A Homily for the Third Sunday after Pentecost

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Sunday, June 9, the Third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 5(B).

“Where are you?” the Lord asks of Eve and Adam after they have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Seduced into apple-grabbing self-sufficiency and self-reliance by the serpent, Eve and Adam hide themselves away from God’s presence having richly grasped for themselves what can only properly be received poorly as gift. “Yes, everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God,” says Paul. Grace upon Grace all the way down and us stomping our feet complaining about mealy apples that will never satisfy.

This contrast between willful grabbiness, ownership, and doership against open-handed reception of the gift (“eveything is for your sake”) is the basic tension of the life of Christian discipleship. We live in a culture of activity, acquisition, and accumulation. Everything is one-click away from purchase on a playing-card sized supercomputer from which we are never separated. In this dismal picture we are what we acquire and happiness is just one Amazon delivery truck away.

In this context of getting and spending, simple, undefended, agendaless wonder–that there is something rather than nothing, the precognitive goosebump intuition that Being is Gracious, that Being gives itself to us inexhaustibly in each and every moment–is replaced by mere acquisitive curiosity. Wonder has no beginning or end. It marvels, it awes, it comes undone in face of the mystery and simply, poorly receives and responds compassionately from all that God gives (which is everything, simply everything). 

Adam and Eve’s curiosity, by contrast, collects, curates, displays oddities for amusement and entertainment, like those Victorian cabinets of curiosities with their shriveled heads, four leaf clovers, and chloroformed carp with three eyes. Curiosity is aroused, peaks, and is satisfied once we’ve assimilated the curiosity to ourselves and got our dopamine hit. I suppose the parallel to our time would be how everything has to be captured as a photo (preferrably a selfie), but never really encountered, entered into, experienced in and of itself for itself. A mountain path, a spring flower, a bluegrass woodshedding session all need to be captured, preserved as curiosities to be gawked at later. And all the while, the actual living, uncontainable experience is simply missed, viewed secondhand on a screen.

Having a Grabbed God in our pocket like a piece of fruit to buff, polish, and nibble at when we are a bit peckish (Adam and Eve taking a selfie of themselves while munching the apple?) is understandably convenient. Convenient in the way that trail mix is convenient when you’re on a hike. You need it when you need and don’t when you don’t. God gets turned into an object, a thing, a big ole being among among lesser beings whom we acknowledge in a pinch perhaps–but is never encountered or experienced as the unpossessible, endlessly giving Ground of Being, the Divine Lure of Love coaxing us home to the place we only left in our poor little heads. “Surely God is in this place and I did not know it!”

Wonder reveals a God who walks through the garden of our daily life with its dirty dishes, drab strip malls, slowpoke pothole roadcrews and quiet desperations. Through this very life, and in this very place God walks as the cool breeze of presence that nothing can diminish. “Heaven in a wild flower,” with William Blake certainly, but God shines through as car horns, houseflies, and newspaper scraps kestreling over a busy intersection. Make no mistake, this, “house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens,” is not far off! It is revealed, disclosed, given right in the midst of this life when the oughts and shoulds are seen for the phantoms they are and we receive without agenda the sheer gift of life just as it is (and not how we think it should be).

“Where are you?”--God’s question of Eve and Adam–is a perfect question to practice with in daily life. I ask myself this all the time. Where am I? Under some Pharoah’s thumb of worry, planning, woe-is-me… curled in myself like Rodin’s stinking Thinker? Distracted from distraction by distraction… hunched over a cellphone like some prehistoric hominid species? “Where are you?” is another way of asking “What is going on right now?” What are the sights and sounds and smells and tastes and touches? What’s your most believed thought right now? From teachers, parents, nation, even churches we inherit stories about ourselves that quickly become core beliefs: I’m worthless. I’m unlovable. Nobody gives me the respect I deserve. This isn’t it. This isn’t enough. Something’s missing. If only… We munch away at the fruit of fear, scarcity, lack; we double-down on willful self-reliance and find ourselves booted from the garden of God’s presence to hobble about on a bruised heel.

And how do we feel when we live from that believed thought, that apple-grabbing story? Miserable! Isolated. Separate. Exhausted. Depressed and self-enclosed. One little thought like, “This isn’t it,” is enough to sink our ship. Sometimes for an afternoon, sometimes for a whole life spent grindingly separate from ourselves, life, our neighbor, and God: always a day late and a dollar short. “Where are you? Why have you hidden yourself away from my presence, from relationship with me whose only desire is to give everything for you? I built my house in your heart! Won’t you meet me indestructibly there, Dear One?”

This, I think, is one way to understand the sin against the Holy Spirit–dwelling in the land of unlikeness, trusting only in our own efforts, our own curiously confected “peace” that’s always dependent on us cooking it up, maintaining it, fretting about when it will go away. We are forgetful of the wondering that opens us to the sufficiency of Grace. But the sin against the Holy Spirit is not a once-and-for-all type thing. It emerges when we think that God’s an object to be grasped rather than a living reality into which we are invited, and to which we surrender. It emerges when the wonder is replaced by curiosity.

Relying only on ourselves, we are immediately in competition with all the other selves relying only on themselves… chaos ensues. The true nature of being adopted into God’s very life makes every person, each creature, each moment an encounter with our kith and kin. Brother, sister, mother, moon, sun, field, stream, and sky. Unspeakable intimacy with Christ-shaped Life giving itself to us, living itself through us. 

“Where are you?” Grabbing apples and relying only on ourselves, our ideas, our requirements, and our demands for life to be other than it is, or walking open-handed in the cool of the morning walking with our walking breezy, easy paradising God? Are we listening to safely stale old stories that haven’t changed since childhood, or attending to the tussling whisper of our belovedness in God? When we don’t need things to be our way, everything–the sound of traffic, a certain slant of sunlight, a grief, a pain, birdsong at dawn, and clouds unscrolling over distant peaks–is known as the sound of God walking through God’s house, built without hands, eternal in the heavens revealed as this very wasting away. Paul’s “eternal” shines through the “temporary”–like cottonwood fluff blown over the powerlines and into the boundless blue. At once timeless and eternal and preciously fragile and fleeting. Please appreciate this our life together. Amen.