring drag. 
	I find it curious to encounter the contrast between the reading from Job and the Gospel. What better moment for Job to go into the marketplace and say, thrice, “I divorce thee”, to rid himself of the one person who should have been able to be there for him, but somehow failed. And this ties in to what Jesus was saying about the custom regarding marriage and divorce. Note that the question was one of law, not morality.  In the time periods covered by both readings marriage was a property contract, and one totally weighted in favour of the man. Therefore if the wife didn’t quite come up to snuff, she could be dumped.
	But Jesus sought to have His hearers recognize that people are infinitely more important that property – because of quote from Genesis about unity.
	The whole point of developing relationships, of giving one’s self to another unconditionally, of becoming one with them at every level of being, seems to express the “conviction that life was not meant to be so fragmented, hard, and full of pain.” 4 What Jesus pointed to, what Job, perhaps, failed see, for all his insight, what the majority of twentieth and twenty-first century culture seems to have left behind, deliberately, is a willingness to acknowledge that tremendous yearning to be so conjoined – with another human as well as with the Ground of our Being – to face up to and accept the creative power of both expressible and inexpressible emotion that leads us into the Presence of Being.
	It’s easier for us today to fall back toward the property rights definition of marriage, complete with pre-nuptial agreements. We’ve become uncomfortable living with the deepest, strongest, most basic emotions at our cores. We seem, contradictorily, on the one hand to long for making sense of life and finding absolute fulfillment, but on the other hand, we resist the purity of what we sense lies in the experience of such unity.
	Maybe THAT’S why, in every relationship among humans – in marriage as much as in economics; in the Franciscan stewardship which we’ll celebrate this afternoon in terms of how we interact with creation; even in our dealings with God; – maybe THAT’S why we face an almost shoulder-shrug mentality, as if it’s only to be expected that CEOs will rip off the share-holders; or government officials, elected and bureaucratic, will be ignore the common good and turn to corruption; maybe when even Church leaders and congregations fail, it’s because they find themselves unable or unwilling to pick up the vow of the psalmist and “live with integrity” the life that calls us to mirror the Beauty that we glimpse occasionally, when we have those dazzling, albeit fleeting, moments of bliss when we find ourselves completely at one with God and creation.
	But then, we have to be willing to enter the darkness, to surrender all thought of self-orientation, before we can experience the Breath of God within and around us.
	The writers of the Book of Job, and the Letter to Hebrews, and the Gospel bearing the name of Mark all define our search for the who and how of God in life as a struggle. They knew the temptations which beset us each day. But they also hold out encouragement that we CAN and WILL find in the strongest earthquake, and the deepest economic recession, and the horror of living with unrelieved and untreated pain, and the most tattered of human relationships, we CAN and WILL find God beside us, no matter how dark it may seem. That’s when the light comes on.
	And that’s the good news for this week.
NOTES:
1	“The Case for God” by Karen Armstrong.  A Borzoi Book: Alfred A. Knopf, A Division of Random House, New York. © Karen Armstrong 2009 Chapter One – “Homo religious” Pages 3 – 26. http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html/ref=amb_link_85314991_1?location=http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/randoEMS/Armstrong_ch1.pdf&token=957BBB0669152D76BE1C614537975585163C1748&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=hero-quick-promo&pf_rd_r=1N9PH9DKZBBPN2RCFYDV&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=490340991&pf_rd_i=0307269183
2	Evening Prayer,  B.C.P. page 100, etc  Psalm 139:11a emphasis added.
3	“Contemporary” Collect for Proper 22, B.C.P. page 234. 
4	Karen Armstrong, Op cit.


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Robert P. Morrison
The Episcopal Parish of St James,
PO Box 789
Lincoln City, Oregon, 97367

541-994-2426 (Church)