TEXTS FOR PREACHING

First Reading: Isaiah 6:1-9a – (an alternative lectionary text to the RCL used in Australia, New Zealand and other domains that want to continue to include the Hebrew text in Easter season).

Mind | Body
by Gregory Djanlkian, an Egyptian born American poet and professor at U. Penn.

How do they survive, riven
as they are, the one undoing
the other’s desire?

Tell the body to outrun
the mind, and the mind smirks,
whispering too loudly
this way   this way,
blocking all the exits.

And the body, luxurious
sensualist by pool side or in bed,
|doesn’t it hear the mind’s
impatient machinery ticking
it’s time   it’s time?

And only in our mind’s eye,
as we’re fond of saying,
someone else’s body leaping nimbly
in jetés of thought, or revealing
to us Act V, scene iii
in one gestural flourish,
body and mind beautifully
synchronous.

Oh, the mind is eely, slipping
out of its puzzle boxes,
loving its own wit.

And the earnest body: speak of it
with the least irony, and already
you’ve begun to unnerve it.

Better to let them have their way,
forgetting about them both
until they meet again sometime
as if for the first time
in library or steam room
ready to shake hello
or lead you to whatever door there is
and always the two sets of stairs.

Luke 24:36b-48 (Gospel reading)

SERMON

I watched the roofers this week,
finishing the copper work on the chapel,
and beginning the slate work.

I call my office “the nest”
because it is on the second floor
of ‘The Connector’ –
the little bridge of a building
that connects the big sanctuary
to the Chapel.

So my little office looks out
over the courtyard
between the two stone buildings,
eye-level with the flying buttresses
supporting the big church
and the huge trough gutters
running along the steep chapel roof.

Some years, a falcon nests
on the Pitt Petry building across the street,
and every year all manner of birds nest
in the purview of my office,
and all manner of mayhem –
public and intimate –
can be witnessed from my perch.

All of which has nothing to do with anything,
except that the noise and activity level
of roofing and repair
has been in sound-surround
outside my windows for several weeks.
I cannot help but lose myself on occasion,
watching and listening.

It is fascinating.
We normally do not get to watch roofers except from below.
And truth be told,
usually when roofers come around,
it is a good time to be gone.
But, like everything else
associated with an historic building,
this is different.

Working the copper requires
skills born of experience,
and the same with slate.
It is clear that these men
have been doing this work for a long time.
They are likely unaware
of how skilled they are
and how valuable those skills are to the rest of us.

I found myself watching one man
fitting a sheet of slate,
working with it for several minutes
until he got it exactly the way he thought it should be.
He was a large man,
sleeveless shirt on a chilly day
exposing alternative sleeves of tattoos.

My attention went from his hands
working the slate,
to his feet
balancing precariously on a narrow plank,
to his tattoos
that must have cost a fortune,
to his singing and banter with his colleagues
as heavy metal blared from the radio.

He knew his craft so well it was second nature to him –
he flowed with it
and it flowed through him.
If I would have asked him to consider this
and analyze it,
he might think me crazy
and not recognize what I was seeing.

Then I turned around toward my desk
and began reading Isaiah.
It hit me like a ton of slate:
I do the same thing.
I know nothing about roofing copper and slate
but I do know about reading sacred texts –
I have been doing it
one way or another,
since I was eighteen years old.

Now that probably does not come as a shock to you,
but it did give me pause.
It is so second nature to me,
that I forget it is not second nature to many of you.

No doubt, some of you
read the Bible with fluency,
or other sacred texts,
and so
King Uzziah’s
and six winged Seraphs
and Dead Men Walking
do not seem extraordinary.

But for others of you,
if these texts are read without the skills
developed by experience,
then they are just
bizarre,
absurd,
and perhaps even stupid.

I can see why atheist’s
can become so incredibly scornful
and mocking of religion,
when they have no skills
with which to read sacred texts.
It would be worse than trying to read a map
without a legend.
Besides coming to the text
with the expectation that there is nothing there,
they also have no way to perceive
what actually is there.

If we read these texts like a menu,
or worse,
like a recipe
or equation,
they offer the ridiculous
rather than the sublime.

If we read Isaiah,
for example,
as a description of an actual event
rather than a vision
or dream
or poem,
it will seem more like
animation
than reality.

If we think that Isaiah
meant for us to read him literally,
or that he even had a
particular message
to deliver,
then he will seem more
schizophrenic
than wise.

If we read Luke’s closing paragraph
to his long Gospel narrative
as depicting an actual event,
rather than summarizing
and re-enforcing
the message
of his theology,
then it will seem more
like a huckster’s fanciful sales-pitch
than an evocative story.

If we come to sacred texts
without the skills or experience
to allow them to wash over us
like music with our eyes closed,
then we will receive them as
ridiculous
bizarre
make-believe
boring, or worse…
literally true.

Have you ever had an experience
that was as fully
of the mind
as of the body?
As our poem today evokes,
usually the body
and the mind
take a different staircase
to the experience
of each and every moment.
Rarely do they
occupy
the same time
and same place
and same space
together.

We could talk all day
about why that is so,
and come at it
from a psychological
or physiological point of view;
or from a Buddhist,
Hindu,
or Christian point of view.

But the fact is,
unless you are someone
really, really special,
we walk about
with a mind-body split
with one or the other
taking the lead
in any given moment
and with any given experience.

But sometimes,
once in a while,
we have an experience
when mind and body
are welded together as one
and WHOMP,
we come down on all fours
at the same
and specific moment.

It can be a moment of
supreme pleasure
or joy,
but it can also
be a moment of
intense pain
or grief.
Generally,
it does not happen
in moments of fear
or anxiety
or trauma
because such intensities
tend to keep us from being present
in the moment.

But once and awhile,
we have a mind/body experience
when both attend the same moment,
at the same time,
in the same space.
If I can get personal, I will give you an example.
One of those experiences
hit me like the proverbial ton of slate.
It happened on the day I got sober,
or maybe the next day –
after all this time
it is a little hazy.

I was sitting in my apartment,
alone,
when all of a sudden
I was visited by a vision
that included
everyone I had ever hurt
and betrayed
up to that moment in my life.
And believe me,
it was a crowded vision.

It was a vision,
like Isaiah’s,
in that,
impossibly,
I saw everything I had ever done
and everyone I had ever wronged
all at once.

The weight of it all
literally drove me to my knees.

It was the opposite of
the old Christmas movie,
“It’s A Wonderful Life”
in which Jimmy Stewart
got to see the accumulated effects
of all the good he had ever done.
Maybe I will get one of those
before I die.

But it was one of those
mind/body moments
in which the mind
was fully conscious and engaged
at the same time
and in the same space
with the body,
and it produced
an intensely shared moment by each.

Now…
did that really happen?
Was it a manufactured moment
of my imagination,
or some kind of psychological anomaly,
the unconscious belching
the release of a memory bubble?
Was it me,
was it God,
was it indigestion?
Is orgasm an act of biology or love?
You see what I am getting at?
Isaiah’s vision,
whether it happened in a wakeful state
as did mine,
or whether it happened in a dream
like some of the dreams you may have had,
does not really matter.
Isaiah is describing one of those
mind/body moments
when something so powerful
engulfed him
in such a way,
that in a single moment,
in both his mind
and his body,
he knew as never before
how small
and insignificant
and utterly imperfect he was
huddled in the presence of the terrible magnificence
of the one and only God.
“Holy crap!” he mutters,
only it begins with an “S.”
Driven down into himself
like a shivering, whimpering dog,
the only thing he can say, feel, or know…
is how woefully
small and inadequate he is
before the exquisite
wonder of God.

If you have never had that kind of a moment,
then you have never known “AWE”
as it can be fully experienced.
Such splendid AWE
requires a humility
most of us are not prepared to
embrace
unless and
until
we are driven
to embrace it.

Then
we collapse into it.

And, as if
that were not enough,
more than enough,
he gets the burning-coal-thing
in which he understands
in a visceral
and imagination-filled way,
that he is loved
and forgiven
and embraced
just exactly as he is.

Terror,
awe,
and liberation
in a single
mind/body moment.
WOMP!
It would turn your hair white
or render you bald,
I don’t know which.

So here is the deal.

No line of Scripture,
no word
or phrase
or story
is restricted to a single meaning.
This is not science
or math
or engineering.

There are no single meanings
holding the limits on a sacred text
like ropes
on a boxing ring.

Sacred texts
are like dreams,
the ones we have at night
that we are never quite sure
what they mean.
The longer we noodle them,
and the more frequently we have them,
the more they come into focus,
and the more robust
the meaning we draw from them.

If we treat a sacred text
like something else,
then we engage the mind
or the body
but not together.
I suspect that some of you
are having a tense conversation
with me right now,
your rational mind engaged in a game of “But:”
But how can that be true?
But that is weird?
But something without precise meaning
can be manipulated?
But, but, but…

The mind has a hard time
sharing experience
with the body, and the body
is far more comfortable
with squishiness,
vagueness
and whackomysticality.
The body is content
to ruminate
and patiently process
what it does not understand,
and much more willing to
hold onto that which defies explanation.
That is why dreams take place
when the mind is asleep.

But sometimes
we have those experiences
while awake.

And it is through the lens
of such experiences
that we come to sacred texts.

I have no idea
what Luke’s story has to say to us,
but I have a pretty good idea,
as I already indicated,
of what Isaiah
is wandering around in.
But then,
my interpretation of each
has changed
and morphed
and been reversed over the years.
That is a normal and appropriate experience
when it comes to being in relationship
with a sacred text.
So all of that
is just another way to remind us
that this religion-spirituality thing we do,
is aimed at opening us up
like a can of soup.
The sacred text,
the communion,
the music,
the prayers,
the strange mixture and tension
between “I” and “We” -
all of it.
It is all
a can opener
working its way slowly
around the rim of our lives,
opening us up
to an unexpected
encounter with God.

Some of those encounters
are with the mind,
and some are even with the body,
but the longest-lasting,
more life-changing
are the ones
that bring the mind and the body
to the same moment,
at the same time,
in the same space
and in the same place
all at once.

And when you get one of those moments, call it Easter.