January 21, 2018 - Third Sunday after Epiphany - "Sacramentally" Living - Alice In Wonderland with Caterpillars and Polar Bears

I write down what I experience each week with Creator members. From my conversations with these fellow worshipers I know both my individual and our collective worship can be and, at least for most Sundays, is meaningful.

I recently reread the 2018 posts. So far, each of these recent Sunday epiphanies have built on one another - a number of  immediate, progressive revelations since the beginning of the year and today was no exception. In contrast, here is an observation about religion made by Abraham Heschel about religion as he observed it in 1955.

“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

God in Search of Man was published the year I was born. Perhaps this observation was more prophetic then. Now I must take exception in how this quote over-generalizes.

Religions are systematized traditions, rituals of faith and worship. When those traditions or rituals become irrelevant, dull, oppressive and insipid; blaming religion for what is lost rather than the loss of some spiritual imagination, inspiration or intuition of those worshiping seems to me to be passing the buck.

With that in mind I will move to writing what happened today when Pastor Ron presided because Pastor Ray was under the weather.

Epiphanies during the Children's Message are rare. This morning it happened for me when Pastor Ron voiced a line in a scene from his favorite movie as a kid. Specifically this was a scene from Alice in Wonderland where caterpillar asks, "Who are you?"  (click the link for the video). He asked the children how they would answer the hookah-smoking caterpillar's question "Who are you?". He subsequently gave them an answer for their consideration "A Child of God".

How Pastor Ron imitated, in a deep, spooky voice, the caterpillar from the Disney film made me pay attention. His voice conjured up my memories of the film but there was another quality that was apparent. A quality beyond our everyday world. I thought about voices from the many different, hidden worlds that Alice became exposed to when something about her was changed, in this case her size. Had she remained the girl she was when she went down the rabbit hole she would not have had a conversation with a caterpillar..

Of course a caterpillar, by its nature, conjures up an image of transformation that we can experience in our everyday world - a  life within a life - many have a future that is not yet visible. When Pastor Ron asked the children the caterpillar's question they gave him answers from our everyday world (as he expected), either their name, or what they did, with an interest thrown in.

His "A Child of God" answer moves our frame of reference from this everyday world to the Promised Land that I wrote about in other January and Advent epiphanies posts. For example, in a Wednesday Advent Study the discussion focused on what John answered when he was asked who he was.Watching the animated scene with this in mind was wild.  In the animation, the entertaining smoke that moves from one to another illustrates different messages (or letters) that pass between Alice and the caterpillar as they talk.

Pastor Ron started his sermon proper by powerfully quoting Neil Young lyrics off a song from his album Prairie Wind, When God Made Me. What these words conjured up for me was a question of how to live as being as nearly wholly (or holy) human, an American and also an inhabitant of this Promised Land. Here again, in the song title, the "prairie" evokes for me visions of pioneers. I was not expecting any of what I am labeling as progressive epiphanies in today's worship. Pastor Ron gave this sermon without the shared Creator Advent journey and past epiphany moments and yet here were more aha eye-openers. The Holy Spirit showed up as prairie wind this morning.

The sermon soon turned to how startling epiphany moments can be. Pastor Ron mentioned how some Christians will brave freezing temperatures and plunge into icy water to celebrate the Orthodox Epiphany. This age-old ritual for them commemorates the baptism of Jesus Christ in the Jordan River. He thought that the Polar Bear Clubs were linked to this ritual and, from the brief web research I did I believe he was right.

Some Orthodox Christians were in the original Polar Bear Clubs, plunging into the depths of rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, and oceans after the waters are blessed. There are photographs of church leaders in vestments, with icicles dripping from their eyebrows and beards, standing on the edge of a cross cut into the ice as the faithful slip beneath the frigid waters, to experience a stinging remembrance of their baptism and life after death.

Part of what is startling is how this ties neatly with the iceberg image of God that resurfaced in the 2017 year end summary blog. For cold water to have an ancient link to baptism was something I had not thought about before. I knew that water baptism, practiced by immersion in the early church, created a parallel between fish and converts. I once read a quote from the second-century theologian Tertullian that "We, little fishes, after the image of our Ichthys, Jesus Christ, are born in the water." but icy waters with polar bears were not associated in my mind with baptism until this morning. They are now.

Pastot Ron closed with a thought on and for communion:

During communion Jesus re(members) us as the body of Christ and sends us out again as who we are but different.

As I reflected on some facts about polar bears. They are born on land and yet possess the ability to gracefully swim and be at home in the ocean. They live in two worlds, with a mixture of land and water spirits within them.