Go Deep

Go Deep

This Sunday is particularly important in the American liturgical calendar. It is the Sunday we celebrate the triumph of good over evil, of truth over untruth, of the ultimate victory of the righteous. I mean of course that this is Super Bowl Sunday.

One of the most thrilling plays that we will wait for; one of the plays known in backyard games and college playoffs, is when the quarterback gets in the huddle and in whatever code is used, looks intently at a receiver and says “God says, “Go deep.””

It means that the quarterback will throw the ball far and true deep down the field. Fans will be thrilled, situations redeemed, careers rescued.

This drama will be played in the midst of what is often a grinding sport of men smashing into each other and being carted off the field. It is the drama of our lives, because our lives often feel like a wearing tension of and unending series of runs up the middle.

Life is often tedious and religion irrelevant.

Most people have lives of grinding regularity. Their waking hours are filled with repetitive tasks and few real challenges. Most interpersonal relations stabilize into a steady state of habitual actions in which conflict and caring takes very predictable forms. We are people of habit who put on our pants one leg at a time because of the way pants and legs are made.

In this life of cycles and circles, there is a dim understanding that there must be more. And so we reach for the divine, the not us, the holy other, the prophetic perspective on who we are to take us to a new, livelier place.

We skim across the surface of what looks like monotony. The deeper waters are rich and alive, however. I enjoy scuba diving and will go wreck diving in Malta with my father in law in just a few days. Off the Florida keys I have been diving in John Pennecamp state park. This completely marine park is a sancuary for the reefs and is off limits to fishing. You will find in its depth colors and darting fascination you wouldn’t suspect from the surface. You will also find in its depths a statue of Jesus that was sunk there many years before called “Christ of the Abyss.” Christ of the Abyss is a 8 1/2 foot, 4000 pound bronze sculpture of Jesus Christ that stands in 25 feet of water off of Key Largo, Florida. Jesus has his hands outstretched, reaching up, waiting to be discovered by those who look beneath the surface.

The church has often been irrelevant in our search for deeper meaning. Paul Tillich, in the beginning of his systematics says that religion, for the most part, has been “answering questions no one ever asked in language no one can understand.” It is not unusual that people have given up on the church. We are caught up in committees and structures, fighting battles the culture finished years ago. We still fight about full participation for gay and lesbian people when it is a fact of life for most of our culture.

Peter Hears the Call

Like Peter, we are trying to get on with the business of life and watch in amusement as the church does its thing. Peter, like most of us, is fatigued and skeptical. Like us, he has been fishing in the dark for many fruitless hours.

Clarence Darrow was quoted as saying his favorite bible passage was from Luke 5:5, "We have toiled all the night and have taken nothing." For all his accomplishments, he felt his efforts were often fruitless. History judged him differently.

The call to dedication did not come to the early disciples in the cloistered halls of some worship center. The call came to them in the midst of the frustrations of their normal life. The people who built and rebuilt this church after its fires were people who faced the dedication required by the events of the day in the midst of the complexity of their lives.

The unusual suggestions of God have to do with how we go about the regular business of our life. Jesus spoke to the fishermen disciples through their very vocation. “Put out into deep water.” The fishermen thought they knew better than this holy guy. They knew the fish weren’t biting. They were at least polite, of course. With much eye rolling and perhaps a nudge to each other they followed Jesus suggestion with only a mumbled protest. Jesus calls them to have faith and fish where the big ones are. He calls them to expect great things.

It was as though an obscure minister came to an engineer who was trying to get a light bulb to work after thousands of trials and errors and said, “Have your tried a carbon filament?”

God’s Unusual Suggestions for Us

Jesus has suggestions for each of us and they call us to the deeper waters of life. They seem unusual only because we think we know better.

When the culture wants you to settle for mere comfort. God says, “Go deep.”

When your employer wants to take all your energy. God says, “Go deep.”

When your children want the easy answers. God says, “Go deep.”

When you’re down by 6 and there’s only a minute left. God says, “Go deep.”

When the people in your life are like things and things are like people to you. God says, “Go deep.”

When our country wants you to think only about short term gains and sacrifice principles. God says, “Go deep.”

When the chips are down folks are afraid to go deep, even in desperation. In the history of the Super bowl, the longest reception was 81 yards (Favre to Freeman – 1997), this season in the NFL there were 10 longer than that. We are afraid of the depths, afraid of being intercepted, afraid there will be no one at the other end.

Don’t be afraid. The depths will not crush you. Let us go together in this boat, the church, into deep water. Let us transcend the ordinary today and find God’s extraordinary presence in our lives.

Lord’s Supper as Going Deep

The elements of the Lord’s Supper that we are about to take are completely ordinary. We have eaten bread and drunk juice thousands of times before. Jesus dines with us in the midst of the ordinary and asks us to put our nets into the deep water again. We approach the table fatigued and skeptical, but Jesus continues to meet us here. After the teaching, after the work, Jesus comes to us in the ordinary actions of our life with the extraordinary suggestion that we go deep into the mysteries that bring us home.

Communal Love

1 Corinthians 13:1-13
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.


Communal Love

In the armed forces, as you may know, chaplains not only serve God, but serve as "morale officers" for the enlisted. It presumes that there is a thing called morale that is a general term for the feelings of a group. Chaplains presumably are to monitor these feelings and keep them high.

Our culture isn't very skilled with words about feelings and even less with feelings held by groups of people, but this is one example. When Jimmy Carter was president, he described a certain emotional tenor of the country as a "malaise."` When we attend football games, it's easy to see the spirit of supporters wax and wane given the success of the team. School spirit describes some feeling of enthusiasm that is expected of loyal students.
This morning we'll explore the idea of group emotions then consider how Paul might be getting at such and idea in his chapter on love, then we'll try to apply this to what it might mean.

Group Feeling

It's easy to determine the ideas of a group of people. They write them down in constitutions and creeds and policies. They teach their ideas to their children. They organize around ideas into political parties and religious denominations. They are often able to identify and articulate their ideas and how they differ from others. The ideas of these groups may even take on legal status as with the bylaws of a corporation.

The thoughts of the group obviously have influence on the individuals. "Group think" is a negative term coined in 1952 by William H. Whyte describing how the ideological culture of a group can shape the individual's perspective.

In an article in the New Yorker a few years ago, the editors quote Randall Collins who finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves: Wang Ch'ung, Bassui Tokusho, and Ibn Khaldun. I have ten dollars for anyone who knows about any two of those people. The editors write, "Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another's spouses. Freud may have been the founder of psychoanalysis, but it really began to take shape in 1902, when Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler would gather in Freud's waiting room on Wednesdays, to eat strudel and talk about the unconscious."

While it is obvious that we influence and share each other’s ideas, it is less clear how we share and influence each other’s feelings. We know that the attitudes and feelings of prejudice are learned from the culture and largely from the family setting, but generally, there is far less we know about the feelings of our social systems.

Intuitively, however, we know that a group can have a tangible emotional atmosphere. How many times have you walked into a room and felt tension, even when you had no reason to know of any. As a pack animal, we constantly send off hundreds of non-verbal messages that influence each other and result in a shared emotional experience.

Rational people may be uncomfortable with feelings in general or experiences that can’t be clearly reduced, so religious emotion may be discounted, especially in group experiences. I know a man very well who is the model of an intelligent, rational being, yet when he went to see the Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, he was so overcome by the complexity of the feelings in the room, he passed out and an ambulance had to be called to the movie theater.

Emotions, personal or communal, are not easy to understand or control, yet they are of course, what makes life worth living. Who would want to reduce the exalted feelings we have in the midst of a big hymn or a perfect silence? In fact, I would suggest to you that a part of the important experience of First Reformed is the particular feelings of worship in this place, the big organ sound, the fine choir, and the emotional flavor of the people around you.

There were no cathedrals for the early Christians, though. There was only the arching spirit that drove their community.

Communal Love

In Chapter 12 of First Corinthians, Paul talks at length about the differing and needed gifts individuals bring to the body of Christ. But in the 13th chapter, he is well on his way to the transition of talking about the church as a whole. We usually hear this chapter in terms of our individual experience of emotion. We even twist it into use at weddings when the agape love here described is far from the romantic love celebrated.

American culture has taught us to think of all ideas and feelings in the individual contexts, but think for a moment about what Paul is after for the early church. He is all about the stability of the community, all about being the corporate body of Christ. The agape love he describes is not some feeling we have by ourselves in a corner, but the feeling we encourage in the community as an atmosphere.

Communal love is not the feelings we have for the community, or even for each other. It is the general emotional disposition that we share that becomes an infectious force in itself.
This may sound a little mystical, and perhaps it is. When we understand the feelings that we share that go beyond the sum of our emotional parts, perhaps we are approaching the realm of spirit. It may be that some of our spiritual language is a way of talking about the subtleties of personal and communal emotions.

But so what? How does this idea play out in our lives?

Loving as a Group

What would it mean to foster and develop feelings in our families and churches, specifically love?
Patience, for instance, as a component of love, is not only something practiced by individuals, but whole communities can conspire to be patient. One of the marks of a spiritual community is the way it treats unusual or annoying people. When we set a standard together of patience with folks who need love in a patient way, we form a tangible expectation that children learn and that others can sense.

Kindness is more than acts of graciousness, it is a felt attitude of benevolence that we can decide will happen in our midst.

Arrogance, rudeness, and stubbornness are qualities that we can challenge with the gentleness of love and firmly place outside the culture we establish as the body of Christ. We conspire, you and I, to create an emotional environment that is just as important as any doctrine, any confession, any policy. Policies will become charming history and creeds will look archaic rather quickly. As for knowledge, it will become obsolete. The attitudes of caring will continue to ripple out to the generations. Love never ends.

People were not attracted to the religion of Jesus because of the rigorous theology. In the early days, there simply wasn’t any. People understood and understand the emotional intelligence of humility and love. In his warmer moments Paul understands this. He understands that for all he talks about faith, something is more important. For all he dwells on hope, something is more important.

As a people of God, we will approach the divine to the extent that we can develop the culture of love. John wrote that God is love, and so by algebraic extension, God is patient, God is kind, God is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. God never ends.

May this God, this love be ours today.

Pre-emptive Forgiveness

“Pre-emptive Forgiveness”
Sermon by Bill Levering, preached at the First Reformed Church of Schenectady
January 21, 2007

People are likely to make mistakes.

Odds are, I am about to make a mistake. There are thousands of rules about grammar and word usage and chances are in the next few minutes, I will violate at least one of them. In fact, it is almost a certainty that I will make several mistakes.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson wrote a book called the Steps to the Ecology of Mind that begins with a series of interactions with his daughter that attempt to portray, in simple terms some critical issues in human life. One of these essays is “Why do things get in a muddle?” His daughter asks:

[...] people spend a lot of time tidying things, but they never seem to spend time muddling them. Things just seem to get in a muddle by themselves. And then people have to tidy them again.

Bateson answers her by explaining, ‘it’s just because there are more ways which you call “untidy” than there are ways which you call “tidy.”’ He explained that there are far more places for her dolls to be out of place, than in the right place.

This is true across a broad range of issues in life. There are plenty of ways to be wrong, and only a few ways, often one, of being right. So, like this sermon, it’s almost impossible for any of us to be anything but incorrect many times a day.

Most married people understand this. Abby, my wife, has a clear idea about how an adult ought to act in the world. Now Abby is not a judging person at all, but I suggest to you that before breakfast is over, I have made several grave errors in her eyes. She may not say anything. In fact, she may forgive me completely, but the fact is that it isn’t long at all before mistakes are made.

Army people have long understood the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way. However we measure ‘rightness,’ it’s much easier to be wrong. There are many many wrong answers to the problem of 1+1. In an effort to experience the vast way in which we could be wrong about this, I’d like everyone to shout out an incorrect answer to the problem of 1+1. (shouts) I know that some of you said “two” just to be obstreperous, but, given the assignment, that would have been a mistake, so all is well.

God and Forgiveness.

If often seems as though our relationship with God is in the same terms. There are apparently a millions ways to get God mad. Many, many commandments, rules, and moral injunctions to break in all sorts of creative new ways.

One of the most popular exercises in confirmation classes I have run is the task of figuring out one act that breaks all the commandments at once. Young people who would normally have trouble engaging a set of rules become more animated when trying to break them. We usually end up with someone lying in court about murdering their parents on Sunday, . . . well, you get the idea.

In the Judaism of Jesus’ day, there were rules and sacrifices to be made. The sin offering, for example, was an important offering made by observant Jews for sins that they may have inadvertently committed. The law had gotten so complicated, you literally needed lawyers to figure out what should happen when certain mistakes were made.

Jesus bring about a whole new way of dealing with these mistakes. Forgiveness. First of all, he forgives the people about him, even those who are murdering him. He broadens this and establishes a new ethic for forgiving each other. “ You have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth . . . . “ Most importantly, though, he is the instrument of our forgiveness with God.

Forgiveness is Jesus’ major theme. It is at once the hardest teaching to accept and the most important one to integrate into our lives. We are forgiven, we need to forgive. It affects international relations, criminal justice, marital relations, and institutional

I will be here for the life span of one of your pets. Hopefully, your only pet isn't a gerbil. In that time, I will talk to you about many of the dimensions of forgiveness, but in blatant self interest this morning, I’d like to address pre-emptive forgiveness.

Possible Upcoming Errors

We have established that I am about to make a mistake, but let me sketch the possibilities for you.

I may be too flip, or too serious.

I may not wear a tie when one is clearly required.

I may forget your name.

I may repeat myself.

I may forget your name.

I may be impatient or strident in my desire to change the world.

I may not care about something as much as you want me to.

I may begin to horribly split infinitives.

I may like someone you don’t want me to like.

I may be insensitive to a cherished tradition.

I may use a Presbyterian word when I should use a Reformed church word.

I may not call you back fast enough.

I may get too excited about technological toys.

I may speak in language that is too political or too religious.

I may spill coffee on your new slacks.

I may break your brother’s arm while playing squash.

For all these potentialities, I need your forgiveness. In fact, I need to know that you might forgive me even before I do anything, because I don’t want to live in fear. Now, I don’t intend to break your brother’s arm. Quite the contrary. But we have already established, as Paul said “I do the very thing that I don’t want to.”

For this boon, I promise to do my best to forgive you. Forgiveness is a street with many lanes. Just as those of you who are Republicans may need to forgive the fact that I am a Democratic, so I will forgive you for being Republicans.

All this warm talk of forgiveness between us may be fine in the abstract, but in application, it may be more challenging.

Future forgiveness.

The early disciples must have had trouble with this idea of forgiveness, because they come to Jesus looking for clarification and ways out of this crazy idea. They ask how many times do we have to do this and Jesus’ answer rather mocks the idea of counting at all. As it I could keep track of each time I forgave someone and then stop at forty nine or seventy seven. If there are literalists in the crowd, however, feel free to start the counter going now. Personally, I think Jesus is more complex and more interesting than a simple rule giver. Also, it would be counterproductive for him to just give more rules that needed forgiving.

The question the disciples ask implies action in the future. Unless they are remembering a whole series of events that need forgiveness, they are looking with trepidation into the future of forgiveness and wondering about its limits. Surely if people are obnoxious enough to make the same mistake over and over we don’t need to forgive them,

Of course an attitude of forgiveness can be corrupted and taken advantage of. But that is for another Sunday. The first word is forgiveness. Before we say, “yes, but . . .”, we need to say, “yes” to forgiving even as God has and will forgive us.

There is a great fear about talking about God forgiving us in the future. That it will somehow create sociopaths undeterred by guilt. But for people who are trying to find the holy, understanding that God will forgive us in the future gives us the courage to act in the world at all. We need no longer be cowed by complexity or muted by the chilling judgment of any church structure. In response to the overwhelming moral codes of medieval Roman Catholicism, Martin Luther’s disturbing breakthrough is, “Love God and do as you please.”

Forgiveness is a gracious attitude that is not just about the past. It extends into the future. It is an acceptance and a humility that seeks goodness in each situation.

Once we begin to nurture the attitude of forgiveness that goes beyond measurement, we can let go cherished wounds, we can begin to forgive ourselves even as we do something weak, begin to forgive God, begin to establish relationships of hope, not of fear. To err is human, to forgive - through God’s help - also human.

Our Misplaced God
by Bill Levering
October, 2006

Job is in trouble. His fortune, his health, and most of his family are lost. Much like the mayor of New Orleans, he sits on a pile of rubble and gets bad advice. Job's biggest problem is that he has misplaced God. 'Oh, that I knew where I might find him.'

Now, it's not unusual for people to misplace important things. Key, wallets, glasses. But misplacing God? This morning I'd like to look at our experience of misplacing things and see how it might help us in our relationship with God. We’ll look first at the misplacing and then at the finding.

Misplacing things is a maddening experience. First comes annoyance, then frustration, then anger at ourselves for being so stupid or so disorganized or so undisciplined. The meeting is starting in 15 minutes and I can't find the keys. I've looked everywhere once and most places twice. I've wracked my brains. I was in a hurry before any of this started, now it's an absolute panic. It's not that the important things in our lives get completely lost. We know they are around here someplace. Someplace. Some wrong place.

Most of the important things in our lives have a particular place where they belong. The remote control goes on top of the TV. We all know that. What happens to make the totems of our life mysteriously slip into inappropriate hiding places? Here’s what happens: we get distracted or we get lazy and put the remote down in the first place that is handy.

Just as we certainly don’t intend to put our glasses in the wrong spot, we don’t intend to misplace God, but it ends up happening. We have placed what should be at the center at the periphery. We have placed God under our needs for comfort and security. We have placed God in the freezer when God should always be next to our hearts.

Remember the pearl of great price? Jesus tells of a man who finds an incredibly valuable pearl and sells all that he has to invest in it. Imagine now that this man goes home and hides it someplace so well that he can’t remember where it is.

We have done this as a culture. We have placed subordinate values of punishment and security above Godly notions of forgiveness and redemption. As a nation established for freedom, we have forgotten where we put that basic idea now.

As individuals we have misplaced God. We keep the divine as a charming subset of our busy lives, an enrichment to the real curriculum of reading the trends, writing the checks and the rithmetic of greed.


The Problem of the Misplaced God

Important things misplaced become a crisis when they are needed. The keys can stay in the freezer for all we care until we need them to get to the meeting. God can stay in the wrong place until we suddenly realize we have put the divine in the wrong spot. Psalm 77 says, “In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying.”

It may seem for a bit that this is not our fault. I distinctly remember putting the keys on the dining room table. Who moved them? “My God My God, why have you lost track of me?” “Are you paying attention here?”

There are times when God seems to have misplaced us, but of course, we have misplaced God. When God is misplaced, we try to go it alone, to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, to tough it out.

But just as the misplaced keys bring on a sense of anxiety and anger, so putting God out of sight and out of mind gives us only a sense of a “God shaped hole” as Salman Rushdie wrote: the central place that God is meant to occupy. When we lose important things we get a little disoriented, the rest of our life limps along, we are distracted and worried about the missing elements.

Perhaps you have not lost touch with God however. That’s great. Just take notes on the sermon for someone else in your family because most of us have had the experience of estrangement from the really good stuff, gradually losing track of what is most important.

In order to have billfold when you need it. In order to have God at hand when the problem or the joy arrives, we need to keep track of God.


How do we find God?

Let’s pound this analogy into the ground, shall we? How can the way we find our misplaced passport help us find our God?

Just as people loved to give Job advice, folks love to give advice to people who misplace things. Let’s look as some of it.

Where was the last place you had it? How many times have we retraced our steps, run through our actions in our head? So retrace your steps. When was he last time you felt close to God? Singing a hymn? Sing more hymns. In yoga class? Take more yoga. In conversations of faith? Talk more about God. Were you last closest to God in the middle of the night in a desperate prayer? Um. Buy a bigger car? No. Pray more.

Who else can help? I know that when I have put my cell phone in the wrong place, after about five minutes of looking, or after about 5 seconds of looking, I might shout “Abby! Have you seen my palm pilot?” There is something about a search that invites another perspective. “I think I saw it on the dryer!” She might shout. When we lose track of the divine, perhaps we should ask around. “Have you seen God lately?” Church is a good place to do this.

Where is it supposed to be? Wikihow is a website with short articles that tell you how to do everything imaginable. On their site they have several suggestions on how to find lost objects. One of them is, “Look for the missing object where it is supposed to be, or where it can usually be found.”

Hmm. Where is God supposed to be, or usually found. Isaiah says “Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.” (55:6) If there is a place that God is supposed to be, I suppose that just might be worship. If God seems far off, trying visit the holy house more. It sounds like a joke, but I bet you know someone who misplaced their glasses right on top of their head. God is like that. Right where you might expect the divine to be. Waiting for us to sheepishly look in place that God has always been: everywhere.


The Finding is Worth the Looking

In the book of Jeremiah, God addresses the pain of people who have been moved en masse to Babylon. He tells people the pain of the Babylonian exile will not be for much longer. Jeremiah reports God’s benevolent availability: “For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you," declares the LORD” (29:11-14)

Sometime in the next few weeks you will lose something important. You will misplace keys, glasses, remote control, or something. As you are frantically looking about, stop for just a moment and consider if there is something bigger you should be looking for as well.

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and it’s righteousness. And all these things will be added unto you. Allelu Alleluia.

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