THIN PLACES February 22, 2009, Transfiguration of ... - Brick Church

More documents

Recommendations

Info

hermit monks. We don’t live in a Celtic thin place. We have not seen the likes of Transfiguration. “Is there a mysticism for the earth-bound rest of us?” +++ Yes. At the center of the Gospel story, at the center of the enigmatic tale of the Transfiguration, stands the same bold Christian affirmation, the incarnation. The incarnation is a core affirmation of the Christian faith. The incarnation insists that somehow, somehow Eternity entered time and space in the person of Jesus Christ. And here’s why incarnation matters so much. It means that God is not “above” or “beyond,” but that somehow, God has trespassed our space and time and is “down here,” “with us,” “among us,” even “in us.” This means that God is to be found not so much in the remote or the extraordinary, not so much in the exceptional or wondrous, but rather that God can be discerned right here, right here under our noses, in what is outwardly ordinary. The theologian, Belden Lane put it this way: "The one great practical truth of the incarnation is that the ordinary is no longer at all what it appears. Common things, common actions, common relationships are all granted new definition because the holy has once and for all become ordinary in Jesus Christ." The great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, “insisted that God's naked, awful majesty could never be pursued directly.” So, he said, “in order to shield human beings from the unapproachable light of God's glory, God always remains hidden by a mask...” It is because our mortality cannot abide the brilliance of pure divinity, Luther said, that God put on the mask of the ordinary, and was born into the world you and I can comprehend. And God still wears the mask of the ordinary because, perhaps, the human eye dare not behold raw God. All of this may be the poetry of hyperbole, but it reminds us that we can comprehend only what lies within the parameters of our understanding. We are human and finite, so we must understand the Eternal in our terms, the human and finite. - 4 - * Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
Which is exactly Luther's point. God is masked in all the ordinary around us. God wears the mask of creation. God wears the mask of our loved ones and our neighbors. God wears the mask of all the simple movements and encounters of day-to-day life. The poets have often said this better than the theologians. And to my ear, no poet better than Francis Thompson, and no poem more eloquently incarnational than his "The Kingdom of God: In No Strange Land," which you have come to know is a favorite of mine: “Does the fish soar to find the ocean, The eagle plunge to find the air – That we ask the stars in motion If they have rumor of thee there?" Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars! – The drift of pinions, would we harken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors." "The drift of pinions" – angel wings – "would we harken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors." So the question in Thompson’s words is this: “How then do we open the clayshuttered doors of our souls?” Or to ask it in Luther’s terms, “How do we see God behind the mask of the ordinary?” This may be the essential religious question. If God is not “beyond,” but “here,” if God is not “then” but “now,” how do we recognize divinity in the ordinary? Belden Lane, whom I quoted earlier, hints at the best answer I know. He says that any quest to see the divine hidden in the ordinary requires of us two things: attention and love, love and attention: to pay close and faithful attention to the ordinary around us, and to see it all with the eyes of great love. Let me leave you with a riddle-clue. “A woman walks into a large, crowed room. In one hand, she holds a stick with long horse hairs stretched from one end to the - 5 - * Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
Page 1 and 2: THIN PLACES February 22, 2009, Tran
Page 3: was from Iona that Columba brought
Page 7: Listen to the sound of it. Look the

THIN PLACES February 22, 2009, Transfiguration of ... - Brick Church

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?