Sermon: Let’s Get Small

 “You promise all who trust you . . . eternal life in your realm which has no end.” (Sermon series on the UCC Statement of Faith)

Texts: Hosea 4:1-4 (Good News); John 5: 24-30 (NRSV)

Hymns (New Century Hymnal): 12/I Sing the Mighty Power of God; 444/We Are Often Tossed and Driven; 32/God of the Sparrow, God of the Whale

Date: April 3, 2011

Guest Preacher: Reed Price

The UCC statement of faith, which we’ve been examining in a collaborative sermon series for several weeks, concludes (as we just read together):

“You promise to all who trust you forgiveness of sins and fullness of grace, courage in the struggle for justice and peace, your presence in trial and rejoicing, and eternal life in your realm which has no end.”

“Eternal life in your realm which has no end.”

What in the world—or what out of this world—do those words mean: “Eternal life in your realm which has no end”?

Let’s begin at the end: the “… realm which has no end.” In our lives, most everything ends, does it not? Books, movies and TV shows all conclude; roads dead end; relationships peter out, and certainly nothing finishes with more finality than life. It ends in death.

In preparing for this sermon, Dee asked me if I had ever been present at a person’s death. Yes, only once. With siblings and close relatives I was in a hospital room in Coupeville, on Whidbey Island, early July 21 five years ago when my mother died. She had been on life support – the noisy ventilator mechanically pumping air into and out of her lungs following the massive stroke from which she would not recover. After my brother, sister and I agreed to have the machine silenced we sat and stood, we held her hand, and listened . . .as slowly her shallow breaths dwindled to silence.

How long were we there? As I think back I realize I don’t know. Several minutes certainly. Maybe an hour. Death did not arrive with the clarity of the medical ventilator, which was whooshing and wheezing one minute and then, switch thrown, was silent. The point at which my mother was no longer alive, the point at which she was dead, is not a fixed moment. It’s something that was evident only after the fact. She must have died because she’s not alive.

Looking back on that experience, on her dying moments, leads me to think about the borders and frames we put around our lives and the world. And to realize they are our borders and frames, not necessarily the world’s.

In an online interview with Stephen Gibson , Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong presses us to recognize those borders in our lives are porous. When we dig into our world, what we think we know gets fuzzy: rules we expect to apply don’t, or at least not in the way we expect.

For example, biologists have documented the continuous ribbon of DNA sequences that runs through “human life and cabbages and great apes.” Most of the time I think of human life and cabbages as distinct and separate—don’t you?, but in another way—a perhaps more fundamental way?—biological inquiry is showing us that animals and plants are all part of one unfolding process. What we’ve known as separate and distinct, we are learning now can be viewed as whole.

Or turn to astrophysics, the study of the universe, the many different galaxies, suns, supernova and black holes spread out across time and space. But, again says Bishop Spong, astrophysicists have determined that “the substance that makes up your body and mine is the same stardust that’s in the farthest star . . . the universe seems like it has a common source.” Do you see? Not with everyday eyes you won’t; not if we look at borders and frames as we have.

Take quantum mechanics—let’s get small, as Steve Martin used to quip. If we try on Steve’s Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy drug and look at the world through the eyes of a quantum physicist or a very small person (!), we find a similar thing to what’s happening at the grand scale: Break down the atom and find the particle… and go tinier yet, find that particles and waves behave in ways that are indistinguishable – that is, something that seems to be simply a material thing now appears at close inspection to become a non-material thing. Essentially, at its essence, at the depths and breadths of our known experience, reality is surprising.

Let me read to you a bit of American physicist Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams:

Long ago, before the Great Clock, time was measured by changes in heavenly bodies: the slow sweep of stars across the night sky, the arc of the sun and variations in light, the waxing and waning of the moon, tides, seasons. Time was measured also by heartbeats, the rhythms of drowsiness and sleep, the recurrence of hunger, the menstrual cycles of women, the duration of loneliness. Then.. the first clock was built.  . . Here was a human invention that quantified the passage of time, that laid ruler and compass to the span of desire,  that measured exactly the moment of a life. It was magical, it was unbearable, it was outside natural law. Yet the clock could not be ignored.

In the spirit of our quest today – to understand “You promise all who trust you … eternal life in your realm which has no end” – if the clock cannot be ignored can it be looked beyond, behind, under, around? Can we “get small” -- can we be in a frame of mind to allow surprise--when it comes to time, just like scientists are when it comes to matter?

Jesus talks a lot about the Kingdom of God, God’s imperial rule, as something that breaks through into our known existence. It’s not always recognized, but Jesus says in several places—in Luke, in the Gospel of Thomas, in Matthew, that “God’s imperial rule is right there in your presence,” or that it is “spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it,” or he prays that God’s “will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Robert Funk and Roy Hoover—historical Jesus scholars and Jesus Seminar fellows-- suggest in the book “The Five Gospels” that these teachings illustrate that “Jesus conceived of  God’s rule as all around him but difficult to discern.” They go on to say, “God was so real for [Jesus] that he could not distinguish God’s present activity from any future activity.”

That’s surprising! To me, most of the time, present activity and future activity are VERY different things. Present activity – NOW – is time-bound, now is space-constrained. And eternal life, if it exists, is very much FUTURE activity: beyond my time and space. But Jesus urges us to get deep inside the NOW and see that what we expect of eternity is possibly happening now. Get small.  Jesus, in our reading from John today, says:

Very truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgment, but has passed from death to life. Very truly, I tell you, the hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.

Jesus is not talking about eternal life as something in the future. The dead can hear the voice of God and live - now.  I think that Jesus is not talking only about the physically deceased, if at all. I think he is very much talking about dead men and women walking –the people God calls out in Hosea:

The people do not acknowledge me as God. … And so the land will dry up, and everything that lives on it will die. All the animals and birds, and even the fish, will die.

We need to acknowledge God’s breakthrough into the world. That’s what Hosea is saying: Listen Israel!  To those dead men and women walking, indeed to all of us, Jesus also says: unstop your ears, hear my word, and live in the Kingdom of God. . . now.

Author and scholar Andrew Harvey tells us:

For Jesus, the Kingdom was a present mystical reality, the only authentic reality . . . its splendor is always around us and only our blindness and driven desperate attachments to . . . conventional wisdom prevent us from seeing the wonder of it, living in it, and living it out so others can catch flame from its fire.

Maybe, in the words of Desert Father Abbot Joseph, to be “utterly changed into fire.”

So Jesus is not only, if at all, talking about eternal life as something that happens after we die. He’s talking about something that happens in this life. Jesus says the eternity, what he called “living water” to the Samaritan woman at the well in our reading three weeks ago, is not something we have to wait to encounter in the by-and-by (though we may, as our hymn puts it, understand it better by-and-by). Eternity is to be experienced by digging into the now.

UCC Minister Tony Robinson puts it this way: “whatever eternal life is, it starts when his word burns in our heart and we take the risk of trusting our lives to the One who sent Jesus. . . Jesus is telling us that eternal life isn't just a quantity of life. It is a quality of life.”

I think that quality of live involves getting small. Getting deeply into creation and discovering that the rules we thought applied don’t. With John Shelby Spong I think it means showing our respect for God--the source of life--by living; acknowledging God—the source of love—by loving; and worshipping God--the ground of being--by being all we can be. Realizing that the Kingdom of God is not focused on life beyond death; rather it is focused on life instead of death.

I recently heard Church of Scotland theologian George McCloud quoted as saying our risk is not in missing God in the after-life. Our risk is in missing God in the now. If you miss NOW, you miss God. Now is the time for us who are dead to hear; now is the door to eternity. God’s future begins right now.

http://www.truthdriventhinking.com/audioblog.htm

Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman, p. 117-118

The Five Gospels, p. 137

Son of Man, by Andrew Harvey, p. 14

http://www.ucc.org/feed-your-spirit/daily-devotional/life-before-death-1.html