June 14, 2009 Second Sunday of Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 84; II Corinthians 4:16-18, 5:6-17; John 7:37-39
This sermon is about what may be the biggest spiritual challenge we face. From
the moment we are born to the moment we die, from the moment we wake each day to
the moment we go to sleep and even in our dreams, desire and longing are almost
constant. Every living thing depends on desire for its survival and the survival of its
species. It is what keeps all beings eating and drinking and resting and procreating and
fighting for life against all threats. It is what keeps us turned to God and seeking the
sacred way through life and trying to do what is good and beautiful and right.
And yet for humans, desire is both a blessing and a curse. There is a side of
desire that can serve love and life and light, but there is a dark side, too. Like the dark
side of the Force in Star Wars, the dark side of desire is extremely powerful. It is
always pulling our natural desires out of balance, pulling hunger and thirst toward
overindulging and addiction, pulling natural attraction over the line into lust or
jealously or envy, corrupting even the desire to do good into prideful ambition.
Desire has many forms on the dark side, and they all lead to suffering in the end,
but there is only one form of the side of light, and that is to desire God—to desire to
share God’s desire and follow God’s way when it comes to dealing with all our natural
desires. If we make God our first desire, then we will keep all our other desires in
balance. If they veer into the dark side from time to time, the light will help us pull
them back. As a result, out desires and actions will be characterized by the Spirit of
God we desire. We ourselves will be like springs of living water, we will be like
doorkeepers in the house of God, leading the world to what it longs for most, to peace
and joy and love and to abundant life, which is what the desire for God leads to and
what God desires for us.
Today’s scripture passages are full of wisdom that can help us live better lives
and die better deaths by working to have the better kind of desire.
Psalm 84 is a beautiful love song to God. “My soul longs, indeed it faints, for the
courts of God, my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.” This is passionate
desire! It could be Romeo outside of Juliet’s window. And what is it that is so
desirable? It is home. God’s home is the place where we are unconditionally welcomed
and accepted, nurtured and transformed, protected and loved. God’s home is where we
find at last perfect oneness and fullness, our heart’s deepest longing.
We long to know were we can find such a home, and the Psalm says, “Happy are
those in whose heart are the highways to Zion.” Zion is the name for where God’s
home is, and the road to it leads through our heart. The Psalm says that as we walk that
road through the desert, we make it a place of springs and pools. The Psalm ends, “No
good thing does God withhold from those who walk uprightly. O God of hosts, happy is
everyone who trusts in you.”
If you want the result of your desire to be fulfillment and joy, if you want to be a
source of fulfillment and joy in the desert places around you, the way is simple. Make
God the first object of your desire. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Strive
first for the realm of God and the way of righteousness, and all these [other material]
things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6:33) This is all you would need to
know—the path to healthy, balanced, fulfilled desire is just that simple—except for this
one problem: it is extremely difficult to trust and follow this wisdom. The spirit is
willing, but the flesh is weak. Other sides of desire are powerfully seductive and logical
and lure us away from the light.
Imagine that you are one of those thousands in the crowded streets of Jerusalem
at the festival two thousand years ago that John described. It is the Festival of Booths,
celebrating the exodus journey through the wilderness and God’s gift of water in the
desert, with the making of little tent homes and the pouring out of water libations. It is a
joyous harvest feast and carnival atmosphere with vendors crying out to come and
sample their wares. Feet are kicking up the dust of the street. The sun is hot. Your
throat is parched. Suddenly you hear someone cry out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come
to me,” and you look at your friend and say, “Sounds good,” and you turn toward the
voice. Then you hear him cry out again, “Let the one who believes in me drink. As the
scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” You
hear that and look at your friend and you shake your heads and turn to look for a
lemonade stand, or maybe someone turning water into wine. And who can blame you?
What the thirsty want is something to drink, not something to believe.
Yet Jesus was starving in the wilderness when Satan suggested he turn stones into
bread, and Jesus refused the suggestion and said, “One does not live by bread alone, but
by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.” Jesus was not being a snake-oil
salesman at that Jerusalem festival, trying to take advantage of people’s desire. He was
telling people what he had found that had quenched his thirst in the wilderness, and
become his source of fulfillment. He drank from the springs of the Holy Spirit in his
heart, and as a result, the Holy Spirit’s force flowed out of him like great rivers of living
water. The illogic of what he was saying turned some away, and the seduction of
competing desires turned others, but many did heed his voice and did drink, and they
found the same wisdom and power flowing through them. It may not have taken away
their physical thirst but it changed their relationship to it.
Jesus is calling out to us every moment of every day through every little physical
or emotional impulse of desire we have. He is offering this other way to respond to our
desires and seek fulfillment. He is inviting us to come drink and gain the Spirit’s gifts.
And yet how often do we heed his voice? How often do we trust him and turn to him
when we are thirsty for approval or affection, or power or control, or pleasure or
comfort, or security or survival, or a cool drink or anything else that we look to for
happiness?
A few weeks ago I quoted the Eastern Orthodox Christian book, Christ the
Eternal Tao by Hieromonk Damascene, which says, “The pleasure of the senses is
emptiness ever filling itself, yet remaining ever empty. The pleasure of the soul is
fullness ever emptying itself, yet remaining ever full.” (p 184) Jesus is calling to us,
inviting us to have that pleasure of the soul of finding that we are always full of God’s
love and life and light. He is telling us that the Holy Spirit wants to help us pour those
gifts out to us into the world and refill us with all we give and more. And yet we tend
not to hear Jesus over the voices that tell us we are empty and need to fill our emptiness
with material things.
A good spiritual practice is to try to notice every time we are feeling
empty and seeking some material way to fill that emptiness. As we watch ourselves
doing that, we can try shifting our perspective, reminding ourselves that we are already
full of God’s unconditional love, that we already have God’s eternal life filling our
being that even death cannot take away, and that we have in us God’s light that shines in
the darkness that the darkness cannot overcome. We can try desiring those spiritual
things that we already have within us at the same time that we are longing for a glass of
lemonade or a friend to talk to or success at work, and watch what happens. The
Apostle Paul says that if we do this we will find that it changes everything. It places us
“in Christ” so that we are relating to the world as Christ does. We discover a whole new
way of relating to our desires and the material world.
Paul’s letters in the New Testament pose serious problems. For one thing, most
scholars today acknowledge that he wrote only some of the letters attributed to him, and
that even within those he wrote, other people inserted whole new sections into his
letters after Paul’s death. As a result, there are inconsistencies. Some of the letters
reflect the Roman and Jewish establishments’ repression of women, for instance,
whereas we know that Paul lifted women to full equality and leadership positions in the
churches he founded. Long before the Bible was compiled, people began imposing their
own prejudices and hang-ups on Paul, and that has continued to this day.
So another problem besides the distortion of his original letters is the long
history of misinterpretation that has led to some of the worst problems on earth today.
One major source of these problems is how people understand Paul’s use of the terms
“flesh” and “spirit.” People have come away thinking that Paul was saying to hate the
flesh and love the spirit. As a result, they have felt justified not only to punish their
own bodies, but to punish or ignore the needs of others’, and to kill and wage wars, and
to destroy the earth. This is not at all what Paul intended, as can be seen when we read
the flesh and spirit passages in the context of all of Paul’s authentic writings. The body
and all creation are holy to Paul as the place where the Spirit lives. Love is Paul’s
greatest law, as well as Christ’s. I hope that remembering this will help you be able to
make use of Paul’s extremely valuable insights.
Paul talked honestly about his struggle with tempting desire. He found that a part
of him that he called the flesh or the body had a tendency to desire in unhealthy ways,
but another part of him called the spirit desired completely differently. He noticed that
the body’s way of fulfilling desire was temporary, but the spirit’s was eternal. And yet
he was not always able to follow the spirit. He longed to be home in the spirit, in God’s
home, but he kept shacking up with his body.
This created suffering for him. But through his struggle, he discovered something
useful. He found that it helped him when he was caught up in the desires of his outer
nature if he brought into them the intention of pleasing God. He would try to see from
the spiritual perspective, to see with the eyes of Christ. And he discovered that, “If
anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see,
everything has become new!”
It changes everything just to shift our perspective from the emptiness in our body
ever filling itself to the fullness in our soul ever emptying itself, yet remaining ever full.
This transforms the flesh into the holy home of the Spirit. It creates a right relationship
to our desire and to the material world. And yet, like Paul, we keep on trying to fill our
emptiness in unhealthy or imbalanced ways even though, like Paul, we know all the
problems with this. The emptiness returns, and we need to keep filling it or we suffer.
And sometimes the things we try to use to fill our emptiness do not cooperate, and so
our desire is frustrated, and we suffer fear and rage and grief. Or the things we depend
on and love die, and we suffer terribly. Or we become addicted and cannot stop filling
ourselves, and we suffer. In the end, we come to the realization of our own death, and
we see that there is no material thing that can possibly fill that emptiness and we suffer
fear and rage and grief.
We are human, and so the pain of these things is to some extent inescapable, but
there is a way to transform the suffering into wisdom, meaning and undying joy. There
is a way to feel full inside even when life outside is most desolate. We have heard
stories of people who were full to overflowing with powerful love and life and light
even in a Nazi death camp or Soviet gulag, even on their death bed or at the graveside of
a beloved, people who had strength and peace to share with others even as their bodies
were being destroyed or hearts broken by the worst suffering imaginable, even as they
were longing for things to be otherwise.
These people somehow found their way to the springs of living water in their
hearts. They found the road that led to God’s home within them. Whatever we are
suffering, whatever we are desiring in our life right now, we can find this same grace if
we accept Christ’s invitation and follow his way. If in the moment when our emptiness
is aching to be filled we will turn to the Spirit, if we say a simple prayer, one word even,
a simple shifting of our focus from the emptiness we feel to the fullness we believe, if
we meet our emptiness with courage and compassion, welcoming it, accepting it, being
still before it and knowing God in it, then by the power of God’s grace we may find as
Paul did that everything changes, that we see a new creation rising before us, that we
feel well up in us a fullness of gifts to share, and that we become instruments of God’s
peace in a world that longs to find it.
We can do this, we can be this, if we make it our desire.
Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 06/14/2009