The journey into darkness...

NOTE: Here are my notes for this coming Sunday's message: October 18th, 2009. I will be away later in the week exploring some of the arts and music of this region. There is a jazz fest in town - and some great exhibits at MassMoca and the Clark - so I will be taking some time to see what they are saying to my soul. And then on Sunday, after worship, it is our second annual CROP Walk to End Hunger. Please go online www.churchworldservice.org/site/TRpx=1295280&fr_id=4303&pg=personal to make a contribute to support my goal of $250. Also, if all goes well, we'll have a version of this week's song to post soon, too. Thanks for reading and supporting this ministry.

THIS WEEK'S TEXTS:
+ Job 38: 1-7/34-41
+ Psalm 91
+ Mark 10: 35-45

The late depth psychologist, Carl Jung, once observed that just as the Lord Jesus Christ called us to discover his presence in the world through the least of these my sisters and brothers – that is, within and among the hungry, tired, wounded and broken lives out there – he also invited us to discover God’s presence within our own hungry, tired and wounded places. It seems that simultaneously there are two realities when it comes to God’s kingdom:

• Out there – in the world – where we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

• And in here – within – where there are just as many hurting, angry, frightened, confused and broken places as there are out in the world.

The biblical text reads: “When did we see you, Lord and bring you comfort? Whenever you did so unto one of the least of these my sisters and brothers: for I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was homeless and you gave me a room, I was shivering and you gave me clothes, I was sick and you stopped to visit, I was in prison and you came to me.” (Matthew 25) We’re talking about God’s kingdom within and among us, ok?

Today, in part two of our series, “Wrestling with God’s Absence,” I am going to share with you two touchstones that souls’ far wiser than I have discovered to be essential for guiding people through the darkness of life’s hard times. (Next week I’ll give you two more; I was going to try to get them all into this message but… it’s just too much.)

Now let me be clear: every journey with Christ to the Cross is unique and filled with surprises that no one can anticipate. So I am not talking about a one size fits all approach, ok? At the same time, there are often at least these two indispensable standards that can help us discover both the deeper meaning of our anguish when truth has been obscured and how to embrace it, too.

You see, when it comes to the dark night – or the way of Christ’s cross – there are no guarantees. Some people actually waste their time with the Cross. They distract themselves or deny the truth that is all around them, blaming others or self-medicating their pain until the worst has passed. And the sad fact is that while this breaks God’s heart, we are made with free will and if we choose to flee the wisdom of the Cross and our wounds, we will also miss the resurrection. St. Paul spoke of this with great clarity in Romans chapter one:

What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn't treat God like God, refusing to worship the One who is Holy, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in her hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand. At which point God said, in effect, "If that's what you want, that's what you get." And it wasn't long before people were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth, inside and out… all because they traded the true God for a fake god and worshiped the god they made instead of the God who made them—the God we bless, the God who blesses us.

Did you hear that? We can choose to ignore God’s calling – which is always more of an invitation than a summons – and if we keep distracting ourselves and avoiding the wisdom of our wounds, then the One who is Holy seems to step back and say: “If this is truly how you want to live your life – acting always on your own terms without regard for my grace – ok – have it your way.”

• Not in penalizing or mean-spirited way – there are no divine thunder bolts of judgment here – just a broken-hearted Father or Mother letting their strong willed child experience the full consequence of their choices.

• You want to live in my absence? Then go ahead… have it your way.

I think that is part of what is taking place in the lesson from Job today. At its core, I hear God is saying to Job: “Yes, you’ve suffered – and yes it is miserable – what’s more it makes perfect sense for you to be angry and bitter against me. So give me your best shot – I can take it all – I’m God. But don’t stop there: have you learned nothing from your sorrow? There is wisdom and depth to be gained from the hard times, too. So don’t for a moment think that you are greater or smarter than the very Source of Creation because I am in the darkness as well as the light!” Listen to the words of Job – they are brilliant:

Have you ever gotten to the true bottom of things, explored the labyrinthine caves of the deep ocean? Do you know the first thing about death? Do you have one clue regarding death's dark mysteries? And do you have any idea how large this earth is? Speak up if you have even the beginning of an answer. Do you know where Light comes from and where Darkness lives so you can take them by the hand and lead them home when they get lost? Why, of course you know that. You've known them all your life, grown up in the same neighborhood with them!

Do you hear the irony – and challenge – in God’s questions to Job when this broken, wounded soul is at his lowest? This is rich territory, beloved, words that need to be mined deeply. For in this perplexing, honest and sometimes startling exchange between Job – a human being just like you and me – and God – the compassionate Creator who takes all of Job’s anger and questions seriously but also puts them into the context of their deepest significance – is an invitation to mystery.

• “Do you really think you understand the way life and death works better than… their Source? Go deeper, man! There is a power and truth greater than your ability to comprehend – there is a wisdom richer than your immature imagination – so work a little harder and remember: you are NOT the center of the universe.”

• And that is the first touchstone: coming to terms with the shock that our anguish and pain can be filled with mystery and insight that is rarely recognized at the onset of our woes. Simply stated: we don’t get what’s going on at the start of our troubles – it takes time.

Job couldn’t make any more sense out of his sorrow at first than the disciples could at the foot of the Cross. In the beginning, it all looks like tragedy – or a waste or something worse – because it takes time and careful discernment to discover God’s light in the darkness. God’s mysteries do not bear fruit as blessings overnight.

• Think of Good Friday: nothing good about it on Friday, right? But on Sunday – Easter – this same horrible mystery had become something very different and hope-filled, yes?

• Or consider Christ’s birth: the poetry of the Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit overshadowed a young, frightened Palestinian peasant girl who didn’t understand anything that was happening at first but was open to God’s blessing so that eventually – nine months later – hope was born through her flesh. This stuff takes time to ripen.

Theologians talk about this as the wisdom of the Paschal Mystery: the hidden truth of God that takes on the rhythm revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It points to how God can take something bad and transform it into something good with time, grace and attention – and it is never obvious in the beginning. Again, St. Paul is the master in the book of Romans:

We believe that there is NO condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. What’s more we know that in everything God works for good with those who love God and are called according to God’s purpose. (NOT that everything IS good, but that it can become good with God’s grace.) That is why we tell everyone that nothing – neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities or powers, nor things present or things to come, nor height, depth of anything else in all of creation – will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord… so even when we are beaten with troubles…we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we're never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary—we can't round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!

Touchstone number one tells us that in the beginning it is impossible for us to know that God can turn even death into the font of life. When the darkness first overcomes us, we feel helpless – abandoned – bereft and bewildered – because, you see, we’re supposed to. We are not the center of the universe. We have rarely cultivated gravitas. Hell, most of us are too busy – caught up in solving problems – to let the darkness teach us anything. So, at first, much like Job – or even James and John – we are mostly disorientated about the deeper truths. Thomas More, one of our generation’s wisest writers, makes this observation in his book, The Dark Night of the Soul:

You probably have learned more about the depths of your soul from those periods of pain and confusion than from times of comfort. Darkness and turmoil, you see, stimulate the imagination in a certain way. They allow you to see things you might ordinarily overlook. You become sensitive to a different spectrum of emotion and meaning… and perceive the ultraviolet extremes.

And that is touchstone number two: to discover the hidden presence of the Lord in our anguish, we have to cultivate our imagination. How does the Bible put it? Let those with ears to hear – and eyes to see – affirm what the Spirit is saying to the church? We’re talking a new language – a new way of seeing and living – and anything new takes time to ripen and develop roots.

• Have you ever learned a foreign language?

• As an adult? It is much harder, isn’t it?

Some of you know that over the summer, Dianne and I spent some time in Montreal – one of our favorite places in North America – and before we left we tried to upgrade our French vocabulary. We would practice different drill driving in the car – or when commercials came on the TV – and while I won’t say we got a whole lot better, we made some progress. So much so that we could go into a market or restaurant and say with authority, “Bonjour!” After that, however, it was a total crap shoot and more often than not we would have to plead: “Parlez-vous Anglais?”

Learning a new language isn’t automatic – it takes practice – and a whole lot of encouragement, too. Isn’t that what Jesus is teaching his disciples in today’s text: a new vocabulary of depth and imagination?

You've observed how godless rulers throw their weight around," he said, "and when people get a little power how quickly it goes to their heads. It's not going to be that way with you. Whoever wants to be great must become a servant. Whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave. That is what the Son of Man has done: He came to serve, not to be served—and then to give away his life in exchange for many who are held hostage. (Mark 10)

The first shall be last – the leader is a servant – the way to find eternal life is to die to your self? What is that but poetry, my friends, imagination talk – the upside down wisdom of the arts – that takes words and symbols, sounds and stories as well as movement and images and teaches us to explore the extraordinary presence of God at a deeper level in our ordinary experience?

• Are you with me? To go deeper, you see – to explore the mystery of our dark times on the way of the Cross – requires new tools. And the second insight or touchstone is that only the creative arts can help here.

• Therapeutic or clinical language – let alone our obsession with engineering – won’t help on the way of the Cross. Most of our ordinary words talk about curing and fixing things – solving problems in a literal sense – but the dark time of suffering is not a problem or a disease… it is a journey.

So we need new ways of sharing and exploring what this journey might mean – and on this all the spiritual masters all agree: the only way to go deeper and gain insight in the darkness is with the imagination. “In your darkness,” Thomas More observes, “the truth can only be expressed aesthetically – in story, picture, film, music or dance. Only when ideas are poetic do they reach the depths and express our new reality.”

That’s why I keep insisting that we bring contemporary music and poetry and art and film into to our sacred conversations: it is the only language that can help us unlock part of the mystery – and – help us share our experience with others, too.

• Here’s what I mean: I can teach you all day long and all night, too, about God’s radical grace. I can give you countless biblical and theological examples of how God aches for us to be nourished and comforted. What’s more I can make a pretty convincing case that the best thing we can do for the Lord is incarnate God’s love through radical acts of hospitality.

• And at the end of our time together you will have retained a little information and maybe a few insights. But, if I share with you a song that is tender and true, a tune that evokes these same truths but through the mystery language of music, then you will feel in your heart – and know in your soul – what is really at stake.

So that’s what I’m going to do along with my colleagues in mystery.

I can tell by the way you're walking

That you don't want company
I'll let you alone and I'll let you walk on
And in your own good time you'll be
Back where the sun can find you

Under the wise wishing tree
And with all of them made

We'll lie under the shade
And call it a jubilee

And I can tell by the way you're talking

That the past isn't letting you go
But there's only so long you can take it all on
And then the wrong's gotta be on its own
And when you're ready to leave it behind you
You'll look back, and all that you'll see
Is the wreckage and rust that you left in the dust
On your way to the jubilee

And I can tell by the way you're listening
That you're still expecting to hear
Your name being called like a summons to all
Who have failed to account for their doubts and their fears
They can't add up to much without you

And so if it were just up to me
I'd take hold of your hand,

Saying come hear the band
Play your song at the jubilee

And I can tell by the way you're searching
For something you can't even name
That you haven't been able to come to the table
Simply glad that you came
And when you feel like this try to imagine
That we're all like frail boats on the sea
Just scanning the night for that great guiding light
Announcing the jubilee

And I can tell by the way you're standing
With your eyes filling with tears
That it's habit alone keeps you turning for home
Even though your home is right here
Where the people who love you are gathered
Under the wise wishing tree
May we all be considered

Then straight on delivered

Down to the jubilee
'Cause the people who love you are waiting
And they'll wait just as long as need be
When we look back and say

Those were halcyon days
We're talking 'bout jubilee

This song is our prayer – it is part of the new and sacred vocabulary of the heart – and it seeks to speak to that place within us that still aches for God’s presence and comfort. Oh Lord, give us ears to hear what you are saying the church. Amen.

credits: the art for today's posting was taken from the incredible creativity of Malaika Favorite of Augusta, GA. See her work at: http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/gallery/exhibits/Malaika.html