May 13, 2018 - Seventh Sunday of Easter - "While I was Still With You"

I was excited before the service to hear the run through rehearsal for Creator's Pentecost celebration next week by the youth. Both Anelise and Sonnet practiced the Glocal music for next week when the youth will lead the congregation through these songs. Anelise helped us lead the congregation in the music this morning.

Today's service was somewhat bittersweet in large part because of the Gospel reading. There are obviously verses throughout the New Testament that grab mind and heart. These are times we read with understanding and awe God's words of authority and love for the world.  At other times we are moved when, through the word, Jesus speaks as an individual who shares our common humanity and connects with something real within us. An example would be the lament on the cross "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Here, in John 17:11, the words of Jesus, just before his arrest, are particularly and profoundly grief-laden, "And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world". This is a reminder, on the last Sunday of Easter, that even though Christ is risen there is a sadness mixed with joy knowing Jesus is no longer in the world in the same way as we are - the flesh and blood Emmanuel God with us.

Today Pastor Ray's sermon continued to explore the metaphors in the Bible used to describe God or how God can physically manifest to us. He preached about hearing a keynote speaker in Colorado, an Episcopal priest - Lauren Winner - who wrote a book called Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God. She is familiar to many in our congregation as one of the Animate Faith presenters from several years ago. (Session 6)

In Wearing God, Winner’s draws her readers to the biblical images that have captured her attention and awareness: God as clothing, as smell, as laboring woman, as flame.  To start off with - thinking of God as a woman in labor seems somewhat appropriate for a service where we are celebrating Mother's Day today.

To continue with the other metaphors, her thoughts regarding clothing could be summed up in a line from her book "God clothes. God is our clothing. And, finally, God draws us into the act of clothing, by instructing us to clothe others."  To underscore this she references Genesis 3:21 and what God generously does for Adam and Eve just before they are expelled from Eden. God shows love and gives them protection by functioning as a tailor or seamstress in this verse, "The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them."

Winner becomes fascinated with the intimacy of how God clothes us and and what inspiration can be drawn when we ponder God being tied to our clothes. God as near to us as our clothes is something she aspires to believe even though she admits that faith is elusive for her. Also, in Genesis, the God / clothes intimacy is inextricably bound to shame of our bodies. God understands us in that shame on a level that is uncomfortable to accept.

Winner also cites Paul, who wrote in Galatians 3:27 "For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ." This lends credence to thinking about clothing as "fashioning" both individual and group identities or, conversely at times, serving as a barrier to the building of those same identities. We have taboos and associations with clothes we find hard to break,

The next verse is a more recognized verse "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." To think of this with the clothing overlay that cones from verse 16 takes our understanding of this familiar verse in different directions. Actually this is a heads up and a fine reason as to why all may want to wear red next Sunday.

Another intriguing way of meeting God she wrote about, and that Pastor Ray spent time preaching about, was through aroma. There are many passages that reference God and aroma. Early on in the Bible aroma is cited as a reason for God's promise not to curse the ground. We find this in Genesis 8:21,  "The LORD smelled the soothing aroma; and the LORD said to Himself, "I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done."

I appreciate what Winner pursues in her book, Many of the God metaphors used in the Bible are not part of our daily life. We don't see shepherds, kings, vintners or potters regularly in our everyday life as 21st century Americans. Sharing directly what does connect with our life and captures our modern imagination can lead to new, insightful understandings. For example, with Pentecost still in mind, when I read about fire in her subtitle I immediately recall my first dramatic Pentecost worship at Creator.

The intern at that time, Amanda Zentz, during the service came into the sanctuary with a bowl of fire. Connections, associations and the experience of the Biblical event that were triggered by this instantly filled me with excitement. Typically when these Acts verses are read during Pentecost the familiarity with this post-resurrection beginning of the church leads to domesticated responses, even when hearing the detail of divided tongues of fire seen on the disciples. The actual experience of fire in the sanctuary instantly burned all that domestication away.

Jesus often started his teachings with, "The kingdom of heaven is like..." and would allude to something the crowd would know from their daily life. Often we need to be taught the Biblical images which do not come from our daily lives but are rather mediated through these teachings. How often are we told, this is how people, in the time of Jesus, would have responded to his teachings. Any insight that relies on this is, at heart, derivative. We have to learn and trust in the teaching to understand the metaphor. We end up a step removed from encountering what Jesus was communicating to those around him.

Often, being Christian, we accept tradition like we may experience architecture. This is not something to be changed. We marvel at the structure of what has come down to us. We learn what makes it beautiful and why. There is another approach to take, however. We could accept our religious traditions as we would gardening traditions that have come down to us. We can think of the knowledge and wisdom we inherit as ways that have worked in the past to grow in spirit. Those inherited traditions need to be adapted to the conditions of the current "gardening" moment - to the soil, to the surrounding plants, and to the overall state of the whole garden.

Pastor Ray pointed out the two words that are used the most in today's gospel are given and world. This morning he emphasized the word for world is the same as in John 3:16, "For God so loved the world". This helps to reveal that God is not drawing a distinction between the world and what is holy and sacred. The world is not separate and apart from what is considered holy. God loves the world, recognizes it as good and holy and, through us, the body of Christ is God's current expression of that love in the world.

The prayer Jesus makes in John 17:15, "I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one" seems to follow from this understanding of what we are, by nature, as the body of Christ alive in the world today,

You have a choice:
see God as here or not;
see salvation, or see only
human courage; see the divine
subtly at work or see chance.

Lauren F. Winner