wisdom – By Another Road

Poetry: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 22, 2024, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 1:39-55, the Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth.

Holy Sacred Spirit/Vanishes noiselessly/Shining Rivers, Dying Trees/Quietly Grass Whispers

This little verse is in a magnetic frame on our refrigerator, and I’m somewhat self-conscious to admit that it’s a poem I wrote in 3rd grade, while sitting with my class in a field in rural northern California. I think the class assignment was to write a haiku, and I didn’t meet the sentence structure or standards of that venerable art form at all, but hey, I was 8.

I share those few lines with you not because they’re anything remarkable, but because they remind me, whenever I see them, that from a very early age, as kids we are already aware of the sacredness of the world, no matter what words we might attach to this awareness.

When we are young, wonder and love and fidelity and that vivid, almost-tangible presence we call God are all as natural as breathing. I was not raised going to church, but I could write a poem about the Spirit whispering to me in the brown field grass because, well, I was young, and the whole world felt alive. That’s childhood. We find it easier to accept that God is at work wherever we look.

And then we grow up a bit, and our capacity for poetry falters. The grass is just the grass. It wasn’t until much, much later, after many faith-uncertain years, that I began to wonder what had ever happened to that holy, sacred Spirit who used to whisper and hover and suggest herself to me on the wind.

She hadn’t gone anywhere. One day, years later, I was back again in rural northern California, driving down a winding road with some friends and I looked up into the forested hillside and I saw a mantle of fog unfurling down among the green boughs of the trees and those words came back to me again….holy sacred spirit…and I thought, oh, there you are, old friend. I had almost forgotten. I need to remember to name you when I see you.

Calling God by name, and naming God’s presence. That is, in many ways, the primary vocation and the mission of the Church. We have inherited the story of how God named things—how God made the world and named it good, named it beloved, named us as the bearers of God’s image.

And in a way, all of Scripture is one long record of us trying to give a name back to to God—to pronounce that unspeakable holy word disclosed to Moses, I AM THAT I AM—a word in Hebrew, sometimes translated as Yahweh, which isn’t really a word at all, but the sound of breath, of dynamic silence. The sound of the wind stirring the grass.

And the names we have given this nameless One are many—Elohim. Adonai. Shaddai. And later, in our own language, God. Lord. Creator. Holy, Sacred Spirit.

But here’s the thing: we aren’t called or tasked with simply coming up with new names to address God.

No, more importantly we as the people of God are asked to name those moments and movements and things in our world that are revelations of God. We are asked to look for God at work and to point him out when we see him, so that others might understand what God is all about—

We are to say, look! There! Yes! That is what God is like. That is the One we speak of! There he is, filling the hungry with good things. And there is God, leaning against the bus stop in a shabby coat, smiling in the rain. And there she is, doing her children’s laundry with just a few dollars left in her purse. And there, too, there is God, in the grasp of my beloved’s hand when I am frightened, and in the laughter between old friends, and in the candlelight, and in the taste of bread and wine. There is God, and there, and there, and there…This naming is one of our primary jobs as disciples.

But we forget about it as we grow up. We forget how self-evident is the sacred dimension of all things. We don’t hear God in the grass anymore. The world is a bit more matter of fact, a bit less poetic. Growing up, growing older, can do that.

Elizabeth, who we meet in todays Gospel, would have known something about that.

Now, we don’t know much about Elizabeth, other than that she is Mary’s much older relative and Zechariah’s wife and that she has been, til now, unable to have a child. In her time and place and culture, this would have been an especially great source of sorrow and shame.

And we might imagine that Elizabeth had long given up on trying to figure out where to look for God at work in her life, or how to name his presence. She has not lived a life with much poetry in it.

But then, a miracle. Despite being advanced in age, Elizabeth has been blessed by that holy, sacred Spirit, and in the great Biblical tradition of barrenness transformed into promise, she, like Mary, now carries a child in her womb, a child who will be named John, who will grow up to be sort of wilderness poet himself.

But before John, and before Jesus, and even before Mary sings her own Magnificat, that powerful song of hope and redemption we heard today, Elizabeth does something quite remarkable. It’s easy to overlook. Let’s revisit the text, so that we don’t miss it:

Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?

Do you see what Elizabeth does there? She names the baby in Mary’s womb as Lord. She is the first one—the very first person—to call Jesus Lord.

She, Elizabeth, she the forsaken, she the unfruitful, she who had capitulated to an unpoetic life, she is now speaking the first verse of a new creation—the first human person in the Gospel narrative to speak of God and flesh as one—the first person to say that this child is God and that God could be a child and that a new poetry is emerging, being birthed from the deep mystery of life.

Elizabeth names what thus far only angels have dared to say—that the shining rivers and the dying trees and the whispering grass and the whole laboring creation are about to become ONE with the substance of heaven.

And in seeing this, and saying this, Elizabeth is, we might say, the very first Christian disciple. The very first to name God where she sees God at work in the world, in the most unexpected of places.

So what does that mean for us, we who are doing our best to make Christ known, here, in another time and place?

It’s means we must do what Elizabeth did. Look for God at work in the world, and take part in God’s labor in the world—the work of peacemaking, of compassion, of justice, of service, of loving our neighbors, of loving the earth—and—this is very important—call it what it is. Call it the work of God.

Not just a nice deed or an act of human kindness. No, not just that. Give God back his name. Give the world back its divine poetry. Name the work of love as the true work of God, the true nature of God—the God who is love—the God who saves and sings and comes to us in frailty and gentleness.

Because the problem of our own time is that the Christian message has been de-poeticized. It has been stripped of its creativity and robbed of its lush beauty. It has been turned into a cultural weapon or a social club or a benign pastime we fit in between brunch and grocery shopping when what the Kingdom of Heaven really is, is the insistent, upwelling, powerful transcendence of the living God that saturates and spills out of every cell of creation and asserts its advent into every moment of our day. If only we would look for it and name it and take part in it.

The world needs us to take part in it. The world needs to hear the true name of God, which is love, which is undying, reconciling, proactive, poetic love, which is what we are waiting for in Advent, which is what we are naming when we speak the name of Christ, and when we speak the name of that holy, sacred Spirit who still sings, in wind and grass and in the Magnificats that well up in our hearts. Let them well up, my friends. Let yourself see the world as poetry again.

And when we do, then we, much like Elizabeth, will be able to say,

Blessed are we, and blessed is the fruit we bear. And blessed are those who know that God has a name we are finally able to speak, and that it is Jesus, and that it is love.

And blessed are those who speak it.

Emptiness: A Sermon

“In the canyon, we perceive how negative space has its own power; we find that we are just as compelled by what is missing–what has been hollowed out–as we are by what remains.”

I preached this sermon for the 3rd Sunday of Advent, December 13, 2020, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are John 1:6-8, 19-28 and Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11. It is a slightly edited version of the sermon I wrote for The Episcopal Church’s “Sermons that Work” collection for Advent & Christmas 2020.

I spent much of my 20s living in the desert, and whenever I was feeling stressed out or in need of some quiet time, I would drive out past the city limits to an overlook that took in views of Nevada’s Red Rock Canyon and a seemingly endless expanse of earth and sky.

Some people find the desert off-putting: all of that muted, windswept rock and dirt and shrub, where you cannot hide from the sun or from yourself; but others, like John the Baptist, are drawn to such places for precisely this reason—because there is no distraction, because it is a place of unobscured perception, of stark clarity, where one can see farther outward and further inward, if they are willing to brave the emptiness.

Indeed, if you have ever stood at the rim of a desert canyon, you know what it is to comprehend the immense majesty of such emptiness. These clefts in the earth, carved by the incessant flow of water over millenia, are rocky vessels holding a world unto themselves.

Peer over the edge and look down into the sky held between the canyon walls—a highway for the howling wind and winged creatures of the air.

Look down upon the stubborn shrubs clinging to the ledges, where tiny crawling things seek precarious shelter at the edge of the abyss.

And then look down, down, down to the bottom, to the river—the improbable, sinuous source of this vast openness, branching out like a vein, still eroding and shaping the earth in its insistent passage towards a distant sea.

In the canyon, we perceive how negative space has its own power; we find that we are just as compelled by what is missing–what has been hollowed out–as we are by what remains. There is a potentiality, a spaciousness in the open chasm that, in gazing upon it, we also begin to sense within ourselves, in the caverns of our soul, a certain thick luminousness, a sense of seeing deep into the heart of things that are usually hidden under the surface.

And so perhaps it is in just such a place, deep in a canyon in the Judean wildnerness, that we might imagine John the Baptist, his voice crying out, echoing off of the wizened rockface, mingling with dust and birdsong, proclaiming the Coming of Christ: an approach that will, like a river of Living Water, soon carve its own path through the petrification of the human heart.

John heralds the advent of God’s own bone and breath and blood; the anointed flesh of the Messiah, which, in its birthing and breaking and Belovedness, will reveal the truth of how our own lives are sustained by the Divine ecology of Love.

But before we get there, we are here, in Advent country, in the desert. And just as emptiness defines the canyon, so it is, in this season, that discovering our identity in God is predicated, first, upon clearing away all that is not for us, in order to discern exactly how God might fill that open space.

“Who are you?” John is asked by those eager to label him and his peculiar mission. But he responds only with negations.

“I am not the Messiah,” he says.

Are you Elijah? “I am not.”

The prophet? “No.”

Relinquishment of these identity markers, alluring as they might be, is John’s act of humility, of refusing to be carried away the expectations or agendas of others. He is so grounded in God that he has become an open channel of grace and truth, letting the breath of the Spirit blow through the cracks in his soul, like a reed, like a wind-song.

And, if we wish to let God shape the melody of our own lives, so must we be.

How often we secretly wish that we were solid rock; the savior of ourselves; the long-expected sovereign of our own small dominions, with the power to do it all, to be it all. How often we take on the titles offered to us, not because they are accurate, but because they’re there, because it sounded good at the time, and because an identity, a name, even one that doesn’t quite fit, makes us feel more real to ourselves, at least for a while.

But just as the canyon only becomes itself in the void, so, too, with us: so it is ok, it is necessary, even, to not be all things to all people. It is ok to let go of the names and roles that never quite fit. It is ok to let your life take on some empty space, to let the wind rush through you. Because, like John, it is only in each of our own negations that we get closer to the spare, essential truth of our identity—the one that God has prepared particularly for us.

John shows us how brave and beautiful it is to simply be what we are, and to trust that, for God, this is sufficient.

But how difficult this can be. In this anxious time, faced with the multiplying needs of our families, our communities, and our planet, we are frequently tempted to take on far more than what we can actually do or be. Even as many of us attempt to slow down and be more attentive to what matters, the world continues to surround us and shout, “Who are you? Who are you?”

But, if we are ever to cultivate the space in ourselves for God to rush in, then, like John, we must respond with:

I am not the Messiah.

I am not.

No.

We must be willing to disappoint the onlookers. We must be willing to embrace the emptiness of what we were never meant to be.

And then, perhaps, we will find what was ours to claim all along.

“I am,” John admits at last, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’”

Not a king. Not a savior. A voice. Just a voice–an invisible resonance piercing the air, unbounded, free. Nothing more and nothing less than this. And exactly what God needs from him.

For John, the purpose of his own voice is clear: the announcement of God’s Incarnate Promise. And so he baptizes in the river, that ancient agent of transformative power, inviting others to let themselves be scoured by it—to let their layers of defensiveness and artifice be stripped away, to hollow out a space in their hearts in preparation for “the one who is coming after,” the Christ, the one who makes all things new.

And here, in another time and in another wilderness—the one that we struggle to navigate each day—John’s invitation remains open to us. It is as urgent as ever, because we are still learning who we are and who we are not. Like the canyon, we are still being shaped; still being laid bare to the wind and the light, still becoming as deep and open and vast as God imagines we can become. And, like John, it is only in the cultivation of our own holy emptiness that we will, at last, be the vessels of God’s inbreaking purpose:

to bring good news to the oppressed,

to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

and release to the prisoners;

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,

and the day of vengeance of our God;

to comfort all who mourn. (Isaiah 61)