March
6, 2006
from the Lenten Preaching Series
Calvary Episcopal Church
Memphis, Tennessee
Slipping
into Mystery
by
Phyllis Tickle
(This
sermon is also available in audio)
Being a writer by trade, and therefore, as all of you well know, a teller of
tales, I want to tell you a story that belongs to the time of the Exodus. The
story itself is fairly slim and direct in its plot, but so rich in its sequellae
that I have chosen to write it out, lest even some small part of it be lost
to us in the gestures and nuances of a less formalized re-telling.
So
what our story says is that, by the time it actually commences,
the Children of Israel had already fled Egypt—had fled,
in fact, to the accompaniment of mighty signs and wonders and
had come, almost in record time, to the borders of the Promised
Land. They made camp there so that the people might rest and
that the land which lay ahead of them could be reconnoitered.
So it was, then, that twelve spies were sent across the river
into this lush and fertile land…sent for forty days and
forty nights to scout the land and its people…
…but
the reports with which the spies returned were not as promising
as the land itself. The country across the Jordan was indeed
rich and fecund, the spies said, but it was also filled with
mighty warriors—giants almost in their size and strength.
Ten of the scouts said there was no way that the Children, a
rag-tag band of exhausted migrants, could conquer, much less
evict, such warriors.
But
two of those who had gone to spy out the land filed a different
report. Joshua and Caleb said the Children must cross
over and enter, for Yahweh had pledged them that this land would
be the strength of their hands and the defense of their lives.
Ten almost always takes precedence over two, however, and the
Children of Israel, freshly come from the glory of a parting
sea and a Passover angel, decided to follow the advice of the
ten fearful scouts. They broke camp and returned to the desert
across which they had just come.
Yahweh
was angry at this faithlessness and decreed that the Children
of Israel were to wander for forty years in that desert they
had chosen for themselves, wander one year for every day which the spies had spent in
the Promised Land, wander until every single one of the Children,
save only Joshua and Caleb, was dead. So they did wander, and
they tested God and one by one they died, until indeed only
their children survived.
It
was those Children's children, then, whom near to the end of
the forty years, Moses, along with Joshua and Caleb, began to
lead back toward the Promised Land. But like their progenitors,
the men and women of this second generation began also to doubt
and complain. They said things like, "Let us go back to
Egypt. At least there we were fed, had homes, could live in one
place." They said also, "Who of us has seen God? To
which of us has He spoken? Who among us can say he or she believes
all the tales our fathers and mothers left us? Who?"
And
the wrath of Yahweh lashed out again. This time, the story says,
Yahweh sent snakes into the camps to kill His apostate people.
There were droves of snakes moving through the camp of the Children's
children…snakes in the tents, snakes in the bread baskets
and the cooking pots, snakes in the bedrolls and snakes in the
cribs. Then Moses, falling on his knees, petitioned God's mercy
on the people. God told Moses to take a consecrated brass vessel
at the door of the Tent of Meeting and hammer it quickly into
an image of the serpents that were attacking the Children's children.
Moses wound the brass snake around the cross-piece of his staff
and ran through the camp, holding the staff aloft and calling
out to the people in the throes of their agony, "Look up!
Look up and be saved! Look up! Look up and be saved!"
And
the Bible says that those who believed Moses, those who stopped
looking down at the snakes, who stopped trying to pull them off
of themselves and their children, but looked up instead at the
brass snake…those men and women did not die, but were saved.
This does not mean that they were not bitten, but simply that
those who looked up and not down did not die of their wounds.
Eighteen months later, it was these men and women who saw the
Jordan part before them and who walked across its dry bed to
claim the land of milk and honey promised them by God.
It's
a good story, in fact, a very impressive story, for all its slenderness.
And what the story recognizes is that all of us are going to
be bitten—painfully bitten—in this life. Most of
us learn that truth fairly quickly just from experience. But,
according to the story, it
is not the being bitten that we in this imperfect world can do
anything about; it is only the how we respond to being bitten
that we can control. When we look up, usually
we are saved by that very act of faith, for it is when we look
down and struggle with what is tormenting us that we most often
empower it by the very attention we are giving to it.
Now,
the story of the snake is superb psychology and the stuff of
great wisdom, and if we were to leave the story of the snake
right here, I would hope you would deem yourselves as having
been well served just by having heard it again; but we can't
leave it there…or I can't anyway.
If
in this country of ours where 97% of us say we believe in God
and where 84% of us presently claim to be Christian in our exercise
of that belief…if in this country religion journalists
and analysts like me ask the 84% what their favorite verse of
Christian scripture is, the answer overwhelmingly would be—and
always has been—John 3:16: For God so loved the world that
He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him
might not perish, but have eternal life.
Jesus
of Nazareth is the speaker, of course, and he is speaking about
himself to Nicodemus, a leader who had come to him under cover
of darkness to inquire whether or not this teaching carpenter
might indeed just possibly be the messiah. So it was in the context
of answering Nicodemus's query that Jesus spoke the words of
John 3:16. They are good words, and they sit reassuringly upon
our ears. They were, however, troubling to Nicodemus, for John
3:16 is preceded by John 3: 14 & 15, verses Nicodemus himself
heard but which we today almost never think to be curious about,
much less to actually look up and read. The whole of what Jesus
actually said, according to those verses, is this:
As
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must
the Son of Man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in
him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so
loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth in Him might not perish, but have eternal
life.
It
is one of the two or three times that the Christ whom we Christians
name as Son of God ever reaches back into the Torah of His people
and lays direct, specific claim to the events and actions of
His human life as being re-enactments or realizations of specific
events and actions in Jewish history. The minute he did, however,
the minute Jesus said as was Moses' snake on a cross to a plan
of release so is my death on a cross to a plan of salvation…the
minute He did that, He stepped beyond wisdom and beyond psychology
and into that component of religion which is mystery. To be specific, He
took the religion of Judaism and applied a new and scandalous
mystery to its wisdom, a mystery into which Nicodemus could not
at that time follow Him, a mystery of so great a creating love
and so eternal, daring, and intricate a plan for the creature
that only grace can make it palatable and only faith can receive
it.
And
that, finally, is what the story has taught me and what I hope
to give away to you in this Lenten time of waiting; for if my
years as a writer in the field of religion have made me aware
of anything at all, they have made me wrenchingly aware that
ours is the first generation in America's history for whom one
of the burning questions will be how every single one of us deals
with, respects, and inhabits a culture of many faiths and many
gods while living with intellectual and spiritual integrity in
allegiance to only one of them.
The
truth of the matter—and we would be very foolish to not
profess it—is that all religions deal in human psychology.
All religions likewise offer us wisdom—much wisdom, wisdom
that is useable, effective, and of worth to all humankind; wisdom
that, because it is sound, is also very similar in substance,
from one religion to another; for it is in their mysteries and
not their wisdom that religions differ.
How
the wisdom of any given religion slips over into its mysteries—the
mechanisms, the devices, by which it accomplishes that transport—these
are how the followers of that religion slip the traces of
time and space in order to enter awe. And
ultimately we all—body, mind, and soul—come to
be like unto that before which we bow.
All
of which is to say that my yearning, keening wish for all of
us here in this time and place is threefold:
- that
we may live out our lives deeply respectful of religion wherever
it exists in our world and deeply appreciative of the wisdom
within the various religions of that world;
- that
in doing these things and exercising these attitudes of appreciation
and respect, we will come never to confuse the wisdom of religion
with the mysteries of religion; and
- that
while functioning as a faithful citizen of the world, each
of us may also live as one forever held in the amazement of
a specific religion.
Amen.
Copyright ©2006
Phyllis Tickle
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