The Ordinary Kingdom

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fourth Sunday After Epiphany, January 29, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

 We’ve all heard the beatitudes so many times that it’s easy to miss the radical import of the picture Jesus is painting as he speaks from his direct, intimate wilderness experience of God the Father’s Abba, Poppa, Daddy’s just as you are belovedness. To get a sense of just how radical Jesus’ vision is, all you have to do is turn the tables on the beatitudes (like how my children have “opposite day” where “no” means “yes”, “up” means “down”, and “salt” means “pepper”). It runs something like this: Blessed are the rich, the smugly contented, the powerful, the self-righteous, the litigious grudge-holders, the self-sufficient, the war-makers, the persecutors, the famous. 

Sound familiar? With some minor alterations, this opposite day version of the Beatitudes is a pretty good thumbnail of what it means to be a successful individual in American consumerist society. You can’t actually say that out loud, but Jesus, being Jesus, is always saying the quiet part out loud. Look out for number one, the one with the most toys wins and all the rest. It’s a picture of life, a form of life, that is largely responsible for the horrors of our present-day world–endless war, people in the richest, most powerful country in human history without food or shelter or access to medical care, environmental devastation, racial violence facilitated by access to military-grade weaponry, and by-the-minute enmity stoked by the thumbs up/thumbs down button on social media (which should really be called anti-social media). A world, incidentally, where the bumpersticker “People Not Profits” is even a bumper-sticker!

We might hear the Beatitudes as a way of undoing in love all the ways we’ve been conditioned to search for the happiness that is already here–Like one in water crying, "I thirst!" Like the son of a rich man wandering poor on this earth. God has made God’s home among mortals, the kingdom is spread out upon the earth, the pearl of great price already nestled in the field of the heart while we busy ourselves with earnest pearl diving and wreck the oceans while we’re at it. And this “coming undone in love” as I call it is really all captured in the first Beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Obviously, Jesus is not saying that there is anything good about grinding poverty and systemic inequality. Just go to Hildegarde’s or The Point to bear witness to de-humanizing effects of being cast-off, stepped over, and a society that politely crosses to the other side of the road when it sees a “dirty Samaritan” in the ditch.

No, poverty of spirit is something much more radical–it goes to the root of what causes all the mayhem in our lives and those whose paths we cross: our weddedness to false pictures of self-sufficiency, invulnerability, and control.  Now, poverty of spirit is not just being a little blue, or down in the dumps. Nor is Jesus saying that untreated mental illness like depression is somehow a good thing, or something you can overcome with enough prayer. 

The poverty of spirit to which Jesus calls us, and which sits like a crown jewel atop the Beatitudes, is quite simply a recognition of our need for and dependence upon God. Poverty of spirit is a call to drop the whole misguided project of “go-it-alone” and self-improving our way to happiness. Poverty of spirit is a call to let God be God instead of trying to manage, control, and manipulate ourselves into some idealized state where the conditions are just right, we get what we want, and it stays that way forever. Poverty of spirit is really a way of being-with our life just as it is–just this very moment–open, receptive, aware and alert–and noticing how we don’t like doing that very much. Can’t tolerate it most of the time, in fact. But difficulty is not what pulls us from our path to God. Difficulty and ordinariness are our path to God.

At the Quiet Day last Saturday, we spent some time praying with a painting by Jean-Baptiste Chardin that’s in your bulletin. A glass of water, some garlic, a coffee pot, some dried herbs, perhaps. Nothing special. Nothing extraordinary. Just everyday objects captured in what Duns Scotus calls their thisness, their quiddity. The painting, in its dustily radiant silence makes the case for a kind of intimate seeing, untimbered by like-dislike, good-bad. “Consider the lilies of the field,” says Jesus. No really. “Consider the lilies of the field!” Christophe Andre, calls this innocent, child-like gazing… 

Looking at things without hope, convetousness, or comment…. adopting a position of open, curious, humility towards the world around us…. looking at objects for what they are. Disconnecting even from what they have to tell us. Gently disengaging from their story [which is always our story about them] (“I was given it”; I found it”; I bought it one rainy day when I was feeling sad”), their point (“I use them for this or that”), our judgement of them (“It’s beautiful”; “It’s ugly”; “They’re weird). We can gently free ourselves from this mental talking, pass through it and go further still, to see things in their secret state of quiet substance and connect simply to what they are.

Christophe Andre, I would say, is calling us see from a place of the first beatitude, a place of poverty of spirit where things are as they are, and cherished, worshipped, adored, in themselves and for themselves. How quickly looking is tinged with judgement, and usefulness. Notice that whenever we judge, whenever we think about something’s usefulness, it always refers back to a “me”--“I” like or don’t like. “I” find this useful or not useful. The small self with its conditioned set of reactions like a great judging sun at the center of the galaxy.

A still-life like Chardin’s is really a call to come and see. It’s a call to lay gently aside our thoughts about things and come into direct experience of the thing-in-itself and there find the presence of God. Chardin, in his quiet, understated way, is teaching us to look and see, to stay and remain, to step outside of the cramped confines of how things should be, and embrace things-as-they-are. And not just glasses of water, garlic cloves, and coffee pots (but that might be a good place to start–baby steps as they say). People too. How often do we actually meet the person in front us? Are they ever just who they are without us running them through what they can do for us, whether they like us or not, how we can get what we think we need from them? No wonder when we spend time with someone who doesn’t have an agenda for us, who is simply and quietly attentive to us as we are, makes space for us, we feel better. We feel “seen” as people say these days. We feel loved.

Why, I wonder? Because that person, in some small way, is seeing us, attending to us, holding us in their loving gaze like God sees us, attends to us, holds us in God’s loving gaze. Poverty of spirit opens a way for us to hold ourselves with the same gentleness and loving-kindness with which God hold us, and to hold our neighbor, the stranger, the good earth and all of creation in a tender, warm embrace: “Love melting into love,” as Teresa of Avila says. If you learn and practice that basic human faculty (which goes by the rather dispiriting term “contemplation” and makes it seem like the special preserve of some spiritual elite), all the rest of the Beatitudes come to flower in our lives. Unbidden, and at best, not particularly noticed by us at all–”The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” Poverty of spirit gives birth to the virtues because we are simple, still, quiet (not talking to ourselves) and rooted and grounded in God as the groundless ground of our being, rooted and grounded in the source of all beauty, truth, and goodness. Becoming little, poor, open, receptive, dependent, vulnerable and letting God be God in/with/for and ahead of us we are made beautiful by the Beautiful One whose beauty will save the world. 

Moments like these happen to each of us, each and every day. We just don’t notice them. It’s the painters and poets–well-practiced in Christic foolishness, trained in uselessness, and schooled in stumbling block poverty of spirit–who notice it for us that we might notice it too. Like R.S. Thomas, the Welsh Anglican poet-priest, who writes in his poem “The Moor”--

It was like a church to me.

I entered it on soft foot,

Breath held like a cap in the hand.

It was quiet.

What God was there made himself felt,

Not listened to, in clean colours

That brought a moistening of the eye,

In movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness

Of the heart’s passions — that was praise

Enough; and the mind’s cession

Of its kingdom. I walked on,

Simple and poor, while the air crumbled

And broke on me generously as bread.

Walking the moor, breath “like a cap in the hand” and “on soft foot”  in a space where the heart’s passions are stilled, immersed in sensate experience without commentary (there are no prayers said), the mind’s tyrannical kingdom ceased for just a moment, simple, poor and without agenda (he’s not “trying to get his steps in” or take a selfie to post on his Instagram feed), he wakes (and invites us to wake to) the daily bread of heavenly manna breaking over us in each and every moment. The provision, peace, and bounty of this sacramental ordinary available to us when we stop trying to make our life how we think it should be, and receive it softly, gently, simply, poor in spirit. Just this ordinary moment. Angels ascending and descending on yarrow stalks poking akimbo up through muddy snow. Red-tailed hawk in and out of shadow on the pine tree top. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.