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Blood and Thunder, Fear and Faith“I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.” “I will bear witness against you; for I am God, your God.” “All of these died in faith without having received the promises.” “The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” “Our God will come and will not keep silence; before him there is a consuming flame, and round about him a raging storm.”
Are we all encouraged yet?
Come Sunday morning we enter a space we think of as a “sanctuary” and we get phrases like I just read from our lessons. What sort of sanctuary is this anyway? And where are we going to find good news and hope this morning?
I believe today’s lessons do bring good news, but it clearly does not come in a pretty package of cuddly comfort. This is solid and sober good news: grown-up good news, if you will, and I find that rather refreshing. While the world is filled with all sorts of bad news on the one hand and vacuous, smarmy sound-bytes on the other, it’s nice to have something land squarely in the middle—words that combine reality and hope in a world that has a surplus of fantasy and despair.
So much of our very worst behavior emerges out of fear. It is not that fear does not have a role to play. If bee stings send you into anaphylactic shock, it is a very good thing for you to fear bees and exercise caution around them. Fear responses have kept our species alive in a world with no lack of dangers. Unfortunately, fear can also take over and be invoked or applied where it is not appropriate and the responses it evokes are not helpful.
How many survival mechanisms embedded deep within our genes and how many live events have programmed us to respond with fear? How many years do we spend in therapists’ offices learning other more appropriate ways to understand and respond to situations where old patterns keep asserting themselves to our detriment? How easily do we fall prey to those who would raise our fear level to manipulate us?
When we see the world as unremittingly scary, we retreat, we build defenses, we struggle to control chaos and fear by playing power games, we become manipulative and desperate, we lose our compassion, we treat the “other” as our enemy. We forget the image of God in the other and in ourselves. We become less than ourselves. And we make things worse.
Even our religion becomes a device to get what we want: God’s blessing and forgiveness and approval. We pray “thy will be done” while we are really doing everything we can to ensure that our will is done. We forget how God called to us in love and invited us into a passionate and transforming love affair with the divine. We lose our first love. We show up, we do the expected thing, we get our ticket punched. Then, when we find a great parking place on Monday we think it’s because we went to church. Well, that usually comes out as a joke, but that we even joke about it says something.
Mechanical religion, like a mechanical relationship, simply does not work. There may be a semblance of the real thing, but on the inside it’s hollow. We come to win God’s favor, not to let God transform us, and God replies: “Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me…. Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.”
Isaiah does include good news, however. “Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” In other words, God is less interested in our pious façade and profoundly interested in our doing what we were created for—acts of justice and love, compassion and decency, living in community in a way that reflects the God in whose image we are made.
I’m an odd duck. I love preaching on the Trinity. Consider for a moment the ground of all being and becoming as a dynamic relationship of love. Instead of all those strange terms like “coequal, co-eternal, consubstantial” and the like, ponder this: the Persons of the Trinity interact as equals, without fear, without constraint, in total freedom and complete mutuality, from power, for the sake of love, submitting to one another in love. Isn’t that the model for our relationship with each other?
Not that we are equals with God, but that we treat each other as equals. When Jesus came proclaiming the Reign of God he was talking about a radically different way of being in the world, one based in God’s passionate desire for a new community of justice, freedom, and love. He kept inviting us beyond fear. So think about this alternate way of being in the world: acting without fear or constraint—get your mind around that one for starters—in freedom and mutuality, from a position of power instead of weakness, out of love instead of fear, submitting because you want to and choose to, not because you have to or are afraid not to.
Isaiah says that even with our hands full of blood, we can wash, and our scarlet sins can become white as wool. We cannot only envision God’s alternative, we can actually experience it, participate in it, make it real.
This does not mean we get a new set of facts on the ground. The limitations of the world as we know it will remain, including all the hardships and challenges. What we do get is a new perspective, a new context, a new way of seeing—and these enable us to risk a new way of being and doing.
There is a difference between living a faith-based life and a fantasy-based life. Faith deals with reality but sees more possibilities than either what has been done in the past or is evident in the present. Fantasy denies reality and we pretend we can wish it away. God does not call us into fantasy but God does call us into the possibilities of faith. Jesus tells us not to be afraid, assures us of God’s good pleasure toward us, and then challenges us to let go of the security blankets by which we try to protect ourselves from our fears. He calls us to begin living in God’s future, no longer trapped in our past.
Once upon a time there were three bears: Bentley, Brenda, and Bradley. They served a very great mistress who had things to do elsewhere and told them to have things ready for whenever she returned. For a little while things went on as normal, but when the mistress did not return as quickly as they expected, changes began to occur.
Bentley, who lived up to his name, was the mistress’ chauffeur. He kept her small fleet of extraordinary vehicles in tip-top shape, including the midnight black Bentley, the silver Rolls Royce, and the Aegean blue Fucci-Minulli (the only one in the whole world). Each of them had always run smoothly and Bentley kept them shining like mirrors. But as the mistress delayed her return he began to wonder why he bothered. Bentley began to spend a little more time touring the countryside on his Harley and less time maintaining the mistress’ mini-fleet. He saw no point in putting all that effort into his work when the mistress was not there to appreciate it. Dust began to accumulate and Bentley no longer cared.
Brenda could not understand Bentley’s lackadaisical attitude at all. All her life had been dedicated to pleasing her mistress. Brenda kept house and she ran a tight ship. The growing wait for the mistress, however, distressed her. She worried about when the mistress might return and so wanted to be ready. She picked her brain for any clues the mistress might have left—a note tucked away somewhere, a casual word. Brenda looked for any hint she could find. She even began checking obscure prophecies in Ezekiel, Daniel, 4th Ezra, Enoch, Revelation, Nostradamus, the Weekly World News, and the latest postings online at various sites dedicated to the Rapture. She found all kinds of hints that correlated with the latest headlines but they seemed to point in twelve dozen directions at once. The Left Behind books scared the bejeebers out of her. Brenda jumped at every ring of her cellphone, lost sleep, lost weight, and let her housekeeping slide, she was so consumed with anxiety over the mistress’ return.
Bradley had trouble understanding both his coworkers. His task centered on the kitchen. He shopped, he cooked, he scrubbed, he kept meals ready in the freezer and, when he had time, put up preserves. If Bentley was once known for shining vehicles, Bradley was known for the shine on his copper pots. His was the kind of kitchen where one might dare to eat off the floor, it was so clean, and he even hummed to himself when he struggled to clean the pans where baked chicken stuck like glue. Bradley assumed the mistress would return whenever she chose and he just kept about his work.
When the mistress eventually returned, only one of the three bears was ready. The mistress came into the kitchen, told Bradley to sit down, uncorked a bottle of wine, whipped together a nice chicken salad, and they had a nice chat. Brenda and Bentley, alas, did not fare so well.
What sets us free to just be who we are called to be and do what we were made to do? What allows us to be faithful and not fearful? How can we enter into God’s world of possibilities? Certainly not by denial, nor by fantasy. There is some middle ground where we both receive a gift of faith and we choose to act in faith, somewhat like Abram and Sarai who dared to go beyond what had been—or like Mary of Galilee who took the most incredible risk in saying yes to an outrageous God, allowing God’s Light to enter our dark world by facing the darkness.
The following is a poem by Kathleen Raine entitled “Northumbrian Sequence IV”:
Let in the wind,
Let in the rain,
Let in the moors tonight,
The storm beats on my window-pane,
Night stands at my bed-foot,
Let in the fear,
Let in the pain,
Let in the trees that toss and groan,
Let in the north tonight.
Let in the nameless formless power
That beats upon my door,
Let in the ice, let in the snow,
The banshee howling on the moor,
The bracken-bush on the bleak hillside,
Let in the dead tonight.
The whistling ghost behind the dyke,
The dead that rot in the mire,
Let in the thronging ancestors,
The unfilled desire,
Let in the wraith of the dead earl,
Let in the dead tonight.
Let in the cold,
Let in the wet,
Let in the loneliness,
Let in the quick,
Let in the dead,
Let in the unpeopled skies.
Oh how can virgin fingers weave
A covering for the void,
How can my fearful heart conceive
Gigantic solitude?
How can a house so small contain
A company so great?
Let in the dark,
Let in the dead,
Let in your love tonight.
Let in the snow that numbs the grave,
Let in the acorn-tree,
The mountain stream and mountain stone,
Let in the bitter sea.
Fearful is my virgin heart
And frail my virgin form,
And must I then take pity on
The raging of the storm
That rose up from the great abyss
Before the earth was made,
That pours the stars in cataracts
And shakes this violent world?
Let in the fire,
Let in the power,
Let in the invading might.
Gentle must my fingers be
And pitiful my heart
Since I must bind in human form
A living power so great,
A living impulse great and wild
That cries about my house
With all the violence of desire
Desiring this my peace.
Pitiful my heart must hold
The lonely stars at rest,
Have pity on the raven’s cry,
The torrent and the eagle’s wing,
The icy water of the tarn
And on the biting blast.
Let in the wound,
Let in the pain,
Let in your child tonight. *
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” Amen.
* This poem is from Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine, © 1965 by Kathleen Raine. I found it in Vol. 1 of The Liturgy of the Hours, the English edition of the Divine Office according to the Roman Rite, where it appears courtesy of Hamish Hamilton, London, for Kathleen Raine.
End Document — St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church