To See as God Sees

Pentecost 2020; Acts 2:1-21; John 20:19-23; St. Paul’s 5/31/2020

Jim Melnyk: “To See As God Sees”

Whether it’s through the gentle breath of their teacher and Lord on that first Easter evening, or in the midst of rushing wind and tongues of flame seven weeks after, Holy Spirit comes upon a gathering of early Jesus Followers and their lives – and the life of the world – are changed forever.

           

All three images – wind, fire, and breath – are images of change. On a nice spring day we open the windows of our homes and allow a delicious breeze to blow through the house – dispelling any sense of staleness and restoring balance with the creation surrounding us. Fire may scour a country side – and it can prove damaging as we know all too well. But it also can keep us warm, bring us light, help us prepare nourishment for our bodies, it can cleanse, and it can induce seeds long-buried in the earth to sprout and reach for the sun. And then consider the intimacy of the gentle breath of a friend, a spouse, or a lover – how it can cause our skin to tingle with anticipation and stir our hearts, causing them to beat just a bit more quickly. Wind, fire, and breath – these are the symbols of Pentecost.

           

And Pentecost is a significant moment in the history of both Judaism and Christianity. Both are decisive moments of change in the lives of God’s people – both are decisive moments when God’s power and presence are made known among God’s people.

For the Jewish people Pentecost – which is the Greek name – was first known as Shavuot, or the Feast of weeks. It comes 49 days after Passover, and was marked this past Thursday evening by our Jewish sisters and brothers around the globe. An early agricultural festival, Shavuot came to commemorate God’s gift of Torah to the Hebrews gathered at Mount Sinai. Realize that to know and to pray the Torah is to be in the presence of God.For Christians, Pentecost signifies the gift of God’s Holy Spirit given to the first Jesus followers and communicated ever since through the sacrament of Holy Baptism.

In the deepest sense, I would argue that the two gifts of Torah and Holy Spirit are not at all different – that they are two sides of the same living coin – the expression of God’s presence for and with God’s people. Both are gifts of God’s grace in the lives of God’s people. Both are offerings of God’s wisdom – teaching us how to live in communion with one another and with God. Both are gifts intended to help us see each other – and to see the whole of creation – as God sees; and then to live, move, and be with one another in ways that emulate the grace, and love, and compassion of God.

In John’s gospel the Holy Spirit is given to the small community of Jesus Followers on the evening of the Day of Resurrection. In Acts the gift is fifty days later. We don’t need to force some sort of theological or chronological conformity upon the two stories – we can let them live side-by-side as each evangelist tells the story of the coming of God’s Holy Spirit upon God’s people in their own way.

In essence, both John and Luke tell us that Easter Day – the resurrection of Jesus – and the gift of the Holy Spirit, are inextricably and unexplainably intertwined, and that both are expressions and experiences of the ongoing incarnation of God in our lives and in the world.

Pentecost is born out of surprise, and it is a harbinger of sudden newness. Pentecost comes upon us this year in a season of uncertainty and in what feels like a new abnormal. Pentecost comes upon us with wind, and flame, and the breath of God – and it brings with it ever again the gift of God’s Holy Spirit to renew us – to strengthen us – to point us in new directions – with Jesus going ever before us. But our uncertainty of the future doesn’t mean there’s a lack of God’s presence in our lives and in our communities. Physical separation from one another is not lack of community. Not being sure about what God might be doing in the world doesn’t indicate an absence of God. God’s Holy Spirit in our lives is the power to face uncertainty and challenge with hope as well as “the courage to will and to persevere.”[1]

In a few minutes we will once again renew our baptismal covenant – making promises before God to be faithful in our lives as followers of Jesus. The words we proclaim each time we renew these vows do not change over the years, but hopefully we do. We are not the same people who first recited these words together nearly ten years ago. Nor are we the same people we were five years ago – or two – or even three months ago – before the coronavirus pandemic changed our definition of normal, and changed the face of society for some time to come.

There is nothing good about the pandemic. There is nothing good about a virus that has already killed well over 100,000 people in our nation alone – in just three months. But I can see how the reality of this terrible ongoing event has opened so many eyes, and moved so many people to action – move us toward taking our faith and our baptismal promises seriously.

Perhaps the questions with which we are faced on this day of Pentecost are simple to ask and a bit daunting to answer. Are there ways we’ve missed or ignored the Spirit’s promptings in our lives? I find myself disappointed with those in so many faith communities who see church as a right to be exercised no matter what the cost in human health and well-being.

Packing into enclosed spaces, mask-less and sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in pews, enveloping one another in spirited hugs is terrible theology – and I suspect a failure of Citizenship 101 as well. I see video of workers being assaulted for asking patrons to wear a mask. I see video of people purposely coughing or spitting on fellow human beings who just want as safe and healthy a work space as possible. I see larger corporations taking stimulus checks instead of readily available low interest loans or dipping into their own capital, while mom and pop franchises with no access to those kind of funds have to lay off employees.

On a day when we celebrate the Spirit of God being made known as Jesus breathes upon his followers, we shouldn’t be faced with realities in our nation where people of color find themselves gasping out the plea, “Help me, I can’t breathe – I can’t breathe,” as they themselves give up their last breath of life unjustly. I don’t see any of that as a people looking for or paying attention to the Holy Spirit’s promptings in our lives.  

On the other hand, how have we responded positively to the Holy Spirit in our lives? During the pandemic it seems pretty simple. It’s as easy as wearing a mask to protect the most vulnerable among us. It’s picking up groceries for a frail or susceptible neighbor. It’s staying six feet away from others in the grocery store. It’s about recognizing that our Diocese will err on the side of caution and pastoral concern before allowing us to open our doors to even a reduced number of worshippers in this sacred space – not to be controlling – but as a way of being pastorally present to those whose lives would be at risk.

It’s also about willingly taking a daily stand against racial injustice and speaking out against what has been called America’s original sin – a wound of racism that has been with us from our very beginnings of a nation.

Wearing a mask and keeping our distance isn’t about being afraid – it isn’t about being a sheep – or about being controlled by others. Speaking out against racial injustice isn’t about being politically correct or pushy. Both are about honoring our promise to seek and serve Christ in all people, our promise to love our neighbor as ourselves,

and our promise to work for justice and peace, respecting the dignity of every human being. Both are about exhibiting the very love that Jesus commanded when he said, “Love one another as I have loved you.”  It’s about listening to the Holy Spirit in our lives.           

In the late 13^th or early 14^th century mystic Meister Eckhart offered a poem that for me speaks to the heart of what it means to be created in the image and likeness of God no matter what path our faith might take us – but especially for me about what it means to be Holy Spirit filled followers of Jesus.

It is your destiny to see as God sees,

to know has God knows,

to feel as God

feels.

How is this possible? How?

Because divine love cannot defy its very self.

Divine love will be eternally true to its own being,

and its being is giving all that it can,

at the perfect

moment.

And the greatest gift

God can give is [God’s] own experience.

Every object, every creature, every man, woman and child,

has a soul and it is the destiny of all,

to see as God sees, to know as God knows,

to feel as God feels, to Be

as God

Is.[2]

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[1] BCP, 308

[2] Meister Eckhart, To See As God Sees

Easter 5A; John 14:1-14; St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Smithfield, NC

5/10/2020 Jim Melnyk, “What is Essential”

Today’s lesson from John has some of the most beautiful, consoling words one can find in the Bible. At the same time, it has one of the most personally frustrating passages I’ve ever experienced. What in the world do you do when that happens?

The easy thing would be to talk about the beautiful, consoling words of John in the first part of the lesson and ignore the frustrating, often misunderstood passages…easy to do, but not faithful to the content of the lesson.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me,” says Jesus. “I have prepared a place for you – and where I go you can follow.” How often we’ve listened to these words of comfort! They are offered as a consolation – as a promise of God’s presence in our lives in and through the person of Jesus. “Be at peace – I will be with you,” Jesus tells his disciples then – and tells us now, generations later.

These opening verses of consolation and the promise of a home with God are far from a sentimental, emotional dream about life in some heavenly realm – they are meant as a rallying cry for strength in the face of the cross back then, and in our darkest moments today. And when the Jesus we meet in John’s gospel talks about his Father’s house we’re getting part of John’s theology of the incarnation. Jesus is talking about the mutual indwelling of God and Jesus – and our invitation to dwell there with them – a reality we experience through the gift of God’s abiding Spirit living within us now – not in some great by-and-by.

Yet in spite of those promises we are not a world at peace, are we? We are not a people – for the most part – who have learned how to take these words to heart. We, as a nation, seem to be more anxious and sick than ever before – the pandemic notwithstanding.  

We’ve become a self-prescribing, self-medicating people who always need more stuff – and not because our hearts are at peace, I’m sure of that! Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” yet that’s exactly what they are all too often – troubled.

Jesus can say, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” because he fervently believes in God’s presence in his life and in the life of the world. There is no place where one can be where the God of Jesus is not. According to13^th century Islamic poet Rumi, God says to us, “Are you looking for me? I’m in the next seat.” Rumi goes on to say, “God is the breath inside the breath.” He could easily have had Jesus’ life in mind when he wrote those words – and this is the sense of God people hunger for today.

A tradition among the Jewish Hasidim says it another way. In the early 19^th century a young boy, who would later become a rabbi, has an encounter with a scholar in a nearby town. The scholar says to the young boy, “I’ll give you a gold coin if you can tell me where God lives!” The young boy responds, “And I’ll give you two gold coins if you can tell me where God doesn’t live!”

Like Jesus, the young boy fervently believes in God’s presence in his own life and in the world. And unlike so many Christians today, the young boy has enough sense to understand God isn’t so easily pinned down as the scholar would have him suppose – though the more often quoted portion of today’s Gospel lesson has been used to say otherwise. This leads us into the frustrating part of the passage.

The disciples, unable to understand Jesus’ words of consolation, want more information. “Where are you going and how can we follow? How can we know the way?”

Jesus responds, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” People tend to quote this verse, John 14:6, as if it were some sort of mantra protecting God, Jesus, and the Christian faith. It’s as if we have somehow lost or forgotten the integrity of Jesus and his ministry. It’s as if we somehow think the promises of God – and the faith of generations – would become meaningless if we don’t take that verse literally. It ignores 13 chapters of John’s witness to Jesus by setting up Jesus and God as the in-clique to everyone else’s deadly exclusion.

Throughout the early chapters of John’s gospel Jesus goes to great lengths to point not to himself, but to God. Jesus is the agent of God – the shalliach of God – who acts for God, and with God’s authority. He always points away from himself and toward God. Even the great “I Am” statements of Jesus in John’s gospel end up pointing to the One who sends him into the world.

I suspect the only thing God, Jesus, and our faith need to be saved from is a body of doctrine or thought which limits the way in which God is capable of loving God’s creation. For all our talk about God’s unconditional love, we take this particular verse from John quite literally, and suddenly a vast number of Christians have no problems with unconditional love having one very significant, exclusive, and dismissive condition.

Marcus Borg writes, “The way of Jesus is… not a set of beliefs about Jesus. That we ever thought it was is strange… as if one entered new life by believing certain things to be true, or as if the only people who can be saved are those who know the word ‘Jesus.’ [It ends up sounding like being saved by syllables.] Rather,” he goes on, “the way of Jesus is the way of death and resurrection – the path of transition and transformation from an old way of being to a new way of being.”[1] To acknowledge Jesus as the way, the truth and the life is to acknowledge and claim as our own the life and death of Jesus.

The way, the truth and the life that is Jesus is the way of compassion, reconciliation, freedom and peace. In other words, we experience Jesus as the way, the truth and the life when we follow Jesus – not when we believe in Jesus, but when we follow Jesus - when we live as Jesus lived - not crossing our fingers when we get to the hard parts. Oneness with God comes as we live into the fullness of God’s love. St. Paul reminds us, “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”[2] Jesus summed it up in what we have come to call the Great Commandment: To love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength – and to love our neighbor as ourselves. In his farewell discourse Jesus tells us, “Love one another as I have loved you.”[3]

The way of Jesus is the way of the heart. Too many years ago to count I learned a valuable lesson in French class that I too often forget. In the book, Le Petit Prince – The Little Prince – a young boy, searching for someone to be a friend, ends up in a conversation with a fox. By the end of the chapter they become friends. As they prepare to part company the fox shares a bit of wisdom with the little Prince: “Here’s my secret,” the fox explains. “It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”[4] I didn’t understand it then, but I now see an amazing sacramental theology behind those words – intended or not. It is not the signs themselves that matter, but rather, it is the deep love and grace which those signs communicate to our hearts that make the difference.

At its heart, our faith calls to live in ways that make these hopes real for all. The world will still be a trying and serious place, but when we open ourselves to the Spirit of God in our lives we find ourselves at home in God. And though the world may seem to only change one person at a time – it will change.

“Are you looking for me,” asks God? “Are you looking for me? I’m any one of the people you see in your Zoom feed this morning. I am in the people commenting this morning on Facebook Live. I am in the people at the other end of your phone call. I am the person for whom you wear a face mask these days – or from whom you faithfully remain six feet away in the grocery store. I am in the people beside you in your home this morning and in the people you long to see once again in the seat next to you at St. Paul’s. Look for me with your heart.”

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[1] Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, p. 216-217

[2] 2 Corinthians 5:17

[3] John 13:34 (paraphrased)

[4] Antoine de St. Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, chapter XXI