Sermons

16 Pentecost: From A to B (or dying again, and again, and again…)

September 12, 2021 by Cam Miller

There is something about September,
even when it has been years since you were
in school or had kids in school, that is so fresh.

To me September feels more like the New Year
than January 1…or Advent 1 for that matter.

I don’t know how to launch into this gracefully,
so here goes: I know we all think we are special.
I don’t know if that is a Western thing,
or an American thing,
or a human thing,
but we all think we are special —
even if we think we are a terrible person
we think we are an especially terrible person.

Whether you are unemployed at the moment
or a corporate executive;
whether you are a teacher of children
or a child of teachers;
whether you are of Italian ancestry
or your genes are rooted in Tanzania;
whether you eat sushi from expensive restaurants
or Mac ‘N Cheese from a box;
we are all on our way
from A to B
and there is only one way to get there.

Now we all have different ideas
and names
for “A” and “B.”
And that is what this sermon is about –
indeed, that is what today’s Gospel is about
and what religion is all about
not to put too fine a point on it.

When we hear stuff like Jesus predicting
he will be rejected and killed and suffer,
and that he supposedly wants us to do the same,
that is,
deny ourselves,
find a cross, and
follow him into oblivion,
that is the A to B path
being recommended by the gospels.

Now let me add a caveat
included in Marcus Borg’s “Reading the Bible Again, for the First Time.”
He tells of being at a Christian seminary somewhere
when a guest speaker, a Hindu,
offered an interesting response
to such gospel language.
In particular, it was to Jesus purportedly declaring
that HE is
“the only way
and the only truth
and the only life.”

“It is absolutely true” the Hindu said,
“that Jesus is the only way.
And that way – of dying to an old way of being
and being born into a new way of being –
is known in all of the religions of the world.”

You see, it is a universal A to B.

It is an example of Jesus’ abundant reversal sayings
that are rough paradoxical wisdom
that every one of us knows from experience,
but which we would rather not know
and look away from.

Dying to an old way of being
and being born into a new way of being
is a universal human wisdom
that is echoed in particular
at the heart of the Christian Gospel.

But please, let’s not be literal-minded.
Just because the text says, “take up your cross
and follow me”
does not mean
we have to go looking for ways
to be persecuted.
And most especially
it does not mean the myriad
assortment of pain and suffering
we all experience – as if the cross
is a symbol of random tragedy.

This saying gets bastardized
and trivialized
when we talk about our arthritis
as a cross we have to bear.
Or our domestic partner’s slovenly habits
as our cross to bear.
Or our children’s discipline problem’s
as our cross to bear.
Or any one of the standard and normal
difficulties that we humans encounter
in the course of our every day lives.

Dying to an old way of being
and being born into a new way of being
is about choice.
It is about choices we have the opportunity to make
that subvert the way the world is organized
and which helps the transformation of the old order
to a new place.

Whether it is our own resistance to being transformed,
or the resistance of those with power
who use that power to repress justice,
dying to an old way of being
and being born into a new way of being,
is about becoming agents
of transformation.

The cross we have to bear
is not about our personal pain and suffering,
it is about our willingness
to become agents of personal
and social transformation.

Please allow me to repeat that,
because it is so counter-cultural:
The cross we have to bear
is not about our personal pain and suffering,
it is about our willingness
to become agents of personal
and social transformation.

It is about our willingness
to become midwives of death
and the mothers of new birth.

Peter’s horrified reaction to Jesus’ A to B, is typical.
We want to be comforted.
We want some assurance
that all this effort will give us some safety
and some personal protection.
We want our religion
and our god
and our church to calm our fears,
cradle our pain,
caress our grief,
erase our scars,
forgive our crimes,
heal our remorse,
and generally make us feel better.

Peter’s response is our response:
“Hey, man, what are you talking about?”

But the stunning wisdom we behold
underneath this ugly text,
tells us that the God
who invites us to die to the old —
an old way that is keeping us from being transformed into the new —
is not the least bit deterred by our fear,
or our pain,
or our anxiety
or even our death.

If I am even close to understanding this text,
then the God who we come to worship —
while not desiring our suffering
or encouraging our pain —
does not consider they are a barrier to our efforts
to bring justice into life.

I don’t mean to over-emphasize this point here,
but it does seem kind of important.

Most of the prayers I offer to God,
are petitions for God to intervene somehow
on behalf of other people
or myself,
and for the relief of our pain and suffering.
But I get the distinct feeling
from this very core gospel text,
that such things
are not really at the heart of God’s concern.
Rather, that in giving birth
labor is expected
and pain
has a function in delivery.

If I listen to this wisdom,
and don’t get angry because I don’t like it —
which I don’t — then what I hear
is that much of our pain
and much of our suffering
is unfortunate
but a natural course of events.

This excludes, of course, the pain
and suffering we inflict upon one another.

If I am hearing this wisdom right,
then I can imagine God saying to me:
“Cam, I feel your pain, I really do,
but your pain is beside the point.”

”Listen, I hear your fear,
and I know, I really know,
that fear is difficult to move beyond,
but that is your task.”

”I know you hurt, Cam,
and I know, because I hurt too,
that it gets hard to see beyond your own needs,
but that is what you need to do.”

“Cam, I know you are very sad
at the loss of so much which was familiar to you,
and I really do know
what grief and sorrow feel like,
but don’t use that to hold back the tide
of transformation
which is something I have set in motion.”

“Remember Cam, I have searched you out
and known you…
I really have
and I really do.

So you need to know
that your life is found in death,
and that all those things you cling to
need to be let go of.
And you need to risk the death
of what you care about
in order to gain the life you imagine.”

That is just my imagination:
what I imagine God would say to me
in a way I could understand.
Inside this ugly text of the gospel,
is a stunningly beautiful wisdom:

To be transformed
and be born into a new way of being
we have to die to our current way of being.

If you don’t like this painful wisdom
seek not the Buddha,
for he will tell you that
before enlightenment
much death comes first.

Seek not an escape from this wisdom
through Hinduism,
because the cycle of life is an endless dying
to the old in search of the new.

Seek not an escape from this wisdom
through Islam, for death is the doorway to relief.

Seek not even the science of Physics
for it will tell you
that energy is transformed through death –
over and over and over again.

In fact, I suspect this wisdom
is what we are looking for in coming here.
Not because we cherish suffering.

Not because we necessarily believe Jesus
died for our sins.
But because intuitively,
experientially,
every one of us knows
that there is only one way
to get from who we are at this moment
to the person we have always wanted to become.

That way,
in one way or another,
includes a death.
Not a physical death
but a letting-go-death of the things
we hold onto that keep us from transformation.

I don’t know what that is for you —
it could be an obsession with power
dependence on alcohol
drivenness for beauty
an endless lust for pleasure
a bottomless hunger for success
a penchant for absolute security
even the toxic nectar of resentment —
but to the extent that they keep us from being midwives of justice,
and hold us back
from a personal transformation
that has called to us through the years,
is the extent
of the death that awaits us.

This ancient and homely story
we tell over and over and over again
through the centuries,
is a metaphor for the wisdom
that aches inside us all.
It is universal.
It is the way from A to B.

15 Pentecost: Jesus Repents

September 5, 2021 by Cam Miller

Texts for Preaching: “The Greatest Grandeur” by Pattiann Rogers and Mark 7:24-37
For the video version, scroll to the bottom

Jesus escapes.

The story begins with an escape.
Jesus runs away from his life, and he escapes.
Remember that as
we savor that delicious poem.

I do not know what the greatest grandeur is, do you?
It certainly could be
the reptilian dance of the purple-tongued sand goanna,
but I am more inclined to end up
where Pattiann Rogers ends up:
in wonderment above that one fathomless moment
we have yet to live.

“But the dark emptiness,” she writes,
“contained in every next moment
seems to me the most
singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill…”

Hot dog! That’s a great,
spectacular,
spiritual place
to arrive:
the void which we are free to fill.

I can’t ever forget watching that moment
when it was at my father’s death.
It was a moment of stunning sensation
of no more moments.

At his side,
holding his hand,
watching the pulse in his neck, when suddenly
it got markedly slower,
and smaller, and
just melted into stillness.
He had no next moment.

For all of us there will be a moment
with no next moment,
and that intuitive knowledge
makes each ‘next moment’
the most glorious grandeur there is.

Now most of us, most of the time,
simply stumble into the next moment
sleepy-eyed and half-unconscious.
We just slog through it because…
well, because it is there.
We miss the grandeur of it all.

And then something happens
and we wake up…
we wake up in the moment
and instead of something we are plowing through
the moment opens up, inside of us,
like a succulent red tulip
blooming in the morning warmth.
The moment wakes us up
and we are alive!
It is a stupendous grandeur — that next moment of ours.

But now back to Jesus
and his escape, which, as we will see,
has a double-meaning.

You may not have picked this up,
or remembered the context of this story,
but Jesus has taken off again.
He likes to do that, especially in Mark’s gospel,
and it makes his friends so angry.

One of my children,
I won’t say which one in order to protect the guilty,
used to love to run away in big stores
and hide.
He was three or four, and very mobile.

The worst day
was in a huge Burlington Coat Factory
when he decided to escape
and hide in a rack of thick winter coats.
The joy of his very ‘next moment’
was the source of terror in our ‘next moment.’
Perhaps some of you remember
that special kind of terror.

Anyway, Jesus escapes.
He takes off, leaving his friends and associates
in the dust.
He runs away to Tyre, which by the way,
was a prosperous Roman port city.
I am not saying it was Cancun
but maybe it was
in relation to the pus and blood
of filthy, needy people
that was his usual scenery.

Jesus escapes and sneaks into a house,
because, as the text says,
he did not want anyone to see him.
So he is hiding out,
reading a good book,
or eating pizza with his feet on the coffee table.
Get the picture?

Then some stranger bursts in.
Stop and think about that.

He is finally alone
and taking care of himself,
and settling into the arms of the moment
like you fold into a hammock.
Then an unknown woman walks in the door
asking for help.

Okay. We got that picture.

But then there is a whole other layer
to Jesus’ consternation.
He is suddenly alone in a house
with an unknown and unrelated woman.

Even today,
even in our free and open society,
a well-known public figure,
a religious figure no less,
cannot be found alone
in a home with an unrelated
person of the opposite sex.

In Jesus’ day, the taboo was more powerful
and more dangerous
than you and I can possibly understand.
It violated an untold number of religious purity laws
as well as the rigid moral caste
of a tightly stratified society.

It was bad all the way around.

Never mind that he went there to escape,
and to escape people like her.
No matter that he went there to be alone
to recover from people like her.

Never mind that he went there to get away
from people like her – and people
like you and me.
You know, needy people.

Then, on top of all of that,
she wasn’t even Jewish.
She wasn’t even Judean.
She was foreign.
She was a Gentile — alsop like you a me.
In other words, a dirty gentile.

Actually, dirty Gentile is a redundancy.
Gentiles are by nature dirty.
A Gentile was the source of ritual impurity,
and she was the source of moral impurity as well.

Don’t touch,
don’t speak,
don’t acknowledge anyone like her.
That was the rule
and the expectation.
And Jesus, before this encounter,
seems to be mired in that thinking.

If we imagined that Jesus was free
of that sort of bigotry,
as if he somehow lived by 21^st century
North American norms and values,
this story will correct that assumption.

In this story, if we listen,
we can almost hear Jesus thinking:
“Dirty, filthy, pig-eating, gentile;
interrupting my quiet time;
risking my reputation;
begging for special treatment…”

Let’s pause here and remember
that the grandeur in each of our next moments,
is not that they promise to be filled with goodies
like some fat piñata,
but that the next moment
is full
and waiting
to be opened.
What we find there may not be warm and fuzzy
but it likely can wake us up
and even save us from ourselves.

To get what is going on in this story,
I ask you to put aside your disbelief in healing miracles
if you are someone who simply can’t imagine
that kind of supernatural wonder.

When she asks Jesus to save her daughter,
Jesus calls her daughter ‘a dog’ unworthy of scraps.
Now Christians usually come to this story
with an overlay of bizarre dogma
that Jesus was perfect,
and they twist and contort the story with rationalizations
and say he was testing her faith,
or some equally unlikely proposition.

But if we come to the story without doctrine,
and really listen to it,
that is NOT what the story tells us.

The story tells us that Jesus’ knee-jerk reaction
is his own bigotry.
She has poked a whole
in the wasp nest of nastiness
that resides inside Jesus,
just like the ones that reside inside you and me.
Woe to those poor slobs
who unknowingly poke a hole
in the cyst of bigotries and prejudices
that have attached themselves to one of the chambers
in our heart.
Whoever it is, is going to get it.

So now listen to the story with that background.

There is nothing noble in this situation,
for the woman or for Jesus.
Anyone who has known danger to his or her child
knows the unnatural terror
that grips you in that moment.
You do not think or act according to any rules,
you just do what you need to do
to take care of your baby.
Puff up or slink,
beg or demand,
you do what you need to do in that horror-filled moment.
So the Syro-Phoenician woman who has no name,
probably because a privileged man wrote this story,
goes into the house
to ask a perfect stranger for help her.
Jesus is likely her last resort.

It says she ‘begs.” She begs at his feet.

Jesus, who is angry and resentful,
tells her that she and her daughter
do not deserve what he has to offer.
It is the ultimate blaming the poor
for being poor.

The only thing that could be colder
is the way he says it:
“…it’s not fair to take the children’s food
and throw it to the dogs.”

Jesus is telling her that in the scheme of things,
under the universe of God,
it would be ‘unfair’
for her daughter
to get what he has
because she is not one of the deserving children.

He does not even make the scarcity excuse
that there isn’t enough to go around.
Some people get some and some don’t –
you know, the Capitalist argument.
Instead, he says,
it would defy the laws of nature
for him to help her daughter.

Some of the people I knew in El Salvador
had a special kind of scorn they hurled
toward some rich people.
“His dog is fat,” they would say
with a scowl.
What they meant
was that he cares more about his dog
than other human beings who are hungry.

Well, Jesus tells the woman
her daughter is a dog.
The woman is brilliant.
In spite of whatever bitter anger
she may have felt,
instead of spitting in his face she says,
“Yes, sir,
but even the dogs get scraps.”

Now we get to see what makes Jesus Jesus.

Whatever his weariness,
whatever his prejudices,
whatever his bigotries,
whatever his dogmas and theologies,
whatever his grief,
whatever his sorrow,
whatever his own poverty,
whatever his own shadow of dark demons…
he opens himself to the grandeur of that moment.

Suddenly he sees himself reflected in her eyes.
Suddenly he hears himself echoed in her voice.
Suddenly he knows he has been deeply corrupted
and immediately
he turns around
and changes direction.

And by the way, that is the original meaning
of the word, “repent.”
Repent means revolution –
to turn around
and to change direction.

Right there and then,
in that moment
and on that spot, Jesus repents.
A revolution takes place in Jesus
and he changes inside and out.

In fact, if we pay attention to the story,
it says that he leaves Tyre
and goes to the Decapolis –
which was a series of ten Gentile cities.
In opening to that moment
with the woman he had never known before,
he suddenly explodes into a whole new realm.
He suddenly goes where
no prophet has ever gone before…
and we are where we are today as a result.
Dirty, filthy, pig-eating Gentiles
that we are, each
with our own wasp nest of prejudices
forming a cyst of bigotries
upon our hearts,
because of Jesus we know there is an alternative.
Because of Jesus we know we are not condemned
by the demons
that will always inhabit us.
We can decide something different
and a revolution awaits us
if we open to it.

I think that is even greater
and more amazing
than the reptilian dance
of the purple-tongued sand goanna.

That’s all I got. Amen.

14 Pentecost: We see your inscape

August 29, 2021 by Cam Miller

As you may know,
I just spent a week back in the Midwest –
Michigan specifically, and like here,
it is green and luscious from all the rain.

Traveling through corn and soybean fields
flattens the horizon.
Then you get “Up North,”
as they call it in lower Michigan,
where glacial hills and lakes thread through
the Boreal forests.

Passing through the land
and being near where I walked
and fished and played as a child and youth,
seeing the darker, richer soil of Ohio
beneath the longer, flatter, endlessness fields of crops,
and crossing the greater distances — all of it —
opened me up inside
like eucalyptus awakens the brains
with a rush of air.

I had not been to that part of Michigan
for fifteen years.
We saw a young man
running up the hill I used to run up
and Katy said, “Hey look! That was you thirty years ago.”

So returning to the Song of Solomon
and Mark’s story that “It’s not about soap,”
was a bit of a jolt.

Every image in the first two readings
derives from the passion of living large
with one another
in the Garden of Earth.
There is no hint of control.

There is no sense of safety.
There is no modulation of tactile sensation.
There is no neat square frame around love
and hurt and pain
to allow us to pretend that loving
is a safe sport
in which injury is rare
or wounds unheard of.

Then there is the the gospel story.
It reveals a deep fissure in our religion.
It is a conflict that extends at least 3000 years
into the past.

It is a bitter argument
that has hardened
into a kind of Hatfields-and-McCoys divide
witnessed in Judaism and Christianity.

There are such terrible fractures in Buddhism,
Islam, and Hinduism too,
but I’m too much of an outsider there
to speak about them.
In every religion I know anything about
there is a deep division between
purity and prophecy
regardless of what they are called.

It is a snarling, bitter, rarely polite argument
between priests and prophets.
In ancient Israel
it was the struggle between religionists
that emphasized personal moral purity
practiced through ritual, worship,
and the rules of morality,
verses those who were fierce champions
of prophetic demands
for more equitable distribution
of wealth, power, and resources.

To over simplify it, do we “get right with God”
by going to the Temple and sacrificing a pigeon or lamb,
and never eating shellfish or pork?

Or do we “get right with God”
by sharing your resources with those in need,
and agitating those with power
to use their power
to create a human community
that more nearly reflects the love of God?

I have heard Evangelical preachers say,
and I quote,
“Our God washes filthy hearts to be perfectly clean.”
And I have heard sermons elsewhere
about how the Church needs to do right
by the LBGTQ community.
The conflict between purity and justice
is alive and well 3000 years later.

The hand and pot washing referred to in Mark’s story
is not about pandemic hand-sanitizer,
or whether we use Dawn or Seventh Generation,
or wash by hand or in a dishwasher,
or use antibacterial or lavender oil soap.
It is about ritual hand washing
and separating pots and pans
that cook dairy products
from those that cook meat products.
They didn’t know about bacteria and microbes back then,
it had to do with maintaining ancient purity laws —
as in, ritual moral purity.

Clearly Jesus isn’t big on regulating his disciples,
perhaps he didn’t keep those rituals himself –
although it is impossible to say from the story.
But ritual purity was not a priority for Jesus.
Rather, social purity was much more important.
“Fornication” in his day,
among Judeans of the first century
referred to engaging in prostitution.
I am guessing that the social effects of prostitution
upon women
would likely have concerned him far more
than individual sexual behavior.

But what he is saying is this:
What we do with our body,
how we engage other people in relationship,
the ways in which we conduct business,
the means by which we make our money,
how we treat other people…
all of our external behavior
flows from the condition of our internal life.

In other words, and this is what he wanted us to hear:
the landscape of our lives, what others see about us,
is shaped by the inscape of our mind or soul.
Deep space, where we live alone with God,
is the generator of external action.

It is true that WHAT we do
begins to shape who we ARE, inside over time.
But WHAT we do
begins with who we are — inside.

But here is a paradoxical little twist for Jesus,
one that Jesus could not have articulated
since the world in which he lived
was dramatically different from ours:
The environment AROUND US
has the power to shape
who and what we are as well.

The environment around us
has the power to shape who and what we are inside.
If we live our lives
in completely protected environments —
whether it is a human climate zone
like a Mall
or an air conditioned house,
or it is a gated community
that protects us from social diversity,
or it is a lifestyle
in which we simply do not encounter
those who are forced to live
extremely unprotected —
then we will begin to fall asleep, inside.

I am not saying it is impossible to stay morally awake
in a protected environment,
but it is much more difficult.
The more protected we are
from the storms around us,
and I mean that literally as well as metaphorically,
the sleepier our inner-mind becomes.

The sleepier our inner-mind becomes
the more diminished our senses become.
I am speaking here
of our spiritual senses.

You didn’t know we have spiritual senses
in addition to our physical senses?
I am talking about
compassion,
imagination,
intuition,
and reverence.

They are senses — tentacles
that reach beyond us and feel the world around us.
Just as our perception is diminished
when we lose the acuity of
taste, smell, hearing, sight or speech,
when we lose the acuity of
compassion, imagination, intuition, or reverence
then our experience the holy in life
is diminished.

I am not suggesting we all go live in a shack
or pitch a tent tonight in a vineyard,
but I am echoing Jesus’ warning
that when we fall asleep inside
because of extreme comfort and security,
then we not only endanger others by our sleepiness,
but we also diminish our own senses
and ability to experience what is truly valuable
and makes life worth living.

You do not need me
to tell you how to awaken inside,
nor am I an expert on how to do it.
All we need do
is take a few steps out of our comfort zones
wherever we have encircled ourselves in them.
That will make us uncomfortable.
Heck, the pandemic has made us all ill at ease.

All we need do
is practice shutting off the grid
of humanly regulated environments
from time to time.
That will make us uncomfortable.

All we need do
is engage in relationship
with people who are not like us,
or who we imagine are not like us,
and that will make us uncomfortable.

Actually, and I will end with this,
we do not really have to go looking for weapons
to poke through our comfort zones,
all we need to do is acknowledge and focus
on the discomforts
we already have within and around us.
Health problems,
emotional turmoil,
identity issues,
work or vocational concerns,
relationship struggles,
neighborhood problems or squabbles,
and just about any issue or dimension
of public life in and around us.
All of that, when we focus on it,
will awaken us inside.

We get seduced by so many offers
to ignore or deaden
what lives within and around us,
but if we simply allow ourselves
to see
and hear
and feel
then we will awaken
and be led to something new.

Being solidly in the prophetic mold,
Jesus poked and prodded and pushed
his contemporaries
outside their comfort zones
in order to help them see
with new eyes,
and envision with new imaginations,
and feel with others
who they had long felt distant from
or repulsed by.

I hope that coming here
and being with one another,
does a bit of that: poking,
and prodding,
and pushing us
outside our comfort zones.

Here is a little mantra for your week,
from an unlikely source for me to be quoting,
the Chinese Evangelical preacher, Wang Weifan.
But he nailed it when he said:
“The boundaries of the Spirit
depend on the narrowness or breadth
of the heart.”

“The boundaries of the Spirit
depend on the narrowness or breadth
of the heart.”

Leave the protected environments
that keep us comfortably asleep,
and get UNcomfortable
in order to grow the breadth of our hearts.

13 Pentecost: Your Giftedness

August 22, 2021 by Cam Miller

You know, sometimes,
(and this is one of them),
I am compelled to leave the lectionary behind
and branch out on my own.

The New Revised Common Lectionary
has a scratch in it,
and we have been reading and re-reading
the same thread from John’s Gospel
for weeks and weeks. Ugh.

So I am going to jump off
that Mary Oliver poem that is ostensibly
about prayer — but, I think, much deeper.
And catch a lift
from that wonderful psalm 139,
and then land in the midst of…Kurt Vonnegut!

First of all,
if you do not know what a “Hoosier” is
then you probably haven’t read Kurt Vonnegut.
Hoosier is the name of native Indianians –
that is, someone from Indiana.
Vonnegut uses them
as a subtle thread running through his stories.

No one seems to have the definitive
derivative source of the name,
but legend has it
that “Hoosier”
comes from the accent.
As in, when someone knocked on the door,
back in the day, they answered, “Whosetheyer”.

Now that is apropos of nothing.

But I am a Hoosier,
and there is a piece from Vonnegut’s well-known work,
“Bluebeard,”
that I found more inspiring this week, than John.

Here it is:
“…simply moderate giftedness
has been made worthless
by the printing press and radio and television
and satellites and all that.
A moderately gifted person
who would have been a community treasure
a thousand years ago has to give up,
has to go into some other line of work,
since modern communications put him or her
into daily competition
with nothing but the world’s champions….

A moderately gifted person
has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until,
in a manner of speaking,
he or she gets drunk at a wedding
and tap-dances on the coffee table
like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers.

We have a name for him or her.
We call him or her an ‘exhibitionist.’
How do we reward such an exhibitionist?
We say to him or her the next morning,
’Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!’”

And isn’t that so true?

I am a writer of truly moderate giftedness
and it took me forty-five years
to get up the nerve
to try and get something published.

Now, there are so many writers
of truly moderate giftedness
and much less,
who get published with independent presses
or publish works themselves
with what used to be called vanity presses,
that it is extremely difficult
for rare and especially gifted talent
to break through the morass.

Digital publishing
and digital music
and digital everything,
has made so much accessible to the public
that it is now quite difficult
to sort through it all
to find some of the more spectacular talent.

The line between talent and exhibitionism
has been made difficult to discern
by Facebook, Instagram, and Tick Tock,
but Vonnegut’s point still resonates
because it hits close to home
for all of us.

I had a couple children
who eventually became athletes
but the competition was fierce
and the winnowing process astounding.

One of my daughters was a swimmer
and she would blow out other girls
in the 200 yard butterfly at one swim meet,
only to place way back in the pack
at another, bigger swim meet.
She went on to be an eight time All-American
at the DIII level
but put her in the DI pool
and she might not have even placed.

Or my “little” 16 year old who was 6’5”
and a dominant center in Buffalo,
but then we would go
to a basketball tournament in NYC
and he suddenly got shorter and slower.

Or, when planet Earth seemed bigger,
and you were the smartest kid in your high school,
you had to travel a far piece
to realize you weren’t the smartest kid in the world

So Vonnegut is very perceptive
when he recognizes how we keep our
merely moderate giftedness
all bottled up
because there are so many other
more gifted,
true champions
out there.

The Olympics remind us of this every couple of years.

What that means for you and me
is that our creativity
which is the life-blood of giftedness –
lives deep down in us,
deep down
where mushrooms grow.
Down there, in the depth of our hiding places,
our creativity –
which is also the wellspring of joy –
can get depressed.

How many artists are in sales these days?
How many musicians are teaching math
or social studies?
How many dancers are in advertising?
How many poets write copy?
How many authors are working for Verizon?
How many painters are behind the counter at CVS?
How many sculptors went into the ministry?
How many story-tellers spend their days punching a keyboard?
How many athletes grow slow at their desks?
How many gardeners work in file cabinets
or how many spectacular cooks
spend their days drywalling?

What happens to our creativity
when the artist or athlete or performer in us
is buried underneath a 27 hour life in a 24 hour day?
Or for those who are retired,
it may be a reduced energy level
and lack of community or companionship
that holds us back.

But touch the dilemma,
let your own mind search out
where this struggle lives in you,
and we will put our finger
on the core challenge
for anyone
who wishes to deepen their spirituality.

I do not care if you are ninety-six years old
or twelve,
this is a true struggle
worthy of our attention and effort.

What
is your giftedness?
Where
are you allowing it to bloom?
When
is it recognized,
whether simply by you or anyone else?

We all have giftedness.
It may be
mechanical aptitude,
innate Fung Shui,
intuitive fishing acumen,
or any number of less obvious
and more mysterious kinds of talent.

But the question,
the challenge,
is if and how often
we are able to exercise it.

I am thinking of creativity in a very broad sense,
as in our being co-creators with God
in the on-going act of Creation.
Those things we have been gifted with are the very talents that evoke our partnership with God
as we live life within our small place on the planet.

Suppress the gift,
push the creative process to the side
for want of time,
or fear we are not good enough,
or because no one will pay us for it…
and our spirituality will suffer.

Indeed, if we do neglect our giftedness,
if we do not keep fidelity with that gift,
no matter how moderate our talent it is,
then our efforts to grow
and deepen spiritually
will be diminished.

So, let loose “imagination’s tongue,”
as Denise Levertov wonderfully describes it.
Hear the orchestra of life’s fullness –
then taste and see
where the goodness of co-creating with God
can be unleashed with your gifts!

Unleash your gifts!

Even the small ones.
Even the moderate ones.
Even our very least gift,
if truly a gift,
will unleash a process within us
that has enormous power.
At first our legs will feel heavy
because it is scary to be
only moderately gifted
in a world awash with the images of champions.
But there is power even in just beginning.
There is even more power in unleashing it
once we allow it to grow.

So there is the challenge from me to you:
Unleash your gift.

You may never become a champion
or Best Selling author or cook,
but when you free your creativity
to exercise your gift,
you will experience the power of it.

12 Pentecost B: Have you seen the stars?

August 15, 2021 by Cam Miller

I remember reading once,
probably a decade ago,
that in New York City, during a Black Out,
they saw stars.

Real stars!

It was a big deal
because some people there
had not seen “real” stars in the sky
since the previous big major Black Out a
decades earlier.

Now imagine a world
in which there are only “real” stars
because the only human light
is from fire –
as in the kinds that smolder
and go out at night.

Imagine a world
in which humans realize
how small they are
in the vast expanse of interstellar space,
because their ability to forge tools
had not yet morphed into
the creation of machines,
flight,
speed,
or digital communication.

Imagine a world
in which humans live
in intimate relationship
to their surroundings
and are affected daily
by the tidal forces of nature,
the rough terrain of the Earth,
and the whimsical dictates of the weather.

Imagine humans like that
and it is easy to imagine the experience
of a transcendent God.

Transcendence
refers to the complete otherness of God.
The unspeakably awesome Creator of the cosmos
so far beyond our imagination
as to seem almost terrible in proportion —
terrifying actually.

When the ancients, of whatever religion,
speak of the “fear” of God,
it is about awe
more than afraidness.

When the ancients
point to the vastness
of the Creation
and speculate as to what kind of force
could possibly create
such an incredible equation
of matter and life,
it is always with a stutter
or gasp.

But in our mind,
our human mind that is,
we have become quite a bit bigger
that we used to be.

We have tiptoed to the edge
of our own self-destruction
with the creation of truly amazing devices
that both enhance
and screw up life as we know it.
With the power of our own hands,
the Earthen forces of nature
have receded
as we learned to shield ourselves
in environments of our own making.

In this kind of world,
the kind in which we are big
and God is distant,
we tend to seek a more immanent
experience of God – not transcendent but immanent.

That means up close and personal.

We seek the Pentecostal moment
in which we are grasped
by the holy terror
who enters our body space
and makes known, in no uncertain terms,
that God is alive and well
and living in our neighborhood.
In a cosmos that God has to share with us,
immanence is the thirst
and transcendence can seem
kind of antiquated – a bit too Wizard of Oz-ish.

A God that offers “wisdom”
and promises understanding; and
a God that can be eaten
as if bread and wine,
is an immanent God to be sure.
That is a God
that can be prepared and swallowed,
not to mention
told, read, and understood.

Even in our hymns,
while the words may mention
the big, transcendent Creator God,
they still sing about the one
that does stuff for us —
the milkman God
that still delivers to our doorstep.

Wendell Berry’s poem could
potentially be either,
but I think he is pointing
toward the dark sky with stars
filling us with amazement
more than a cuddly, whispering God
that tells us what we hope to hear.

My favorite line in the poem,
because it is also the core of my theology,
is where he writes:
”There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.”

Whether transcendent
or immanent,
we desecrate the holy
when we imagine it is ours;
and we desecrate the holy
when we treat it as if it is ours
to do with what we want;
and we desecrate the holy
when we presume we understand it.

The grand sanctuary of 520 S. Main Street
was built upon the imagination
of God the transcendent —
spectacular,
beautiful,
well beyond our reach.

The intimate space at 78 Castle Street
was formed to imagine
God the immanent
that surfaces among us
with whispers,
and hears the cries
within the closeness of community.

We do both of course:
look upward and outward
toward the transcendent God
who is the force behind and within the cosmos,
as well as peer inwardly
both searching for
and listening to the still small voice
that knows us each by name.

The truth of it all
is that is God both – or in fact,
God is neither
but we experience God in both ways.

The tendency of our tradition,
because it has conserved
the ancient wisdom and practices,
is toward a focus on transcendence.

The tendency of post-modernism,
because we are so uncomfortable
with the overly rational,
formal, and systematic,
is to seek the immanent.

But these need not be, nor should they be,
two poles that pull us apart
or reject each other
when they in close proximity.

Rather, they are natural rhythms
in a well-practice spiritual life.
Religion, old or new,
ought not seek the demise of the other
but rather, incorporate
and be rooted in both.

It is a neat trick if we can do it,
but looking toward the future,
when we have both Trinity Place
and Trinity Church
to worship in,
we ought to be able to figure it out.

Think of the image of the Yin-Yang,
often associated with Buddhism and Taoism.
It is not only about the masculine
and feminine experiences of life,
it can also refer to the transcendent
and immanent experiences of the holy in life.

Moving away from the either/or,
all-or-nothing dualism
so predominant in our moment of history,
and into the embrace
and exploration
of a dance with the holy —
that is both intimate and distant —
is exciting.

Most of us are weighted
toward one or the other.
If you tend to look for and experience
God in the grandeur of nature
or the gush of light through stained glass,
try watching and listening and feeling God
in the face of a friend,
the shared song of our community,
or the presence one can sometimes feel
when people sit in silence together.

If you tend toward that up close
experience of God,
that rush that happens in a group
or even in the stillness
of your own quiet mind,
then lean into the big God.
Lean into the horizon
or the heavens,
or the deep, mysterious unknowns
from which come huge forces
that seem awesome
and even terrifying
in our smallness.

It is a dance, I am recommending.
It is a dance
in which we need to learn
to both lead and follow.

Whichever comes naturally,
we need to lean into
and learn, the other.
It is a spiritual dance
for a spiritual practice,
and young or old,
we can learn it.

Transcendence
and immanence —
the experience of awe
and intimacy
with the Creator
of all that is.

Keep dancing, even if your feet no longer move,
keep doing this dance.

It’s good for what ails you.

16 Pentecost: From A to B (or dying again, and again, and again…)

15 Pentecost: Jesus Repents

Texts for Preaching: “The Greatest Grandeur” by Pattiann Rogers and Mark 7:24-37
For the video version, scroll to the bottom

14 Pentecost: We see your inscape

13 Pentecost: Your Giftedness

12 Pentecost B: Have you seen the stars?

Trinity in Time of Pandemic

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Visit “savetrinity.org” which tells the exciting story of historic re-use striving to be born. You can help us save this magnificent building by visiting savetrinity.org and signing a letter of support! Thank you.

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Texts for Preaching: “The Greatest Grandeur” by Pattiann Rogers and Mark 7:24-37
For the video version, scroll to the bottom