Scandal, August 23, 2015, The Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith

The sun is warm,
The wind is wild
The grass is green along the shores,
Here no bull can hide

The teacher held up his staff and waved it before his monks.
"If you call this a staff," he said, "you deny its eternal life.
If you do not call this a staff, you deny its present fact. Tell
me just what do you propose to call it?"

And here’s one you’ve heard many times:

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

These are koans from the Zen masters. A koan is a riddle without a logical answer. To the casual reader some of these riddles will seem utter nonsense.

“The purpose of the koans,” one Zen teacher writes, “is to break the mind of logic. What the master wants of the pupil is not understanding in any usual sense. He wants to "burst the bag," and drive the pupil with whole-souled precipitation into [enlightenment].”

Jesus is using a similar teaching method in today’s gospel, but instead of koans, he scandalizes his disciples. The Greek word scandalon means a stumbling block, something you trip over as you pursue your spiritual journey.

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them...whoever eats me will live because of me.” His words here are a scandal, a stumbling block. Many people, once they hit that stumbling block, give up the journey.

Those of us who grew up in the faith are hearing this after centuries of teaching and practice of the Eucharist, so we’ve gotten used to this imagery, but for those hearing it for the first time, you can’t blame them for doing a 180 degree pivot. The words are a stumbling block.

But as with a Zen koan, if you can hang in there, that very stumbling block will lead you to a deeper understanding and a fuller life.

Jesus does this. He scandalizes people. A lot.

He’s like Georgia O’Keeffe, the artist known for her amazing paintings of flowers. The paintings are huge and colorful and in your face. She says why she paints them this way:

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

And like O’Keeffe, Jesus in today’s gospel wants to make sure we, in all our rushing around, really, really come to understand a profound paradox, whether we want to or not.

This particular stumbling block points us beyond an either-or kind of consciousness common among Greek thinkers in John’s day: time versus eternity, the good versus the bad, truth versus falsehood, life versus death, male versus female, past versus future, darkness versus light, earth versus heaven.

One of these oppositions in John’s time was flesh versus spirit. Many Greek philosophers saw flesh as evil, spirit as good. The spiritual path required disciplining and denying the flesh for the sake of the spirit. We in the West are heirs of this philosophy. It helps explain today’s cultural distrust and disregard of the body and many of our taboos against sex and women.

Over against this split, John says starkly: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Creator spirit who existed before time entered fully into our human flesh. Now there’s no more split, and this is the paradox Jesus wants his disciples to grasp here: that flesh is charged with spirit, earth is wedded to heaven.

You can no longer say that becoming spiritual is at the expense of your body--your bones and muscles and ligaments, your pleasures and pains, your delight in good food and music and sex, your physical health, your veins and arteries, your breath and heartbeat. All these bodily things are charged with spirit because the Word has become flesh.

This opens a new spiritual appreciation. As one spiritual writer puts it,

As our senses sharpen, we pick up the buzzing of the bees and the rustling of the wind through the leaves. We become aware of the remarkable artistry in the veining of every leaf and bird feather. Inevitably, at some point, we sense the musculature beneath our own thin skin that miraculously holds us at 98.6 degrees in both snow and blistering sun. We wiggle our toes and stretch our arms and enjoy the sun or perhaps the taste of a raindrop on our tongue. This is God’s gift of sensuality awakening--becoming more sensitive and appreciative. 

This oneness of flesh and spirit has implications for how we live, because this spiritual path demands a profound love for our bodies, a concern for what we eat, the substances we put into our bodies, how we exercise, make love. It involves not subjecting ourselves to the absurd Barbie-doll and Ken-doll body images the media present to us. It involves creating living environments for ourselves and each other that are healthy and beautiful. This spiritual path is very fleshy.

And this oneness of flesh and spirit has implications for life in our larger society.

• In a gentrifying city like ours, with the bodies of so many families and seniors being evicted from their homes and ending up on the sidewalk, this oneness insists on the basic human right to decent physical shelter.
• In a culture of rape, this oneness of flesh and spirit involves women stepping forward to demand respect for their bodies, and the rest of us honoring that demand. 
• In a racist culture, when black and brown bodies are confined to ghettos and prisons and detention centers and many times beaten and killed, this oneness of flesh and spirit involves people of color demanding respect for their bodies as well, and our society honoring and protecting those bodies. 

Te-nehisi Coates, a black writer, reflects on what honoring his body has meant for him as a black man:

You preserved your life [as a black person] because your life, your body, was as good as anyone’s, because your blood was as precious as jewels… You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs nor to the insidious gravity of the streets. Black is beautiful--which is to say that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths must be protected against modern surgery. We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self...to defiling and plunder.

Because the word has become flesh, spirit and flesh are now one. In scandalous words--eat my flesh, drink my blood--Jesus guides us to embrace and honor that oneness.

At the end of this passage, after many have left, Jesus turns to his apostles and says, “Have I scandalized you? Will you also leave?”

This joining of flesh with spirit, with all its implications and demands, can be for us, as it was for them, a stumbling block, leaving us with a choice: to leave what seems on the surface a very strange and grotesque spiritual path, or to continue with just enough trust and a wild hunch that these scandalous words of Jesus just might lead us to life.

St. Mary the Virgin, August 15, 2015, the Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith

I want to say a few things about Mary herself and then about her song in today’s gospel.

• She was a teenage Jewish girl from a fourth world country, a country under brutal occupation by a foreign power. 
• Despite the efforts of Western artists to portray her as white, she in fact had dark skin, dark brown eyes, and dark hair. 
• Some English translations say she was a handmaiden, which sounds nice, but the Greek word Luke uses is “doulos,” which means slave or servant. She was a servant girl in a fourth world occupied country. 
• And her name was Mary, a Hebrew name with two meanings. The first meaning is bitterness. She lived in a bleak time of struggle. Like many of her fellow Jewish women from Miriam on down, Mary knew the bitterness that her own people experienced under the slavery and oppression of foreign nations, from Egypt to Babylon to Rome. Like them she struggled to keep hope alive in her people.
• The second meaning of her name is rebellion. Not the Mary meek and mild of Hallmark Christmas cards, she is the one who rebels against anything that crushes the human spirit.

And this young woman is betrothed to marry Joseph when, in a powerful moment, she suddenly has an extreme makeover. She becomes not only pregnant and a mother, but also a powerful prophet who sings the revolutionary words of the Magnificat.

God, she says, 

...has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

Words you might not expect, from a slave girl in an occupied land. Where did this powerful song of hers come from?

These words emerge not from the hot political winds of her day, but from a deeper place, a moment of solitude. Away from all the ruckus and the noise, in an annunciation she had heard an angel say to her: “Rejoice, highly favored one!”  She took those words in. They transformed her. 

Seeing herself as a beloved child of God with an infinite beauty and dignity, she is able to discern the ways God is moving and acting in her own individual story and that of her people. She says Yes. Out of her solitude she embraces a new calling, steps into a new, larger identity as both a mother and a powerful prophet.

It starts in solitude. Her words are grounded in a profound relationship with God, with the child in her womb, and with her own people.

In our society we are inclined to avoid this kind of hidden solitude. We want to be seen and acknowledged. We want to be useful to others and influence the course of events.

As Henri Nouwen writes: “When we enter into solitude to be with God alone, we quickly discover how dependent we are.  Without the many distractions of our daily lives, we feel anxious and tense.  When nobody speaks to us, calls on us, or needs our help, we start feeling like nobodies.  Then we begin wondering whether we are useful, valuable, and significant.  Our tendency is to leave this fearful solitude quickly and get busy again to reassure ourselves that we are "somebodies."  But that is a temptation, because what makes us somebodies is not other people's responses to us but God's eternal love for us. To claim the truth of ourselves we have to cling to our God in solitude as to the One who makes us who we are.”

In the normal comings and goings of our lives, responding to other’s reactions and evaluations and judgments of us can leave us alienated from ourselves, distorted. We can lose touch with our true selves. We can create what early teachers in the church called false selves, distortions of who we were called to be.

I’ve mentioned before the story of the guy who went to buy a suit. He’s standing in front of the mirror and says to the sales clerk, “The sleeves are too long.” The sales clerk says, “Oh, no, sir. The sleeves are fine. Look, you just need to hold your shoulders a little higher and stretch out your hands a little farther. Like that. See, the sleeves are fine.” The man says, “Yeah, but, look, one pant leg is longer than the other.” The clerk says, “No, no, sir. If you just slightly bend one leg, like this, the legs are fine.” The man says, “Yes, but look, one shoulder seems higher than the other.” “Oh, no, sir,” insists the sales clerk. “If you just hold your left shoulder like so… There, the shoulders are even now.” Reluctantly, the man decides to buy the suit and to wear it home. As he is walking out the door, trying hard to keep his suit in place, two elderly women are watching. One says, “Oh, did you see that poor man, how crippled and twisted he looks.” The other woman says, “Yes, but did you notice how nice his suit looks!” 

In our day-to-day lives, responding to all the reactions and evaluations and judgments others have of us can leave us alienated and distorted like that guy with the suit. We can lose touch with our true selves.

But if we can step away from the crowd, as Mary does in that moment of annunciation, then solitude can be a place of purification where we can find our true selves as beloved sons and daughters of God. We can connect with the source of our strength, discern the fullness God is calling us to.

In our neighborhood right now, many poor families and senior citizens are being evicted from their homes. With all the new luxury condos being built, the market value of property is going up. Landlords are seizing the opportunity to raise their rents sometimes by 50 and 100%. 

And in our neighborhood and all across the country, many young people of color continue to die from gun violence, often at the hands of the police. From Ferguson, to Charleston, from Michael Brown to Amilcar in our own neighborhood, we’ve seen some bleak moments this past year. 

In the bleakness of her own times, with her own people at times being slaughtered by the Romans, Mary moved into a moment of solitude, and there she heard a call to become larger, more loving, prophetic. I wonder what we might hear today if we, in our own context, listened in solitude as she did. 

James Baldwin, the African-American writer, was an insightful critic of both Christianity and of religion in general. He rightly rebelled against the ways religion, in the face of cruelty and injustice, was often used to constrict and paralyze the human spirit, especially the spirits of African-Americans. He wrote at one point, “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

He’s right. If your own image of God crushes you with anxiety, diminishes you in the face of the world’s challenges, constricts your compassion for those suffering around you, and diminishes your joy, then you’re better off being an atheist. Better to have no God than a God who diminishes you like that. 

Because this cannot be the true God. This is not the God whom Mary encounters in her solitude and from which emerges her powerful Magnificat. This is not the God who waits to speak to our own hearts in this neighborhood and this country at this critical moment.

One of the early teachers in the church said that “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.” 

This is the God that Mary encounters, the one who calls her to be more fully alive. 

This is the God that St. Paul says gives us “not a spirit of timidity, but one of power, and love, and a good mind.” 

This is the God who speaks to us, calls to us, as he did to Mary. 

The popular American spiritual writer Marianne Williamson puts it beautifully. “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Mary emerges from her solitude with a new stride, a new and larger sense of herself, a new song, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” We should take her words at face value: that God becomes bigger, magnified, by this young woman's unique soul. Over time, the unique shape of her life will make God more God than before. This was the calling she heard and said yes to in that moment of solitude when she was able to hear the angel’s words.

I wonder what song would emerge from our own hearts if you and I-- as individuals, as a parish, in our own contexts--entered into the kind of solitude that Mary did. What would we look like?

Would we emerge larger, full of more life, more love, more joy, more compassion, more justice? 

In the new expansiveness of our own souls we discovered there, how would we in our own ways make God bigger?