The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of the 4th Sunday after the Epiphany
28 January 2018
Readings:
Deuteronomy 18:15-20
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1:21-28
Psalm 111
Being in relationship with God is an exercise in both imminence and transcendence. It is as multifaceted as our view of God reflected to us in the intimate touch of our closest loved ones, the curve of our own faces, the strangers we pass on the street, the intricate beauty of the natural world surrounding us, as well as in the infinite splendor of the cosmos we’ve been exploring in this season’s Eucharistic Prayer—which some of our 8:00 crowd may be experiencing with us for the first time today!
Today, as we gather together in a single service for this one Annual General Meeting Sunday, we have in our readings a reminder of both the imminence and the transcendence of our relational and yet timeless and eternal God.
Called together this week, we hold in our embrace both the now of our very real fiscal and pastoral responsibilities as the Calvary Community of 2018, as well as whole history of our people from 1864 to 2018, and beyond to the generations we’ll never see who will look back on us as another distant and beloved page in Calvary’s presence in Santa Cruz.
It seems a fitting Sunday to have our readings remind us of the distant past relationships with our same God of intimate personal relationship and timeless eternal presence.
Moses is nearing the end of his life in today’s reading from Deuteronomy. Looking back, he recalls the trepidation and fear of his community as they pled to have him speak with God on their behalf rather than have to face the awe of God’s presence themselves. Knowing his time is short, he assures them that God will continue to speak to them, and that God would call, from the midst of the people, another prophet to take his place. The imminent and transcendent God who led them out of Egypt would ever be with them, even when Moses time on earth was through—still as an intimate voice, heard through the prophets who would continue to carry God’s words after Moses time amongst them came to a close.
Our Psalmist exults in precisely this imminent and transcendent nature of God’s presence. God is one who acts in time, with hands of love, to feed and redeem God’s people, to bless them, make covenant with them, and to work to establish justice, truth, and equity, yet is awesome in majesty and power; timeless and eternal—one who inspires both awe and reverence (which are the traditional Hebrew sense of “fear” as used in today’s Psalm).
For us today, that divine, awe inspiring and humbling voice continues to be heard not just in scripture, but in our ongoing relationship with God where the Spirit still speaks, where we still listen with ears and heart, where we still respond in compassion and love, as well as in awe and reverence, and where we still encounter God in the relationships of community, of “this fragile earth, our island home,” as well as in our ever expanding understanding of this incredible universe that breathes with God’s own life, love, and creative energy.
Drawn into Christian community, this message of imminence and transcendence factors into Paul’s declaration that knowledge puffs up while love builds up. The community in Corinth struggled with being socioeconomically diverse, as is made clear in other parts of the letter. In the portion from today’s reading, the rich in the community, who are used to going to banquets and to buying meat in the market, which in Corinth meant it had already likely been dedicated to some god or another, take comfort in the knowledge that there is only one God and that idols are no gods at all. To them, this knowledge is one that allows them to maintain their faith while also giving them the freedom to maintain their place in society. However, to the poor, who rarely taste meat at all, and particularly those for whom consuming meat sacrificed to an idol was a threat to their faith, the prospect of eating in Christian community with those bringing idol-meat with them was a stumbling block to community and their participation in it.
Paul assures the rich that he agrees with their understanding of freedom to eat without guilt or sin, but explains that freedom in Christ is one that goes beyond what is permissible to what is loving and what builds up the whole community. For him, he would prefer to be a vegetarian than to allow his freedom to be a stumbling block to another’s faith or to the building up of Christian community. The imminence of individual freedom is held up against the transcendence of love in the Christian community that draws us beyond ourselves to an identity that is communal, that opens our perspective and our experience from an individual and myopic view of our faith to one that is a harmony of voices and an experience of self not as I, but as the “we” of community.
This week I had the joy and privilege of joining several others from Calvary to attend a talk at UC Santa Cruz by Nancy Ellen Abrams on her book, A God That Could be Real. Nancy described herself as an atheist, married to a scientist who had been working on the theory of dark matter and dark energy since the 1970s. Struggling with her weight for many years, she became part of a 12 step group, a major part of which was appeal to a higher power that she quite simply did not believe existed. Trying on what God might be to her, she began to have conversations with herself in which she played both parts—God and herself. To her, God became the character in her mind whom she couldn’t fool with denial or untruths that she told herself for years. As she said, it was surprisingly useful, helpful, and life changing to have such a presence in her life. So she began to think that perhaps there was something to this idea of God that might be more beneficial than she had given it credit. But she also couldn’t bring herself to believe in a God that didn’t measure up to science and the universe as we know it today. So she posited what in this real universe might be worthy of being called God. What she came up with was both simple and yet profound.
Showing an image of a man standing in front of a 12-foot tall ant hill, she talked about the concept of Emergence as what happens when systems of simple organism act in relationship. Inside the ant hill, which no single ant could either have imagined or known how to build, she described tunnels, roads, store rooms, and a whole complex network of relationships where food is allocated to feed the colony, where childcare is allocated, guards and soldiers are allocated, food gatherers are allocated, and all in balance that keeps the colony thriving—yet none of which could have been planned or conceived by an ant. Emergence, as she described it, is the something that occurs that is greater than the sum of its parts, and which only happens when systems are acting in relationship. At every level from subatomic particles acting in relationship to the emergence of atoms, and atoms emergence in molecules, all the way up to humans as individually emergent entities made up of a multitude of smaller emergences—and not just as a mass of functioning organs and tissues all working together in some form of life, but as a thinking and creating being. For Nancy, the level of emergence at which the whole history of human ambition in creativity, hope, and promise has functioned is where she places God—as dependent upon and emanating from us. But for those of us who take more stock in the history of human relationship with God as described in scripture, she opens the possibility of greater levels of emergence all the way up to the macro level of the universe itself being emergent in the unimaginable infinite, transcendent, and awesome God we have come to know imminently in human history. The journey of Nancy from atheist to believer was one that took her from her known universe to one in which everything we have seen in the visible universe has accounted for only about four percent of what we now know is out there. It was a journey that took her from a picture of empty space to a new picture of a cosmos filled with a presence that cannot be seen but which is nonetheless observable in relationships of action. It was a journey that took her from certainty that God was a fiction to certainty that God’s existence changes lives, changes the rules of self, other, and the whole system of interrelationship between “self” and “community” as an emergent phenomenon that changes everything.
As our Gospel today continues Mark’s story of Jesus life after the calling of the disciples, we encounter the imminent God who walked with us in human relationship, who focused his life and ministry on healing, on breaking down walls and barriers between us and God, and who astonished those who encountered him as one who taught not just with words, but with actions. Here is one who teaches not with empty words, but with the astounding actions that change everything.
This Calvary Community is a place where the sum of our individual parts has become an emergent family. We act together as a community to change lives, to inspire one another to greater faith and greater community impact, to deeper connection with our imminent and intimate relationships as well as to transcend the limited time we share in each lifetime that has made this a continuous community for the past 154 years and plans to be here well beyond the reach of any of our own individual lives.
As we celebrate the start of another year together, may we take this once a year opportunity to look around us and take in the fullness of our family all gathered together. May we draw in the collective breath of awe and wonder at all that God has done for us in the past year. May we celebrate the love that continues to build us up and draw us out into the community around us to serve our world as Christ’s hands and heart. And may we, as a community of action, find God and ourselves in the emergence of whatever new things God has in store for us this coming year!
Amen.