Delivered at Trinity Church Buffalo
February 5, 2012
Text: Isaiah 40:21-31; Mark 1:29-39; and,
an excerpt from “Listening to your life” by Frederick Buechner
I am going to start out
in lecture mode this morning,
but without any warning,
and seamlessly I might add,
will roll into preaching before you know it.
And just as a warning,
the ending is rather abrupt too.
Fred Buechner
is talking about the world within the Gospel story
when he writes:
“It is a world of magic and mystery,
of deep darkness and flickering starlight.
It is a world where terrible things happen and
wonderful things too.
It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil,
love against hate, order against chaos,
in a great struggle where often it is hard
to be sure who belongs to which side
because appearances are endlessly deceptive.
Yet for all its confusion and wildness,
it is a world where the battle goes ultimately
to the good, who live happily ever after,
and where in the long run everybody,
good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name…”
That makes a Gospel sound a lot
like a Fairy Tale.
And yet, except for that last sentence,
Buechner could be talking about us
and our lives.
“It is a world of magic and mystery,
of deep darkness and flickering starlight.
It is a world where terrible things happen and
wonderful things too.
It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil,
love against hate, order against chaos,
in a great struggle where often it is hard
to be sure who belongs to which side
because appearances are endlessly deceptive.
That is our world, our lives, don’t you think?
As for the last sentence,
I think we have all grown up enough
to acknowledge and admit
that it does not all
work out to the good,
nor does everyone live happily-ever-after.
In fact,
thinking about good and evil
and happily-ever-after
makes me want to offer a definition
for something you probably don’t care much about,
but that is hugely important in our world…
and even to you and me.
I am thinking about the epochs
of human perspective:
Pre-modern, Modern and Post-modern,
and I want to notice the boundaries between them.
Don’t worry, there is a personal connection to you.
This is not a textbook definition either;
it is a Camism,
so take it for what it’s worth.
The Pre-modern world
believed in the perfectibility of the human being,
and that God could and would
bring about an idyllic world,
maybe even an idyllic form of governance.
The Pre-modernists believed
that God and Good and Truth will out in the end.
And Pre-modernists still believe that,
because there are millions of people
in cultures around the world
that still, in spite of modernism,
insist upon seeing through a Pre-modernist lens.
Much of Christianity today,
in all kinds of churches, is Pre-modernist.
The Modern world was born after WWI
when the heart of human evil
became magnified
by a leap forward in weaponry.
The Modernist perspective is confused,
dazed, stunned.
It believes that Reason and Science will solve
the niggling problems and dangers
that seem to litter every horizon,
and yet…
underneath that deep faith
is a mounting anxiety.
The Modernist lens
doesn’t see how God, Good and Truth
wins in the end,
and itself ends up either in wishful thinking
or cynical resignation.
The Post-Modern perspective
begins as the gates of Auschwitz open,
and the full implications
of the Atomic Bomb dawn upon us;
and it recognizes that Reason and Science
are just as limited as Religion and Government,
and that God, even if able,
is not going to save us from ourselves.
The Post-Modern perspective
knows up front that we have to act on the basis
of insufficient knowledge;
and that we have to act
without final clarity about truth and goodness;
and that, in fact,
there is no such thing
as absolute truth and absolute goodness.
So…which lens do you wear?
Maybe it varies depending upon the subject.
But you see, even this big idea about
historical perspectives get personal.
These epochs of human perspective
do not have dates in time,
as if they belong to one century or another.
They exist simultaneously,
side by side in our world.
The surreal juxtaposition of such different
perspectives is epitomized
in Pre-modernist groups
such as the Taliban, using modernist weaponry,
while Liberal Academicians act as
dogmatically about Modernism
as Pre-moderns act about religion.
It’s a crazy world.
I mention this, first of all,
because I think it helps us to decipher
some of the wars and culture wars going on
around and within us.
We can see it playing out on the news,
and even feel it
when we have a visceral reaction
to the behavior in another culture or religion…
and we think to ourselves,
“How could they possibly believe that?”
But what I really want to hone in on
is our own hearts and minds,
yours and mine.
You see, one of the reasons I love the Bible
is that there is wisdom in it
that is as Post-modern as Chaos-Theory.
That bit from Isaiah, for example:
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
and spreads them like a tent to live in;
who brings princes to naught,
and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.
Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows upon them, and they wither,
and the tempest carries them off like stubble.
To whom then will you compare me,
or who is my equal? says the Holy One.
Now the Pre-modernists
interpret this to mean that God is in control
and managing things like Donald Trump
moving the pieces around his empire.
But that is not what the prophet is saying here.
Think Job; remember him?
Job, is that ancient yet
Post-modern understanding of suffering
so often misinterpreted by Pre-modernists.
In response to Job’s complaint
about how the world order needs adjustment,
God interrogates Job.
“Where were you,”
God thunders,
“when I made the foundations of the earth?”
In other words,
with your puny perspective,
what makes you think you have enough information
to even ask the right questions?
Isaiah’s rant, yes rant,
amounts to the same thing:
“Just how much perspective
do you think you have, O mortal?
Do you not understand God’s timelessness?”
Today’s readings give us an opportunity,
if we employ a Post-modern perspective,
to travel deep into the heart of Biblical wisdom.
Here is what I mean.
In the Pre-modernist mindset,
we came to the Bible with pre-determined ideas –
assumptions we made
that the Bible was not allowed to contradict.
For example:
God is changeless,
God is all-powerful,
God is always good,
Good always trumps evil,
God will save the Righteous,
Jesus is God and
the only means of Salvation.
When the Bible contradicted those and
other doctrinal ideas,
and the Bible DOES contradict them…
the Pre-modernists found ways to rationalize
or ignore the contradictions.
Coming to the Bible with
hardened doctrines in hand
disables the capacity of Pre-modernists
to hear Biblical wisdom
because they have to screen what it says
through their lens of doctrine.
The Modernist’s have a different disability.
They come to the Bible
with predetermined ideas about “reality”
and what constitutes reality.
For the Modernist,
reality is based solely upon facts –
measurable, replicable, quantifiable facts.
Without them,
whatever it is we are talking about
it is not reality.
So Modernist’s had to explain miracle stories
about the parting of the Red Sea
or the star appearing at Jesus’ birth,
with known natural events.
Either the stories were factual or they were untrue,
so how to make them factual
became the Liberal intellectual effort
of 20th century theologians.
Both the Pre-modernists
and the Modernists
delighted in Systematic Theology,
which was the attempt to make theology
sound like science.
Base it in logic,
use rational explanations,
and weave it all together
in a web of legalistic arguments,
and then it will be more credible.
But the Post-modernists,
whether in Isaiah’s time or ours, know better.
“It is a world of magic and mystery,
of deep darkness and flickering starlight.
It is a world where terrible things happen and
wonderful things too.
It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil,
love against hate, order against chaos,
in a great struggle where often it is hard
to be sure who belongs to which side
because appearances are endlessly deceptive.
We do not get to know how it all ends.
We do not even get to know
how our own little lives end!
We do not even get to know
how far the impact our own little life
will ripple out into the universe,
or how long.
The more we acknowledge
what we do not know,
and will never know,
the greater is our capacity
to hear the ancient wisdom
whistling through the Bible.
The fewer assumptions we bring to it,
the smaller and softer
the amount of doctrinal beliefs we hold before it,
the more we will hear.
As last week’s Gospel indicated,
and is echoed in today’s reading from Mark,
Jesus did not come to heal the sick and wounded
or any other supernatural thing.
Jesus came bearing wisdom,
but our neediness
for him to be something else
or do something else,
gets in the way of our hearing the wisdom.
Today’s reading is such a great story in Mark.
Jesus cannot even have a quiet evening at home
without scores of wounded,
disabled, and unhappy people
crowding around
needy and hungry for fixing.
So needy
and so hungry
they could not even begin to hear
the wisdom he came to impart.
They want to be fixed
not to hear the voice of wisdom;
cause wisdom is healing
not surgery.
The voice of wisdom
is about transformation
not fixing what ails us.
Healing requires our work
and our engagement utilizing Jesus’ wisdom.
So, finally,
in the dark of the night,
Jesus sneaks away.
Literally, he hides.
He finds a “lonely place” the Gospel says.
But they “hunt” for him.
They hunt him down.
Jesus’ handlers,
his campaign managers and strategists,
urge him to go back and turn some more tricks
so that people will “ooh and ahhh”
and love him.
“No thanks,” Jesus says,
“that is not what I came for.”
Jesus was the bearer of wisdom,
not the fixer of neediness.
OUR neediness,
yours and mine,
gets in the way of our hearing the wisdom.
Now, please, do not hear me judging
our neediness.
I don’t like acknowledging my neediness
any more than you do,
maybe even a lot less;
but let’s just be honest:
you and I are pretty doggone needy creatures.
Not only do we have hurts and aches
in our bodies,
we have wounds and deep gashes
in our very souls.
Not only are we sick and susceptible
to illness and disease,
we contract stinking thinking,
resentments
and all manner of mental viruses.
We collect wounds in childhood that
fester the rest of our lives.
There is no denying it,
you and I are needy. Ugh.
The issue for us,
the deep and pervasive spiritual challenge,
is how are we going to manage our neediness
so that we can hear the wisdom
when it comes our way –
whether from the Bible,
in a dream,
through a friend, or in some other way?
So now we are down to a hard truth.
We started at 10,000 feet
with a global idea
and we have worked our way
down to a hard nut.
How are we going to manage our neediness
so that we can hear the wisdom
when God whispers it to us?
This is the answer:
Somewhere,
sometime,
somehow…
we are going to have to name our neediness
out loud
to somebody else.
I’m sorry, I wish I weren’t the bearer of bad news,
but there it is.
If we do not name our neediness
out loud,
to someone,
it will close us in
and cloud us up
and keep us dim.
There are all kinds of ways to do it,
but doing it somehow,
in some way,
is vital to our spiritual health –
as individuals
and as a community.
Naming what ails us
and what distracts us
makes room for us to hear the wisdom
when it is spoken to us.
“…and where in the long run,” Buechner writes, “everybody,
good and evil alike,
becomes known by (their) true name…”
We must name our neediness
so we can manage it
without it managing us.
When we are in reaction mode
to our very real neediness,
our capacity to hear the wisdom of God
is almost nil;
unless we name it out loud
in the presence of another
who can remind us,
that we are the beloved of God
and all shall be well,
and all manner of thing shall be well…
no matter how the story ends. Amen.
© R Cameron Miller
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