A Fourth Church Sermon by Alice M. Trowbridge

January 29 , 2006 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Lost in Wonder, Love, and Praise

Alice M. Trowbridge
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 111
Deuteronomy 18:15–18
Mark 1:21–28

“They were astounded at his teaching,
for he taught them as one having authority.”

Mark 1:22 (NRSV)

That is how it is when we praise you. We join the angels in praise,
and we keep our feet in time and place . . . awed to heaven, rooted in earth.
We are daily stretched between communion with you and our bodied lives,
spent but alive, summoned and cherished but stretched between.
And we are reminded that before us there has been this One truly divine
(at ease with angels) truly human . . . dwellers in time and space.
We are thankful for him, and glad to be in his missional company.
Alleluia. Amen.

Walter Brueggemann
Awed to Heaven, Rooted to Earth

One of the great paintings in the history of Western art is by then-twenty-seven-year-old painter Raphael, called The School of Athens. This fresco was commissioned by Pope Julius II sometime in the early sixteenth-century in Rome, the height of the Italian Renaissance. Pope Julius wanted Raphael to fresco the walls of what would become the pope’s personal library. Julius wanted a grand library decorated with portraits of poets, philosophers, great thinkers, and intellectuals of antiquity to inspire his own pursuit of truth and wisdom.

In the center of the painting we see perhaps the most famous teacher-student pair of all time, Plato and Aristotle, placed in an imaginary paradise of grand architecture, surrounded by the great thinkers of antiquity, who represent the major disciplines of philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, and music.

Barely noticeable in this painting is a very subtle hand gesture: Plato is pointing upward toward heaven, and Aristotle is pointing outward toward this life. These two gestures symbolize the ends of all human discovery, the mystery of our place between the two realms, how we are stretched, “awed to heaven, yet rooted in earth” as Walter Brueggemann puts it. In some way this painting reminds us of how we spend our lives: in pursuit of wisdom, making sense of our ultimate meaning in life, our purpose, our mission, yet still forming, still questioning, working to arrive at this truth.

One of my favorite professors at Union Theological Seminary was Dr. James Cone. Somewhere in his lectures he would challenge us to discern what would be the most important pursuit of our lives. He would demand that we ponder, “What is your truth?” He’d say that when it comes time to decide where we’re going and what we’re doing, what causes in this world we devote ourselves to, how we decide to spend our work time, our leisure time, God’s time, we’ve got to know what our truth is.

Joseph Campbell phrased it another way. He asked, “What’s your bliss? Follow your bliss.” In other words, be true to yourself, be authentic. Intrinsically we know this is true. “This truth,” Campbell says, “is the way to be alive in this world and the way to give the world the best we have to offer” (Reflections on the Art of Living: Joseph Campbell Companion).

In today’s Gospel lesson, the scribes are the important and knowledgeable teachers of first-century Palestine. They witness Jesus and are amazed and astounded at his teaching, for it is unlike anything they have known. We see Jesus teach with authority and a truth unlike any of his contemporaries. In this scripture we see Jesus at the beginning of his public ministry, and we are invited to participate with Jesus’ first disciples in the gradual and growing recognition of who he is and what Jesus’ truth is.

Life with Christ doesn’t remove us from the world; it leads us more deeply into it.

This past week, many of us spent a fascinating evening at Chicago Sinai Congregation where the film Bonhoeffer by Martin Doblmeier was shown and was followed by a panel discussion. Bonhoeffer could not be silent about the killing of the Jews. His family knew all about what was going on. His faith mandated him to respond. Bonhoeffer believed that we live now—not tomorrow and not yesterday—and so we must be rooted in this world and open to however God wants to use us to further the kingdom Jesus came to teach us and lead us towards, that it is only by living completely and fully in this life that one learns to have faith.

Some of Bonhoeffer’s last words from Letters and Papers from Prison ended the film. He asked, “Who am I? You know me, God. You know I am yours.”

Bonhoeffer believed that it’s not only to our own sufferings, but to God’s sufferings in the world that we are called to respond.

Sometimes it is in and through our sufferings and those of others that we come to know God and experience God’s call. Henri Nouwen says that “God becomes incarnate in the humanity of those who love others. We become the hands that hold them and show them God’s faithful love. Where we are our most pained or weakest is where Jesus lives” (The Wounded Healer).

Perhaps no other figure in the twentieth-century entered into the suffering of others as dramatically as Mother Teresa. It had been a lifelong dream of mine to visit Calcutta and to come to understand her ministry more fully. I went to volunteer at Kalighat, Mother Teresa’s Center for the Dying. Kalighat was filled with cots of very sick people, and the illnesses the people were suffering from were ones I had only read about in books. Death seemed to be lurking in every corner of this place. The Sisters of Charity were busy administering basic medical treatment, whatever had been donated that week, and everyone seemed adjusted to the situation. As I walked around and tried to find a place where my help could be useful, I felt totally out of my element. I ended up helping with the cleaning of the dishes that day, and when I arrived back at my hotel room, the fear and the shock that had been with me all day finally sank in. Never had I seen so many people so sick, so absolutely destitute, and so young. How could God allow such misery, such abject poverty, such darkness? I was confused, and I felt that my whole system of belief had been turned upside down. The patients seemed to be in a living hell, and where was God? Looking back on that experience, I know I was beginning to develop my answer to Dr. Cone’s question: What is your truth?

I began to understand Nouwen’s words that compassion is born when we understand in the center of our own condition that our condition is that of every other. “Every human face we see, no matter where, is a reflection of our own, is the face of our neighbor.”

I began thinking about the advent of God, that God beckons us to follow and find the places of love and grace and hope, even, and perhaps most of all, in the midst of darkness and despair. I returned the next day and had a new job. which was to dry the women off with a towel as they came out of the shower. The Sisters would bathe them, and one by one, I would dry them. Over the next week I continued this job, and between shower times I gradually began to visit with the patients who were awake. Most of the patients spoke only Bengali, and most of them were too weak to speak anyway. But I remember learning a new language from them, the expression through the eyes and through the smallest gestures. And even more, I realized that my own inhibitions and fears, my own expectations of what I was going to do there, slowly began to fade, and I saw for the first time what it meant to be open to God’s love, to plunge in, heart first, stretched between communion with God and the limitations of our bodied lives, summoned, cherished, but stretched between, part of Jesus’ missional company.

Just when we think there’s nothing but despair, that is when God is born again, and that is fertile ground for our faith to grow.

As I thought about these encounters with the women of Calcutta and I thought about how Jesus came for all of us, to love us, to be with us in our suffering, to never let us go, I began to feel in that destitute place the presence of God. This is a new teaching Jesus of Nazareth brings to us, a new way of living in relation to the world. God is available to us in every place and time, and God calls us to offer to others the love we have received.

There is something about living in the wonder of God’s love that is the essence of our faith, that love that brings people together. The love that dissolves all barriers and reaches across cultures into that one universal human experience with which we all identify. The love that can heal the spirit even when the body is failing. It is our privilege as children of God to be instruments of that love, conduits of that life-affirming, healing force that we witness in Jesus’ own teaching and ministry.

Life with Christ doesn’t remove us from the world; it leads us more deeply into it, for to live fully open to the wonder of God and to live at the same time rooted in our everyday toils and trials of life is, in a way, to be a step closer to the wisdom of the ages and the love of God. Something new is happening in Jesus Christ, and as e. e. cummings calls it, “the ragged meadow of the soul” is filled less by noisy clamor. There is more room for mystery and wonder, love and praise. If we can trust that we are as yet unfinished, ever growing and evolving, and if in that process we can learn to trust enough to accept the invitation to explore more fully the truth of Christ, his teaching, compassion, and healing, we will then begin to lose ourselves to a new place altogether, a place of wonder, amazement, and awe that such a love exists. And in that place, we come to know our own truth; we are led there by love. As one theologian describes it, “Life like this becomes an ongoing prayer, no words necessary, only attentiveness to the power of God already present in nature, in history, within us. The heart leans toward this love and responds with acts of love” (Wayne Simsic, “Learning to See,” Weavings January/February 2004).

Awed to heaven, rooted in earth. Daily stretched between communion with God and our bodied lives, we are summoned, cherished, but stretched between. Lost in wonder, love, and praise. Dear Lord, may it be so. Amen.