George Hermanson

Discernment

Discernment -  Nov., 18, 2012   Buckingham United church.   The Rev Dr. George Hermanson

Mark’s passage this week is a difficult one.  When we understand that he is building a narrative that will sustain the early community, we get insight on the passage.   He uses the oral traditions that the early community shared.  Then he tries to address particular issues of that early community. 

Mark is not a history book but a work of art and imagination, built on experience.  Having experienced God he goes on to imagine what would happen if we committ ourselves to God’s dream. 

His focus is a common theme of God desiring that the kingdom come on earth and that there will be a people who will respond and live the kingdom values.

Mark is realistic for he knows that there is competition for our loyalty.  Not every thing is clear.  There are set backs.  There are victories.  It is hard to be faithful.  There are real questions about the efficaciousness of God.  It is easy to slide into hopelessness and lack of faith. His stories deal with people like us who are looking for some light to break into the cracks.

Samuel reflects on the need to discern when things look hopeless.  Hannah is barren, thus of no account, yet she is sign of God’s care for she gives birth to a son - out of time and unexpected.  The writer wants us to see this as way of discerning the nature of God’s rule - overcoming barren reality - that within is hope and life.  There will be unexpected epiphanies and we need to learn ways to discern the outbreaks of hope.

Mark is reflecting back from the resurrection, creating a story about sacred space - it is every where.  The stories about healing and preaching illustrate that nothing is outside of the presences of God.  The stories discern the light of God within complex reality.  Sacred space is the whole world, God is within every nano second and reality.

This morning’s reading is the dramatic shift in the story.  Danger is everywhere.  The times are out of joint.  Chaos rains.   For Mark’s community this was the actual experience of the community.  They lived after the Jewish/Roman wars.  The temple, the holy of holies, the symbol of the presence of God had been destroyed.  There were false starts.  False prophets were the order of the day.  There were many claiming to represent truth.  The community had experienced rejection by others they thought were on the same side. 

When times are out of joint there is a temptation to move to despair.  Despair can lead to a desire that history should end and we should begin again.  This is apocalyptic thinking and such thinking is unfaith.

We know about such thinking.  You see a bumper sign and it says if there is no driver I have been raptured.  When time is out of joint and there is a sense of hopelessness, there are those who use religion as a means of cleansing.  They become terrorists because they see the world as evil, culture as evil, and those different from them as evil.  

We can identify with Mark’s community for we live in times of unjust wars, rumors of wars, and times of terrorism.  We know people suffer.  The innocent die.  There are groups that wish ill will.  So we are tempted to move to despair and unfaith - to be apocalyptic about the world - to see no hope or health.

To address these feelings of hopelessness, Mark reminds the people who Jesus is.  Jesus is the one who came announcing that the kingdom of God is here, in this reality.  The problem is we don’t have the eyes or the ears to see and hear the love of God in our reality.  We live in noise.  We create noise so we cannot hear the music of love.


To cover the anxiety we build monuments, structures, ideas that reflect our ego.  These structures are easily destroyed.     Our world makes the penultimate ultimate - the perishing eternal - the temporary the permanent. We need to remember that while the temporary can be beautiful, and it is only temporary.  We do this so we can discern the beautiful that lasts.

There are many out there competing for truth.   I love the Colbert show because it is a satire on all who claim to have the final fix on the truth.  The word he uses is truthiness.  It means that we project our cut on reality, our viewpoint as the truth about reality. 

There are many who seek deception and strife.  In times when things are out of joint there are many who seek to exploit our fears.  It can be a political group and it can be a religious group and the most dangerous are those who claim their political viewpoint represents what God desires.

So Mark reminds the people that in times of anxiety discernment is crucial.  He has given some hints about the reality of sacred space being present.  It is healing of the outcasts, the care of the widows, the expansion of sacred space to the edges of society, and hospitality.  He suggests that God’s light is always breaking through the cracks in the cosmos. 
Like Leonard Cohen’s song - there are cracks in everything that lets the light through. “There is a crack in everything 
That's how the light gets in.
Ring the bells that still can ring 
Forget your perfect offering 

Every heart, every heart 
to love will come 
but like a refugee.
Ring the bells that still can ring 
Forget your perfect offering 
There is a crack, a crack in everything 
That's how the light gets in.

We are called to join with those who discern the light that breaks into reality.  It is to see within all things the hints of God.  It is to understand that even the most mundane activity may contain hints of God.  We judge culture and activity by how the common good is enhanced.  We judge outcomes by how much beauty is created.  We judge activity by how people are built up and healed. 

God’s dream is for the care of all of creation, to see all as important to God’s being.  In this we have a hint on how to live. God is luring us to compassion and justice, our joining is how light breaking into our time and space.  When we have hope, even in the darkest times of experience, we know there is light breaking in.  Our job is to help the light become stronger, to point it out, to join with it, to celebrate it by our living.

Nostalgia for the Light

Nostalgia for the Light
Nov 11, 2012     Southminster United Church  The Rev Dr. George Hermanson

I have a friend who is an astronomer.  Part of the year he is in Chile viewing  the skies.
Because of this our eyes caught an announcement for a  movie on PBS called Nostalgia for the Light.  Patricio Guzmán’s movie focuses on the similarities between astronomers researching humanity’s past, in an astronomical sense, and the struggle of many Chilean women who still search, after decades, for the remnants of their relatives executed during the dictatorship. The documentary includes interviews and commentary from those affected, from astronomers and archeologists.

All of them are asking questions we all ask, who we are,  and how we become who we are? These are the questions that science can only point us to.  My friend can see the stars that have been and yet still are touching us.  The look into the stars can tell us that past is part of our becoming.  Our time line is long.  And it reaches back, into the present moment.  In one sense, metaphorically, we remember in this present moment the influences of the past.  Yet that moment is fragile.  We also learn that that energy of the past is never lost, and that we are all intimately connected.  We are star dust.  We are part of one another.  Part of the cosmos.

One reviewer said “the documentary is (to be) praised for its stunning visuals and impressive views of the cosmos but despite the aesthetics, it evokes the idea that we, concern ourselves with fleeting power and evil deeds, treating both as though they are more than mere smudges on a much larger blueprint.”

It is the more than mere smudges we deal with in our reflections on our religious reality. We gather on remembrance day,  where memory is crucial.  We struggle with the meaning of such events as this.   We are tempted to romanticize the past.  We are tempted to use the past as a means to justify our own values: be it a rejection of war, or  to justify war or seek a just war ethic. Thus we have ambivalent feelings.  We seek to honour the past and at the same time reject romanticizing the past.

In the movie, astronomer Gaspar Galaz is introduced and he comments on how astronomy is a way to look into the past to understand our origins. It is generally a science seeking answers, but, in the process, creates more questions to answer. He comments that science in general, like astronomy and geology, is a look into the past; even sitting there having this interview, he comments, is a conversation in the past because of the millionths of a second light takes to travel and be processed. An archaeologists relates astronomer’s endeavours to his own; archeologists and astronomers have to recreate the past in the present by using only a few traces.

The processing of the memory is done in this fragile present.    We seek to weave together family stories with historical events, to create the meaning of an event.


One of the persons interviewed has to do this.  Her parents had been disappeared by the regime.  To save her, her grandparents had to give up her parents. The gift they gave her, though, was a love of the stars. After studying astronomy she comes to terms with what happened by believing that we, just like the stars, are all part of a cycle in which matter and energy is continuously recycled, but never lost. This idea leaves her strong and optimistic.

Remembrance day brings many emotions out in us.  We seek to come to terms with our history, both personal, nationally, and internationally.  Part of my family story is that my grandfather served in the Swedish army in the occupation of Finland.  In response they came to Canada to forget this past.  Yet, many of my cousins and uncles served in the second war.  Most of them did not want to talk about that experience and did not join in groups that romanticized that experience.  This formed my memory. 

There was another family memory that I did not learn about until I was a teenager.  A my father’s older brother served in the first war.  He was killed.  The story I learned as a teenager was that he was killed on Nov 11 at 10 in the morning, in 1918, when it was known the war was ending.  There was a general who wanted to make one last statement.  It does not matter that my family reversed the dates, because Nov 10 at 11 1918 was when he was shot.  The rationale was the same.  Such a memory made me question remembrance day.  How to remember?  Yes, many in my family served in the second war because they believed in the reasons for the war. Yet, his death was meaningless.   How to put the two stories together was the theological task?

The answer is Guzmán’s words at the end of  the documentary.  He affirms the value of memory because, as he states, “those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moments. Those who have none don’t live anywhere.”  No easy answers.

This view reminds us that remembrance day is about loss, facing danger, facing those who seek a world that is evil.   It is also about the cost and a reminder that never again was the reason for this day.   It is a fragile present we live in and our remembering calls for us to both to honour those who served and the horror of wars.  Remembering does not justify sacrifice or war, but understands that sometimes we must act to prevent a more corrupt future.  Remembering does not justify the acting for that justification is not ours.  Remembering makes us realistic about the joys and dangers of living.   Calling us to weave a way of living that lessens the reality of a broken reality.  To work to make this world a place of peace.