Kendall's Notebook page 46
“Spirituality: Reaching for the Reality”
by Kendall Brown
January 8, 2006
Mark 1: 4-11
John the Baptist was onto something, when he went out into the wilderness and preached a message of a new world to a people oppressed by their Roman overlords and their religious regulators. John was onto something. He had something that others did not have and they flocked to the wilderness to see if they could have it too.
What could it be that John was onto?
Another important player in the Gospel of John, Nicodemus was onto something when he came to Jesus at night and asked how to be born again. You remember Nicodemus. His story is in the third chapter - one of John’s first tales - immediately on the heels of the opening stories. Nicodemus was the member of the religious high order in Jerusalem who was uncomfortable with going along with the pack in the Sanhedrin’s desire to put an end to Jesus’ work in the countryside. The other rulers were coming up with all sorts of mischief to do in Jesus. Nicodemus didn’t buy it. An inner ear cued Nicodemus in but he couldn’t quite get it, or put it all together. So he went to Jesus to straighten it all out. He went to Jesus in the middle of the night, in darkness for enlightenment.
At the well Jesus, took up a conversation with a Samaritan women. He amazed and floored her by his knowledge about who she was and what was going on inside of her. She knew that she was in the presence of something startling and wonderful. She ran back to the village and brought others to Jesus. Even though the other villagers saw the light, we are not quite sure from the Gospel account that the Samaritan woman ever got it. John, the storyteller here, does not let us know if the first villager to meet Jesus at the well ever came to see for herself what others saw. John leaves every indication that she stayed in the darkness
What could it be that John the Baptist was onto?
What was it that Nicodemus’ inner ear was telling him?
What was it that the Samaritan villagers recognized and heard that the first woman missed?
Let us reframe those questions in the vocabulary of some central Epiphany themes. Two of those themes are the realities of light and darkness. Our focus Scripture today is from the Gospel of John. Light and darkness were two of his favorite themes. “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it,” wrote John in the verses (John 1:4) immediately before today’s lesson.
A third theme for this season is the season’s name itself, “Epiphany.” Epiphany means, a revelation, a manifestation, a breaking through of one reality into another reality, light into darkness, the spiritual into the physical, otherworldliness in to this world.
We can read the Biblical stories and see the epiphanies or potential epiphanies therein. Another favorite epiphany image is the story of Moses and the burning bush. That story has it all: Light and darkness, God’s holiness in the form of light in fire breaking into Moses’ profane and darkened world.
Moses’ experience of epiphany is obvious. Where are ours’?
Epiphanies can be shared by telling the story, but the experience cannot be shared. Epiphanies are AHA experiences, where suddenly everything comes into a whole new light for us, - we can tell others about it, but other people have to have their own experiences and stories to really know what we are talking about. They are like dreams. Sometimes we have a dream that we can vividly remember for years or the rest of our lives. We can tell others about them. But no one else can actually get into our dreams and experience every dimension of them in the same way that we did during the dream.
I’ll share one of my central epiphany stories in my own life. I have been in the church all my life. By the time I graduated from High School, I had one of those attendance pins with a wreath around it and a long ladder of bars, one for each year of perfect attendance. I knew the Bible stories as well as anyone. My home was a parsonage. I attended youth group and church camps, not to mention men’s club, women’s guild meetings with my mother, summer church camp, national youth events and the General Synod as a teenager. I majored in religion in college and went to seminary to study more in the religious field. I entered ministry, was ordained. I baptized, married and buried people and taught many classes myself.
In spite of the fact that my life could not be described without using the words church and religion, I had much in common with the Samaritan Woman and Nicodemus. I knew that there was something missing in my spiritual life. I knew that Jesus had it. I knew others had it and somehow others had gone through doors of spiritually that I had not even found to knock on. I prayed, but prayer wasn’t helpful to me. It is another testimony to the working of the Holy Spirit through us in spite of us that others were helped through my prayers, worship work and ministry. Sometimes I would be amazed that my parishioners would share with me spiritual dimensions of my own worship services. They had experienced the spiritual, but I didn’t have a clue about it. My parishioners were saying AHA. I was saying HUH. The bumper sticker says, “God is my Co-pilot.” Clearly, I was not the pilot here - hardly the copilot. At best I was a passenger in the back row. We are never really the pilots of own lives and deceive ourselves if we think we are. A phone call, a trip to the doctor, a lab test can in a moment reshape every plan, hope, expectation or dream that we ever had made.
Worst of all for me was the emptiness and darkness of prayer. Praying is like epiphanies, dreams and AHA experiences. Those who pray can tell about it. But everyone has to have their own experience. I am all too suspect that many people have given up on prayer because of their own experience of the emptiness. One thing we forget is that the emptiness itself is a part of the experience of prayer.
In spite of my religious, life and work, the light had not broken through my own spiritual darkness. But an epiphany experience was to come by which the light would break through; I would have my own knowledge of the reality of the holy ever present in the mundane of our lives.
Like most breakthroughs of the sacred into the secularity of our lives, my epiphany came in the midst of the mundane of daily living. One of my fatherly duties was to walk part way to school with my daughter. I walked with her to the first street corner where she had to cross a street and parted ways for the morning at that point. I often lingered at the corner for conversation with the crossing guard. After some time I learned that she was an alcoholic struggling with the strangle hold of her disease. She had just gotten into an AA group. The group was growing and needed a new home. I helped her group find a home in our church. In gratitude, she gave me a copy of one of the books used in the program. Until that time, I knew nothing about the AA program. I took the book home and couldn’t put it down once having started to read. I had one Aha moment after another as I read the pages. I had never read before anything that spoke to me so profoundly and deeply.
It is not that I am an alcoholic. Alcoholism is a physical, social, emotional and spiritual disease. The AA offers a spiritual treatment for the disease. The 12-step program is a spiritual program. I am not an alcoholic but I was spiritually ill. My illness was my emptiness, that I felt so profoundly in my prayer life. Prayer felt like a must-do exercise - the duty of every Christian. I was good at duty doing, but deficient in spiritual living and experience of the spiritual. The 12-step program, being a spiritual program did something for me that a lifetime of being in the church, going to seminary, and being a pastor had not done for me. It opened the door to the spiritual side. The spiritual became something experienced and not studied. The spiritual became a real dimension of my life, not just a topic for conversation with others. It was an AHA experience, an epiphany, a breakthrough of the holy into the mundane of my earthly living.
I am not saying that everyone has to have this same experience. The spiritual side can open up for individuals in a variety of ways. A central biblical story for this season is the story of the magi. As we remember those three foreigners who came at Jesus birth, we are reminded of the varieties of experiences for epiphany that God provides for us.
Too often we dwell in the deep darkness, the darkness of spiritual emptiness. We stay there because in side of us there are these little creepy voices, filled with expressions of “should” and “should not.” These voices trick us into thinking that there are only certain ways that are right for us if we are indeed Christians.
One of the voices that I used to hear a lot was a voice telling me all the time that I was not really a Christian unless I had a personal relationship with my Lord. I bet some of you have heard that inner nagging voice, too. Although my upbringing exposed me to that particular “should” about being a Christian, my upbringing in a mainline Protestant church never exposed me to learning how to experience a personal relationship with my Lord. My emptiness as a youth just got emptier and emptier.
Just a block up the street from my parsonage boyhood home was a holy roller church. People there had personal relationships with their lord. If they went to that church they had no problem talking about Jesus in their lives and Jesus being with them.
I wondered if I had to become a holy roller to really be a Christian. I slowly got over that, but it remained a nagging doubt until I finally had that AHA epiphany experience that opened up the spiritual side for me.
No doubt about it, you don’t have to be a holy roller to be a Christian. I no longer worry about having a personal relationship with my Lord, whatever that means.
But after that AHA epiphany, what became important for me was that I shared with Jesus of Nazareth and the Risen Christ the experience of the holy, the sacred the spiritual in the here an now of earthly life. Every page of the Gospel drips with Jesus consciousness of the presence of the spirit. I believe in his calling us to be his disciples, he invites us to share that same awareness. That awareness transforms us and makes these earthly bodies of dust and ashes spiritual beings.
To know a little of what Jesus knew of the spiritual, to understand what Jesus understood about holiness, to experience what Jesus experienced in soulful ecstasy and agony, to be where Jesus was close as a breath and distant as a universe from God, is all the relationship with him one ever will need to be his disciple.
Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night is one of the images that has been before us this morning. It is wonderful illustration of epiphany as it is filled with images of dark and light. Van Gogh was a person of deep faith and spirituality. That part his of personal core steered him towards ministry as a young man. He went to seminary and started off as a minister in a small church. His deep sensitivity, huge heart and compassion, that equipped him so well for ministry, also set him up to be deeply injured by his work in the church. After a couple difficult and struggling years, Vincent left ministry and turned to his artistic talents as his career. Throughout his short life Van Gogh suffered from the depths of depression. Starry Night was painted during the last year of his life. At the time he was in an asylum unable to be brought out of the snares of his depression. Starry Night bears witness to the darkness of Van Gogh’s soul at that time. In viewing the painting one’s vision is led from the prominent darkness of the foreground into the brilliance of the night sky. Two objects point to the light. One is the church steeple painted in black and the tree is the other object pointing to the sky also painted in black. The tree is much larger than the steeple perhaps reflecting that for Van Gogh, nature had become much effective as a vehicle for experiencing holiness in life than the church. But in the painting both the church and nature are darkened for Van Gogh, reflecting the depth of his despair. Yet there is light. It is the light of swirling dancing stars in the sky that break through all the darkness of night. Vincent’s media, painting, became the door to the light of the spiritual side.
Starry Night, Epiphany, the stories of this season are about a light that breaks through and shines in our darkness. It is the light of the spiritual. It is the light of knowing and experiencing that prayer is far more than words or right words far more and yet very simple. Simply being in the presence of God and allowing one’s heart to be open to that presence.
It is the light expressed in the Psalm, “Even though I walk in the valley of the shadow (darkness) of death, I fear no evil for thou art with me.”
It is the light that Jesus always knew was present to him and that he was constantly sharing with his disciples who repeatedly demonstrated the darkness of their own spirits. It is the light of spirit, hope, healing and renewal that he offers us and is as present for us as it was for him. “Let us walk in the light as he was in the light, and have fellowship one with another.”