Tuesday, November 24, 2015

See God play









On Thursday morning about 3 a.m. I woke up from a dream.  The details of are not important except that it was about a man and his beautiful wife.  I was his brother, and I offered them some bread and cheese.  He did not take it, but she did, which led to a painful breach of trust.  I only mention this dream because I woke up with the sense that it was a gift that could help me see what I was supposed to preach about today.  Because what the people in the dream did to restore the trust that had been broken was to go outside and play.  They went into the woods and they played with each other—not a competitive game with a lot of rules and a winner or a loser, but the kind of open-ended, improvisation play that children do.  
Some of the things they did were pretty silly, but they kept their heads, as the saying goes, in the game.  They never stepped out to an ironic distance, but whole-heartedly kept running around in the woods holding pinecones on their heads like rabbit ears, or thrusting their arms into the stream bed up to the elbows and pulling them out, glistening wet and covered with tiny black pebbles.  There was no cathartic resolution, no single moment of truth, just a kind of faith in the game, to give them a deeper understanding, and put things right between them.     
We don’t often think of the Bible as play.   We know it is serious, because, like my dream, it is about broken trust.  It also begins with a man and his wife, and a meddlesome third party, with sharing food that leads to betrayal.  It goes on from there to tell how human beings break their trust with God again and again, but also how God acts to heal the damage.  There’s a lot in there about scary grown-up business like commandments, and punishment, and sacrifice. 
And this can cause us to overlook how much of it sounds inviting and even fun, like the verse in the psalm today that says “taste, and see that the Lord is good, happy are they that trust in him!”  Our reading of the Bible has been known to leave out the message that God wants more for us than just to feel ashamed and get back into line, and do a better job of obeying from now on.  God wants us to taste and to see, and to know deep-down how good God is.  And to get this message through our thick skulls, the Bible says, God does more than give orders and make threats—God plays. 

The story of Job pushes us right up to brink of our worst fears about a God who is arbitrary and cruel, who plays with us the way a cat plays with a mouse, and tortures us just to see what we will do.  And for chapter after chapter of the book Job and his friends try to talk each other down from that ledge, try to salvage their image of a God who plays it straight, who is comprehensible and predictable and follows the rules. 
But when God finally speaks, God’s answer to Job is not a legal case, to justify Job’s punishment.  It is not a philosophical explanation of how a good God can allow the innocent to suffer.  What it is is a poem.  God invites Job’s imagination out to play, to journey through the orders of creation, from the “springs of the sea, and the recesses of the deep” to the “storehouses of the snow…and of the hail.”   God shows Job the animals of the mountains and the plains, the lions and wild oxen and ostriches, and the monsters that live in the sea.  And God’s description of these wonders is interspersed with questions that ask him to imagine the mind of God: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”  “Can you number the clouds?”  “Do you give the horse his might?”  “Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars?”
And so Job comes to the moment when he does see: he sees himself, not as the innocent victim of God’s injustice, but as a fool who’s been talking and talking about things he does not understand.  And Job sees God, no longer as a secondhand notion, but face to face.  Job sees God in the grandeur, and wisdom, and power, the dazzling diversity and wondrous unity of everything that is.  Job sees God at play all creation, and this revelation is not Job’s alone.   You and I can participate in this drama; you and I can share Job’s vision, you and I can be moved to Job’s repentance, because God plays in the literary art of this book, and the contemplation of  creation that it invites us to enjoy.      
The Gospel of Mark does something similar; it also invites us to see God at play.  Again, this play is serious—its purpose is the healing of a broken world.  But what it dramatizes is not the vastness of creation but the breadth of God at play in human experience, in the heights of human nobility and love, and the depths of human cruelty and suffering.   Like Job, Mark invites us to change our minds, to break through to a new way of seeing, and to do this he invents a new kind of story.  He writes a Gospel, to brings us face to face with God in the life and death of a human person.  And one way Mark talks about this breakthrough is to tell stories of Jesus giving sight to the blind.
The story of blind Bartimaeus is not a simple historical account of a physical healing that happened to someone else a long time ago.  It is an invitation to discipleship, a dramatization of what it means to see God at play in Jesus, and to follow him.  It is a deep story, because of the density of its connections with the whole sweep of the drama.  When Jesus asks Bartimaeus “What do you want me to do for you?” we remember that last week he asked the same question of James and John.  They wanted to sit at Jesus’ right hand and at his left in glory; Bartimaeus only wants to see.  When Bartimaeus casts aside his beggar’s cloak, and follows Jesus on the way, we remember a rich man Jesus also met along the road, who could not give up his many possessions and become a disciple, but went away grieving.
This story sums up what the Gospel has already said about discipleship, but it also marks the transition to what it is going to say.  Bartimaeus follows Jesus, but there is only one more stop on Jesus’ way; from Jericho it is only fifteen miles to Jerusalem.  He is the last disciple Jesus calls, and for him it is too late to eat his fill of bread and fish with the 5,000 in the wilderness, too late to see Jesus calm the stormy wind and sea by night, or see the glory of the transfigured Lord on the mountain.  Bartimaeus receives his sight, only just in time to be a witness to the way of the cross.
The Gospel story and the way it is told share the same purpose, which is to open the story of Jesus up, so we can enter.  So we can open our eyes in a world in which Christ walks, as the depth of God’s mercy and love, healing the blindness of broken trust.   It does not give us a vision of a different world, but of the true depth of this one—to see and know that we are players in the theatre of Christ’s passion.  One result of this is that we can never be simply happy.  We can know times of laughter and love and peace, but for us this will never cease to be the world that crucified its own true heart and soul. 
But we can also never be simply sorrowful or afraid, even in the worst of times, for Christ’s story does not end with death.  When the gospel has opened our eyes, and we have followed Jesus on the way, we see this as the world God so loved that he gave his only Son.   We suffer, and struggle, and grieve, but we know that our sufferings and those of all poor, afflicted humanity are the sufferings of Christ.  They are one with his sacrifice, which he offers continually to God, who repays it with life, and mercy and grace.  Our sufferings are his play, which is completely serious, but also absolutely free, full of perfect bliss and joy. 
 

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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.