Stones into Manna

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fifth of Easter Sunday, May 7, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

One of the things we’re up to as a parish family in Eastertide is to live out the existential implications of hearing our name spoken on Love’s lips at the empty tomb in each and every context and circumstance of our ordinary everyday lives. Easteride is first a deep, personal knowing in our own experience of death trampled down by death, of captivity being taken captive, of Christ breathing aerating peace to dispel fear in what whatever locked room we’ve happened to have talked ourselves into. But it is then the practice of taking this knowledge (in the Old Testament sense of intimate, personal, experiential knowing rather than mere ideas between our ears) on the road, into our daily lives. That’s why our usual Old Testament readings for Eastertide are replaced by portions of Luke’s Book of Acts. What does it look like for ordinary people like you and me–butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers who have come to share in Jesus’ selfsame intimacy with the Father in the Spirit–to go about our lives as the very love we have received, for others?

As a priest, I have the great privilege of visiting folks who are prevented from coming to church and sharing communion with them. This past Holy Week I ventured into a rehab I’d never visited before (rare for me since I’ve darkened the doors of most in this valley and a few beyond). There in the bed I encountered an old friend who you might say had let herself be built into a spiritual house. She had indeed tasted that the Lord is good and grown into her salvation. Integrated her heavens-ripping, well-pleased belovedness thoroughly. Outwardly, there was no real reason for joy or gratitude. There was significant pain. The noisy interruptions of nurses coming and going. The pokes. The prods. And, of course, the food. Try finding a good cup of coffee in a medical facility in Mormon Utah. This is not the place (for that).

And yet, and yet. There–amongst spread newspapers, rumpled sheets, a half-eaten cup of what the label unconvincingly proclaimed as “chocolate pudding”–was presence, radiance, joy, and thanksgiving: the fruits (undimmed by circumstance) of a daily habit of coming home to love, of knowing the Lord as true refuge, as strong rock, as safe castle, as crag and stronghold. How could this be? We have seen strange things today!

When Jesus tells us that in his father’s house there are many dwelling places, we, by default it seems, interpret this as referring to where we go when we die. We mistakely think that having a place prepared for us, means we’ve got a reservation in heaven, and miss the more transfiguring reality of what Jesus is pointing at: Just this. Here. Now. God’s effervescent presence shining through in the midst of it all: joy, heartbreak, sickness, health, in good times and in bad. The Great I AM disclosed to Moses and with which Jesus’ presence blazes forth cannot be dimmed or diminished by the chances and changes of this world. God with us to the end of the age. Even when, with Peter, we are dragged by a belt tied around our waist to a place we don’t want to go. Even when, yes, like Stephen, we find ourselves at the hands of a whipped-up mob convinced that by the eradication, erasure, and silencing of this scapegoated other they will find the peace for which, underneath it all, they long. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem.

Stephen’s, “into your hands I commend my spirit,” his forgiving of his persecutors just as Jesus did, is exactly the same as knowing the loving presence of God in a rehab. They differ only in degree. It is the recognition of the dwelling place prepared even here, even now. You don’t magically encounter difficulty and utter, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” This is the fruit of a deeply disposed availability to God’s presence practiced as Teresa of Avila says, “among the pots and pans,”--in the trenches of the frustrations of daily life: carpooling, budgeting, illness, relationships, growing old and witnessing the diminishment of our faculties. But how? Lord! teach us to pray.

The key resides in the twofold litany of I AM statements and the call to abide/dwell in John’s Gospel. Teacher, where are you staying? Where do you dwell? What is the ground from which you live? Come and see. And Andrew and the other disciple of John the Baptist go. They abide with Jesus. All day! Until four in the afternoon. They dwell with Jesus, abide in him, and come to know his presence as the ground of their very own being.

Abiding–resting our being in the Great I Am–is the simplest thing in the world, which is why we don’t do it, or why we overlook its transfiguring power. Not who you are, how you are, where you are, but that you are. Offering ourselves just as we are to God just as God is until the seeming two mingle into a single unified presence without boundary or limit. Simple presence–just being–is experiencing God’s presence. A seamless, dancing whole whose pulsing current is love drawing, dragging, all things to itself that we might have life and have it abundantly.

When we cultivate the habit of disposing ourselves to God’s presence–little glimpses many times–what slowly starts to flower forth, what is unveiled, is the basic, unimpeachable bedrock stability of our life in God. Fears and anxieties, even if they still flit around, are more like a momentary globe of gnats in a slant of sunlight. No need to entertain them. No need even to chase them away. No problem.

I AM, resting in and as the I AM, is the way, the truth, and the life. What a tragedy that Christians have in their rather predictably befuddled way turned this all-inclusive statement to know the simplicity resting in the Great I AM into a proscriptive and exclusive statement of mere belief. As if our salvation consisted in having the right ideas between our ears. As if we could think our way to the Kingdom of Heaven that is closer than thoughts, closer than breathing, closer to me than I often am to myself! The novelist E.M. Forrester talks of “poor, talkative Christianity,” to highlight for us how easily we trade the utter child-like simplicity of being, of knowing ourselves enfolded, upheld, springing forth from God in each and every moment, for a collection of ideas about God. We trade the meal for a laminated, well-thumbed menu and wonder why we’re always hungry.

What is the way to this I AM we ask? Is there a method, a technique, that we should deploy in order to get to this I AM? How do I do being? Do we hear how crazy that seemingly innocent question is? How can we ever be separate from our own being? We can’t! Of course, our conscious connection with God as the Ground and Fount of Being can be eclipsed, veiled, forgotten. But it is only seemingly veiled. God is always here–holding, sustaining, healing. The way to the I AM is just to be, as you are, and to wake to the simple, unalterable fact of your belovedness–before you’ve tried to change things, feel a certain way, make your mind a certain way, pretty up the picture, or get your life just how you think it should be.

“I’ve tried to meditate before but my mind is too busy,” people say. Who said anything about meditating! Don’t meditate! That sounds like work to me. Just be. Be easy like Old Easy Yoke Himself. Stop trying to make yourself something other than who you already are. Stop trying to make your experience anything other than it already is. Stop the war with what is and cease all the efforts to manage and control. So we sit–even for a few moments– and let everything be as it is. Struggling with experience? No problem. Feeling at ease? No problem. Experiencing states conventionally labeled as positive? No problem. Being visited by so-called negative states? No problem. Quiet mind? No problem. Restless mind? No problem.

This simple practice of the I AM, just being, is the way, the truth, and the life. We come to see all experience, regardless of content, as held in the boundless love of God. And we slowly come to hold our experience the same way. And what happens when we learn to hold ourselves the way God holds us? We automatically start to hold others that way too. We stop throwing our stones of how they should be at them. Judging and criticizing them, tearing them down behind their backs. We stop trying to fix people and make them conform to our ideas about how they should be. We see others, all others without exception–gay, straight, non-binary, rich, poor, black, white, yellow or brown–as participating in this same sense of beingness: literally loving them as ourself. Maybe we see manna in the stones people throw at us. Maybe we swim in the living water in a rehab with bad coffee and something purporting to be chocolate pudding. Maybe the driveway stones spritzed with spring’s first dandelions cry out, “Hosannah in the highest!”