“On the Way”

A number of years ago at a conference Eugene Peterson told the story of the day he was in his backyard with his lawnmower tipped on its side. As he tells it, “I was trying to get the blade off, so I could sharpen it. I had my biggest wrench attached to the nut but could not budge it. I got a four-foot pipe and slipped it over the wrench handle to give me leverage, and I leaned on that still unsuccessfully. Next, I took a large rock and banged on the pipe. By this time, I was beginning to get emotionally involved with my lawnmower.”

          Until his neighbor walked over and said that he had a lawnmower like Peterson’s once and that, if he remembered correctly, the threads on the bolt went the other way. So as Peterson says, “I reversed my exertions and sure enough, the nut turned easily. I was glad to find out I was wrong.” Peterson was saved from frustration and failure and may never have gotten the job done no matter how hard he tried doing it his way.

          Psalm 121 is like the neighbor who notices we are going the wrong way on our lifelong journey of faith and says gently and in a quiet voice, “hmm, er, I think you might want to try going the other way. Here let me show you.”

          The very first few lines set us on the right path with the observation that the pilgrim looks to the hills, the mountains, the horizon, the path in the distance and wonders, “from where will my help come? Where will my guidance, my protection, my guardian of life come from? In ancient Israel, pilgrims would have looked to the hills wondering where the thieves, the desperadoes, the robbers, or the lions were going to come from. Traveling on foot to Jerusalem was a perilous journey, which was why pilgrims traveled in large family groups and village groups as a measure of protection against the perils of roaming, hungry wild animals, or roving bands of greedy, hungry wild humans. We hear this concern and anxiety clearly in the opening sentence, but later in the psalm we will hear about other possibilities for injury for people making a pilgrimage like spraining an ankle from a loose stone, sunstroke from walking out in the open grassland and desert areas in the hot sun as well as the fatigue and anxiety of trying to reach one’s destination may grow to pressures that effect our emotional well-being-described by ancient writers as Moon stroke-which is by the way where we get our notion of lunacy; Luna being Latin for moon.

          Of course, we could update these possibilities for injury with a person with handgun or piece of explosive turning the travel plans of three hundred air passengers into disaster. Diseases like Ebola and cancer can break through our pharmaceutical defenses and invade our bodies with crippling effect, even diseases we thought were no longer a threat can make a comeback such as the plague or smallpox. An accident in a car or a fall from a step ladder can change our plans for a Saturday afternoon quickly.

          Yet, the possibility for injury is not the only thought on the minds of pilgrims when they look to hills and mountains, since Palestine like other ancient places were overrun with popular pagan worship and much of this pagan worship was practiced on hilltop shrines, grottoes, even groves of trees were planted as places for worship of various gods and goddesses. Within these hilltop shrines were places where sacred prostitutes both male and female were provided, so people would be lured to engage is acts of worship that enhanced fertility of the land by mimicking the acts of Baal and other pagan gods and goddesses. Some acts of worship would make you feel good, protect you from evil with spells, rituals, enchantments against the perils of the road. As Peterson writes in his “Long Obedience Toward the Same Direction,” “Do you fear the sun’s heat? Go to the sun priest and pay for protection against the sun god. Are you fearful of the malign influences of moonlight? Go to the moon priestess and buy an amulet. Go to the shrine and learn the magic formula to ward off the mischief of demons.”

          While we might scoff at the ancient travelers for their superstition, what about the advertisers promising to delay aging creams, pharmaceuticals that will alleviate a wide range of disease symptoms and shouldn’t we ask our doctors to give them to us or cool body sculpting processes to give you the body you want without any effort? The hucksters promoting life-changing products on television, internet sites or magazines at Wegman’s check out counters. The politicians whose mantra is “trust me I’ll protect you and your family,” while passing laws that will destroy whole communities, who will traumatize children and parents and are busy raising money to stay in office by repeating those same lies repeatedly.

          Our anxieties, fears, diseases, trials, tribulations and traumas are real and we should be crying out, “Help,” but if we focus on the hills or what’s on the hills to be our help, our sources of guidance, the protector and guardian of our lives and all life we will be let down, we will be betrayed because the hills and mountains for all their quiet strength and beauty are just hills and mountains and for all the promises of safety and protection against the perils of our life long road trip the priests, priestesses, con artists and hucksters are very just lies or as the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, “Truly hills are a delusion, the orgies on the mountains.”

          Our friendly, quiet neighbor Psalm 121 speaks clearly and simply where our help will come from-the maker of heaven and earth. The Lord. The Creator of all life in the beginning and each day. It is not in worship of flowers, stars, mountains, or organs, in religions that make the best of what it finds on the hills. It is in the Lord who creates life, not in creation because the Lord is always present. The Lord does not doze off or leave us to our own devices or allow evil to overcome us. God does not get tired and disgusted by our meandering obedience and leave us to fulfill some false prophecy in the Middle East. God’s interest in us does not wax and wane in response to our spiritual temperature. This was in part the point of Jesus asking his disciples while standing among the hilltop shrines above Caesarea Philippi, “who do people say I am?’ Do the people get that I am God with them? That I have come to heal them with God’s grace? This is, also, the point the psalm is making: that the Lord is with us, guarding us in our beginnings and our endings, when we leave home, and we arrive at our destination. Sun, moon, trees, rocks, and human created idols have no power. They are not able to inflict evil upon us because God guards us from every evil. The promise of Psalm 121 is not that we will never have trials or troubles, fears or not ever stub our toes, but that none of this-no accidents, no distress, no disease, no person will have the power to separate us from God and God’s purposes in us. This is the basis for the petition in the Lord’s Prayer. “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” and it is a prayer that is answered every day, sometimes several times a day in the lives of those who walk in the way of faith.

          What Psalm 121 invites us to do is not only to take our fears, our trials, troubles, trauma, the accidents, the anxieties of life seriously, but to take God more seriously as the source of life, the guardian, the protector of our life and all life by daily living God’s path of life where we affirm the each step we walk, each breath we take we know we are preserved by God, we know we are accompanied by God, we know and celebrate God is our bridge over life’s troubled waters and telling the Christian story by describing the God who preserves, accompanies and keeps life, so that whatever we experience we know God is with us as Luther wrote in his hymn, “And though this world, with devils filled should threaten to undo us, we will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us.”

          Life is created and shaped by God and the life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which God’s love and grace is experienced. This is the blessing of Psalm 121. May it be so for you as it has been for me.

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Voices of Silence from the Edge

“Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk to you again because a vision softly creeping left its seeds while I was sleeping and the vision that was planted in my brain still remains within the sound of silence.”

 Silence, as Paul Simon wrote, can be a cancer preventing people from hearing each other, may be the oppression that keeps criticism and truth telling stomped down, or can be the way prophetic words are seen and heard and acted upon in places of poverty, or can be the realization of the truth contained within the mystic Rumi’s question, “Why, when God’s world is so big, did you fall asleep in a prison of all places.”

              Yet, silence may be the very thing we crave when the legion of voices taunting us, screaming at us, confusing us, never leaving us alone, until we are driven to such distraction and mind fragmenting chaos that people want nothing more than to drive us out to the edges of the community and chain us to a tree in the wilderness where death permeates every breath we take.

          Silence may also be the very thing we crave when fear, the exhaustion of running away from both success and failure drops us to our knees in the far edge of a desert wilderness where only a small tree or a cave may shelter us from the harshness we experience. The wilderness is a place where we need food and water to nourish us and where we need the strong encouragement to stand up and go and live our purpose.

          Silence may also be the very thing we crave when the disorientation of grief over an ending sends us out into the wilderness of discernment, the wilderness of thoughtful reflection, so we might find the anchor we need to stop feeling as though we are free floating like an unmoored boat bobbing in the sea. Or we feel lost as if we are meandering in a maze.

          This silence we crave is found in the wilderness, whether an actual place or simply time spent in solitude away from the daily hassles, but wherever it is, it is on the far edge of life because that is where God finds us, nourishes us, encourages us, heals us then leads us back to the place where we will live our life’s purpose, our reason for existence, our new why.

          Both Elijah and the man from Gerasene experience God’s actions and voice on their far edge and both are transformed by God’s actions, and both are sent back to their communities. While their stories end up being remarkably similar and give us some ideas about our relationship with God and how God may be or will be acting in silence on the far edges of our lives, their stories have very different beginnings.

Elijah had just proven to 450 Baal prophets that Yahweh, the Lord of the universe is the only real God in existence. Baal is nothing more than an idol, incapable of creating or sustaining life. As Jeremiah would later taunt the Judeans, Baal is just like a tree or a rock, nothing more. Elijah does this by challenging the 450 Baal prophets to a sacrificial worship contest to see whether Yahweh or Baal could light a huge bonfire altar with sacrificial animal on top. Of course, Baal does not light the fire even with the Baal prophets dancing around it. Then, Elijah repairs the altar to the Lord using twelve large stones to represent the tribes of Israel, digs a trench around the altar, filling it with a years’ supply of seeds. Finally, Elijah places the sacrificial animal on the wood invites all the Israelites gathered on Mt Carmel to pour water on the wood three times before praying for the Lord to set the wood on fire and consume the sacrifice, so the people would know that the Lord is God. Of course, the Lord does light the wood on fire by a lightning strike. Elijah has won the debate! The people fall on their faces to worship God. Then, we are told Elijah solidifies the win by killing all 450 Baal prophets in accordance with Deuteronomic law that says the community must execute any prophet that leads God’s people to worship idols. Afterwards Elijah tells King Ahab the three-year drought will be over, so get ready to celebrate God and God’s goodness. However, Ahab goes to tell Queen Jezebel, who introduced Baal worship, how Elijah proved Baal was no god and how he killed the Baal prophets. Jezebel sends out the message to Elijah,’ you killed my prophets, so I’m going to kill you.”

Now, I don’t know what Elijah thought was going to happen, but clearly being killed wasn’t it. Maybe, he expected Jezebel to turn toward God and give up worshipping Baal. That might explain him being so overwhelmed by fear that he runs and runs and runs until he ends up in the Exodus wilderness of Mt. Sinai on a journey that mirrors the Israelites journey from slavery and genocide in Egypt through the wilderness to the land of milk and honey, the land of abundance of life for all. Like the Hebrews, the wilderness will be the place where God teaches Elijah to trust God. First by trusting that God will feed Elijah, that God will give him sustenance for the 40 day and night journey just like God gave the Hebrews food and water during their 40-year journey. More importantly, Elijah will learn that God comes not in the grand displays of earthquake, wind, and fire as Moses experienced, but God may also come in a fine, sheer silence. Coming to the prophet with a word of vocation, with a call to go back to God’s people to anoint one person for prophetic ministry and anoint another for a ministry task.

 Elijah learns to trust that God is the God of life, but that sometimes it is valuable to seek a critical distance-to take a step back- from our fears and the distractions of our lives, so we might slow down, be still, be calm out in a place of a fine, sheer silence and listen for God’s voice speaking to us the wisdom of God’s unconditional love calling us to go and live our life’s unique purpose among God’s people, all of whom also have a unique purpose given them by God, because doing so roots us in God’s garden of life where our lives will blossom fully just like the peonies and the lilacs do.

Elijah ran away from his community, but the Gerasene man was driven away by his community. He was chained and shackled naked in the tombs because the Gerasene community was afraid of him and thought him to be a wild, dangerous beast unfit to live within the Gerasene community because he was possessed by a legion of demons that tormented him so fiercely that demons drove him to break his chains and shackles and run out into the wilds, into the far edges of life. Indeed, his life was on the far edge, and it really doesn’t matter whether we say it was because of demons possessing him or a mental illness possessing him the effect on the man and his community was the same.

Now before arriving on the Gerasene shore, Jesus had traveled across a storm-tossed lake in a boat the disciples feared would be capsized by the violent waves crashing in over them. So, of course, in their fear they woke Jesus up and said, “Master, we’re all going to die” or words to that effect. Naturally, Jesus stands up, stretches, calms the storm, silences the waves of the lake, and rebukes his disciples for their lack of faith, their lack of trust in him.

When Jesus steps ashore he is confronted by the demoniacs holding the man prisoner within his own body and mind. Like he did with the storm Jesus calms the storm-tossed man by commanding the demons to leave and go into some pigs. The demons do this and, as we know, they jump off a cliff and die. When Jesus calms the storm inside this man, he brings him into the fine, sheer silence of God.

 But Jesus actually does more than that. You see, Jesus heals the man so completely that the people of the village do not recognize him anymore. They heard the witness of the swineherds, who told them about what Jesus had done with the demons and the pigs, so they came to see for themselves. When they arrived, they saw Jesus and this stranger sitting together. The man was healed, healthy, made whole and was now wearing clothes and listening to Jesus. The people of the community have no idea who the man is until they are told. Indeed, the man is so transformed the villagers are afraid of him and of Jesus, who sent the demons into the pigs.” I mean if Jesus can do that, what else might he do? What might he do to us,” they say. So out of their fear, they drive Jesus away.

Standing on the shore in silence, the man wants to come with Jesus, but Jesus gives him a calling to go, leave the far edge of life for village of Gerasene, so he can tell the villagers and everyone else he meets about what God has done for him. He, a Gentile, is to be a witness for Christ. He is to tell the story of how God healed him, made him whole without first asking if he was worthy enough to be healed or if he was among the “right” people. He was healed to wholeness by God because he was a person in need of healing. God reached out to him in unconditional love to heal and make him whole. This was the story he was to tell the villagers and everyone else. This was his purpose for life, his reason for existing, his why.

The Gerasene man and Elijah point us to the value of silence, stillness, of taking a step back to create a critical distance for thoughtful reflection and response as the way to stop running through the mazes of a harried and fearful life and instead focus on our faith in God, our trust in God. Trusting God will calm our storm-tossed lives, will nourish us, will heal us and make us whole, so we will be ready to go back to our community with a purpose for life, with the reason for our existence. When we fully live our God given purpose our lives will fully blossom and show people that God is the God of life for every person and all creation.

As a poet writes, “God’s wisdom is the voice of unconditional love from the edges of life, not heard by many, responded to by less, and followed by few. Therefore, be aware, listen and hear in your center Wisdom’s voice calling for unconditional love from the edge. Then in thought, word or deed be this gift to the other person; unconditional love from your center to the other’s person’s center in the fine, sheer, healing silence of God.      

This is our purpose, our reason for existence as a compassionate Christian community. May we blossom fully into being it.        

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