United in the Light

January 22, 2023

Texts:
     Psalm 27:1, 4-9
     I Corinthians 1:10-18
     Matthew 4:12-23

[The following, writes Kent in an email, is the manuscript from which I spoke, which I did not stick to, because I wanted to be more direct and personal in whatever I shared.]

How difficult it is to unify ourselves to follow God in the Light!

Where are the climbing shoes with enough traction or the handholds strong enough to help us climb together as we approach God?  Surely Wisdom of our religious tradition offers a lasting invitation: follow this ancient, everflowing stream of ultimate concern and commitment across the ages, and you will arrive somewhere good, where we are all invited.  In the midst of the wisdom traditions of all religions comes Christianity, and Jesus calling us in the Gospel, as Peter and Andrew with James and John, "Follow me, and I will make you fisher of people."  And when we follow, we follow Jesus to the Cross.

I want to explore with you what "Unity in the Light" means and how to develop it.  What does unity look like and feel like here?

• Showing up; setting aside other people, places and things to stand together, in solidarity.
• Seeking God's face, together; praise, prayer, preaching and singing.
• Being open to our own vulnerability and brokenness; receiving consolation.
• Watching for and seeing Jesus in one another: we are being saved by the grace mediated through doing what Jesus did, and encouraging each other, who do the same.
• Watching, fondly admiring, God work to sculpt our lives: across the arc of years, decades often, throughout each of our lives, calling and re-calling us to become something more, something larger and also smaller than we think we are.  This happens mostly through mission groups and friendships, but also just witnessing God's power and grace working through us, across the years.
• And we do this because of the Cross, as Paul says, "so that the cross of Christ may not be emptied of its power."

Yes, we have found good and a good measure of unity here, lived in the loving humility, charity and veracity we experience here, we see, hear and feel among our small courageous gathering of friends.  We summon one another to follow, to unite, then to lead and, finally, to create.  Ever since the calls to those two sets of brothers, ordinary people like us have been uprooted from what they thought was more important towards a deeper, more valued prize: an action-based conviction to be children of One God, to set out to act in the world in accord with Jesus "light yoke," and to share examination of our hearts and minds to these ends.  Why do it?  Why show up here and follow Jesus on this Wisdom path all the way to the cross?  I share Paul’s gratitude for you, as articulated in Corinthians 1, just before today's Epistle reading:

I give thanks to my God for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind — just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you — so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord, Jesus Christ.  God is faithful; by him you were called into fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord." (1 Corinthians 1:4-9)

Yes, we are called, somehow, to be here, now, with all our gifts.  Paul goes on, after appealing to the Corinthians to "be in the same mind and same purpose,"

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.  For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. (1 Corinthians 1:17-18)

And, as Jesus' very presence is revealed among us, it's hard to know or recognize what is actually saving us.  Where do you recognize the power of God that is saving, the very meaning of the word Jesus, "he saves."  There are many traditions of wisdom, and although Jesus was a Wisdom Teacher, surely he was one of many.  Wisdom is wonderful, however, and as we seek God's face, may we be wise enough to acknowledge our ignorance and vulnerability as very limited humans.  May we see in our foibles all the ways "God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength," as Paul mentions later in Corinthians.

We press on, together, seeking the "face of God," much the same as all religious Wisdom traditions do.  In fact, Huston Smith, acclaimed scholar of The World's Religions, in his "Final Analysis" concludes: essential virtues of humility, charity and veracity are shared with all the world's religions.  Huston Smith found ample evidence, surveying Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Primal religions, that humility, charity and veracity extend from all of them, that they remarkably reaffirm one another in this.  This yields a greater confidence that, by following Jesus, I share common ground and profound unity with brothers and sisters in a faith universal, called to a common experience of divinity.

Our own roots in Church of the Saviour (CoS) derive from such deep ecumenism.  This was cultivated perhaps by an army chaplain named Gordon Cosby who, in serving in the end of World War II and preparing men to fight in the Battle of the Bulge in Europe, found men ill equipped to be willing to face battle and possibly die.  He was trusted with final letters and foxhole prayers unimaginable.  Perhaps we all are.  Where do you find meaning when faced with a final battle?  Gordon drew upon the wisdom of unity for part of that meaning, as he formed the Church of the Saviour with friends, and gathered them for their first Commitment in 1948.  They were to be an "ecumenical church," and their building would be named an "Ecumenical Headquarters of the Church of the Saviour" as we entered the battle of life together.  Dorothy Devers, longtime CoS member, also reaffirmed this in her inter-religious dialogue work in deep ecumenism and her writings.

I came to commitment and re-commitment here late in my own mid-life journey.  In the Eighth Day Faith Community, after starting to worship with you in the Fall of 1979, I didn't sign the membership book as a core member until the late 90s, almost twenty years after first finding the community.  As I shared with my small group of fellow writers, one said, "Why don't you say more about your twenty-year path to deeper commitment."  So I will share a bit.  It has not always been "unity walking in the light" here among you.  Between a tumultuous set of career changes — from seminary, to construction (at Jubilee Housing), back to secondary teaching, social work, supervision consulting and hospital social work and private practice — and even the building of a marriage, the starting of a young family and the de-construction of a marriage, Eighth Day was the steadying and light-filled parts of my too-dark and intense existence.  That feeling of being trapped somewhere between treating people with alcohol and drug addiction, and faltering in my own family and marriage, it's here, I learned about how to share my limits and faults, but also to celebrate my gifts; it's here I saw how the power of a small group can identify, shape and manifest those gifts in acts of service and face my darkness; again and again I saw and felt how alone, and applied the AA slogan "'I can't,' 'but God can,' and my work was to 'let him.'"  It gave me, for example, the gift of a Prayer of Abandonment by Charles de Foucauld, so compelling and complete to me that I shared it in song here, and then at my spiritual director's ordination service, and then in the ordination of my own life purpose on a daily basis for years to this day. 

Father,
I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you.
I am ready for all, I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures.
I wish no more than this, O Lord.
Into your hands I commend my soul;
I offer it to you, with all the love of my heart,
for I love you, Lord,
and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands,
without reserve,
and with boundless confidence,
for you are my Father.

Charles deFoucauld, who was murdered in Algiers, said, “This is the last prayer of our Master, of our Beloved ... may it be ours ... And may it not only be that of our last moment, but of all our moments."

Take a moment to consider your call, your own roots and story of hearing and responding to a call here.  What drew you to and interested you about Eighth Day and our unique ways of following Jesus?

This same power of God resonates throughout many faith and wisdom traditions.  A similar surrender that meaningfully saves can be found in Taoism, where human life is such a small part of the expansive flow of all of nature, the only authentic human actions are those in complete accord with the larger flow of the "Way and it's Power," There are three ways the Tao is an ultimate reality which can never be fully perceived or conceived, too vast for human rationality.  The opening lines of the Taoist scripture, the Tao te Ching, literally "the Way and it's power," are a puzzle: "The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao."  It's unspeakable, permeating all, and yet beyond and transcending, reaching further than what we see, hear, feel, touch.  The awe inspired by this primal Tao invites the witness to a central mystery, a mystery of mysteries.  "How clear it is!   How quiet it is!   It must be something eternally existing!”  or "Of all great things, surely the Tao is the greatest!"  Imagine my wonder, at seventeen, finding a book called Creativity and Taoism at a local bookstore, and reading Chapter 22 of the Tao te Ching, astounded at how much it reminded me of the suffering servant on the Cross:

If you want to be whole,
Let yourself be partial.  If you want to become straight,
Let yourself be crooked.  If you want to become full,
Let yourself become empty.  If you want to be reborn,
Let yourself die.  If you want to be given everything, Give everything up.
"The master, by residing in the Tao, Sets an example for all beings.
Because he doesn't display himself, people can see his light.
Because he has nothing to prove, People can trust his words.
Because he doesn't know who he is, People recognize themselves in him.
Because he has no goad in mind, Everything he does succeeds.

"When the ancient masters said, 'If you want to be given everything, Give everything up.' They weren't using empty phrases.  Only in being lived by the Tao Can you truly be yourself."

I was reminded of this experience while reading a sermon of Corey Farr, in a Christian, online at Spectrum Magazine, which explores "community through conversation."  Farr finds in this passage from the Tao te Ching "a source of God's power drawing him to a Christ-centered faith."  I do, too, just as I did when I was seventeen.  There are passages here that sound like, "lose your life and you will find it" (Matt.  16:24).  The cycles of death and rebirth, seasonal and natural death, resound throughout nature, our lives, the whole cosmos.  In both particulars and universals, all of this is the power of God in action.

"The people who walked in darkness," from Isaiah, may well describe our own divided and contentious period as a nation.  Competing secular, political and technological idols seem to dominate the wisdoms of religious experience, where relationships and community has the potential to be infused with sacred Light.  It is the Light of the Lord, and what may save us.  Does the Light we experience from the Lord dispel our fear?  The Psalm describes where that light dispels fear­-in the house of the Lord, at worship, where the beauty of the Lord dwells in God's temple;

• where God shelters us when in trouble and sets us on a high rock;
• from there, we have our fear dispelled as our "head is lifted up above our enemies all around me,"
• and finally, when we offer sacrifices with shouts of joy, when we "sing and make melody to the Lord."

Our worship, our faith community, is where we formally and informally "seek God's face." Despite the real threats we experience in "violence breathed out against us" in darkness or division, we seek and walk towards God.  This brings light, helps us appreciate the light that's given, the perspective-taking balance and even confidence we receive in community, friendship and bonds of trust as we walk and seek.

I want to make some claims about why I show up that you may share.  As we share and make this community vital and engaged, I continue to seek unity here, to feel and seek unity as we approach God's face not only in our Christian faith but also across all religious wisdom traditions.

The Power of God

1. God is Universal.  A first and primary claim is that the Power of God is universal, expressed through all wisdom traditions.  There is a danger in any faith practice of being too close to your own ways, your own group, so that in the midst of diversity and division, disunity may not be overcome.  We only have to see many examples of injustice, oppression and war to see evidence of this.  And we have had our own problems with racism and division about membership process in our own church.  Do we lose courage in the face of these?  It's easy to do, if we do not follow the Cross.
2. The Power of God is expressed through Surrender.  Where conflict emerges and battles are fought, the power of God cuts across divisions, where that message of the cross tells us: powers and principalities of this world do not overcome the power of the surrendered servant on the cross.  But what does the cross actually mean?  Why did Jesus die, and what is the ultimate meaning?  Traditional theological understanding of the cross is a "punishment-based, substitutionary atonement" theory: Jesus's suffering is punishment for OUR sins, and because he was SO sorry for our sins, he took his place on the cross FOR US, and this sacrifice was acceptable to God for the wrongs we commit.  This idea of theology has, as Richard Rohr reminds us in The Universal Christ, has "led us to thank Jesus instead of honestly imitating him.  At worst, it has led us to see God as a cold, brutal figure, who demands acts of violence before God can love his own creation."  On the contrary, rather than demanding violence and sacrificial suffering, Jesus provided a way, Rohr says, for us to "eat his body and drink his blood," nurturing us with symbolic presence, communion with justice, solidarity and community, unity WITHIN Jesus own body.  Rohr continues to point out that the church offers "no redemptive alternative to the very 'powers and principalities' that Paul says unduly control the world (Eph 3: 9-10, 6:12)...  It's time for Christianity to rediscover the deeper biblical theme of restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitation, restoration and not punishment.  We could call this Jesus' story line the "'myth of redemptive suffering' not as 'paying a price' but as in offering the self for the other.  Or 'at-one-ment' instead of atonement!”  This at-one-ment desire, for me, is met in the Prayer of Abandonment.

There are two ways people grow, Rohr is fond of saying, through Love and Suffering.  The Cross may be the one image that exposes our human journey to both most intentionally.

[But how did we get here, historically, in our thinking about Jesus' love and suffering.  There's a long history of thinking about how the cross becomes a way Jesus, who's supposed to be divine, must "pay back God" for becoming human by dying on a cross to restore divinity" (Anselm of Canterbury).  This seems to be the projection of our own history of suffering or abuse onto the meaning of Jesus.  "Why would you love or trust, want to be with [or be saved by] such a God as this?" Rohr asks.  This is so different from a view that embraces "the cross as a freely chosen revelation of Total Love on God's part (John Duns Scotus 1266-1308)."  Instead of the cross being a transaction, a tit-for-tat exchange, it's instead turned into a vivid outpouring of love for humanity, intended to "utterly shock the heart and turn it back toward the trust and love of the Creator." (Rohr, p 144.)  René Girard took it further, saying the Jesus went to great lengths to put an end to all ideas of sacrificial religion "once and for all," as it frequently repeats in the book of Hebrews.  This ends the need to please God through transactional sacrifices, contends Girard; God's love unites us with God's transforming Light in resurrection.  It's not a transaction, but a transformation.  A couple other places in the Gospels, besides the call of the earliest disciples, Jesus' restorative and uniting words come in, "I did not come to condemn the world, but to save it." (John 12:47) and Matthew's "Come to me all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest...  for I am gentle and humble of heart.  Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden is light." (11:28) ]

We are called to follow Jesus to the powerlessness of the cross.  We are called to allow our suffering to change us, as Jesus did (which is "Resurrection"), so we do not have to keep projecting our pain and suffering on others, so we don't feel the trapped and triggered vulnerability of our own burden.  I did this for many years, within community, this community, before I fully committed.  I drifted between "trying too hard" and not practicing presence of God in my daily relationships, especially with my family.  Sure, it meant unlearning messages of my family of origin and cultural expectations of what I thought my role ought to be.  Only when I could surrender myself could I accept and be myself.  Yes, allowing ourselves to be yielding and open to our own pain and suffering is part of the "easy yoke" of Jesus, but, no, it's not easy.  This is one of the ways we resolve the opposite, often contradicting, experience of "standing tall and strong, together in the light of God" and also choosing open vulnerability of humility, charity and veracity.

3.   Life in Jesus is Embodied and Committed (conscious, enacted choice).  As Christians, our invitation to assume the cruciform shape of all life is one we choose to accept.  This is why it took me so long, I believe, to fully commit to belonging here.  I could only commit when I knew something I didn't quite trust before that:

• I cannot do this alone.
• I am not I fully, unless I allow Christ to live in me.
• I release my will, my self, to become aligned with God by letting go.

We are the hands and feet of Jesus, as we assume this embodied, cruciform shape in our lives.  This is the prayer of abandonment, as spoken by another Carmelite, Teresa of Avila, a prayer called, "Christ has No Body."

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

This is why, embedded deeply in that first call to his disciples is the call to both crucifixion and resurrection.  Yes, we must take up our Cross to walk down the road to dying to ourselves.  In Eugene Peterson's Message translation of Matthew 16: 24-25,

Don't run from suffering; embrace it.  Follow me and I'll show you how.  Self-help is no help at all.  Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self"

But, all due respect to Peterson, I know that it's more than "self-sacrifice," but also self-giving, release from the bounds of self to give from a sense of being one with God in our generosity.  That's the kind of loving and self-giving I witness in our community.

What does unity look like and feel like when we engage it?  Sometimes, even through squabbles or different approaches, it looks like our Writer's Spirit Group.  Strengths bend and weaken to listen, cooperate, and warm to one another's diverse lives and tectonic shifts in life circumstances, to simply show up and receive one another's writings.  What's liberal in our style or craft becomes carefully hewn and kindly appraised.  The witness to prose or poetry extends tokens of insight, vulnerability and critique, and often a measure of wisdom.  The active dialogue becomes a trusted lifeline or source of motivation to do better, to be better, to follow and integrate a new perspective as we edit our actions, our writings.  Encased in a crackable egg of routines and sometimes fragile habits rests an inner powerhouse of yolk and albumin deeply nourishing, as we share and encourage one another.  Of course, the egg must be cracked, and sometimes, through feedback, the pieces of the shell must be fished out of the bowl, but once scrambled it becomes delicious.  This is lived creativity.

This recalls Huston Smith's final examination of the world's religions, where the vision of religious experience turns us toward ethical action, but also beyond to an "inestimable unity." The world's religions are a tapestry of meaning, Smith asserts, which viewed from the back seems fragmented and random, but viewed from the front and within the whole picture, reveals an integrated whole.  This vision of unity extends further, asserting from within these Wisdom traditions that the universe is better than our sensibilities discern.  They portend, he says, a possibility, a signature of "perfect being." "Make way for the image of God," St Paul reports in 2 Cor.  3:18, "beholding the glory of the Lord changes us from one degree of glory to another." I have felt how our shared journey to and through Jesus re-birth, this Christmas in this community, has made us more integrated, better, shown an image of being that "changes us from one degree of glory to another." The vision of the world's religions offer a third aspect, says Huston Smith, that

Reality is steeped in an ineluctable mystery; we are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.  ...It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger the world becomes.

So, as we continue to follow Jesus' call we may embrace the humility, charity and veracity of Jesus' vision for our lives, alongside all people of any faith anywhere, in unity:

• "Things are more integrated than they seem,
• Things are better than they seem,
• And they are more mysterious than they seem."
  • -Huston Smith, "Final Analysis," Religions of the World