dance me to the end of love: let those who have ears to hear...

Forty years ago, my mentor in ministry, the Rev. Dr. Ray Swartzback (pictured here with his wise and beloved Jane) often closed his weekly sermon saying: "Let those who have ears to hear, hear." His prophetic admonition took up residence in my heart. As a theological neophyte, a young man without adequate comprehension of the life-changing implications of this summons, those eight words spoke deep unto deep. Somewhere in the still hidden recesses of my heart, I was being fed - and hungered for more. As is often the case for me, this yearning first took me back into the Scriptures. Six times in the New Testament gospels and seven times in Revelation, Jesus invites us to wrestle with this challenge:

St. Matthew: Matthew 11 finds Jesus explaining the importance of John the Baptist to some of the Baptizer's disciples noting that John was the
personification of Israel's prophetic spirituality under the law. Jesus then clarifies the way his own ministry of tenderness differs from John's calling even as it embodies the essence of the prophetic charism: "The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers[ are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them." (11: 5) Likening John to Elijah, Jesus concludes by suggesting that John had a job to do, and he did it to completion - and now a new era has begun for "those with ears to hear."
Matthew 13 is the parable of the sower where Jesus speaks about people who react to God's love in four different ways: some miss the blessing entirely, others are enthralled quickly but lack depth and dry up, some have the grace squeezed out of them by their harsh environment, and a few go deep and yield bountiful blessings for others. So "let those who have ears to hear: hear." Later in chapter 13 there is an explanation of this parable with a fiery apocalyptic conclusion (13: 40-43.)

St. Mark: Chapter 4 is the original written form of the parable of the sower that is restated in Matthew 13.

St. Luke: There are two uses of the phrase in St. Luke's gospel. Luke 4 is a later treatment of the parable of the sower; Luke 14 articulates the challenge at the close of a series of parables concerning the cost of discipleship: "“Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

The Apocalypse of John: Throughout the second and third chapters, the Alpha and Omega speaks directly to the seven churches of Asia Minor about their essence: some are faithful, some are lukewarm, and some have forsaken the grace of God entirely. After each judgment (2:7, 2: 11, 2: 17, 2: 29, 3: 6, 3: 13, 3: 22) a common challenge is pronounced: "He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches."

There are a few other places in the Hebrew Bible that offer clues about the words Jesus uses to call us into discipleship. The first would be the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One!" Another comes from the wisdom tradition of Proverbs 8:34: "Happy are those who listen and hear the word of the Lord." But my favorite comes from Psalm 40:6: "Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required." I particularly like the late Eugene Peterson's brilliant explication of the metaphor:

Literally it reads “ears thou hast dug for me...” The Hebrew verb is dug. Imagine a head with no ears. A blockhead. Eyes, nose, and mouth, but no ears. Where ears are usually found there is only a smooth, impenetrable surface, granitic bone. God speaks, no response... So God gets a pick and shovel and digs through the cranial granite opening a passage that will give access to the interior depths, to the mind and heart. Or imagine... something like wells that have been stopped up with refuse: cultural noise, throw-away gossip, garbage chatter. Our ears are so clogged that we cannot hear God speak... so God redigs our ears filled with audio trash... (and in this) our eyes become ears to hear. (Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles, pp. 101-102)

The Bible offers two broad insights into what it means for "those who have ears to hear." One has to do with the Scriptures themselves: how do I hear about/learn from/and live into the grace of the Lord? Peterson's interpretation has been foundational. One path has to do with letting the holy help me get rid of the cultural noise and audio trash with silence. Not with more words, but rather with the simplicity of "being still so that I can know..." To be sure, my immersion into the texts of my tradition gives a context for trusting the sacred nature of the silence. I think of Elijah in I Kings 19: 11-13 where the prophet is instructed by God to: “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord... and there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence." It is in the still, small voice of silence - the emptiness and quiet - that the holy can be heard. The late Thomas Keating, master of Centering Prayer, put it like this:

Without thinking or feeling some emotion, there is just awareness. There is no desire for bliss, enlightenment, or to teach others. Things are just as they are. In that so called emptiness, enjoyment arises of itself. As soon as we try to enjoy it, the enjoyment ceases. Somehow at the bottom of emptiness (openness, pure awareness) there is the Divine Presence and the peace that surpasses all understanding.

Being grounded in Scripture taught me that Jesus practiced being in this silence, too. The gospels remind us that he often went out to a quiet, lonely place to simply rest into God's presence. But Scripture is just one way of learning to be still and hear and learn to hear what our ears can hear. The other implied path in the Bible is to choose everyday to discover the delights all around and within us. Maria Popova wrote this morning about one of her favorite books this year: Rob Gay's The Book of Delights. 

Each day, beginning on his forty-second birthday and ending on his forty-third, Gay composed one miniature essay — “essayettes,” he calls them, in that lovely poet’s way of leavening meaning with makeshift language — about a particular delight encountered that day, swirled around his consciousness to extract its maximum sweetness. (Delight, he tells us, means “out from light,” sharing etymological roots with delicious and delectable.) What emerges is not a ledger of delights passively logged but a radiant lens actively searching for and magnifying them, not just with the mind but with the body as an instrument of wonder-stricken presence — the living-gladness counterpart to Tolstoy’s kindred-spirited but wholly cerebral Calendar of Wisdom. Page after page, small joy after small joy, one is reminded — almost with the shock of having forgotten — that delights are strewn about this world like quiet, inappreciable dew-drops, waiting for the sunshine of our attention to turn them into gold.

This is to my soul the essence of incarnation. It is the loving practice of our words becoming flesh. A way of living sacramentally wherein the first word of the Lord - creation and nature and all that exists - become a partner for us to dance with into the fullness of our existence. Popova adds:

In a passage evocative of those delicious lines from Mary Oliver’s serenade to life — “there is so much to admire, to weep over / and to write music or poems about” — he adds: "It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study… I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows — much like love and joy — when I share it."

I can't help but think of Leonard Cohen, my totally mixed-up mentor, who both danced with and wrestled with his flesh in the presence of God's spirit. At times, there was joy, often there was suffering; and more often than not there was no clear distinction between the start of suffering and the end of joy. He grasped the blessing of sacramental living as well as its curse. He knew the breath-taking awe of life even as he experienced the suffocating agony. From the very beginning, his poems and music articulated a paradox with a sensual irony that often felt like prayers.

As my tradition's season of Advent moves into its conclusion this Sunday, I can see that my journey towards Bethlehem is every bit as convoluted as was that of Brother Lenny: just as joyous, just as sad, just as exalted, just  as human, and always just as tarnished. As the journey continues, in the midst of the mess of this season, I continue to hear an invitation: let those who have ears to hear even as we close in on Christmas.

credits:
+ Ray and Jane Swartzback
+ Shema @ https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/4089302/jewish/10-Facts-Every-Jew-Should-Know-About-the-Shema-Prayer.htm
+ Still Small Voice @ https://astillsmallvoice.org/writings/

+ James Lumsden