Take a Ride on Mister Sei’s Horse

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Seventh Sunday After Pentecost, July 19, 2020 by The Very Rev. Tyler Doherty.

       Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. (Hebrews 13:2)

When Michelle and I were living in Boulder, CO a couple of decades ago (that sure makes me feel old!) we had the privilege of getting to know a Zen Buddhist priest named Gerry Shishin Wick. He was, and remains, a beautiful, humble, and kind-hearted man of deep wisdom. And he also didn’t seem bothered in the least by my curious Anglican ways. One day, Shishin, as he is called, told a story I’ll never forget. It goes like this.

“Mr. Sei lived in a small, poor village. He owned a horse and was one of the wealthiest members of the village. His neighbors used to come to him and tell him how lucky he was to have that horse because he could plow much more field and have a larger income and take better care of his family. Mr. Sei was a very wise man so he didn’t say anything. He just nodded his head.

“One day, the horse ran away and his neighbors come and told him how unlucky he is that his horse had run away. Again Mr. Sei nodded his head.

Then the horse returned and a second horse was following. Now Mr. Sei had two horses. The neighbors came and said, “How lucky you are that your horse ran away and came back with an extra horse! Now you have two horses!” Again Mr. Sei just nodded his head.

“The next season, Mr. Sei’s son was plowing the field with the second horse and had an accident. He broke his leg. The neighbors rushed over again. “How unlucky he is that he had that second horse, otherwise his son never would have broken his leg and now he can’t help him in the fields.” Again, Mr. Sei just nodded.

“Within a few weeks, war erupted in the province, and the lords were conscripting all of the young men to fight. Mr. Sei’s son had a broken leg, so he didn’t have to go into battle.The neighbors came again and told Mr. Sei how lucky he is that his son broke his leg.This story has no end and continues today.”

It’s an ancient Chinese parable that speaks to the dangers of rushing to judgement, at arriving too quickly at a fixed and final interpretation about a particular situation or event. It’s a reminder that a certain amount of non-judgmental not-knowing often will prevent us from unnecessary suffering--”Oh, no! My son broke his leg!”--and  open us to Godly possibilities our puny little intellects could never have fathomed. Particularly in times of global pandemic when the news is anything but good and we’re all desperate to gather together again in worship safely, and when the country is undergoing momentous shifts in terms of the recognition of structural inequality and systemic racism, it’s pretty easy to fall prey to the mindset of Mr. Sei’s well-intentioned but rather panicky neighbors. They are either Chicken Littles--”The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” or they are rainbows, unicorns, and lollipops--”This is the greatest thing since sliced bread!”

Our reading from the Gospel and the Old Testament, both speak to this same inborn tendency that we have as human beings to filter out ambiguity, messiness, and complexity, and engage in what the American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) calls the “quest for certainty.” Take Jacob’s dream at Bethel. He lies down for good night’s sleep on his trusty pillow-rock and has a curious dream of angels ascending and descending on a ladder. And after God tells him how fruitful his offspring will be, the Lord speaks those astounding words of blessing, promise, and covenantal faithfulness: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Powerful words when you are sleeping, seemingly alone, in the haunt of jackals. To know that God is with us no matter what, that God will keep us no matter where we go, and that the land--not as a geographical locale, but as the rich soil of the heart wherein is buried the pearl of great price--will never be taken away from us.

But Jacob’s exclamation at the end of the passage is equally astounding--”Surely, the Lord is in this place--and I did not know it! How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” What Jacob is unfolding and proclaiming here is a fundamentally sacramental vision of reality, a mode of seeing and being in the world that is saturated, even over-saturated, with the presence of God. Angels ascending and descending on a ladder speak to the connection, conversation, and participation between so-called ordinary, everyday experience in the world and the divine. 

And in a time of trial, it’s important to remind ourselves of, and practice, the innocent, open-hearted awe and wonder that Jacob embodies here. I actually use those famous lines throughout the day as little practice pointers/reminders for myself. Perhaps I’m stuck in traffic. Perhaps I’m fretting over the daily case counts. Perhaps the children after five months of familial bliss at home are finally getting on my last nerve. In those moments, the temptation is to say, “Surely, God is NOT in this place! Get me outta here!” But if we pause and say, “God is in this place. This is the gate of heaven,” we’re more likely to open to who and how God is actually working even in the midst of apparent absence. Inquiry begins. Perhaps we can open to the fact that our thoughts about how things should be, our requirements of the situation are what is separating us from noticing that even here, even now, even with our heads on a rock for a pillow, shivering ourselves to sleep on in the desert--THIS is the gate of heaven, the doorway to presence.

In our Gospel for today, I think you can see something similar at work. We’re conditioned to think of wheat as good and weeds (or tares) as bad. By our conventional thinking, if we see weeds and our first instinct is to yank them up. But Jesus warns us against this, doesn’t he. Not so fast! He says, don’t pull the weeds,  “for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” In the spiritual life we often approach our lives with a similar impulse. We want to let the nice things, the things that conform to our idea of who Christ is, grow, and we want to yank up all the stuff that gets in the way of love. The trouble, of course, is that we can’t just yank up our anger, our impatience, our fear, our loneliness, our depression, our greed. It simply doesn’t work. And further, it sets us up as always at war with our experience--gouging ourselves with the weeding tool. That doesn’t sound like the way of love to me. It sounds more like violence and self-hatred that wants to cut out bad parts and cling good parts.

We actually don’t know what parts of us are good and bad in the grand scheme of things. Especially once we’ve begun the spiritual journey and consented to God’s presence and action in our lives, it’s hard to tell what parts, under the transfiguring power of grace, are good and which ones are bad. What’s more, sometimes it’s exactly the parts we think are bad that God uses as the vehicles of grace for ourselves and for others. The painfully shy person who as a child spends the cocktail party clinging to her mother’s leg unable to even say hello, turns into the one who can sit and be with people in their pain and suffering, listening to their stories, without jumping in and hijacking the conversation. Paul’s own persecution of God in the name of serving God--the unquestioned killing of Christians because of his upside-down picture of who is in and who is out according to the Law--becomes the vehicle for his earth-shattering and church-forming perception that God’s grace is for everyone--there is no male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free, gay or straight, black, brown, or white. Grace abounds. Somehow tongue-tied Moses was the perfect man for the job. Thank God he didn’t see his stutter as a weed and take elocution lessons!

That’s not to say that our habits and patterns that get in the way of accepting our acceptance and then being that love for others don’t change over time. Of course they do. And while we might not see much difference in our lives, it’s often those who are closest to us that will make an off-hand remark like, “You seem a little less anxious these days,” or “You’re not as irritable as you used to be,” or “You never seemed too socially engaged before,”-- “What’s changed?” The irony is that the change comes from accepting ourselves, and our experience, just as it is. It’s in letting things be, and trusting that in surrendering to God’s grace God will do what God needs done with our quirky little lives, that the change we want to see actually happens. By grace, not by pulling weeds. We don’t need to toss the bad parts of ourselves into the fire. Gradually, as we surrender more and more deeply to the love that’s always with us, all that is not wheat will be transfigured under the fire of love, into what is fruitful, life-giving, and holy. But it starts with old Mr. Sei’s head nod of not-knowing and non-judgement. It starts with calling off the quest for tight-fisted certainty. It starts with the recognition that even here, even in the midst of THIS, God is present, active, accompanying, and keeping us. “Surely, the Lord is in this place--and I did not know it!”