Seventh Sunday after Pentecost - July 16, 2023
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost July 16, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.
One of the great pitfalls of the spiritual life is to presume that the seeds of Divine Presence are to be found in some times and places and not others. It’s an understandable mistake to make, of course. After all, we have places like this Cathedral set apart with beautiful stained glass windows, flowers, candles, breath-taking music, fancy vestments, sacraments of baptism and eucharist. This is the place where the Holy Stuff happens, right?
Well, certainly, holy stuff happens here. Sometimes I swear I see angels around the raised host. Smell roses when there aren’t any on the altar. Mistake the light through the windows for heaven itself–whether in heaven or on earth, I know not which. There’s a reason why people are drawn to this place. To sit, or kneel, and bask in the presence that holds, and caresses all our cares, and concerns, our hurts and heartbreaks, our joys and thanksgivings and quiet overflowing gratitudes. I see them every week–people I don’t know and who don’t especially want to be known–who find a pew and plop down in a place where “prayer has been valid,” in T.S. Eliot’s words from “Little Gidding,” to enjoy God, to be enjoyed by God, to be present to Presence. To behold and be held.
The trouble comes when we start to associate God’s Presence with a particular place, feeling, or mental or emotional state. We become like moths to a flame–chasing after a fleeting, momentary experience we had once in a desperate attempt to recreate whatever it was we experienced then and avoid our life as it actually is now. We can get tricked into thinking, into living actually, as if the seeds of Divine Presence are only sowed in particular times and places, or available in particular situations. We associate Presence with a very particular and idiosyncratic set of causes and conditions (the right music, incense (or not), a good sermon, sitting next to our friends, and all the rest). When that fragile, fleeting set of causes and conditions comes together just so, Presence is there. When they don’t, it’s not (and usually because someone else–an inconvenient other–has thrown a wrench in the works by singing off-key or having a coughing fit at the exact wrong moment). But Presence is seeded into each and every moment… a beautiful sunrise, certainly, but also grief, pain, loss, loneliness.
The first thing to notice about the Parable of the Sower is that it is God who is the Sower and Christ who is the seed. And not to send you faithful Episcopalians running for the exits, but as it says in Nicene Creed, Christ is the one “through whom all things were made.” That means each and every person, place, and circumstance is charged with Christ’s presence, with a full measure, pressed down and overflowing–even the people or aspects of experience we don’t like, from which we recoil, or try our best to deny, expel, or repress.
A few weeks ago I was talking about that curious little word hostis that is the root of both “hostility,” and “hospitality.” Abraham is the person in whom this choice of hostility or hospitality is most evocatively worked out in Holy Scripture. He welcomes those three strange men from the moment-of-decision vestibule of his tent in an act of radical hospitality that reveals the strangers to be Angels, and in the great 14th Russian icon writer Andrei Rublev’s reading of it–God in Godself, the Three-in-One, and One-in-Three right there under the dry and dusty oaks of Mamre. And Abraham is also the one who loads kindling on his son Isaac’s back. An act of mis-hearing as God’s voice his own captivity to a Crocodile God hungry for sacrifice. Abraham, like us, is equally prey to acts of radical welcome, and shockingly mis-guided violence. We stand perilously balanced, as I said a couple of weeks ago, always and everywhere on the slippery stone of hostis. Acceptance or rejection. Hospitality or hostility. Welcome, or what are you doing here? Stony, recalcitrant ground choked with acquisition, preoccupation, and judgment, or grace-softened, receptive soil?
I’ve always found it to be the poets who show us what this looks like in the midst of our ordinary lives. Particularly, the haiku poets of Japan who find Ultimate Reality in what most of us never notice, God in the wink of a sun-glinting piece of mica on a footpath. It is the poets of the ordinary and the everyday, who eschew grand statement and tedious moralizing, who show us that with eyes peeled and ears perked, hearts soft and wide as the world, that the seeds of Christ’s Presence are silently, hiddenly, mysteriously working here, now. Take Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) who lived much of his too short, pain-addled life in a one room hut confined to bed coughing up his life-blood due to tuberculosis:
Heath grass–
sandals
still fragrant
Having mustered enough energy to go for a short walk, the ailing Shiki is, what–attentive enough? Aware enough? Open-hearted enough? Graced enough?—to notice the scent of heath grass on his sandals. In five words he conjures both his huffing and puffing walk among the grasses and this tender scene of the sickly poet not long for this world seated just inside the door of his shack strung out by the simple act of taking off his sandals. Out-of breath. Stiff and in pain. And yet even in the midst of that–the fragrance of his heath grass scented sandals fresh from sauntering. Or this:
Summer sky
clear after rain–
ants on parade
The simple, bare, unadorned, and untheologized appreciation of the moment after a rain squall when the ants, mysteriously, hiddenly, come out to strut their stuff. The vastness of the sky and the minute particularity of a thread of ants both held at once just so. Or this:
Storm–chestnuts
race along
the bamboo porch
Not the grand magnificence of the storm for poor, sick, Shiki, but the rolling, rattling, knocking of a handful of chestnuts along the porch. Perhaps more of the majesty of the storm revealed in that humble sound than a blustery Shelleyan discourse about lightening and thunderclaps on Mt. Blanc.
The good soil, of which Jesus speaks, is receptive, allowing, softened. Trusting. Patient. Forbearing. It’s open like the mind of a child (when they’re not in the throes of a temper tantrum), like the deaf man to whom Jesus utters those words, Ephaphtha–Be opened! Allow yourself to come home to the sacrament of this present moment, this already seeded patch of Christ through whom all things were made and by whom all things have their being–and be softened, be opened. So often we bring our ideas of “this isn’t it,” our unacknowledged stories of fear, scarcity, and lack to our encounters with the world (Another boring day), each other (Oh great, disappointing old you again), or ourselves (There I go again, I’ll never get it right) and we miss the gift.
As if we were 747s who didn’t know they could fly and spend our lives taxiing on the runway, guzzling from gate to gate. So stuck in our heads that when John comes we say, “Too ascetic!” And when Jesus comes we say, “What a lush!” We mourn, deafened to when the flute plays (it’s always playing). We’re out of step, stock-still, and unresponsive. And in the meantime, we miss the Eucharist of those rattling chestnuts, those parading ants, those sandals still fragrant with grasses we walked through perhaps for the last time. The good soil is simply life without our stale old storyline running the show. Stale stories that keep our life, the Angelic Other, and the lightning from shook foil world from revealing itself to us, in us, as us. “Joy is what’s going on, minus our opinion of it,” as Joko Beck was fond of saying. If only we’d be opened–Ephphatha. If only we’d get out of the way and let the uncontainable liveliness of God grow, bear fruit in and through our lives. Not as the result of our efforts, but to the degree to which we receive our life–simple, poor, open-handed–as the sheer miraculous, seed-packed gift it is.
Tell me then, where is the true Cathedral? Where do its walls start and stop? Is there ever a time Eucharist is not being celebrated? Where is the Holy of Holies? Answer that and you’ll know the true meaning of holiness. “When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?” someone asked William Blake. “O no, no,” he replied. “I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” Fragrant sandals. Ants on parade. Chestnuts racing across the porch.