Sermon: Missing God
Text: Mark 10:46-52
Changes in our lives – there’s always lots to say about them and share about them.
The changing of the seasons is a good metaphor. Colours are the first sign that tells us that a new season is coming. Each season arrives with its own colour palette, then, gives way to the next by losing it. In Nature, there is beauty in loss; there is also hope. Nature establishes, over and over, that the act of losing, letting go, is, in its true aspect, the thing that sustains what is needed here and now.
Changes often evoke anxiety, especially when we don’t understand them: what are the changes really about? What for? When we don’t clearly grasp and pinpoint what things are changing around us and what they mean to us, we get anxious. If you are anxious, you are not alone. This week, I was very fond of a quote from Simone Weil, an activist, a pacifist, a militant, a mystic and an exile who lived a short but intense life from 1909-1943. She’s one of the contemporary “saints” who lived a life of boundless inquiry and advocacy (“crazy freedom”), rather than choosing a middle, safe, road. Weil says, “Why should I be anxious? It is not up to me to think of myself. It is up to me to think of God. And it is up to God to think of me.” I hope this gives us a fresh perspective.
Throughout our lives, we experience many changes: dramatic or quiet, steady or unexpected. Some changes evolve around the health issues of our own or of our family members or friends. Or death. We grieve when we don’t see some long-familiar names when we open the new church phone directory. We grieve, yet move on. Our neighbours change, too. Those we have known for a long time, whose children grew up with ours, leave, and new neighbours move in. Years ago, it seemed that we had more similarities with our next-door neighbours; nowadays we note the differences. It was easier to feel close or connected to them when we worked at the same jobs, had the same cooking smells at dinnertime. Increasing diversity invites us to experiment with being more open and welcoming, more than just saying hello and being friendly.
Regardless of what kind of changes we have been dealing with lately and what has been affecting us, adjusting our lives to the changing environment, changing relationships is not easy. I would say, this is a journey… “going” out of ourselves to open our hearts and minds to the changing Universe. This journey, this new journey, is absolutely with God.
In your life journey, if you feel that you are stuck at some point, that you can’t find the right vocabulary to explain exactly what you are going through, when your ability to understand the world around you begins to crumble and you are feeling overwhelmed and overburdened, I say without hesitation that the only strong rope (or hope) we can rely on is spirituality. The only thing that can get us away from our own predicaments is the act of re-packing our backpack with the right knowledge, vocabulary, concepts and language that offer us a deeper spiritual awareness about ourselves, our lives and God. True spirituality can confidently guide us towards hope. Spirituality is the full package of what we need.
Last week, I went to Best Buy to buy a PC for my 12-year-old son. We don’t keep a TV at home. What we have are two laptop computers (Min-Goo’s and mine) and two iPhones (Min-Goo’s and mine). My older son said, “My friends all have an iPhone and an iPad. (He’s not wrong) They have X-boxes and play Fortnite (a video game) with it on TV. I have nothing. I want a PC. I can play video games and do school homework and emails and online searches if I have a PC.”
After months of agony, (He’s just twelve!) we decided to buy a PC for him. The important computer prerequisites I had to learn as a parent: For him to play his video games, smoothly, without experiencing any inconvenient “lagging” “freeze” slowing down, etc, his PC should have a strong Processor, Graphic Cards, and adequate RAM (data storage). If the computer hardware is below the minimum of what is required to play a game properly, the player would experience lots of lagging, slowing down, and thus would be prone to complaining, “a lot.”
While looking for the right PC for my son, I had an epiphany: repacking our spirituality is comparable to looking for a stronger hardware processor power for our mind and spirituality, to enable us to be faithful and to be joyful in our changing world. We need to acknowledge our needs, our neighbours’ and God's; we should be able to avoid unnecessary lagging and slowing down by clearly seeing and deeply feeling how we function emotionally and spiritually; we should be in good shape to perform God’s commandment of love. Each individual’s experience of God is unique. Really, everyone needs to do their own personal study to find the spirituality and theology that work the best for them – just like we were looking for a computer that my son can work with, well into the future.
In today’s reading, Jesus meets Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, who is sitting by the road-side. Bartimaeus cries out, breaking his silence, as soon as he hears Jesus approaching. Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?”
Bartimaeus answers, “Let me see again,” which means there was a time in his life when he could see.
The first word Jesus says is a command - “Go”.
In spirituality, “Go” as an action and a word has always had a special place. “Letting go,” “Going out of your self”, “Departure from ourselves,” … departure from dependency on our ego, security or fear. Faith has a similar element to what we experience when we fall in love. Ponder with me: Falling in love is really a departure from ourselves, our ego, in order to know the Other and love deeply. Love involves some essential changes. When we are in love, we risk and let ourselves be vulnerable, be tender, to accept, to “finally touch” something, the most inward essential part of our being that is open to both joy and pain.
Another important spiritual time of deep change is when we go through what mystics call a “time without consolation.” Misfortune. Suffering. Joylessness. Good spirituality helps us to see pain, suffering, and a time without consolation as a reality of the mystical experience. Does suffering have a place in Christian spirituality? Yes. Jesus suffered on the earth and became bread to eat, a friend to weep with, for those who suffer. Jesus proclaimed on the Mount, “Those who mourn are blessed, for they will be comforted.”
Dorothee Sölle tells us in her book, The Silent Cry, that being mystical means being one with God, and there are three steps in the mystical way.
The first step is Being Amazed. It is a state of radical amazement, or bliss. It is something similar to the exclamation, “Being here is magnificent!” This stage is similar to the state of falling in love. It is the state of freedom from fears. You are willing to leave yourself. It is the state of beginning a great journey… for adventure. This state is symbolized in the image of the rose that blooms in God. You find great joy in being-in-relation. You praise God.
Then, we enter the second stage… which is Letting Go. In this stage, we miss God. It is symbolized as the dark night. We experience the utter absence of Christ. The utter absence of joy. Joylessness becomes deep pain. It is different from simply experiencing loss. Your life condition doesn’t have to change to experience this stage in our lives. Your soul has changed. What used to be interesting to us, what energized us and shaped our identity no longer has the same effect on us. Consequently, we begin to search for the deeper meaning of things, … in other words, we miss God. We suffer, feeling removed “from God.” (We may also put it as “We suffer from God.”) It is a state of spiritual dryness, drought.
Then, Healing comes like the dawn. We become resilient. We grow resistant to what is silently, subtly, invisibly oppressive, and name those negative agents. Rather than being changed by the exterior forces of the world, we commit to changing the world with compassion and justice, with “affectionate tenderness” that excludes no-one; it remains faithful to all. This state is like a rainbow.
In today’s story, Jesus tells Bartimaeus, and us, “Go; your faith has made you well”. The good spirituality package, good spirituality backpack, that fits us perfectly, carries the mystical way and the benefit of being crafted in the dark night — the spiritually deep time of radical change… In every such dark night, we are not totally alone. The stars are our crown. We become dignified in this true human quest. Even when we are not sure of whether we would ever be able to find comfort, consolation, in the time of change, losses, terror, fear, God whispers, “Love is not consolation. It is light.” That light allows us to see again that what we’ve been missing is God.
%5EJ%202023.jpg)
