God meets us in the hall.
When Dean invited me to speak to you today….and talk about the ministry of spiritual direction or spiritual accompaniment, a ministry I’ve been working in part time for more than four years now... which is not long... I wasn’t sure. A few days later we talked again, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a computer printout of the readings for today. I am not a Bible scholar. But I love the Bible. And when I read those lessons, I wanted to share some thoughts about them with you.
The basic premise of our spiritual life, both as individuals and as a community, is that God desires not only our spiritual health ...and our salvation...but also our friendship.
I’m using the words here of William Barry, a spiritual director of some forty years experience and a wonderful teacher. He used this idea of friendship in a workshop he gave last month in Montreal, and I was really struck by it.
By the fact that .....God, the unknowable God ... desires to be friends with us and to have us as friends.
When we speak of spiritual direction, we mean that it is God who gives our wanderings a direction....who leads us and walks with us. The person (the director, companion) who has the privilege of witnessing this in the life of an individual... or sometimes a group... also has the responsibility of helping them pay attention to what’s happening in that walk as it goes forward.
Today’s scriptures are, not so coincidentally, two landmarks along the way of our walk with God.
My friend Debra phoned me last week and asked, “What’s your sermon going to be about?” I said (without looking at the text) “Well, the people of Israel have been rescued from being slaves in Egypt and they are in the desert on their way to the Holy Land, Moses has been giving them water out of a rock, and God has been feeding them manna every morning, and they’re sick of it. They are scared they will die out there, and they start bellyaching and saying they want to go back to Egypt. ... They miss the food.”
But it’s also about something we all experience.... the difficulty of moving from one space to another, and how even when the change is a good thing we lose our nerve.”
“I get it” she said, “ you mean, ‘When one door closes, another door opens but in the meantime it’s hell in the hall!’”
Exactly.
The transitional space, or liminal zone, is the place we stand when we have budged from where we were, and haven’t yet gotten to where we’re going.
This is where we find ourselves in the first lesson.
I would like to suggest that the liminal space is where we are most likely to meet God.
It’s not the ONLY place we meet God, of course.
For many of us, faith was easier when we were children, whether we remember it or not.
I remember stopping for lunch at Janet King’s house when her children were little. Darren, who was in pre-school, came home for lunch carrying a huge fist-full of dandelions. Well... as you might know...Dandelions don’t do very well as cut flowers. But Janet put them into a glass of water in the middle of the table and then she invited her Darren to say the blessing. He just started talking to God, without any shyness or hesitation, reeling off the names of the people he wanted God to bless, and making sure to include the food and the ...by now sagging...dandelions. The words just flowed out of him with joy and freedom and a confidence. With complete trust.
Where does that trust go ? ?
We grow up and discover that food doesn’t really appear magically on the table.
We see the flowers wilting, even after we pray for them.
We find out that some people detest the flowers we loved, and say they are weeds
We find out that work isn’t always fun and that we still need to do it to pay the mortgage or the rent.
We start doing almost everything for ourselves.
BUT FAITH IS NOT SOMETHING WE CAN DO BY OURSELVES
Almost without realizing it, we move away from that comfortable familiarity with God to thinking... mistakenly... that our faith is something we make ourselves in our own hearts. But sooner or later we discover that we can’t do that.
Because our faith is not, in fact, a kind of attainment like physical fitness or good grammar
or even a natural gift like perfect pitch or a good eye for colour and form,
it is a supernatural gift ...a grace...and it needs to be continuously given and received. In Saint Paul’s words, “by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing: it is the gift of God.”
WE CAN LOSE SIGHT OF THIS
Life can get tough.
And in our world today... where our first response when something breaks is to get a new one...whether it’s a toy or a goldfish or a fridge or a marriage or a job or a government...
we are more comfortable dealing with replacing what’s missing than with suffering, and frustration, and anger, and loss. So we keep our unhappiness to ourselves. We want to protect this precious friendship, and we think it’s safer and less painful not to share our disappointment with God. And if we allow this to go on... through fatigue or despair... our friendship with God, like any friendship where some small truth is too dangerous to share, withers away, it becomes an empty pantomime, we’re just going through the motions
In William Barry’s words, “The only way through the difficulty is to bring it up.
This is also the hardest thing to do.”And where we go next might not be a short commuter hop, either.
What we understand of Israel’s deliverance is that it took a whole generation.
When we last saw the chosen people, they were running off and getting themselves bitten by vipers and dying.
Is this what happens if we try to duck out of our friendship with God?
Does the love that has been keeping us alive die, if we run away?
NO. It most assuredly does not die. But it can FEEL like that.How does Moses handle it?
He listens to them, he prays for them. He doesn’t pat them on the shoulder and tell them it will be all right. He doesn’t tell them they have nothing to be afraid of.Instead, he hoists up an image of the poisonous viper that was biting them. “Look on it and live,” he says. I understand this to mean that he was calling them... us... to wake up to where we are with God and what’s happening.
By becoming more mindful, more aware.
Somebody once told me that Carl Jung said a guilty conscience was more useful than a city full of therapists. Sin can’t be overcome in the past or the future, It can’t be conquered by hiding in a hole in the ground or running away. It can only be overcome now, in the present, in the here and now.
In the daily prayer time
In praying with scripture, or centering prayer.
In awareness.
This shift... which seems such a small thing ....really does give life.Let us in the words of Psalm 107, “give thanks to the Lord who is good, whose love endures forever!”
And there’s more!
To be healed from sin is already an amazing grace... (to coin a phrase)...
But we are actually asked to open our hearts and allow ourselves to be filled....when and how God permits this...with the love that has redeemed us.
And we might be surprised by the form that this takes. It’s tempting, when we’re out there in the wilderness, in that liminal space between captivity and a stable new life, is to think we know what form God’s friendship with us is going to take.
Think for a moment about a pair of teenagers talking for hours on the phone.... utterly absorbed in each other. It’s not unimaginable to have time like that, with God. What an adventure. How can anything so self-absorbed feel so generous? And yet it is experienced as a complete gift.
But in time, that experience gives way to something different. The friends have a shared project. The young couple has children. They look less at each other, and more at what they are doing... and this experience connects them in a different way, but because they have a focus outside themselves they actually get to know each other better. It is a real heart sharing.
The form this generosity ... or vocation... takes can vary
The young couple... being transformed into parents... might be an obvious example.
I know a woman whose parents were one of a number of families in Hull who decided, when they were all young couples, to get together and build houses for each other. None of them had much money. Each of them studied up on one trade or another, and then they all worked together building first one house and then another. One guy planned all the plumbing, another did the roofs, another did the wiring... And somewhere in Hull there’s one street where all those little houses still sit, one next to another...
The archetype of self-giving....for us...is Jesus’ life and death and resurrection.
And his promises to us...are a model of what this transformation looks like.I don’t mean these families are saint in the formal sense.
I mean the joyfulness and generosity of their response ... lifting them beyond what they had thought they were capable of, resembles the generosity with which Jesus responded to HIS vocation.
With the ESSENTIAL difference that Jesus’s vocation was for ALL people and for ALL time.
Jesus is fuller of life than everybody else around him. If you go through the gospels and pick out the words that describe his activity it’s always
Went ...saw ...sighed...spoke ...Said ...Wept ...Walked ... Went ...Came ...Looked.
He is unstoppable.
Not only is the Jesus we meet in the gospels alive.... in himself... he is alive to people around him... all kinds of people...and also to his time and place ... a time of enormous change...
Today’s gospel is the second part of a long interview Jesus has with Nicodemus...a Jewish leader, a holy person, a good person, a member of the Sanhedrin who comes to him secretly, at night, to learn what he is teaching. It’s to Nicodemus that Jesus says, “you must be born again” by water and the holy spirit, and it’s to Nicodemus that Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up”
I mentioned earlier that the space between where we were and where we are going, the liminal space, is a place where God comes to meet us. By referring to Moses’s saving act in the wilderness, in this way, Jesus is claiming as his own rightful place what is to us the scariest of all those liminal spaces, the place between life and death. “So that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
Implicit in this is that we must look. We don’t find it easy to look at suffering, to stay with it. In the middle ages, kneeling before the crucifix and spending time there was something everybody did, but today we squirm away from that place. It’s difficult. As Tony Jemmott said once, “brothers and sisters, this is not cheap grace I’m talking about!” We might need to start where we are... praying “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief”... and remembering that even the desire to believe is itself a grace... from God... (where else could it come from?!)
This is a trust walk, as surely as the walk out of Egypt into the Holy Land was a trust walk.
But it also assures us of God’s readiness to attend to all the deaths and births in our lives. I started to make a list of these and... surprise... they are almost identical to the categories on our intercession list: travellers, captives, the sick, the dying, the nations. We need community when we’re in transition, and our community prayers mirror exactly these points of concern. Which does not mean we cannot bring our other deaths and births to Jesus on the cross: Midlife crises, encounters with the law, career transitions, addictions, retirement. We can add the life events of our planet, the governments of the nations, the church.
What do we see when we look on Jesus?
We see God-with-us. In the words of N.T. Wright, [which I condense so much I risk distorting his sense]: “we look at this Jesus and say with awe and wonder and gratitude, not only “Ecce Homo” but “Ecce Deus”’....But, he adds, “as with some icons, the focal point of this image is actually on the viewer. Once we have glimpsed the true portrait of God, the onus is on us to reflect it: to reflect it as community, to reflect it as individuals. We see this not for our own benefit, but so that the glory may shine in us and through us to bring light to the world that still waits in darkness and in the shadow of death.”
Amen.
Lections for Lent IV in 2006:
Numbers 21:4-9 Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22 Ephesians 2:1-10 John 3:14-21Other references:
William A. Barry’s book on God desiring our friendship is not finished yet.
N.T. Wright. “Jesus and the Identify of God.” Ex Auditu 1998, 14, 42-56
on the internet: http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_JIG.htm
The concept of liminality was developed by Victor Turner, an anthropologist of religion (Freedom, Liminality, and Social Change).