Archive for February 2011
February 27, 2011 | 
Author 
The “King James Bible” was completed 400 years ago. St. Andrew’s will mark
the anniversary with a sermon and discussion series that examines the
question, “how are our spiritual texts chosen and shared today?” Over the
next 9 weeks (the season of Epiphany) we will ask who is shaping our
cultural canon today, and we will encourage you to participate by letting us
know which texts and kinds of texts (movies, songs, books, etc.) inform you
and move you when you look for deep meaning in your life.
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Wiki-Bible Week Seven
Eat, Pray Love
Luke 14:12-23
Russell Daye
February, 20, 2011
St. Andrew’s United Church, Halifax
This sermon will try its best to steal some mojo from two stories. One takes up 334 pages; the other takes 240 words. One’s teller is self-referential, self-indulgent, and sometimes self-obsessed. The other makes no reference to its author. Both are told by people who can drive you crazy if you let them. One employs an easy, comfortable irony. The other’s irony is sharp and indicting. One is a current mega-bestseller. The other is a tiny piece of the biggest seller of all time. The two stories are Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love and Jesus’ parable of the Great Banquet. Although the two stories could not be more different, they both compellingly carry us to the same place….
Let’s start with the shorter story. A man, obviously wealthy, decides to throw a great banquet. He invites many guests, also people of some means. The feast is prepared, but they don’t come. Some say, ‘Oh I’ve got business to attend to.’ One’s just been married. Reasons are given. The man, determined to have his big party sends his servants out to the streets to bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame – a collection of people not unlike the 250 who sup in our hall every Sunday. The servants do so, but still there is room, so the man sends them out into the countryside to ‘compel’ people to come in, demanding: ‘my house will be full!’
To capture meaning from this parable, it is important to understand the backdrop for all of Jesus’ teaching and preaching. Jesus’ peasant listeners in Palestine were living lives made miserable by the dictates of the Roman Empire. Already impoverished, they were taxed at backbreaking rates, causing many to lose everything. And comfort could not be found in religion. The priests were collaborators and tax collectors for the imperial authorities. Politically, economically, even spiritually, the empire of Caesar was the dominant reality in their lives, one that imposed hunger, heartbreak, dislocation, and constant fear.
Jesus’ parables were told to assert a contrary reality, an opposite reality, which lay hidden behind the veil of tears of the normal human condition. A reality that he believed gestated within and among his listeners. This is what he called the Kingdom of Heaven – or, more inclusively translated, the Reign of Heaven. And what was this reality like? The Reign of Heaven is like the biggest party of the year. The Reign of Heaven is like the one time when everyone has a full belly, when everyone eats the same food. The Reign of Heaven is like the one day when the community sets aside its troubles, its feuds, its constant grinding fear and comes together in joy, generosity, and hope. The Reign of Heaven is like the one day that is not dominated by the monolithic reality of empire. To quote one parable scholar, ‘Jesus was a party animal.’ The Reign of Heaven is a constant celebration. What was his first miracle? He turned 164 gallons of water into wine at the wedding in Cana. Over and over again, his stories make reference to parties like banquets and wedding feasts.
But this parable tells us there is a problem. The Reign of Heaven lies behind the veil of ordinary life, calling us into communion with a deeper life, one marked by sheer joy, the absence of fear, and equal, intimate celebration – but we don’t go. Some of us have business to attend to. Some of us have just been married. Some of us have just had kids. Some of us have hearts filled with bitterness or guilt because our businesses, our marriages, or our kids have not turned out the way we wanted them to. Some of us have done very well in this life and we fret and worry over our gains so the day won’t come when we have to sup at St. Andrew’s on a Sunday night. So how do we break through these barriers and find Jesus’ party? Eat, Pray, Love has something to say to us about this.
Elizabeth Gilbert has an extraordinary power to inspire ambivalence. She is, by turns, self- absorbed and generous, shallow and deep, naively new age and surprisingly insightful. Reading her memoir, one alternates between thinking ‘boy, that’s a real nugget of wisdom there’ and wanting to shout at her ‘grow up, get real, and get over yourself!’ Hers is the story of a woman in her thirties who has suffered a brutal divorce, an extended and traumatic break-up with another lover, and depression that needs treating with therapy and drugs. She loses everything: all her money, all her peace of mind, all her understanding of herself. She leaves home for a year, which she spends in three places and three pursuits: eating in Italy; praying in India; and loving in Bali. Italy is all about pasta and pastries, breezy friendships, and trying (successfully) to refrain from taking a lover in sex-saturated Rome. Her time in India is spent within the confines of a single ashram, practicing long hours of meditation, chanting and service. In Bali, she finds various kinds of love: the love of an ancient healer who embodies all the joy of the universe; the love of new friendship; and a return to erotic love after 18 months of panicked flight from it. The year ends with a wiser and happier Liz, one restored to health, to balance, to hope, and to the ability to love.
Throughout, Eat, Pray, Love has fun little anecdotes about the pleasures and follies of travel in new places. The reader is reminded of his own episodes of joy and embarrassment. It made me remember my first truly cross-cultural experience. At twenty-one years of age, I had packed up my ten words of French and moved to Quebec City to take an immersion in Canada’s other official language. After our instructor had given us a little more vocabulary, she sent us on some field work: ‘go to a bar and offer to buy a Francophone a drink if she or he will chat with you.’ A small group of us went to a tavern. There was one other patron in the house – a man sitting on a stool near the bartender. Drawing the short straw, I was dispatched to chat with him. I walked up meaning to say: ‘Voulez vous avoir une bierre avec moi?’ (‘Would you like to have a beer with me?). But, for some reason the words came out: ‘Voulez vous avoir un bain avec moi?’ Which translates as ‘how would you like to have a bath with me?’
But I’m wandering off topic here. Eat, Pray, Love is not ultimately about travel and cultures but about communion – at many levels. One level is communion with one’s own angels and demons. This is how she describes a moment on an Asian beach that marks the beginning of her year-long odyssey:
I went into meditation one evening … I said to my mind, ‘This is your chance. Show me everything that is causing you sorrow. … One by one the thoughts and memories of sadness raised their hands, stood up to identify themselves. I looked … at each unit of sorrow … in its horrible pain. And then I would tell that sorrow, ‘It’s OK. I love you. I accept you. Come into my heart now. … Then I said to my mind, ‘Show me your anger now.’ One by one, my life’s every incident of anger rose and made itself known…. I felt every piece of anger completely … and then I would say, ‘Come into my heart now. You can rest there. It’s safe now.’ … Then came the most difficult part. ‘Show me your shame,’ I asked my mind. Dear God, the horrors that I saw then. A pitiful parade of all my failings, my lies, my selfishness, jealousy, arrogance…. and I would say, ‘I do want you. … You are welcome here.’
This is an amazing moment, made even more so by the fact that it comes before her year-long pilgrimage. It is as though all the wisdom she would glean in her travels, at the ashram and with the old healer in Bali, is already with her – an older and wiser Liz who reaches to her from the future and pulls her into the journey she needs. She stops warring with those little demons inside her that carry her pain. She stops trying to meditate or medicate them away. She befriends them, welcomes them to the table and says, as one would to a crying child, ‘Shhh, shhh, you are safe here. I will hold you.’
I will confess that India was the most compelling part of the book for me – perhaps because I’d spent several weeks myself in a monastery on the banks of the Ganges, twisting my body into pretzel shapes and meditating so long that I thought I’d never have feeling in my bottom again. Liz has a dramatic experience of union with the divine in her ashram. Here is how she struggles to find words to describe what happened in the meditation hall one night:
Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely. I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and I entered the void… a limitless place of peace and wisdom. The void was conscious and it was intelligent. The void was God.
Besides being a very powerful experience, this sounds like a very private experience between Liz and God. But it only happens when she has been in deep communion with other people for weeks on end – praying and chanting beside them, scrubbing floors with them, breaking bread with them, discussing her troubles with them. Time in an ashram or monastery looks profoundly solitary from the outside, but the group experience can be uncommonly and beautifully intimate. The Buddhists call it Sangha – the community of seekers. Sanga is a vehicle to the transcendent. In fact, Liz’s deepest communion with God happens when the whole community together descends into almost total silence for an extended period. The sanctity of that group silence opens a door for her. Even this silence, this not talking to each other, is a communal experience. I’ve been there. Going into days-long silence is a fearsome prospect. Members of the community need each other and find ways to develop solidarity that go beyond words. The group silence, the holding of each other’s fear, makes Liz’s experience of God possible because people are both getting out of the way and carrying her there. Even alone in the meditation hall, revelling in God, Liz knows herself to be deeply connected: ‘I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe.’
Liz is having a direct immersion in the Reign of Heaven. She is communing with God and with the whole cosmos. It sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Let’s circle back to Jesus’ parable at this point and look at it through the lens of Liz’s journey. Liz comes to the Reign of Heaven, to joyous communion with all that is not in spite of her loss, her depression, or her inner demons but because of them and because of her new way of relating to them. The very things that we spend our lives trying to flee from turn out to be doors to God’s great and eternal party.
And what is true for the person is true for the community. I have often noticed that the assembly that gathers for Sunday Suppers enjoys each other’s company with a raucous abandon that we rarely experience in here, during this time. Jesus parable speaks to us about this. In God’s eternal party Sunday morning in the sanctuary and Sunday evening in the hall will conflate into one ongoing reast. They will come in, the poor and the rich, the lame and the dancing. They will come from the housing projects and the gated communities, from the city centre and the boonies. And the broken, the grieving, the vulnerable will lead the way. Their very need, our very need, our hungry hearts, to steal a phrase from Bruce Springsteen, will be the doors to the banquet. There together we will eat and we will pray, perhaps at the same time, uttering praise to God with our mouths full. There together we will love fully and unconditionally everyone and every part of ourselves.
1Corinthians 2:1-12
Russell Daye
February 6, 2011
St. Andrew’s United Church, Halifax
When we’ve been here ten thousand years…
bright shining as the sun.
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise…
than when we’ve first begun.
Twenty-five years ago, at the end of a week-long Canadian Theological Students’ Conference, closing worship was held in a light-filled chapel. There we sat, one hundred or so: women and men; straight and gay; liberals, radicals and conservatives; Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, evangelicals. As the service progressed, something strange and beautiful happened. We began to melt. The first sign of it was that some began to weep. And then our singing changed. It became, at the same, time much more intense and much more relaxed, natural. When the hymns ended, our breathing continued the rhythms of the sacred music, even in the silence. When women and men rose to preach or pray, the distance between them and their listeners seemed to disappear. I remember looking at the preacher, a Catholic with a Kentucky drawl he’d kept since childhood, from a distance of about thirty feet, but it seemed as though his blue eyes were right before me, as though his voice was being projected from only inches away.
The hundred gathered there had done a lot of fighting that week: about the authority of scripture; about missions to convert non-Christians; about the ordination of gays and lesbians and women, even. We had fallen into like-minded cliques, made enemies of a sort. Now the walls between us were being gently dismantled, stone by stone, by hidden hands of light – and with it our body armour: the set jaws; the raised shoulders; the taught diaphragms. We began to love each other. To love even our enemies, especially our enemies. We came to understand that we shared something that was deeper than any of our differences. We all believed that a great and silent participant was with us, ministering to us, touching us with grace. As we loved others, we came to love ourselves – without hesitation or qualification. We each saw ourselves as we were seen: as a creature of light, with no dark spots… bright shining as the sun …
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise…
That’s the last verse of Amazing Grace. Here’s the first:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me….
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. Around the same time as that students’ conference, some versions of Amazing Grace came out with the word ‘wretch’ replaced by a less offensive one, like ‘soul.’ There were debates about the wisdom, even the propriety of such a change. Folks like John Spong weighed in. Some argued that it wasn’t appropriate to have people refer to themselves as wretches. Well, I’ve been your pastor for almost six years and the verdict is in on you lot: You are wretches. You’ve got your dark spots. Ok, let’s get the pronouns straight here. We are wretches. You’ve known me long enough to know that I’ve got my dark spots too. You and I, we are companions in wretchedness!
Let’s explore our wretchedness a little bit. I’d like to take fifteen or twenty minutes or so and expound broadly on your wretchedness, but part of mine is that I have a serious attachment to material gain, in particular my salary. So, let’s take a different tack. Let’s investigate wretchedness by looking at the wretch who wrote Amazing Grace – and he really was one. John Newton was born in 1725, the son of a London shipmaster, and went to sea at a young age. A rebel who frequently got into trouble, he was dragooned into the Royal Navy. After attempting to desert, he was whipped and humiliated in front of his crewmates. It was such a psychic blow that he contemplated suicide. Soon he found himself working on a slave ship, where he continued to be such a troublemaker that his captain dumped him in West Africa to become a slave himself – in the service of an ‘African duchess.’ After he was rescued by a man dispatched by his father, he sailed home on the Greyhound, which was caught in a horrific storm. Calling out to God, he underwent a conversion experience and became a man of faith. He gave up profanity, gambling, and drink – but not working in the slave trade. In fact, Newton’s new stability made him more effective in the brutal commerce of human cargo. He went on to captain slave ships.
This is a key biographical point. The story of Amazing Grace’s author as a slave trader who was converted is well known. But most who have heard this tale assume that it happened in a flash; that Newton went from being a predatory wretch to a champion of the downtrodden in the flash of one brilliant moment. The truth is much more complex. Newton himself, looking back in the latter years of his life, saw that this first conversion was incomplete and that his transformation had played itself out over a number of decades. But it did come to fruition. Newton had more moments of trial and conversion, one during an awful fever, another one after a stroke. He abandoned the slave trade. He had a run of seven frustrating years trying to become a clergyman while earning his keep as tax collector. When he finally did get a pulpit, his preaching was so compelling that his church had to build a new gallery to accommodate all those who wanted to hear him. Newton became a truly rare phenomenon in the church: a minister whose fire warmed bishops and Dissenters, establishment figures and evangelicals, rich and poor … and, yes, abolitionists. His conversion became complete. Along with his friend William Wilberforce, he became a champion of the stop slavery movement. His abolitionist tract was a bestseller. He lived to see the passage of the Slave Trade Act.
It was to illustrate his 1773 New Year’s Day sermon that Newton wrote Amazing Grace …
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see…
T’was Grace that taught
my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
Grace, grace, grace… Looking at Newton’s life, you can see it working on him, pursuing him incessantly over the long years, breaking him open, filling him with fear, pouring light through the cracks, cooking him, moulding him like wax. Or perhaps all that grace was doing was burning the scales from his eyes… I once was blind but now I see. I once was blind to the light in those children, women, and men stuffed down in the hold to die in stench or be sold as chattel. I once was blind to the light in me. I once was blind to the hidden hands that minister to all of us, keeping us alive, touching us gently or tearing us open to grace. But now I see, I see all of these people – captives and masters, predators and prey – the way God sees them: as creatures of light.
And what about us? What about this assembly of wretches? Sometimes, when I stand before you, the space between us closes and I see your eyes bright and close. Sometimes, sometimes I get glimpses of you as God must see you: full of light, each shining, not self-contained, but merging with the light of those around you; becoming the hidden hands that minister. I saw you like this on the day we read the story of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany and then the children anointed us for our own deaths, and on the All Saints Days when you silently walked up to light a candle. I saw you like this the day we voted on same sex marriage – all of you, those for, those against. I saw you like this at funerals for people with names like Leni and Wilf and Abby and Bob. I saw you like this two weeks ago when we heard Cohen’s Hallelujah. In those moments I want very much for each of you to see yourself as God sees you: a child of light, without an ounce of wretchedness, without a single dark spot. I would like for this to happen in the flash of one brilliant moment, but, like John Newton, our conversions are mostly slow. We take a lot of heating up, a lot of breaking open, a lot of pouring of light through our cracks before we rush to close them. But don’t worry. There is time.
When we’ve been here ten thousand years…
bright shining as the sun.
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise…
than when we’ve first begun.