Forgetting the Names of Flowers

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 16th Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

One of the strange blessings of COVID-19 “brain fog” is that names for common flora, fauna, people, kitchen implements and the like simply fall away. At first, the  experience can be rather disconcerting, even panicking, as the brain tries desperately to dredge up the word it knows it knows, but is unable to access. Of course, the frustration only makes it worse—like a Chinese finger-trap, the more you struggle the more stuck you get! I had this experience with a flower in our yard. It was late spring, early summer, and this beautiful flower—white sepals backed by a ring of blue petals, daub of margarine yellow in the center, long spurs extending out behind. On a normal morning, I would have taken a quick glance, named it, and called it good. But this time, the name didn’t come. And in that open space was an invitation, a call really, to actually attend to the flower, to be with it, rather than just box it up in words and symbols. Without the availability of the name, true seeing, being-wth (always already in the background), came to the fore. It was only days later that a passing neighbor tipped me off—”Just love y’all’s columbine!” And the effect was immediate. Now that I knew its name I didn’t have to look at it any more, be in relationship with that stranger any longer. The curtain on wonderment came crashing down. That space of communion and encounter—what Hasidic theologian Martin Buber calls the I-Thou relationship—changed to an I-It relationship: me as a separate subject relating to a separate object in a world of objects. 

When Jesus asks the question, “Who do you say I am?” very much the same dynamic is at work. Words, of course, can free us, open us up to the mystery of existence, but they can also imprison the effervescence of moment-to-moment experience—life in Christ—in stale formulae. Think of someone you love. Hopefully, you know their birthday, where they were born, what schools they attended, the color of their eyes, details of their family tree. But if you were to answer the question, “Who do you say your spouse/partner is?” with a dutiful line-by-line recitation of their resume, your interlocutor might consider calling the men in white coats, or give you the name of a good divorce attorney.

Who someone is is revealed to us, unveiled to us, apocalypsed to us, only in relationship. That’s what apocalypse actually means—an unveiling. Strange to think that each person, each glint of sidewalk crack silica, each sip of morning coffee before we’re awake might be an apocalypse. It’s a reminder of our habitual tendency to treat others, and even ourselves, as fixed objects, “Its” in Buber’s language, rather than unrepeatable instances of disclosure: “Holy Thous” ever fresh and ever new. Who Jesus is is apocalypsed to us in daily prayer, regular encounter with him in scripture, weekly worship in community, serving others in the spirit of self-forgetful love. We discover him anew each moment. Daily we touch Him.   

Jesus asks the disciples what the word on the street is to begin with, because he knows that what other people are saying about him is likely to have an impact on who the disciples say he is. Language and culture shape how we see. As St. Wittgenstein says, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Jesus wants to tease out from what frame of reference people are operating: John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the Prophets. All things that had come before. All things that were in some way settled, predictable, precedented, known. Having brought those preconceptions to light, Jesus moves in for the kill and asks the $64,000 question—“Ok. That’s what everyone else is saying, but what do you say?”
Peter, of course, is the first to answer—”You are the Messiah.” Ding! Ding! We have a winner! Or do we? Jesus tells Peter to not tell anyone (let each person come to know me in their own experience rather than just through notional assent to propositional truth). And after explaining that Messiahship means undergoing great suffering, being rejected by the chief priest, elders, scribes, and being killed, Peter is appalled. Peter has the “correct” answer—the title is correct—but his understanding of that title is mistaken: too limited, too tied to his worldly, human understanding. His God is too small. That’s one of the reasons that Jesus rebukes Peter, exorcises Peter, cleanses him of the limiting preconceived ideas that prevent him from embracing the full reality of Jesus as the God-Man. And he follows that rebuke/exorcism with the lines about taking up the cross and that “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who want to lose their life will save it….For what will it profit them them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”

One of the ways to understand this is by going back to my little analogy of the stranger-flower. The call for each of us is to see, be, commune with, life as it is just as it is, life in Christ, without the limiting frame of words and concepts. What does it matter if you know the name of that flower but you never actually experience it? That’s why “brain fog” can be a blessing, honestly. It puts in abeyance our innate tendency to taxonomize experience instead of actually, wordlessly experiencing it. Even without the gift of “brain fog” the call is the same, however. We practice the assiduous discipline of putting all labels, all concepts, under the sign of the cross in the faith and trust that the uncontainable reality with which we are confronted cannot be exhausted by the top three inches of our brain. Losing one’s life can then be seen as losing one’s story about oneself, others, God, the world, and meeting life undefended as if for the first time. Unburdened by preconceived ideas, judgments, storylines, we enter the mystery. We are “saved” from the world of “I-It” and enter the unfolding mystery of God’s Eternal Now where there are only Thous. That “homeless person on the parking strip” shines bodily forth as a beloved child of God with an inextinguishable dignity and preciousness we’d never noticed.

It might seem a strange statement to make after starting the program year this morning with its cornucopia of formation offerings for children, youth, adults, newcomers, but it’s true—”Christianity is not what you think!” Certainly classes help us, but in a very particular way—using words, ideas, concepts, questions, and dialogue to open us up to the mystery of God’s presence and action in our lives right here and right now. The Word won’t be confined to any word! Mere information about Jesus won’t save us, heal us, make us whole. Surrender to love, knowing ourselves to be held in all our messiness, is what saves, heals, and makes us whole. Words nudge us slowly, slowly, slowly, into being open, receptive, allowing. Words dispose us to accept our acceptance, and then to be that unconditional acceptance and love for others. 

When we have the experience of God loving us despite our obvious shortcomings and quirks we realize that we are much more than our fixed ideas about ourselves and that others, too, are much greater than whatever label about them we have chiseled in stone about them. Maybe, it dawns on us, just maybe, God, too, is something more, something greater, grander, than that policeman God, that judgmental sin-tallying God of the scorecard who’s haunted our days since childhood. What wondrous love is this? 

Yesterday, we marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. I don’t know about here in Utah, but in Philadelphia and New York there was a precious, stunned, precariously grace-filled moment in the direct aftermath of the tragedy when there was a palpable sense under those suddenly silent skies that we were all indeed siblings. Differences were erased in the shared common experience of the incomprehensible. As Paul writes in his Letter to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3:28). There was a brief glimmer of seeing beyond the labels that divide us and pit us one against the other. There was a moment where what James called last week, “partiality”—being for or against—fell away in the tender heart cracked wide open amidst the rubble and dust.

But it didn’t last long. Soon enough, Muslims were being targeted. People who “looked like” Muslims—Latinos and Latinas, Sikhs—were singled out for scapegoating violence. The old divisions reasserted themselves and partiality—”us” and “them”—became the distorted lens through which things all too predictably operated once more. That disorienting moment of realizing that we are in fact one body in Christ was too much to handle and we frantically grasped at some sort of way to restore order—even a bad, broken, and hate-fueled order. The Thou of the stranger, our sibling in Christ, was exchanged for an It—a mere object, a scapegoated stand-in for everything we feared most.

Twenty years on, Jesus’ question, “Who do you say I am?” still has the power to disrupt and dismantle our perhaps even more deeply divided world—to point the way from I, me, mine to you, we, and ours. What if, instead of having that person, that group of people, that party neatly dismissed, “cancelled,” and written off once-and-for-all, we asked that same question of ourselves? “Who do you say I am?” of the person who makes us absolutely crazy. “Who do you say I am?” of the one you are quite certain you know exactly who they are, what they stand for, and why they are wrong about everything. We can ask the question in any situation, in any encounter. And what we realize is that the mind wants to answer it in a flash—”Columbine!” “Messiah!” “Terrorist!” “Liberal Milktoast!” “Anti Vaxxer!” We don’t do well with groundlessness, wonder, and curiosity for too long. But if we keep asking the question—sit with it and let the question call us into question—something beyond what we already know and already think might just burble up. The Word Himself rising from the ashes of so many words. Love where there was just a label. We are ephphatha—opened—to the reality beyond labels and concepts and already-decided-upons—our muddy ears unstopped from the fixed ideas we have about ourselves, others, God’s good creation, and God in Godself, our tongues released to pronounce the belovedness of each and every child of God without exception. Christ bowing to Christ. Christ receiving Christ. Not an It in sight. Just Thous all ‘round. “Who do you say I am?”