Where Are We Planted?
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Seventh Sunday of Easter by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.
As we come to the conclusion of the Great Fifty Days between Easter and Pentecost, it’s useful to reflect on what’s been asked of us in this time. Often, we think of the Church as providing answers. I know that as a confirmand I always had my “Big Three” ready to trot out with my arm shooting up in response to any question the teacher posed--”Jesus?” “God?” “Holy Spirit?” “Mary?” was my back-up and if all else failed a good, safe answer was always, “Love?”
Following Jesus, the Way of Love, the practices and habits we learn in the church--daily prayer, dwelling on the Word as revealed in scripture, weekly worship in community, serving others in the spirit of sacrificial love, witnessing to peace and justice--don’t so much provide us with easy answers, but teach us to live the questions under the pressure of God, Grace, Love: to walk by faith, not by sight trusting that something will emerge that we couldn’t have planned or predicted. Seen in that light, scripture is not so much God’s answer book and a repository of presence that asks us questions, questions that have the capacity to crack us open and induct us into a new way of seeing and being in the world. Sometimes dwelling in the question is more important than finding snappy answers--one reason Godly Play, which our children engage in every week, is such a gift. It cultivates wondering. Entering the sacred space of story with an open mind and open heart, and with gentle, playful curiosity pondering the things of God.
This Eastertide, I’ve been pondering the question I mentioned a few weeks ago--”What do Easter Eyes see that I don’t see?” I drop the question at the beginning of my times of silent prayer each morning and evening and just let it do it’s work--let the question call me into question, excavate me. It’s not a process of the thinking mind, but a pondering in silence. And it begins with the recognition that I don’t see with Easter Eyes much of the time. “Surely God is in this place and I did not know it”--Jacob’s surprised exclamation upon waking from sleep--might as well be my epitaph. But asking the question, knowing by faith that things are other than how I perceive them to be through the scales covering my eyes, opens the door of my routinized, mechanical perception to see something new, to perceive the new song God is singing in the person and work of Jesus, to see and live from the mercies of God that are new each morning.
What do Easter Eyes see that I don’t see? What does it mean to live the resurrection in the minutest details of our daily life, and not just give my notional intellectual assent to the Empty Tomb? What does resurrection look like in a budget meeting? Behind the wheel of a car? Sitting with a grieving widow? Answering one of the 35 e-mails in the inbox each day? Walking to get a drink from the water fountain? If the resurrection doesn’t saturate each nook and cranny of my life, if I don’t practice resurrection, then I’ve just got lots of nice poetry and beautiful words banging around in my tiny little brain. I’ve got answers for questions, but remain utterly untransformed. I’ve read the menu (and can recite it chapter and verse from memory), but haven’t tasted the meal.
The world needs transformed Christians--people who see with Easter Eyes, who practice the habits and disciplines that open our eyes and our hearts. The world needs Christians who have been transformed through surrendering to love--direct, intimate encounter with the Living God--who then live as that unique, unrepeatable expression of love in the world. The world needs Christians who are Eucharist outside the walls of the church--a living sacrifice on the innumerable altars of the streets of Salt Lake City--and not just people who receive (or worse, take) Eucharist as members of a private club of people like themselves on a Sunday morning. Yes, you are loved just as you are in a way that’s beyond any love you can comprehend. Yes, you are showered by free, unmerited, unearned grace just as you are before you’ve prettied up the picture or gotten your ducks in a row (word to the wise, you’ll never get those ducks in a row and that’s the whole point of a Savior). But experiencing for ourselves--each and every one of us--the reality of that love, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable enough to receive that love, becoming little, last, lost, least, giving up control and throwing ourselves in Jesus’ lap like a little, dependent child, is something no one can “do” for you. How easy it is for “accepting our acceptance” to become just another buzzword, a bit of interesting furniture in the beautiful, but rarely visited Victorian-themed parlor of the mind labelled “Christianity.”
It’s interesting to notice that as we are about to enter into that great swath of the Church year known as “ordinary time” whose only outwardly remarkable feature is that the Sundays are numbered as the “X Sunday after Pentecost,” we should encounter Psalm 1. Back to the beginning we go. As Anthony of the Desert says, “Every morning I must say again to myself, ‘Today I start.’” “Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor lingered in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seats of the scornful!” The Psalm sings. “They are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither; everything they do shall prosper.” The question the Psalm is asking us is simple and potentially deeply transformative. Where am I planted? In whose seat am I sitting? Where am I abiding? Who or what is at the center of my life? We all know that God in Christ through the Holy Spirit should be there. But what habits are we practicing to dispose ourselves to that love, to soak and bask in that love on a daily basis?
When we look at the suffering in our lives, it becomes clear that it always always always results from having my story at the center of everything. Instead of abiding in love (what the Psalmist calls meditating on his law day and night) we meditate on ourselves. We do “me meditation” day and night. My wants. My desires. My hurts. My security. My reputation. My bank account. My story. The illusion of a self separate from God who is the ground of our being, sets up a situation where we have to defend ourselves against anyone and anything that threatens our little homemade ego self. That whole project is like chaff the wind blows away. That whole “Me meditation” is doomed. It brings only suffering for ourselves and others. It’s the cause of every injustice and every war. It is a hell of the most claustrophobic sort. It’s why Luke, writing of Judas, describes him as one who “turned aside to his own place.” I thought the great American Dream was to have a “place to call one’s own,” to enjoy, “a Room with a View.” Not so, the Psalmist reminds us. Having my own place, relying on myself, having anything but the One for whom my heart is restless even if I don’t know it yet on the throne of the heart, is a claustrophobic enclosure of the most hellish sort. Just ask Judas.
Where are we planted? Whose seat are we sitting in? Jesus’ lap, or on the throne of being right? Abiding in love, or seated on the wobbly chair of needing to control everything out of fear? Dwelling in and with the One who dwells in us, or being compulsively busy in order to keep everyone else happy and fend off criticism? Surrendering to love, or surrendering to the impulse to scapegoat and cast out those deplorable others who don’t think, act, look, and talk like us? Where are we planted? What fruit is being born in our lives?
“Whoever has the Son has life. I write these things… so that you may know that you have eternal life.” We all have the Son. He has poured Himself out for us. Love is the only reality worthy of the name. But that stunning, world-shattering gift needs to be received, opened, embraced, endured, undergone, embodied. We, each of us as unique members of the one body, have to root and ground ourselves in the stream of living water and drink from the source daily. You can do it right now. Close your eyes. State your intention to open to God, to open to the boundless openness that is our true home and simply let yourself be. Thoughts will come and go. Let them come and go. Don’t push them away. Don’t hold onto them. Thoughts are just thoughts. Know that you are not your thoughts. Know that God is not your thoughts about God. For once, do nothing. Receive. Welcome. Allow. Yield. Be. Abide. Behold. The world will hate you for doing nothing, for wasting time gracefully with God. They’ll tell you you are a lay-about. Unproductive. Useless. No matter. Simply be in and with the One in whom we live and move and have our being. “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”
And then… every once and a while throughout the day ask yourself the question, “Where am I planted?” and stop and be. Come home to the one who has made His home in you. Open to the presence who is always present to us--before thoughts, images, identities, stories, roles, masks--rest in the great I AM who is always available to us, who never leaves us comfortless, who’s love is waiting to be received, embraced, embodied, and poured out for others.