Blog, Journal, for CRTaylorbooks.com

January 15, 2015January 12, 2018

I See You

Second Sunday After the Epiphany | John 1:43-51

I See You

Lectionary Project

Nathanael was a dreamer. There is nothing wrong with that. There is much that is very right about sitting under a fig tree and watching the world around you. It doesn’t even have to be a fig tree, or a tree at all. A park bench will do. A curb. A quiet corner.

In some ways dreaming must have been easier in Nathanael’s day—fewer distractions. On the other hand, where did he find the spare time? Life in general was more difficult then, or so we think as we busy ourselves with our gadgets and conveniences. We have traded the joy of a meal for the convenience of fast food, and our lives are the less for it.

Perhaps that is what Nathanael was doing when Jesus spotted him—having a meal. There are worse places to have lunch than under a tree. Of course, he may have been taking a nap, or waiting for a friend.

Jesus saw something in this young man, not that we even know how old Nathanael was. He could have been quite old. He may have sat under that same tree with a loaf of bread and a little wine every day for forty years, for all we know. Maybe he was famous for sitting and day dreaming, the sort of old man who feeds the birds with scraps from his lunch.

Jesus spotted him as an honest man. Maybe there was something open and inviting in the way Nathanael looked out at the world, expecting something to happen or someone to call him to join an adventure.

He certainly got one.

Jesus promised Nathanael that he would see “…heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the son of man.” That would be something, heaven opened to our view, and angels coming and going. I wonder whether Nathanael ever got to see it. If so, the gospels fail to mention it. If Nathanael wrote a gospel himself, it’s been lost. We may never know whether he saw those angels. We do know that he saw plenty after that day under the fig tree. He saw enough.

He was amazed that Jesus had seen him and known what sort of man he was, just from looking at him. It must have been a simple thing for Jesus, like a circus announcer knowing at a glance whether a child will prefer the tigers and elephants or the clowns. Whether the insight Jesus had was human or from God, Nathanael was amazed.

You ain’t seen nothing yet, Jesus told him.

According to the Gospel stories, Nathanael saw sick people healed, blind given their sight, and the dead raised back to life. He heard some of the most profound teaching that has ever been spoken on the planet. He listened as one man challenged the practices of an ancient religion and belief systems stretching beyond the Roman empire. Perhaps even more amazing, more spellbinding, was watching a man walking willfully and purposefully toward his own end for a higher purpose.

We are mesmerized by computers and video screens. We are astonished by government waste and abuse. We are fascinated by the failures of the famous, enthralled by the excesses of the rich, captivated by the atrocities of terrorists, evil regimes and unlikely lunatics. Why are we amazed at these things?

We walk past children and flowers as though they were commonplace throughout the universe. They aren’t. A fig tree doesn’t get a second glance, even if it got a first one, and nobody wastes time standing around under the thing. Viruses replicate, stars flame, and water dances within and around us, pouring through our veins, falling from the sky, dancing as ice crystals and clouds, and we either take no notice or complain. We move in bodies made of stardust, and we have forgotten the wonder of it.

There is so much in our lives that should astound us, so much that should settle or shake our faith. We are amazed when we stumble upon the things we did not see but that were there all along.

Hearing a kind word when we did not know we were seen. Disregard from people we love. Love from someone we had not noticed. The laughter of children, the love of dogs, and the toleration of cats. The ability of human beings to get out of bed when the day before has taken everything from them. Sunlight. Starlight. The vivid elasticity of memory. The power of dreams. A changing heart. The brevity of our years.

We should stop to look, stop to be seen. Breathe the air, watch the light, look for what is in plain sight that we have not noticed. Hurrying is not the best use of our time. Being busy is not the same as being alive. Talking about God is not the same as being touched by God.

Nathanael professed faith in Jesus as soon as they met. It was not because of what Nathanael saw in Jesus. It was because of what Jesus had seen in him.

We are surrounded by people, captured on cameras, pulled into roles that fill the minutes of every day, and still we often feel that we are unseen, unknown, strangers to one another, moving so very alone and invisible through crowds of people like ourselves. We realize that the people who do not see us are themselves also unseen, that each of them is as surrounded and as alone as we. And we do not see them, because we are lost in our own solitary way through the crowd. We tell ourselves that we value our anonymity, that it is safe.

When you were under the fig tree, I saw you, Jesus said. I noticed. I saw you standing there, unseen by everyone but me.

It is amazing what being seen, really seen, by another human being can do.

Imagine being seen, really seen, by God.

That is what faith is all about—simply believing that God sees us, even when we cannot see God.

January 7, 2015January 5, 2018

Familiar Things

Baptism of the Lord | Mark 1:4-11

Familiar Things

Lectionary Project

Familiar things are the hardest ones to see. We walk past them, overlook them, think we already know everything about them—how they look, what they mean, what they are going to tell us. But we don’t know them, not really. We only know what we think about them, which is not the same thing.

There is a glass sun on a slender pole outside my front door. It is beautiful, a once blue glass disc with metal sunbursts, a face with a bemused smile on the glass. Days go by before I see that the disc of the face is turned in its frame, rotated so that it is looking at me sideways, napping. I do not know if it is the wind, or whether children come and move it, perhaps on a dare or to find out how long it will take me to notice. I seldom do. Perhaps it moves with the help of the birds, or somehow more mysterious. As I said, I often walk by without even seeing it.

I have an image in my mind of how that glass sun appears, a memory of it standing new in the corner of a shop, when my daughter was a toddler. Yet every time that I stop to look at it, I realize that it does not match the image in my mind. The color is different. The blue is more pale, or more green. The smile is less, or maybe more, friendly. I find that I do not know this sun so well as I may have thought.

John the Baptist again—the lectionary insists that we keep returning to the Gospels to read about him, even though we already know him. We already know God, for that matter, and the entire Christmas story. A child in a manger, angels singing, wise men, sheep and shepherds, we know them all.

And so we cannot see them.

We do not see our neighbor, because we know her, and if we stop to see the burden she is carrying we may have to lift some of it ourselves. We do not look for God, because we already know as much as we care to know, thank you. Seeing God would be life changing, and we are not that brave or that stupid. Why look in the mirror when the image we imagine is more pleasing?

Stating the obvious, that is what I am doing. We don’t care to hear it. We already know what it means, and we have all heard this sermon a hundred different ways, so why listen now?

“He saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him.” Was that John or Jesus who saw, and did the other one even notice? And the voice that came from heaven, who heard it? Who believes such a thing happened, or was it only a way of telling a story, a wrinkle in the Gospel narrative, and do we hear this voice at all? If I hear a voice, could it be God, or must it be my unconscious mind talking to me? How do I know the difference?

Anyway, how do you talk about God to people who are tired of listening? When did it happen that talking about God, or, God help you, the Bible, was the same as being intellectually insipid? Why are skeptics celebrated as insightful and brilliant, while those who are open to possibilities of the spirit considered dimwitted?

If I can walk past a glass sun at my own front door and not see it, what makes me think I would notice God-things? We don’t see the things we know are there. Why would we ever see or hear the things that we may doubt? It is ironic—those who claim to know God do not look for what they think they already know, while those who deny the existence of God do not look for what they refuse to accept.

It’s a wonder that anyone notices God at all. In fact, it’s a miracle.

Just look at the messengers. John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness. An unlikely bunch of rough disciples. Women. Most of the New Testament written by a zealot claiming mystical experiences. More women. Prophets who wore strange clothes, or no clothes, or who otherwise exhibited odd and unusual behaviors, things that might indicate mushrooms were involved. Judging by all of these people, it seems that God does not speak through the mainstream. The people existing comfortably in the middle already know what they want to know, and they’ve heard all the voices they care to hear.

God is on the edges, witnessed by the fringe elements of the faith community. Remember, Jesus himself was an outsider, rejected and killed by the intelligentsia. It was only years later that he became a central, loved, and respected figure at the heart of what is now Christianity.

The world we think we know, the people we know too well to see, the truth we think we understand—these are what separate us from God. We fail to know God, not because God is far away, but because all that is holy is too close for us to see.

January 1, 2015

Seeing God

Second Sunday After Christmas | John 1:1-18

Seeing God

The Lectionary Project

Earth_Moon_NASAimage — Earth and Moon, a NASA image

No one has ever seen God, says the evangelist John in the first chapter of his Gospel. Never mind the vision of Isaiah, or Elijah in the cave, or Moses on Mount Sinai: they were mistaken, or only had a glimpse, or perhaps it all happened in their minds. Only the Son has seen the Father, John tells us, leaving us in the quagmire of understanding the Trinity, one God in three Persons, Father, Son and Spirit.

As we have said elsewhere, we may be like God, but God is not like us.

And what does John the Baptizer have to do with all of this? All of the Gospel writers insisted on the importance of this odd man in the wilderness, pointing people to God. What is the big deal, and why should we spend time at Christmas remembering such an outlandish man?

Perhaps pointing people to God is the message of Christmas, and that is what mattered about John the Baptist. He wasn’t making a fuss about himself, certainly wasn’t dressing to impress or living out the delusion that the world revolved around him. In that regard he was a spiritual Galileo or Copernicus, pointing out that the world, in fact, is centered elsewhere. We might consider living the same way—centered elsewhere. Both Johns, the Gospel writer and wilderness prophet, tell us so.

For all that we grasp the shape of our solar system, we cling to our notion of a world that spins around us.

A Christmas resolution then:

May we be centered in God, not in ourselves. May we live life better for knowing it is not only about us. May we keep Christmas by pointing to the presence of God, the holy Other all around us.

God has come into our world, and God will come into our world. Blessed are those who see.

December 25, 2014December 29, 2017

Christmas Truth

First Sunday After Christmas Day | Luke 2:22-40

Christmas Truth

The Lectionary Project

Luke tells a story not found in the other Gospels, a story about the infant Jesus being presented at the temple in accordance with Jewish law. The child is circumcised and named, and he enters into the life of the Jewish people with the blessing of the establishment who would later condemn him and call for his crucifixion.

In this short story we meet Simeon and Anna, an old man and an old woman, both waiting in faith to meet the Messiah. Had they grown old looking forward to this day, or were Simeon and Anna looking forward to this day, to God coming into their world, because they were old? We don’t know. Luke does not tell us, and there’s no other mention of them.

Were they real people, factual folk, or were they something more symbolic?

Luke’s account of the birth of the Messiah differs from that of Matthew, and both of these gospels differ from John and Mark. Other than the symbolism of John’s prologue, John and Mark skip over the birth narrative entirely. We could fret over the differences, the omissions, the additions, or we could accept what we have. Truth is not the same as factual detail. The facts of our existence are small and lose importance over time. The truths of our existence are less substantial, less documented, but more important.

We might hear the story of the birth of Christ and regard the event as a fact. We might also hear it as truth, the elements of the story each relating something true about our existence and God.

The temple, where an infant Jesus encounters Anna and Simeon, is huge— clean stone walls, walkways, polished bronze and gold, guards and priests with fresh robes and gleaming adornment. It is a gateway, the keeper of the rituals and the entrance into the communal life of the Jewish people. It is also the symbol of the establishment, the place where communion with God is being traded for the mere observance of rules, because the rules are simpler and easier to follow than a God who cannot be seen.

The old man and woman are also symbols. They are the wise, the seekers, the faithful, not trading their faith for rules, not exchanging their expectation of God’s coming for empty observances. They are children, waiting with pure devotion.

The temple and these old wise people are also part of us, within each of us. We value such rituals as we have, whether kneeling in prayer or checking our emails, for the way that they help us to define our existence. Stone by stone, we build temples in our minds. At the same time, deep in our minds dwell a Simeon or an Anna, telling us to look for more, something we have not seen in the great temples we construct around us. Look for something real, the old ones tell us, something that may not be so much a fact of our existence as a mark of genuine truth.

Then there is the child. This infant, now named Jesus—both a name and a meaning, Jesus, Yeshua, Joshua, Savior—is a small thing, of little importance by comparison to the great stone walls and priestly rituals surrounding him. This child does not look more special than any other child the temple walls have held, no more special than any we ourselves have seen. Only the two wise ones recognize him. This child, born in poverty, in the muck and straw of a stable, is God becoming, Emmanuel, truth unremarked by eyes that are filled only with the splendor of the temple.

Christmas is not a day or a season. We open the presents, put away the ornaments, and say that it is over, but that is only the ritual, a small thing that we have named and welcomed and that passes, facts and details marking a holiday. The truth of Christmas is in the expectation of what has come, and what is yet to come. That is what our Simeon and Anna are waiting to see. That is what we are waiting to see, the coming of truth, God made real.

December 18, 2014December 23, 2017

Vision of Mary

Fourth Sunday of Advent | Luke 1:26-38

Gabriel didn’t tell her everything. Mary knew that.

“Greetings, you favored one!” Gabriel said. “The Lord is with you.”

Mary was no simpleton. She knew from stories that angels making announcements were just the start of the trouble, and so she stood there and tried to work out what kind of greeting this Gabriel creature was offering her.

The angel, perhaps seeing that it did not have her full trust, went on to say that she would have a child. This would be not just a child, the angel claimed, but a king, and not just any king, but king forever without end. It was quite a claim, backed up by nothing but words. Sure, these were the words of an angel, but words nonetheless.

Mary’s presence of mind was remarkable. Most of us would stare slack jawed at the spectacle of an angel, but Mary was thinking on her feet. She listened to the promise of a son, and she knew that the angel was skipping over an important step in the process.

“How can this be, since I do not know a man?” she asked. It might be the best question anyone ever asked, when you think about it. She could have asked for proof that Gabriel was, in fact, an angel. She might have asked for miracles, or gone into whys and wherefores. She might have lost her self control and fallen into a cowering heap at the sight of an angelic being. Instead, Mary (her actual name was Mariam) chose the path of empirical evidence. Mary was a woman with a scientific and logical mind.

With statues and paintings, rosaries and Hail Mary prayers all over the world, it may sound strange to say that we don’t give Mary enough credit. Maybe it is more precise to say that we do not give her credit for the right things. People speak of Mary’s purity, and her humility, and her faith, but this story reveals a woman with remarkable intelligence and courage.

Gabriel told her that a holy spirit would come upon her, that the power of the Most High would overshadow her, whatever that might mean, and that the holy one being born to her would be called the son of God. Then the angel changed the subject. It began to talk about Mary’s relative, Elizabeth, who was pregnant even though she was thought to be too old, like Abraham’s Sarah. To top the announcement off, it told her that nothing was impossible with God.

“Behold, the servant of the Lord,” Mary said. “May it be to me according to your word.” And Gabriel, satisfied with the response or having nothing else to say, left her.

We should admire her intelligence at least as much as her other attributes. She could have objected that the angel was a little vague on the biology question, and she could have asked what Elizabeth’s situation had to do with her own. Instead, she asserted her faith, and she added a sensible, “May it be so.”

A son who becomes king sounds like a good thing. This was an angelic being standing in front of her. Whether one believes in the angel or in what it says, there is little point arguing.

In so many words, she said, “We’ll see.”

The Gospels tell us that Mary faced a pregnancy that came too early to be respectable. She traveled. She raised a family. She did all of this with courage, intelligence, and more than a little grace.

Perhaps this Advent season, we might welcome a new vision of Mary. This one has nothing to do with robes and roses. This new vision of Mary is of a woman who thinks clearly and acts with courage. Our daughters, and our sons, would do well to look past the statues and to imagine the overwhelming difficulties she faced, to learn from her sensible and steadfast nature.

In this season, we might ponder—as did Mary—the journey of God toward humanity, on unexpected paths, announced by unlikely messengers. We may meet no angels. We do not know whether such visitations are rare or whether we simply do not recognize them when they happen to us. Perhaps that was one of Mary’s gifts, to know an angel when she met one.

Hail Mary, full of grace.

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