This is an archive sermon from a 2004 Sunday evening Jazz worship in Buffalo, NY
and there is no video version of it.
“The brave things in the old tales and songs,
Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them.
I used to think that they were things the wonderful
folk of the stories went out and looked for,
because they wanted them,
because they were exciting and life was a bit dull,
a kind of a sport,
as you might say.
But that’s not the way of it
with the tales that really matter,
or the ones that stay in the mind.
Folk see to have been just landed in them…”
From “Two Towers” by JRR Tolkien
That’s the way of it with us
and with all those others out there
who aren’t here in the same place we are.
We have been just landed in an adventure
and for some of us it is exciting and splendid
while for others it is just plain debilitating.
Here is one way to describe the adventure
we have all been landed in.
Almost everyone who breathes today has had their religion –
whether Christianity or some other worldview –
de-constructed without consent.
The work of historians and archaeologists
have called into question essential details
of the Moses and Exodus stories.
More than a few academic’s suggest that
Moses is a literary compilation
of pseudo-historical and mythological characters,
rather than an actual single leader of a movement.
They then suggest that the Exodus
was an evolutionary migratory event
that brought together an economic class
into historical significance
rather than ethnically related tribes
that we know of as Hebrews.
It is the same the world over.
The existence of the Chinese Sage, Lao Tzu,
who has been attributed as the author of
the Tao Te Ching,
is now generally considered
a mythical character as well.
Buddha, Jesus and Mohammad
are fairly safe as historical persons
but there is not much else about them
or what has been attributed to them,
that is worth betting on
as they are taken under the microscope
of those who investigate antiquity
with a cold and neutral lens.
When the Earth was the center of the universe
and the sun orbited around us,
it was natural for us glorious human beings
to image that we were the crown jewel
of the Cosmos.
Back then
we could imagine that we were
but a hiccup from God,
an arrangement upon God’s footstool.
But now we know that our whole planet
is but a speck of sand
at the tale end of our solar system,
which itself is but a molecule of gas
in the flatulence from a single Black Hole.
When God’s hand, his very fingertip,
could be painted upon the vaulted ceiling
of a Church,
it was easy to imagine God
being within reach of a prayer
whispered in the dark corner of a sanctuary.
But now we feel silly,
if not down right angry,
that God was ever imagined as male,
human,
and personal.
We used to have religious festivals
where our beliefs were fashioned in the form of saints
and the stories of miracles were told,
and the whole village came out to sing
and carry virgins on a horse-drawn float,
and banquets were prepared
and families who hated each other
came together to eat and dance.
But now
we have movies in which we discover
that we lead only imaginary lives
inside a computer matrix;
and that Spider Man lives
and can stop trains with his nuclear altered strength;
and The Force is both good and evil
and there are still keepers of the Jeti magic
and so our old festivals look low tech,
and our handcrafted icons seem so very worn
and like Santa Claus,
even our best rituals and ceremonies seem
quaint and odd and antique.
Back in the old days
we told stories about a Golden Age Past
when everything was perfect
and when we lived in a garden of utter
balance and delight.
And while we lost our way somehow,
we were able to tell stories about the Golden Age Future
when balance and perfection would be restored
and justice and fairness would be the rule
rather than the exception.
Every religion reminisced about that Golden Age Past
and every religion imagined the Golden Age Future.
But now
ever since we learned how to blow up the world
and could actually see genocide in real time
and so also observe that no one did anything about it,
and the victims’ prayers to God were powerless,
that Golden Age Future is harder to imagine.
And now,
now that we can turn on the Discovery Channel
and see male lions and bears eating their offspring
and Chimpanzee’s engaged in warfare and cannibalism,
the Golden Age Past feels like an even further
reach into the past than we can grasp.
“The brave things in the old tales and songs,
Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them.
I used to think that they were things the wonderful
folk of the stories went out and looked for,
because they wanted them,
because they were exciting and life was a bit dull,
a kind of a sport,
as you might say.
But that’s not the way of it
with the tales that really matter,
or the ones that stay in the mind…”
Yep, we have been landed in an adventure all right.
Here we are at the gate of an unknown time in which
what knew to look for in the past
has been erased
and what we expected to find in the future
has been disposed of.
Some find this exciting
while others are distraught.
But no matter which one we are,
we are all in this adventure together.
And you know what?
It is a spiritual adventure!
The role and power of science and technology
in the de-construction of our ancient wisdom
and mythology
might lead us to imagine that this adventure
is an academic one –
an intellectual one.
But that is not the kind of adventure we are on.
The powers that de-constructed our previous
world views and religions
do not have the power to re-construct
or re-mythologize.
So even though you may want Jesus to be God,
or Buddha to have the single best path to emptiness,
or Mohammad to be the last trustworthy voice of holiness…
we may have to settle for something else
and, by the way,
discover something else wonderful
and enlightening along the way.
There is a wonderful T.S. Eliot poem
that goes like this, slightly paraphrased:
“I said to my soul, be still,
and let the dark come upon you
which shall be the darkness of God.”
(He wrote this by the way, in a subway bomb shelter under London during a Nazi air raid).
“…I said to my soul, be still,
and wait without hope
for hope would be hope of the wrong thing;
wait without love
for love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith
but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting…
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
Applied to our adventure,
the one in which our mythologies have been gutted
without our permission,
and we are stumbling in the dark with our hands
outstretched and feeling for the way
as in Blind Man’s Bluff,
this idea of waiting without faith, without love,
without hope
is wise beyond belief.
If we grasp for filler to stuff the gaps in our knowledge and pretend it is Eternal Truth
we will surely miss the spiritual wisdom awaiting
us if we wait instead without answers.
To wait without answers
is to become more mindful –
the essential spiritual methodology of every religion.
Remember,
God is experienced not an idea.
God is experienced not a belief.
God is experienced not a doctrine.
Our mindfulness to the present,
even where there is a lack of knowledge,
will lead us into an encounter with God
more surely than following old or new ideas
about God.
And that is what Frodo and Sam discovered:
that an adventure
is experienced not planned.
God has not been de-constructed,
the eyes through which we see God
are receiving a new prescription.
God has not been de-mythologized
because God is not mythical,
but the eyes through which we see God
are re-imagining the world
because our eyes have changed.
So we need to understand what is happening
and not grasp for answers
that are not there yet,
nor re-mythologize with ideas and images
that simply will not stand up
to life as we know it.
Rather, we need to practice mindfulness
so that we can be more fully present to the moment
and to ourselves
and so be prepared to experience God
who remains in our midst
whether or not we have the eyes to perceive.
We can experience God
even if we do not understand God.
We can experience God
even if we do not know what to call her or him or it.
We can experience God
even if we are not sure about what God does.
And that experience will lead us into the next thing.
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