April 10, 2022

Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29

Luke 19:28-40

 

Ever hear of “Nominalism” or people called “nominalists”?  I probably did once upon a time in seminary or college, but I’m not 100% sure.  Well, the term came up in my reading throughout the week and now I’m pretty sure I suffer from Nominalism from time to time.  It’s the idea that God exists among other objects in the universe, just as we human beings do or pretty much everything else does.  There’s God’s existence and then there’s the existence of everything that God created.  For the created world to experience something of God, God will have had to decide to interact, much the same way it is if you and I are to have a conversation: two distinct entities would have to connect.  But, our interaction would be natural in a sense.  Since God exists outside of creation an interaction with God would be supernatural.  And we would be left to decide if we believed the interaction to be from beyond the rules of nature or not.  Miraculous or not.  Of God or not.

And that, I think, is where I suffer – maybe where we all suffer a bit.  God is a foreign entity in our minds.  God is either intervening or not, entering our world or remaining distant, speaking or staying silent.  What happens when this is our way of viewing things is that it becomes less and less natural to see anything that is supernatural.  We become less capable of apprehending what is divine or spiritual – really real – because we are expecting it to work the way we work.  And, when we don’t see it, God – or the notion of God – becomes less and less relatable.

There are times when I feel a depressing kind of displacement that says all of this Christianity stuff is pityingly quaint, a leftover from a now aged and old fashioned modernity, or a clinging to ancient stories and cultures and understandings that are worlds apart from where we are today.  There are times when Jesus is just an idea that doesn’t feel real or relevant when compared to the rest of life.  What feels real to me now when I watch the news are the vile and horrific crimes the Russian army has committed against Ukrainian citizens in their retreat from a criminal offensive, and those only feel as real as they can when you see them on the news next to local political absurdities and highlights of the Masters.  What feels realer is the incomprehensible inexplicable fortune of my life in comparison to what Ukrainians and others in various places all around the world have experienced and are experiencing.

And, my nominalist mind has me thinking that if God is showing up or not showing up it’s in ways that make absolutely no sense to me.  Why them and not us?  This is life for people?

 

But, what I want to suggest is that the life of faith – deep faith – invites us to a different kind of seeing, what some call a “mystical seeing,” which is a much more exciting way to live, in which God and creation have another kind of relationship, and there’s no “if” to the question of God’s presence.  Here’s how Rowan Williams, the former head of the Anglican union, says it: “Creation is an action of God that sets up a relationship between God and what is not God.  Eternally, there is just God – outside time  –  and time begins when God speaks to call into being a world that is different and so establishes a reality that depends on God.  [Here’s the important part:]  It depends on God moment by moment, carried along on the current of God’s activity.  Behind and beneath everything we encounter is this action.  We may look at something that seems unmoving and unchanging, like the pillars of a cathedral or the peaks of a mountain, but what is within and beyond it is an intense energy and movement.  The scientist, of course, will tell us that at the heart of every apparently solid thing is the dance of the subatomic particles.  The theologian … will want to add that at the heart of the subatomic particles is an action and motion still more basic, beyond measure and observation – the outpouring of life from God.”[1]

In other words, creation isn’t a theory about how things started; it’s a way of seeing everything in relation to God.  If God’s attention were to slip for just a moment, if God blinked and stopped pouring God’s life into everything, it would all simply stop being.  We would all just vanish.

Lucy saw “The Passion of The Christ” last week with her CCD class.  Ever see it?  I was a bit nervous for her because she’s more of a “Dance Moms” and teenage sit-com kind of girl.  She doesn’t do well with violence and gore, and if you’re familiar with Mel Gibson’s retelling of the story you know there’s a bit of violence and gore to it.  In fact, that’s some of the criticism that I remember reading about the movie when it first came out: that it glorifies Christ’s suffering and turns him into the kind of superhero that can undergo more brutality than anyone else.  But, I’ll say that that wasn’t Lucy’s reaction.  The movie actually had quite an impact on her.  She said how it was tough to watch, but also how it really left her with the sense that God would do anything to show us that God loves us.  She said, “You really see how God/Jesus/whatever is willing to sacrifice so much, and how God will forgive us for literally anything, and how God will love us through anything.”

I was impressed.  The Passion of the Christ awakened within her that night a kind of mystical seeing; she was able to see the spiritual truth of God’s love as the truth of our lives.  This life of Christ, literally poured out in blood on the cross, became an expression of God’s heart, and mind, and way of being toward creation.  It pointed to the kind of God who is ever pouring out life, and energy, and action into existence as an expression of endless, extravagant, divine love.

On Palm Sunday, the Church begins its own telling of the Passion of the Christ, and we are given once again the opportunity to see mystically – to apprehend the spiritual reality of our lives – by joining with Jesus as he makes his way into Jerusalem and then into betrayal, and trial, and cross, and death, and ultimately resurrection.  Palm Sunday is not so much about a proclamation as it is an invitation.  That is, an invitation to relive through our patterns of holy week worship the central truth of God’s will to give God’s self.  It is a time to experience the journey, not just retell it, and a time to find ourselves anew within God’s story of creation and salvation.

Professor and priest, Sarah Coakley of Oxford University agrees.  And, because she says it so beautifully I’ll end this sermon with her.  She says, “Think of this entry into Holy Week as an invitation: perhaps not to a mere drama after all, but to a Passion to end all dramas; not to a story of justice and deserts, but to a story of divine love so exquisite as to exceed and upturn all justice as we know it.

She continues the thought:

“There are [times or] years – perhaps it is this year? – when we sense that we stand at the edge of some new discovery, either because Jesus beckons us for the first time into the deeper, mystical meaning of his death, or because our narrative and liturgical repetitions have over time broken down even our most resistant inertia: we step in, this time …and now the waters close over our heads and we stand with and in the narrative of the mystery of redemption [with those first disciples] who loved Jesus just as much as they also betrayed him. In this way the pulsing chronology of despair and new hope are vitally related because they press us inexorably forward: the unbearable contradiction of divine [divine absence and presence,] is to be resolved, not by clever argument, not by falsely-anticipated theological resolution, but by entering, waiting, enduring, undergoing, these days of passion and salvation.”[2]

Now is the time, my friends, to enter into a holy Holy Week.  Now is the time to carry our palms into the darkness and days ahead, to journey with Christ into a mystical kind of seeing, into the spiritual truths of our lives, in which a God of unending compassion and love is never possibly anywhere other than here.

 

 

[1] Rowan Williams, “Tokens of Trust,” page 36.

[2] https://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/articles/holy-week-at-salisbury-cathedral-invitation-address-1/