“Surprising
Uprisings: Little Things, Little People Mean a Lot”
For some weeks now we have been using
variety of drawings on bulletin covers, something different each Sunday –
wondering how they are received? This Jackson Pollock for today represents
the full net of a kingdom of heaven made up of every kind! People-fishes of
every description! If God makes such variety even with the species of fish
– as God does of all other species – why be surprised that God makes such
variety with the species called “human being!” It is a long and wondrous,
if sometimes a fearful journey to explore and discover all that it means to
be human! Especially all that it means to be sexually, spiritually human.
Our work it seems by the parable is to be sure that we fill the whole net!
That we do not overlook or exclude anyone, do not leave anyone out or
behind. That we honor both the diversity of all selves and the complexity
of each self.
We start as the smallest of all seeds,
growing into the greatest of shrubs, so that every last bird of the air may
find a place in us! We are like yeast that works its way invisibly into the
flour, losing itself (even as seeds do, as salt does, as light does) so the
bread may rise to its richness, its fullness and wholeness! We are like
treasure found by accident in the midst of everyday life, where no one would
think to look for it! We are like searching always and everywhere for the
pearl of such value that we would reverse our lives, leave all we have been
and have done behind to go off in ways we never have been or have done
before! This is the openness to life made new every day God calls us to by
the Holy Spirit -- whose surest sign in our midst is that we are led daily
in ways we never expected to go! Always keeping our eyes on the prize, the
“big picture” of life as God sees.
That is what Jesus’ parables are –
chances to see as God sees, to hear as God hears, to think, to feel, to
speak, to do as God does. Parables are our glimpses of what it means for us
to be “imaging” God in our lives, our works, our relations with others. God
chooses, for worse and for better, to show up in us! Just look at us! Can
we see God?! “God longs for God,” says Gunilla Norris in our Call to
Worship this morning. But God is not stupid, self-serving, or greedy. God
settles for who God can get! God settles for us. God “uses us, rises in us
. . . becomes in us!” God moves into our every pore! God lives in us as
God pleases! We, no matter how small we may seem, how insignificant, in any
sense of the word, as persons and as peoples – we are meant, as new dough
newly-yeasted each day, to be filled with “surprising uprisings” of God --
God who will not stay small, who will not stay insignificant, who will not
stay denied, defeated, down-hearted, depressed, devastated, destroyed, --
God who will not even stay dead!
To be in the image of God, as parables of
God, is to live by imagination – by seeing and hearing even that which has
never been seen or heard before – even to be as “image-in-nation,” to show
our whole nation a new way of being! – and to live by creativity – by that
which creates and gives life, not that which destroys and takes life. We
are so gifted, as congregation and as community, as building and as base,
with the arts of Artown, of music – including the music of women and
children and youth! -- of dance! (Let’s be a dancing congregation! Even
with our gimpy preacher!) The arts of theater -- of Nevada Shakespeare, of
Ageless Repertory, this week of Missoula Children’s Theatre, of Jennifer
Reid’s parable for performance Wednesday evening – still need a few
readers! Especially men! Talk to us, please. Even the artworks of
Jonathan Boyd, displayed out of pain and tragedy. Yet Jonathan is among us
as one whose life may be uprooted and uprisen in ways each day revealing
gifts, to him, to us, as never seen before.
As Paul says here, the Spirit comes to us
and works with us and helps and supports right in our weakness! In fact,
our weakness, our wounded- and brokenness, often provide point of entry for
the Spirit! We do not even have to pretend to be strong. Paul is always so
conscious, for all his strengths of character and even of connection (such
as his dual-citizenship and his high training in law), of being just a step
away from disaster at all times. Not only is there a thorn in his own flesh
he wrestles with and pleads with God to remove. But also the Spirit forever
leads him crisis to crisis, bail-out to bail-out -- which he then chooses to
see as kairos to kairos, opportunity to opportunity! The freedom of Paul is
one of those freedoms of nothing to lose Janis Joplin sings about. Paul
says we do not even know how to pray – is that right? Yet the “Spirit
intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” Can I get a witness? To that
kind of sigh as a sign in our lives? That even the most highly-trained and
articulate of us, without Holy Spirit, often finds ourselves with nothing to
offer, nothing to say?
Walter Wink reminds us with this
morning’s passage, “It is God rather than ourselves who initiates prayer.”
“It is God’s power, not ours, that answers to the world’s needs.” We are
engaged today in a worldwide struggle over powers. There is only one
“super-power” in today’s world. Yet with all the worldly powers at its
command, it finds itself, we find ourselves, powerless to seek solutions
that make for global and lasting justice and peace. Why? Because for all
of our godly rhetoric and ritual, when push comes to shove of our “vital
interests,” we do not trust God at all but only our own powers, which means
our own weapons and ways of war. Listen, please, and I am listening, too –
I am speaking to me, too – I am not among us as one with answers but as one
with questions to share with you, as we seek God together!
Listen. We cannot win a “war on terror”
because we are part of it. Because it is part of us all. Because if we
fully explore the capacity of the seed to become a shrub for all birds, and
the capacity of the yeast to lose itself in all the flour, then we see that
there is plenty to be terrorized of for every last person on earth! Some
terror rains down from above, some terror blows up from below. But there is
plenty of terror for all! If we truly let ourselves be caught up in this
net full of every last fish, then we may see and hear what today’s world has
to show us – that anything can happen to anyone at any time and in any
place. I need to hear that again: anything can happen to anyone at any time
and in any place! There are no certain securities, no practical
protections. We cannot earn or buy ourselves out of the market of our
mortality, our vulnerability to this world.
When we look at the drawing on our cover,
and imagine the net full of all kinds of fish, let us imagine as well all
those people caught in the World Trade Center September 11 . . . all those
people caught in the path of the tsunami December 26 – people of every
nation, every language, every color, every class, every spirituality, every
sexuality – people without respect or regard to anything else about them but
that they were people, mere human beings, caught up together in a particular
time and place. This is not even to mention for now pollution, radiation,
disease, plague, drought, famine that touch us all. No matter how well we
gate our communities, how well we wall off our nations, how well we arm and
patrol our borders, we cannot escape or avoid one another and our common
destiny as a species – the youngest and most the dangerous species on earth.
Let me try to get across a little more of
what Walter Wink says, then I’ll quit at least for today. Paul is aware of
a “groaning of the Spirit within us” that relates us at a gut level, though
we may try to ignore or repress it, to the groaning of the entire creation.
Our personal fate is no better or worse than the fate of our earth. For
years the church has sold us a bill of goods, or of “bads,” if we have
believed that our salvation could happen just personally, privately, apart
from that of everyone else. As Dr. King says, until everyone is free, no
one is free – for those who are not free will haunt those who think they
are. Climate change is speaking sharply for itself. Millions are starving
to death each year. Others are tortured, imprisoned, battered, abused.
Species not only of plant and tree, bird and fish, insect and animal, but
species of language, species of music, species of culture verge on
extinction. The pain and the suffering, the groaning of our
interconnectedness with all of life -- especially given our networks of
information and communication today -- may well tend to overwhelm and to
immobilize us.
Wink says, “What we need is a portable
form of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, where we can unburden ourselves of
this accumulated suffering. We need to experience it; it is a part of
reality. Our task in praying is precisely that of giving speech to the
Spirit’s groanings within us . . . We are to articulate these agonizing
longings [That’s who we are as a species among all the others – We are the
articulators of earth’s sufferings and longings! We are earth’s imaginers
and creators of better, healthier, safer, more holy and more whole future
for all!] – We are to articulate these agonizing longings and let them pass
through us to God! Only the heart at the center of the universe [Is that
not a helpful image for God? The heart at the center of the universe?
Remember, “heart” is made up of the very same letters as “earth!”] – Only
the heart at the center of the universe can endure such a weight of
suffering! Our attempts to bear them are masochistic, falsely messianic,
and finally idolatrous [Sounds like many preachers, starting with this one!]
– as if there were no God! As if we had to carry this burden all by
ourselves!” The bottom-line hope of prayer to Paul seems to be, How can we
let all the powers of God serve us as our own?
Wink says, “We learn to pray by stopping
the attempt and simply listening to the prayer already being prayed
in us! . . Our task is simply to bring the Spirit’s utterances to language,
to consciousness, to awareness.” By all our imagination! With all our
creativity! “It is we who need to be present to the always-present
Holy Spirit,” writes Wink. “The Holy Spirit is already groaning in us . . .
We are able to pray only because God is always, incessantly, praying in us.
Perhaps this is what Pascal meant when he said, speaking for God, “You would
not seek me, had you not already found me.” You would not seek me -- see
me, hear me, think me, feel me, speak me, do me – were I not already alive,
and well, and at work in your lives! And in your life together. Let me,
asks God, let me . . . Amen.
