Have I mentioned how lucky I am to be your pastor?
I am continually amazed that I can make a living by writing about interesting ideas every week, and that, to top it all off, you folks are willing to listen to me as I ruminate over them.
How did I get to be so blessed?
By allowing me the privilege of this pulpit every week, you have allowed me the opportunity to think deeply about ideas – not just on one Sunday, but over time. I can encounter these ideas in the context of scripture, and in the context of life, and find new ways, week after week, to sneak up on them and see what happens when I surprise them from a new angle.
My hope is that the result gives each of you something nourishing to consider as you go about our week.
May the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in Thy sight O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.
I preface this morning’s sermon in this way because for a year or more there has been a theme that has appeared at the core of many of my sermons – a theme that I want to investigate again today.
The theme I refer to is: ways of knowing.
It will sound familiar to you when I say, again, that we know things in different ways. I have suggested four different ways of knowing.
Intellectual knowing – the knowing of the mind.
Emotional knowing – the knowing of the heart
Physical or somatic knowing – the knowing of the body
And Spiritual knowing – the knowing of the soul.
I am interested in all of these ways of knowing, but since I am a pastor and a poet, I am naturally most interested in the last of these… perhaps the most mysterious of the four – spiritual knowing. The knowing of the soul.
How do we know with our soul?
This is a question that I have been preoccupied with for quite some time.
I hope that today’s extraordinary scripture lesson will give us some insight into this question…
But first, I need to set things up a little bit.
When my kids were growing up, it sometimes happened that one or the other of them would come downstairs and wander into the kitchen and, swinging open the refrigerator door, proclaim:
“I’m starving.”
I remember thinking…
Well…
That was a bit of an exaggeration, wasn’t it?
The young man may have been feeling a wee bit peckish, but starving? No way!
The words certainly required no action on my part. They went in one ear and out the other. If I bothered to give his words a second thought they probably just elicited a passing smile of indulgence. If the kid wanted the peanut butter, he knew where to find it.
Two words: “I’m starving.”
In that context, and coming from that person’s mouth the words have almost zero significance.
Zero significance, because of our privilege.
If those same two words were spoken by another child… a child who truly has not eaten … that would be a different story wouldn’t it?
If the child who speaks these words is speaking from the wasteland of rubble that is now the Gaza Strip…. if, that is, the child who uses these words is truly on the brink of succumbing finally, to a painful death after months of awful malnutrition… When this child utters the same two words:
“I’m starving…”
…we understand the words in a completely different way.
Now there is no indulgent smile. Now there is no room for casual, rational acceptance of the reality of what has been said. Our reaction is not a reaction of the mind, but a much deeper reaction— a pain of the heart, or perhaps a wounding of the soul. We hear, in these words, the heavy weight of injustice; we are indignant at the caprices of fate that make one child’s belly full, and this child’s stomach gnawingly empty.
The difference could not be more stark.
The words of the child who is not hungry, have practically no meaning. However, for the child who really is starving, these two words are filled with urgency. They could not be more potent; more burdened by care.
All of this is intended to illustrate an obvious, but often overlooked aspect of the way that we communicate with each other.
In an act of communication, the meaning of the words we use is only part of what is communicated. The full meaning that we gather from words depends as much on who is speaking as what is said.
What is spoken is only part of the message. The speaker, him or herself, is also part of the message.
This is not an earth shaking idea – in fact it is so basic to our daily lives, that it is almost invisible. It hardly needs to be pointed out, for example, that if your pastor was ever foolish enough to hazard an opinion about the game of football, you would do well to ignore him altogether, but if you were ever lucky enough to interview Bill Belichick on the same subject, you would certainly be all ears because, of course, unlike me, Mr. Belichick knows what he’s talking about when he discusses the game of football.
Be that as it may, I am not content with the idea that it’s better to ask the advice of an expert. Expertise, as such, exists in the realm of intellectual ways of knowing, and that is not what we are interested in right now.
Our job, this morning, is to try to peek into the mysteries of spiritual ways of knowing.
And this is why I used the example of the well nourished child versus the starving child.
The hungry child may know more about starvation than the child who lives in an abundance, but that’s not the point.
When the words “I am starving” are spoken by a truly malnourished child, the resulting intensification of meaning has nothing to do with expertise.
It has to do with something else.
It has to do with ultimate concerns.
The intensification comes from a deep awareness of injustice. It comes from being in the presence of great suffering. It comes from the proximity of death. It comes from the awareness that ertnity – something that is, and always will be a complete mystery to us – is less than a hair’s breadth away.
When we are confronted with the immediate presence of ultimate concerns, something other than our intellects are being appealed to.
I suggest to you, this morning, that when we are confronted with ultimate concerns, our spiritual ways of knowing are being exercised.
Enter Jesus.
The quality of human communication that we have just discussed applies to Jesus too, but in a unique way.
Jesus is not an expert. He does not have a Ph.D in Molecular Biology.
He is not a politician. He has not been vetted against opposition research. He is not supported by political action committees that create advertisements on his behalf.
“I’m Jesus and I approve of this message”
No. None of that.
As far as our criteria for judgment is concerned, Jesus does not have very much to say for himself.
In today’s world it is more than likely that, if Jesus spoke, no one would listen.
But…
Our Christian faith makes the audacious claim that, in the person of this poor carpenter from Nazareth, we have come into contact with the Divine.
Jesus is Emmanuel “God among us.”
In Jesus we come to know the mystery of incarnation… God in human form – the appearance of the eternal, within the temporary.
Infinity made finite.
Is such an idea even possible?
Is Jesus somehow God? God somehow Jesus?
How can we know such a thing?
We cannot.
And yet, as people of faith, we affirm it.
We say “yes.”
Does this “yes” come from a place of spiritual knowing?
Perhaps, because when we say “yes” to the unusual and improbable claim of Christ’s divinity, we give mystery a tongue with which to speak to us.
Christ becomes for us the voice of eternity,
the singer whose melodies wander through infinity itself.
If, as followers of Jesus, we accept this claim – of Christ’s divinity – it is only right that we should attend, with utmost care, to every word that issues from his mouth.
So what does Jesus say in today’s scripture lesson?
According to the snippet of Matthew’s gospel that Rikki read for us, Jesus took aside the disciples and
began to show [them] that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised.
Jesus was not joking around here. He was addressing a weighty matter – a matter of life and death.
These were ultimate concerns spoken from the mouth of the ultimate itself.
And yet, instead of attending carefully to what Jesus has said, one of the disciples – Peter – rejects his words.
“God forbid it, Lord! Peter says: This must never happen to you.”
Christ and his disciples were not speaking the same language. Since Christ was speaking of ultimate concerns, he wanted the disciples to understand his words as an expression of spiritual knowledge. But the disciples, (as Peter reveals) did not hear him with their souls. They heard his words with their emotions. Christ appealed to their spiritual knowledge but they responded with their emotional knowledge.
This disconnect is made clear when Jesus responds to Peter. We are taken aback by how rude Jesus is to Peter, when he says:
“Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me…”
But after these shocking words Jesus says:
you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Christ wants his disciples to break the habit of always thinking only of human things.
He want them, instead, to develop a knowledge of Divine things.
And in his frustration he goes on a bit of a tirade in which he speaks of “divine things.”
So listen up.
This Jesus, this unique man who, unlike anyone else who has ever lived, can speak for eternity; whose teaching offers us glimpses of the infinite; whose concerns are not human, but divine… this Jesus is about to speak, and tell us, in a few short sentences, his knowledge of Divine things:
“If any wish to come after me, he says let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
We are not told to get a certificate in the latest computer programming language.
We are not told to “network” with the executives in order to move up the corporate ladder.
These might be good ideas in the human world. They are human things.
That make intellectual sense.
But Jesus is talking in a different language.
A spiritual language.
To follow him, Jesus – the divine one – says that his disciples must deny ourselves.
We must deny ourselves.
Deny ourselves and take up our cross.
Jesus is not practical or emotional. He is addressing ultimate concerns that speak to our souls: Give up what you understand to be yourself, and open yourself up to the reality that your cross – your particular form of suffering, is something that you must not ignore. Something you must carry.
This sounds crazy! It doesn’t sound prudent to give everything up and accept pain.
But remember, Jesus is not speaking the language of prudence. He are speaking the language of the soul. The language of eternity.
Why, you ask, must we do this?
Jesus explains:
For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
In the language of God, we are not our own.
We are much more than that.
So when we seek to save ourselves, according to God, we are seeking to save something less than what is real.
To find God, we must lose ourselves.
Get out of our own way.
Get out of the habit of thinking only of ourselves, and recognize, rather that we are one.
One with the mystery.
One with Eternity.
One with Infinity.
How do we know?
Because mystery said so.
Amen