Homily for Sunday, March 12
The Rev. Bill Harkins
The Cathedral of St. Philip
12 March 2006, 8:45 a.m.
2 Lent 2006
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38
In the name of our loving and creating God, Amen. All week long I have been thinking about the scripture for today. I would find myself thinking about Abraham and Sarah, a story ultimately about faith and grace, and, I believe, about trust.I thought about Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which he reminds us that covenant depends not on law, but on grace, through faith: “It was reckoned to him,” the lesson reads, and thereby it was reckoned to us as well. I found myself wondering what this might mean, this “reckoning.” These are such comforting words, aren’t they? We are given to believe that our trust in God will see us through, no matter what, no matter the twists and turns our journeys may take. This is especially true during Lent, a time set aside in the ancient church for spiritual preparation for those who would be baptized in the early morning hours of Easter. These words must have been comforting to them, too, because the preparation leading to baptism was logical and well thought out. After that, however, what happened was anybody’s guess. In fact, back then, baptism could get you persecuted and even killed for your faith. And the structure of Mark’s Gospel reminds us of this essential nature of our Lenten journey. We are asked to embark on a journey the precise nature of which is uncertain. We are asked to go down a path without knowing where we are going. In recent passages from the Gospel of Mark we heard stories of Jesus’ ministry: the miracles, the feeding of thousands, the calling of the disciples. Mid-way on the journey is Peter’s remarkable declaration, “You are the Christ,” the first time anyone has stated exactly who Jesus is. And then, starting today, we continue our journey toward the cross. It is a journey of trust, in the midst of the challenges of being faithful. I don’t know about you, but real trust is hard when I am asked to embark on a journey whose precise nature is uncertain. I like to know where I am, and where I am going. The professor in me wants a syllabus, and a lesson plan. I make my living depending largely on one leg of our Anglican three-legged stool—that of reason. I don’t like to be lost, and worse, I don’t like to be told that in taking up my cross the possibility of becoming lost is part of the deal. Not too long ago I went on a kayaking trip with a clinical colleague to Lake Jocassee, in South Carolina. I was excited about going because I had gotten a new boat—a 14-foot sea kayak, and I was happy about putting the boat in the water, and me in the boat, for the first time. Lake Jocassee is a lovely place, tucked into the northwestern corner of South Carolina where it connects with Georgia and North Carolina. Looking north across the lake one sees the dramatic wall of the blue-ridge escarpment as it runs from southwest to northeast. One could follow this all the way up to Virginia if so inclined, a lovely blue forested line of demarcation between the Carolina piedmont and the mountains. For three hours we paddled north, toward the mountain range, up into the Horsepasture River corridor, one of five lovely whitewater rivers that feed Lakes Jocassee and Keowee. As we continued our journey we gradually found ourselves in the old river canyon, rather than the large, open body of water on which we began. The hills rose steeply on either side of us, and we saw and heard the lovely waterfalls as they tumbled into the lake, overflowing from spring rains. As we wound our way upriver the water became a deep, clear blue-green, lovely to the eye. At one point, near the confluence of the river and the lake that it had created, I saw a pair of large birds swimming upriver, ahead of my boat. They were white and black, and they dove under water as I came near, only to pop up a hundred yards or more ahead of me. Elusive, mysterious, lovely birds. I could not place them in my categories of local lake residents, but they sure seemed to remind me of the common loons I had seen on canoe trips in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. “But this cannot be,” I said to myself, quite logically. “What respectable loons would winter in South Carolina, so very far from home?” I knew what I thought I saw, but “reason” prevailed, and I did not trust my own eyes….my own heart. It would have been against what I considered to be a “law” if you will, of southern birding, to find loons in upstate South Carolina. One could find them in Maine, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Canada…yes, sure, but not South Carolina. Nevertheless, these mysterious birds seemed to be leading me upstream, until they disappeared around the next forested bend in the river. A few minutes more of paddling found us at the lovely bridge on the foothills trail, across the Horsepasture River, now a whitewater river at the end of its 2000-foot plunge into Lake Jocassee. As often happens in early spring in Appalachia, the weather was on this day changing rapidly. It was growing colder, and soon a cold, sleety rain began to fall. We had three hours of hard paddling ahead of us to reach our put-in, and the afternoon was getting on. I felt a momentary sense of…what exactly? Fear perhaps…uncertainty…disorientation. The wild white-water river upstream from the bridge, where we now sat, eating our lunch in a cold rain, was dramatically different from the calm, sunny lake upon which we began our journey. We were in very different territory now. And what were those birds, I kept wondering? They seemed to add to my sense of uncertainty. Had I really seen them at all? Their lovely mystery, and elusive behavior, only increased my weary disorientation in this hauntingly beautiful place. Where were we? Would we make it back safely? Could our maps be trusted? Was God with us here, too? I can only imagine what the disciples must have felt before Peter’s declaration, “You are the Christ,” as he says in the passage just before today’s Gospel text. There must have been a good deal of uncertainty and speculation about exactly who this man Jesus might be. Of course, finding out who Jesus was brought the disciples more than they had bargained for. They must have felt—in exponentially greater emotion, some of what I experienced on my water journey. They must have had thoughts such as; “this is not exactly what I signed up for on this trip,” and, “what was I thinking?” When Jesus told them that he was to be rejected, abused, and even murdered, Peter, perhaps fearing for his own life, and out of anger, rebuked Jesus. In his reasoned humanness, Peter could not imagine such a thing happening to the Messiah whom he had only moments earlier named as just that, “the Christ.” Perhaps in his own mind he envisioned the great and powerful things that Jesus would do when his “Messiah-ship” came to its fruition. Perhaps he even imagined himself standing beside Jesus as a trusted assistant, sharing the glory with this new David, overthrowing the enemies of Israel, securing national independence. Surely, suffering was not a part of Peter’s dream for Jesus, or for himself or the others. I love this about Peter, truth told, who was so human and so easy to identify with. And that humanity is, I suspect, one of the reasons we are drawn to Peter throughout the Gospel accounts. We can easily see ourselves acting likewise. We know from the stories of the disciples that taking up one’s cross is no easy task. Some of them went into hiding. Peter denied him; his head—his reason, denying what his heart knew was true. They were all weary, and afraid, and uncertain. Now, in this second Sunday of Lent, let us remind ourselves that Jesus’ message is for all who would follow him. This includes all of us, here and now, today—the Incarnate Body of Christ in the world. And we are not alone in this. Because Jesus asks of us that we become disciples too, and we have his promise that nothing can separate us from God’s love, and it is reckoned to us through God’s covenant it our own suffering, our own trials, our own doubts—even our doubts about what we see right before our very eyes. There is nothing that Jesus has not seen, that he has not heard, nothing that would cause him to withdraw his love or saving grace. And so we have come full circle, back to the issue of covenant, and trust. The poet William Butler Yeats knew something of this. In a poem about the nature and essence of journeys, he wrote:
I am content to follow to its source…Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!…When such as I cast out remorse…
So great a sweetness flows into the breast…We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.
Yeats is writing here about trust, and faithfulness, and grace. None of us can know what lies before us, or what will be asked of us in the days or years ahead. But we can reflect on the nature of our discipleship. We make choices on our journey by trusting not so much our sense of “reason,” but rather the Christ, who calls us to be in discipleship. Incidentally, those English scholars among us will recognize that in the passage from Mark Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” The words “deny yourself” in this passage have no direct object. In Lent, we often believe we need to deny ourselves “something.” Yet, I wonder if this is so. This passage does not refer to a denial of anything. Fred Craddock, a wonderful preacher and mentor, has said that often, paradoxically, this denial of one thing or another—chocolate or TV or cussing—actually has the opposite effect of causing us to focus on too much on ourselves. Perhaps the best way to deny ourselves is by getting ourselves off our hands, doing the work we have to do, handling our tasks joyfully so that when we are called to do God’s work; our issues do not get in the way. We thereby trust ourselves, in relation to God, to be the disciples Christ calls us to be. Meanwhile, back on Lake Jocassee, we made our way, homeward, down-river in a steady rain and dense fog. At one point, at a fork in the river canyon, not quite sure which way to go, my colleague up ahead somewhere in the mist, I saw the mysterious diving birds again, just ahead of my boat, appearing, seemingly, out of nowhere. They went under water, and reappeared 50 yards ahead to the right. For reasons that still elude me, I went right, too, and eventually made it back to the car. Later, warm and dry and seated at my computer, I pulled up the Department of Natural Resources website for the Jocassee Gorges area, and clicked on the “wildlife” link. It read, “the common loon is an occasional winter resident at Lakes Jocassee and Keowee. They return north in April. Their numbers are growing.” You see, my sisters and brothers, my heart had known what my head would not allow. And as Carl Jung once wrote, “the soul rejoices in hearing spoken out loud what it has known all along.” It pains the professor in me to say this out loud…but perhaps “reason”—as wonderful and important as it is, can sometimes be a hindrance to our journey in faith. Perhaps the lure of the Holy Spirit is somewhat like—I would say it is exactly like—those loons guiding me back down the Horsepasture River. We must be willing to let go of intellectual assent to our faith, and open ourselves to the abundant life to which Christ is calling us. Somehow, letting go of the law of reason—of the safe maps and certain pathways—is paradoxically to open ourselves to God’s abiding, reckoning, grace-filled love, to abundant life, to the Way of the Cross that asks that we give up our abundantly well-reasoned plans, and plan, unreasonably, exorbitantly, to give all that we have, for life abundant, in Christ Jesus. Amen.
Comments? Contact Bill Harkins at: Bharkins@stphilipscathedral.org