5 Easter: “From Blossoms” to Bread and Wine

May 2, 2021 by Cam Miller

Sermon Text: “From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43012/from-blossoms

From blossoms –
those wafer-thin pedals of color
now adorning trees all around us –
comes a brown paper bag
full of late summer
dusty skinned,
succulent peaches.

Oh, mamma,
the round jubilance of peach,
as the poet says,
can make it seem as if death
were nowhere in the background.
Just life full of blossoms.

If I may,
I want to wax a little bit theological.
Not in an overly academic
or rationalistic way,
but more in the way of blossoms.

The opposite of sacred is not “profane.”
The opposite of sacred is not bad or evil or nasty.

The world, the Creation,
is not divided into sectors
in which the sacred is a dimension we enter
only if we are able to travel
through the ugly profane like a Teflon pan,
and collect no debris.
That is a Medieval world-view
and in it the Church
becomes the gate-keeper of the sacred
as well as the arbiter
of all things sacramental.

We all know how that story ends,
and how corrupt religion becomes
when it assumes that role
and people allow it to.

The opposite of sacred,
the boundary on that other territory
that gives the sacred its definition, is
commonness…ordinariness.
It is not that the sacred is good
and the common is bad;
or that the sacred is pure
and the ordinary corrupt.
We need to get rid of such false distinctions
and moral judgments
if we are to catch a view of the sacred
from our perch in the ordinary.

We live in the ordinary
but we are fortunate
in that we regularly
brush up against the sacred,
and like those blossoming trees
with fragrant scents wafting in the air
around us this spring,
we are reminded of the presence of
the extraordinary in life
and the magnificence of Creation.

Oh, how truly blessed we are –
living from “joy to joy
to joy to joy,
from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”

Even the common,
even the ordinary,
is almost too gorgeous to behold –
hearty with goodness
and succulent with joy.

But the sacred,
the sacred when we glimpse it,
will bring tears to our eyes
and reduce our heartbeat to a quiet pulse.
The sacred will hush
even the rowdiest, most monkey of minds.

But we also know
that while the sacred is not fragile
our hold on it
is astonishingly delicate.

Like rice paper,
or those wafer-thin petals,
the veil
between the sacred
and the ordinary
will simply dissolve
into nothingness
if we are too rough with it
or hold it too long.

It is that very thin veil
that actually allows us to glimpse God.

It is the veil
through which we sniff the holy
and feel God’s warm breath
upon the back of our neck.

It is that thing between us
we may wish to get rid of
that actually allows any near contact at all.

Remember the story
about when Moses gets a glimpse of God?
It turns his face into a brilliant light
and from then on
he must wear a veil over his face.
No one can look on Moses’ face anymore
after that.

Elsewhere, the Bible warns
that to look upon God
is sure and certain death.

It is not death and destruction
as in crime and punishment –
it is more like Icarus flying too close to the sun.
His wings melt.
Well, we just can’t get that close to God
without being obliterated.

We need the veil in order to glimpse the sacred,
just as we need special sunglasses
to look upon a solar eclipse.

That can be maddening to creatures like us.
We do not like limits to begin with,
but to be told that we don’t get a choice
in this scheme
can rub us the wrong way.
But alas, we are limited.

But think about some of the veils
we have available to us.

Blossoms,
and other such exquisite works of nature,
can become a veil for us.
They seem like ordinary old flowering trees
we see every spring
until they aren’t –
until we suddenly see them
in their burst of sweet, delicate beauty
and we gasp: “Uuh!”

But we also make veils
through which we catch a glimpse –
sometimes,
randomly perhaps,
but with a kind of regularity.

We have veils
that work a bit like a favored fishing spot –
someplace we’ve caught fish before
but not always.
Veils that catch the light
and form rainbows sometimes
but not always.
They are a little mysterious
and can even be frustrating
because they let us down as often,
if not more, than they reveal the holy.

I am talking about veils like bread,
and wine,
and even water.

We might rightly ask,
with our most rational mind,
how such things can work –
how ritual can take something at one moment
quite ordinary
and turn it into something,
at the very next moment,
sacred.

How does a blossom turn
from an ordinary tree in flower
into the spectacular presence of the holy
in our midst?
That is precisely how fragile a veil can be.

How can bread,
at one moment common flour and yeast
baked into a crumbly whole,
at the very next moment
become a sacred food
through which time and space is collapsed
and heaven and earth are joined?

How can water,
the most common substance on earth
and the most elemental substance for life itself,
be that clear, wet, thirst-slaking liquid one moment
and the very next appear as a veil upon the sacred?

Well, you know the answer of course?
It is you.
It is us.
Like the shutter on a camera
opening to regulate the light entering through the lens,
we open our minds, or not.
We open our hearts, or not.
We open ourselves to one another, or not.

On one level, the rational level,
these veils
are all human creations.
We construct them.
We make them what they are.
They are not magic.

On the other hand, together — and
it’s always together;
historically and communally, together —
we allow certain things
to open us up.

We allow certain things
to help us see and hear
and feel
what normally we are insensitive to.

We imbue certain moments;
we imbue certain elements;
we imbue certain people;
we imbue certain texts;
we imbue certain relationships —
with the power
to reveal the presence of God
even in the ordinary.

And here is the thing:
If we do not imbue such things with power
we simply do not see,
we simply do not know.
That is why there is a difference
between receiving the communion
as a symbol of something that happened
sometime a long time ago,
and participating in Communion
as a transformative event.

They look the same
but the are worlds apart.
We cannot count on the transformation
taking place every time we receive Communion;
but we can count on something happening
as a result of returning again and again and again
and being present with others in community
as we share those moments.

Something some of us learned
during the pandemic
is that it can even happen
when we are together while apart.

Whether blossoms or bread,
the iris in the eyes of a friend
or an iris growing unexpectedly among weeds,
there are ordinary things
that become veils
through which we glimpse the extraordinary —
the holy in our midst.

It is that simple act of posing
with our hands opened in vulnerability,
waiting in anticipation,
even somewhat awkwardly
while someone mumbles their way toward us
and places in our open, exposed hands
a tiny piece of bread
and a tiny sip of wine.

Week after week after week after week
we do it, and the effect accumulates
and it eats away at our arrogance.

Week after week
the effect accumulates
and eats away at our pretense of self-sufficiency.

Week after week
the effect accumulates
and slowly the veil moves into place
and then one week,
suddenly, without warning,
we see what was standing there all the time:
Love –
love so deep,
so pervasive,
so abundant
and so completely without condition
and impossible to earn or lose.

Love.

Present here in the field around us,
within us,
among us,
so completely surrounding and imbuing us.
Love.
And then the veil reveals it
and we are taken up
in that “joy to joy
to joy to joy,
from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”

How is it that we can sit in the ordinary
and see the sacred?
Only because we allow ourselves
to become so open.

That’s all, just us allowing
the veil to appear —
the one that is there all along.

How great is that?

13 A Pentecost 2020: The Beginning of God (according to Exodus 3:1-15

August 30, 2020 by Cam Miller

Sermon Video

Sermon Text

We are Christians,
but the reason we talk about
the Judeo-Christian tradition
is that we were Jews first.

Jesus, who is the central figure of our religion –
the Wisdom Teacher, Gautama, or Messiah…
the HUGE One at our center – was a Jew.
If we desire to know where Jesus was coming from
then we need to know and feel
the biblical narrative that lived under his skin.

If the empty tomb is the primal Christian moment
then the burning bush is the primal moment in the Hebrew Testament.

There are other rival primal moments though,
unlike in the New Testament,
but Exodus 3:1 through chapter 4:17
is the core primal narrative to which Jesus was rooted.

WWJT – What Would Jesus Think?
Whatever it was, he would have
thought it
through the lens of Exodus 3:1-15.

Now the ancients of many cultures throughout history
believed that a story had power:
If you tell the story,
and you tell it well,
and you tell it often,
then it becomes your story.
Then – then – YOU become part of the story,
and the STORY shapes you
and the story SHAPES those who live with you.

In other words, life becomes shaped
in the image of the story.

On the surface of it,
that sounds ridiculous – we’re too sophisticated
to believe that a story has power
when we know darn well that life is shaped by bacteria,
DNA, and physics.
But be that as it may,
we also know in our bones,

in the muddy and gritty experiences of our lives,
that the ancients were right.
The story we tell shapes life.

This could be a sermon about getting in touch
with whatever story we have hitched our life to –
the story or stories that are shaping who we are and life around us.

That is a pretty big deal,
and discovering our story
is an essential chore of spiritual practice.

But I am sticking to THE story today
because the one evangelical bone in my body –
the mandible bone of the preacher –
thinks this story needs to be the core story
of our primal narrative as Christians.
As I tell you about it,
it will become obvious why it was also
the primal narrative of 18^th and 19^th century slave theology
in the United States.
We would do well to re-enter this story ourselves.

Anyway, just remember that the story we tell
shapes the life we live
and shapes life itself.

In the story of Exodus 3:1-15,
we learn right up front, at the very beginning,
what the differences are
between God and human beings.

Understand please, this is the very first appearance of God
in the whole of the Biblical narrative.

We heard about a few things that God did in Genesis
but until this moment with Moses,
God has been behind the curtain.
It is here that God inserts godself
smack dab in the middle of things.

Also understand
that while we are used to thinking
that the Book of Genesis
is the beginning of the bible, it is not.
Genesis is a prequel –
like the three Star Wars movies added to the first trilogy
to explain how it all began.
Genesis came later,
much later in historical time
and was then added as a preface to the Exodus story.

But the biblical story
really begins with Hebrews in slavery in Egypt.
The story begins by telling us about
an increased cruelty and oppression
heaped upon the slaves
because Egyptians lived in fear of the Hebrews
who had grown to out-numbered them.
All tyranny lives in fear of the oppressed
rising up to overthrow the tyrants.

We read about the same fear among white slave owners
in the colonial United States
and in the pre-Civil War South.

So 3:1 is the first appearance of God in the bible.
First impressions make a big difference.
Let’s look at what we learn about God
right from the beginning.

What strikes me is that, unlike us,
God knows how to create heat and light without fuel.
We, on the other hand, are consumers
from the first moment we slip from the dark.
Our fuel-efficiency is pretty poor too.
But we learn that with God,
as with all energy,
it changes form
but is never destroyed.
Isn’t that the First Law of Thermodynamics or something?

Right there in the burning bush
we have an example of God adorned
in a basic law of physics.

So we, who are consumers of energy
meet God, who is the source of energy.
And then we learn that God,
making a first appearance in the bible,
has in fact been around for a long, long time –
even longer than the story:
“I am the God of your fathers and mothers,” God says.

But now, here, in the second paragraph,
is where we learn the most important things about God –
most important to us human beings, that is.

Right up front God tells us what happened:
First, God says, “I saw the misery of my people.”

Second, God says, “I heard their cry
as they were being beaten and whipped by their taskmasters.”

Third, God says, “I know their suffering.”
I want to stop with this one
and just stare at it for a moment.
Think.
”I know their suffering” means
that God suffers too.
How did our story ever come to include a god
that was impervious to pain and above it all?

Fourth, God says, “I became present to them
so they might be delivered from their oppression.”
And finally, fifth, God says, “I acted,
so that they could be liberated
and be given an abundant alternative.”

I saw
I heard
I knew
I became present
I acted.

Going forward,
whether in Exodus, Ruth, Matthew, or Paul,
we will find one or more of these five characteristics of God.
If we don’t, then it is a different story
we are reading.

This is NOT the story of a god that just hangs out
up there or out there
as an amorphous energy –
that is the story of a different god
from the God in the Exodus story.
We know right up front
that God is a god who sees,
hears, knows,
is present,
and acts.

Now enter human beings.
Moses is the original Prophet –
a religious leader who is equal parts social critic,
political activist, and spiritual guide –
and he is also the prototype of human relationship
with God.

We notice that Moses does something smart
straight off the bat – he hides his face.

He knows, as we all know,
that being in close proximity to God
is like Icarus flying too close to the sun.
We can’t survive such intimate,
unadulterated holiness.
So Moses covers his face and turns away.

But Moses goes downhill from there,
and that is part of the beauty of the narrative:
Story don’t lie.
It is actually a very funny conversation
that gets lost in translation.
It goes like this.

”Moses, I want you to go back to Egypt
and tell Pharaoh to let my people go.”

We have to picture the look on Moses’ face
because Moses is an escaped assassin
with a price on his head –
put there by Pharaoh who felt personally betrayed by Moses.
It was a personal vendetta thing.

God could probably have knocked him over with a feather.
Moses finally responds:
Uh, you know, I am not really up to the job.
I am not powerful enough to face Pharaoh like that.”

Objection number one.

“Not to worry Moses,” God retorts,
“I will be with you and I am powerful enough for both of us.”
“Well that’s nice, O burning bush, but exactly which god are you?
I’m I dealing with a Sun, Rain, Fertility, Earth, or Wind god?
I mean, Pharaoh is a god too,
and he has lots of gods working with him.
I can’t go up against all of that power
without knowing who has my back!”

Objection number two.

”Aw, go on Moses, just go back to Egypt,
gather all the elders around you
and tell them that “I AM” sent you.
You can tell that to Pharaoh too.
Tell him I am is not ‘a’ god
but ‘I am’ THE God.”
“Well, I certainly appreciate you your ‘I AMness,’
but somehow I don’t think they are going to believe
that I am on a first name basis with THE God.”

Objection number three.

If we use our imagination, we can almost see
Moses backing away slowly from the bush
a little more with each objection.
This is where we run out of story
in today’s reading.
But because it is THE story
I am going to tell you how it ends.
God says, “Oh, don’t worry about it,
I’ll give you lots of powerful magic.
Here watch – “
and God does several very cool magic tricks.

While Moses must have been impressed
he may still thought he could smell a rat.
After all, why doesn’t God deal directly to Pharaoh.
Was this I AM god unsure it could prevail over Pharaoh?

Moses surely had plenty of survival instinct like most human beings.
He didn’t make it out of Egypt in the first place
by acting as anybody’s fool.
So Moses says, “Oh Lord, I would love to do what you ask
but really, I have a speech impediment – a very disturbing disability –
and clearly you need someone more articulate than me.

The fourth objection.

At this point God might be getting impatient
and wondering about what kind of partner Moses would be.
”I told you,” God says, “I will be with you
and I will put the words you need
right on your very tongue.”

Moses is running out of excuses.
”Oh Lord, you are so generous,
but why don’t you send someone else?”

The fifth objection.

This time there is anger in God’s voice.
”Look, you little weasel,
I will send your brother Aaron with you.
He has the gift of gab enough for both of you. Now go.”
All five objections are over-ruled so Moses finally has to go.

The whole thing ends up pretty well
following some dramatic moments of suspense.
But this beginning,
which may have been written
as a liturgical recitation of some kind,
is the core of the narrative.
It presents a pretty clear contrast between God –
who sees,
hears, knows,
becomes present,
and acts –
with us human beings –
who fear,
connive,
make excuses,
second-guess,
manipulate,
and resist.

It seems pretty obvious to me
that we have forgotten the power of the story we tell,
or been convinced that we live in a universe
that only has one story to which everything is subject –
a kind of story bubble.

Capitalist economics is one such story bubble –
we’re in a dog-eat-dog world,
and greed is the invisible hand
moving all human behavior,
so the best thing we can do
is be a winner.

Fundamentalist religion is another story bubble –
we have the truth and those who do not believe our truth
are enemies of God.
Our task is to be powerful enough
to make human society conform to truth
and so bring about God’s blessing.

Scientific determinism may be the biggest,
most powerful bubble yet today – it says that since
there is a cause or causes for everything in nature,
whether known or unknown,
and we exist in nature,
then all human action is likewise determined.

So what is your primal narrative?
It really does make a difference
because conscious of it or not,
you and I are acting out the story we have been given
or adopted.

The story we tell,
the one we see ourselves as living in,
is hugely powerful.
And not to put too dark a tone to it,
we better know what story we are in
or which story we want to be in
because there are a whole bunch of people
telling us which story we are in –
and doing so, to appropriate our stories
into theirs.

It seems to me that if our spirituality
actually has any meaning or importance to us,
that the Judeo-Christian story
is one we would want to lean into –
to see it as our story.
I do not mean literally – I am not a fundamentalist.
I mean to understand what that story tells us
about God, ourselves, and the kingdom
that God dreams for us to create on earth.

It is a story that has power
and could have more power
should we opt to live into it.

Well, as they say,
it’s just a story –
a story that each of us is living one way or another.
But it truly matters how we read it
and what version we embrace because,
under the power and influence of story,
it will become the world we live in
and the people we become.

I appreciate you being with me
and listening.
I hope it offers a fertile place for your own thoughts.
Peace be with you.

1 Christmas 2019: Primeval Atom

December 29, 2019 by Cam Miller

You will have to determine
if this sermon is about the Big Bang or
angels in my head.

From time to time
someone will ask me
why I always dig around
and poke things
when it comes to faith,
the bible,
and God.
Usually it is less of a question
and more of a statement,
as in, “cut it out.”

The answer to that question
or complaint, is:
the Gospel of John
and the Big Bang Theory.
In the beginning…there was a bang.
In the beginning,
the name for the theory of the “Big Bang”
was, “the hypothesis of the primeval atom.”
I’m not kidding,
that was the first name of the theory.

I’m guessing that “primeval atom”
may have sounded too theological
to gain general respect in science
so they went with a more sophisticated:
The Big Bang Theory.
Then, to confuse everything,
they made a television sitcom by the same name.
Anyway, the Big Bang Theory
and a variety of nuanced speculations
that fall under that general moniker,
is our best guess
about what happened at the beginning…of everything.
But the theory does not really
tell us about the beginning.
You see, we have absolutely no evidence
or even computer models
for what happed
or existed
BEFORE the big bang
that then led to a Big Bang.
And so, the Big Bang Theory
does not provide any explanation
for an initial circumstance
or the particular conditions
that produced the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is more about what has happened since –
an explanation
for what is NOW
rather than what was at the beginning.

From what we can see and imagine
taking place in the universe NOW,
we know that the farther away
a galaxy is from our vantage point
the higher the velocity
with which it is moving.
That also suggests
the further back in time we go toward the big bang
the more extreme
will be the densities and temperatures
of all the stuff in the cosmos.

Based upon such observations
we have constructed imaginative models
to demonstrate how it all began
from one giant explosion

so powerful
that billions and billions of years later
the cosmos is still expanding outward from its force.
(One of the big questions
and little arguments now however,
is when will the expansion stop
and the cosmos fall back in on itself…
or perhaps, some argue,
that process has already begun).

Anyway, the Big Bang Theory
makes a lot of sense
even if it still doesn’t tell us
about the beginning –
before the bang.

“In the beginning was the Word…”
John doesn’t tell us about the beginning either.
“The Word”
is just a gap-filler too, John’s gap-filler.

The author of John’s gospel
wants to make the theological argument
that Jesus
was the primeval atom.
And honestly, that is not so strange
because everyone who wonders about such things –
whether in religion,
science,
or science fiction,
also wonders about that primeval atom.
The primeval atom is the Holy Grail
of human inquiry.
It is the thing
we wish we knew
but are unlikely to ever know – ever.

In religion,
philosophy,
and science
there is routine banter
between those that believe
the cosmos comes from NOTHING
and those that believe
it comes from SOMEthing.
Was there ever a time when there was nothing?
Or, was there always something
from which time itself
was then created?

For those who look to the bible for answers
to such daunting questions
there are two creation stories
in the Book of Genesis:
one in which God makes the Creation from nothing
and the other in which God
makes the Creation out of what was in the beginning.
It must be maddening
for those who insist on only one answer.

“In the beginning was the Word…”
it seems to me, was just John’s way of punting.
But it was a pretty good punt.
John doesn’t make a commitment
to either side of the argument about the beginning
except to say that either way,
Jesus was there.

Still, I prefer the first Genesis story:
In the beginning there was nothing
and then God created an oozing,
bubbling, broiling water
that covered the face of the earth.
Because the bible doesn’t care much about the rest of the cosmos,
except as it relates to the earth and human beings,
it doesn’t say much about the process
or sequence in which everything else came to be.
It punts too, just like John did.

But the bible imagines the beginning of the earth
much like science does in all those classic
museum miniature models:
giant, hot shallow seas
covering the planet like a hand over a face;
a scalding soup of micro-organisms
with chunks of biologicals
we can only imagine.
And eventually,
out of that ooze
emerges LIFE.

Squiggling cells
burst forth into ever greater complexity
until there is abundant LIFE.

I suppose most people could care less
about such speculation.
Most people, I suspect,
do not spend much time fretting about
Creation out of nothing verses
Creation from something –
or angels on the head of a pin for that matter.

In fact, it does not matter
what we think one way or the other.
It does not matter
which side of the argument we come down on
and it does not matter if we never wonder
about the beginning
or angels for that matter.
What matters is that
we wonder,
because the end of our wondering
is probably the end of abundant life too.

When I was still a pretty new parent,
and our first child was only about three or four,
she asked me out of the blue,
“God made everything?”

“Yes,” I murmured
as I went on doing what I was doing,
more engaged in my own project
than with the small wonder at my feet.
“Then who made God,” she asked flatly.

Her question stopped me in my tracks.

Just like all the parents since then
who have asked me how to respond
to their child’s questions
about God or death,
I froze.

I remember reminding myself at the time,
that she was too young for abstract thought –
because that doesn’t come along until age six,
or even seven, eight, or nine.
But there she was,
her little toe-headed curls
and blue eyes looking up at me.

“Well, what do you think, sweetie?”
I finally asked, then waited with baited breath
to hear wisdom from the mouth of a child.

“I don’t know,” she said nonchalantly,
and went on picking clover
and talking to her doll as if she hadn’t just asked
the biggest question in the world.

When small children ask us
questions about
life and death and God,
and we give them answers
as if we actually know the answer,
we are dulling their curiosity.
Far better to invite their wonderment
without filling in the gaps
that are full of mysteries we can’t answer.

Perhaps one reason you come to a place like this
is to wonder about such questions –
because there are profound gaps
in our own knowledge.

We often have a knee-jerk instinct
to fill those gaps
in hopes of making ourselves feel better –
especially as grief piles up.

We think that filling the gaps with answers
will make us feel better
and will dull the pain of grief
or staunch the swirl of anxiety
that builds up with each loss
or sorrow
that we collect along the way.
Loss after loss takes its toll
but even loss
is part of abundant life.
Filling the gaps with answers
made up like placebos
to dull the pain
also dulls our curiosity
and limits our openness to the holy.
Answers
that are not really answers
stultify our wonderment.
Muffling curiosity
and wonderment
retards growth and shallows our depth.

So, at least from my point of view,
if we want to host a vibrant spiritual community
we will not be in the answer-business.
Instead, we will be in the question-business.

John’s Gospel claims
that Jesus is the “Word”
and that in the beginning
the “Word” was with God.

We can ask, “What the heck does that mean?”
And we can wonder openly about it
and maybe even come to a different speculation
than John does.

We can wonder about the God-in-the-baby thing too, you know, we can ask how Jesus could be God AND human.
We can be perplexed about the claim
that Jesus was perfect
given that we do not know any perfect human beings.
We can push up against the claim
that one human being born thousands of years ago could have something to do
with our own spiritual salvation.
In fact, we are welcome to wonder
about whether there is such a thing
as spiritual salvation –
as in, from what do we need salvation?
It is not all that bad to ask why God
would create a system
in which some people get to play the harp
on gilded clouds
while others gnash their teeth?
It is okay, of course, to dig around in claims
that one religion is the exclusive guardian of ultimate truth.

To wonder and discuss and explore such things
will lead us to think more about
our own community,
and to be more curious about other people
and their communities.
Like the layering pedals
unfolding a rose,
one question will lead to another
and the greater our sense of wonderment
the fuller our imaginations will bloom.
The more our imagination blooms
the deeper we will travel into the depths of our lives,
and once there,
the more we will hear
and the more we will see
and the more we will understand
even as we get clearer and clearer
about the gaps in our knowledge.

It turns out that in the beginning
was awe and wonderment.
And wouldn’t you know,
even the bible claims that the beginning of wisdom,
is indeed awe…and wonderment.

So let us invite awe
and then share our wonder.
Amen.

Proper 22A: Poetry, Chimpanzees, and a God Not Hidden

October 8, 2017 by Cam Miller

As you know, I like poetry.

I write poetry,
and I have some published poems.
But I am a hack –
a poet-wannabe that will never achieve
the exquisiteness of language
rendered by some of the poets I love most:
Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Anne Sexton, or Li-Young Lee.

The ceiling on my abilities
is limited by how little I understand about language,
even the language I speak.
I know enough to be amazed by such poets
but not enough to write like that myself.

Therefore, I marvel all the more at Isaiah.

Two thousand, six hundred years ago, in Hebrew,
Isaiah wrote exquisite poetry
with an elegance I can only stutter over.

Check it out.
In Hebrew, a language I do not speak or read by the way,
one of the words for justice, is “mishpat.”

A very similar word to mishpat can mean bloodshed.
It is almost the same, but it is mishpach:
m-i-sh-p-a-ch (“k” sound instead of a “t” at the end).
Mish-pat and mish-pach.

Likewise, a word for righteousness
and a word that means, to cry
are almost the same.
Righteousness is “tsedeqah.”

But a word meaning, a cry,”
is tse’ahqah.
t-s-e-‘-a-h-q-a-h.
(“ah” in the middle instead of “de” in the middle).

The point is, Isaiah
is playing with similar sounding words
that have poignantly different meanings.
His poem says:
God expected mishpat but saw mishpak,
and God expected tse-de-quah but heard tse-ah-quah.

In English: God expected justice but saw bloodshed,
and anticipated righteousness but heard cries.

I once read an article about Jane Goodall –
I have long since forgotten where I read it,
but it described her thirty-year study of chimpanzees.
Her research, of course, is legendary
and had a broad focus.
But this particular article was about the history of events
taking place in a community of chimps
that she observed for three generations.

To bring her study closer to home,
her observation of a particular chimp colony of over time,
would be like someone observing the city of Geneva
for sixty years, and noting what took place
within and among a given neighborhood.

In Goodall’s study, she gives names to each chimp
and identifies each one’s role in the community,
and evocatively describes each one’s death.

Beginning in 1960, Goodall describes
an idyllic community of interdependence
where communal affection and parenting is commonplace,
and care for the aged intentional and well-developed.

Then something changed.

I do not remember if she even knew the cause or not,
but suddenly a war broke out among the chimpanzees.
It was a protracted and bloody war,
with weapons and deadly ambushes and attacks.
The war ended in genocide.

In the end, the conquering group
systematically destroyed every member
of the opposing clan, including infants.
The dead were left for scavengers.

Peace then ensued, for a time.
But then an even more wretched development took place.
The dominant female and her daughter,
began the practice of cannibalism.
Goodall described how the mother/daughter team
would forcibly snatch a newborn from other females,
and eat them.

This new, awful practice of course,
ensured the continuation of only their genetic strain.

The final, sad chapter
of Goodall’s history of twenty-six chimp generations,
was a polio epidemic.
The original community was largely destroyed
and in the end only a few remained.

When I first read this account of war,
genocide,
and cannibalism
among a species not our own,
I was shocked and dismayed.
I had assumed such carnage was a human dysfunction.
I had always felt that God
was in the frenzied buzzing of bees
and in the undulating chamber of the human heart,
but looking at that chimp story,
I could see atrocities were in there too.
What’s going on?

God expected justice but saw bloodshed,
anticipated righteousness but heard cries.

All of that leads us to the gospel of Annie Dillard:
“The surface of mystery is not smooth,
any more than the planet is smooth,
let alone a pine.
Nor does it fit together;
not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules
is a perfect match…
Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding radicality,
extremism, anarchy.
If we were to judge nature
by its common sense or likelihood,
we wouldn’t believe the world existed.
In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade.
The whole creation is one lunatic fringe…”

Oh my goodness, is that so true!
The whole creation is one lunatic fringe!

And yet, we dither around trying to put the pieces together
in some kind of perfect order,
tied into a nice package without a seam,
wrapped with a splendid bow –
as if we can be what no other thing is:
a perfectly smooth life without ruffle or rage.

I remember when my youngest son was in fourth grade,
he had a science project to complete.
I think the assignment was to pick a problem to solve
and provide an original solution.

First of all, please understand
that when I took an aptitude test once,
I scored in the bottom three percent
for mechanical aptitude.
My son, in fourth grade, had already surpassed me.

Anyway, his idea was to make a hanging rod for a closet
that a short person, or someone in a wheelchair,
could lower and use to hang his or her coat up.
I was dutifully impressed with his idea,
and purchased the supplies he thought he needed:
dowel rod, pulleys, and twine.

He finished it and it worked.
I watched him demonstrate it and immediately,
I wanted to show him how to make it look better.
Never mind that it worked just fine.
I began telling him my ideas and as I did,
I noticed that his whole face seemed to glaze over.
It was as if he had said, “You’re making me tired, Dad.”

That is how I imagine God looks at us
when we fret about our obvious imperfections,
or even our gaping failures, for that matter.
God looks bored,
as if to say,
“You’re making me tired,
go look at the lunatic fringe I created.”

I love Annie Dillard’s brilliant understanding:
“If creation had been left up to me,
I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination or courage
to do more than shape a single,
reasonable sized atom, smooth as a snowball,
and let it go at that.”

Oh, so true.
Smooth, clean, and orderly
is an imprint of perfection with which we are obsessed.
Even if we have the creativity and imagination
to mix and match,
and play with color,
chances are we will still be driven
to get it just right.

All of us
have an idea of the way the world is supposed to work;
that our lives are supposed to be lived;
and the way we will know when we have done enough.

We have a tyranny of ideas
imposed upon us from above, and within,
built up over time like dead skin forms a callous.

A tyranny of ideas
about the way we are supposed to look,
about the way we are supposed to act,
about the way we are supposed to think,
about the way we are supposed to succeed.
None of it, I suspect, even comes close
to the rough and peculiar surface of mystery.

Instead we have a mania for management, machinery,
and refinement
rather than the abounding radicality
that is the lunatic fringe we call creation;
that we call God.
In fact, rather than see God through the lens
of creation’s lunacy,
we imagine God as a singular, smoothed out atom.

Blaise Paschal wrote that any religion that does not
affirm God is hidden, is not true.
But God is not hidden by creation:
creation is rather, a sacrament
that reveals God –
that opens up to show us
the hand of the Creator in all its marvelous,
terrifying, incredible, and lunatic elements.

God is hidden, instead,
by our penchant for perfection
and our ideal for smooth, orderly, progression –
or worse, our presumption of God
as wedged into the past,
preserved in our precious temples
and place under the glass of time.

But nothing could be farther from the truth.

God is hidden behind our blinders,
the ones that would have us cast the world
in our own image –
and not even our actual image,
but an idyllic projection of ourselves
we have built up and expanded
into something monstrously dangerous.

It seems to me, that we need to intentionally dismantle
the OZ-God projected in human image
on the big screen of our imagination,
and instead, peer into
the exquisite details, even
beginning with just the surface of the Creation.

If we look upon the atom and molecule
we will see traced the great mystery.

Everything about life –
from drunken chlorophyll soaking up light
to the sucked-dry blemished wrinkles on our own faces –
reveals God,
holds God,
is tinged and tangled with God.

We need to turn our gazes away from perfection,
maniacal penchants for orderliness,
and lust for smooth outlines to life,
and get wild with God.
We need to turn away from our unreal ideals
and fantasy images
about our lives
our bodies
our minds
and ourselves.

Instead, we need to turn toward the faint tracing
on the surface of our lives
that point to God,
a god who is present in every moment.

Instead, we need to turn toward the roughness,
the blemishes,
the goofiness and crazed thinking,
and all the strange and peculiar things
about ourselves that tell the real story,
and reveal the real God.

If the question of agnosticism is,
“Who turned on the lights?”;
and the question of faith is,
“Whatever for?”;
then the question of spiritual practice is, “How?”

How can we learn to see the presence of God
here and now,
in life and in ourselves,
as we really are –
instead of how we wish the world
and our own lives were?

Proper 17A 2017: God

September 3, 2017 by Cam Miller

800 BCE, first known mention of the God of Israel

Text for Preaching

Exodus 3:1-15

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.

Matthew 16:21-28

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Sermon

You may or may not have noticed,
but I do not preach much about “God.”

Instead, I start with the Bible
or the Liturgical Reading,
and dig into whatever it says.
Wrestling with the readings
to imagine what the author or editor
wanted us to hear –
given his or her context –
is usually where I like to start.

Starting there usually offers plenty of wisdom
to then explore and share
over the twelve or fifteen minutes
I have to preach –
which may feel like an eternity to you,
but feels short to me.
I am reticent to preach at length
on something I know so little about – God.
But today is different.
Today, because of that Exodus story,
I feel emboldened.
So let’s just notice
what we have spread out here before us.

There is a fire that burns without consuming.

Turns out, that is a metaphor for God.
As we read on,
in Exodus and elsewhere,
we learn about a god that loves without controlling,
gives freedom without conditioning,
desires justice without punishing,
and offers mercy without questioning.

We have here
a fire that burns without consuming,
which stands for love so perfect
even we can almost feel it –
though we cannot get close enough to touch it.

We can almost imagine the kind of love that kindles fire
even though we actually never know it like it knows us.

What we have here
is a god who sees misery.
Think on that, pause on it,
get curious about it.

This god that burns without consuming
has lost its innocence,
and been defiled,
by the sight of infants impaled upon swords.

This god that sees,
has seen women violently battered and abused.
This god that sees,
has watched men enrich themselves
while trading other men for gold.

This god that sees,
does not look away
and does not squint.
This god that sees,
stares at misery through tears.

But we notice so much more in this story
if we pay attention.

We discover a god
who hears.

We should be shocked by that –
really, if we are at all honest,
we should be amazed by a god who hears.

This god that hears,
hears slaves scream.

This god that hears,
listens even to dispossessed, marginal, enslaved people
scream while bleeding at the hands of taskmasters.

This god that hears,
listens to the cry of a single human voice
even amidst all the music and noise of the cosmos.

This god that hears,
can even hear the quiet, internalized agony
hidden in a human heart,
beating within the envelope of these pews –
right here, right now.

This is a god who can focus on the music of Niagara Falls,
a songbird at dusk,
an oboe playing in the stillness of some empty cathedral,
AND, while hearing all of that,
still hear
your silent pain and mine.

A god that sees
and a god that hears
is more than we can imagine,
at least in our right minds.
But what we have here,
is a god who also knows – us.

This is a god
who actually experiences us.
Seriously, a god that is embodied in us.

This is a god
that could just as easily
have created the cosmos
and let it go like a spinning orb,
just to watch what happened.

This is a god
that could have dispassionately experimented with us,
or simply smirked at our foolish state,
from an invulnerable perch of otherworldliness.

But instead, this is a god
who chose to experience us – that is, know us –
from the inside out.

Think about what that means.
Seriously, bore into the notion
of what it means that god knows us,
and experiences life as we live it.

In order to do that,
to know us,
this god must be vulnerable like us.

You see, to know us is to suffer, like us.
To know us is to explode with joy, like us.
To know us is to be amazed by hope, like us.
To know us is to have tasted love so sweet it hurts, like we have.
To know us is to have reached beyond our grasp for something we desperately wanted
and come up short, just like we have.

What we have here before us
in this story from Exodus,
the story at the beginning of the story,
is a god who hears us
and knows us
and sees us;
a god who is with us like a second skin –
or maybe under the first one.

So now,
because we have a god who knows us like that,
it is only natural for us to want to know God
with the same intimacy.
That is what Moses asks:
he wants to know God as God has known us.
Tell us about yourself, God.
Tell us who you are.
Let us hear.
Let us see.
Let us know you, as you have known us,
Moses chirps with utmost eagerness.

“No,” God says.

The god who knows us so well
is also a god who refuses to be known.

“I will be who I will be,” is God’s answer.

In other words,
You are unable to know me the way I know you.
You are unable to see and hear and experience me,
as I see and hear and experience you.

What we have here is a god
who burns but does not consume,
sees but is not seen,
hears but is not heard,
knows but is not known;
a god that loves without controlling,
gives freedom without conditioning,
desires justice without punishing,
offers mercy without questioning,
and knows us from the inside out but is not known by us.

All of that is why I avoid talking about God
if I can help it.

5000 years later,
we do not know anymore about God
than Moses did standing on that mountain.
The best we can do
in the presence of this kind of god,
is to take off our shoes and be amazed –
and be grateful.

But let’s be honest.
Amazement and gratitude is never enough
for creatures like you and me.
We want it all.

We want definition.
We want proof.
We want a god who fits within the laws of nature –
even though we do not fully understand those laws,
or that nature.

We want a god
that acts like we expect a god to act,
and do what we need a god to do.
We want a god
we can prop upright in the corner
that will listen while we yammer.

Amazement and gratitude are all well and good
in the moment that we feel them,
but what’s after that?

We want a god
that does stuff, and does the stuff
we ask that god to do.

That’s who we are.
But let’s stop right there and pause.
Is what we want, what we need?

Did you ever feel truly heard by a friend?

Remember what that feels like?
Remember pausing from the long, woeful description
of your pain and fear
as you realized that your friend
had actually been listening intently.
Remember how it felt to know
he or she not only heard your words,
but also heard the feelings within tears
rolling down your cheeks,
and the ache gripping your heart,
and the knot tying up your stomach?
Remember what that felt like,
to be held within the rapt attention
of someone else’s caring?

Amazing, right?

So then, can you remember a time so horrible
that the only thing anyone could do for you,
was just…to be there?

Remember what that was like?

They were just there with you:
not asking or doing,
not trying to fix or cover up the awfulness
of what you were going through,
but just there for you?

Maybe at the time it didn’t seem like that big a deal,
but as you looked back, you realized how crucial
and how powerful
their willingness to just be there with you
was, and the impact it has had.
It was a grace, wasn’t it,
if ever there was grace in your life?
They were just there with you,
and in retrospect, you are so very grateful.
Remember that?

The bravery of simple presence,
and the courage to experience
what someone else is experiencing,
is powerful beyond words.

Even if that was all we ever got from God,
wouldn’t be enough?
Would we demand more?
Do we really need more?

I think what we see
when we take a syringe
to the heart of this Exodus story,
and extract a single drop of its healing blood,
is a god who hears,
who sees,
who experiences,
who becomes present,
and who points to a way out.

I know we like to get all miraculous
and supernatural about such stories,
and make inflated claims and promises
for things we have never seen or heard,
before or since,
but I do not think we need to do that with this story.

What this Exodus story actually offers,
tucked up under the gold leaf and statues,
is much more basic
and much more powerful.

Being known from the inside out,
and knowing the presence
that extinguishes the darkness,
is plenty powerful enough.

A god who sees,
a god who hears,
a god who knows,
a god who experiences,
a god who is present,
and a god who points to the way out,
is plenty powerful enough for creatures like us.
Don’t you think?

5 Easter: “From Blossoms” to Bread and Wine

13 A Pentecost 2020: The Beginning of God (according to Exodus 3:1-15

Sermon Video

Sermon Text

1 Christmas 2019: Primeval Atom

Proper 22A: Poetry, Chimpanzees, and a God Not Hidden

Proper 17A 2017: God

Trinity in Time of Pandemic

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