“Christ
Mind”
Matthew
5:21-37
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
February
13, 2011
Do you ever have restless nights or am
I the only one? You know the
kind…sleep for a while and then wake up and not be able to get back to sleep.
Sleep in fits and starts. I
used to fight it. I’d lie in
bed willing myself back to sleep and the more I willed the more awake I’d get.
So I have learned when restlessness comes that, instead of tossing and
turning, just to get up and do some reading or writing.
It is a prime time for finding books on my shelf that I long had
forgotten were there. I never buy a
book unless I think it is going to be good.
The problem is, I buy too many books and so some of them get only a
cursory look before finding a place on a bookshelf waiting to be found a few
years hence on a sleepless night.
That is a long way around to saying
that during a restless night this past week, I found a little book on my shelf
called Psalms of My Life by Joseph
Bayly. I am not sure why I bought
the book, whenever it was, except to think that maybe it was so that I could
find it this week when I needed it.
The Bayly psalm that spoke right at me,
to me, this week is one called “A Psalm Requesting Faith.”
In some ways, it seems a fitting follow up to what I said in my sermon
last week about daring to live on God’s behalf as the salt of the earth and
the light of the world. But it also
seems to open a window into today’s gospel reading.
This Bayly psalm is as follows:
Give
me courage Lord
to take
risks
not the
usual ones
respected
necessary
relatively
safe
but those
I could avoid
the go for
broke ones.
I need
courage
not just
because
I may fall
on my face
or worse
but others
seeing me
a sorry
spectacle
if it
should happen
will say
he
didn’t know what he was doing
or he’s
foolhardy
or he’s
old enough to know
you lead
from the side
instead of
letting yourself be
caught
in wild
stampede.
Give me
courage Lord
to take
unnecessary risks
live at
tension
instead of
opting out.
Give me
the guts to put up
instead of
shutting up.
When it
comes right down to it
Lord
I choose
to be Your failure
before
anyone else’s success.
Keep me
from reneging
on my
choice.
These last lines give me a way of
making sense of today’s gospel text.
When
it comes right down to it
Lord
I choose
to be Your failure
before
anyone else’s success.
Keep me
from reneging
on my
choice.
As we have been reading the Beatitudes
and ensuing sections of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount like our text today, it has
occurred to me how “beyond me” they seem to be.
John Shea tells the story of writing a commentary on Matthew and, as he
wrote one day, the phone rang, Shea answered, and a friend on the other end of
the line asked him what he was doing. “I
am meditating on the Sermon on the Mount,” Shea said.
“Oh,” said his friend, “that’s just a list of things we can’t
do. It’s too hard.”
I think of all the times in my life I
have hungered and thirsted for seemingly everything but righteousness.
I have every good intention and then someone cuts me off on the road and
I want revenge, not righteousness. I
am haunted by all the chances I have passed by to show mercy.
I have not murdered anyone, not literally, but I shudder to think how
many times I have slain people’s spirits by my words or actions and how Jesus
says that is like killing them. I
cannot count the number of times I have turned another person into an object of
my scorn or adulation or personal need rather than honoring their status as a
child of God in his or her own right. And
I wish I could say I have been true to every “yes” I ever have said or
promised or held fast to every “no,” but then the truth would not be in me.
But, still, more than anything else and
deep down I want to live into the life that Jesus describes.
I do not want to give up on it. This
is where Bayly’s psalm helps me. I
know that first and last my life has to do with God and so, even failing to live
up to or into the life that Jesus draws for me in the Sermon on the Mount, I
would rather be God’s failure than anyone else’s success.
So, what do I do?
Do I try harder and harder? Do
I pound the Beatitudes deeper and deeper into my brain in the hope that they
somehow, sometime, some way will “take”?
Do I beat myself up for not keeping the inner spirit of the law even if
decorum often puts a pretty face on my outer behavior?
William Martin has a book called The
Tao of Forgiveness, another book I found on my restless night this week.
Those who have been a part of our Aging & Saging Group know that
the “Tao” can be translated in many ways.
Among them: The Way the
Cosmos Unfolds Itself; the Mystery behind all mysteries, the God behind all
Gods, the Unnameable behind all names, the True Path.
It is the overarching divine reality in the world.
In that sense, the Tao is synonymous with the Christ.
So I want to share a story that Martin
tells in his book except whenever Martin writes the word “Tao” I am going to
substitute “Christ.” This short,
little story is called “The Birds.”
The
Sage looked calmly at the birds. “Everyone
has birds,” he said. “You
can’t get rid of them.”
“Can’t
get rid of them!” cried
“Walk
with me,” said the Sage, and they walked for several hours up over a small
mountain range and down the other side to the ocean.
They made their way down a steep path cut into the cliff until they
reached an expanse of sandy beach.
Together,
they walked out to the ocean’s edge and stood looking across the vast water to
the horizon.
“Now
what?” asked
“Now,
nothing,” said the Sage. “Just
listen to the ocean.”
He
turned his attention back to the ocean and, once again, the birds expanded their
range, circling even farther away this time.
He
turned to the Sage. “Interesting,”
The
Sage nodded. “The ocean is your
Christ mind. It is always there,
always offering an infinite amount of room for your life.
Do you understand?”
“I
don’t know,” said Stanley, “but I want to be here by the ocean more often,
that’s for sure.”
The
Sage smiled, “It is always here.”
“By
the way,” said
“Oh,”
said the Sage with a dismissive wave of the hand, “they’re still here but
their circle is miles away. I hardly
notice them anymore unless I really concentrate on them.
And I cannot imagine why I would want to do that, can you?”
So, a few things.
Several weeks ago I offered an interpretation of salvation as
“spaciousness.” The Hebrew roots
of that word and concept in the Bible talk about salvation as entering into the
spaciousness, the expansiveness, the largeness of God.
In this story, the Sage said to
We get so used to them that we come to
believe that the squawking, circling birds in our lives represent Real Life, the
way life has to be. The names of our
birds are shame, resentment, anxiety, bitterness, anger, guilt, need for
control, all those things that Jesus talks about in his Sermon on the Mount that
lead to less than satisfactory relationships with others and a diminished sense
of oneself. On the one hand, it
might be good to pay attention to these chattering birds a bit, finding out why
and where they come from in our lives and how they manage to command our
attention in ways that keep them flying in tight little circles around us –
troubling us, stirring us up, snatching away our peace.
But always we are invited to remember
the ocean. The Christ mind is the
divine spaciousness in which we can forgive ourselves and others and so lessen
the power and proximity of our nattering birds.
It is not that we never will be aware of our birds, but we do not have to
put food out for them and focus on them. Instead,
we can choose to swim in the ocean of the Christ mind and in that way begin to
be free to come to our true selves, to begin to live into the way of life Jesus
describes in his Sermon.
The Christian life really is about
waking up more and more to “the eternal ocean,” to the Christ mind.
“Be ye transformed,”
Martin offers a Christ (Tao) Mind meditation with which I conclude:
The birds are familiar and noisy,
They clamor for attention,
distract, and divert me from my life.
They accuse me of transgressions
and point out the evil others do.
I have created them
and I accept them.
But I choose not to feed them.
May their noise become faint in the distance
and the soothing surf of the (Christ) be my company.
Amen.
Copyright
© 2011 First Presbyterian Church