Thursday, March 1, 2018

Touching the Holy


A Reflection for III Lent                                                         All Saints Church, Southern Shores, N.C, March 4, 2018                                                               Thomas E Wilson, Rector
Touching the Holy

In the Gospel of John passage for today Jesus goes to the Temple and cleanses the Temple by disrupting “business as usual” in the Holy place during the preparation for Passover Time. Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell the same story during the preparation for Passover Time, but they all tell it at the end of Jesus’ ministry, during the last week of his life. 


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.
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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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