May 24, 2009
Edwards (Knox) United Church
Seventh Sunday of Easter
Acts 1:1-11
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Luke 24:44-53
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
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The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson
Every day we are faced with some decision about what we have read in the newspaper, or seen on the TV news. Are we to believe what we hear or see? How should we respond in creative ways? We ask, "Will our decision make a difference to how we plan the day?"
Other times it is a minor decision. What we are to have for breakfast? It can be on another level, about how we shall relate to others? A family member comes to us and asks if they, or we, should do this?
In a world of competing images, it is hard to know what we should do.
As Alvin Toffler said:
In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.*
Our situation is made more difficult when voices actually manipulate our fears by their appeal to emotions. There was a movie a few years ago called, Lost in America, as a metaphor for our times. The poet Yeats spoke of losing our center in a time of chaos. Deep in our hearts, we sometimes feel this way - lost.
One of the constant narratives is being lost. We read a story about a person who gets stuck in the snow and gets out and walks in the wrong direction. Always there is a disastrous outcome. We read in the paper about someone lost in the woods and we are reminded what will save us is to stay there. The way to find our way out of the situation is not to ask, "Where are we going?" We are told the answer is to stand there and locate oneself in the context. What are the other things we see around us? Those who have had wilderness training are reminded that locating the surrounding things is how to begin to be found. It is to discern.
Our texts are about this. Here they are, remembering their experience with Jesus, for he is no longer with them. In religious symbolism and language, Jesus has ascended - returned to God. They speak of this time in the symbols they know, referring back to Elijah being taken to the sky. What we have in the commission and the words is the early Church's summarizing the gospel. It is a confession of faith that gives them instructions for whom they shall be; what their work is now to be.
Luke moves the task from the geography of Jerusalem to the whole world. A new understanding of reality has been formed which has been transformed into a world religion.
In a metaphorical way, they have lost a center and now wait for a new reality - a new identity. They have a great enthusiasm, a passion for getting on. Yet the message is to wait - "to stay in the city." They receive a passionate blessing.
Yet what do they do? They stay in the temple. Rather than rushing out, they stayed. They reflected. They discerned. In their lostness, they did not ask where are we going? They waited for insight. They asked questions of their situation, their time and place. Metaphorically, they asked, what are those other things we see? What they have set in motion is reflection, action and then reflection. It is continuous activity with no outcome as a goal but to be present in the moment around them.
The texts also tell us that two things centered them. The first was they learned in community. They needed other voices to help them discern what they should be about. The other is, the community had a shared understanding of who they were and what values or ideas motivated them.
In our search for a way to address the sense of being lost, there are many books and speakers who will offer a plan. In the secular world it can be a Tony Robbins or in the religious world it is Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life. What these books have in common is the idea there is some map out there, some plan that will get us to some prearranged goal. They assume there is only one road to be taken to get us to where we what to be.
One of things true about our time is the rate of change. The familiar signposts are gone. We know there is no map to be found. What is needed is discernment for thinking is necessary for change.
This does not mean we are lost forever. Rather there are hints to how to live in the present tense. It is to begin in finding out who we are. What is that motivates us? What is it we want to achieve?
Thus discernment begins with the self, to ask what is it we want? It is to also look at what we think is of value and what is it that we think is true. To discern is ask hard questions of ourselves. What tradition do we belong to? And then to ask how did this tradition come to be? There is a difference with traditionalism, which is to ask what grandma said and do it, and tradition, which is a living organism adapting to the present tense.
The discernment process takes place in community. We need one another to test our ideas. We need to check one another, to see if our particular understanding has a wider meaning than ourselves. The community helps us move beyond self gratifying and selfish visions, to world visions, visions that bring in the common good.
And the community is the holder of tradition. It is the vision that God does offer an aim to each moment. God comes to each of us, and to the community, luring us into more beauty, more justice, more compassion, more intensity, and more novelty. It is community reflection that helps us see that aim of God in each nanosecond. This is to trust the aim of God is coming to each moment. To be a witness to it demands reflection and then actions. And when we have acted we then check our doing in community: Was it enough? Did it create more inclusion? What were the negative outcomes? How can we be better in the next moment?
One of the mystics of the church said this:
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.+
What this says to me is discernment helps us understand we are not to fix people but are to invite them, and ourselves, to more depth. In every moment, to lure out a new possibility for today and that will lead us to more depth tomorrow. It is to work with God whose aim is constant in love and dynamic in response to how we have lived love. The religious experience is to help us live faithful as the witness: that God calls us to wisdom, and to love, and that we are continually learning how to do that, by our living out of this vision and expanding it out of our achievements. Together we learn to be a witness to love and learn to love, to live that love in all our actions. To heal ourselves and this our world.
*Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, 1991.
+15th century Catholic monk Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
George Hermanson,
www.georgehermanson.com
