“The Guest House”
Luke 2:22-40
First
Presbyterian
The Reverend
Thomas A. Sweet
December 27,
2009
First Sunday
After Christmas Day
For
many of us, this time of the year – winter, Christmas, the end of one year and
the beginning of a new one – can cause us to be especially reflective about
out lives…
what
is going on in them and how we are feeling about things
or
what is behind
particular
feelings in us of loss or hope, sadness or joy, anxiety or elation.
While
the popular picture of Christmas is mirth and merriment, “blue Christmas” is
the experience of many people and perhaps, if we are deeply honest, a part of
our own as well.
And,
then, right on its heels comes New Year with its almost unavoidable demand to
take stock of things, to come face to face with what is going well in our lives
but also with what is broken and breaking.
Merry Christmas
and Happy New Year are the socially
crafted greetings for these present days and, if we are lucky, they ring at
least partially true to us. But for
almost no one do they tell our whole story.
There is unspoken social pressure to keep under cover and out of sight
those feelings in us that might upset the spirit of the season.
And, many times, we are glad to do so because we do not want to confront
them, either.
The stockings are hung by the chimney with care,
Stuffed with our feelings we’d rather not dare…
Even
something John wrote in the first chapter of his gospel sometimes is enlisted to
sweep away what we might call “dark” or “difficult” feelings and
situations in our lives under foot:
The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.
(John
1:5)
Too
often we interpret the light solely as positive and darkness only as evil and so
we invoke the good light to vanquish the bad darkness.
But that was not John’s sense of what he wrote.
Light and dark exist alongside each other and each needs to be
appreciated for what it offers to us for our growing and maturing.
Plants need light to live, but, if they did not have the darkness of the
earth in which to germinate, they would never come into being in the first
place. Maybe that which we
experience as a darkness in our lives contains a sacred wounding that is a
precursor to some necessary healing. Maybe
the darkness of crisis requires us to find an alternate path from the one we had
been traveling in the same way that Mary and Joseph were warned in a dream not
to return home by their usual route but “by
another way.” Perhaps John is
encouraging us to rethink our conditioned interpretation of darkness.
The darkness may not be a comfortable place to inhabit but it may
sometimes be important for our growth.
If
we do not deal with what we might consider to be a dark or negative emotion, it
does not simply slink away. It
resurfaces later and sometimes in destructive ways.
John was assuring us that in the presence of the Christ, there will be no
unremitting darkness because the Christ brings the light of God to shine on and
in our lives. But neither will there
be unrelenting light, for darkness is of God as well as light.
John was telling us that the light dances with the darkness and the
darkness does not overcome the light. So
do not be afraid to enter into the dark, John is telling us.
That we should engage all of the feelings and emotions that come to us also is the counsel of the Sufi poet, Rumi, in his poem The Guest House.
The
Guest House
This
being human is a guest house.
Every
morning a new arrival.
A
joy, a depression, a meanness.
some
momentary awareness comes
as
an unexpected visitor.
Welcome
and entertain them all!
Even
if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who
violently sweep your house
empty
of its furniture,
still,
treat each guest honorably.
He
may be clearing you out
for
some new delight.
The
dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet
them at the door laughing,
and
invite them in.
Be
grateful for whatever comes,
because
each has been sent
as
a guide from beyond.
In
our gospel reading today, Simeon and Anna, an old man and a prophetess, seasoned
and wise, were the ones who ritually presented the infant Jesus to God in the
temple. I always have loved the
picture I have in my imagination of them. I
envision them as having engaged a lifetime of visitors in the guest houses of
their lives – joy, depression, crowds of sorrows who swept their houses empty
of their furniture – yet they stood faithful to the end…living substantial,
fruitful, and humble lives because they were willing to engage
all the visitors to the guest houses of their humanity…both the light and
the dark. Their accumulated wisdom
garnered from having lived so deeply gave them the sensitivity and sensibility
to discern the special vocation of Jesus the Christ in a way that others could
not yet see.
Wendell
Berry’s poem, There Is No Turning Back,
describes not only the Bible’s Anna and Simeon but a whole host of Annas and
Simeons I have known across the years, some of whom are here in this room this
morning, people who have entertained all sorts of “house guests” in their
lives, who did not shrink away from the hard places and the difficult feelings,
people who have made their peace with and who have embraced both the light and
the dark, and who, thus, the more they age, the more supple are their souls.
Listen:
There
Is No Going Back
No,
no, there is no going back.
Less
and less you are
that
possibility you were.
More
and more you have become
those
lives and deaths
that
have belonged to you.
You
have become a sort of grave
containing
much that was
and
is no more in time, beloved
then,
now, and always.
And
so you have become a sort of tree
standing
over a grave.
Now
more than ever you can be
generous
toward each day
that
comes, young, to disappear
forever,
and yet remain
unaging
in the mind.
Every
day you have less reason
not
to give yourself away.
There
is no going back. There also is no
going ahead. Not yet.
There is only the present moment, really, and there are stories and
allusions throughout our scripture to affirm that.
There is the Exodus story of the Israelites sojourning in the wilderness
and receiving a daily portion of manna from heaven with the proviso that God
would continue to provide the bread so long as the people only ate that day’s
fill and did not try to hoard it, that they would trust God that there would be
bread on the morrow as there was bread that day.
The psalmist declared, “This is the day that the Lord has made…”
And Jesus taught his disciples to pray a prayer that said, “Give
us this day our daily bread…”
The
present moment is all there is, though, of course, we hold in it all that has
gone before us. The fullness with
which we have attended to our lives will, in large measure, determine the way we
receive and live and experience each present moment.
If we have paid attention and engaged the previous moments of our lives
and what they have brought to us – the dance of darkness and light, the whole
panoply of feelings and emotions – and have not shied away from the difficult
ones, there comes to us a maturity and wisdom that enables
us to be generous toward each day and more and more allows us to
give ourselves away toward a more just and compassionate world.
How
do we do that? How can we pay rapt
attention to those lives and deaths that
have belonged to us? We can dare
to face whatever comes our way because we know that our lives are secure in God.
We may not always be safe, be we are always secure because…in
God we live and move and have our being. If
that is all you ever learn at church, really learn it and trust it, I think it
is enough. Say it with me.
“In God we live and move and have
our being.” So, as the
Christmas angels said repeatedly, we need not fear.
We can admit all visitors into the guest house of our lives and learn
from each one. We can stand
faithfully in the present moment as a living tree
standing over the grave of what has been and cannot be again because there
is no going back. But, we can take
whatever has been and trust that, like a seed that falls into the ground and
dies so that it can rise again as something good and new, our lives truly can
flourish, too.
It
really is the journey that matters. God
is not a destination, but rather the fullness of each of our days, both the
darkness and the light, and we grow into our true and full humanity by being
open to it all.
Amen.
Copyright
© 2009 First Presbyterian Church