Like Honey From the Rock
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Twlefth Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.
It’s always a good Sunday when we get to talk about about money, the marriage bed, and power! Our three readings appointed for this day make clear to us a very simple truth of the Christian life–we come to resemble more and more the end (telos) that we place at the center of our lives. Thomas Merton puts it this way, “Life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.”
David Foster Wallace, in his 2005 commencement speech to the graduates of Kenyon College reminds us that, “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” This is what Jeremiah is so bent out of shape about. He knows that we are homo adorans–worshipping animals–and that the people of Israel are worshipping the wrong God with dire consequences. Idolatry and injustice, Jeremiah and the prophets tell us, go hand in hand. It’s a simple and direct causal line. Wherever there is inequality, exclusion, injustice, and environmental degradation, idolatry in one form or other is always at its heart.
Worship “whiteness” and racism is the inevitable result. Worship riches, and a world of haves and have-nots emerges. Worship heterosexuality and hate-crimes against LGBTQIA+ folks become not only a matter of course, but somehow God-sanctioned. Anything but the unconditional love of God whose deepest desire is to draw us to Godself and love us into loving others, hollows us out from the inside. Or in Jeremiah’s blunt assessment of the people of Israel–”[they] went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves.” And later in the same passage, “my people have changed their glory for something that does not profit.” Whoopsie daisy. A bad trade.
In the same address, Foster Wallace has a wonderful, if slightly close-to-the bone, litany to this effect. It might as well come straight from lips of an Old Testament prophet:
If you worship money and things–if they are where you tap real meaning in life–then you will never have enough…. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you…. Worship power–you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
What’s at the center of our always-already worshipping life is of grave importance. So the ordering and shaping of our desires into a pattern of life that leads to justice, beloved community, and a life of human flourishing, is what Christian discipleship is all about. God wants us to be happy, for goodness’ sakes! We just look for that happiness in all the wrong places, make ourselves miserable, and then conclude amazingly that God doesn’t exist.
You get a lot of “land talk” in the Old Testament–the Israelites ping pong back and forth: in the land, out of the land, they are promised the land, they go towards the land, they retreat from the land… on and on. And we can get the impression that God is a commercial real estate broker with Israel as the sometimes interested buyer. But the land is not a geographical location, ultimately, or something to be bought or sold. Being in the land, in the Wine Vat-Watchtower-Vineyard with grapes aplenty, waking up to the reality of one’s life spring forth as the fountain of living water (Samaritan Woman at the well, anyone?) is a disposition, an inward and interior spiritual grace not dependent on outward circumstances. The land is wherever we open, receive, allow, cooperate with God’s ever-present grace. That can be in a meeting, washing the dishes, stopped in traffic, changing a diaper, stuck in our house during lockdown, or on our deathbed.
The good and broad land, the land of milk and honey, those waters rising up to eternal life, emerge wherever and whenever all the usual ways we’ve sought happiness on our own terms comes to a frustrating end. We’ve tried it all–power, possessions, prestige, control, and all the rest–and we come that empty place where we realize we can’t do it under our own steam, that we can’t self-improve, or self-help, our way to the happiness for which we are created. We turn, return, and come home to the God who has made his home in us as the source, the fountain of living water, at the ground of our being: “I will never leave you or forsake you,” says the author of the Letter to the Hebrews citing Psalm 118.
The frustration of our way seeking happiness in the ways we’ve been conditioned to look for happiness, what we term “failure,” is in fact an opportunity to recognize how we’ve “dug out cisterns for ourselves, cracked cisterns that hold no water.” We’ve made ultimate what is of secondary or tertiary importance, and we suffer. When the way in which we’ve been conditioned to seek for happiness in what comes and goes is frustrated, we get angry. And the anger is a gift, a stranger to whom we should show hospitality, an angel who is bringing us a sign that we’re bringing some expectation, some “should” to the situation. Can we gently, lovingly, and with a little bit of humor release that “should,” open to our life as it is, and there find ourselves sourced and resourced from some place other than our own finite efforts, strategies, and tactics? Can we gently release our grip on how things should be and learn to welcome our strange, God-saturated life as it is? Can we turn from what comes and goes and learn to rest in, habituate to, and stabilize our lives in the risen life “Jesus Christ [who] is the same yesterday and today and forever?”
The image of the banquet is one of the most enduring in all of scripture. It speaks to the reality that we are, by grace, always already at the sumptuous feast of belovedness that’s been in full swing since before the foundation of the world. It’s free. Everyone is invited. And all we have to do is recognize how hungry we are for what doesn’t come and go and accept the invitation to the party. Now what do human beings do with free grace and indiscriminate hospitality? We place human conditions on God’s unconditional love. We set up pecking orders. We craft seating charts and badges of honor. We erect hierarchies of power, prestige, and possessions that inevitably create a world of insiders and outsiders, clean and unclean, those on the top and those on the bottom.
Jesus is giving his followers a spiritual practice in this parable. It’s a practice of radical acceptance. A practice where first we know ourselves–poor, crippled, lame, and blind as we are–as unconditionally loved and accepted, just as we are. Perhaps we experience this as a stirring in our hearts, a quickening of belovedness that showers us without requirement. Perhaps we get a small, fleeting taste of God’s love for us and we want more and more to live from that love, as that love. We consent to God’s presence and action in our lives so that all that is not love in us might fall away, might be refined, so that the one who doesn’t come and go, the one who is the same yesterday, and today and forever, the birthless, deathless love of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit might manifest through our very hands and feet in the world for others.
So first we wake up to our own belovedness. Through regular prayer, reading and pondering scripture, being fed open-palmed at the table with God’s real presence come to us in ordinary bread and wine, in being forgiven in our sins Sunday after Sunday, we come to know ourselves as an honored guest. “Friend, move up higher.” “Who me?” “Yes, you!” “Couldn’t be!” “Then who?” And from that boundaryless, highways and byways, come-as-you are inclusiveness we then learn to practice the same radical acceptance of others as equally beloved children of God, as fellow invitees to the banquet of Divine Love. Having come to that place of failure and frustration, having come to see that we are indeed poor, crippled, lame, and blind when we try to navigate life on our own terms under the illusion of self-sufficiency and without God’s knocking-on-the-door grace, having taken the last place, and discovered that in becoming little and lost is actually our salvation, we then practice God’s radical acceptance and radical welcome for others.
As sometimes happens, I came back with a sandwich from Harmon’s the other day to find someone slumped in a chair in the front hall. Honestly, all I wanted was to sit down in peace and quiet and eat my overpriced egg salad. But the poor guy was in rough shape and wanted to talk with a priest. At first it was about money for a bus ticket to get to Seattle, but the real thing he wanted to say was, “I’m not dangerous. I’m a good person. I’m not dangerous. Don’t be scared of me. Don’t be scared of me.” He ground it out mechanically as if saying it aloud would exorcise the devastating effect this internalized belief had on his psyche. And each time I leaned close and whispered, “Shh. Shh. Shh. Be still. Come home. You’re not scary. I’m not scared of you. You are beloved.” Eventually, I anointed him healing oil and laid my hands on him and blessed him. And then he just wept. And wept. And wept. And then I started to cry as well. “Praise be,” he canted, “praise be” as the tears flowed like a fountain of living water. “Praise be, praise be,” he croaked with a voice like honey from a rock. This stranger an angel with love on his lips, praising from a once-dry cistern, brought up from the land of Egypt and praising now from the promised land. I came closer to him and he came closer to me and in that strange place we found ourselves in God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Yes, indeed, friend who came closer. Praise be.