|
Believing in the Dawn A Worship Service by the Reverends Mark W. Christian & Jonalu Johnstone The First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City Sunday December 4, 2005
Ancient Reading Jacob Wrestles with an Angel Genesis 32:22-32 (NRSV) The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me." So he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." Then the man said, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with divine and human beings, and have prevailed." Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved." The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the hip socket, because he struck Jacob on the hip socket at the thigh muscle.
Modern Reading Matthew Fox Original Blessing This is the path a mother knows when she holds her newborn child. It is dawn streaking a wild palette of pink in a pale morning sky. It’s the sound of music, the song of a bird. The touch, the look, the sound of a beloved. It’s communion with a kindred soul. Spring flowers on a high mountain meadow. The sound of the sea—waves gently caressing the shore. Billions of stars grabbing you by the nape of the neck and enveloping you in night-space mystery. It’s juicy watermelon on a hot day and homemade soup on a blustery one. Playing and dancing and creating—a poem, a song, a work of art, a good dinner enjoyed with friends. Laughter overflowing, giggles, ho ho, ha ha, hee hee! It’s work that matters. It’s living in the Eternal Now with gratitude unceasing.
Meditation and Prayer The Imperishable Flame By Max Kapp (adapted) Blessed are the stars of the wintry night that sprinkle the floor of heaven with their lustrous and far-shining light. Blessed is the moon that seems like a lovely maiden walking in the fields of sky, clothed with raiment of wondrous golden light. Blessed is the sun with its great brightness, circling the seasons and bringing the benediction of ever renewed life to the earth. Blessed are the hearth-fires, the lamps and tapers that hallow our homes and make a glow of beauty within the surrounding shadows. All are wondrous fair. But blessed beyond all these is the light that lightest every one that comest into the world… the imperishable flame of the human spirit touched into being by the Eternal One… O fire of reason O fire of leaping thought O fire of compassion and pity O fire of friendship O insatiable burning of the hunger for beauty O divine glow from on high kindled in the human heart, strangely and deathlessly! …[T]he sacred flame [has been] discerned in every age… by Persian and Jew, by Hindu and Christian, by scientist and prophet, by sage and child. …[T]he holy fire… signified hope and promise to lift against the darkness of the night. Many there have been in other centuries and other years who have been guardians of this flame… they have carried it to the shadowed regions of the world… they have dispelled ignorance and superstition and cruelty and injustice… they have thrown back the frontiers of darkness and planted the sacred torches boldly in far and perilous places. Now it is our watch. Now the light will move from the manger cradle to the silent and saddened and songless streets of the world only if our hearts carry it, and our hands shield it from the blasts of the wintry selfishness. Many are the windows of the world that will stay darkened unless we light them. It is our watch now! Come then… carry the Sacred Flame to make light the windows of the world… It is we who must be keepers of the flame... It is we who must carry the imperishable fire. It is our watch now.
Believing in the Dawn A Sermon by the Reverend Mark W. Christian Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City Sunday December 4, 2005 Last Sunday I spoke in praise of darkness—of the necessity of stillness and the need to let mystery be mystery. Today I ask you to imagine that the dark still surrounds us. We have wandered inside the mystery holding in abeyance our fear of things unseen and unknown. What now? What next? In this morning’s ancient reading Jacob struggles through the night with a divine being—only to be saved by the arrival of the dawn. In the light of day Jacob would learn the identity of his opponent so the angel offers him a blessing—naming him Israel since he had struggled with divine and human beings. The dawn brought Jacob its blessing, but must it always? When we encounter that darkness what thing do we find there? Does something follow the darkness of our lives? That “something” in terms of physical darkness is the dawn—that time of ever so slight changes in the sky, hardly perceptible but real none the less. Believing the story of Jacob to be as much about an spiritual struggle as an earthly one, I note that we face a similar task in our inner lives—encountering the dark and remaining open to what comes next, being willing to struggle through the night to find a blessing in the dawn. In our inner and outer lives, part of our life task is, at times, to be in the darkness while “Believing in the Dawn.” Have you ever waited for the dawn? I have. The people who know me well will tell you that I am a morning person. I know that some of you think that is a form of mental illness—but there it is. I am a morning person. I am normally pretty well acclimated to be the solitary robin in the world of night owls. The place where this personality trait gets fully tested is when I go camping. I can remember on more than one occasion waking up to darkness and realizing that no matter how hard I tried I wasn’t going back to sleep. For many years I didn’t wear a watch so I would get up stoke the fire a bit and wonder how long until dawn. Is it 5am, 3am…is the light hours away or will the heavens begin to leak light any moment now. I can remember busying myself about the campsite—waiting for the dawn. Checking the sky. “Any light yet? No. Oh well, nothing left to do but sit and wait.” If you’re far enough away from town bereft of watch and radio the darkness means you really have no idea what time it is. All you can do is wait, trusting that sooner or later one corner of the deep colorless sky will begin to evolve. First, the faint stars near the horizon disappear—leaving behind planets and the lights of higher magnitude. At the same time a touch of gray speckles across the formless void that surrounds the stars. Soon the black shifts to blue and striations of red and orange and yellow signal the advance of day. Then it happens, the day returns, light grows abundant. The things of the night recess and day-life, the things we usually see, begin their cyclical ascendance. As striking and memorable as the dawn can be, it sometimes passes un-noticed. I have had those moments when I arose in the void, looked unsuccessfully for those first signs of light, settled back into my inner world, and looked up to realize it had already happened. I had missed the dawn. It is a hard lesson when the rooster discovers he only announces the dawn, he doesn’t cause its occurrence. Part of believing in the dawn involves recognizing that it comes to us unbidden. It comes whether we are ready or not. The gift of the day is not given solely to the worthy and the prepared—the awakened. The day is shared by all. The dawn is a symbol of newness and rebirth for me. The sunset speaks to me of settling in, of quieting down, of recharging. I love the sunset, too. I deeply appreciate the sunset—the dusty hues of dusk. As much as I admire the waning light, it doesn’t engage me the same way the dawn does. I appreciate the beauty of sunsets but I am surprised by the colors of the dawn. The dawn symbolizes the untapped future, a world filled with possibilities. Where the night holds mystery, the day brings wonder. Mystery begets wonder which begets mystery—dark gives way to light which recedes into darkness. That’s what happens on the good days, you’ll understand. Mystery and wonder characterize the dark and the light—only some of the time. The dark also ushers in fear. The day can unmask a frighteningly clear view of inadequacy. Instead of mystery to wonder, sometimes the rotation is from fear to fear-confirmed. Are there any among us who don’t know both of these scenarios? I suppose it is thin solace to quote someone like Terrance, the Roman dramatist, who observed in the 2nd century BCE that “I am Human…let nothing Human be alien to me.” It does little good in the midst of that cycle of fear and fear-confirmed to quote Ecclesiastes—“To everything there is a season. Even in the midst my times of fears-confirmed the dawn still calls me to believe in the hope of the day. The dawn calls me understand its wonder and embody that wonder—use that wonder to create a new day. Creativity, the human ability to echo divine creation, is what lets us abandon the cycle of fear and loathing. Creativity lets us set aside fear and enter the playful balance of mystery and wonder. I have come to understand the dawn as the mythic embodiment of creativity. Matthew Fox, in his book “Original Blessing,” offers insight to assist us in the religious task of “Believing in the Dawn.” We need, both as individuals and as peoples, to face creativity and the fears it conjures up straight in the face. Naked. And learn reverence for it, a deep, divine, “fear of the Lord” reverence. We need to befriend creativity, embrace the shadow it extends over all of us, and love it as we have never learned to love any enemy or any friend in our whole lives. We need to wrestle with creativity today the way that Jacob wrestled with the angel. (P) For if we do not, our creativity will destroy us, if not in the form of nuclear way, then in the form of the multiplication of McDonalds hamburger stand and agribusiness conglomerates, of pornographic magazines and sentimental news broadcasts. Consumerism after all is a kind of creativity, albeit a perverse one. We cannot rebirth this perverse way of birthing without ourselves being equally committed to the enterprise of giving birth. Is our creativity to be for life or for death? For people or for profits? For justice or forgetfulness? (182) In this creative dialectic between dawn and dark, night and day, I think it essential to remember that one side does not hold goodness and the other evil. The commitment to life over death and to justice over forgetfulness that Matthew Fox cites isn’t divided into light and dark. The creative birthing he proposes is the product of light and dark, of knowing both the deep void and the light of day. To participate in this act of re-creation one must both speak in praise of darkness and equally believe in the dawn. This time of year it is very easy to be swept up in the lights of the season. As I observed last week Christmas, Hanukkah and Solstice all celebrate light. When I preached “In Praise of Darkness” I observed the need to let the dark be dark, to experience the void before stepping into the light. Essential as that is there is more to it than that, though. We can’t stop with darkness. We must process into the light. Just knowing the darkness and stepping into the light may be fine if you can consistently understand the world as Mystery and Wonder. For me, too often, the dark of night brings fear and the bright of day brings a desire for forgetfulness. What do we do then? We must find a way to encounter the wonder and awe of the light in a way that will let us choose to affirm creation rather than retreat into fear and loathing. I can only tell you what I try to do to live in the awe-filled light when the awfulness of life seems impenetrable. I can tell you what tends to work for me but I know that your path will follow its own course. The power of community is that we have enough in common to learn from each other without any of us believing our world an exact fit for someone else. I can tell you that in those hours of fear and hoped-for forgetfulness, I find it useful to believe in the dawn. I find hope when I trust the dawn’s arrival and believe, deeply believe, that I can do differently in the day that dawns than I did in the sun that has set. Believing in the dawn means believing in slow, minor, evolutionary change—not the magic that comes in with a magical flash of divine light but the beauty that is exposed when one ray and then another in-fills from the horizon. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ugly sunrise. There are, though, a couple of dawns that I carry around in my memory as particularly striking. I don’t know if the light was “just right” or if the clouds were perfectly perched. It may be that I was in just the right mood to be awed or that I was deeply in need of the hope that the dawn brings—the point is that there are moments of dawn that I relive when I am drawn far away from the belief that I can co-create the future. One dawn that I remember occurred when I was in seminary. I went to seminary part-time while continuing to work a full time job in radio. Linda, Scott and I were living out in Jones and I had an 8am class in Enid. Believe me when I tell you it is an act of faith and commitment to have an 8am class one hundred miles from home. This schedule meant that I had to leave the house about 6am. Now in all truthfulness I could probably have left about 6:30 but as those who know me will attest, I believe that if you aren’t 15 minutes early, then you’re late. So I add about a half-hour onto most drive times. Yes, I know the numbers don’t add up…but that isn’t the point. The point is that the drive usually covered the gulf in time between the dark of night and the light of day. When driving at night, our eyes focus on the path of our headlights. We certainly look around but generally we see the path that is illuminated before us. We drive in the light, even when it’s dark outside. If you have ever driven up I-35 and made the westward turn toward Enid, you know that the exit that connects the two roads makes a long arcing curve. This particular day as I was merging from one road to another—caught in an interior world of worrying about the events of my day—the image that flashed across my rear-view mirror vaulted me from a world of fretting to a world of wonder. There in the 10 inch by 3 inch strip of my rear-view mirror were displayed every color I think I had ever seen. Right there! Right there in the car with me were yellows and greens and reds and oranges and blues and at least a dozen shades of white. Right there, but not right there. I was only seeing their mirror image. I remember thinking at that moment that now I understand what prayer should be. The dawn had touched me. The dawn had surprised me. The dawn had healed me. Not really the dawn, though—just the reflected image of the dawn. Still I had been snapped me out of my dead headed dreariness and had given the gift of every color I could imagine. I had a new palate from which to create. In retrospect, I guess I should have pulled over to fully drink in the dawn. Instead I adjusted the mirrors as I sped along giving myself the best view of the changing creation of this new day. Since that day, I have never questioned the dawn. I have that dawn—that near perfect dawn—tucked away inside me and I know I can see the world birthed anew anytime the need arises. I have come to see the dawn as a special moment, pulled out of the normal sweep of time. The dawn is where mystery and wonder allow miracles to live. I have come to find in the dawn the hope of new days and new ways—better ways and better days. I have come to know that the dawn symbolizes the best way of embodying the divine in my life I have experienced. We are created in the divine image and the most telling sign of that is the creative impulse that for me has become embodied in the dawn. It takes dark and it takes light…but hope and happiness and justice and love stem, I think, from that brackish mixing of day and night. The dawn surprises me. Each time the dawn sneaks up on me—I look for it and still it comes from somewhere I can’t anticipate. What the dawn brings is unknown. It is for you and me to shape…to create. All I can tell you is that I have chosen to live my life “Believing in the Dawn” and for me it makes a difference. AMEN
|
