C3/CCC Sermon Transcript for December 2, 2007
John Bradford, a university student, was on the side of the road hitch hiking on a very dark night and in the midst of a storm. The night was rolling on and no car went by. The storm was so strong he could hardly see a few feet ahead of him. Suddenly he saw a car slowly coming towards him and stopped. John, desperate for shelter and without thinking about it, got in the car and closed the door, only to realize there was nobody behind the wheel and the engine wasn't on! The car started moving slowly. John looked at the road and saw a curve approaching. Scared, he started to pray, begging for his life. Then, just before he hit the curve, a hand appeared through the window and turned the wheel. John, paralyzed with terror, watched how the hand repeatedly came through the window but never harmed him. Soon after, John saw the lights of a pub down the road so gathering strength, jumped out of the car and ran to it. Wet and out of breath, he rushed inside and started telling everybody about the horrible experience he had just had. A silence enveloped the pub when everybody realized he was crying and wasn't drunk. Suddenly two other people walked into the same pub. They, like John, were also wet and out of breath. Looking around and seeing John Bradford sobbing at the bar, one said to the other, 'Look, Bruce, there's that idiot that got in the car while we were pushing it.' There is always more to life than meets the eye There is more to life than what our habitual sight has come to see. Margaret Wheatley writes in “A Simpler Way:, “Our eyes do not simply pick up information relayed from an outside world and relay it to our brains. Information relayed from the outside through the eye accounts for only 20 percent of what we use to create a perception. At least 80 percent of what the brain works with is information already in the brain.” (p.49) We only use a small fraction of our brainpower. We very rarely exercise the full potential of our physical bodily strength. We rarely access all that is available to our senses and observation. We rarely maximize the potential of mind, body and spirit in harmony. There is always more to life than meets the eye. Every moment in life is pregnant with possibility. Every moment is awaiting your sensual wonder, that you might birth new life in the moment; new possibility, new insight and greater wisdom. My hope this Advent series, as we look at some of the extraordinary stories that are told at Christmas time, is that you might be empowered, excited, and inspired to find in even the most ordinary situations of life the most extraordinary power. The most extraordinary wisdom. The most extraordinary resources. And my hope this Christmas is that you might also be more open and more trusting to that which you do not yet know. The vast consciousness that is as yet hidden from us. Helen Keller described it as a “misty consciousness.” My hope is that through the mist of your consciousness you might be opened to new and more powerful possibilities in your life. Even if that misty consciousness is the tears of lost hope or a lost loved one. May you find even in that moment some extraordinary power to live your life more fully. The miracle of Helen Keller’s life was only firstly that she was able to speak and sound out words. The far more profound miracle was that she was able to experience meaning in the words that she put on experiences. Words that could put flesh on her experience of water! This was the ultimate miracle. The wonderful miracle of Helen Keller’s life was the misty consciousness that was growing exponentially in her world. Extraordinary Knowing and Kundalini in New York Yesterday I did a Kundalini yoga class in New York City. Let me tell you a little about that, and what happened to me while I was in the class. Kundalini is a word that signifies something very similar to prana; it’s the life force that lies dormant in us most of the time. The Kundalini is the coiled snake that resides at the base of the spine. Whether you understand that literally or metaphorically, there is a dormant power within you that lays waiting realization. It is realized when you come to that wonderful uniting of body and mind and spirit, which is what Kundalini yoga is all about. During the class we were encouraged to keep our eyes closed, and while we were doing the various poses, movement and stretches, we were encouraged to look to what is described as our “third eye.” You can try it if you like, if you close your eyes and look up just towards your brow, according to that tradition that is described as your third eye. I have to tell you that I was feeling slightly uncomfortable because it was my first time doing this type of yoga, and I didn’t know the moves. When I was asked to keep my eyes closed, I felt anxious. I was in the middle of a warrior stretch, with my eyes closed, looking up just above my brow. Do you know what I saw as clear as day? There was a quality to my vision that made it clearer than sight. I saw the teacher sitting there right in front of me. It was so ordinary and yet at the same time it was just what I needed to trust her words, to go with her and what she was describing, and I didn’t need to open my eyes. It was a wonderful moment for a rational person like myself to surrender to this moment and to go with the flow of the class. I wonder whether some of you are a little uncomfortable with talk about a third eye and life force and prana. I wonder whether some of you are feeling at this point quite logical and rationalizing the experience that I had. Maybe some of you have had your own experience seeing things or knowing things or sensing things and you couldn’t explain your experience. I wonder whether some of you have had experiences of extraordinary knowing but have never been able to speak out loud the experience because our culture, and particularly our church culture, doesn’t encourage this type of knowledge. Church culture has so often been one that is rational and logical and disinterested in personal experience. Truth is propositional. It comes from scripture and the tradition, and it is a neat package, and if you want it we’ll give it to you but you must follow it the way we tell you to. The Church and the Senses The most dramatic expression of this church tendency to deny personal experience came in the church’s response to Galileo, the 16th century Physicist. Galileo came several decades after Copernicus with the very same theory. The Copernican theory was that the earth was not the center of the universe and then as a consequence of that, the church is not the center of the earth. When Copernicus expounded this theory, the church was grateful. They appreciated it because it was useful to them. They were able to more accurately date Easter and other yearly events because of the Copernican theory. When Galileo expounded the same theory a few decades later, the church was quite threatened, and they censored him. They excommunicated him and he spent the last years of his life under house arrest. And the reason they were so threatened by Galileo was that, unlike Copernicus, who brought a scientific hypothesis to the table, Galileo brought his own experience, the observation of his senses and research, and this was what threatened the church. Galileo became known as the “father of modern observational astronomy”. He threatened the church’s central and dogmatic control of knowledge. My hope for this community is that we can be a place incorporating the best of scientific method and also the deepest of our personal experience and hold it all together. If there is some clash between the two, some tension between science and personal experience, we can have the conversation about that. We can be an open enough place that we can have difficult conversations where there are no neat answers. The Church as Truman Show The church has functioned so much over the last centuries like Ed Harris in The Truman Show. If you haven’t seen that movie, Jim Carrey is the main character, Truman, and from the moment of his birth he was cocooned in a world of television. He was being filmed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and broadcast to the world without being aware of it. Ed Harris plays the part of the director of this gigantic global broadcast. He is a God-like character. He decides if the sun shines on Truman, if it will rain on Truman, or if things will go well or poorly for Truman. The character played by Ed Harris is interviewed and asked the question, “How do you explain that Truman has never figured out that his whole life is just a television show?” He responds, “We all accept reality as it is presented to us.” Church has depended on that fact for centuries. Reality as the church presents itself to you has become a habitual way of thinking in religious circles. The church has effectively played the role of Ed Harris, deciding what you will know, what is good for you, and what is valid as experience. And again my hope for this community is that we might be liberated from this “Truman Show” trap; liberated to think freely, to explore freely our experience and our wisdom. There is so much more to life than meets the eye. Consider even the word on a page. That word is so much more than a word on a page. Consider all that went towards bringing that word to the page- the bark on the tree, the water in the soil that grew the tree, the factory workers and the publishers who brought the book together, the context of the words on the page, the process of editing and revision, the intent of the author etc. You see the word, but there is so much more there. Peter Senge made this point well. The Virgin Birth- More Than Meets the Eye So it is with the words of the Bible. We generally only see words in a way that is familiar to us. We only see them in the habitual way that the church has presented them over many years. As you find yourselves liberated from this habitual mind, this familiar mind, you just may discover treasures of wisdom in the words and the pages of the Bible. The virgin birth has been presented to most of us according to a habitual way of thinking, which is, that the virgin birth took place literally and physically the way the church has taught it. Today we liberate the virgin birth from a literal understanding. There’s no reason to think that Matthew believed that Jesus was literally born to a virgin. There’s no reason to think that Matthew was writing a history in the way we think of history. He was writing poetry in order to build a myth. Matthew borrowed most of his material from Mark. Mark’s gospel was written before Matthew’s gospel. Mark doesn’t mention any virgin birth. Mark doesn’t even mention the birth story at all. It’s very unlikely that Matthew would have known about a virgin birth that Mark would not have also known about. If Mark had known about it, he would definitely have it included in the words of his gospel. You can’t leave out a detail like that if you know it to be true. There’s no reason to read these words as literal history. They were never written that way. In fact, in the first century they didn’t even know how babies are made. They believed women were simply ovens in which the man’s seed would reside and grow to birth. They didn’t understand the physiology of childbirth or conception and there’s no reason to read these stories as literal accounts. The gospels were written to describe an experience that early Christians had with Jesus. The experience that they had of Jesus was one of wonder and inspiration. It felt to them like they were surrounded by a miracle that was growing larger every day. It felt to them like they were surrounded by virgin births. Every moment with Jesus, every teaching of Jesus was pregnant with possibility. The only way that they could put into words this profound experience of Jesus was with poetry and myth. And so they used the notion of the virgin birth to draw together the best of the traditions’ poetry to describe a miraculous experience. There were lots of virgin births in stories around that time. The Christian story is not unique. One of the very famous virgin births is described in the letter to Hebrews. Hebrews was written even before Matthew, it was a very early epistle. It’s quite possible that when the letter to Hebrews tells of the virgin birth of Melkizedek, the great high priest of the Hebrew tradition, what Matthew is attempting to do is to equate Jesus with Melkizedek. Melkizedek was born with no mother or father, according to the tradition. His birth was shrouded in mystery. Matthew tells the story to suggest that Jesus is a great high priest in the tradition of Melkizedek. But he doesn’t come with ritual, dogma, or to squash personal experience. Jesus is a great high priest who comes to empower people to own their own experience, to think their own thoughts, to feel their own feelings, to observe their own sensations. Shrouding the story of Jesus’ birth in mystery was an attempt to both capture the sense of wonder and inspiration in his life, but also place him in the context of other inspirational stories. Jesus Birth- Extraordinarily Ordinary There is a wonderful distinction in these words from Matthew Chapter 1. Jesus is introduced in these words with two different names. The two names are Emmanuel and Jesus. Emmanuel is the name for the great unknown, the mystery that comes and resides in the midst of life. Jesus, on the other hand, is the most common of first century names. Jesus is the name that is so ordinary, and yet Jesus filled this ordinary name with such an extraordinary life. So we have Emmanuel and Jesus. Emmanuel, the unknown, Jesus, the known. Emmanuel, the extraordinary, Jesus the ordinary. Emmanuel, the unseen, Jesus the seen. While Emmanuel was the poetic, Jesus was the rational. Emmanuel was the ecstatic or passionate, Jesus was the rational, and they came together in one divine union. Jesus was the ordinary filled with extraordinary meaning. Emmanuel was the extraordinary manifesting in such ordinary ways. Matthew paints this picture of Jesus as both extraordinary and ordinary at the same time. So it is in your life. You have both the most ordinary of lives and at the same time the most extraordinary possibilities in your life. And that’s what divine union is all about, Emmanuel coming and dwelling even poetically in your life; filling the most ordinary of observations and thoughts and sensations with extraordinary meaning. Inspiring you to go deeper into this habitual mind. Draw more from it. Find resources in your mind that you didn’t know you had. See some of that “more than meets the eye” that makes life so wonderful. Extraordinary Knowing and a Pickup Truck Let me try and draw this together with one more personal experience. Some of you remember Karen Wolffis very fondly. Karen was a member of this church for many years and a good friend to many here, including myself. Tragically, Karen died about four months ago after a battle with cancer. I want to tell you about something that happened to me about a month after Karen died. Some of you may remember that Karen drove a very distinctive pickup truck. A month after Karen died I was driving through Grand Haven and I saw Karen in her pickup truck. Just as clear as day, there was Karen. It was the most ordinary moment. She didn’t even look at me. She was just there in her pickup truck driving through the streets. I went home that night and told Meg. She told me that she had been driving that day and she too had seen Karen in her pickup truck. Now, I could rationalize what happened in all sorts of ways, she’d been on my mind, I was missing her, and so she appeared in my mind. It doesn’t matter what happened, what matters is my experience of what happened. Because in this most ordinary moment as only Karen could offer, understated, matter of fact, laid back Karen appeared to me as another virgin birth in my life. And she showed me again that there is no such thing as death, there is only the continuity of life and new birth. Karen showed me again that if I can just look with clear eyes, observe with my third eye if you like, if I can liberate myself from this habitual familiar mind, that there are treasures to be seen, and wonders to be experienced. It just happened once. I haven’t seen Karen again in her pickup truck. But that too was like Karen, she didn’t need to come more than once. She made the point. I saw her. I knew the message that she brought me. We are surrounded by life on every side. Helen Keller summarized the notion of divine union with one word, “aliveness.” How do you know if you are coming closer to a realization of divine union? You know it because you feel more alive. You feel more alive and the ordinary becomes filled with extraordinary meaning, and you feel it in those moments where you drift into the unknown. You float in a sea of mystery and don’t need to have the answers. You don’t need to put it in a bundle, to put a bow around it and tie it up, just allow it to be the mystery that it is. This Christmas and in the lead up to this Christmas we’ll explore the story of the virgin birth, the story of the star that took the wise people to Jesus, stories of dreams and escapes from Herod. Fanciful stories, not based in literal history at all. Liberated from habitual mind, may you find extraordinary meaning in these most ordinary of stories this Christmas. May you be empowered, inspired, excited to live your life with the same sense of wonder and gratitude that the story exudes. May you see life for what it is. And may you always know that there is so much more to life than meets the eye. close window | ^ top | home |