Proper 6, Year B: Losing Your Illusions: Axel Rose, Mustard Seeds, and the Veil of Separation from God
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark
1 Samuel 15: 34-16:13; Psalm 20; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10,
14-17; Mark 26-34
The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge
“O God, help me to believe the truth about myself, no
matter how beautiful it is.”—Galway Kinnell
One of the biggest roadblocks on the spiritual
journey is the presumption that God is somehow absent. In fact, Teresa of Avila
writes, “All difficulties in prayer can be traced to one cause: praying as if
God were absent.” This presumption, which gets stronger as we get older, is
what must be dismantled on the spiritual journey. You could say that the whole
purpose of the spiritual journey, the journey into union and communion with God,
is about dismantling the monumental illusion that God is distant, or absent.
The way of union with God is the way of subtraction. It’s “losing our
illusions” to quote those great theologians of the 90s Guns n’ Roses.
When we approach the spiritual journey from the
standpoint that God is absent or distant, we begin from the standpoint of lack,
of not being enough. We think we have to acquire something we don’t have and we
engage in all manner of spiritual calisthenics to make ourselves acceptable in
the eyes of God, or to get ourselves noticed by this distant, distracted deity
whose attention we have to attract by some dramatic display. Our contemporary
consumer culture, of course, reinforces this sense of lack convincing us that
we are somehow incomplete unless we have a hairline like Brad Pitt, a bank
account like Warren Buffett, and 150,000 followers on Twitter.
We might say that the illusion that God is
absent is the veil through which we must see. Jesus’ parables are all about
helping us to part the veil of separation from God, to realize and live from
the starling fact that God has indeed come near. “The saints and sages down the
ages proclaim with their lives and witness that the God we seek has already
found us, already looks out our own eyes, is already as St. Augustine famously
put it, “closer to me than I am to myself.” O beauty ever ancient, ever new,”
he continues, “you were within and I was outside of myself.”[1]
So the whole journey to union and communion is
all about discovery and realizing what is already given than it is about
acquiring something we don’t have. Last week, Paul was telling us about the
house that is not built with hands, that building from God that is eternal in
the heavens. When we learn to dwell, to abide, to rest, and live from the gift
of God that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5) we
start to learn that the spiritual journey is really all about letting go,
letting be, and relinquishing what gets in the way of our realizing that God is
already present and active in our lives. We think we have to do all manner of
things to somehow earn God’s grace. We think we have to do something to somehow
make God present. But that’s all just a trick of the mind that likes to put
itself at the center of the show. Rather predictably, it makes it about us and
our efforts rather than what God has already done. All that’s really required
is that we wake up to the Good News of God in Christ: “you have just won the
big mega ball Cosmic Lottery to beat all earthly lotteries. You are a spiritual
billionaire. At the very center of your being, in your heart of hearts, you are
always at peace, happy, filled with well-being and perfect contentment. You
are, right here and now, already in perfect union with God. Believe it nor not,
you were born that way.”[2]
Our passage from Mark this morning is all about
waking us up to the reality that God is already present at the ground of being.
In the first parable, we hear that the seed is scattered and grows of its own
accord. Whether we sleep or rise, God is present and active, and it’s our task
simply not to interfere with that process. Notice that the parable doesn’t have
a long list of requirements or hoops that the sower has to just through. The
sower is not out there with grow lamps and fertilizers. The sower is not
charting the progress of the plants and worrying about the yield or comparing
it to last year’s crop. The sower trusts that the seed is growing and knows
enough to let it be. The sower knows that God is present and active in the hidden
soil of her heart. The basic thrust of the first part of the parable is just to
let ourselves be. Let God live God’s live in you. Open to what is already there.
Or alternately, recognize then you are struggling, straining, and caught in
attainment and cycle of lack. Relax, rest, allow, be, and you’ll realize that
God’s countenance is shining upon you.
The second part of the gospel—the parable of
the mustard seed—can also read as trying to wake us up from the dream of
separation from dream. You probably remember that mustard plants were
considered weeds in ancient Israel, a little like kudzu grass or dandelions
today. These weeds are what we need to keep out of the garden if we want it
neat, orderly, and predictable. But Jesus is saying that neat, orderly and
predictable is not how God works. In God there are no distinction between slave
or free, Jew or Greek, male or female, daffodil or dandelion. Our God is a God
of surprises who is present and active in all things—even the most seemingly
mundane and ordinary.
When we get caught in the trap of thinking that
God is absent, or distant, we get tricked into looking for God in big
experiences. Like the Israelites under Samuel, we are looking for Kings like
all the other nations have, and miss how God is already present and active
within and among us in the most humble of circumstances. Jesus, the one who
comes as a servant to wash and feed, knows that our expectations of God often
blind us to how God is always already showing up in our lives. We create boxes
for what God looks like and then walk right past Him when he doesn’t conform to
our ideas of he should be. Indeed, the hearers of parable of the mustard seed
were accustomed to hearing about the nation of Israel referred to through the
figure of the mighty Cedars of Lebanon—these tall magnificent trees not unlike
our own California Redwoods. So Jesus is trying to shock us into an appreciation
of the God of small things, the God of humble and lowly, the God who shines
forth in most ordinary of circumstances and baffles our expectations by showing
up when we least expect it. We are looking for God in the Redwoods, and
bemoaning the fact that we don’t live in California. All the while, in the
dandelions right under our feet that we call Chemlawn to come out and get rid
of, God is busy revealing Godself to us that we might see through the veil of
separateness and participate in God’s mission to reconciling all things to
Himself.
The anointing of David with the horn of oil is
all about the same shattering of expectations and the revelation of God’s
hidden purpose in the least likely of places. Eliab—the one Samuel is certain
is the Lord’s anointed—is passed over in favor of the youngest, the one with
the ruddy complexion who’s out tending the sheep and too busy for all the
wrangling over who should be King. As our reading from the Old Testament
reminds us, “the Lord does not see as mortals
see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks
on the heart.” It is when we see with the eye of the heart, and don’t get
tricked by outward appearances that we begin to see how God is working in our
lives in the most ordinary of circumstances. “If the doors of perception were
cleansed,” writes William Blake, “everything would appear… as it is, Infinite.”
God has indeed come very near. He is closer
than our breath, than even consciousness itself. The seed is already sown in
the field of the heart. All we have to do it let it be, make a little space for
God to act, and allow the process of Christ-ening to unfold. When we do that,
when we realize that we have been welcomed by the Welcoming One since before we
were formed in the womb, we become places of welcome ourselves. Our little,
weedy, ordinary lives become a house with windows and doors flung wide open for
all the birds of the air whose strange and unexpected voices sing the song of the
new creation unfolding right under our blessed little noses.
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