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This Extraordinary Power
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 20, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 34:29-35 II Corinthians 4:1-12
“Not long ago on an August afternoon,” writes novelist Andre Dubus III, “I found myself in a seaside town on the West Coast.” There Dubus and his family were passing the time by wandering through shops on the beach as they waited for the ferry that would take them farther up the coast. Amid the venders of hand-tooled leather hats and artists’ easels holding half-painted pastels of the waterfront, Dubus spied a bookstore. He scooped up his two-year-old and made haste only to find himself in the wrong place. The first hint of his misplacement, he writes, was the smell. The place did not have the smell of a bookstore: “that beckoning scent of pine shelves and dust and slightly damp paper and the old-glue scent of hundreds of aging hardcovers.” Rather there was incense in the air, “a cross between ginger root and sage.” Furthermore, it did not sound like a bookstore. It seems the sound system was chanting something amid “the low tinkling of chimes.” The shop-keeper or, as it turned out, the spiritual healer sat behind a counter full of polished stones and rocks, fixing her gaze on the half-melted ice cream cone in the two-year-old’s hand. Promising not to let the child touch anything, Dubus drew closer to the shelves in search of fiction or poetry. Instead his eyes were met with categories of Healing, Psychotherapy, Transcendence, Self-Help and Spiritual. He had, of course, stumbled into a spiritual bookstore. And in spite of the small acts of transcendence he attempted every Sunday when he worshipped with this family, he knew he was in the wrong place! He got out, he says, as fast as he could. A little farther down the street, he came upon the right place, another bookstore “full of fiction and poetry,” he writes, “some Miles Davis playing, the man behind the counter in a T-shirt, smoking a cigarette and reading a fat hardcover with no dust jacket.” This place even smelled like a bookstore, with the bonus that the store’s back windows opened onto the sea. I am caught on an August morning, by way of Dubus’ bookstores and Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, between these two approaches to our life with God (call them the spiritual and the material), between two disparate presuppositions about the extraordinary power of God (one supernatural and the other radically incarnational), and so between two oppositional understandings of where we are most likely to find ourselves face to face with the God we have sought in all the wrong places. Both understandings are addressed in Paul’s words to the Corinthians, the first when he writes disparagingly of “the god of this world” that has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing “the light of the gospel in the glory of Christ”; the second as he insists that the treasure we have—which is the light of the gospel—is to be had only in earthen vessels, vessels that are afflicted but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed. And though Paul’s words concerning God’s glory would seem to be, at first glance, the stuff of spiritual experience while his words about earthen vessels merely the stuff of good fiction and poetry, it turns out that earthen vessels are precisely the matter through which the glory of God is revealed. If, then, we first step across the threshold of Dubus’ spiritual bookstore by way of Paul’s critique of the gods of this world, into what sort of place have we stumbled? Paul is writing to Christians taken in by the teachings of itinerant preachers, writing to Christians who had cobbled together what must have been, if we read between the lines, a kind of Jewish/Christian spiritual pragmatism. That is to say, their following of the law was as those practicing a technique rather than as those shaped and bowed down by Torah or by Jesus Christ. Therefore in spite of the religious ambiance apparent to his senses, Paul knew that he was in the wrong place, had entered into a community whose smells and sounds and sights may have been religious but that, at the end of the day, had little to do with the extraordinary power of the God made known of old through the law and the prophets…or with the same God whose glory in these latter days has been revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. At issue metaphorically is what Paul refers to as a veil drawn between God and mortals, a veil set aside by Christ. “When one turns to the Lord,” he writes in the previous chapter, “the veil is removed”; but in Corinth, the veil was very much in place. The metaphor has its origins in the story of Moses, who returned from his meeting with God on the mountaintop with the law chiseled on stone tablets in his arms and with his face veiled lest the glory of God be seen directly by the people and they die. By the time of Paul’s writing, religion had become what people did on the other side of the veil and it was enough. No doubt the law was as close as any people had come to the presence of the living God, the land was as tangible a sign of God’s promises as any people had been given, and the words of the prophets, even when they were words of judgment, sounded indirectly as God’s speech in the ears of God’s returned exiles. But now wrote Paul to the Corinthians, whose practice of the law had become what they believed in instead of God, now in Jesus the veil between God’s glory and human sense had been lifted. Now he said (and we say in so many words as we pray at every funeral), they were free to walk amid the things of this world with eyes wide open to the beauty and the glory of the eternal, to quit the shelves labeled spiritual in favor of the grit and gravity of this material world. The catch was and still is that religion and spirituality thrive on the existence of a veil between God and God’s creatures. The first bookstore into which Dubus wandered is in business--not to mention the mega-churches that are burgeoning--because the reigning cultural narrative proclaims a God whose supernatural power can only be channeled or whose elusive presence can only be experienced by way of a person finding the right path, learning the most effective technique, following in the steps of some self-appointed master. Often they are the most vulnerable who search in these ways for God, for a disembodied power able to deliver healing and wholeness, contentment and well-being. And even if a book found on some shelf labeled healing or psychotherapy or transcendence or spirituality should help them for a season, the smell and sound and sight of much that flies under the banner of spirituality keeps most seekers on the prowl for a relationship that continues to escape them. Put in Paul’s words, the god of this world--whose deceptive, counter-intuitive guise is the ethereal, the insubstantial, the otherworldly--is blinding their minds to the extraordinary power of the God whose chosen dwelling turns out to be fragile earthen vessels. Paul’s advice: head for the nearest exit as fast as you can, lest in the words of Thomas Merton, you give in to the temptation “to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” Find yourself in the bookstore down the street that smells of dust and slightly damp paper and the old glue scent of hundreds of aging hardcovers, where Miles Davis is playing and the man behind the counter in a T-shirt is smoking a cigarette and reading a fat novel with no dust jacket. That is to say, the treasure we seek awaits us in an earthen vessel. We will meet the God we have sought in all the wrong places where the shelves are dusty and the storekeeper reeks of smoke, where the bindings are cracked and the sea air has mildewed most of the collection. We will meet God where God has come to us: in the details and the disarray of our ordinary lives, in the messy narratives, the flawed protagonists, the tragic heroes, the disastrous and unintentional consequences of our best intentions, in the chance encounters with our baser selves. There we can hold no illusions that the veil will be lifted between us and God by our better techniques. Rather we know ourselves only as afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed, but not driven to despair, persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed because the extraordinary power belongs to God and not to us. We bow at best in praise and thanksgiving for this unexpected encounter in the dark stable of our lives where we are met and made to behold the glory of God in the face of him who now has gone before us in all these things. “In his prison letters,” writes poet Robert Cording, Bonhoeffer [who, had he lived, would have given us an imagination for what he meant by religion-less Christianity] “Bonhoeffer [the poet writes] is thankful
for cigarettes and Schelling’s Morals Vol. II. Thankful for stain remover, laxatives, collar studs, bottled fruit and cooling salts. For his Bible and hymns praising what is fearful, which he sings, pacing in circles for exercise, to his cell walls where he’s hung a reproduction of Durer’s Apocalypse. He’s thankful for letters from his parents and friends that lead him back home, and for the pain of memory’s arrival, his orderly room of books and prints too far from the nightly sobs of a prisoner in the next cell whom Bonhoeffer does not know how to comfort, though he believes religion/begins with a neighbor who is within reach. |