Saints Alive! (All Saints Sunday; Hebrews 12:1 - 2, Romans 8:26 - 39)

     Today is All Saints Sunday, but I can't resist talking about Halloween . . . It's tomorrow, you know, and we as a church are going to do something a bit different, we’re going to gather on the sidewalk at the far limits of our property to meet and greet and serve some members of our community.  Actually, it'll be technically off our property, on the sidewalk right-of-way, and that is symbolic, kind of: for millennia, it’s been kind of like Field of Dreams—when we built churches, they would come.  It was enough for churches to just throw up their shingles and air for people to show up.  Now, for a variety of reasons, that is no longer the case, and both the Paul Nixon resources and the Presbytery effort, Transformation 2.0, emphasize the same thing: getting out into the community where the people are, building relationships with our neighbors where they are, rather than expecting them to come to us, to become like us.

And so, it's symbolically important that our Halloween ministry is—even if only technically—out into the neighborhood, because that's where the people are.  Of course, going into the neighborhood and meeting the people—not just people like us, our age and our income level—is dangerous, because it might actually do something to us, it might subject us to change, and nobody likes that, especially as we get a little older.  Not that any of y’all are getting that way, but I certainly am . . .

Anyway.  Enough about Halloween.  Let's talk about the day after.  All Saints Day.  That's what we're celebrating today, ‘cause it's the closest Sunday to it . . . Our ancestors in the faith, the saints we’re celebrating today, a lot of them didn't have to do that . . . They had church services available every day, and in fact, for most Roman Catholics, All Saints Day is a day of obligation, meaning you must go.  Of course, I suppose a lot of folks don't, just like a lot skip other special times and seasons, as Paul called them.

 Even so, in some heavily Catholic countries, All Saints Day is a national holiday, and that gives it a weight that it doesn't have when you share it with another special day—if you look at our Presbyterian planning calendar, you'll notice that Reformation Sunday is celebrated today as well, which, it seems to me, gives saints a raw deal.  After all, for us, saints aren’t just those who've gone through a lengthy process of canonization, but anyone who has lived and died in the faith.  And where would we be without them?  Where would we be without all those first- and second-century Christians, who kept the faith alive when it was illegal to be followers of The Way?  Where would we be without all of those saints who met in one another’s homes, no costly buildings for them, no expecting their neighbors to come to them . . . they spread the faith by going out to their neighbors, relating to them in glistening networks of service and faith.

And where would we be without those faithful, anonymous scribes, who copied hand by hand by hand the letters of Paul, and the Gospels and Hebrews and Revelation, long before the advent of movable type?  Or the equally anonymous desert fathers and mothers who maintained and advanced the contemplative tradition in the face of increasing Romanization and increasingly rigid structures of the church?  Or the centuries of anonymous monks, who were their spiritual children, and who even today point the way to what caring communities  of Christ can be?

Our brief passage from Hebrews says it all . . . It speaks of the Saints as a great cloud of witnesses that surround us all, and in the embrace of that mighty cloud—to use the poetic line from the old hymn—in the embrace of that mighty cloud of witnesses, we are empowered to run the race that is set before us, the race of Christ’s disciples, spreading the gospel in thought, word and deed.  But the mighty cloud of our passage is not composed of Christians but Israelite heroes.  But they are our ancestors in the faith, they are our Saints every bit as much as they were to the author of Hebrews. That writer speaks of  Abraham, Jacob and Moses.  Rahab, Gideon and Samson.  David and Samuel and the prophets.  All surrounding those first Christians, all supporting them and enabling them to run that long and sometimes difficult race.

And notice that Hebrews uses the present tense, as in we, are surrounded by a mighty cloud of witnesses, a great cloud of saints.  There is a mystical, spiritual connection between us, between all who have gone before.  Whether in heaven “up above” as we often picture it or literally around us as Hebrews has it, we are somehow connected, somehow continuous with those who have gone before.  The Franciscan mystic and theologian St. Bonaventure pictured our souls—that part of us which is eternal—coming from God and returning there after death, after we have run that race.  But if God is within us, if Christ holds us together, if the Holy Spirit dwells within as the scripture portrays, then our loved ones—though in a spiritual form, a form too subtle to reliably perceive—our loved ones, along with all our faith ancestors, do surround us, and not only that, we are infused with them as well.

Can you picture it?  Can you feel it?  Our forebears in the faith, our forebears of this church, related by a common thread, with us in spiritual essence right now, continuing to support our work in ways that we can only imagine,  adding their ineffable aid to what we do.  The people without whom this church would not have survived ten years, never mind seventy eight, who worked tirelessly at the many tasks it takes to keep a congregation afloat.  These are saints every bit as much as those first, anonymous Christians, every bit as much as Teresa or Francis or Augustine.

But wait . . . there’s more!  Throughout his writing,  Paul—canonized himself—makes it clear that the saints, the blessed ones, are all who do Gods work, past and present.  Saints that even as we sit here work to feed hungry people on the mean streets of Cincinnati.  Who write great, inspirational hymns of the faith.  All who keep the great gears of God’s universal gathering turning, who love it's earthly form in spite of its undeniable frailties.  To Paul, we are the saints, all of us, and in the great passage I read, he describes the relationship we have to God through the Spirit who, he writes, “intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” with “sighs too deep for words.”

And it’s clear that the road might be rocky, the race might be long, but our God is with us, with all the mighty saints, those who surround us, whispering and soothing and communing, past, present and future, because if God is with us, who can be against us?  If the Spirit fills us and dwells within us, how can we ultimately fail?  And so as in a few minutes we remember just a few of the many saints who have enriched our lives, let's expand your consciousness to take in all the many millennia of ancestors in the faith, all those of that mighty cloud, in the flesh and spirit, who continually nourish and sustain us in our own race.  Amen.

Who's Your Pharisee? (Luke 18:9 - 14)

     Walter Breuggemann is a tremendously talented preacher and teacher . . . probably the most widely-respected Old Testament scholar the Christian church has . . . he’s also undoubtedly the most widely-read – one time I went into the store at Montreat, the Presbyterian conference center in North Carolina, and you’d have thought it was the Walter Breuggemann memorial bookstore, there were so many of his books, he was probably the single-most highly-represented author, perhaps second only to God . . . he also has a reputation for heading Daniel-like into the Lion’s den.  Back when I knew him in Atlanta, he was always lecturing to roomfuls of powerful business-people – CEOs and Chairmen of the Board of Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and the like – about how un-Christian their business practices are, how they tend to increase their own wealth at the expense of everybody else . . . the first time I saw Walter in action, even before I had him for Hebrew, he was teaching a Bible study of Joshua, and drawing a lesson from it about predatory banking practices.  This at First Baptist of Decatur, church home – along with First Presbyterian – of a goodly chunk of the banking establishment in East Atlanta . . .

      In certain circles, Brueggemann is considered a show-boater, a guy who goes into the boardrooms and corporate offices for his own aggrandizement and glory.  And there maybe something to this, I don’t know, but in today’s passage we can see that there is scriptural precedent for it . . . Jesus tells this parable right, smack dab in the lion’s den, to some of the religious establishment of the day, to – as Luke puts it – “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.”  And the first thing we need to see about this is that here, Luke places Jesus squarely in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets . . . and just like his predecessors, just like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Jesus gets right up into the face of those whom he was preaching against . . . as Luke calls them, those who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt . . . that’s what the prophetic tradition is all about, carrying the message right to the people it’s aimed at . . . and it’s tremendously dangerous . . . Jeremiah got thrown in the poky.  John the Baptist got handed his head . . . literally!  And we all know what they did to Jesus . . .

      Christianity has lost a lot of that prophetic edge since those days . . . it may have been inevitable . . . when it went from being a religion of the outcasts – of the kitchen help, as one biblical scholar put it – to being a religion of the establishment, it was inevitable that accommodation should occur.  After all, the establishment doesn’t like being yelled at, and if they are your patrons, if they are the ones whose offerings keeps the church going . . . well.  A prophet’s gotta eat, don't you know . . . and we all know what they did to Jesus . . .

      But Jesus is fearless, and he tells about a Pharisee – one of the dominant religious parties of the day, sort of like Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians, only much nicer – he tells about a Pharisee and a tax-collector who go up to the temple to pray, and of course his audience – who, remember, considered themselves to be righteous and everybody else . . . not – and his audience are sitting there identifying with the Pharisee, the most law-abiding person on the planet, the original law-and-order candidate, a guy who was a member of the most religious of the religious parties of the day . . . and he was a pretty good guy, really, somebody you’d not only like to meet in a dark alley, but who you’d be glad to see your daughter bring home, and his audience was identifying with this guy, certainly not the other, who was one of the dreaded tax-collectors, a Jewish man who’d gotten in bed with the Romans, who was doing their dirty work for them, collecting their taxes, a guy with whom the people in Jesus’ audience wouldn’t be caught dead, and so they know what the end of the story’s going to be like, they’ve heard these little morality tales from their own teachers . . .

      And the Pharisee stands up there and says “God, I thank you that I’m not like those others . . . thieves, adulterers, rogues or even this” and he sniffs to make sure he’s not down-wind “this tax-collector here . . .” and Jesus’ audience says quite right . . . here, here . . . it’s right to thank God for their good fortune, for after all – there but for the grace of God, go I . . . good form, only right to begin the prayer with thanks . . . and then he goes on “I fast twice a week, I give a tenth of all my income . . .” and I can see every preacher in the country going after this guy, he’s a tither, churches are built on these guys . . . he’s penitent – that’s what the fasting is about – and a big giver . . . what’s not to like?

      And contrast this with . . . the tax-collector.  He’s hunched over, darting nervous little glances at the powerful religious leader, and when he prays, what a mean little insignificant prayer it is . . . he doesn’t look up into heaven – to where everybody just knows God is – he doesn’t raise his hands up in supplication, he just looks down like he’s ashamed and beats himself compulsively on the chest . . . thump, thump, thump . . . and he mumbles so that the great man can barely hear “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” thump, thump, thump, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” thump, thump, thump . . .

      And now Jesus has got ‘em where he wants ‘em, he’s got his pious audience in the palm of his hand, they’re on the edge of their seats, leaning forward in anticipation of the pay-off, even though they know what it’s going to be . . . They’re thinking “Here it comes . . . here comes the punch line of our little morality play . . . the Pharisee, who’s done all the right things, hit all the right marks, has all the right stuff, is gonna come out on top . . . after all, he’s keeping all the things God told us to keep way back in Moses time, he’s tithing, and fasting, and all that jazz . . . and there’s gonna be a big, booming voice, come down out of heaven, maybe a shaft of light breaking through the clouds, transfiguring the religious leader in it’s glow . . . and the voice will affirm the man, affirm him and confirm him as a child of the covenant: “This is my son, in whom I am well-pleased!”

      But instead of that, instead of sustaining their expectations, instead of substantiating their world-view, Jesus tells them the exact opposite: “This man” – and he meant the tax-collector! – “This man went down to his home justified, made righteous, not the other.”  Jesus Christ, Son of the great reverser, child of the One who is constantly doing a new thing, stands their expectations on their ears: the tax-collector, that scum-bag Roman collaborator, that weasel who lives off his fellow Jews’ miseries, is made righteous, is made right with God, and the religious leader, a symbol of all that’s good and right about their religion, a stand-in for all who were listening to Jesus on that sunny Palestine day, was not.  Evidently, his prayers didn’t work, while the prayers of the tax-collector did.  Talk about your reversal of fortune.

      And over the two millennia since that day in the Judean sun, this parable has been interpreted in a variety of ways from a variety of Christian pulpits. Perhaps the most straightforward way is to pay attention to Jesus’ last words – for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted – and thus, the Pharisee’s sin is pridefulness, it’s boasting . . . he’s standing up there, praying in public for all the world to see, and he’s bragging about his own wonderfulness.  The tax-collector, on the other hand, looks down, ashamed, and admits he is a sinner . . . he humbles himself, so he is exalted; the Pharisee exalts himself, so he is humbled.  The first will be last, after all.

      Another way of looking at it is to view it as an illustration of grace versus law, something old Martin Luther might’ve done.  The Pharisee, he might say, follows the law to the letter – he fasts to be cleansed of sin, he tithes a tenth of what he has, he praises God in all things – OK, so we only assume he does that last thing, but hey, he’s a Pharisee – the point is he does everything the law requires, but still can’t get to heaven, only the tax-collector – who does nothing but confess – is saved.  Thus the great truth: you can’t get to heaven by following the rules, you’ve gotta throw yourself upon God’s mercy, you have to trust in God’s manifold grace.

      And the thing to notice about this interpretation is that it’s kind of a weird re-casting of the story.  This story casts us Christians – both in Luke’s time and today – squarely in the tax-collector’s camp.  We’re the Christians, we’re the ones who are saved by grace, thank you very much, we’re the righteous ones, and the Pharisee . . . isn’t.  And if the Pharisee isn’t, the Jews as a whole aren’t – because that’s who the Pharisees are in this story – and if they’re not righteous, then they are ripe for subjugation, which has happened time and again in the two millennia since Christ.  anytime there’s a majority culture and a “different” minority – whether different racially or religiously or whatever – they are susceptible as scapegoats, convenient whipping-boys when times get tough.  Think Esther.  Think Hitler.  Think the Crusades . . . and having a sacred text that can be interpreted as supporting that scapegoating – oppressors are righteous, oppressed are not – is just icing on the cake.

      What I’d like us to think about this morning is . . . who are our Pharisees?  Who do we see as going home from the temple unrighteous?  Is it the Jewish people?  They’re always handy . . .  every time some group of Aryan skin-head types decides they’re being oppressed, a synagogue goes up in flames, or gets defaced . . . maybe it’s other Christians, Christians not like us . . . I must admit I’ve engaged in a bit of that . . . back when I first started preaching, I got in trouble with a friend for – jokingly, of course – dissing the Baptists from the pulpit . . . look at it within our denomination.  The conservatives see the decay of our denomination, the loss of members and influence and power, and blame the liberals . . . the liberals do the same thing, of course . . . or what about so-called “illegal immigrants?”  What about the folks from below our borders, who are desperate for a better life, who come into our country and do the jobs we don’t want to do?

      And of course, how could I preach about scapegoating without mentioning our current election?  Nobody’s ever seen anything like it . . . the feelings running so high . . . the rhetoric is down-right nasty . . . Immigrants are being scapegoated at a scale that makes my head ache, and makes me nostalgic for the old days, when they were just supposedly taking our jobs, before they were called rapists and murderers . . . And there’s more than enough of it to go around . . . Smug TV comedians and cable-news talking heads mercilessly make fun of Southerners and people in the “fly-over states,” and blame all the ills of the country on them.

      Brothers and sisters, I ask you: who are your Pharisees?  Who are the people you associate with the unrighteous?  Maybe you don’t have any – if so, you’re more advanced in your faith than I am  – but I suspect we all have a few . . . the poor are a drain on our economy, why don’t they just go out and get a job?   Those immigrants demand, demand, demand . . . free medical care, schooling for their children, they’re sapping our country of its resources.  We all, I suspect, have our Pharisees – it’s after all a mark of our imperfect humanity.

      But Christ calls us to a more perfect humanity, he shows us – through his own life and example – what we can aspire to . . . and our walk as Christians here on earth can be considered a movement, a journey toward our perfect humanity which will not be fully realized until time’s end . . . But Christ provides more than just an example . . . he himself is with us, every step of the way, and the Holy Spirit as well, powering us, supporting us, uplifting us as we seek to do his will.  Amen.

A River Tale (Genesis 32:22 - 32)

One of the inevitable consequences of the commoditization of Christianity, of the making it into a salable product—the better to attract members by, my dear—is that our religion to a certain extent has become whitewashed.  A friend of mine—a pastoral therapist—once told me “let’s face it: the roots of Christianity are murky and bloody.  At its heart, it’s a Middle-Eastern mystery religion, dark and unfathomable.”  Ok, he might not have said unfathomable, but that’s the general idea, but in fact, it’s a pretty good descriptor.   Most biblical stories have depths that we cannot fathom, that we cannot measure, or understand . . . we treat them, though, as if they were, as if we here in the 21^st century can understand what a writer from three thousand years ago means, what he has in mind by what he has written for people in his own time, people with his own background, who understand the context of what he was writing.  The best we can do, I think, is to see through a glass darkly, to measure a story’s depth with the full understanding that the water’s clouded by the silt of many years and many intervening scribes.

That’s where the Holy Spirit comes in, the Advocate as Jesus calls it, the Comforter . . . we pray for the Spirit to come down upon us and create for us a space within which to interact with these ancient texts, a space where a symbiosis of our 21^st Century sensibilities and those of three-thousand-year-dead authors can thrive and be fruitful, at least for the space of the fifteen minutes or so on a Sunday morning sermon.

I trust that this process has occurred with this morning’s passage, although I think that in this case, the Holy Spirit has its work cut out for it.  This is a particularly enigmatic, especially mysterious, little tale.  It just sort of happens, out of the blue, as Jacob is returning to his home after years away from his family, having fled the wrath of his brother Esau after having stolen his birthright.  Jacob, it seems, wasn’t one of the nicest guys, especially in his earlier life; he’s been compared to the “trickster” figure of Native American lore, the entity who, while not really evil, creates mischief and, sometimes, heartache for those who cross its path.

So he’d taken off after conning his brother out of his birthright, after Esau threatened to kill him, and he ended up with his Uncle Laban, who turned out to be more than his match, swindling him out of seven years labor for a wife he didn’t even want.  But all the work seemed to make Jacob a better person, or maybe it was the humiliation of it all, and when he starts back toward his family in Palestine, he is a changed man.  And as he nears the River Jordan, he becomes more and more nervous about what Esau might do to him, and he sends some servants ahead of him to meet with his brother to test the waters, so to speak, and they come back saying Esau’s on his way with 400 men, which was a sizable bunch in those days, and Jacob becomes, as they say, sore afraid.

So he divides his retinue into two parts, all the goats and sheep and cattle and family members, separated to ensure that if Esau comes upon them bent on destruction, at least half of them would survive.  And as an extra added precaution, he sends some gifts to bribe his brother, or to put a more positive spin on it, to show his contrition, that he’s seriously sorry for what he’s done.

But, trickster that he is, he can’t just send the gifts outright—he has to complicate matters, he has to hedge his bets and draw out the gift-giving, perhaps to make it seem like the presents are more than they really are.  He lines all his livestock up in their individual droves, and sends them out, drove by drove, well separated, and instructs the drovers to tell Esau that the livestock “belong to your servant Jacob; they are a present sent to my lord Esau; and moreover he is behind us.”  Then he goes to bed.

But some time in the dark belly of the night, when even the night-birds are silent, and the stars sleep veiled in their velvet drapery, something moves Jacob to wakefulness, perhaps some whisper of the divine, or maybe just an undigested bit of mutton, and he moves his family across the River Jabbok, his two wives Leah and Rachel, his children and his servants, but stays himself on the near side.  And with a breathtaking, matter-of-fact simplicity, the narrator tells us “Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.”  We get no play-by-play broadcaster, describing each move and hold, no color announcer comparing the action on Jabbok’s bank to when he wrestled as a sophomore at Samaritan State University, just a simple, stark announcement: a man wrestled with him until daybreak.

Today we would analyze it to death, likely.  Thinking of the psychological implications, maybe, how the man in the dark represents Jacob’s dark side, his repressed nature hidden from the world, who comes out only in his dreams and nightmares.  Or maybe we would dismiss it whole-hog as a dark fairy tale, a deus-ex-machina meant to punctuate and explain the sudden shift from Jacob the runner, Jacob the trickster, to Israel, patriarch of a nation.

But our narrator does none of those things, he—the writer was almost certainly male—announces the fact and leaves it to our imaginations to fill in the details.  Where did the man come from?  He doesn’t tell us.  Could they see one another as they fought?  He doesn’t say.  Were they exhausted in the morning light?  We haven’t a clue.  We’re only told that a man wrestles with Jacob, and really, that’s enough.  The stark fact of the wrestling is what counts here.  He sends his family off across the Jabbok, and a man wrestles with him.  And we’re never told who the man is, though by the end of the story we, like Jacob himself, have a good idea.  And when the man sees that he can’t beat Jacob, he whacks him on the hip socket and puts it out of joint.  And though it’s been a long time since I managed my Junior-high-school wrestling team—I was not an athletic child—I’m pretty sure that hip-whacking is not a legal move in wrestling, and so the inescapable conclusion is that the man Jacob was grubbing around with in the Middle-Eastern sand cheated.

Or is it?  An inescapable conclusion, that is?  There were no referees there on Jabbok’s bank, no three-minute timers, no rules and mats and time clocks.  The assumption that the man cheats is a modern one; the 11^th Century BC hearers of the written story, and those before who heard it around the flickering light of thousands of campfires, wouldn’t have thought so.  Theirs was a tough life, a hard life, and you used every advantage.  The original listeners would quite understand the apparently underhanded ploy, and perhaps even applaud.

The first clue we’re given as to the possible identity of Jacob’s assailant—if that is what he is, an assailant—is when he tells Jacob to let him go, because the day is breaking, and I’m thinking “What is this guy?  Some dark spirit of the night, some phantom or wraith, that would fade away like the mist with the rising of the sun?  Or maybe he’s a vampire—I like vampire movies—that the sun would burn to a crisp were its rays to touch him?”  And I’d be scared out of my wits, not to mention mentally exhausted by that point, but Jacob’s always looking for an angle, always striving for an advantage, and he tells him no.  I will not let you go unless you bless me.

And we would miss a big chunk of the point if we didn’t notice that this lust for blessing is exactly what got him in trouble in the first place, exactly what got him banished from his father’s household in the first place, after he stole Esau’s blessing and had to go on the lam, and here is the height of Jacob’s striving, the height of his machinations . . . the riverbank wrestler, who for all Jacob knows is some kind of dybbuk, some kind of ravenous spirit, wants to be let go—you wouldn’t like him in the morning light!—and he uses that desire to extract a blessing.

And the man asks his name, and Jacob gives it, and the man says “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and humans, and have prevailed.” And again, we should be thinking back to an earlier time, when the Lord told his ancestor Abram that his name would be Abraham from now on, but Jacob’s still not satisfied, and he asks the man’s name, and today we don’t quite get the import of this question, but it’s yet another attempt of Jacob to get the advantage . . . in the ancient world, if you knew someone’s name, you had power over them, and here Jacob is, trying to get a little more juice on the man by the river, though we know by now that he’s more than just a man, and probably God’s own self, for who else but God gets to pronounce the names of God’s creatures?

And in return, the man asks an equally dangerous question: “why is it that you ask my name?” and we know why, we know that it’s because Jacob is always on the make, always looking for an advantage, even from God, but in spite of that—or is it because of it?—Jacob receives his second blessing.

And after he goes on his way the next day, after he crosses the Jabbok and rejoins his family, and finally meets up with Esau, his brother runs up to him and embraces—shades of the tale of the prodigal son!—he runs up to him and embraces, all is forgiven, apparently, and we have to ask: would it have happened like that if Jacob had not wrestled with God?  After all, Esau was heading his way with a small army, far too big a force just to go and lovingly meet his sibling.  Would he have forgiven Jacob if God had not blessed him, if Jacob had not been somehow . . . changed?  The fight on the Jabbok is a hinge event, a fulcrum around which the narrative turns.  Jacob strives with the Lord, he contends with God, and he comes out the other side blessed.

And I guess if there is a lesson for us modern Christians, us modern worshippers of the wrestler on the Jabbok, it is that we are not to be afraid of a little contention, a little wrestling with our Maker.  As I mentioned right at the beginning, in our quest to make our faith nice, we’ve taken much of the grit from it, much of the meat.  We fall down on our knees in respectful worship, never thinking that there is value in contending with God, that there is merit in struggling with our faith.

When I was growing up, we were taught not to question God, not to question our faith or at least our denomination’s version of it.  We sat in Sunday School and nodded our heads and learned our lessons like good little girls and boys, and the result was Christians who are good, but a little on the unimaginative side.  Ok, a lot on the unimaginative side.  We knew how it is, how God meant it to be, and didn’t question.  God said it, we believed it, and that settled it.

Problem is, an unquestioning faith is a brittle faith, a faith that doesn’t stand up very well to the winds of change and newly acquired information.  I don’t have any statistics to prove it, but I suspect  that if you did a survey of those folks who have grown disillusioned with the faith come disproportionately from its more rigid manifestations.  There is value in the striving, in the contention, in the wrestling with God.  Our Hebrew ancestors understood that, it’s shot through the Old Testament, but many of today’s Christians have unaccountably lost that ability or desire.

That’s why I thank God we belong to a wrestling denomination, and in particular, a wrestling congregation, that encourages striving with God, contending for understanding and meaning.  Because even though we may not ever fully get it, until perhaps the last trump sounds, there is value in the striving, worth in the wrestling, merit in the questioning of our faith.  We are a wrestling church, a striving congregation, and like Jacob, we will be blessed.  Amen.

A Singular Vision (Colossians 1:15 - 20)

     On December 10, 1831 a six-gun barque named the HMS Beagle set sail from Devonport, England bound for South America and points East.  She had been refitted for survey work—the Naval moniker for “exploration”—and that’s what she was doing.  Her commander, Flag Lieutenant Robert FitzRoy, had felt the need for a “gentleman naturalist” on a previous trip, and a young geologist (and future pastor) named Charles Darwin was recommended to him.  The Lieutenant almost rejected him because, as a acolyte of physiognomy—a pseudo-science that was all the rage at the time—believed that a person's character could be judged by his facial features.  As Darwin himself wrote, with deadpan humor, the Lieutenant “doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.”

Of course, the world is lucky the lieutenant relented.  The voyage of the HMS Beagle established Darwin as a preeminent geologist, but more importantly, it provided both impetus and evidence for his publication, 23 years later, of On The Origin of Species.  This monumental work is considered the foundation of evolution science, which is the glue that holds the life sciences together.  Contrary to popular belief, the book did not cause a firestorm in most religious circles.  Fundamentalism was just a gleam in someone's eye, and  most theologians accepted some form of “theistic evolution,” wherein God sets things up and designates evolution as the mechanism of biological adaptation to changing environments.

Twenty-two years after the book’s publication, and one year before Darwin’s death, a child was born across the channel in the Auvergne region of France.  Given the name Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, his life would be closely intertwined with Darwin’s work, and that of other evolutionary scientists.  When he was about six, his mother was cutting his hair when one of his locks fell onto the fire and was burnt up.  This terrified Teilhard, who took it as evidence that that life—including his own—was fleeting and infinitely fragile.  This sent him on a search for solidity, and later, for coherence, something eternal he could hang on to, a search that at first led to his collecting every piece of iron he could get his hands on and then, after he discovered rust, rocks.  Fortunately for his peace of mind, he didn't yet know about erosion.

 As was the family custom, he was sent away to a Jesuit boarding school, where he developed an interest—perhaps inevitably—in geology and paleontology (they weren't separate disciplines back then) as well as a vocation for the priesthood.  After his graduation, he entered the Jesuit novitiate, and took up the two occupations that would define his life: geological science and exploring his knowledge of Christ.

During his studies for the priesthood, his superior allowed him to collect fossils from a nearby  bed, and his life became embedded in a rich stew of scientific exploration and theological rumination, which grew deeper and more fecund every day.  In 1911, he was ordained a priest, and not too long after that, he began to work on a doctorate in paleontology.  It was about this time that he read a book by Henri Bergson called Creative Evolution—still in print, by the way—that rocked his world.  It’s hard to overstate the effect of evolution on his thinking.  It's woven into all his ideas about both science and theology.  The fact the universe is dynamic, that it is different yesterday than it is today, and will be different tomorrow as well, was fundamental to his convictions about life, the universe and the divine.   So intense was this revelation that it had the force of a conversion experience.  He wrote “Is the world not in the process of becoming more vast, more close, more dazzling…? Will it not burst our religion asunder? Eclipse our God?”

In saying this, he meant the cramped, limiting, orthodox image of God as out there, separate from us. Didn't Jesus himself put the lie to that when he asserted that he and God—whom he called Abba—are within us?  Didn't he also say that the Kingdom of God—associated with the Christ himself—is within us?  And wasn't it brilliantly summarized in that pivotal Colossians passage: in Christ all things hold together? He had searched his whole life for a sense of solidarity, of coherence, and here it was: Christ is the glue that holds the universe together. Everything—every mountain, every tree, every human, every flower—burns at its core with the fiery heart of Christ.

And here’s the thing: if the universe is evolving, if it is “in the process of becoming more vast, more close, more dazzling,” Christ is at the center of it all.  You could no more separate Christ from evolution than from God the Creator and God the Comforter.  What's more, his studies in paleontology convinced him that evolution had direction, that in every one of its branches, or fibers as he called them, it was moving in the direction of increasing complexity, and as complexity grows, so does consciousness. And since Christ is at the center of everything, holding it all together, it was not a leap to realize that he is the captain, the motive force, the provider of direction for it all.

As Teilhard’s understanding of these things grew, his studies were interrupted by World War I, but instead of setting him back, in a weird way it solidified his core vision.  Instead of taking a comfortable position as a priest, as he could have, he became an ambulance driver, one of the most dangerous jobs in that hideous war.  Miraculously, he came out the other side with nary a scratch, but he was hardly unchanged.  In particular, his love for matter, the stuff of the earth, of the universe, had grown enormously, which culminated in  his prose poem Hymn to Matter, which goes, in part: “Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock . . . Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untamable passion . . . Blessed be you, mortal matter: who one day will undergo . . . dissolution within us and  . . . take us forcibly into the very heart of that which exists.”  And here is the very core of his thought: the sacredness of matter, an increasingly complex, increasingly deep universe, and at the very center of it all, the sacred heart of Christ.

Meanwhile, back in the land of science, though it had become well-accepted that biological evolution did happen, experts were still squabbling over how it happened.  [Darwin’s natural selection (aka survival of the fittest) was viewed as only one of the possibilities.]  In addition, the  implications of human evolution, which Darwin only hinted at in On the Origin of Species, had come out of the closet.  Human beings descended from animals, scientists said; the most logical culprits were apes.  This got religious folk all riled up, and helped give birth to Christian fundamentalism, with its vehement rejection of both modernity and liberal theology.  And by the end of the War, a lot of fundamentalists had zeroed in on evolution as the symbol of all that is wrong—if not downright evil—with modernity.  These developments, of course, culminated in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925.

Well. If the position of Christian fundamentalism was hardening, so was that of the scientific community overall.  The notion that what we can measure—or have the potential to measure—is all we can study scientifically was morphing into the view that what we can measure is all there is to reality.  This hard, scientific materialism, which had been brewing since the time of des Carte, was taking on the unmistakable scent of dogma.

And the funny thing is, both the Christian view that the only important thing is spirit, and the scientific view that there is no such thing, ended up being bad news for Planet Earth.  Because if this earthly vale of tears is only a temporary stopover on the road to eternal bliss, and if it's kind of base and evil to boot, then it doesn’t much matter what you do to it.  Didn’t God give us dominion over it all in the Bible’s first book?.

By the same token, if there is no spirit anywhere, either out there or in here, within matter, then the logical thing to do is to exploit it for our own use—responsibly of course, so we won't poison ourselves.  Because after all they’re “just” cows and chickens and pigs and trees and rocks and mountains and coal and et cetera, they’re just matter, with no soul, and we’re bigger and stronger, and the only ones with consciousness, we use nature and exploit nature because we can.  And  from both sides of the debate—spiritual and material—there is nothing preventing us from destroying the whole shootin’ match but self-interest, a desire not to “foul or own nests,” which we have done a pretty good job of anyway over the last couple of hundred years.

And that’s why Teilhard's vision is so important today.  If God is in matter, if it's all sacred—Christ holding all things together—then the material universe has value in itself, intrinsically, apart from what it can do for us.  If the divine is the ground of everything—in Christ all things hold together—then it is in all the processes of the universe as well.  Christ in evolution, cosmogenesis and, yes, scientific discovery.  Christ in speciation, copulation and every nation on earth.  There is no separation between sacred and profane, fact or fiction, science or faith.  It is in fact all good, and doesn't it say that in the Bible’s first book as well?

The deadly separation between those who believe that Spirit is all that is important and those who believe there isn't even such a thing rages even today.  Smug “modernists” like Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins insist on obnoxiously dissing anybody who doesn't believe like they do, to wit the naïve, simplistic notion that matter is all there is.  Meanwhile, the diss-ees, the folks they are ridiculing, have for decades obnoxiously dismissed anyone who didn't agree with their two millennia-old belief in a white, male God who is “up there,” separate from “the world,” which makes it inferior and therefore disposable in their all-important quest to save their own skins.  The combination of smug, naïve scientists and smug, naïve Christians is killing our planet.

Teilhard's ideas—of an undivided, unified cosmos, where spirit is inseparable from matter, where, where the material world is just another face of spirit and spirit is just another face of matter—are revelatory and—more importantly— salvific for the earth and all that is in it. His ideas are coming to new consideration, and are being re-examined in light of Quantum Physics, which is showing that this his vision of a unified, ever-evolving universe are not so crazy after all.  String theory, strange attractors and quantum entanglements all point to a universe that is much more weird and at the same time much more unified and non-random than we ever thought before.

As we prepare to use Teilhard's Mass on the World to inspire us and illuminate our communion, I invite you to consider joining in what he called “the great work:” the calling together of science and religion, matter and spirit, for the re-vitalization—and I am convinced, the  salvation—of our world.