Anything but the rain
When I went on my very first round of pastoral visits, wayyyy back in the summer after my freshman year of college, in Atlanta, I visited this one very nice old lady. "Come back and see me," she said, "and we'll talk about anything but the rain." I like that phrase, mainly because it sounds pretty, and says a lot about Southern avoidance techniques.
In the past two weeks, I've managed to do pretty well for myself here, back in the South. (It's funny--when people ask me where I live, I say NYC, then they kinda glaze over, and I have to hastily add that I grew up here in Newport News, in order for them to snap back into friendly conversation--Yes, Virginia, I am one of you.) I'm running an adult education series on Wednesday evenings, showing a movie, and discussing faith-based elements in it. So far, we've talked about O Brother, Where Art Thou? which is happily full of stuff. It's all about baptism. Really. Watch it, and see if I'm lying to you. Next up, I think, will be Romero. Because I think it makes perfect logical sense to move from George Clooney acting like a Southern Depression-era fool to Mr. Addams dressed up as a Salvadoran martyr in the 1980s.
This week I've also participated in two Eucharists with deacons (real ones!) at local nursing homes. One of the deacons went through discernment with me, many moons ago, and now is finally a deacon herownself, so I get a kick out of seeing her all done up in a collar, and stole, and doing diaconal things. I also preached the sermon today--and managed to get some sort of response from a group of about 30 very old people, mostly suffering from various stages of dementia. (this I consider to be a positive thing. It makes them more fun to have in church--though less willing to sing along with hymns.) It was an index-card sermon, and one of those cases where I completely forgot to look down at my index card, in my concern to say what I wanted to say, and in my waving of my arms around. I think I even turned a bit Baptist there for a bit--though my emphasis was 'follow Christ' rather than 'follow Jesus'. My evangelical vocab still needs tweaking.
In any case, here's the sermon I preached on Sunday. Bear in mind the remarkable counter-scheduling: the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown was occuring the same day. At the same time. With the Presiding Bishop, and every other Episcopal and Anglican dignitary in the Commonwealth present. I lose!
Lectionary was this
Monday was my first day off since I’ve been here working at Emmanuel, and I went to the beach. And I confess to you, here and now, that I haven’t been to the beach in years. Last summer I was working as a hospital chaplain, and never found time to go, and before that, it seemed like I was busy with other things. So I was looking forward to Monday.
So I drove down to the beach, all excited about my day of relaxation. And? I promptly got lost. Horribly lost. I ended up, not on 87th street like I wanted, but hurtling rapidly down Rt 60, and I ended up at First Landing National Park.
Oops.
It wasn’t too bad, though. I got myself turned around, and headed back, and got myself on the right fork in the road. And I eventually found my friend.
Getting lost, though, that was an interesting way to start my day. I realized, as I sat there on the beach, that I was sitting pretty close to where everything started for us about 400 years ago. All those people, coming into the unknown, all with their varied reasons, setting into motion such a huge story. Walking onto the beach that first time, those hundred or so Englishmen surely had no idea what they would find here. They didn’t know about the current inhabitants of this land, or how their interactions with them would color our story for generations. They didn’t know that the very act of holding Anglican worship on that beach would set the precedent for the Anglican Communion that we belong to today. They didn’t know hardly anything--This was wilderness for them, in every sense of the word. And the wilderness is not particularly warm and relaxing, despite my plans. It’s where a person can get lost.
In our reading this morning, Elijah is having a rough time of it. The life of a prophet is generally not an easy one, but Elijah is having an especially hard time. The current queen of Israel wants him dead, after he had publicly embarrassed her and killed about seventy of her closest personal friends and religious confidants.
Oops.
It was probably not the smartest political move Elijah had ever made in his life as a Prophet of the God of Israel, the taunting and slaughter of the prophets and priests of Baal, but so be it. Now they were dead. Killed on Mt. Carmel, after Baal had mysteriously declined to answer their prayers and ignite their offering to them. Queen Jezebel was displeased about their deaths, since she was a Canaanite, and devoted to Baal herself. King Ahab was also less than thrilled about the situation because he wasn’t the strongest king in Israel’s history and Jezebel basically dictated policy, both public and religious. And here Elijah goes, taunting her favorite religious advisors and then killing them on one of the Canaanite holy places.
So he gets in trouble.
He gets in big trouble, actually, and flees. He runs all the way from Mt. Carmel, way in the north of the country to Beer-sheeba. In the southern tip. He runs out of the kingdom of Israel. Today, this is about a four-and-a-half hour car ride on modern highways. Lest we underestimate the fleeing powers of Elijah when he panics—let the hearer understand: the man runs as far away from Jezebel and her death sentence as he can physically get.
So he ends up in the desert, basically. Out in one of the Hebrew scripture’s favorite places—the wilderness—and doing another time-honored tradition of the prophet: he sulks at God. The prophet job was not working out. He had done the right thing—he had fought against idolatry and the enemies of God, and things had not turned out correctly at all! So, he hits the panic button and heads for the wilderness. And waits for something to shift.
Out in a similar place is the demoniac we meet in today’s gospel. Like Elijah, he’s in the wilderness, but with an important difference. Elijah fled to the wilderness, and the demon-possessed man was thrown there by others. He’s kept in chains because he’s so violent. He’s too dangerous to be around other people. He doesn’t wear any clothes and he scares anyone who comes near him. Society has kicked him out, and he ends up living in the tombs—absolutely forsaken with his problems. He’s not in Israel either—Jesus and his disciples leave Galilee, notice, and cross to the country of the Geresenes. Jesus is leaving his country. We’re out beyond the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ people. This demoniac is an outcast among outcasts.
And now, Like Elijah, he is Another one in the wilderness, in the very midst of death, waiting for something to change.
No matter how we get there, the wilderness is that place where we end up when nothing else is working. It’s the realm of spiritual chaos; it’s where everything is falling apart and we’ve thrown in the towel. It’s where we get lost.
It’s not an easy place to be. There are tombs. There is heat. Rocks. Scorpions. No water. The Hebrew Scriptures line up the wilderness with the desert, and just think about all the time the Israelites spent wandering around in the desert wilderness before reaching Canaan after the Exodus. All the stuff that happens out there. It’s a tough place to be.
And yet….the wilderness has a redemption. Out in the wilderness, moping in a cave, Elijah hears a voice: “What are you doing here, Elijah?”. Promptly, Elijah spills out the whole story: “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away!" the people of Israel have messed up! Now they are angry at him! And it’s really not his fault! He did the right thing!
Then God passes by. Not in the way you’d expect maybe. Not in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire, but in the sheer silence.
Now the prophet of God has met God, has seen God, but not in the way he expected.
This is a prophet who called down fire from the sky in the name of Yahweh, who slaughtered the prophets of Baal in the name of Adonai. That was his experience of God. This silence, this quiet. This was not that. This God was something else. This was a wilderness God.
For the demoniac, raging about the tombs all day, the relationship with God was off the table. When Jesus appears, the man expects pain, suffering, torture. After all, he had been cast out of his village. He had been thrown out of his family, and also, he’s not even the right nationality :”What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God…I beg you, do not torment me.” Even the demons within him react with fear to the Divine in Jesus, expecting punishment, or revenge. {Luke’s in good Greek dualism mode here.}
But that’s not what he gets. Jesus responds with mercy, even for spirits of questionable character. When the demons ask not to be sent back into the abyss, Jesus sends them into a herd of pigs—bad for the pigs, good for the demons, who would rank higher for a Jewish Messiah than pigs anyway. Like Elijah, the Gerasene man gets a wilderness God who doesn’t do what he’s expected to. This God confounds expectations. This God is merciful even to demons.
The wilderness, as messy as it is, is a place of last resort. And we run there looking for something, after everything else collapses and we have no other choice. Sometimes we’re even cast there, by other people. But that thing that we find out there is usually not what we thought that we would.
The God of the wilderness, our God, is wild. The God of the wilderness talks to the wrong people, uses the wrong languages, acts in completely inappropriate ways, and asks us extremely difficult questions. When we come out to the wilderness looking for something, looking for relief, looking for God, When we end up there, we should be prepared, because there’s no guarantee that we’ll be comfortable with what we’ll find. In fact, we probably won’t be.
The wilderness is a place of uncomfortable revelation, disturbing restoration. It’s a place that fulfills the Rolling Stone’s lyric ‘You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.’ God brings us healing and relief in the wilderness, just not in the expected way.
But we don’t get to leave it there. As my seminary librarian once commented, “No one gets to live in the wilderness. If they did, we’d call it something else. We’d call it suburbia.” Once we are ransomed healed, restored forgiven, in all those new and unnerving wilderness-like ways, we get turned around again. We get sent back to civilization that needs a bit of wildness to it.
After his healing, the demoniac wants to stay with Jesus to be a disciple. He wants to stay as he was, in a sense, cut off from his community and the person that he was before his wilderness experience.
Jesus says no.
He sends him back, to his hometown, to those people who knew him to be damaged, to be broken. Those people who now needed to see a healed, renewed person with good news to share, and a new life to lead. Those very people who cast him out in the first place, because those people needed to see him back again. They needed a revelation of the Wild Divine themselves.
And Elijah, up in his Cave of Sulking, after his epiphany of the wind, the earthquake and the fire, then the silence, hears the same question once more: “Elijah, what are you doing here?”
Poor Elijah, mind really blown now, gives the same answer he did before, probably in a more subdued tone of voice this time, and hears the response: Go back. Go back to a new place, to a new people, and a new strategy. Your work is not finished yet, and we’ll give it another try. But go back. We aren’t done yet.
We are healed for a purpose. We are restored for a calling. We get what we need in the wilderness, but we get it in order to share with the world, which needs to experience the rush of God as we have. The reasons we ran to the wilderness are still back there; we were restored in order to return to them. Our healing is not just for us, it is for everyone in our communities that we are sent to.
I have a plaque, hanging on the wall of my apartment in New York, just as you walk in the door. It’s up over the light switch in the hall, so it’s the first thing I see as I walk in, and the last thing I see as I leave. I bought it on my first trip to Jerusalem—it’s a copy of a drawing found underneath the current Church of the Holy Sepulchre, dated back to the 2nd or 3rd cent. CE., done by some of the first pilgrims who came to the site, because it was then, and still is, tradition among pilgrims to inscribe a cross, or some other sacred sign on the site that you made pilgrimage to in Jerusalem, among the Orthodox. The ancient pilgrim drew a boat, and wrote an enigmatic phrase in Koine Greek, which loosely translates, ‘Lord, we are here.’ It also could read ‘Lord, we will be going.’ What a perfect way to sum up a wilderness pilgrimage. Our flight out into the wild places, waiting for the restoration, however it might come, and our returns back into the civilization, never one without the other.
Lord we are here. Lord, we will be going. Amen.
In the past two weeks, I've managed to do pretty well for myself here, back in the South. (It's funny--when people ask me where I live, I say NYC, then they kinda glaze over, and I have to hastily add that I grew up here in Newport News, in order for them to snap back into friendly conversation--Yes, Virginia, I am one of you.) I'm running an adult education series on Wednesday evenings, showing a movie, and discussing faith-based elements in it. So far, we've talked about O Brother, Where Art Thou? which is happily full of stuff. It's all about baptism. Really. Watch it, and see if I'm lying to you. Next up, I think, will be Romero. Because I think it makes perfect logical sense to move from George Clooney acting like a Southern Depression-era fool to Mr. Addams dressed up as a Salvadoran martyr in the 1980s.
This week I've also participated in two Eucharists with deacons (real ones!) at local nursing homes. One of the deacons went through discernment with me, many moons ago, and now is finally a deacon herownself, so I get a kick out of seeing her all done up in a collar, and stole, and doing diaconal things. I also preached the sermon today--and managed to get some sort of response from a group of about 30 very old people, mostly suffering from various stages of dementia. (this I consider to be a positive thing. It makes them more fun to have in church--though less willing to sing along with hymns.) It was an index-card sermon, and one of those cases where I completely forgot to look down at my index card, in my concern to say what I wanted to say, and in my waving of my arms around. I think I even turned a bit Baptist there for a bit--though my emphasis was 'follow Christ' rather than 'follow Jesus'. My evangelical vocab still needs tweaking.
In any case, here's the sermon I preached on Sunday. Bear in mind the remarkable counter-scheduling: the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown was occuring the same day. At the same time. With the Presiding Bishop, and every other Episcopal and Anglican dignitary in the Commonwealth present. I lose!
Lectionary was this
Monday was my first day off since I’ve been here working at Emmanuel, and I went to the beach. And I confess to you, here and now, that I haven’t been to the beach in years. Last summer I was working as a hospital chaplain, and never found time to go, and before that, it seemed like I was busy with other things. So I was looking forward to Monday.
So I drove down to the beach, all excited about my day of relaxation. And? I promptly got lost. Horribly lost. I ended up, not on 87th street like I wanted, but hurtling rapidly down Rt 60, and I ended up at First Landing National Park.
Oops.
It wasn’t too bad, though. I got myself turned around, and headed back, and got myself on the right fork in the road. And I eventually found my friend.
Getting lost, though, that was an interesting way to start my day. I realized, as I sat there on the beach, that I was sitting pretty close to where everything started for us about 400 years ago. All those people, coming into the unknown, all with their varied reasons, setting into motion such a huge story. Walking onto the beach that first time, those hundred or so Englishmen surely had no idea what they would find here. They didn’t know about the current inhabitants of this land, or how their interactions with them would color our story for generations. They didn’t know that the very act of holding Anglican worship on that beach would set the precedent for the Anglican Communion that we belong to today. They didn’t know hardly anything--This was wilderness for them, in every sense of the word. And the wilderness is not particularly warm and relaxing, despite my plans. It’s where a person can get lost.
In our reading this morning, Elijah is having a rough time of it. The life of a prophet is generally not an easy one, but Elijah is having an especially hard time. The current queen of Israel wants him dead, after he had publicly embarrassed her and killed about seventy of her closest personal friends and religious confidants.
Oops.
It was probably not the smartest political move Elijah had ever made in his life as a Prophet of the God of Israel, the taunting and slaughter of the prophets and priests of Baal, but so be it. Now they were dead. Killed on Mt. Carmel, after Baal had mysteriously declined to answer their prayers and ignite their offering to them. Queen Jezebel was displeased about their deaths, since she was a Canaanite, and devoted to Baal herself. King Ahab was also less than thrilled about the situation because he wasn’t the strongest king in Israel’s history and Jezebel basically dictated policy, both public and religious. And here Elijah goes, taunting her favorite religious advisors and then killing them on one of the Canaanite holy places.
So he gets in trouble.
He gets in big trouble, actually, and flees. He runs all the way from Mt. Carmel, way in the north of the country to Beer-sheeba. In the southern tip. He runs out of the kingdom of Israel. Today, this is about a four-and-a-half hour car ride on modern highways. Lest we underestimate the fleeing powers of Elijah when he panics—let the hearer understand: the man runs as far away from Jezebel and her death sentence as he can physically get.
So he ends up in the desert, basically. Out in one of the Hebrew scripture’s favorite places—the wilderness—and doing another time-honored tradition of the prophet: he sulks at God. The prophet job was not working out. He had done the right thing—he had fought against idolatry and the enemies of God, and things had not turned out correctly at all! So, he hits the panic button and heads for the wilderness. And waits for something to shift.
Out in a similar place is the demoniac we meet in today’s gospel. Like Elijah, he’s in the wilderness, but with an important difference. Elijah fled to the wilderness, and the demon-possessed man was thrown there by others. He’s kept in chains because he’s so violent. He’s too dangerous to be around other people. He doesn’t wear any clothes and he scares anyone who comes near him. Society has kicked him out, and he ends up living in the tombs—absolutely forsaken with his problems. He’s not in Israel either—Jesus and his disciples leave Galilee, notice, and cross to the country of the Geresenes. Jesus is leaving his country. We’re out beyond the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ people. This demoniac is an outcast among outcasts.
And now, Like Elijah, he is Another one in the wilderness, in the very midst of death, waiting for something to change.
No matter how we get there, the wilderness is that place where we end up when nothing else is working. It’s the realm of spiritual chaos; it’s where everything is falling apart and we’ve thrown in the towel. It’s where we get lost.
It’s not an easy place to be. There are tombs. There is heat. Rocks. Scorpions. No water. The Hebrew Scriptures line up the wilderness with the desert, and just think about all the time the Israelites spent wandering around in the desert wilderness before reaching Canaan after the Exodus. All the stuff that happens out there. It’s a tough place to be.
And yet….the wilderness has a redemption. Out in the wilderness, moping in a cave, Elijah hears a voice: “What are you doing here, Elijah?”. Promptly, Elijah spills out the whole story: “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away!" the people of Israel have messed up! Now they are angry at him! And it’s really not his fault! He did the right thing!
Then God passes by. Not in the way you’d expect maybe. Not in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire, but in the sheer silence.
Now the prophet of God has met God, has seen God, but not in the way he expected.
This is a prophet who called down fire from the sky in the name of Yahweh, who slaughtered the prophets of Baal in the name of Adonai. That was his experience of God. This silence, this quiet. This was not that. This God was something else. This was a wilderness God.
For the demoniac, raging about the tombs all day, the relationship with God was off the table. When Jesus appears, the man expects pain, suffering, torture. After all, he had been cast out of his village. He had been thrown out of his family, and also, he’s not even the right nationality :”What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God…I beg you, do not torment me.” Even the demons within him react with fear to the Divine in Jesus, expecting punishment, or revenge. {Luke’s in good Greek dualism mode here.}
But that’s not what he gets. Jesus responds with mercy, even for spirits of questionable character. When the demons ask not to be sent back into the abyss, Jesus sends them into a herd of pigs—bad for the pigs, good for the demons, who would rank higher for a Jewish Messiah than pigs anyway. Like Elijah, the Gerasene man gets a wilderness God who doesn’t do what he’s expected to. This God confounds expectations. This God is merciful even to demons.
The wilderness, as messy as it is, is a place of last resort. And we run there looking for something, after everything else collapses and we have no other choice. Sometimes we’re even cast there, by other people. But that thing that we find out there is usually not what we thought that we would.
The God of the wilderness, our God, is wild. The God of the wilderness talks to the wrong people, uses the wrong languages, acts in completely inappropriate ways, and asks us extremely difficult questions. When we come out to the wilderness looking for something, looking for relief, looking for God, When we end up there, we should be prepared, because there’s no guarantee that we’ll be comfortable with what we’ll find. In fact, we probably won’t be.
The wilderness is a place of uncomfortable revelation, disturbing restoration. It’s a place that fulfills the Rolling Stone’s lyric ‘You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.’ God brings us healing and relief in the wilderness, just not in the expected way.
But we don’t get to leave it there. As my seminary librarian once commented, “No one gets to live in the wilderness. If they did, we’d call it something else. We’d call it suburbia.” Once we are ransomed healed, restored forgiven, in all those new and unnerving wilderness-like ways, we get turned around again. We get sent back to civilization that needs a bit of wildness to it.
After his healing, the demoniac wants to stay with Jesus to be a disciple. He wants to stay as he was, in a sense, cut off from his community and the person that he was before his wilderness experience.
Jesus says no.
He sends him back, to his hometown, to those people who knew him to be damaged, to be broken. Those people who now needed to see a healed, renewed person with good news to share, and a new life to lead. Those very people who cast him out in the first place, because those people needed to see him back again. They needed a revelation of the Wild Divine themselves.
And Elijah, up in his Cave of Sulking, after his epiphany of the wind, the earthquake and the fire, then the silence, hears the same question once more: “Elijah, what are you doing here?”
Poor Elijah, mind really blown now, gives the same answer he did before, probably in a more subdued tone of voice this time, and hears the response: Go back. Go back to a new place, to a new people, and a new strategy. Your work is not finished yet, and we’ll give it another try. But go back. We aren’t done yet.
We are healed for a purpose. We are restored for a calling. We get what we need in the wilderness, but we get it in order to share with the world, which needs to experience the rush of God as we have. The reasons we ran to the wilderness are still back there; we were restored in order to return to them. Our healing is not just for us, it is for everyone in our communities that we are sent to.
I have a plaque, hanging on the wall of my apartment in New York, just as you walk in the door. It’s up over the light switch in the hall, so it’s the first thing I see as I walk in, and the last thing I see as I leave. I bought it on my first trip to Jerusalem—it’s a copy of a drawing found underneath the current Church of the Holy Sepulchre, dated back to the 2nd or 3rd cent. CE., done by some of the first pilgrims who came to the site, because it was then, and still is, tradition among pilgrims to inscribe a cross, or some other sacred sign on the site that you made pilgrimage to in Jerusalem, among the Orthodox. The ancient pilgrim drew a boat, and wrote an enigmatic phrase in Koine Greek, which loosely translates, ‘Lord, we are here.’ It also could read ‘Lord, we will be going.’ What a perfect way to sum up a wilderness pilgrimage. Our flight out into the wild places, waiting for the restoration, however it might come, and our returns back into the civilization, never one without the other.
Lord we are here. Lord, we will be going. Amen.
posted by Dajjimeg at
10:38 AM
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