June 10 200
Luke7:11 -17
Galatians 1: 11-17
The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson
When you were listening to the letter of Paul to the Galatians did you eyes glaze over? All those towns and places he visited. He talks about his former vocation and now his new mission. Think of it as a resume. He is telling us about what is important to him and what motivates his passion. His resume begins with what is important to how he lives.
He is telling us about his mystical experience, his encounter with God. One of the things we talked about at our event with Bruce Epperly was how many of us in the United Church hold back on sharing such crucial faith formation events. We see other brands of Christians who seem to go over board and we are just more private about our resume of faith. One of the results of the week is one of the participants went online, on Wondercafe.ca, and created a topic for progressive Christians and their mystical experiences. And there was a great response and sharing of moments when we feel the presence of God in quiet or earth shattering ways. Our world was expanded and we felt God in our bodies.
Of course we don’t talk too much about these experiences because someone might look at us as strange. We have been well schooled in the temper of our times. We don’t expect enchantment for our world represses enchantment. The lights come on and that is not a miracle, so we have hard time feeling a story where bushes burn and are not consumed, where the dead are raised, and people are healed.
We are cursed by a rationalism that makes it hard to jump into the biblical narrative. It is hard for some of us to see our story in the biblical narrative and see it as basic for our resume.. Sure, we come each week seeking that experience, being open to its reality. We pray and sing, we eat bread and wine, and we are touched by the Spirit. However, we want to be careful in our enthusiasm.
Of course that is important for we have seen the excesses of extreme beliefs. There is an insight from Freud that when something is repressed it can emerge as neurotic or even psychotic. There is a danger, then, in ecstatic experiences -especially when it is repressed. It can be misused to create people who are so otherworldly they never get their feet in the muck of life. Misused it can create suicide bombers. So we hold back.
Yet we feel some hint of God’s beauty that calls to us, and calls us into making this world more beautiful. We do have a sense of God in our experience.
Jesus breaks the taboos of his time and touches the coffin. In that act new life happens. Eyes are opened. God does awe inspiring things. Now we can read the narrative as those things don’t work. We can read the narrative as if these things are magic and we need secret knowledge. Or we can read the narrative that such things are normal. Reading as this is normal means reading as metaphor.
In the story in Luke we never hear the outcome. What does the young man do with his life? The narrative is unconcerned with that question. The concern is can we see life as it is meant to be - full of beauty and compassion and justice.
Can we walk a different way of being? Think of burning bushes and think of how many times Moses walked by it before he saw it. This is what worship is about - training our eyes and bodies to see the love of God in this world, working with this world as it is to lure it to what it could be.
Some times in ordinary experience we have a moment of ah ah where the world is transformed. Miracles are not something against nature - they are the unexpected, unprepared moments in our life where nothing told us this would happen. We were in the midst of a conversation last week with Bruce and talking about how the world is inter related, we live in a matrix, a web of shared experience. The phone rings. Suzanne answers it and it is her brother. He never phones and he asks is everything o.k. - “I had a feeling about you.” A reminder that even when we are unconscious we are in a deep way connected. Our problem is we walk by those moments of enchantment and all of sudden it is there, filling us, touching us, and we are transformed. We now know again the world is our place to live with passion.
What is on our resume? We begin with the basic fact - we are God seekers. We are those who feel a call to be in the world making it a better place. Our resume says the most important thing about us is we seek to practice our faith. In the process of doing so, we also know we are learners, we are seeking to grow in wisdom and understanding. Our resume says we are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness so return to the source of our identity each week to be fed and after being fed we go out to share with others what we know to be true about life - that is is full of the experiences of God.
What worship does is to help us attend to those qualities that deepen awareness about the truth of reality - that it is full of enchantment. By that I mean we see life for what really is, a relational reality full of beauty. Because it is created by relationships we know that what we do adds value to life, we make a difference to what this world will be. Our resume tells us that every act of kindness has a cumulative effect. Every act of justice making makes this world a safer place.
We know that in our world there are those who seek to increase chaos, and that there are those who by their resume of selfishness makes this world a darker place. We are realistic and that does not stop us for we know we have touched the truth of life, that there is no place that is Godforsaken. We can touch the other’s face with love because we are loved. We know deep in our being this truth and it is our resume, who we are. And like Paul we go out to touch this world of ours with healing touches.
So the practicing church begins in the Sunday School, training us. It moves to adult reflection and study. It prepares us to be sensitive to those moments of God’s presence, which is everywhere - in the world, and now right here in each of us. We go out to share that insight that the world is not Godforsaken but full of love and God’s presences. It is only a matter of opening our eyes and minds to that reality that flows through all things.
George Hermanson
