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17 Pentecost: Leaving the 100 Acre Woods

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A video is available when you scroll to the bottom of the text

I go away for one week
and someone slips in two awful readings.
Billy Collins is a saving grace, however.

Psalm 137 has an iconic beginning
and an horrific ending.
And Luke’s gospel story
has Jesus, who is talking to slaves
and horrendously poor peasants
who are de facto slaves,
and using them as fodder
in his parable.
I’m going to slip the noose
with these readings
and sneak into territory they imply
even if not directly.

There is that haunting cry:
”By the waters of Babylon
we sat down and wept…
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
in a strange land?”

This is a cry,
a lament for what has been lost,
and a grief
transformed into bitter,
violent resentment
as we see at the end.

It is the lament of the exiled,
those who look back
to what was
and should have been
and land in a pool
of nostalgic vengeance.

We hear it today in our own world
rising up from the rubble
of lost manufacturing jobs,
union members who remember
how it used to be
before they were exiled
to a gig economy.

We hear it today
among Christian church-goers
who used to be a majority
with bulging congregations
and have been exiled to a secular culture,
in which one religion seems much like another
and none of them quite fit
with modernity.

We hear it today
among Liberal Arts academics
that used to carpet the floors and walls
of the academy
before their forced march
into a STEM wilderness where big incomes
for engineers and programmers
replaced pure knowledge for its own sake.

We hear it today
from the fear-festering pockets of White America
calling for or demanding a return to “normalcy”
when power and privilege never had to be
thought about because they were assumed,
and a multi-racial, mutli-cultural nation
sounds to them like exile.

Whoever or whatever brought us
to the places
we do not want to be,
“dash those little ones on the rock!”

Nostalgia soon morphs into resentment
leading to bitterness,
and arriving at vengeance.

But authentic faith,
the little mustard seed kind,
is a bulwark against nostalgia
for the way things used to be
and against the anger
that arises when brittle beliefs
crumble like autumn leaves.
Faith, as we know,
has nothing to do with beliefs.
Beliefs are things we pad our minds with
in the hopes they will protect us.
Faith is something else altogether.
In that whacky and weird parable
Luke has Jesus tell,
there is a similar kind of bitterness
beneath the apostle’s plea
for Jesus to increase their faith.
They want more…they want protection.
When they don’t get it —
when faith turns out to be something else —
they will be bitter
and wander away.

Crushed by grief,
endangered by trauma and tragedy,
raked across loss
as all of us have
or will be,
how can we have faith?
How can our faith survive
the ordinary ravages
of an ordinary life?

This is the question
posed by Psalm 137
and Luke’s funky little parable.
(Well, maybe it is the question posed
and maybe it is just my take on them.
But either way,
this is where we arrived today).

It takes us back to bedrock,
to the place we cannot dig any deeper.
So let’s revisit it.

We start with an ancient Hebrew word.
You will remember it
because I bring us back to it often:
‘Emunah (em-oo-nah).
It means a fierce
and ferocious holding onto.

‘Emunah
was a word they used
to describe the experience
— the experience not the idea — of “faith.”

You see, faith
was not an intellectual set of beliefs
for our ancestors,
it was ‘Emunah:
a holding onto God.
It indicated a fierce and ferocious
grasp on the experience
of God.

‘Emunah – holding onto God
and not letting go.

And of course, holding onto
and letting go are choices.
Faith is a choice.
More about that in a moment.

Billy Collins helps us
describes
that wonderful yet
melancholy border
between childhood and the next phase,
whatever we want to call our next phase.
It is the phase in which
we choose faith or not,
because before that phase
we don’t have to choose.
In post-childhood
we have to choose to hold onto
a power greater than ourselves
in a life that is bigger
and more ferocious
than any single belief we ever have.

Do you remember the last scene
from the original Winnie the Pooh?

In it Christopher Robin
leaves the 100-Acre Wood
for the last time.
The 100 Acre Wood
is a metaphor for childhood
and reading it as an adult to a child,
we know he is never coming back.
The child we are reading to
doesn’t know it yet,
but we know
Christopher Robin
is never coming back.

At turning 10,
that first big number,
when we discover that we bleed,
and that mom and dad can’t always fix it —
and by extension
that mom and dad
cannot always protect us —
suddenly the world
seems a more dangerous place.

On the day we turn 10 — metaphorically —
or on the day we leave the 100 Acre Wood,
or on the day our parent dies
and we are still a child,
or on any day when the magic light
drains out of our bicycle for the last time
and we bleed,
is the day we arrive
at the border of ‘Emunah.

That is the day
when you and I have to decide
for the first time,
to choose God
or retreat into our nest of beliefs.
It is the day we know there is a choice.

Now please do not misunderstand me:
I am not talking about believing in God,
as in all the things
we were ever told about God
in Sunday School
or from the Nuns
or the Preacher.

I am talking about choosing God:
choosing
to hold onto
our “experience” of God.

You see, young children
do not have difficulty believing
that Mohammed moves mountains
and Jesus walks on water
and God protects us from disaster.

We do not have to work
to believe such things
because there is magic everywhere
when we are small.

The world is a magical place
before we arrive at that border.
But at that border
and beyond,
‘Emunah — holding onto God —
is that tiny mustard seed
of faith
that Jesus tells us
is powerful.

Holding onto God no matter what:
no matter how painful the loss,
no matter how depressing the outcome seems,
no matter how bleak the options appear,
no matter how confusing the events shake out.
Holding on…holding on…holding on…no matter what.

You see, faith is not a thing that protects us —
that if we have it
we will be safe
or rewarded
or protected.
It is a thing we hold onto…no matter what.

Faith is rooted
in our experience or experiences of God.
It doesn’t come
from what someone told us about God
or Bible stories about God.

That is where our beliefs
come from.

Our beliefs
are the ten thousand images
of how we want life to be
that cover the walls
of the cave or hut or house we live in.
Beliefs come from others
and are made up within our minds
and they help us make sense
out of a world
that probably does not make a lot of sense,
and beliefs help us to feel bigger
in a universe in which we are so small
as to be insignificant.

But when we have faith —
the kind the ancient Hebrews meant
when they used the word, ‘Emunah —
we know that our beliefs
are just beliefs.
We know it
and though it is a little scary
we can still live forward
because we are holding onto
God.

Faith
is holding onto God
even when the pages of our beliefs
flutter by
and we no longer know
what to believe.
Not knowing what to believe
is okay
because we are holding on…holding onto God.

You see, most of our religious mistakes
come from the fact that we live
in an economic culture
in which everything of value
is transactional.
We ask of everything:
”What good is it?”
”What can I get for it?”
”How much is it worth?
”What will you give me for it?”

Which is what we also ask of faith.
But faith has no answer
for transactional questions.
Faith
does not buy us anything.
Faith
does not protect us from anything.
Faith
does not have value beyond itself.
Faith is simply the ability and choice
to hold onto our experiences of God
regardless of how far
they recede into the rear-view mirror.

Can we step into any hurricane
that surrounds us
and know, deep
in our bones,
that no matter what happens
it will be okay?
Not even that we will survive,
but because of God,
because God is good
and we are part of God,
we are and will be okay?

I think that is what it means
to hold onto faith.

No theology professor or spiritual director
ever told me that, but
it seems to me,
that mustard-seed faith
is about that kind of holding onto God
while letting go of beliefs
as our foundation.

Now I know we have to have beliefs,
it is part of the life of the mind
and human beings were given
beautiful minds.
But beliefs are not faith
and most of them will dissolve in a storm.
But an experience of God,
small or large
dramatic or quiet,
is enough to hold onto for a lifetime.

‘Emunah — hold on to it.

2 Easter: Practicing Resurrection

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Here is what I know about this gospel story:
John was terrified of doubt.

And here is what I know about us:
We live in an era of doubt.
No, not an era, a miasma of doubt…a body bag of doubt.

Let’s start with us.
We are living through an extraordinary
tunnel of doubt
from which we cannot yet see
the light at the end.

It is a bit strange for us too,
because we have just been through
such a prolonged sense of abundance
and prosperity without a fearful external enemy
and very low interest rates to boot!

But since at least 2016
we just haven’t known what to expect
and when it will end —
the “it” being whatever existential threats
seem most threatening to us.

Of course, on one level
that is a real white, cis-male, liberal point of view
since there are a whole lot of people
who have been living on the margins
for a whole lot of time.
But there is this envelope we entered together
in 2016 and it got even grayer
and foggier
with COVID-19.
And now there is even a war in Europe again.

Our institutions seem to be crumbling
under the weight of it all.
School classrooms and administrations are imploding.
Banking, courts, governments, law enforcement,
publishing, health care, religion…

It is hard to think of an institution
that is not fraying at the edges
if not crumbling from the foundation.

We don’t know how it will end
or where our place in it is,
and what, if anything, we can do about it.

That is why I say it is an era of doubt,
existential doubt
about what is enduring
and what is passing away in the night.

I’ll give you a very graphic example
from my own current experience.

I am the part-time rector of a congregation
that I have helped transition
from a huge historic neo-gothic building
and campus of buildings,
to a storefront church
located in a former wine bar.

It is a great story,
and too long for this sermon.
But the part I am thinking about
has to do with the congregation’s columbarium.
You see, the congregation had built a wall in its chapel
as a place for people to intern the ashes
of their loved ones.
Well, I spent much of last summer
and early fall
contacting family members
from all parts of the country
to let them know we were closing
the columbarium.

Now whoever would expect
that a two-hundred year old church
and its columbarium
would close?
That is just not a thought
most of us would have had
before the last few years.
Big old churches were here forever,
and that was the way we treated them.
But as we know now,
those big old buildings are closing
all over the country.

That example is amplified and echoed
with other stories from schools
and offices
and hospitals
and businesses.
That is what I mean
about an era of doubt.

We just don’t know,
and when we just don’t know
it is hard to put our trust
in anything or anyone
that says they do.

Now back to John’s gospel for a moment.

John’s Jesus was not just a messiah.
John’s Jesus was in the beginning…the Word…
and the word that was with God.

John’s Jesus was cosmic
as well as enfleshed.
John’s Jesus was a really really big deal,
and I would say,
an even bigger deal
than Mark, Luke, and Mathew’s Jesus.

After all,
Mark’s gospel begins
with a full grown Jesus
who almost seems to stumble into
a radical new relationship with God,
and it ends with an empty tomb
and no ghost stories.

John has an awful lot riding on Jesus
and he is terrified of doubt.
He makes a point of saying
that everything he, John, says is absolutely true
and he knows, because he witnessed it.
Which, by the way,
inspires doubt in all kinds of New Testament scholars.

So John narrates this really weird and cool encounter
between Jesus and Thomas
in such a way as to alienate
an awful lot of 21st century folks.
You might even be one of them.
I mean, he basically says,
those of us who cannot put our fingers
in the spear-hole in Jesus’ waist
or the nail holes in his hands,
have to believe what John tells us
or we’re spiritual chopped liver.
Now that ain’t right.

John sets up a terrible dichotomy
between those who believe
what the editors of those long ago stories
want us to believe
and those of us who believe our own experience.

Most of us, I am guessing,
have not had the kind of experience
John is describing.
So he is afraid that if we doubt the stories
we will doubt his Christology
and the whole thing will unravel.

He is not wrong,
at least not from my experience anyway.
Once we start de-mythologizing
and de-constructing
the Biblical narrative,
the way we have and are doing
with our own national history
around slavery,
we are left to then
re-mythologize
and re-construct
a NEW narrative
that is more consistent
with our own experiences.

Those who are deeply invested
in our believing them,
and believing the way they
want us to see Jesus — or slavery for that matter —
are fearful of that process.

But I say, faith has almost nothing
to do with theology —
certainly not an institutional theology.

You see, what we often think of as faith,
is actually belief.
Beliefs are things we “believe in” or not,
but faith, faith is an experience.

I am going to try to describe
the experience of faith
but like trying to describe being in love,
I will not be able
to meet the challenge.
But I am a preacher, so
I have to try anyway.

Think of an athlete
or dancer or musician,
who enters into the grace
of the thing she or he does best.
For me it is someone like NBA star Steph Curry
when he can’t miss a three-point shot
no matter where it is on the court
or how off balance he is.
He gets into that zone and
what happens is just amazing
and appears to be totally natural.

Well faith is likewise a kind of zone we enter
in which everything just clicks and fits —
and the love
and relationships
and work
and the commitments of our lives
all feel as if they’re floating together
in a single current.

It is not a sensation that lasts very long
but when we feel it we are deeply grateful.

And I don’t mean to say
that we are suddenly without pain
or challenge
or that somehow all of our difficulties
are removed. Not at all.

It is just that we know,
even for only a moment,
that we are part of something much bigger
and more magnificent,
and as small
and as insignificant
and as imperfect
as our own little life is,
we are part of this bigger flow, and wow…
all is well.

Do you know that experience?

It may be evoked by awe, as in the Natural world
or music
or love —
but whatever instigates or inspires it
we suddenly feel the current
within which our life flows
and for a just second
we know…we know the ordinary presence of the sacred.

That is the experience,
and trusting it when it has passed —
holding onto it
when we do not feel it any more — that is faith.

So you see, faith
is not about intellectual beliefs
or doctrinal formulas.
That is religion.
The institutions of religion
seek to get the rest of us
to go along with a prescribed
set of beliefs and ideas about God.
That is what religion does.

But faith is a flesh and blood,
real time
encounter
with the holy.
Whether it is a wee small voice
whispering to us in the dark of the night,
or a blistering dream
that shatters our previous plans,
or the warm depth of God in community
making itself known in the bread and the wine…
it is an experience
that we hold onto
and trust
even as it passes.

What I would say about faith
is that it is an actual encounter
with the presence of God in our midst —
an experience we engage in or not
rather than an idea or doctrine
we believe in or not.

If I had to boil down
this Christianity thing we do
to some manageable and digestible chew,
it would be that resurrection
is a thing we practice…or not.

I have no idea what resurrection is,
at least not in the way we talk about it in our songs
and theological pronouncements.
Really, I just don’t know about all of that.
But I do know how to practice resurrection
because Jesus told us.

“Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done…
on earth as it is in heaven.”
On earth, as it is in heaven.

To practice resurrection
is to bring forth the kingdom of God
on earth
as it is in heaven.

Now I come from Upstate New York
and I don’t mean to say
we have created heaven on earth up there.
We are as much in the body bag of doubt as you are,
and so I am not talking about utopia.

Again, let me use an ordinary personal experience.

I am happy to say it has happened more than once
but I am thinking about the recent privilege
of being trusted by a colleague
who came to see me to discuss a family matter.

But honestly, the conversation that ensued
was one in which we shared our experiences
of family and work and loss.

It was one of those moments
that I walked away from feeling
absolutely whole
and well
and refreshed.
Why?
Because it was the confluence
of my calling
and my life
and a friendship
that felt like grace.
In it a little bit of the kingdom
arrived on earth
as it is in heaven.

How do I know that?
Experience. I experienced such grace before.
The experience of faith
which I trust and hold onto.
It isn’t science —
it does not require measurement
or replication in the laboratory.

It is the experience of faith
that says “Yes!” in that moment
and is able to trust it
as it recedes in the rear view mirror.

While the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven
is also brought about with justice work
and peace work
and equity work,
it also happens interpersonally
and in community,
and wherever two or more of God’s creatures
find the currents of their lives intersecting
and moving within the love of God.

Those are faith experiences
and whenever and wherever we engage them
or allow them to happen,
we are practicing resurrection.

And by the way, we need not fear doubt
because doubt is part of faith, not the opposite of it.
Doubt is a tendon within the network
of spiritual bone and muscle
that empower us to see and feel and know
the experience of faith.

Doubt is perfectly natural
and a kind of resistance training
that helps us build spiritual muscle.

We doubt ourselves
and our experiences all of the time,
and there is a utility to doubt —
it causes us to pause and take stock of the moment.

But then we take a deep breath
and recollect the wisdom of our experience
and move on.
We need not fear doubt
or give it too much power to discomfort us.

So…that’s it.
Faith is an experience
of the ordinary presence of God in our midst,
and doubt is a normal and natural part of the flow.

Personally, I have no doubt
that we will get through this tunnel of doubt we are in
and find ourselves in the midst of some kind of renewal.
In the mean time,
we can keep practicing resurrection daily
and build the kingdom on earth
as it is in heaven.

2 Easter, 2021: Small Wire

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For video version, scroll to bottom

Sermon Texts: John 20:19-31 and…

Small Wire
by Anne Sexton

My faith
is a great weight
hung on a small wire,
as doth the spider
hang her baby on a thin web,
as doth the vine,
twiggy and wooden,
hold up grapes
like eyeballs,
as many angels
dance on the head of a pin.

God does not need
too much wire to keep Him there,
just a thin vein,
with blood pushing back and forth in it,
and some love.
As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.
So if you have only a thin wire,
God does not mind.
He will enter your hands
as easily as ten cents used to
bring forth a Coke.

I am asking for your grace here,
and perhaps indulgence.
This Anne Sexton poem
has a place in my heart
and life
that is abiding
and powerful.

Someone gave me
a handwritten version of it
that I carried for years and years
until is became too faded and frayed.
It was a double-sided gift
that only revealed one side
at the time I first read it.

Honestly, it has been so long
with so much water under the bridge
that I can’t clearly remember in detail
what was going on at the time,
except that I was considering leaving seminary –
in the very first semester.
Perhaps a bit like Thomas,
everyone else seemed to know more than me
and seemed so sure of what they knew.

I had entered seminary as an exploration,
not with any clear vision or understanding
or with a goal in mind.

Halfway through that first semester
I was pretty sure it was a mistake.
And trust me, if I couldn’t handle
The Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA.
then I wasn’t going to fit in anywhere.
It was a wide-open feminist, social justice,
and academically venturesome institution —
at least for its time.

But dang, if people didn’t walk around
talking theology
with the confidence of ideology
and as if it was obvious and apparent
for everyone to see.
It was like the week Thomas had to live through
with his colleagues all talking about something
he couldn’t understand because
he had not experienced it.
And to be brutally honest,
it had been five years
since I attended church
other than Christmas Eve with family.

Suddenly I was in the belly of the whale.
I felt like I was in the old horror/Sci-Fi movie,
”Invasion of the Body Snatchers”
and I was the last one left.

Well, along came this poem
from Anne Sexton.
She was speaking my language
and saying something I could understand.
Somehow she gave me a little confidence
with which to see through the bravado
being exhaled all around me.

Anne was just one of the reasons
I kept on going
but she came to symbolize so much more.
Then the other side of the gift
came along years later.
She was the one
who introduced me to poetry I liked.
She wrote poems I could understand
in a language
and with a concreteness
and frankness
that the poetry I read before her
never seemed to have.
All these years later
all those poems later
I count this poem, Small Wire,
as the first.

Okay, that was a way-long introduction
that was too much about me
and maybe not enough about us.
Except that I think maybe it is about us.

Faith IS “…a great weight
hung on a small wire,
as doth the spider
hang her baby on a thin web…”

But here is the thing about faith,
it doesn’t take goo-gobs of it
to be a person of faith.

”…God does not need
too much wire to keep Him there,
just a thin vein,
with blood pushing back and forth in it,
and some love…”

How is it we came to think of faith
as a quantity?
It’s like the old McDonald’s cheeseburger, fries,
and coke that got super-sized
but now requires an athletic eating competition
to consume.

Faith isn’t an athletic ability
that measures whether you are a LeBron James
or Mr. Magoo,
one with obvious superior talent
the other a cartoon character.

Faith, authentic faith,
is always hung
by a thin wire
but we confuse faith with belief.

We have tons of belief
about all sorts of things.
We believe in conspiracy theories
and we believe that science will save us.
We believe the vaccines are not safe
and we belief they are the answer.
We believe in what Donald Trump says
and we believe that anything he says is unbelievable.

We believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
and we believe that Jesus is God.
We believe that Buddha uncovered the path
to enlightenment
and we believe that Mohammad
was the last of the prophets.

Those are all beliefs not faith.

Belief comes from the Greek word, PISTIS,
which denotes an investment of confidence
in something
or someone, but most especially
that something is true.
We believe in certain descriptions of reality
and act accordingly.
Beliefs are an intellectual assent,
a decision to give credit to something.
Beliefs are ideas about how things are
or the way things are supposed to be
and we back those with our confidence
and choices.

But faith is something else altogether.

In ancient Hebrew, the word translated into English
is EMUNAH and shares its roots
with the words for WOMB and MERCY.

Faith is experiential rather than intellectual.
It is what surrounds us
and holds us.
It is not something we “believe in”
it is an EXPERIENCE to which we say “YES!”
or even, “NO!”

Like all experiences
we hold onto them or we do not.
They slip away into memory
and fade in importance,
or we hold onto them
and keep them present.

In fact, “to hold onto”
is a common Biblical interpretation
of the word Emunah.
Faith is the experience of holding onto God.
That is why it is hung upon a thin wire —
because experience for us
is a spider’s web
upon which we dangle.
We are always playing with memory
of experiences
and interpreting and re-interpreting them
so that they conform
to our beliefs.
Belief has confirmation bias
built into it.
We look for what we believe
and when we find something that contradicts
our beliefs,
we look to re-interpret it or discard it
of somehow make it conform
to what we thought in the first place.

Faith does not interpret.
Faith does not subject experience to analysis.
Faith holds onto the experience.
Like awe or joy,
once we start analyzing faith
it is gone.
We hold onto it
or we don’t,
and then it fades and is gone.
It does indeed hang from a small wire.

But just like a cough
and love
cannot be concealed,
even a small cough
and even a small love,
a small faith held onto
is enough.

So I guess I am inviting you too,
to redefine faith, and
decouple it from belief.

Truly, a small faith
held tenaciously over time,
is enough.

Beliefs are a dime a dozen
and we have bunches of them.
But the experience of faith?
The experience of God’s presence?
The experience of the Creator-of-all-that-is
in the moment with us
as if the very womb that holds us?
That is a rare and precious moment
to hold onto for a lifetime.

I don’t know if I’ve ever said it before,
but thank you, Anne. Thank you.

https://youtu.be/N5QTGdMPq_I

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