Going to God With An Empty Cup

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 21, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

“This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven,

will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

There is a fun old story from Meiji-era Japan (1868-1912) featuring a Zen master and college professor that has a tantalizing similarity to the story of the ascension, which we encounter this morning in the Gospel According to St. Luke. It goes like this:

Nan-in, a Japanese master… received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. ‘It is overfull. No more will go in!’ ‘Like this cup,’ Nan-in said, ‘you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?’

The little teaching story reminds us of all the ways in which holding on, grasping, and captivity to our preconceptions and judgments often get in the way of us really encountering our life in God. And it turns out that is as common in first century Palestine as it is in nineteenth century Japan. Welcome to the human condition.

I’m not so sure there is such a thing as seeing reality “as it is,” and I am rather skeptical of people who claim to have unimpeded access to the truth of things. I’m not so sure that we can empty our cup by force of will any more than we can conjure a blank slate of consciousness. Nonetheless, we can be honest about the kinds of ideas, preferences, and judgements (the buzzing hive of uninterrogated ‘shoulds’) that shape each and every encounter–with ourselves, with the world, with strangers, and indeed with God. Just being aware of what’s running the show, noticing the tight fist of grasping is the beginning of freedom, of love. Awareness heals.

There is a consistent pattern in Holy Scripture of the necessity for letting go of old ideas, patterned and habitual ways of seeing and being in the world, so that something new can emerge. You could say that the practice of prayer is actually a kind of regular, daily discipline of just this kind of gesture: opening the hand of thought. What we were talking about a couple of weeks ago as the practice of resting in the Great I AM–simple being in the presence. It’s why Rowan Williams will call the practice of prayer, “making space for God to get at us.” We open, we dispose ourselves, face our panic and anxiety and our boredom (this is stupid nothing’s happening), so that we can wake to God’s presence that is always present, active and working, but often overlooked. In the words of our psalm we release all those thoughts and, “Let them vanish like smoke when the wind drives it away… as the wax melts at the fire.” And when we’re not holding on, the God who has always been here is revealed, unveiled– “God in his holy habitation!” all along, as the psalmist proclaims.

Mary is, of course, the paradigm of this kind of disposition–the icon of Christian discipleship and its purpose to give birth to Christ through our “yes,” in the manger of the heart that we might be those selfsame hands in the world for others. But recall that Mary has to release, to surrender, all the things that her culture has told her she is–too young, a woman, not married, not from the right bloodline–in order for the new thing God is doing in/with/through her to emerge. From a moment of bewilderment that draws her up short, and empties her cup, she wagers–like Abraham, Jacob, Tobias, Samuel–and makes a leap of faith into an impossible future made full-of-gracefully possible. Something has to fall away for something new to arrive.

Richard Kearney points out that, “Abraham has to lose his son as a given in order to receive him back as a gift; he has to abandon Isaac as possession in order to welcome him back as promise. Isaac is not his (as extension, acquisition, projection) but another’s, another, an Other.” This is the very same pattern. A letting go, a release of old ways of seeing and being in the world, a making space, so that something else might be born. Abraham has to learn that most difficult of parental lessons–my child is not my possession–so that he can receive his child back as pure gift–God come to him in the person of Isaac.

We see this pattern over and over in scripture, so it makes sense that when it comes to the person of God’s only begotten son, Jesus, we see very clearly what had perhaps been previously only partially glimpsed. Imagine what it must have been like for the disciples to receive the Risen Christ back after the crucifixion. From that place of desolation, loss, and shame at their own betrayal, they are suddenly met by Jesus, companioned by Jesus, taught by Jesus, fed by the peace-breathing Jesus. What joy! What freedom they must have felt in the knowledge that death and their desertions don’t have the last word. How tempting it must have been to want to turn the Risen Christ into a possession. To hold on to him.

But we learn over and over again that holding on doesn’t give us the happiness we think it does. To Mary Magdalene: “Don’t hold on to me.” To the disciples on the Road to Emmaus: a recognition of Jesus in the breaking of the bread and then the disappearance. And today, Jesus is lifted up and a cloud takes him out of sight with the angels telling the crowd, “People of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” They have to release Jesus as possession to receive him back as gift in the Spirit. Just like we have release how we think our life should be in order to receive it as gift. Just like we have to release others as possessions in order to receive them as Christ come to us in the face of someone we thought we knew. Empty the cup. Empty the cup. Empty the cup. It will empty itself if you let it!

Jesus is “no longer in the world,” in the words of the High Priestly Prayer of John so that we, the Body of Christ, might, in the Spirit, receive Christ and be Christ for others. So we make a little space for God to get at us that we can come undone in love and be an open place for the new song God is singing in Christ to sing itself in us. We rest in the great I AM of our belovedness without condition, and regardless of circumstance: the blessing of the “spirit of glory… the Spirit of God… resting on you.” We “keep alert” for the ways our cups are too full, for the way the hand of thought cramps up and how we want to possess and control our life that is properly only received as gift. We open and take a little leap into the ease of simply being. “Let it be with me according to your word.” “Not my will, but your will be done.” “Into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Like my parents on that bench in Philadephia Starbucks in hand with nothing to do and nowhere to go, we open our hands, cast our anxieties on him, release our fears, in the faith that something other than the diminishing story we tell ourselves about ourselves, the world, our neighbor, and God is at work in us. We let love’s oneing work be done in us so that we can then go out into the world to serve those other members of the one body as unself-consciously as we would floss our own teeth, or apply a plaster to a cut on our hurt toe.

That’s the placeless place our readings for today invite us into. Letting go and letting be in order to receive. We release people, places, things, even God from the tyranny of being our possession so that we might receive them and everything as gift. As gracious rain that refreshes the weary land. “The presence of God, the God of Sinai… the presence of God, the God of Israel.” So what’s in your cup? Are you willing to let it be emptied out so God might fill it? “People of Galilee, why do you stand looking up to heaven?”