josephholubsermons
Epiphany 2
January 17, 2010
Thin Places
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me."
(Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34)
How many of you do Facebook?
Yes, I do Facebook, and one of my Facebook contacts posted a
comment this week, "Where
is the face of God in Haiti?"
I used to have a book in my library that somewhere
along the way I lost. It
was primarily a collection of lithograph-type pictures of works of art,
beautiful renderings of the face of Jesus painted or sketched by
many of history's most renowned artists, hence the title,
The Faces of Jesus.
I used the book in small group settings.
I would project a "face" of Jesus up on a screen using an
overhead projector. Then, I would have the group
focus and reflect
on the "face" for a few minutes and share what they saw and experienced
in their moments of reflection.
I would pose some thought questions like,
"Is
this the face of person you would like to know?"
"What feelings and
emotions do you perceive in the face?"
"What
feelings inside of you does the face stir up?"
"What is the artist
trying to convey about his/her experience of Jesus by portraying his
face in such a way?"
The responses were always fascinating and insightful.
Of course, behind each painting was the artist's
experience of Jesus and what Jesus meant to him or her.
I remember a recurring incident in my second grade
Sunday School class when our teacher would say to us, especially when we
were misbehaving or not paying attention,
"God is frowning!"
She would say it just like that,
with a kind of harsh, admonishing edge to her voice,
"God is frowning!"
And
she would frown
when she said it. She would
invoke a threatening image
of God to discipline and restore order. I look back on it
now, and I realize it was
sheer manipulation through fear and intimidation.
Over time and repeated use, a picture of God's face formed in my
young mind of a cantankerous old man, with long, wild, white hair and an
angry look, piercing eyes and his mouth was curved and distorted
downward into an exaggerated frown.
Wow!
What a nurturing image that is, huh?
It was burned
into my subconscious, and it took a long time to
purge my soul
of such a grotesque distortion of God.
But the advocates of a judgmental, frowning,
vindictive, and manipulative God are unfortunately still
very much alive and well.
True to predictable form, televangelist Pat Robertson announced this
week that the reason for the indescribable tragedy in Haiti is God’s
judgment upon the Haitians for making a so-called
“pack with the devil”
when they were trying to cast off the oppressive evil of French
colonialism/slavery in the late 1700’s.
Invoking the name of a frowning God, he inflicted a cruel
and dehumanizing blow to a desperate, despairing and suffering people.
He is a classic example of dogmatic and doctrinal religion
imposing it’s cold, rigid and primitive views upon reality and
committing heinous abuse to vulnerable human beings in the process.
"Where is the face of God in Haiti",
my friend asked?
I do not subscribe to a theistic God who is somewhere "out-there"
separate from us and the world
sitting comfortably at a great control panel pushing buttons and
manipulating events for reasons we can only guess at. That image
of God, for me, is totally
problematic. If
that rather primitive image of God is true, it only leads me to
conclude that God is either
pathologically capricious
or totally indifferent
toward the world and humanity.
That image of God is primitive and based on a
world-view of long ago.
The terrible tragedy in Haiti is explained by
the fact that Haiti sits on the convergent boundary of two mighty
tectonic plates that grind together and create the potential for the
release of tremendous energy in the form of an earthquake.
That's what happened.
We live in natural
world. We are a
part of the natural world,
and we are vulnerable to
it - even more so
if you happen to be very
poor - and the people of Haiti are trapped in extreme poverty
and have been for a very long time.
(So) "where (then) is the face of God,"
my friend asked?
One of the things that Christianity has always
affirmed, even though it has forgotten it at times, and
Christians have understood it different ways, but nevertheless has
affirmed, that in the face
of Jesus we get a
glimpse of the face of God.
Each gospel writer, in his own way, paints a unique portrait
of Jesus, but the one thing they have in common is that, in Jesus,
people experienced God intensely and in ways that
stirred them,
motivated them,
inspired them
and even transformed
them.
Another thing
the gospel writers all affirm is that
Jesus identified and
placed himself in solidarity with the suffering, poor,
oppressed, and the forgotten of his time. Each gospel writer contributes
something unique to that common theme.
·
MARK
shows Jesus forever crisscrossing over forbidden religious, social,
political, economic, racial and gender boundaries to embrace and engage
the real people minimized behind them.
·
LUKE
weaves into his telling of the Jesus story, one of the New Testament's
most provocative stories, the
Parable of the Good Samaritan.
·
JOHN
is filled with stories only told by him of the radical nature of
Jesus love, including the
Woman at the Well and the
Crippled Man by the Pool
among others.
·
MATTHEW'S
amazing gift is Jesus' Parable
of the Sheep and the Goats where listeners are
shocked to hear Jesus say,
"Whatever you do to the least
among the human family... you do it to me."
I have mentioned this before, but in Celtic Christianity, going back to
the 5th century, they talked about something they called
"Thin Places."
A
"Thin Place" for
the Celts was a place, situation or circumstance where the perceived
boundary between humanity and God becomes soft and permeable, and
almost transparent - and God suddenly
emerges into greater
clarity; a circumstance when God is perceived and
experienced more intensely.
It is not
that God intervenes,
but rather, it is that God, who has
been there all along,
emerges; the
veil is lifted and God is experienced in greater clarity.
Of course, the Celts affirmed that Jesus is the primary
"thin place."
If we take the gospel testimonies of Jesus’ solidarity with the
poor and suffering seriously, we can never look into the
faces of the poor and
suffering in the same way again.
With that occupying the
core of our
faith and spirituality, I would dare
say that Haiti is perhaps the
"Thinnest
Place" on the planet, where the veil has been removed
and the face of Jesus can be clearly seen in every suffering and
agonized face. Their cries
of desperation are not merely their own, but the cries of Jesus himself
when he cried out from the depths of human pathos,
"My God, My God, why have you
forsaken me."
The cries that come forth from each and every face and life, come to us
as an invitation to enter into the deepest of all human
experiences; to
participate in the pathos of another human being.
We are being called and invited and challenge to share our
compassion and tangible expressions of love; to act in ways that empower
others on the ground in Haiti with our financial resources; to learn
more about Haiti and to advocate for Haiti and the poor anywhere and
everywhere among family,
friends, community and our leaders.
I see the face of Jesus every day.
I see numerous expressions of his face on the current Outreach
Board in the narthex. I
see his face, regularly, in the unique faces that appear at our door
here at Lord of the Mountains, people looking for empowerment and
help, because life hasn't unfolded like they had hoped and dreamed.
We take each face seriously, and we do what we can, often
frustrated because we lack the resources to do more.
Open your eyes and see!
The life of Jesus and his solidarity with broken of this world
transformed the way we see each other and experience God in the world.
Every suffering face is a
"Thin Place", an
invitation and opportunity to experience what it means to be
fully human at a profound level, as we share deeply our common
humanity and the pathos of others, at every moment
always in and never out of
the presence of God.
Amen.