“Were
the Whole Realm of Nature Mine”
8.
"Unrevealed
Until Its Season"
1
Corinthians 2:6-16
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
August
15, 2010
Here it is – eight sermons into our
summer series about what we can learn about God, faith, and our lives from the
realm of nature – and I have not yet called on Mary Oliver!
Can you believe it? And she
is a nature poet! So, I want to
rectify the situation posthaste and thus I offer as our beginning today a poem
culled from one of her early collections. She
calls her poem The Sunflowers.
The Sunflowers
Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks,
their dry spines
creak like ship masts,
their green leaves,
so heavy and many,
fill all day with the sticky
sugars of the sun.
Come with me
to visit the sunflowers,
they are shy
but want to be friends;
they have wonderful stories
of when they were young –
the important weather,
the wandering crows.
Don’t be afraid
to ask them questions!
Their bright faces,
which follow the sun,
will listen, and all
those rows of seeds –
each one a new life! –
hope for a deeper acquaintance;
each of them, though it stands
in a crowd of many,
like a separate universe,
is lonely, the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come
and let us talk with those modest
faces,
the simple garments of leaves,
the coarse roots in the earth
so uprightly burning.
There.
Isn’t that well said, writing ostensibly of sunflowers but really
suggesting the purpose of our lives?
“The long work of turning their (our) lives into a celebration is not
easy…” Well, maybe it
is easy for a few, but that has not been my experience nor of most people I
know. Perhaps that is because so
much of the wisdom of life remains hidden to us until we are able to open
ourselves sufficiently to take it in. Perhaps
life’s wisdom remains unrevealed to us until the season when we are ready to
avail ourselves of it. Maybe that is
something of what Jesus meant when he said, “Ask
and it will be given you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be
opened to you” (Matthew 7:7).
I think of the elder brother who got so
famously chapped with his father when he welcomed home the wayward prodigal with
a prodigious party and a forgiving heart. The
older brother snapped begrudgingly at his dad that “all
these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I never have disobeyed
you, yet you never have given me so much as a young goat that I might celebrate
with my friends.” Note that
the father did not say, as many fathers might, “No,
actually son, I have been working like a slave for you…to provide for you…to
be sure you have a good life and I have turned aside from some of what I could
have done in my life in order to take care of yours.”
No, the father – meant by Jesus in telling this story to be
analogous to God – says calmly and simply, “Son,
you always are with me, and all that is mine is yours.
But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was as
good as dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”
The father begs his son to come into the party but we are not told in
the story whether he does or not. I
like to think he did. I like to
think that it was an aha moment for
him, a teachable moment, and that what had been concealed from his understanding
now was being revealed and received. The long work of turning our lives into a celebration is not easy,
but it is the work of our lives to which we are purposed by God.
Just as in a bulb there is a flower and
in an acorn there is a tree and in a tiny white globular ball on the underside
of a milkweed leaf there is a monarch butterfly, so there is always more to come
of us. While our outer appearance
may not change so completely as a bulb turning into a flower or a seed into a
tree, the whole of the Christian life is about our inner nature growing,
changing, and maturing spiritually, emotionally, ethically.
When we are going in the wrong direction, scripture says “repent,” go
in a new direction. When we seem to
be sleepwalking through life, scripture tells us to “wake up.”
When we are complacent and wanting to put off to later changes that would
turn our lives into a celebration or,
to say it more theologically, to make the Christ more recognizable in us,
scripture tells us that “now is the acceptable time, now is the day of
salvation.”
I read recently an article about a
phenomenon known as “mind meld.” Undoubtedly
you have experienced it in your life at some point.
One of our senior high young men has talked with me recently about how he
and his girlfriend experience it. Mind
meld occurs when two people are having a good conversation and they get the
feeling that things between them are clicking on all cylinders.
They can finish one another’s sentences.
They feel as if they are of one mind or that they have the same mind.
A new study of that phenomenon has
found that the act of conversing can produce an almost eerie synchronization of
brain waves, so that the conversation partners experience “mind meld.”
Using a special type of MRI device, researchers at
The research also found that the
effects of mind meld go beyond the parts of the brain used to process language.
During a good conversation, people will unconsciously begin imitating
each other, using similar sentence structures, similar speaking rates, perhaps
beginning to inflect as the other one does, and even adapting similar postures.
They get so tuned in that they can anticipate what the other one is about
to say. (1)
That made me think of how
No eye has seen, no ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who
love him –
these things God reveals to us through the Spirit;
for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
Paul continues:
For what human being knows what is
truly human
except the human spirit that is within?
So also
no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the
Spirit of God. Now we have
received not the spirit
of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so
that we may understand the gifts that are bestowed
on us by God. And we speak of
these things in words
not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit,
interpreting spiritual things to those who are open to
the Spirit.
If a bulb goes unplanted, it will yield
no flower. But placed into the
ground, given water and warmth, a flower eventually will blossom.
There is an oak tree in my front yard and I spend a good part of the
summer extracting from my flower beds all of the little seedlings that spring up
from the acorns that have fallen into the soil and taken root or that have been
placed there by the squirrels who then have forgotten them.
But the acorns that fall onto the driveway or into the street simply
remain acorns.
Similarly, Paul says, “those who are unspiritual, who do not open themselves to God’s
Spirit, do not receive the gifts and wisdom of God’s Spirit, for they are
foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are
spiritually discerned.” Sometimes
people object to the gospel because they say it is not practical in today’s
world. So?
The gospel never claims to be practical (by which its detractors usually
mean convenient or congenial
with one’s lifestyle and beliefs). It
claims to be good news that, if trusted, if lived, yields in its season a
flower, an oak tree, a transformed life and world, the
long work of turning our lives into a celebration.
So Jesus, who opened himself to God’s
Spirit as much as anyone ever has, sees the flower beyond the bulb and thus he
says things like “You have heard that
was said, ‘You shall not murder’ and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to
judgment.’ But I say to you that
if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment and if
you insult a brother or sister you will be liable to the council…so when you
are offering your gift in church, if you remember that your brother or sister
has something against you, leave your gift and go and be reconciled to your
brother or sister and then return and offer your gift.”
Frustrating, hard, challenging but part of the long work of turning our lives into a celebration.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and
hate your enemy.’ But I say to you
to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be
children of your Father in heaven…for if you love only those who love you,
what is that? Do not even the
sinners do that?” What if that
were our foreign policy? Impractical?
Imprudent? Or the bulb before
the flower? Part of long work of turning our lives into a celebration?
“Blessed
are those who mourn,” Jesus said. “Blessed
are the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers.”
Not exactly what the world teaches, but it is the hidden wisdom of
God ready to be revealed to those who want to see, who want to mind meld with
the Christ, who want to turn their lives, and life, into a celebration.
Superficiality is the curse of our age.
With God, there is always more than meets the eye and the whole realm of
nature is our teacher. Like the
mighty oak arising from the acorn, God’s wondrous and mysterious ways yield a
life beyond what we can ask or think or imagine if we avail ourselves of them.
Those ways remain unrevealed until the season of our openness.
Is it that season in your life? Is
it time for the flower to burst forth from the bulb?
Amen.
(1) From an article in The Week magazine, August 13, 2010
Copyright © 2010 First Presbyterian Church