Twenty-one years ago I was living in a Zen
Buddhist monastery in the mountains near Big Sur. My job at the time was called Jisha, which means I was the abbot’s
attendant. Actually he had two
attendants. There was Jim, who was his
personal attendant, who made his bed and his tea and did his mending, and that
sort of thing. And there was me--his
ceremonial attendant. I was the guy who
lit sticks of incense and handed them to him to offer at the altar during the
daily services of chanting and prostrations.
I was the person the other students talked to when they wanted to meet
with him for guidance in their religious practice. When he gave a dharma talk, a sermon, I was
the guy who waited until he had taken his seat on the platform in the
meditation hall and then placed the little stand for his notes in front of
him.
So I was kind of like the character in
today’s story from the Gospel of Luke, the attendant in the synagogue, who
hands Jesus the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and takes it back from him when he
is finished reading. And one of the
privileges of having that position was that I got more one-on-one time with the
teacher than the other students did. And
one time, when we were back in his cabin after a morning sermon on Buddhist
teaching I remarked that the things that he had talked about reminded me of the
Book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible.
He said he wasn’t familiar with it, but that he’d like to see it. I didn’t have many personal possessions at
the monastery, but one of them was my bible, a Revised Standard Version bound in
brown fake leather and inscribed by the pastor of my childhood church in
Indiana, who presented it to me upon completing the fourth grade. (My daughter Risa has it now.)
So I bookmarked Ecclesiastes and lent my
bible to the abbot, and he liked it enough that he recommended it to some of
the other students, and my bible changed hands several times over the next few
days. And then the abbot asked me to
read it in the meditation hall. So about
midway through his next sermon he said a few words of introduction and then
nodded to me and I pulled out my bible and started reading the Book of
Ecclesiastes:
The words of the Teacher, the son of David,
king in Jerusalem.
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil
at which they toil under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains for ever.
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil
at which they toil under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains for ever.
Etcetera.
To this day, I’m not sure why the Zen master
asked me to do that. Maybe he wanted to
show us that he was teaching a wisdom that is universal. Maybe he hoped that the strange and yet
familiar words of the Bible would get through to us in a way that his own words
did not. Maybe he was playing the
trickster, and wanted to unsettle his students, many of whom were ex-Catholics
or ex-Jews. Zen masters do like to do that sort of thing. Maybe he identified with the figure of the
Preacher in Ecclesiastes, the one who goes by the name of Solomon the King. Maybe it was all of the above.
But it is one thing to read a passage of
scripture, or have it read, in order to enhance the authority of your preaching. That’s something that teachers of many
religious traditions do, as a matter of course.
And it is a different thing to read a passage of scripture, as Jesus
does in this morning’s scene in the synagogue at Nazareth, and to say, “this
scripture is me.” But that’s what he
does. When Jesus finishes reading and
sits down, every eye in the synagogue is fixed on him. It is such a powerful moment. We can almost feel the intensity of their
concentration. We can almost hear the
silence, the people holding their breath to hear what he will say. And that is because he has not merely quoted
scripture. He has brought it to life in
their hearing, and it has been for them a religious experience.
Not a compelling religious argument, backed
up with solid scriptural proofs. Not a
fresh new interpretation of a familiar text, but a direct experience of the
Holy One speaking those ancient words as if for the first time:
"The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he
has anointed me
to bring
good news to the poor.
When Jesus
speaks those words from the prophet Isaiah, they are more true than they have
ever been before, and for that moment everybody in the synagogue knows it.
That must be one of the ways that the community
of the Gospel of Luke experienced the Holy Spirit. When they gathered for prayer, and someone
read the scriptures, sometimes the Spirit made those words come alive in their ears. The voice of the reader became the voice of
Jesus, and words were no longer just words, they were the Truth of all truth,
the Wisdom of all wisdom, pouring into their hearts, into their community,
through his grace. And in those moments the
promises of God in the scriptures, promises of forgiveness and healing, of
restoration and consolation and liberation, came true.
There are a lot of churches around that
identify themselves as Bible-centered, or Bible-based. I’m not sure what that means to them, but I
know what it means to me. To me, being a
biblical church means that when we come together as a community we read the
Bible, not to prove something by it, but to hear what it has to say. And we make a ritual of it. We read and hear it together as an act of corporate
worship, to make a public demonstration of our faith that God speaks. In our liturgy we act out our belief that the
living God gives us the gift of a living Word.
The Bible is not the only way that this
happens for us. “The heavens declare the
glory of God,” says the psalm, “One day tells its tale to another, and one
night imparts knowledge to another.” God is always speaking, day and night. The words of God, like the sun, light up the
ends of the world. And we can go for a quiet
walk outside under the stars, or at sunset, and have our own intuitive
experience of hearing the words of God.
Everyone has received a word like this at some time or other, even if
they didn’t recognize it for what it was.
But the hard part, the sad part, is that it
is so difficult to translate our private religious experiences into the common
language of human relationships. It is
even harder to make them the basis for a diverse community. In solitude we hear God speak to us of beauty,
of unity, and justice, and peace. And
then we have to make breakfast for our families, and go to work, or to
school. We get out on the freeway, or go
to a City Council meeting, or turn on the nightly news, and the voice of God is
drowned out by a clamor of noise and a Babel of voices competing for our
attention, and none of them in harmony with the others.
The Holy Scriptures also speak with diverse
voices, voices as diverse as the law of Moses and the love poetry of the Song
of Songs, the story of David and the prophecy of Amos and the philosophical
meditations of Ecclesiastes. And yet
they have this in common—that for going on three thousand years a community has
gathered to hear them and listen for God, speaking. These voices have formed people of different
tribes and diverse gifts into a single family with a common history, with a shared
starting point for conversations about values, and meaning, and hope. When Jesus sought words to describe his
mission, the work for which he was anointed with the Holy Spirit as the Christ,
he turned to the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.
Or was that Luke the Evangelist, looking for words to describe Jesus? Or is it us, here in Petaluma in 2013,
looking for words to describe the purpose that calls us together, the Spirit
that anoints our common life? In the end
it does not matter—all are true, because it is God who is speaking those words.
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