Embers and Dandelions

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

EMBERS and DANDELIONS: Finding God in all Things

12 June 2011 The Revd Dr Raymond Pelly

• Psalm 133;
• Joel 2:21-32;
• Acts 2:14-21

http://wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/index.php/Sermons

‘I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.’ At its best the Bible is wonderfully inclusive and non-élitist. The prophet Joel mentions sons, daughters, old men, young men, male and female slaves. He looks forward to a whole society in harmony with God; and when Peter quotes this same text in his Pentecost sermon, he extends the outpouring of God’s Spirit to include ‘all nations’. Granted that in both texts this is expressed as future hope rather than present reality, I want to explore with you this evening where we might look to find God at work here and now. We often speak of ‘God in all things’. O.K., but what does that really mean?

I.

Let’s start with something a bit ridiculous. Here’s a couple of American intellectuals on the look-out for a ritual that is not conventionally religious. It has to do with coffee. Here’s what they say:

If it is the warmth of the coffee on a winter’s day that you like, then drinking it in a cozy corner of the house, perhaps by the fire with a blanket, in a cup that transmits the warmth to your hands might help to bring out the best in the ritual [ they’re trying to work out what distinguished ritual from routine]. If it is the striking black colour of the coffee that attracts your eye and enhances the aroma, then perhaps a cup with a shiny white ceramic interior will bring this out [Next they try to name skills essential to the ritual]. These skills are manifold: the skill of knowing how to pick exactly the right coffee, exactly the right cup, exactly the right place to drink it, and to cultivate exactly the right companions to drink it with. (1) New York Review of Books, April 7/27, 2011, p.18

This is their ritual; and as for discerning God (or the sacred), they speak of ‘whoosh’ moments, ranging from the presence of charismatic persons to the shared excitement of sports events. One thinks of the World Cup; or perhaps Lady Gaga or even Justin Bieber. Is this where we look for God? Maybe not.

II.

So let’s dig a little deeper. In 1989, 95 Liverpool football fans were crushed by a stampede before a match at the Hillsborough Ground in Sheffield. Months later, a huge memorial event was staged at Anfield, Liverpool’s home ground. The entire playing surface was carpeted with flowers as a million people filed through the stadium to pay their respects to the victims. At the memorial event itself, the stadium was packed; the banner of the club served as an altar cloth; and the club anthem, ‘You’ll never walk alone’ was sung with gut-wrenching fervour. Anfield was held up as ‘the third cathedral of Liverpool’ alongside the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals.

If we reflect about this, we might point to a sense of belonging (to the club), solidarity (with the victims), a place to express grief (not bound by conventions), a whole lot to do with memory and content (each person was precious; and questions abounded about who was responsible) - and much else. Something pretty profound; a combustion of belonging, solidarity, grief, memory and sheer fervour. It’s difficult not to call this religious.

Let me quote another example, this time involving an individual rather than a crowd; and we’re talking about how a sense of the holy or the sacred can occur in the midst of our so-called secular or de-sacralised world. A lecturer at a UK University visits the memorial on Bologna Station to the many people killed by the terrorist bomb-blast there in 1980, among them two of his students, a man and a woman engaged to be married. This is how he describes his reaction.

As I stood and wondered, I found myself unexpectedly standing in the presence of the Motherhood of God, weeping for her children and I, too, wept amongst the unseeing crowd.The Spirit of God calls people to make pilgrimages to strange places, many of them not conventionally sacred or religious.

Something undeniably profound happened there. Is there any doubt that we are (in some sense) talking about God? In what follows, I simply want to touch on ways in which we might make sense of this presence of the holy or the sacred outside the bounds of formal religion or church.

III.

Sociologists talk about dandelions and embers. What they mean is that elements of religion blow beyond the world of church or synagogue (like dandelion seeds blown by the wind) and take root in all sorts of unlikely places. Or, to take the image of embers, the picture is of religion as a great fire which once burned bright, but is now only a set of glowing embers that can – often quite unexpectedly – be fanned into a blaze.

That helps, I think. Another writer talks about ‘implicit religion’. Some of the features of this are where people are seized by a vision of what life is all about, become committed to it as the focus of their lives, a life’s work that then has all sorts of flow-on consequences. One could think of Ed Hillary, a person who had no time for ‘church’ religion but whose work with the people of Nepal commands huge respect. Is this where we see the Spirit of God at work?

Yet I believe we still have to dig deeper still. It’s often said that modernity is a culture without a memory; and not only that, people – in so far as they seek to live in cyberspace or virtual reality – forget that they have bodies; and, what is worse, seek to cocoon themselves from any kind of suffering, their own or other peoples’. In this perspective we could see the Spirit of God at work at any point where we break through these artificial and de-humanizing constraints.

And this is just what a contemporary theologian, John-Baptist Metz seeks to do. He speaks of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as ‘dangerous memory’ – by which he means both shocking and liberating. Why do we need this memory? Fundamentally because it challenges us at every point of our existence. If we seek to be fully embodied as the flesh and blood creatures that we are, we need to do this with reference to (or in living memory of) the incarnation, the becoming flesh of Jesus, the beloved of God. If we’re out of touch or squeamish about real suffering, the passion and cross of Jesus is there to rebuke us and lead us into true compassion. If we don’t see a future for ourselves or our world, we need to look to the resurrection, to the Jesus who is the future, who beckons to us out of God’s ever-provident future.

IV.

To me this rings lot of bells. Along the same lines, we could focus our discernments on the traditional categories of the ‘good, the true, and the beautiful’. Just to sketch that, then:

• We know a good person when we see one, even if defining ‘goodness’ in the abstract is hard;
• We can’t dispense with truth or truthfulness even if, again, saying what ‘the truth’ is in the abstract may be impossible. But without a respect for truth (or truthfulness), science, law, personal relations – not to speak of politics – become impossible;
• We measure art by its capacity to give visions of beauty that give in-depth visions of reality which illuminate the meaning of life, enrich and enhance our hearts and minds.

But authentic Christian theology goes one step further. Like eucharistic bread, it takes anything (or anyone) that is good, true or beautiful and breaks it open in encounter with the living Christ; and this so that what is truly wonderful about the thing or person in question is liberated not only to be fully itself (or himself or herself) but also is freed up to give life to others. It’s like being turned inside-out or doing a somersault so that miraculously you land on your feet, the right side up.

Thus, in the spontaneity and heroism of Christ’s love, we learn what goodness is. In the depths of meaning of his words and parables, we learn that truth finally means the truth of God. In his transfiguration, as even more in the disfiguration of the cross, we see flashes of divine beauty, a beauty that will always surprise us and frequently contradict or call in question all our received notions of beauty.

Perhaps this thing of giving life to others is key: that moment when we turn from being preoccupied with (or bent in) on ourselves, turn in love towards the other, whether this be the other person or the other as the whole wonderful and suffering world we live in. And who knows, have the wit to discern ‘the Other’, the living God who lives in, with, and through all of this; what makes us cry, ‘holy, holy, holy, the whole earth is full of his glory’.