Bridging The Divide

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"Bridging the Divide"

John 1:1-15, Sirach 24:1-12
January 2, 2011

Sirach 24:1-12

Wisdom praises herself,
and tells of her glory in the midst of her people.
In the assembly of the Most High she opens her mouth,
and in the presence of his hosts she tells of her glory:
‘I came forth from the mouth of the Most High,
and covered the earth like a mist.
I dwelt in the highest heavens,
and my throne was in a pillar of cloud.
Alone I compassed the vault of heaven
and traversed the depths of the abyss.
Over waves of the sea, over all the earth,
and over every people and nation I have held sway.
Among all these I sought a resting-place;
in whose territory should I abide?

‘Then the Creator of all things gave me a command,
and my Creator chose the place for my tent.
He said, “Make your dwelling in Jacob,
and in Israel receive your inheritance.”
Before the ages, in the beginning, he created me,
and for all the ages I shall not cease to be.
In the holy tent I ministered before him,
and so I was established in Zion.
Thus in the beloved city he gave me a resting-place,
and in Jerusalem was my domain.
I took root in an honored people,
in the portion of the Lord, his heritage.

John 1:1-5

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without
him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the
life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did
not overcome it

We began the calendar new year just yesterday, though, of course, the church began
its own separate calendar at the beginning of Advent, which make us already in
February, if one mark’s time by the church’s ancient calendar. But we don’t, of course,
and so instead, we follow the rhythms of this world, and its understanding of time, and
that is certainly fine, of course, though I am always amused when I see people marking
time with both calendars, giving a Roman date, and then underneath that date, putting
something like, “The Feast of St. So and So.” It’s oddly comforting to see someone
straddling that divide, the divide between the secular calendar and the holy calendar,
giving a “tip of the hat” to both worlds, and, in doing so, perhaps recognizing how all of
our lives are lived in tension between the holy, the sacred and the ordinary, the unholy,
or simply the common.

And yet, of course, I think that the goal of any spiritual person, and certainly any
follower of the Christ, is not to separate the two, is not to place the life of the Spirit and
one’s work or whatever into two separate categories of being, but instead, to integrate
the two, to see the world, to see all of creation the way God most certainly sees it—as
whole, as one, the holy and common being really one and the same, in some powerful
way. We touched on this idea a bit with Parker Palmer’s book THE UNDIVIDED LIFE
last year, the book that we and some other local churches studied for our Wednesday
Evening Lenten series. The idea was that good lives are undivided lives, where we can
join soul and role in our lives, so that we can be healed of all that causes us pain,
including those things like consumerism, injustice, and violence. Barbara Brown Taylor,
a well-known Episcopal clergywoman who left the ranks of the ordained, but has
remained a Christian, says that one of the reasons she left ordained ministry was her
desire to integrate her life of faith with the world outside the church doors, a place
where she could worship God at “an altar in this world,” rather than just simply
worshipping at that altar within a church. She, like many of us, wants to re-integrate
her life, to live a life of wholeness rather than division, one where something like the
calendar is not divided between the sacred and the ordinary, but is one and the same.
The sadness of Taylor’s choice to leave ordained ministry—though not ministry
because one can have a ministry without ordination, as we all do—but the sadness was
that she saw the truth about how difficult it is for us within the church to be actually
present in God’s world, to see the sacredness of God’s creation from within the church,
especially as a clergyperson. That is a sad indictment of how disconnected we in the
church are to goodness and wonder of God’s creation outside these doors, and how
especially difficult it can be for those of us who serve the church within the confines of
ordination.

But texts like the two before us remind us over and over again that this division we have
set up is not the will of God, is not the way God wants us to live our lives. What these
texts do is to help us see creation the way God sees creation, and these text remind us
of how deeply God is involved in what has been created and is still being created, is still
evolving this world. The first text is one I can almost guarantee you’ve never heard
because it is from the Apocrypha, that set of books within the Christian canon that we
Protestants have tended to ignore, though most Catholic and Eastern Orthodox
traditions consider them holy, though not as holy as what has been commonly
recognized as holy, those commonly held 66 books within our Old and New
Testaments—see, there we go again with those divisions between the holy and not so
holy. Ben Sira is its writer, and he did his thing during about 200 years before the birth
of Christ, composing this book of wisdom for his fellow Jews.

In this text, we have Wisdom, the concept of wisdom, being personified as a woman,
something pretty radical for its time. By no means was Ben Sira a feminist, but
sometimes God gets through misogyny and reminds us of God’s own feminine face.
Certainly, this Wisdom is not a separate sacred being from God, from Yahweh, but
simply another mask that God uses to reveal Godself to us, something we see in our
Christian Trinitarian tradition. Here you have Lady Wisdom coming out of the mouth of
the Most High, from the mouth of God, and covering the earth like a mist—she is
everywhere, this wisdom from God’s own heart—all things, all of creation, reflect the
wisdom and wonder of God. And yet, this wisdom has also been commanded to dwell
in particular with the people of Israel, to be the ones she speaks to so that the rest of
us can reap the rewards of what she knows of the living God from whom she comes.
We always know what we know from a particular point of view, and certainly that is no
different in the world of the spirit—for us in the Christian tradition, we reap the wisdom
of our Jewish forbearers, and their experience of God dwelling with them.

Now, for us Christians, the idea of Wisdom from texts like this probably became a
template, a reminder to us, of how we have come to understand the Christ. Written last
of the four Gospels, and infused with Greek and Roman ideas, today’s second text
comes from the first chapter of the Gospel of John, that bridges that divide between old
and new, between ancient and contemporary understandings of God. Instead of
wisdom coming from the mouth of God, a Word comes, and that Word is the Christ,
according to John’s Gospel, and through this Christ everything has been created—
every beetle, every tree, every cell, every molecule, every being, has been created by
and through this Christ, this Wisdom, this Savior given flesh and blood thousands of
years ago. The text is emphatic—not a single thing has been created without Christ
being involved in its creation. Now, that, that is a wonder, and if there ever were a
moment when we realize that Christ really is involved in everything, then this would be
that moment. Think about this for a second, really think about it—everything you have
ever come into contact with, the grass beneath your feet, the elements that make up
your toothbrush and toothpaste, the piano we just heard, the voices that were raised,
the glasses you put on to read the bulletin—all of it bears the mark of its creator, all of
it has been shaped by the Christ, this One who is eternal, beyond even the moment of
the incarnation, this enfleshment of God, thousands of years ago in Palestine. You
see, everything and every moment shimmers with God, and all things are miraculous
act of creation.

In Wendell Berry's book Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1993), these words are written:

Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air, and
pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and
empty stellar distances, will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine -- which was,
after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by
which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.

What the Bible might mean, or how it could mean anything, in a closed, air-conditioned
building, I do not know .... I know that holiness cannot be confined. When you think
you have captured it, it has already escaped; only its poor, pale ashes are left. It is
after this foolish capture and the inevitable escape that you get translations of the Bible
that read like a newspaper. Holiness is everywhere in Creation, it is as common as
raindrops and leaves and blades of grass, but it does not sound like a newspaper.
--As referenced by Martin E. Marty in Context, 25 (1 December 1993), 6

Now, I’m not sure I agree with Wendell on one point, about holiness never sounding like
a newspaper, but I appreciate the point he is trying to make here, the point that I think
the writer of John is making—that everything is imbued, is infused with God, with its
creator, and the holiness of its creator, remains within that creation, though it rarely just
stays confined within the boundaries of that initial creation. Anyone who has created
anything knows that the thing one creates—whether that is a family, a child, a business,
a piece of art, an organization, anything and everything—we know that we leave behind
a piece of who we are in what we have created. If that is true, that means that God
leaves behind God’s own self when God creates something—for writer of the Gospel of
John, that really means, ultimately, that Christ is within everything, just as a potter is
deeply connected to that clay she is molding with her hands.

If that is the case, and I think it is, I’ll tell you what my new year’s resolution is going to
be: I am going to try to see the Christ in everything this year, to see what I have so
often ignored in the busyness of my life. If mother wisdom covers the earth like the
dew, and the Christ has been the tool with which God has created all things, I think my
work—I think, really, our work—is to look and see—that phrase that Jesus uses so
often, look and see—to look and see for the handiwork of God in all things, in all
places, in all people, in every crack and crevice of my life. What would it mean to see
the world that way, to take seriously this idea that everything somehow reflects its
creator? I have spent most of my life looking for traces of God in the particular places
where Wisdom is said to have deposited herself, the traditions and the scriptures of our
faith. That has served me very well, I think, and there is no doubt that we learn so
much when we root ourselves in one place, because in those places the roots can grow
deep, and thus the tree, the spiritual tree, becomes stronger. But perhaps it’s time that
we really do take seriously the truth that there is an altar in the world, to borrow
Barbara Brown Taylor’s words, that there might be traces of God elsewhere. Of
course, that doesn’t mean abandoning the richness of the soil we’ve been planted in,
the rich soil of tradition and faith and Scripture that strengthens and challenges us, but
what it does mean, I think, is a commitment to bridging the divide between the holy and
the ordinary—and perhaps fully seeing that the ordinary in one’s life is not so ordinary,
not so common, not so normal. Wendell Berry is right here—turning water into wine is
not such an extraordinary miracle—the real miracle is what happens when soil and
water and sunlight somehow becomes the grapes found only a mile away from this very
place.

And what will happen when we cross that divide? There is an old Jewish legend that
says that after God created the world, God asked the angels what they thought of it all.
"Only one thing lacking," they said. "It is the sound of praise to the Creator." So, the
legend goes, God created music, and the voice of birds, and the whispering wind, and
the murmuring ocean, and then planted melody in the hearts of men and women.
When we see whose hands have created everything, whose Christ is found in
everything, how could we not live our lives more deeply in praise of that One who has
crossed the divide between heaven and earth through this Child of Bethlehem? I want
more wonder, more awe, more surprise, this year, and, I’m wondering, if you’re
interested in going there with me. I hope so. I think it will be worth crossing the bridge,
crossing the bridge of the holy and secular calendars, crossing the divide between
heaven and earth, moving together our divided lives, and becoming an undivided self,
something we should do because God is one, and we are meant to be one, to be
whole, as well. Amen.