Enlightenment on display

Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Galatians 3:23-25;4:4-7
John 1:1-18
Psalm 147 or 147:13-21 

As has been reported in the Petaluma Argus-Courier,  I once lived for a number of years in a Zen Buddhist community, and if you spend much time hanging around with Buddhists you will sooner or later run across the concept of “enlightenment.”  Now, I’m not a Buddhist, or a Buddhist teacher, so I’m not going to try to explain that concept to you, but I did learn enough about it to realize that “enlightenment,” which is also sometimes called “awakening,” or “liberation,” is a lot more subtle and complex in Buddhist thought and practice that than our society’s popular notion about it might lead you to believe.  However popular notions are powerful things, and so at least part of the attraction that drew folks to the Zen Center was the hope of attaining enlightenment.

And that popular idea is a little easier to explain than the authentic traditional teachings.  It goes something like this: that a person might, through strenuous meditative discipline under the guidance of a master teacher who is him- or herself enlightened, achieve a direct, intuitive experience of ultimate truth that would dramatically and permanently alter his or her consciousness—in a good way.  This notion of enlightenment is not popular only with people who practice Buddhism. All over the world, and especially in certain places like Northern California, there are people following all manner of spiritual paths and traditions who have in common the cultivation of meditative states of consciousness and the desire for enlightenment. 

Some of them are even Christians, and I’m of the belief that if you study the history of Christian spirituality you will see that there is nothing inherently un-Christian about enlightenment or the pursuit of it.  In fact, beginning in January I’ll be leading a Sunday adult study course on a book that represents Jesus as a wisdom teacher, skillfully provoking his disciples to a radical transformation of consciousness.  It’s an image that speaks to an urgent desire that many people feel today to go beneath outward forms of traditional ritual and religious doctrine, which they find have lost their freshness and vitality, and to plumb the depths of direct religious experience.  So I’m not one of those who preaches fear and suspicion of this phenomenon, but see it as part of a welcome and much-needed reawakening of the Spirit.

But I also can’t help noticing that the image of Jesus as a kind of guru, who teaches the way to spiritual enlightenment, is missing something very important, maybe the essential thing that makes Christian religion what it is.  It might be hard to see if you’re sitting on your meditation cushion with your eyes closed, repeating a Jesus mantra in your heart.  But it is plain as day if you go to where Christians gathering on Sunday to hear the Word of God in the Holy Scriptures, and to celebrate the Sacraments.  It is at the heart of this yearly Church festival called Christmas, and our scripture lessons for today are all about it.

It is the news given in the Gospel of John that the true light, which enlightens everyone, has come into the world.  This light is nothing less than the life of all things, without which not one thing came into being, and now we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.  This is not the cryptic language of esoteric instruction, but the plain-spoken, public announcement of something that is there for all to see.  Because the gospel of Jesus Christ does not begin from the premise that if we just find the right teacher and practice diligently in the right way we also have the capacity to attain the hard-won prize of enlightenment.  The gospel begins from the premise that the one who is light has come into the world, and offers enlightenment to anyone who wants it, absolutely free.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make an effort to open our lives to a more whole-hearted acceptance of this gift.  But it does mean that our basic religious attitude is not one of anxious striving or restless seeking, but one of celebration and thanksgiving, of trust, and wonder, and joy.  It is, as the scriptures point out in various places, the attitude of a child.  This is not just because Jesus himself had that attitude, and taught that it was fundamental, but because it is the stance that accurately reflects our relationship with ultimate reality.  Jesus’ own name for that reality was “Abba,” a word sometimes translated as “Father.” But that translation is not exactly right, because “Abba” is a child’s word—“Papa”, or “Daddy” would be better.

Every year at Christmas we encounter an image of Jesus, not as the masterful teacher of enlightenment, but as the tiny child at Mary’s breast.  It’s a powerful image not just because babies are cute, and people are sentimental.  It is powerful because it is an image of a person who hasn’t accomplished anything except to be born, who doesn’t desire anything except to be fed and kept dry and warm.  He hasn’t had any great mystical experiences, or said any timeless words of wisdom, or performed miraculous healings or heroic sacrifices.  He spends most of his time nursing and sleeping.  No one could be more helpless and vulnerable, and yet the scriptures insist that he is already the light that darkness did not overcome. 

I think it is instructive that in the ancient church, “enlightenment” was just another word for baptism.  Recently I had a meeting with our parish Worship Committee, which is a fairly new group that has formed to do some in-depth study and theological reflection about what it is we are actually doing when we gather together on Sunday in this building, so we can do it with more joy and sense of purpose.  We were talking about a book we’d read that said that when we come together for worship, it is not just the priest who is doing the work.  It is priestly work, but everyone participates in it, in whatever way they can, in hearing the words of scripture, and singing the hymns, praying the prayers, passing the peace, and sharing the bread and wine of the Holy Communion, and so the entire service is an act of the whole community.

The folks on the Worship Committee had no trouble with that concept at all, but some of them balked at the part in the book that said that the authority to share in the priesthood of the Body of Christ comes from our baptism.  I could understand where they were coming from.  How can we equate the decisive breakthrough to a whole new life, a new identity, and purpose, and way of being, with an experience that few of us can remember, that happened to most of us as infants?  When we go to church and see a baby having some water poured over its head, maybe crying about it, it doesn’t really square with our idea of what spiritual enlightenment is.

But maybe that’s because we’ve got the wrong end of the stick.  In the Worship Committee meeting we decided to forget about baptism for the moment and start a list of other words that might express the idea that all of us are called to be equal partners in the work of the church’s worship.  We came up with terms like “welcome,” “membership,” “belonging,” “initiation,” and “covenant.”  They were all words that have to do with community.  And, interestingly enough, they have all long been used to describe baptism, which says to me that we can’t really understand how baptism is spiritual enlightenment, if we think about it only from the point of view of the person being baptized.

Maybe what happens at baptism is the enlightenment of the community that is gathered to do the baptizing.  This would be true in all cases, but especially so when we baptize a child.  What we look at Christina and Cason, Tristan and Vincent, being picked up and washed in the water, maybe we are seeing a revelation of ourselves, as we really are in Christ: persons whose significance is not defined by human preconceptions, even our own, but is a word spoken in secret the full meaning of which is yet to be revealed; persons whose potential will not come to fruition without the love, guidance, support, and testing that a family and a community provides; persons participating in a drama we don’t ourselves fully understand, but in which we are called to play our own conspicuous role as one of the vulnerable but beloved children of God.

     

        

  

Changing expectations

Isaiah 65:17-25

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

Acts 10:34-43

Luke 24:1-12

The first time I went to St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco it was Easter morning.  I’d just moved into an apartment a few blocks from there, and, walking around my new neighborhood a few days before I’d come upon the Anchor Brewery.   And, right across the street, there was this extraordinary building, looking like a cross between a log church from Siberia and the Shogun’s castle in a Samurai movie.  A sign out front claimed that it was an Episcopal Church.  Which was my brand, so to speak, at least it had been for about a year-and-a-half, so I took note of the service times.  And because it was right before Easter, I decided to come the next Sunday.

I showed up a little before 10 o’clock on Easter morning to find the place strangely quiet.  There were empty parking spaces along both sides of the street, and the sidewalk the entire length of the block was completely deserted.   The doors of the church were closed, and the windows were dark.  But there was a small white paper sign taped to the entrance, and so I went up and I read, “Our Easter service was last night.  You are invited to join us for an Easter picnic at the Southwest corner of Jackson Park at 11 a.m.  Sorry for the inconvenience, and please come back again soon.”  I was a little exasperated as I scrambled to come up with Plan B, and I remembered that the service at Holy Innocents, the Episcopal church near my old house, was at 10:30.  So I rode off on my bicycle across the Mission District thinking to myself, “What kind of church doesn’t have worship on Easter morning?”

When Mary Magdalene and Joanna and the other women from Galilee set out with their spices at early dawn on the first day of the week, they went with certain expectations.  And they were reasonable.  It is reasonable to expect that, when you go to a Christian church on Easter morning, there will be people there worshipping, and in the same way, when you see a man publicly executed, and you see his lifeless body taken down from the scaffold where he had been hanged, and placed in a tomb, it is reasonable to expect that when you go back to that tomb, his body will still be there. 

One can imagine that they set out for the tomb that morning with a sense of dread.  Perhaps they were anticipating the pain of saying good-bye.  Maybe they were already starting to imagine the sight of their spiritual master, who had been more alive than anyone they’d ever known, lying lifeless and cold.  Maybe they were already weeping at the thought of the marks of torture on his beloved body, as the raw memory of shock and horror came flooding back.  But they went, hoping to do the only thing they could do for him anymore— to finish the job of embalming his corpse.  Now that his enemies had finished using him for their public spectacle, the women went to have just a few quiet moments to grieve together with his body, so that their last memory of him would be one of reverence, and tenderness, and peace.

That was all they were hoping for, but what they found when they got there was something else entirely.   There are really only a couple of things I want to say about this.  The first thing is that the writers of the Gospels, in this case, Luke, want us to take these women seriously.  Luke acknowledges that there will be skeptics—there were skeptics right away, starting with the male disciples of Jesus.  They came around pretty quickly, when Jesus himself came and ate and drank with them.  But the women were the first, and their vision at the empty tomb was enough to convince them.  Perhaps when Luke wrote this he was thinking of the skeptics in his own day, who no doubt tended to be men.  Does that remind you of anyone?

This, of course, is a continuation of a theme that you see throughout the gospels, but especially in Luke, about how the wisdom that Jesus teaches is hidden from the wise and understanding but revealed to babes—or women, or shepherds, or Samaritans, generally people whose opinions were discounted.  It is interesting that it is just at this point, at Jesus’ resurrection, that these women, who have been obscure, background figures up to now, suddenly emerge as main characters.  They even have names.  They were real people, Luke seems to be saying, and the story they told was true.

And I think this has implications for the way we think about Christ’s resurrection now.  It suggests that a lot of the arguments that have gone on over the past couple of centuries between male scholars and theologians about whether or not Jesus “really” rose from the dead have missed the essential point.  I think these arguments betray a lot of typically modern condescension toward the Gospel writers, and the characters they portray.  To hear some of them you would think that people in the 1^st century had never had a warm, fuzzy, feeling about a dead friend—“You know, it was like I could almost feel his presence, almost like Jesus was really here”—and couldn’t tell difference between that, and what they were experiencing now.   There’s also an anachronistic materialism that sometimes creeps into those arguments, as if the disciples were saying “Wow—God reversed the auto-metabolic processes of organic decomposition in implausible contravention of the laws of nature!  Far out!”  

No, the essential point about the resurrection is that the people who were there knew it happened.   And if I were to paraphrase their proclamation for today, it would go something like this--“ I just woke up from the worst nightmare.  Just when I thought all the worst things I’d ever thought and heard about human beings had been proven right, and just when I thought that God had justifiably abandoned us to a never-ending downward spiral of greed, hate, and ignorance; and just when it been occurring to me that the bad guys will always win, and we might as well just give up on ever having a world where justice is really done and peace actually prevails, because people never will learn to love each other, and for all our promise we’ll never have anything to show for it because our hearts our just too cold and our eyes are just too blind, and our tongues are just too forked for anything good to last—just then, at that moment, when I was ready to stick a fork in it and call it done, something happened.  

Something happened that turned that whole picture completely around.  It was like the world I thought I lived in had suddenly turned inside out, and where all I had been able to see was cruelty, suddenly I saw compassion.  And where before all I could see was misery, suddenly I saw resilience.  And where there was treachery I saw forgiveness, and where there was sorrow I saw joy, and where before there was only death, suddenly I could see only life.  And there was one little phrase that summed up the whole transformation.   It was the truest thing I ever said, and as soon as I said it I knew that people will never stop saying it as long as the sun shines and the sky is blue—Christ is risen!”

The open door

2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

John 6:35, 41-51

The people in John’s Gospel who complain about Jesus remind me a little of how someone described one of the candidates in this year’s Presidential primaries—“He’s a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.”  They see religion as chiefly a matter of believing certain doctrines, following certain rules, embracing an exclusive identity and joining a particular group.  And many people who are religious, and many who are not, have that kind of orientation.  But when Jesus says “I am the bread that comes down from heaven,” he is not placing a building-block on a new system of religious precepts.  He is offering entrance into a new kind of life.

When the complainers say, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, `I have come down from heaven'?," they think they are being clever, but really they are just showing how completely they have misunderstood.  They speak from the vantage point of a consciousness that keeps separate the things that Jesus has come to unite.  For him, being a human creature of flesh and blood, with a family origin that is common knowledge, is not incompatible with coming down from heaven.   That is, in fact, precisely the purpose for which he was sent—to reunite God and human, flesh and spirit, earth and heaven, and to restore the original nature, the divine image, the life of paradise in which we were all created. 

We know very well the view of human nature that defines and divides people on the basis of sex, or sexual orientation, or color, or class, or nationality, or religion.   But Jesus invokes the vision of the great Hebrew prophets and says, “`And they shall all be taught by God.' Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.”  The mission of the Spirit that lives in Jesus is to nourish everyone with the wisdom of God, who created the whole world, and sustains it in all its diversity, as a single multifarious feast of love.  And love is a way of being that is characterized by openness.  Love affirms that we flow into and through each other in spite of everything that we think keeps us separate and closed.  Love gives to the one who is loved the freedom to live and flourish, trusting that the other is essentially good, essentially worthy, even if he or she makes mistakes, even if those mistakes injure the lover.  It is this gift of wisdom and love that is communicated to us in the flesh of Christ. 

The openness of Christ’s flesh is revealed on the cross, submitting to the injuries of fractured human consciousness with compassion and forgiveness.  It is manifest in the openness of his resurrection body, inviting Thomas to place his hands in its wounds.  It is tangible in the openness of his Eucharistic body which is reconstituted day by day in the life of the universal church, and is never exactly the same twice. What we are and what we are to become is not determined by who our parents are or anything else we think we know about us—it is a question that remains open, whose answer is hidden in the life of God.  And yet Christ is that answer, embodying the mysterious and irreducible holiness of life in real, ongoing, ordinary human relationships.

The letter to the Ephesians is an instruction to a community that aspires to that live that new divine human life.  It is a profoundly realistic document.  It allows for the fact that people get angry at each other, sometimes rightfully so.  People hurt each other.  They even steal from each other.  But the letter suggests that such behavior is not the last word about human nature.  The example of the earthly life of Christ, and the continual spiritual nourishment of his grace, opens up for them a new possibility.  Christ opens a way for them to follow that breaks out of the endless feedback loop of blame, and shame, resentment and retaliation and leads toward the openness that is God.

 It is a way that begins with speaking the truth. 

Enlightenment

1 Samuel 3:1-10
Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17
1 Corinthians 6:12-20
John 1:43-51 

The unanimous and consistent teaching of the universal church from early times is that baptism is enlightenment.  It is a mystical initiation.  It is a symbolic death and a spiritual rebirth into a new life of grace, of freedom, and of consecration to the mission of God in Christ.  

But it might be hard for us to believe that when we baptized 18-month old Karina Klein last Sunday the event meant that for her.  It’s always interesting to see how children behave at their baptism.  I don’t know if you noticed but Karina, who had been quite restless and vocal in the service up to that point became quiet and still.   It seemed like she knew something was happening.  But we are hard put to say that she experienced enlightenment.  But maybe that’s because we don’t understand what enlightenment is.

Last Sunday Karina may not have had a consciousness-altering experience, but it was the beginning of a relationship with Jesus.  We believe in the actual fact of that relationship because we were there on Jesus’ behalf to call her into it.   We take it seriously because we know that now, and for the foreseeable future, we will be responsible for fostering that relationship for her in the practices, the sacraments and the fellowship of the church.  Whatever sense she ends up making of that event, and whether or not she “saw the light,” depend on this— that we saw her in the light of our life together in Christ and the power of his grace to bring her life’s purpose to fulfillment.

Having an intellectual understanding of what her baptism means, or even the memory of some ecstatic moment, will be less important for Karina than the overall long-term of experience of being loved and included, of being seen by us as God’s beloved and invited by us to participate in the mysteries of our membership in Christ’s body.  She will learn what it means to bear the light of the world in her heart by seeing others receive the same baptism that Jesus did and that she did too.   She will learn what it means to bring that light to others by seeing the world from the vantage point of this place, by turning toward the world from this center.  For this is where she will learn that she is God’s beloved, receiving the body and blood that are the tokens of that love, and seeing her family and all the rest of us doing the same.

Often when I call on members of our parish who are sick and shut in, I am confronted with the limits of my capacity to help.   I can see the struggle and the suffering that people are experiencing and so often there is really nothing I can do about it.   But I am tempted to try.  I am tempted to try to be an amateur social worker, or nurse, or psychologist, and help them find a solution to their problems.  But what I always find is that these visits go better if I stick to the things that I know how to give—a listening ear, a prayer, a reading from the scriptures, Holy Communion.  

I’m not sent to tell them how to have faith or what to believe.  I’m not there to advise them about the practical matters of their situation.   What I’m sent for is to been seen by them in the light of Jesus Christ and his mission in the world.  Usually I don’t know what that means for them.  I don’t know their faith stories— what they learned from parents or Sunday school teachers or other pastors they have had; I don’t know what their spiritual experiences have been; or what religious commitments they may have made over the years.  I don’t know these things, but they’re not really my business.   I’m simply there as a reminder of baptismal grace.  Seeing me they remember Jesus.  And with that recollection comes the promise that the relationship that was begun at baptism is not forgotten.  He still loves them as  his own,  is still  committed to the relationship they’ve had, and their present suffering in fact only takes them deeper into the mystery of it.  I don’t have to say this in so many words—in fact it’s usually better if I don’t—my merely coming to visit communicates it.

 I usually end up seeing that people are capable of finding their own meaning even in the most difficult situation.    In the midst of darkness, they see a ray of light,   and it is a light that comes from Jesus.   From some stirring of love at his name, some presence of wisdom and peace in a word from his teachings or in an incident from his life, comes a  breath of hope, a gathering of strength, comes the faith that no matter  how frightening and overwhelming the present circumstances may be,  all is not lost.  And seeing that happen my own faith is strengthened, by own heart and mind are enlightened with baptismal grace.

I reflect on these two aspects of our life as a church, the baptism of the toddler and the visit with the shut-in, because, although they seem to be opposites, each of them illustrates what we mean by enlightenment.  It has something to do with seeing and being seen and the light that travels between us.  Another word for “enlightenment” is “epiphany” and we are in a season of the church year that takes Epiphany as its theme.  It is a word that means to see something that shines, to have a vision of something that radiates or reflects light.  And for the church that vision is of a human face. 

Following his own baptism, Jesus began to gather the first of his disciples, and the theme of seeing and being seen is a recurring motif in the stories of these encounters, especially in the Gospel of John.  In the passage we hear today Philip invites the skeptical Nathanael to come and see whether in fact anything good can come from Nazareth.   The exchange that follows preserves something of the extraordinary impact that meeting Jesus had on people’s lives.  That Nathanael was converted so suddenly and completely cannot be simply because he was impressed that Jesus could tell him where he was before they had met.   Something about the way he was seen and the way he was known enabled Nathanael to see Jesus for who he really was.

This story represents becoming a disciple of Jesus as a process of being seen and then seeing, of seeing a little but being promised more.  We may not know at the beginning exactly what we’re looking at.  We may never have some dramatic epiphany.   We may never experience ourselves as being enlightened.  But we are not the source of the light that is in us.   Our vision may be dim, but we are not lighting our own path.   However feeble our flicker, even the tiniest spark is still the one true light, the Epiphany light, the star that guided the wise men from the east and the brilliance more dazzling than the sun of the Transfigured face of Christ.  No matter how dim and narrow our vision may be, it is not our vision that guides us, but a reflection of the vision of God. 

And it does seem to be true that if we trust the little circle of light before our feet, it gets a little wider.   It does seem to be true that when we hold the light for others, we see a little further.   It does seem to be true that if we look for the light in others, what we see expands our vision of ourselves.   And it makes you wonder how far the light could really go.   It makes you wonder how vast the vision really is.  And I can’t speak for you, but that makes me want to follow someone who knows.