Being Present to the Presence

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on The Feast of the Presentation by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

As we ramp up for midterm election season, I’d like to go on record as being against purity. It might just be the most toxic idea in all of Christendom. This whole idea that we need to improve ourselves, perfect ourselves, refine ourselves so that God will deign to eventually love us is completely counter to the grace-soaked picture of God we see revealed to us in the person of Jesus. What part of “just as I am,” of Jesus eating with sinners, tax-collectors and sex workers do we not understand? And if we listen carefully to our opening collect, we discover that the Prayer Book is against purity as something undertaken as yet another work, yet another effort on our part to make ourselves worthy as well. 

We pray that we might be presented (note the passive voice) to God with “pure and clean hearts by Jesus Christ our Lord.” What if the point of the presentation is not to pretty ourselves up like debutantes going to the ball, getting our prim and proper little ducks in a row and posing for the camera with our 1000-watt smiles, but to let ourselves be held like squirmy children in the loving arms of Jesus and be presented to God just as we are. What if we just gave up the whole effort to refine ourselves and surrendered to the love that is always waiting to love us into loving? What if we let God be God to us, in us, for us, and let accepting our acceptance do whatever refining needs to be done on God’s terms, not our own?

We live in such a radically individualistic and graceless culture, that being made perfect makes very little sense to us. We think that anything good comes about as a result of our diligent efforts, and anything bad comes about because we didn’t try hard enough. We labor and are heavily burdened by living under the thrall of this picture that holds us captive. The myth of the self-made person, the self-reliant pioneer with a can-do worker bee spirit runs deep. So deep, in fact, that we don’t even recognize it as a myth. This non-recognition of the constructed nature of the myth of the isolated, individual self is the very definition of ideology–that which presents itself as completely natural, just the way things are.

Part of the gift of being in the second half of life, or being really sick, is that we actually begin to feel our powers to “make things happen” according to our will begin to dwindle. Control is not possible and it dawns that it never really was. For some, this presents an alarmingly unwelcome coming into our temple, the unexpected and unbidden announcement of a guest we’ve been trying to keep locked outside the gates. So tight is our grip on maintaining the illusion of control with our efforts at the center of everything, that any perceived weakness is met with more winding ourselves up. We double-down. Try harder. Anything to keep this weakness and loss of control at bay. Anything to keep the fact, ahem, of our own “slavery to the fear of death,”—the ultimate loss of control— at bay (as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews rather pointedly reminds us).

We often think of grace, of the blessed ease of being presented by Jesus Christ our Lord, as good news. And it is surely that. Grace presents to us, births in us, a freedom, a peace, an unshakeableness in the face of calamity that no human construction, strategy, technique, or effort, however heroic, can afford. Happy are they who dwell in your house! Happy are the people whose strength is in you [and not in their own efforts]! The desolate valley of perfecting ourselves (and always coming up a day late and a dollar short), yields to the place of springs given, gifted, free, unmerited, and undeserved (i.e. not as the result of something we’ve done). Grace presents to us the early rains and pools of quiet refreshment where there was just parched ground off of which our bent hoe bounced feebly throwing meager sparks.

But as much as grace is indescribably Good News, it is also really bad news for the self that wants to be in control, to direct its life towards desired outcomes, that fancies itself as the author of its own good deeds, and wants to take credit for it all. “Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” asks Malachi. Certainly not the illusion of a self separate from God’s presence and action! That cherished, culturally-sanctioned idol of self-sufficiency falls, like a seed to the ground when God comes into the temple. Bolinas poet Joanne Kyger writes in her unflinchingly honest “Narcissus”:

“Credit

I never get any credit

for what I do–

No one thanks me

I do all these things

for people

and I never get any credit

I what to be boss

I want to be in charge

I need money money

I never get any credit

People don't thank me

I hate them. I hate this

town

I am so lonely. I’ve never

been so lonely.”

Doesn’t that kind of sum up life with the self (the poem’s titled “Narcissus” after all) as the measure of all things? There’s never enough. People always disappoint. They never do what we want them to do or give us what we think is owed to us. Things never go according to how we think they should go. And we get angry–we project our frustration outward onto others (“I hate them”) or delude ourselves into thinking that if we rearrange the scenery (“I hate this town”) we’ll be happy once-and-for-all. Chained to fickle breezes of praise and blame, sickness and health, good repute and ill-repute, pleasure and pain, we’re buffeted this way and that–isolated, enraged, alone. 

What we miss, of course, is that the only once-and-for-all is Jesus. In him is our peace, our safety, our security, our freedom from the haunting specter of death that dances in our heads like a ghoulish sugar plum fairy in the wee hours of our sleepless nights. When we see the futility of ever trying to maintain control in a risky and contingent universe of constant flux and change, and place our trust in what doesn’t come and go we find that we have come, finally, into the courts of the Lord. Like the sparrow, we make our nest not in our own efforts, but on the altar of the Lord. We stop the frantic effort to get, manage, control, maintain. We stop scorching ourselves and others with the refiner’s fire of shame and blame and make the Lord, for whom we long, for whom we vainly search outwardly in the constantly changing circumstances of our life, our dwelling place.

“Good teacher!” says the Rich Young Man to Jesus. “Good?! Why do you call me ‘good.’ Only my Father in heaven is good.” “I can do nothing on my own,” Jesus tells us in the opening chapters of the Gospel According to John. Jesus’ Temptations in the Wilderness–each of them temptations to self-sufficiency in its various guises–are refuted in turn by pointing beyond himself to dependence on God the Father as the true source of power. And beloved Paul–the recovering self-refiner who visited the refiner’s fire on others in the form of checking coats and passing out stones at the martyrdom of Stephen perhaps says it best–”power [God’s power] is made perfect in weakness. And so he boasts all the more gladly of his weakness so that the power of Christ may dwell in him.

Thinking we have to purify ourselves inevitably leads towards thinking others could use some purifying as well and the consequences are never pretty. The alternative is to dwell in the house of the Lord. To stop all the efforts to be perfect in the eyes of the Lord (perfect, that is, according to our idea of what we think the eyes of the Lord see as perfect) and instead let ourselves to presented by Jesus Christ our Lord. We leave ourselves alone. We stop trying to fix ourselves, purify ourselves, perfect ourselves. We accept that we are accepted. We rest. We enjoy the simple and indubitable fact of just being. We disengage from our frantic efforting, from the stories of not enough, and open, allow and yield to the love that is always already present. We touch that presence that is always present to us and let ourselves be presented. And we discover with wise and wizened Anna that everywhere we stand is, in fact, the Temple. We can never leave it except through our attempts to earn what is always already freely given.

Are there branches that need to be trimmed? God will trim them. Tares that need to be sorted from the wheat? God’s job not ours. A few refinements of character that the warmth of God’s love needs to work? Of course! There is no end to how fully we can embody God’s love and pour it out prodigally like costly nard for others as God’s hands, feet, eyes, and voice in the world. But all of that’s the hidden work of God’s love on us. Set down your burdens and the heavy yoke of doing it yourself and going it alone. Be present to the presence. Be presented. Let those ever-lasting arms hold you, mold you and live through you as what love looks like when it saturates your precious, unrepeatable life. It’s free… no turtle doves required.