Many of you have heard me tell this story. It's one of my favorite religious stories, so simple and so right. Rabbi Issac of Cracow had a dream. If he travelled to Prague and looked under the bridge, he would find a great treasure. The first time he had this dream, he ignored it. Rabbi Issac was a practical man. He avoided extravagant gestures in order neither to be nor to appear foolish. But then he had the dream again. And again. And again. And so Rabbi Issac donned his cloak and set off for Prague in search of gold. After a long and arduous journey, he finally arrived. He found the bridge easily, but it was guarded, day and night, by soldiers. He waited for his opening, one day, then two, but the changing of the guards was too efficient. Finally he gave up, cursing himself for his credulity. Just as he turned to leave, one of the soldiers said, "Hey, Old man, you've been haning around here for a long time. And now you're leaving? What am I missing?"
Rabbi Issac sighed. "I had a silly dream. I thought God was talking to me in my sleep. He told me to come here. All the way from Cracow. I shouldn't have listened."
"Silly man," the soldier replied. "I had a dream like that once, a recurring dream. God told me to go to Cracow and look up a Rabbi Issac. If I did I would find a great treasure buried behind his stove. Can you believe such a thing. I certainly didn't. I am sorry for your trouble, but you, sir, are a fool."
Rabbi Issac tipped his cap to the soldier, returned to Cracow, and found a great treasure buried behind his own stove."
I've spent the last month, a wonderful month, in Australia. When I was invited to serve for a month as distinguished preacher for the largest city church in Australia, St. Michaels Church in Melbourne, I leapt at the opportunity. Not only would this proabably be my only opportunity to touch down on a continent I longed to visit, but, through my readings and people's reports I knew St. Michaels to be a model church, its pastor an inspiration, its programs an internatioanal model for city congregations. All of that turns out to have been true. But, like Rabbi Issac, I travelled a long distance only to discover where my treasure really was, right here, beneath my own hearth. Yes, I learned a thing or two. For instance, St. Michaels greats visitors and prospective members more graciously than we do. Starting this morning, we shall be making a few changes to improve our hospitality. And they do have a fine educational center, which I could take pointers from as we begin to shape our own. Maybe its the old, "There's no place like home," but despite all the strengths of St. Michaels -- and they welcomed me as warmly and treated me as well as I could ever hope to be welcomed or treated -- I returned with new eyes for how wonderful, and engaged, and engaging are this congregation and its ministries, especially its social outreach ministries.
So let me begin this sermon by thanking you. We have lots of plans on how to enhance All Souls over the next twelve months, both physically and in terms of programs. I am excited about these plans, and will be sharing more about them over the coming months. The best way to celebrate one's twentieth anniversery as a minister is to do new things, to make the future brighter than the past. But my first impression on returning is how fortunate I am, how fortunate we are, with this church, as it is, right here and right now.
It is an amazing experience to travel half-way round the world, even more so to settle there for a month and experience the view. I went down-under and was literally upside down. Yet the sky was over my head, my feat on the ground. Simple things, like the fact that the earth is round, and around it people's heads are sticking up -- or down -- in all different directions, blew my mind almost as much as the time line did. For instance, even though one travels west to get to Australia, by telephone I was three hours closer to New York than I was to Los Angeles. There is an explanation for this, but for the life of me I cannot tell you what it is.
One reason to travel, and we can do this from our own armchair if we open our mind enough, is to vary our perspective. The greatest of all spiritual traps is to fall into so familiar and unvaried a pattern that we take the world and our place in it for granted. First we domesticate, then we pasturize and finally we homogenize the miracle of creation.
The primary religious emotion is awe. Not only the awe that follows our inability to answer the question, "Why is there something instead of nothing," but the awe inspired by anything from a sunset to an encounter with a previously unfamiliar, almost impossible to imagine living creature. When we pattern our lives too carefully, even with the completely understandable goal of avoiding unnecessary surprises, we may slowly lose our sense of awe. And then when something inconvenient or unexpected happens, we are tempted to ask, "What did I do to deserve this?" If our eyes were open more often than blindered we would be more conscious of life in its full panoply of unexpected permutations as something we did not do anything to deserve. Life is a gift, a blow it away miracle, best unwrapped every day as a present, not one you have asked for, but a surprise, even a miracle. I am not speaking here of anything supernatural; I am speaking of the super in the natural. Not of the stopping of the sun, but of the sun rising this morning on a new day. You may have seen that wonderful commercial. A son is talking to his father from half way around the world somewhere in the orient just as the sun is setting over Manhattan. "It just went down," the father says. "Okay, Dad," his son replies, "I got it." The question is, do we get it? Do we, when we open our eyes and there it is, another day, the gift of life, for a precious time ours to receive and to give?
Australia is much more, by the way, than a repository for strange animals: kangeroos, dingoes, wallabies, wombats -- though wombats in their humble way are really quite wonderful. For me, the most amazing thing about Australia, the most eye-popping thing that Carolyn and I experienced, was the Great Barrier Reef. We spent three days last week on a little island, the aptly named Orpheus Island, a jewel in the Southern Pacific surrounded by an underwater forest of coral. There were 350 kinds of coral in these waters, from mighty staghorn to intricate brain coral, fascinating colonies of living creatures in every color of the rainbow and every size imaginable. An intirely new world was opened to us, brilliantly articulate with the munificence of the creation.
My favorite new creature was the great clam. We saw dozens of them, some more than two feet tall and two feet long, each planted in a single place for all but the first ten days of their entire 20 year lifetime, their flesh a kalidescope of colors and patterns, electric blues and greens and golds, truly miraculous. Let me tell you something. It is impossible to be blase in the presence of a great clam. In and of itself, that is a blessing, not being blase. Viewing the creation in a new light, refracted through the crystal clear water, we see ourselves and one another with new eyes. Surely, had that great clam been more sentient, it would have been even more surprised than we, surprised to witness us, two flippered and bemasked, magnificent and unaccountable creatures diving to touch it, and then surfacing to share their awe.
Each of the days we were on Orpheus Island, Carolyn and I took a little motor boat and a map and found a new beach in which to plant our blue and white umbrella. Alone together with nature and the creation, we couldn't help but wonder at the mystery and beauty of it all. But again, like Rabbi Issac, I have to admit that the most beautiful, wondrous and amazing thing I saw over the past month was the Manhattan skyline at midnight as our plane approaced Kennedy. How many times recently I have seen this same sight and gone back to my book hoping to complete a chapter before I landed. That is why we need to turn everything upside-down every now and again. To see it with new eyes. To gain a larger perspective and a deeper appreciation for what so often, too often we take forgranted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said the same thing about theology. He suggested that we vary, as often as possible, our angle of vision. Even our angle on God. For instance, if you believe in God, look again at what you believe and cast it into question. Any comfortable belief, long held and unexamined, lacks the element of surprise that invokes awe. So, if you believe in God, perhaps the best thing to do to expand your frame of vision is to suspend your belief. After all, your God is probably far too small to be deserving of the name. By the same token, if you doubt God's existence, then suspend your disbelief, take a leap into the unknown, reawaken to the miracle of the creation, reach out for the hand of the creator.
I think of all the people who have decided that they are not religious simply because they have rejected the teachings of the faith in which they grew up. How incredibly unimaginative. How passive this is, to let someone else define faith or God for you and then, outgrowing their definition, to assume that theirs is the only window and never once thinking to unshutter and look out a larger one. As I've said many times, when someone tells me that she doesn't believe in God, I ask her to tell me a little about the God she disbelieves in. I probably don't believe in him either. It's easy to torch a straw God. I did the same throughout my youth. Until shortly before entering the ministry, I believed in love, I believed in believers, I even believed in belief, but I didn't quite believe in God. That was because my god, the one I didn't believe in -- was far too small.
But it is equally possible to believe in a god that is too small. Anyone who kills for God is killing for an idol. People whose God teaches them to hate those who are different, of different faith, or skin color, or sexual orientation, should, for all of our sake, suspend their belief, change their angle of vision, gain a new and more generous perspective on the holy.
Even as I have returned to All Souls from St. Michaels with a new appreciation for how wonderful, how vital, this congregation is, and from Melbourne and Sydney with new eyes for New York, I also have returned from the Barrier Reef with a renewed sense of awe for the creator and the creation. Awe can't be parsed. It has no subordinate clauses. But it can be muted, dimmed and blindered, occluded from our sight.
Just remember this. The treasure is here, ours now, behind our own hearth, even within our hearts if we will feel them beating, ever open to our mind's eye if only we awaken, change our angle of vision, look and see the wonder and majesty of this amazing day.
As someone once said, they call this the present because it is a gift.
The gift of life. I cannot tell you how glad I am to be back among you to receive and share this gift, to rejoice and be glad in it.
Copyright All Souls 1997
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