Monday Matters: Earth-shaking news
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Psalm 99 1 The Lord is King; let the people tremble; he is enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth shake. 2 The Lord is great in Zion; he is high above all peoples. 3 Let them confess his Name, which is great and awesome; he is the Holy One. 4 "O mighty King, lover of justice, you have established equity; you have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob." 5 Proclaim the greatness of the Lord our God and fall down before his footstool; he is the Holy One. 6 Moses and Aaron among his priests, and Samuel among those who call upon his Name, they called upon the Lord, and he answered them. 7 He spoke to them out of the pillar of cloud; they kept his testimonies and the decree that he gave them. 8 O Lord our God, you answered them indeed; you were a God who forgave them, yet punished them for their evil deeds. 9 Proclaim the greatness of the Lord our God and worship him upon his holy hill; for the Lord our God is the Holy One. This year, Monday Matters will focus on wisdom conveyed in the treasures of the book of Psalms. We'll look at the psalms read in church before Monday Matters comes to your screen. |
Earth-shaking news
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
-Annie Dillard
Yesterday in church, the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, we heard the story of the Transfiguration. It’s an important story, heard a couple of times throughout the year. It’s an other-worldly story about mountaintop revelation. Let your imagination picture Stephen Spielberg special effects. It describes the transcendence of the Holy One made present on earth. As such, it provides a fitting conclusion to the season of Epiphany, a season of divine manifestations.
The experience caused the few disciples who joined Jesus in that thin place to be terrified. I suspect rightly so. That is in keeping with other encounters in the scripture where people experience some kind of epiphany and need to be told: Fear not. The theme is echoed in the psalm you may have heard in church yesterday, Psalm 99 (reprinted above). That psalm echoes the biblical theme that when God’s presence is revealed, it can make the earth shake.
As I reflect on years in parish ministry, one of the things I regret, one of the things in which I participated, was in domesticating the gospel. Making it safe. Making it comfortable. Even making it boring. I did that even though my gifted sister rendered in calligraphy, as a gift at my ordination, the quote from Annie Dillard that began this morning’s email.
In our research with RenewalWorks, we found that about 25% of Episcopalians can be described as complacent, not expecting or wanting any transformation to happen to them as a result of their church engagement. It may be why the number of Nones and Dones increases. (Nones are those with no religious affiliation. Dones are those who have given up on theirs.) When it comes to church these days, people may rightly ask: “Why bother?” It seems to me that there is a need to recover a sense of amazement and the possibility of transformation, maybe even transfiguration. It seems to me that too often we envision the universe as centered around ourselves. We need to recover a sense of worship and the true meaning of the word "awesome."
I think that our liturgies are meant to help us in that recovery process. As a forgetful people, we need to do it week after week, maybe daily, maybe many times in a day. That’s why grace at meals matters, as we recall that we are sustained because of all good gifts around us.
The good news is that as we recognize that our lives unfold in the presence of a higher power, we come to know that the character of that power is love. The season of Epiphany began with Jesus’ baptism, as a voice from heaven speaks of his belovedness. The season ends on the mountaintop, with a voice from heaven speaking again of Jesus’ belovedness.
In his beautiful book, Life of the Beloved, Henri Nouwen says that we can hear that voice speaking to each one of us as well. The God of creation regards us with that beloved perspective. That seems to me to be earth-shaking news. It calls for our response of thanksgiving, praise and worship. It calls for a sense of awe, and a holy fear. To have that kind of response, it seems to me, reflects the way we were designed. It’s the way we were meant to be. On that note, let me close with this insight, really a prayer from Richard Rohr:
I do not want to belong to a religion that cannot kneel. I do not want to live in a world where there is no one to adore. It is a lonely and labored world if I am its only center.
-Jay Sidebotham
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