Generously As Bread

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Third Sunday of Easter Sunday, April 23, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

One of the great paradoxes of the life of discipleship is that the One we are seeking is already here. As Francis of Assisi puts it, “The one you are looking for is doing the looking.” And the pilgrimage of faith–of knowing ourselves intimately embraced by the one in whom we live and move and have our being, the Divine Love that loves us into loving others–is more about entering more deeply, openly, receptively, curiously into this place here and now, than it is about journeying to some distant land, gathering a new set of ideas about God, or catapulting ourselves out of our so-called ordinary life into an imagined spiritual realm. God is present, active, and working here and now in our lives, and if there can be said to be any journey at all, it is a journey to where we always already are. “Not God who is absent,” quips Meister Eckhart, “but we who are off on errands.”

The Road to Emmaus story is a model of pilgrimage into the depth and richness of the always already giveness of God’s presence as the Ground of Being. A journey, you might say, into the present moment, which is the only place we ever encounter God. So often, of course, we miss the richness of God’s presence in/with/for/ahead of us because of our captivity to an ego-centered world of judgements, requirements, and demands. We tell ourselves a story of “Life isn’t how I want it to be,” or “This isn’t it,” or “If only ______, then I would be happy.” We tell ourselves some version of these stories and inevitably discover that life doesn’t conform to our ideas about how it should  be. And when our map doesn’t match the territory (concepts never match reality), it’s a short trip to fear, scarcity, and lack. But Easter, the Resurrection, hearing our name spoken on Love’s lips on the first day of the week reminds us that fear, scarcity and lack aren’t inherent to our experience. Fear, scarcity, and lack are believed stories we tell. They are smudged lenses we bring to our experience that obscure clear seeing. They are conditioned lapses of attention in which the heart closes down and we trade our untrammeled freedom in Christ for life under Pharaoh’s comfortably uncomfortable thumb.

When we mistake our cramped map for the effervescent territory of life in God,  we suffer more than we need to. Often, we get angry. Some lash out at others making them scapegoats for the unhappiness that results from their unexamined requirements. Others conclude that because their life doesn’t conform to their expectations that God is somehow absent and rave a God. Still others conclude they just “Don’t get it,” and they are somehow broken and defective–turning the anger against themselves. But, of course, the God who stoops and feeds us and meets us in the night of our need can’t be absent. Separation from God is a story we tell ourselves and believe without ever inquiring into its validity. The reality of this moment is that each of us receives right here and right now, “A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.” “My grace is sufficient for you.” God is always literally walking alongside in the midst of our daily life patiently listening while we tell God how God is nowhere to be found: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him,” says Mary Magdalene to the Gardener Christ. 

In the past few months I’ve been playing with the practice of what it might mean to shift from framing my life as a problem to solve to a parable to prayerfully discern. Long Covid is a great gift (if a rather stern teacher) in this regard. Chronic, by definition, is something that ain’t going away. It’s not a problem with a solution. There is no endpoint or resolution. It’s something that has to be lived into, explored, embraced, and yes, walked, in order to discover there–in transit and on the way–the God who is with us. Even here. Just like this. “This isn’t it,” creates a world where  I want appears on an always receding horizon and the life I actually have is in the meantime missed. Can Easter Eyes perceive the stranger walking alongside just waiting to be recognized in the breaking of the bread as Christ Himself as I make the pilgrimage of fatigue, headache, and brain-fog?

I’ve learned (and continue to learn again and again and again) that if illness is a problem, I am constantly in a state of resistance, at war, with the basic reality of life as it is. I expend a lot of effort trying to fix what can’t be fixed. And sooner or later this becomes the habitual, default mode. People, situations, indeed every encounter, is approached from the perspective of needing to make it conform to how I need it to be through attempted control and manipulation. It’s a subtly violent approach to life where we think that through force of will we can wrench things into accord with how we need it to be. Those lines from C.S. Lewis come to mind, “She’s the sort of woman who lives for others–you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.” 

But the Good News is there is another way to approach life; not as problem, but as parable. Where problems demand effortful fixes, parables invite an alternative disposition. Parables ask that we approach the world, other people, each moment of our lives, with a certain open-handedness, curiosity and inquisitiveness. Keats calls this “negative capability,” in which the person of genius, the person of parable, the Christian who makes the pilrimage of life without needing it to be a certain way is,  “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Parable assumes presence, not absence. Parable assumes provision and a way through. Parable assumes primordial possibility and abundance.

To be Easter people–the beloved community that arises out of being gathered around the Mother Hen  Risen Christ–means that we actually practice Keats’ negative capability. We practice resurrection by assiduously and honestly noticing the stories we tell about ourselves, others, God, and our life that keep us stuck, circling the drain of fear, scarcity and lack. Questions like, “What story am I telling myself right now?” or “By what stream am I planted?” or “How are fear, scarcity and lack working in me right now?” open us to the possibility that there is more at work in this moment than our stale old stories, our judgements of self and others. So we clarify the story and then like the children in Godly Play we gently ask that wondering question–“I wonder if that’s really true?” Can we make the pilgrimage into whatever this moment presents–a joy, a grief, an illness, a stranger on the street–as a parable to be inquired into? Can each moment, just as it is, be stepped into, welcomed, embraced without the constant commentary of how things should be? The Anglican poet-priest R.S. Thomas says it best 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.

We are always actually on the Road to Emmaus; we are always on pilgrimage into God’s presence which is always already given, already here. “Simple and poor” as Thomas writes–means open and receptive. Inquisitive. Our old stories gently recognized as just stories and not the final word on how things effervescently are. Simple and poor, we walk on. Journeying ever more deeply into the place we never left; out of our heads and into our life in God. Simple and poor we walk on and one day recognize that the stranger at our side is Christ Himself. What we mistook for absence breaking generously as bread on some nondescript moor, at a roadside inn, on a dusty road,  taking out the trash, or even sick in bed. Do not our hearts burn within us? Amen.