Proper 9, Year C: True Encounter and the Ease of Being

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Proper 9, Year C

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

This past week I we got a knock on the door shortly before dinner. Tired, and perhaps a little grumpy, I opened the door to see a lawncare salesperson, clipboard in hand, beaming his 10,000 watt smile my way. Momentarily snow-blind, I lowered my sunglasses from off my forehead, “Can I help you?”

“You mean how I can help you!”

“Excuse me?”

“You mean I how can help you!”

“Right. I mean how can you help me.”

“Let me ask you this, sir... and those are some funky glasses by the way… do like spiders?”

“Do I like spiders?”

“Yes, you know those hairy eight-legged creatures of the arachnid family.”

“Spiders…”

“Because, sir, you have a lot of them. A sea of them, even, on your front lawn and I can help with that. For a one-time payment of…”

We’ve all been there, right? The fawning obsequiousness of the door-to-door salesman whose ingenuousness is matched only by his flattery. It makes us feel like we’re just pawns in this person’s little game, objects they can manipulate with the power of their rhetoric or the voltage of their plastic grin. I find these encounters a little depressing to be honest because they aren’t encounters at all. As Gertrude Stein remarked of Los Angeles—“There is no there there.”

In the age of social media and cellphones, swimming as we are in a sea of distraction, true encounter with another is a rare thing. It’s no wonder loneliness, what Robert Putnam termed, “bowling alone” in his 2000 classic, is on the rise with nearly 3 in 4 people in the UK, United States and Japan reporting feelings of loneliness. We have hundred of friends who “like” our carefully curated posts on Facebook, but fewer and fewer true encounters with people who see us, for who we are, and love us just as we are.

When Jesus sends the seventy out ahead of him to the places he intended to go to proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God come near, it wasn’t as door-to-door salespeople of some product. That detail, “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road,” shouldn’t be taken too literally. Jesus is pointing to a spiritual disposition, a way of being-in-the-world, that leaves room for the other to other in their otherness, that leaves room for true encounter with another, and with God. The seventy’s empty-handedness is sacramental in this sense—it is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. The seventy’s outward poverty and empty-handedness is a sign of an inward openness and receptivity that journeys forth, in the power of the spirit, without agenda, without preconceptions, without what the poet Louis Zukofsky calls “predatory intent.”

Unlike the lawn guy who’s trying to play on my latent arachnophobia, the disciples aren’t sent out with a script. They haven’t learned the tricks of the trade of how to win friends and influence people. All they have are those four tiny little words, like mustard seeds—“Peace to this house.” They come without agenda. They come not just talking about peace but as transformative carriers of that peace that passes all understanding. Having experienced that peace in the person of Jesus, they journey forth as embodiments of that peace for others. “You, and you, and you, and you, just as you are,” they proclaim, “are beloved of God.”

So much of our society’s lack of peace, its dis-ease, comes from believing the story that we aren’t enough—smart enough, rich enough, skinny enough, young enough, faithful enough…. That’s the big problem Paul is addressing in his Letter to the Galatians. They think that there are other things required of them—namely circumcision—that will make them more righteous in the eyes of God. The big problem about this in Paul’s mind is that it can lead to the idea that we are saved by the works of our flesh, by whatever strategy we’ve devised to take heaven by storm on our own terms. The problem of course is that work is our work, and not God’s. We’ve placed ourselves and our efforts at the center of the story rather than what God has done for us in the person of Christ. “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul writes in those big letters in his own hand.

Paul knows first-hand the self-created hell that results from trying to do everything under his own steam. On the face of it, he was perfect. But in terms of his relationships with others he was a threat-breeding murderer. It’s same story with perfectionism. We think we have to be perfect, instead of the flawed human beings we are, and then we hold others to our self-created bar of perfection and judge them when they fall short. How we judge ourselves is inevitably the yoke under which we place others.

Paul’s transformation, and what the seventy set off proclaiming and embodying in their empty-handed, agenda-less journeying into and as love, is that we don’t lack for anything. Everything we seek we already are. The peace that is proclaimed at the end of every Eucharist, which we exchange after the prayers of the people, is the peace of belovedness, of being known and loved just as we are before we’ve moved a muscle, made an effort, or developed a to-do list for how to earn our righteousness on our own terms. That peace is the love of God that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. It’s a fact of being human, not something we have to attain. This means prayer is not an esoteric exercise whereby we try to enter some mystical state, or try to bend God’s ear with eloquent soliloquies in Cranmereque triplet prose. Prayer is simply being. In prayer we are learning to be. Just to be, as you are.

I’ll never forget when we were living in Philadelphia and my parents came to visit. They are very active people. People call our cottage north of Toronto, “the Doherty sports camp.” Every second of every day is scheduled with activities, chores, meal prep and clean up, and of course cocktail hour (we used to have clock where every number on the clockface was a 5). Anyways, they came to visit and Michelle and I were busy working, so they took a stroll through Chestnut Hill. They stopped for an ice cream cone and found a spot a bench. It was sunny and warm. The trees were just beginning to leaf out, and the first flecks of forsythia were coloring the hedgerows like someone had just gone by with a bag of saffron spice and scattered it over everything. They sat. And they sat some more. They just let themselves be there as the robins chortled and the buses rumbled past and the babies mewled in their expensive jogging strollers.

When they got home, I asked them how their day was, and they were almost without words. They tried to talk about sitting on the bench, just being with each other in the sun on a bench outside an ice cream shop on a warm March day in Philly, but they couldn’t express it. They were filled with wonder, awe, and ease. It was an experience of grace, of that peace that passes all understanding. It came free, unmertited, unearned and burbled up from the depths of their being when they gave themselves a little pause, a little break, a moment just to be.

Peace is not an idea, or a strategy for avoiding conflict. Peace is not the absence of conflict, or disagreement. Peace is the knowing-being of our own belovedness, right here and right now and it’s not dependent on outward circumstances. It’s the in-our-bones type knowledge that nothing can separate us from the love of God. It’s the knowledge that when we set down our baggage—our cloak, our sandals, our staff, our purse, our worries about how other see us—and turn the source of our being, we find there a bottomless well of love gushing up to eternal life. Once we’ve experienced that peace, we are more able to be that peace for others. We are likely see the other and let them be other in their otherness than to turn them into a plaything of our personal agenda. We’re a little less like the lawn guy and a little more like Jesus—agenda-less, open-ended love serving love in love.

To pronounce “Peace to this house,” requires nothing but that that peace has become the reality, the ground, from which we live. It’s not something we acquire through techniques. It’s not something we earn for good behavior. It freely given. All we have to do is receive it and allow it burble up. This holiday weekend, give peace a chance, let God’s love get at you and work on you, and then be that peace, that wondrous love, to all whom you meet.