Sermon: A Shaky and Tender Place
Text: Revelation 21
Today’s reading comes from the last book of the Christian Bible, the book of Revelation. It tells us about the city of God, New Jerusalem, which is the fulfillment of all human dreams for the community and security of life in an ideal city. This ancient Christian vision of the ‘end’ of the world we know is full of the imagery of light and eternal life. The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light and its lamp is the Lamb. This holy community has a wall as it is a secure community, marked off from the outsiders, yet, paradoxically, the wall is pierced by gates that are forever open, so that all may come inside. Through the middle of the city runs a river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God. This beloved, beautiful and bridal city is clothed in justice.
In his ecstatic state of seeing the end of the world, the evangelist envisions this fantastic illustration of the holy city. It is not about the ‘future’ as one possibility among infinite possibilities. It is about THE END where all possible futures collapse in the statement of “in the end, God…”
God does not merely bring the End, God is the End. God declares “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” If I explain it borrowing terms from quantum physics (the 20th and our century’s most prominent achievement of science - I find quantum physics to be very insightful in understanding our own Bible and spirituality), “God is the End” doesn’t mean that God is at the end of the train (or rope) of time from billions of years ago, through the ancient human past and onto modern times, moving on to the end of the universe, in the distant future. What quantum science tells us is that ‘time’ is never ‘linear’. God is not the final entity that completes the trains of time, linear, straight, moving to an end. Perhaps we can say it better this way: In the present, (Now), God is both outside of time (eternity) and inside of time (the past, the present, the future), and the people who carry the eternal vision of God in our existence, in our time, can change our world to be holy, loving, reverent, and just.
If we transcribe the Bible’s Holy City into a contemporary vision of the holy community, I believe that it is most similar to the one that Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes about in his book, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time.
“God calls on us to be God’s partners to work for a new kind of society where people count; where people matter more than things, more than possessions, where human life is not just respected but positively revered; where people will be secure and not suffer from the fear of hunger, from ignorance, from disease; where there will be more gentleness, more caring, more sharing, more compassion, more laughter, where there is peace and not war…”
God is both outside of time and inside of time. Not just at the end of time; interestingly, quantum theory proves that there is no such thing as an independent beginning and end of time. No start, no end. Past, present, future do not exist as distinct, independent dots on one endless straight timeline. They are entangled. The past and the future influence the other. What I learned from this theory is the most important thing for us is the present, where we exist as the observer and actor, with our consciousness as the mind of the Universe. This here, this now, this earth and sky, this air and water, these hands and hearts are what we have to build our lives in the soul of God and to carry out our task to create and recreate, as the co-partner of God, because everyone, every entity on earth is bound to today, yesterday, and tomorrow, so precious, so important, so in need of re-creation to better reflect God’s dream for all who live on the earth.
This thinking led me to reflect on human fear. What hinders us from marching through the whole earth to change it, to spread the vision of love? Might “fear” be the demon that lurks in the corners and whispers to us, “We can’t”? It has taken the whole of human history through centuries and even thousands of years, the lifetimes of our ancestors and our whole lifetime, too, to know and truly understand “If we want to love God, if we want to live like Christ, then we’ve got to love every person,” and “Be not afraid” to free ourselves to love and surrender all for Christ.
If we can say that we have loved all others, our love must have reached to the fullness of the love that grows from the root of compassion. Compassion, by definition, is more emotionally challenging than just loving-kindness, because it involves the willingness to feel another’s pain. We ought to live with open arms, to lay down our preferences to make room for someone else’s, to lose our lives to find them (Luke 9). Christ invites us to drop our nets and follow the way of transformation, into a life of abandoned caution, a life of deep awareness and presence, a life traversing boundaries the world constructs, all in order to get to God. We learn to reflect that change is a part of life, God calls humanity to risk and surrender. It is also our honest journey to confess that “what God has made clean, we have called profane,” (Acts 11:8-9) what is beautiful in God’s diverse images we perceive as “abomination and falsehood” (Revelation 21:27), just because of the mere observation of ‘differences’.
I talk against living a life of fear, but I do not condemn fear itself. When we hear “Be not afraid” in the Bible, our response may be to assume fear is the enemy. Our culture trains us to run from our fear and other dark emotions. Miriam Greenspan says, “The fear of falling into the darkness, of going down and not being able to come up, lurks right at the edge of our ability to feel at all… Our culture reinforces this fear, which I call ‘emotion-phobia’”
Now, our contemporary spiritual leaders are beginning to tell us that our fear – our fear of the Other, our fear of change, our fear of loss – can be a wise teacher for us. If we can stop running away from fear, and open ourselves to vulnerability, like when we “finally stand in the storm,” facing fear (and knowing what are we really afraid of) can be the gifted moment that helps us to open to the truth about ourselves. Pema Chodron wisely teaches us that “fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”
(Photo credit: http://juliacasimira.blogspot.ca/2014/06/throbbing-raw-vulnerability.html)
What a gift it would be to learn finally to love what Pema Chodron calls that “Shaky and tender place”, the place deep inside that holds our fear of The Other, our fear of change, and our fear of loss. Chodron wisely notes, “Tapping into that shaky and tender place has a transformative effect. Being in this place may feel uncertain, edgy, but it’s also a big relief. Just to stay there, even for a moment, feels like a genuine act of kindness. Being compassionate enough to accommodate our own fears takes courage, of course, and it definitely feels counterintuitive. But it’s what we need to do.” As Miguel de Cervantes says, “Fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things underground.”
“The end” is the place that scares us. Facing our own stifling, confining fears is hard: the personal, institutional, and cultural ones that have undermined us, dogged us through our lives. Yet, if we embrace the shaky and tender place, fear can be the path, wise teacher, gifted gate that is actually open to us, always, to allow us to listen deeply. We might think that we have our fear shut down perfectly. We might think that it is ok just to leave our fears where they are, untouched, that they really don’t matter and have no effect on our lives. But - buried fear never lies quietly. Like the past in Quantum Physics, it doesn’t lie in a straight line, it isn’t a thing we can leave behind. It’s entangled, unavoidable - we can’t go around it - we must go through it with our eyes open.
Once we journey to be free, we can discover how the fundamental energy of our being is more tender, wholesome and fresh. Once we know the encompassing extensiveness of God’s love that leaves no one alone, including our own self even with all flaws and errors, when we truly know that we are loved beyond boundaries and measurement, we refreshingly realize that we ought to live and act and have our being just as a fully, immeasurably loved, inheritor of God would do. God embraces us in the deepest place that holds our fear and hope. We would know that God as the End is not the darkness of a grave, but the incomparably bright light; the Other side doesn’t mean our death; fear is never the final word in any story with God. The bold act of embracing the Other, the Otherness in ourselves, and the great Other, God, promises our residency in the eternal city, a living city of light and colors – beautiful, beloved and “bridal,” not at the end of the tracks of time and history, but upon our footsteps we make in the here and now, the only time we have to make a change.
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