The Rose in the Iron Dust

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost, October 18, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

Over the past weeks we’ve been journeying with Israelites out of slavery into eventual freedom in the Promised land, the good and broad land, the land of milk and honey. It’s a journey through which God fashions for Godself a people, a people who will be beacon of justice, peace, and mercy to the world. Rooted and grounded in the experiential knowledge of beauty, truth, and goodness of God, they are slowly shaped into a people who know that God is for, with, and ahead of them. They come to realize, in fits and starts, that even in a place of apparent barrenness and lack, God provides. They come to learn that fear doesn’t have to have the final word. They come to see that what they put at the center of their lives, that to which they give ultimate concern and ultimate worth, determines the kind of lives they’ll lead. 

When fear, scarcity, and lack are at the center of their lives, they see that the impulse to huddle up around Moses, point the finger, and cast him out becomes an almost irresistibly seductive option. The incident with the Golden Calf teaches them that anything but the worship of the Living God at the center of their lives leads to a kind of death. Power, prestige, and possessions all seem on their face to promise the happiness we seek and for which we are made. But they ultimately disappoint. They are substitutes for the true and lasting peace and security of life surrendered to God and God alone. Stripped of their golden earrings, the calf destroyed, they are forced to rely on God. They are forced to be like the empty-handed fishermen who drop everything and follow Jesus. They learn to become like little children flopped into Jesus’ lap where he lays his hands on them and blesses them.

The Israelites’ journey is our journey. Over the course of the spiritual life we move through different stages: the purgative, the illuminative, and the unitive. The purgative phase is that time when, like the Israelites we are weaned from all the false gods we’ve grown up worshipping. False gods arise in response to an unmet psychological need--the need for unconditional love. Since we’re made for happiness we seek it in the only way we know how--through things like power/control, affection/esteem, safety/security. The Israelites try all three of course. If only we’d stayed in Egypt where we had regular work (even if it was as brickmakers for Pharaoh) and three squares a day (safety/security). If only we could get rid of this Moses character who seems only to want to lead us into the middle of nowhere so that we can die of thirst (power/control). If only we could be a great nation with a strong, powerful king like the other nations around us, then we would get the respect we deserve (affection/esteem).

What they come to realize is that each of those strategies don’t provide them with lasting peace for which they yearn. It’s only when they learn to rest in the empty space of Moses delayed up the mountain, it’s only when they learn to rest in the groundless discomfort of the in-between without grasping after Golden Calves that the reality of God for, with, and ahead of them starts to break upon them from on high. They learn that by letting go, by opening their hands, the peace, security, and abundance for which they have yearned has always been on offer. So idolatry is not just something to which the Israelites fall prey. It’s a fact of human life in every generation. And it’s the weaning from these false gods that constitutes the spiritual journey, the journey into becoming a truly human human being. There’s a reason why Paul’s Letter to the Romans begins in the opening chapter (!) with a warning about the dangers of idolatry-- “Claiming to be wise, they became fools;  and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles….they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! “ 

Paul says in his First Letter to the Thessalonians that we are to be imitators of him. He’s NOT say that we should walk like Paul, talk like Paul, be like Paul. The freedom of the Christian is not a cookie-cutter freedom of everyone being exactly the same. God loves diversity. God delights in variety. God made the Leviathan for the sport of it for goodness sake! What Paul is exhorting the Thessalonians to imitate is the one Paul imitates--Christ. Paul is striving to make his own the Christ who has already made him his own. Paul is seeking to open so fully, to receive so completely the life of Jesus that he can say “No longer I who lives, but Christ in me.” Imitate the one I imitate. Come into relationship with the one I am in relationship with (much to the shock and horror of my former Pharisee self, a persecutor of the Church!). Spend time with one who has never left your side, who dwells in the depths of the heart. Turn to Him in sickness and in health. Learn about Him and from Him. Worship Him in community weekly. Pray to Him daily. Bless others in His name. Go with Him to the margins in service to last, the least, the lost, and the left behind. Rest in Him beyond thoughts, words, and images, and let Him restore you and make you new. 

In Genesis, God declares, “let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (1:26). The Greek Fathers talk about the Christian life as the journey from image to likeness. Image exists in all people as the potential for Christlikeness. Likeness is the journey characterized by the holy habits, the spiritual practices, the sacred dispositions and attitudes that shapes us, forms us, more and more into the hands and feet of Christ in the world. That’s what the traditions of the Church have to give us. Handed down through the centuries, patterns of prayer, dwelling on scripture, worship in community, service to others and witnessing to justice provide us with a way, a path, towards growing in Christlikeness, becoming a little more like the one we follow after down the way of love and call Lord. These holy habits help us keep Christ at the center of our lives. They show us how holding power, prestige, and possessions as our matter of ultimate concern is ultimately unfulfilling, and leaves us hungering for the full flowering of our humanity that only comes to fruition when we dwell in Him and with Him, when we make a little space in our lives to waste time faithfully with God. 

What we have at the center of our lives, what we worship, that to which we give our ultimate concern, shapes the trajectory of our life. Our hearts are malleable and impressionable. One of the recurring images of Ezra Pound’s Cantos is the rose in iron dust derived from an experiment where iron filaments were placed on a mirror and a magnet was placed on the other side. The magnetic field pulled the scattered filaments into a shape resembling a rose. That’s a perfect image for what Christ does. He draws us, drags us,  from our scattered, dispersed selves with the magnetism of love until we, too, come to look like roses, until we, too, come to look like love. That’s why discipleship matters. That’s why church matters. They dispose us to the pull of the magnetic field of love. So many forces and voices in our culture mitigate against us becoming an open door of welcome to the stranger. Voices of fear, scapegoating, vitriol, and distrust. So many forces encourage us to look only at ourselves and our personal satisfaction and reduce the meaning of human life to getting and spending. Instead of a rose being formed on the mirror, we get the image of a dollar sign, a fist, our own face. 

If we shift our metaphor from iron filaments scattered on a mirror to molten metal we understand what Jesus is up to in his encounter with Pharisees and the Herodians. Our hearts, Jesus says,  are like molten metal upon which any image can be impressed. Jesus is saying that we can have power, control, wealth, domination, accolades at the tip of a spear impressed on our hearts, or we can have the face of Christ--the feeding one, washing one, the healing one, the cast-off one, the forgiving one, impressed there. Caesar or Christ? War or welcome? Whose image? Whose face? 

The Israelites learn what it means to walk in love, to be a people made in the image journey into the likeness of God. In Jesus, we have the example of a life. God has become human so that we might become a little more like God, a little more like love. It starts with being willing to make the journey--”Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.” It continues with seeing those Golden Calves at the center of our lives that alienate us from the ground of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth.  Gradually, everything that is not love that resists the magnetic pull towards Christ being formed in us, loses its hold and falls away. And gradually, in that empty space of holding to nothing, the scattered filaments start to cohere,  our lives start to take the shape of the rose, the shape of love, the shape of Christ. But all that depends on what, on who is at the center of our lives. What will it be? The rose or the fist? The dollar sign or open hand? Caesar or Christ? War or welcome? Whose image? Whose face?