Far off, yet Near
8 February 2015
Epiphany 5B
9:00 a.m. sung Mass before Annual Parish Meeting
Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Recently
John and Mindy Ferris presented a trip they took to Machu Picchu at our monthly
Trinity Travelogue. They concluded their
wonderful presentation with a moving montage of photos John had taken of people
he had met in Peru, set to the music of Bette Midler’s song, “From a Distance":
“From a distance the world looks blue and green,
and the snow-capped mountains white.
From a distance the ocean meets the stream,
and the eagle takes to flight.
From a distance, there is harmony,
and it echoes through the land.
It's the voice of hope, it's the voice of peace,
it's the voice of every man.”
The song says that many of the most
troubling things in our lives—hunger, poverty, war, racial hatred—cannot be
seen from a low earth orbit: they should not exist or be seen close-up at all. It ends,
“God is watching us. God is watching us.
God is watching us from a distance.”
I was
struck by the contrast between the song’s words and the very intimate, personal
portraits that were flashing before us.
The photos’ intimacy is what connected those faces with us. It was closeness, not distance, that
established our common humanity. But it
was the distance—the fact that we here in Ashland are looking at these very
individual faces of people in Peru, so very far away from us, and still seeing
individuals with hopes, fears, and joys, that made the experience so
moving.
The
passage from Isaiah today captures this contrast and interplay between distance
and intimacy.
“Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told
you from the beginning?
…[God] sits above the
circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants
are like grasshoppers.”
“The … everlasting
God,
[is] Creator of the
earth from end to end.”
“[God] gives power to
the weary,
and fresh vigor to
the spent.
Youths may grow faint
and weary,
and young men stumble
and fall;
but those who patiently
trust in the LORD shall renew their strength.
They will soar up like
eagles:
they shall run and
not be weary,
they shall walk and
not faint.”
The Psalm captures
the idea too:
At a distance, “The
LORD … counts the number of the stars,”
but intimately, “he calls them each by name.”
but intimately, “he calls them each by name.”
At a distance, “He covers
the heavens with clouds
and prepares rain for the earth,”
and prepares rain for the earth,”
But up close up
waters individual shoots of grass so they sprout and the plant food each of us
eats grows.
Most intimately of
all, “The LORD heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”
What strikes me in all
this is that God is both overwhelmingly BIG and DISTANT (that’s why we look
like grasshoppers to him), but also profoundly CLOSE and INTIMATE. And he
does indeed seem to be watching us, both at a distance and up close: “He lifts
up the lowly, but casts the wicked [their oppressors] to the ground.”
The contrast is
deliberate. Theologians have special
words to describe it. They call the distance the “transcendence” of God, God
going beyond things. They call the
nearness God’s “immanence,” or God present in things.
We often
get this wrong, and tend to think of God completely one or the other.
At one extreme, a God who goes beyond things
only is remote and disconnected. You get
the watchmaker God of the Deists, who sets the natural processes in motion,
winds the world up, and then never touches it again. Or we get the God of supernaturalist theism
who is “up there” or “out there” but not in the and behind the world. This God might intervene in the natural world
and human affairs from outside, perhaps.
If we think he does so often, we usually say this is because we have pleased
him in some way, begged him in prayer to do something and he has favored us by
listening.
Such belief brings with it real problems: we end
up wondering about the prayers that God doesn’t seem to have heard or answered,
and why God puts up with so much evil in the world. The God up there and out there is hard to
believe in. He is too much like that
petty and vain being we see in that Monty
Python and the Meaning of Life scene parodying a Church of England vicar at
prayer: “O Lord, you are so big, so absolutely HUGE. Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I
can tell You. Forgive us, O Lord, for
this, our dreadful toadying, and barefaced flattery. But You are so strong and, well, just so
super.”
If we
think that the supernaturalist God doesn’t intervene all that much, we are left
wondering whether anything we do or say in our lives matter at all: if we look like so many little grasshoppers
to God, then why worry about pleasing him or having any relationship?
At the
other extreme, we might believe God is immanent but not transcendent at all:
pantheism, the belief that God is the universe and everything in it. God ends up being seen as some sort of gas or
fluid, and there is no personality or person to speak of. And if we try to connect with such an
impersonal oversoul in our hearts and meditations, it often ends up being pure
solipsism: How I think and feel about god becomes paramount and absolute. There is little or no room for community when
it comes to faith, and our religious experience becomes idiosyncratic, and
often, just plain weird.
The
Christian God is both transcendent and immanent, both at a distance and up
close, both universal and personal. Panentheism,
or the belief that God is behind and in all things in the universe, but is not
the same as those things, has traditionally been the way Christian mystics and
philosophical theologians have expressed this.
It is
easy to be misled by the kind of metaphorical and mythological language and
images we see in parts of the Bible: God
is a jealous God. God hears and answers
prayers for his favored ones. You can
please or displease God, and God gets angry, sometimes to the point of wiping
whole cities or nations off the face of the earth. But these images do not describe God; they must
be taken in context with other passages, ones like “Thus says the High and Lofty One who
inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy.
‘I dwell in the high and holy place and also with the one who has a
contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive
the heart of the contrite” (Isa. 57:15)
“The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and full of
compassion” (Psalm 103:8). Rowan
Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, expressed it this way: “What
the Bible puts before us is not a record of a God who is always triumphantly
getting his way by doing miracles . . . , but a God who gets his way by
patiently struggling to make himself clear to human beings, to make his love
real to them, especially when they seem not to want to know or to want to avoid
him and retreat into their own fantasies about him.” Jesus taught us to call God by the very
personal title Abba, father. He said
that God counts the sparrows and the hairs on our heads, and values each of
us. He said God is compassionate for
all, blessing good and bad people alike with his sun and rain. And we need to be compassionate like
that.
Our
lives are hard. The deaths in the parish
this week of our friends Nick and Claire remind us of how short and fleeting
life is. But also how sweet and good it
is. I am thankful that I could be with
both of them, and see their smiles of gratitude, before they died. Another parishioner facing his final days
told me this week that he has no regrets, except perhaps, that he wanted just a
little more time with those he loves. That
regret is actually a thanksgiving, and tells us how sweet our lives are.
God is
overall and above all. This means we can
worship and stand in awe of him. God is
also beneath and behind all, including our own hearts. What do we pray at the
start of each Eucharist? “O God to you all hearts are open, all desires known,
and from you no secrets are hid.” God wants
to give us strength and comfort, wants to give us new hearts. This means we can trust him.
Note
that in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus seeks solitude and quiet time to be alone
with God. It recharges him. It reconnects him with that distant Deity who
somehow also is in our hearts. It renews
his relationship with Abba. It changes
his perceptions and his direction. It is
so important to him that he chooses to take a break from his busy schedule to
make time for it. The distant God can
give him strength, so he can run and not be weary and walk and not faint. It is the very busyness of his schedule that
wearies Jesus; it is the reason he must seek rest solitude with God. “
We must
do this too. Personal prayer, in
solitude and in silence, is important for us to let God recharge us, give us
eagle’s wings, make us run and not grow weary, walk and not faint.
We will
soon be starting Lent. In it, we seek to
follow Jesus and find a quiet place in the wilderness to commune alone with
God. Hymn no.
149 says it well (and note the distance and nearness talk):
“Eternal Lord of love, behold your Church
walking once more the pilgrim way of Lent,
led by your cloud by day, by night your fire,
moved by your love and
toward your presence bent:
far off yet here the goal of all desire.”
I invite
all of us this week to personal prayer alone.
God is at a distance, watching us.
But he is also in our hearts, renewing us, strengthening us, and giving
us his own heart. Jesus was the personal
near expression of the distant God. And
so, like him, let us get up early, seek out a deserted place, and pray.
In the
name of Christ, Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment