The Virgin Day - By the Rev. Dr. Otis Hamm

Lent 2C; Gen. 15:1-12, 17-18; Phil. 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35

St. Paul's Episcopal Church Smithfield, NC

The Rev. Dr. Otis Hamm: “The Virgin Day”

Episcopal scholar Alan Jones wrote, “In the waters of baptism we are reminded that we are not born in a vacuum, nor do we journey entirely alone (although loneliness is often part of the burden). Being reborn, being made alive, involves being born into a community. So there are strings attached to this adventure. Far from being the spiritual journey of the solitary individual in search of God, it drags a people, a church, a nation, and the human race, along with it.”[1] Jones has touched on something powerful to ponder not only during this holy time, but also as we contend with ecclesial life. Traveling through the season of Lent can seem like such a personally reflective time, a time of almost monastic proportions. We fast, we take on exercises and other ascetic practices, which are all intended to draw us as individuals into a deeper and more profound place with our Creator. After all, isn’t that what Lent is supposed to help us realize? But at times it can seem a little one-dimensional. As if the heart we are attempting to fulfill is really just our very own and not so much the One that truly seeks fulfillment. We are sometimes more interested in self-help than reflecting on the image of Christ. For whatever reason life has presented us with challenges and the ascetical practices of Lent provide us with the necessary tools to meet them head on. Or we wear these same practices like a badge, displaying our well-groomed piety. Nonetheless, there are cautionary markers to recognize. Consider our friend from the Old Testament reading this morning, Abraham was more than concerned, some have suggested that he was anxious about his situation. He had been promised an heir and yet, only an adopted son and a culturally illegitimate son was all he had been “blessed” with. Poor guy? Kind of reminds me of someone I know who’s waiting patiently for exam results, and I use the term patiently in a relative sense. The weight of the world is on our shoulders just as it was on Abraham’s; that tends to be our embedded psyche. Whether one is involved in a faith tradition or not, the world we live in bombards us with a multitude of issues daily that channels a variety of anxious emotions.  Alone we are, alone we must be, only if we know not the work of the Creator—a poor attempt at Master Yoda humor. The work of God far excels humanity’s compulsory nature and at times lackadaisical nature. That almost unexplainable dichotomy of “got to have it now” verses “I’ll do it tomorrow.” In an excerpt from Marcus Borg’s Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teaching, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary Borg writes:

“Does participatory eschatology mean that Jesus thought the kingdom of God, God’s dream, would come about through human political achievement? By no means. I do not imagine that he thought that. It is always God’s kingdom, God’s dream, God’s will. And it involves a deep centering in God whom Jesus knew. So did he think God would bring in the kingdom without our involvement? I do not imagine this either. Indeed, the choice between ‘God does it’ or ‘we do it’ is a misleading and inappropriate dichotomy. In St. Augustine’s wonderful aphorism, ‘God without us will not; and we without God cannot.’”[2]

Borg is speaking to the incontestable image of God within humanity. Abraham had yet to realize the image as it reverberated throughout his life. The very son he adopted and the one in which he considered to be that of a slave were both products of the image of God within his own life. Abraham was blinded by his own vision of what he perceived to be the will of God and replaced it with his own.

Nineteenth century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach believed that humanity used religion as a fantasy to escape the harsh realities of life. According to Feuerbach, “people tend to see themselves as helpless and dependent when faced with the challenges of life. Therefore, they seek to overcome their problems through imagination; they imagine or project an idealized being of goodness or power that can help them. Humanity is not created in the image of God, but God is created in the image of {an} idealized humanity.”[3] 

Perhaps Feuerbach makes a valid point in some cases, at least on the surface. One could certainly contend that Abraham might be taking matters into his own hands and attempting to at best manipulate the situation. Our gospel reading today has similar overtones. The Pharisees are attempting to manipulate the actions of Jesus, which is interesting considering pharisaical life and extant readings regarding some of the roles they did or did not actually play. And then there is the ‘fox’, a master manipulator who seemingly just desires to see Jesus. Frankly, scholarship speaks to more than one possibility here, but the real story is Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Where oh where is Jerusalem? For Christ Jerusalem was home, the center of his earthly work and life, his desire—desire, was to go home. It would be at home where Jesus would complete the work of the Father.

Our epistle reading points to whom we are to become, imitators of Christ. For Christ the home of the heart is Jerusalem and it is there that all things for humanity have the ability to become new. Not the image that Feuerbach paints at all, but the true image of God living in the incarnate Christ in all his vulnerability as he died on the cross and rose from the dead. Our Jerusalem is our hearts and our hearts lie in the crucified Christ.

A wonderful image of our own vulnerability and daily virginity comes from a work written by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

How the valley awakes. At two-fifteen in the morning there are no sounds except in the monastery: the bells ring, the office begins. Outside, nothing, except perhaps a bullfrog saying ‘Om’ in the creek or in the guesthouse pond. Some nights he is in Samadhi; there is not even an ‘Om’. The mysterious an uninterrupted whooping of the whippoorwill begins about three, these mornings. He is not always near. Sometimes there are two whooping together, perhaps a mile away in the woods in the east.

The first chirps of the waking day birds mark the point vierge of the dawn under a sky as yet without real light, a moment of awe an inexpressible innocence, when the Father in perfect silence open their eyes. They begin to speak to him, not with fluent song, but with an awakening question that is their dawn state, their state at the point vierge. Their condition asks if it is time for them to ‘be’. He answers ‘yes’. Then they one by one wake up, and become birds. They manifest themselves as birds, beginning to sing. Presently they will be fully themselves and even fly.

Meanwhile, the most wonderful moment of the day is that when creation in its innocence asks permission to ‘be’ once again, as it did on the first morning that ever was.[4]

Merton speaks to the dawn of a new day and the life of all creation as being that of something new. In his view, one that I happen to agree with, it is a virgin day, one that has not occurred before and should be considered as one that belongs to both creation and Creator working together. Lent draws upon an awakening within, which on the surface is an individual matter. However, the journey is not solely individualistic, Jones spoke earlier of our connectedness to one another through baptism, our journeys’ are most certainly manifest representations of the incarnate Christ working within the community not only in an ecclesial setting, but also in an ecumenical one. By carefully reflecting upon Lent and being mindful of the markers that derail us from the journey where we are created in God’s image rather than God created in ours’, the season as well as our journeys’ take on new life.    As Merton resounds with his lovely prose it is not of our own, but that of our Creator that life happens, that we emanate the light of the incarnate within the world around us as each day begins anew and the Creator of all gives us breath, it is our path and God’s dawn.

Amen     

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[1]
                        [1] Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for A Christian Spirituality, (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 111,

[2]
                        [2] Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 2006) 260.

[3]
                        [3] Lewis M. Hopfe and Mark R. Woodward, Religions of the World, Eleventh ed. , (New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc, 2009), 7.

[4]
                        [4] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander, (New York: Image, 2914), 127-128.