“One
Thing Will I Seek After”
Psalm 27
First Presbyterian
Confirmation
Commissioning Day
It happened on the way back from
my recent trip to
I was not happy.
I gave some not-so-subtle indications of my displeasure.
You know how we do that…those little harrumphs and repeated sighs that
are unmistakable signs of irritation. Shifting
in my seat, several times. Rolling
me eyes. Perfunctory answers to
questions asked. All of this after a
week away to be renewed in the mind and heart of Christ.
Finally, the plane was cleared for take off and we were not in the air
more than ten minutes before she reached into her, of course, oversized bag, to
extract her oversized snack pack, and started nibbling away.
In my mind, I threw the book at her.
How could she? How dare she?
No wonder she is like she is. I
was fuming so much that when she turned and asked me if I knew what time it was,
I said, “Time for me to take a nap,” before grudgingly adding, “Five after
three.” She got my message, I
guess, because she did not try to engage me in any further conversation.
A few minutes later, pillaging
through her bag again, she pulled out a book.
I looked over, wanting to see the title, pretty certain I knew what kind
of book a young woman like her would read. But
it was not what I thought. The title
of the book shook me at the core of my self-righteousness.
No Harlequin romance novel, the book she was holding in her hands was
called God’s Remedy for Rejection.
I hardly can tell you how in
that moment it struck me that my behavior toward the young woman had in some
profound way invalidated twenty-six years of preaching.
I had a chance to be kind to this woman to whom the world likely is
hostile most of the time, to be hospitable and welcoming, and not to reject.
Would that have been so hard for me?
Was that asking too much? I
failed in the most basic of ways this gospel I preach week after week.
When I told the confirmation
class this story a few weeks ago, I said that I am living proof that it is not
what we believe so much that matters to God and life and the world as how we
act. We can be theologically
progressive and intellectually sophisticated and if we do not build bridges of
compassion to other human beings and if we do not care for the earth our home
and if we do not do the things that make for peace among all the peoples and
nations, we are, to use St. Paul’s imagery, just “noisy gongs and clanging
cymbals.” If we meet
people’s failures with condemnation instead of grace, their sins with clucking
instead of charity, their demerits with disdain instead of empathy, their
shortcomings with disgust instead of generosity, then all of our religion is
less than worthless.
The ministry of Jesus, I told
them and remind them now, was entirely about waking us up to love, about paying
attention to what love requires in every situation and circumstance of our
lives. I was asleep to love that day
on the plane. It is so easy to go
through life sleepily, simply choosing the roads well traveled, taking the paths
of least resistance, going along in order to get along, following mindless
conventions mindlessly. It is why I
had the members of our confirmation class repeating one night all the way from
Jones & Gifford back to the church the words of a Mary Oliver poem: “My
work is loving the world.”
I could have brought some
goodness into the world, into that young woman’s life, that day on the plane,
but I failed to be roused by love. I
allowed my ignoble sensibilities to take over because love’s work requires
effort and, frankly, I and we too often are lazy.
But we all share the same work in this life.
We all have the same responsibility to each other and to the building of
what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the beloved community” and what our
scripture calls “the new creation” in which there is harmony and hospitality
and everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
We may have different jobs in life, but we share the same work: no matter
our job, our work is loving the world. Here is how Mary Oliver says it in a poem
called When I Am Among the Trees.
When
I Am Among the Trees
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me, the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.” (1)
A long time ago, one of the psalmists wrote: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.” That seems like an odd sentence. The psalmist says that he is going to ask God only for one thing, and then he seemingly lists three…to live in the house of the Lord all the days of his life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in the Lord’s temple. But what the psalmist is asking of God is indeed only one thing: he wants to participate fully in God’s life because he knows that, in reality, that is all there is and he does not want to live somnolently, asleep. He wants to be alive to it all- broad and deep and full, no matter the difficulty, no matter the cost. “In God, we live and move and have our being.”
The psalmist wants to live in
the house of the Lord all the days of his life.
The house of the Lord is the world. Sallie
McFague says that “the universe is God’s body.” The
communion we shall receive as a sacrament in a few moments is a sign of this
greater communion with God that we experience whenever we engage the world
around us and, indeed, the communion we shall receive as a sacrament only makes
sense as we commune with the world in ways contemporarily congruent with the
ways and manner of Jesus. To live in
the house of the Lord means that we commit ourselves to re-envisioning the world
as the best of all possible worlds, and then contributing all our gifts,
whatever they are, toward its appearing. Otherwise,
we are just sleeping our lives away. “Wake
up,” Jesus challenged us repeatedly.
The psalmist wants to behold the
beauty of God. Of all the things I
appreciate about Ross Mackenzie’s ministry in my life, it is his insistent
belief that beauty alone can save the world.
Awaken to beauty, he would say to us if he were here today.
Create beauty because a land without beauty creates only dead souls and
dead souls give rise only to boredom, greed, and violence.
Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote that without beauty there is nothing left in
the world worth doing. Not only
aesthetic beauty. Not only the
beauty of a starry night or of a flock of
Jesus saw beauty to which others
were blind. He saw it in the woman caught in adultery, in Zacchaeus the tax
collector, in a wayward prodigal and a father who refused to give up hope, in a
Samaritan who got involved. He saw
beauty in God’s dream for the world and so he gave his whole life in its
service and invited us to do likewise.
The
psalmist wants to inquire in God’s temple.
Here is the hallmark of progressive religion: religion that asks
questions; religion that knows that blind faith serves only to make us blind to
everything thing that really matters. We
have to be awake, we have to pay attention to life all around us in order to ask
the questions by which we can give birth to a better, more humane, more just,
more joyful world.
So,
confirmation commissioning class of 2007, here is my charge to you and, with
you, the rest of us as well: Seek
after only one thing in your lives. Let
that one thing be to wake up to the fullness of God in a world that too often
lulls us to sleep, convincing us that nothing really can change, that the way
the world is today is the way the world has always to be.
Wake up to God in whom our lives are in every moment being lived.
Wake up to beauty by which we construe and construct a world made and
lived in the image of God. Wake up
to all that needs to be questioned in our world today so that we may build and
inhabit a better, more enlightened, more peaceful one.
Sasha, Chloe, Ian, Lizzie, Bryce, Courtney, Jenny, Duncan, and Trevor: You are not joining the church today in order to become more religious. You are joining the church in order to become more human and to learn how to contribute your human life to love, to loving this world, to hailing a new creation in which life sings and soars…for everyone. We need you and want you and now today we welcome you and commission you as full partners with us in Love’s service.
Amen.
(1)
Oliver, Mary, Thirst.
(2) Ross Mackenzie spoke brilliantly about beauty in his last sermon as Director of the Department of Religion at Chautauqua Institution on August 29, 1999. The sermon was entitled Everlasting Mercy.