Genesis 11:1-9
Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-17, (25-27)
I have always been drawn to today’s Gospel reading and wondered why we didn’t hear more about it. WE can do great works than Jesus? What is this? I’ve always wanted to hear a sermon on these words. And since I always say yes to the opportunity to give a sermon before I look at the readings, it feels as though I got a divine nudging saying, Figure it out for yourself!
And so I did!
The twentieth century philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s most popular essay is entitled The Hedgehog and the Fox. In it, he famously invokes the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, who said, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” On this, I can say that I am most definitely the hedgehog. I do know many things (we all do)—facts about the world and psychology and even the Bible, how to drive a car and play the flute, how to get a college degree and letters after my name—but there’s one big thing I know, and all these other things pale in significance to it. All my sermons are about it. It’s all that sacred scriptures say if we dare to understand below their surface level.
We are so like that ancient people of Babel. We think we can use language to build a tower and “make a name for ourselves”. That irascible Yahweh of the early Hebrew Scriptures was right in trying to show the people that what they were doing was dangerous—that acting out of fear will only scatter them and create confusion as to their true identity. And yet we still do it—we try to create names for ourselves. We try to become nice or successful or a professor or an electrician, and then we define ourselves by those labels, becoming hypnotized by the language used to describe us and creating a false self based on it. We forget about our deep inner life and the realms beneath the surface. We become more and more scattered and we misunderstand even those who seemingly speak the same language that we do. The world is fractured and divided and feels hopeless.
Centuries after the Tower of Babel, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, we began to understand that there is another language, not of words alone but of breath and fire and love. A new rush of understanding entered the world that transcended thought and language and set our hearts on fire. We began to see a new creation, a new way of being in the world—the way of love. Pentecost clearly demonstrates that when we enter into the divine life of love that we can begin to really understand each other—whether or not we speak the same language. We discover that there is another language below the surface of our lives that we are all fluent in. We can begin to understand the language of longing, of connection, of oneness.
The Gospel of John gives us a way to enter into this place of oneness, to understand this new language. Brad was very right last week when he cautioned us about the Gospel of John and how taking it out of the historical context of the small early Christian community it was written for has resulted in thousands of years of anti-Semitism and justified violence beyond imagination. The language of John, like all languages can be dangerous when taken on its surface level only. It can be a language of Babel. And I would like to add a further caveat to the reading and hearing of this Gospel. When read in its entirety is it clearly not just a collection of stories of what Jesus did and said. It is instead a road map into the mystical heart of God and Love, into mystical union with Jesus.
The gospel of John presents a paradigm for understanding our oneness with the Father—that utterly transcendent aspect of God who is beyond our language and our understanding and can only know through the person of Jesus. When we seek to embody and express our oneness with the creator, we are better able to let the trappings of false self fall away and come from a place of divine love. When we operate with divine love as our center, we become aware that we all speak the same language and are able to perform even greater acts of love than Jesus himself! What greater act of love is there than to be totally present with someone, laying aside our expectations, preconceptions and certainties to enter into the dangerous realms of love, perhaps being changed forever? The language of love leads us to a spaciousness of being that includes all things with compassion and understanding. It is a place of paradox where nothing can disturb your peace and happiness and perfect joy and yet you are able to enter into the pain of the world without being consumed by it.
The ability to express divine love pulls us out of our individual agendas and calls us to share the oneness of our being with each other. My years as a therapist and now spiritual director have shown me so clearly the importance and impact of listening to each other with divine love. To listen not only with my ears, but with my spirit, to hear not only the language of words, but the language of the souls longing to live in a connected state of oneness with each other. When we listen on the level of love we find that we can become new people. James Carse says, “A creative listener is not someone who simply allows me to say what I already want to say, but someone whose listening actually makes it possible for me to say what I never could have said, and thus to be a new kind of person, one I have never been before and could not have been before this deep listening.”
This last week, we put my 102 year old mother-in-law into hospice and brought her to our house to die. I’m sure many, if not most of you, have been in a similar situation. Standing on the brink of eternity—standing still in the face of death, letting its inevitability sink in, accepting each moment as possibly the last one, in awe of the mystery of life and death. Jesus calls us to live this way always. He calls us to live and pray in His name—from a place beyond the false self, from the heart of love to the heart of the beloved.
So what is the one big thing that I know? That we are surrounded in each moment by infinities of love, by eternities of peace and yet we most often choose to enclose ourselves in the languages of Babel with their expectations, preconceptions, criticisms and separation. It is a tremendous and awesome thing to choose the language of fire and breath and love, which is a language beyond words and which reaches into the realms of boundless freedom.
This Grace That Scorches Us
A Blessing for Pentecost Day[1]
Here’s one thing
you must understand
about this blessing:
it is not
for you alone.
It is stubborn
about this;
do not even try
to lay hold of it
if you are by yourself,
thinking you can carry it
on your own.
To bear this blessing,
you must first take yourself
to a place where everyone
does not look like you
or think like you,
a place where they do not
believe precisely as you believe,
where their thoughts
and ideas and gestures
are not exact echoes
of your own.
Bring your sorrow. Bring your grief.
Bring your fear. Bring your weariness,
your pain, your disgust at how broken
the world is, how fractured,
how fragmented
by its fighting, its wars,
its hungers, its penchant for power,
its ceaseless repetition
of the history it refuses
to rise above.
I will not tell you
this blessing will fix all that.
But in the place
where you have gathered,
wait.
Watch.
Listen.
Lay aside your inability
to be surprised,
your resistance to what you
do not understand.
See then whether this blessing
turns to flame on your tongue,
sets you to speaking
what you cannot fathom
or opens your ear
to a language
beyond your imagining
that comes as a knowing
in your bones
a clarity
in your heart
that tells you
this is the reason
we were made,
for this ache
that finally opens us,
for this struggle, this grace
that scorches us
toward one another
and into
the blazing day.
[1] Jan Richardson, Circle of Grace, Wanton Gospeller Press, 2015.
