January 11, 2009 First Sunday after Epiphany, Baptism of Christ
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Genesis 1; Psalm 29; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-12
The other day after Prayer of the Heart Valerie Miller and I were talking about a
hymn that we both love written by the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, “Dear Lord and
Father of Mankind.” The last two stanzas form this prayer:
Drop thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of thy peace.
Breathe through the pulses of desire
Thy coolness and thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire:
Speak through the earth-quake, wind and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.
Today we have heard about many waters, the waters of the formless earth over
which the Spirit of God brooded in the beginning like a wind, like a mother hen. And we
heard about the wild waters whipped by the thunderstorm coming over the sea in the
Psalm, that breath-taking, terrible force of God’s Spirit. And we heard about the
baptismal waters, the River Jordan where Jesus emerged filled with the Holy Spirit,
which then drove him out into the desert wilderness as if by a fierce gale.
All these images of Spirit and water and wind, and now Whittier adds one more:
not formless ocean, not storm angry sea, not pelting rain, not churning river, but a drop
of dew, the silence of the deepest spiritual calm in which we hear God’s still small
voice, the mighty wind of the Spirit a whisper now, the lightest breath. Whittier says,
“Take from our souls the strain and stress, And let our ordered lives confess The beauty
of thy peace.”
Ah. Imagine that. Imagine the Spirit lifting on the wings of its wind all our strain
and stress and leaving us by still waters in eternal lightness and the beauty of peace.
But what Valerie and I were discussing was, what does that middle line mean:
“And let our ordered lives confess?” Does that mean once we let our strain and stress
go we enter into the natural order, the flow, the sacred way, the Tao, with all its peace?
Or does it mean that our self-ordered lives, our tightly controlled, over-busy, driven
lives confess that they are ugly and violent, as opposed to the beauty of the Spirit’s
peace?
The American 20th Century Catholic monk, Thomas Merton, said that one of the
most brutal forms of violence was the over-busy, stressed out life. If that is what our
ordered lives confess, it is still true that there is a deeper natural order that we can enter
if we let go of the drive to control and succeed, if we let the Sprit guide and empower us
and give us its joy and love and peace.
You may remember the story of the monk who was asked what they did at his
monastery. He answered, “We fall and get up, fall and get up, fall and get up.” This is
true for all who try to depend on the Holy Spirit. No sooner do we resolve to trust the
Spirit than it seems all our demons leap out to try to drag us back onto our same old
path. It is as if we are captives, we are oppressed by something in the universe and in us
that opposes the Spirit.
I think of the Mahatma Gandhi, whose life was one long struggle against
oppression, who spent long years in prison in between tense confrontations and intense
campaigns and had to endure rage and impatience waiting for justice, waiting for God’s
time to come. Gandhi’s life was full of stress and strain, and yet it was also
characterized by nonviolence and a wise, deep peace. The secret, Gandhi said, was in
his spirit, was his connection with every breath to God, whose name he prayed without
ceasing, a simple one word prayer, over and over, all day.
Gandhi was demanding of others, but he also knew how difficult it was to do
what he was asking. He said that if you see some great evil happening and you cannot
think of any nonviolent way to stop it, then by all means, use violence. He said the
worst thing was not to have the courage or will to confront the evil. But he believed
there could always be a nonviolent way, and that when we cannot find it, the fault is
simply that we have not practiced it enough, we have not trained ourselves enough to
depend on the Holy Spirit to guide and empower us.
So if you set out to try to depend on the Holy Spirit, but no guidance or power
seems to be coming and it is time to act, then by all means, do the work you have to do
and do it the best you can, using the skill and strength you have and whatever
knowledge of mind and wisdom of heart you find in you to use. But do not say to
yourself that there is no Spirit, or that you are not meant or able to receive its gifts. That
is not what it means. The Holy Spirit is not something we can control, but it is
something we can practice and train ourselves to trust, to wait for, to be wide open to
receive.
It is like the Wendell Berry poem I read during Advent, entitled, “To Know the
Dark.” It goes:
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Often I get up long before Lesley and get dressed in the dark. Sometimes the
result is comical—I put things on backwards or inside out. But it amazes me how often
my hand knows just where to go to find my glasses or the doorknob. A sense I have no
name for tells me where the edge of the bedside stand is so that I do not bump it as I go
by. A person who goes blind develops that sense, and many other senses, from the
practice of going dark.
If we try to live by the Spirit, the same is true. We have to “go dark,” closing our
eyes to our usual ways of coping and controlling, letting go of our habitual or
compulsive thinking, and trusting, or acting as if we trust enough to depend on the Spirit
to show us the way and give us the power we need. If we try that, sometimes the results
may be comical or even disastrous. We may make mistakes, get things inside out or
backwards. Trusting in the Spirit may look foolish compared to our usual worldly-wise
ways. We may feel impatient with its awkwardness or slowness.
But we may also be surprised how well things turn out when we are in the flow,
when we fall into the Spirit’s natural order by letting go. Gifts come to us, signs,
epiphanies, glimpses of God’s manifestations. We see in the dark of our daily lives a
beautiful light that hints at God’s presence, and we feel peace. Then a deadline comes
or a crisis of some kind, even just the pressure of trying to get to work or to get the kids
out the house on time, and we forget the Spirit, we forget to trust, or we feel we have no
time to wait for it to act, and we return to our old ways and re-enter the ugly and violent
order of our straining, stressed out life.
Thank God for epiphany, for the glimpses of spiritual order, of peace and flow.
Thank God for leaders and channels of the Spirit like Jesus and Paul, like Gandhi, like
some we have known in this church and elsewhere who remind us that all the
controlling and grabbing for more we have been taught to do not only does not feel
good, but is not the way we have to be. It is possible to increase the amount of time that
we spend depending on the Holy Spirit to guide and empower us. It is possible to
practice working with the Spirit’s gifts. It is possible to turn our stressed-out moments
into practice fields where we try out turning to the Spirit to see how it works.
That is what our Prayer of the Heart gatherings are all about, really. Lately we
have been reading books by an Episcopal priest, Cynthia Bourgeault, about the wisdom
and strength that can come through practicing letting go and opening to the Spirit. In
The Wisdom Way of Knowing she tells the story of a woman whose car breaks down on a
lonely, remote stretch of road in Maine. She was a potter, and had her entire inventory
in the car on the way to a trade show that her livelihood depended on. She panicked. It
was late on a freezing cold day. What if no one came along? What if she missed the
trade show and lost all her income and had to give up pottery? What if she froze to
death? Or what if the wrong person came along and did her harm? She was busy
spinning the wheels of her mind trying to control the damage, trying to think her way
out of this, when suddenly she remembered the Spirit. She said to herself, “Well, I’m
still here. God is still here. I wonder what will happen next?”
And what happened was that the Holy Spirit dropped its “still dews of quietness”
as all her striving ceased, and it took from her soul the strain and stress, and let her re-
ordered life confess the beauty of its peace. She became present to the winter scene
around her, the Maine woods, the late afternoon light, the flow of life, the tracks in the
snow, the flitting chickadees, the darting of a rabbit, and all caught up in that delight,
she did not hear at first the rumble of the coming truck. It just happened to be a tow
truck. It just happened to be going exactly where she needed to go.
Bourgeault says, “Where there is surrender, synchronicity tends to follow.” But
she also says this is not the main benefit of letting go—not the visions that open up to
guide us, nor the gifts that empower us. The main benefit is just the being immersed in
that river, drenched in that dew, blown by that wind over the waters, borne by that flow,
trusting and at peace even when danger is threatening all around.
Bourgeault teaches that that there are two ways we can respond to any threat or
opportunity. We can brace ourselves, clench and grab, or we can soften, open, yield. If
we want to depend on the Holy Spirit to guide and empower us, we need to learn to let
go when we catch ourselves bracing, because “it is never worth the cost,” the cost of
losing our place in the Spirit’s flow. This is the secret Gandhi knew. It is the
mainspring of the nonviolent life. It is not an easy path. Common sense argues against
it. And sometimes the Spirit seems to make it almost impossible to bear, driving us into
the wilderness and drying up altogether, leaving us forsaken and dying of thirst. But if
we keep trusting with infinite patience, depending even then, doing the best we can,
falling and getting up, the Spirit will come the power and guidance will come, peace will
come.
As we prepare to begin a new church year, with all the threats and opportunities
we will face at Annual Meeting, and as we enter a new era in this nation at this time of
our worst nightmare’s threat and our long dreamed of opportunity, let us make a
resolution to live up to our vow in our covenant, and to keep learning and practicing
and seeking the way to depend on the Holy Spirit to guide and empower us in
everything we do, little or large. Let us cultivate patience and trust, reminding ourselves
over and over, that the Spirit’s way is the best way, and that wherever it guides us to go,
no matter how much a wilderness it may seem, will turn out to be the best place we
could ever have imagined going. The formless waters of a whole new creation stretch
before us, waiting for us to use the gifts and powers the Holy Spirit wants to give us in
order to bring into being new manifestations of God’s realm on earth.
Let us pray in silence, practicing turning away from our own thoughts and wants
and fears, and opening to let the Spirit fill us with its still small voice and its power and
peace. Let us let go with trust and patience into silent prayer….
Sermon 01/11/2009