St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
[Wisdom of Solomon 1:16-2:1, 12-22 ; Psalm 54 ; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37]
One night last week while Dennis and I were in Wisconsin for his fortieth high school reunion and to visit with his family, I awoke just before 1:00AM. I don’t know about you, but it is always clear to me within a minute or two whether I am going to go back to sleep or not. That night, I clearly was not. So, I turned on the light and reached for my “book” ….. well, not exactly a “book”. I reached for my Kindle. (Everyone know what a Kindle is? – show it.) Now, this is entirely the fault of our esteemed Rector Emeritus Mary Elizabeth. She brought her Kindle to a clergy meeting a few weeks ago, thus opening a channel of seduction, my following of which I put the total blame for on her.
I turned my Kindle on, deciding to continue reading “The Cave Dwellings and Castles of Europe”, by the Victorian author and Anglican priest, Sabine Baring-Gould. I have long been entranced by what can only be called charmingly dilettante literature, Rose McCauley and Anthony Trollope being other favourites. If you haven’t read Ms. McCauley’s “The Pleasure of Ruins”, I highly recommend it. Anyway: when the home page appeared, behold, a modern miracle had occurred. I forgot that a couple of weeks ago I had pre-ordered a copy of Dan Brown’s new book “The Lost Symbol”, due out on September 15th – and lo and behold it was now past midnight and the morning of the 15th. The Kindle – in a brilliant bit of marketing - allows you to be automatically online anywhere in the U.S. You can search Amazon for over 350,000 “books”, buy what you want, and the cost (usually quite reasonable – all best-sellers, regardless of the print cost, are $9.95) is charged to your credit card. As soon as I had turned on my Kindle, “The Lost Symbol” appeared as if my magic. I opened the electronic book – and finally turned out the light 6 hours later at 7am.
The book is typically and wonderfully Dan Brown, and if you intend to read it I won’t spoil it for you. But for me, beyond all the wonderful arcane stuff, which I love, the book is essentially about a very modern, and yet very ancient, theme. Simply put, it is this: When will we human beings decide to live up to our potential as a race? The Christian theological version of that question is: When will we manifest our Christ-like being and destiny? As Dan Brown makes clear, he believes that every faith, religion, philosophy, path, etc., has at its heart the same question and goal, seen from its own perspective and experience. In Buddhism, it is how one reaches Enlightenment and becomes part of the sangha, the holy community. In the Jewish context, it is when will the Messianic age come. For the classical Greek philosophers, it is how Utopia can be achieved. For the Taoists, it is how one “goes with the Tao”, becomes one with the flow of Creation. For Islam, it is how the Umma, the people of the Qu’ran, become one in the wisdom and spirit of the Prophet.
In “The Lost Symbol”, Dan Brown is asking the age old question: As we gather knowledge – knowledge on all levels, including scientific and spiritual – will individuals and cultures use it to advance the destiny of the human race in a common search for a community of love, compassion and justice, or in support of a human race ruled by power, dominance, inequality, and the hate and division these engender. Some individuals and cultures hold to a belief and hope for the former, and many for the latter. The World is in a particularly dangerous time as to what path we shall choose. I see the tensions in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Communion these days as a microcosm of this tension. I see the tense political and religious climate in America these days as a manifestation of this struggle. Metaphorically speaking, each of us has a Peter Solomon or a Ma’lach, Brown’s protagonist and antagonist, battling within us. What path will we choose? What kind of human person do we strive to be, and what kind of human community are we committed to work for? (Note that many these days are looking to December 2012, when the Mayan calendar apparently predicts either the World's end, or a complete transformation.)
Our readings today all present the same situation and pose the same choice. In the Wisdom reading, the “righteous man” represents the way of God, and the “ungodly” those who follow the “way of death”, who oppose the way of kindness and justice, those who “did not know the secret purposes of God, nor hoped for the wages of holiness, nor discerned the prize for blameless souls”.
The Psalm is the cry of the “righteous man”, beset by enemies, who seeks God’s protection and strength – and who hopes and trusts in God’s faithfulness.
The Letter of James holds up the stark dichotomy as seen in one early Christian community – a picture on the one hand of “envy and selfish ambition” where there is also “disorder and wickedness of every kind” and, on the other hand “wisdom from above” which is “pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy”, and where there is a “harvest of righteousness … sown in peace for those who make peace.” The writer reminds his hearers, “"God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us".
The reading from Mark’s Gospel presents Jesus as the reflection of God’s being and purpose, confronted by those who seek to betray and kill Him. He is trying to teach his disciples the Way of that Godly Kingdom. He boldly challenges their way of thinking of “greatness” as being counter to God’s will. He makes it clear that they have to learn new ways of understanding Life and of making choices for that Way. He does it by gathering children around Him, by telling HIs followers that they must be like the children if they want to know Him and His heavenly father. Now, I’ve known many children; they have ranged from little monsters to little angels and everything in between! The important point I think Jesus was trying to make was that children have to, are going to grow up. To mature fully, they have to be open to learning the true nature of Life. They have to choose the path that supports and nourishes that Journey. As it was starkly put in Wisdom, we – for we are those children – can choose the way of Life or of Death. The walking of the Path is the daily challenge for each of us. The Church is called to be such a culture or community.
The Bible presents a very complex God – not surprising, since that picture is filtered through human experience, which is influenced by all manner of things good and bad, by things that support Life or Death. But in my experience as a priest, most authentic Gospel people know the essence of the God proclaimed in the Christ: Unconditional Love, Compassion, Justice, Mercy. Most spiritually healthy people reject the negative characteristics projected onto the Mystery we call “God”. The incisive Karen Armstrong wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently:
… Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.
As individuals and as “church”, we seek to be shaped and held in relationship with this Mystery, keeping our “spiritual exercises” richly nourishing (which includes embracing change), cultivating a compassionate lifestyle by non-judgmental loving, and cultivating a childlike openness to new capacities of mind and heart. The first two are important; I would say that the latter – new capacities of heart and mind – are critical as we negotiate the times in which Humanity lives at present. Barriers must fall in order to allow an age of new Light to mend the brokenness we all now live in.
The best way to do this is to come to God like the children who came to Jesus. In a poem by Rumi, a young man seeking advice asks to speak to someone wise. The villagers point to a man playing stick-horse with children. “He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child’s play.” Asked why he hides his intelligence, the wise man answers, “The knowing I have … wants to enjoy itself. I am a plantation of sugarcane, and at the same time I’m eating the sweetness.” Later in the poem, Rumi gives us wise advice, for today as we worship and for the path to our destiny:
“Chew quietly your sweet sugarcane God-Love, and stay playfully childish.
Your face will turn rosy with illumination like the redbud flowers.”
Our destiny and our path is to live on “sweet sugarcane God-Love”, to be a “plantation of sugarcane” where others may chew. Gandhi said: … a child, even before it begins to write the alphabet and gathers worldly knowledge, should know what the soul is, what truth is, what love is and what forces are hidden in the soul. It should be the essence of true education that every child learns this and in the struggle of life be able more readily to overcome hatred by love, falsehood by truth and violence by taking suffering on itself.”
Our discipleship is, whatever our age, to know the things a child must know. Only as such can we, as the Collect says, “hold fast to those [things] that shall endure”. And help the World to its destiny as a Human family od God-Love.
