A
Reflection for III Lent All Saints Church, Southern Shores, N.C,
March 4, 2018 Thomas E Wilson, Rector
Touching
the Holy
Matthew, Mark and Luke tell their story
with a building up of tension between Jesus and the religious
leadership until there is an explosion of righteous anger by Jesus
which so offends the authorities that they decide he must die for his
challenging of their authority. John places this story at the
beginning of Jesus’ ministry with three more years to go. I think
they tell the same story but for different reasons for the points
that each writer’s community has to address. There has been a lot
of ink spilled giving reasons for this discrepancy on who was right
and what did it mean. If I were in the beginning of my ministry and
I wanted to know the “right” answer I would, as I have in the
past weighed in this debate; but my time here left as Rector in this
church, heck my time left on earth, is too short to waste. I want to
talk about touching the Holy in life.
When
I say “Holy” I mean something that draws me to itself infused
with a deeper meaning wrapped in mystery. Rudolf Otto called this
“mysterium tremendum
et fascinas”:
The
feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide pervading
the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over
into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it
were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away
and the soul resumes its “profane,” non-religious mood of
everyday experience. [...] It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and
early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something
beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling,
and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or
what? In the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible and
above all creatures.
The
idea of the Holy is not rational but rather based on the irrational
concept that there exists something that cannot be measured or
understood by the conscious brain but only experienced at the
preconscious level. For instance when I look at the bread and wine
that we serve up here every Sunday I know that it is only a piece of
tasteless, Styrofoam textured baked concoction of wheat and water
which we call “bread” and a rather ordinary red liquid which we
call “wine” and we say that it is the body and blood of of the
Christ, an itinerant unemployed preacher named Jesus active in an
unimportant part of the world a couple of thousand years ago. But
when I look at it and take it into myself I enter that numinous
mystery of being connected to the center of the universe.
It
is not just a game of “let’s pretend” but it is an exercise of
imagination and deep memory. I enter this mystery by being still
within myself so I can see the depth behind the surface. I find that
there are moments when I do not prepare my mind that it ends up that
I can only see the surface and then it is just a game of “let’s
pretend” to make it through. It is then that the words of Bob Dylan
come to me: “Something is happening, but you don’t know what it
is; do you Mister Jones?”
I
have searched for the “Holy” for much of my life, and traveled to
many places to experience the numinous; to mountains, to shores, to
canyons, to deserts, to Synagogues, Temples, Mosques, Churches,
Meeting Halls, Concerts, Museums, Schools, Ruins and Classes. I have
read Holy Books and did Holy exercises but sometimes I hear
“Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is; do you
Mister Jones?”
Then
there are times when I look at what I traveled to see; the Holy and
all I can see is Hokum. When Pat and I were in Israel there were
places where I had read about for years: “Oh boy! I am going to
walk in the footsteps of Jesus, on Holy Ground!” Except the Holy
places are full of conjecture and marketing because there have been
wars going on there for three centuries before the church got around
to owning property to have public meetings and there was a market for
making money off pilgrims coming to Jerusalem for Easter.
There
was a tourist trade for Pilgrims coming to Jerusalem which Jesus was
part of in John’s Gospel three different years. The trade fell off
a bit after the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 AD as a punishment
for an unsuccessful revolt. There was another revolt in 120 AD, which
was crushed, and the Jewish people were kicked out of Jerusalem and
it was made into a Roman City as a Pagan City called by Hadrian,
“Aelia Capitolina"
with a huge Temple of Venus as a tourist draw. When Christianity
became legal, Constantine’s mother, Helen, in 325 AD had the Temple
of Venus torn down and put up the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre in its
place. A lot of money came from Constantine’s Treasury to put up a
bunch of Holy Places for the tourist trade. The centuries that
followed had Persians, Byzantine Arab, Crusader, Turkish, British and
Israeli armies marching through at one time or another. I left some
places feeling like a fool because any “footsteps of Jesus” was
guess work and it was under twelve feet of rubble anyway.
I
remember one place, the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre where there
is a huge transparent glass dome over the “Rock on which Jesus was
crucified”. The dome had been put up to keep pilgrims with hammers
breaking off a piece of the rock as a souvenir. There is a opening
where your arm can get in and reach in to touch the rock as an act of
devotion. I did it and as I walked away, my thought was of being
sold a bill of goods in, to use Jesus’s words, “a market place”
instead of a Holy Space.
Except
what made it a Holy Place was when people came to share their
devotion to a mystery they did not understand. If you only come to a
place to live into facts, you miss the point. Holy Spaces are all
over the place. It is the touching of the Holy over centuries that
gives the rock its sanctity and God honors it.
I
think when Jesus was visiting the Temple he was experiencing a “Mr.
Jones” and a “Hokum” moment. All of his life he had been told
about the Holy Temple in Jerusalem where one was to experience the
presence of God. He had come to the Big City as a country rube from
East Nowhere, Nazareth and the religious authorities spotted an easy
mark to fleece. But while Jesus may have been born in a small town;
it wasn’t yesterday, and he did not fall for the sham it was. While
he knew that they were many people with him who saw the show as Holy
but on that day he wasn’t buying it.
The
thing is that Jesus returns to the Temple many times in the next two
years and he is able to join God at work there in numinous moments of
experiences of healing. He will make pilgrimages there and will see
both the Holy and the Hokum, blessing the place with his presence.
For Jesus there is no God forsaken place; there may be that feeling
of being forsaken but that feeling is false for the Divine Presence
is available in all things.
Jesus
coming to the Temple is a metaphor of what happens when Jesus comes
under my roof in prayer; he sees the Holy and the Hokum in me and he
calls it what it is and blesses me with his presence.
This
is what happens here at All Saints we come together as a blend of the
Holy and Hokum and we touch the Holy in one another. We share the
Peace of Christ, the Cup of wine and the Bread by word or deed to say
how we are all connected to one another. Hindus have a greeting;
“Namaste” which
comes from the Sanskrit where the word ‘namah’ means bow, ‘as’
means I,, and ‘te’ means you, translating into “I bow to you.”
It means the Spirit in me bows to the Spirit in you. The Christ in me
greets the Christ in Thee. The Holy in me touches the Holy in you.
This is the true touching the Holy.
Touching
the Holy
Folding
hands and by “I’m sorry” saying,
changes
the atoms in space between us,
moving
from a profane to a sacred, thus
arriving
into a blessed time fit for praying.
With
no heed for pews, vestments or spires,
I
leave behind all my claims for preference
adopting
new different frames of reverence,
beginning
listening to sounds of other choirs,
on
other shores and other planes of existence,
to
touch the vibration sounding deeper truth
wondering
why we had forgotten from youth,
a
beyond the beyond, given to any substance.
The
Holy is here, in the middle of the ordinary
Divine
placed awe-filled peace extraordinary.
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