June 13, 2022
Texts:
Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31
John 16: 12-15
Well, it seems like one of those mornings. We’re having some trouble with the tech here at worship, and my printer wouldn’t work this morning so here I am reading on my computer. It feels like we're getting thrown challenges left and right. So, thank you to everyone who's making this all come together.
Before I jump in, I also want to say thanks to our whole community for supporting us through our wedding. It was amazing. It was a really wild few months in Alli and my life together. And some of you were there on the day in person. But all of you were there in spirit. And I really believe that my time in this community and our time in this community has set us up for a life of more community and shared blessings. So, thank you all for holding us these past few years.
It feels like we're in the midst of a lot of change as a community. And Alli and I are also going through a lot of change. We got some “fun news” in April, when Alli was on her bachelorette trip, that we had ninety days to vacate our apartment. So, that was coming while we were planning our wedding. And it just felt like one more big wrench in the cog of things that was forcing us to deal with change and uncertainty. So, we're in the process of packing up our apartment and moving out. And we're going to spend July and August out with my family in Minnesota and Wisconsin, like we've done the last couple of summers. So, it's all very exciting, but it's a lot of change.
I'm also stepping out of leadership in Eighth Day. Alli and I are both going through some professional career transitions. And here in our community, we have other folks who are stepping out of formal leadership, we have people stepping into leadership, we have new children who are joining our community. And we're still trying to figure out a hybrid worship situation that works for everyone. And that is just a lot of change and uncertainty to be holding all at once. It can cause a lot of anxiety and fear and feelings of being ungrounded. Which I think is a lot of what the disciples were feeling in this passage from John, when Jesus was telling them, “I’m taking off; there's going to be this thing called the Holy Spirit; just you wait; it'll be great. But it's not coming yet.”
It's easy in these moments of transition and uncertainty to feel alone, to feel abandoned and overwhelmed. And it's really easy to try to just look out for ourselves, or to just keep going whatever we've been doing for the sake of it because it's what we know. It's also very easy to try to force control over a situation to try to shape it just how we want it to be, rather than connecting with those around us and trusting that a path forward will emerge through relationship. It can feel in these times of transition like God has abandoned us. Like we're alone and we're helpless. And the scriptures today offer us a few guides to help us through these times of transition.
First, we have Lady Wisdom, or Sophia, from Proverbs 8. We also have the Holy Spirit or Ruah, the breath of life from John 16. So, I'm going to spend a little bit of time with the scriptures. And then I'm going to share some photos and text from our Community Day back in April. This is my parting gift as Moderator in my last few weeks in the role.
So, in our Gospel reading today, Jesus, in classic Jesus fashion, refuses to give his followers any clear answers. He tells them “I have so much more to say, but y'all can't absorb it right now. You can't bear this much truth right now.” I wonder why Jesus tells them basically, “Y'all can't handle the truth. Y'all can't handle what I have to say to you.” There's a lot of possible reasons. The most obvious one is that he knows that Judas will betray him very shortly. But there's another thing that happens a few chapters earlier during that last Passover supper in John 13, that really caught my eye.
During the Last Supper, Jesus gets up and starts washing the disciples’ feet. This is a very dramatic, almost unthinkable, inversion of the master-servant relationship, which was the default in the Roman power structure. It was common in Rabbi-Student relationships of Jewish cultures, and the Husband-Wife relationship in a patriarchal culture. This move was a wildcard! We can be certain that all the disciples were very surprised by this. It’s very unusual. But Simon Peter, in particular, was horrified by this. He says to Jesus, “You will never wash my feet; please, teacher, just wash my hands and my head.” And Jesus says in response, “If I don't wash your feet, then you don't really belong to me.”
I'm fascinated by this word belong, “belong to me.” There are a few possible meanings of the word “belong.” One would be “ownership,” the kind of belonging that Simon Peter expects with Jesus. He wants to belong to Jesus in the way one way belong to a master or a boss. Simon Peter wants to be subservient. He wants someone else to tell him what to do. But with his actions, Jesus is saying “No, no, no. That's not the kind of belonging I'm talking about. The kind of belonging I'm talking about is where everyone has a chance to use their gifts, regardless of their official title, or their position in the power structure.” He's not denying that people do have different roles and job titles and decision-making authority within a community. In John 13, Jesus says, “You call me your Teacher and Lord, and you should, because that's who I am. And if your Teacher and Lord has washed your feet, you should do the same for each other. I have set the example you should do for each other exactly as I have done for you.”
This backstory from the Last Supper helps contextualize what Jesus says in the readings for today from John 16, and why he says, “I have a lot more to say, but you can't absorb it yet. Because you're still looking to me for direction and authority instead of looking at each other. You want a King, not a community. You haven't recognized each other's divinity yet. And so I'm taking off. I'm going back to God, because until I’m gone, y’all really aren't going to grasp this.”
And he leaves them with the promise of the Holy Spirit, which can seem like a very ethereal or otherworldly kind of thing. But as scholars like Neil Douglas-Klotz and others have pointed out, in the Aramaic language and worldview that Jesus lived in and taught in, there was no separation between spirit and matter, or soul and body, or even Heaven and Earth. Those ideas of separation were later put onto Christianity through Greek philosophy. In Jesus's worldview and the worldview of the ancient Israelites before him, humanity had a direct and embodied relationship with God. And the word Spirit also meant “breath.” So, simply through breathing in a conscious way, we can reconnect our ourselves with the Sacred Unity, with God, with the love of Christ. No matter what kind of stress we're under, we can always breathe. So, let's breathe.
I want to say a few words about Proverbs 8 as well. In the translation I was reading in preparing for the teaching, The Voice, Wisdom is called “Lady Wisdom.” The version Steve read had female pronouns, but it's actually called Lady Wisdom in a number of other translations, and the Greeks would have called her “Sophia.” Wisdom is the ability to discern, to make good judgments to take right action. It's important to remember that wisdom to the Israelites was feminine, feminine as in nurturing, as in relational, so the kind of wisdom Jesus was talking about was fundamentally about relationships.
And because we live in patriarchal societies, as Jesus did, as well, it's very easy to get caught up in the more masculine energies of life, of judging, of separating of doing and achieving and shaping. And there's nothing wrong with those things. But that's just one half of life. That's one half of being. Our masculine energies have to be grounded in that relational, feminine wisdom. Otherwise, they'll just run roughshod over everything.
As Lady Wisdom says in Proverbs 8, “It's because of me that kings wield power. And authorities decree what is right. It's because of me that leaders and their agents govern and all judge according to what is right.”
So, how does lady wisdom speak to us? Where and how does she reach us? At the threshold places, away from the hustle and bustle of daily life away from the city. Proverbs 8 says, “Don't you hear the voice of Lady Wisdom crying out? She's taken her stand at the highest place in the city, at the crossroads where everyone can see her, at the gates at the entrance to the city.” So, this is away from the hustle and bustle away from the commotion of daily life within the empire.
Our Community Day at Dayspring every year is a chance, an opportunity for us to put ourselves in Lady Wisdom’s way, to get out of the hustle and bustle of life in the city to breathe, to be in nature. Amid the swaying pines and the rolling hills, we get to immerse ourselves in natural splendor to rest together in open space, and to ask deep questions about who we've been, and who we want to become both as individuals and a community.
I came into Community Day this year thinking that I would spend most of the time out there trying to find a successor for me as Moderator. I'd already decided to step out of the role, and, given how challenging the role is and how demanding it can be, I wasn't sure I'd actually be able to find someone. No one had really volunteered yet. So, my idea coming in was to sort of work the room and you know, try to plant some seeds and find somebody and do a lot of listening and talking and notetaking. But part of why I decided to step out of the Moderator role was because I recognized I was fulfilling this role willingly and gladly but at the expense of other things that the Holy Spirit and Lady Wisdom have been calling me to. Kind of similar to Karen Mohr, with your need to pursue your music instead of leading worship.
For me, it’s things like taking photographs, and writing poetry. So, on a whim that morning, I decided to bring my camera. I think it was Alli who said, “Do you want to bring your camera? Maybe we should bring your camera.” I said, “No, I got a lot of stuff to do; I gotta take notes.” And the moment I got there, taking photos felt like the thing I needed to be doing. Not taking notes, not trying to convince people to put their hat in the ring for Moderator. But looking -- really, really looking at the people in our community, especially after so many months of being apart. Really looking at others closely and doing my best with this camera to work with light and shadow and color and my own vision to capture something of their essence, of their divinity. Lady Wisdom told me that day that the best way I can be of service to the evolution of our community, the best way I could wash other's feet, was to just shut up and take some photos.
Wendy led us through a process of creating mandalas based on the gifts that were evoked from us in small group conversations, and as we shared out our mandalas, I continued to take photos, and I recorded audio of what everyone was sharing. This past week, I put together a slideshow of images and text of the gifts that we shared that day.
This is very much a work in progress. I don't know what will come of this, if it's something we could eventually put on the website. I hope it can be a touchstone for our gifts throughout the year. And a way for us, during times of uncertainty and transition, to really ground into our gifts.
[For those in the community who want view the slide show, please contact David Hilfiker.]
I will also want to say if I have transcribed your words wrong, or if the photo I took of you is not a good or accurate representation, please let me know, I apologize in advance, this is a work in progress. And I also want to acknowledge that a lot of people weren't there on Community Day. So there's a lot of folks here in this room or on Zoom who weren't there. I want to make some space at the end of the slideshow for us to simply name a few gifts of other people in the room who weren't necessarily present, and I hope that we can add photos and images to this document in the future.