Out of the Deep We Call

Sermon:  Trinity Sunday

St. Matthew's Episcopal Church

Genesis 1:1-2:4a 
Psalm 8
    or Canticle 2 or 13 
2 Corinthians 13:11-13 
Matthew 28:16-20 

[Note:  this sermon involved a prop.  I took an 11 ft. pole and taped off various depths to scale.  So, math--it turns out you use it after all!  This infographic approximates a few points on the pole.]

I wonder what some of y’all may be thinking now.

“Oh no, it’s Trinity Sunday, and the priest has a prop. Is he going to try to explain the Trinity with a prop?  Please, no.”

Well, yes, I have a prop.  But I have no idea how to explain the Trinity with a huge honkin’ pole.  So, that’s not what I’m up to.

Instead I want to talk about the ocean.  The ocean is a remarkable and mysterious place.  We have only explored 5% of the Earth’s oceans; yet it’s 73% of our planet’s surface.  We have better maps of Mars than we do our own ocean floors.  Isn’t that amazing?

Specifically, I want to talk about the Marianas Trench, the deepest point of Earth’s oceans.  It’s nearly seven miles from the surface of the ocean.  36,960 feet.  To put that in perspective, that’s from where we are sitting to Santan Village. But I’d like you to imagine that this pole represents the seven mile distance from the surface of the ocean to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. 

The first line you see represents the deepest a human can dive without a suit. But the reason we can’t go further is because the pressure can crush our bodies.

Now the second line, that’s known as the twilight line.  That’s about 650 feet down.  Some residual light continues down, but that’s the point that photosynthesis, which enables plants to grow, stops.  Many animals at these depths have become transparent.

This third line is the deepest a human has gone in a suit (2,000ft).

At the 3,300 ft line, the fourth line, there is absolutely no sunlight.  Pitch black.  At this point, the only light comes from the creatures who can make their own.  Like the angler fish, that really ugly looking fish with the light on its forehead (y’all seen Finding Nemo, right?).  Most beasties at this depth and down are either red or black.  The temperature here is also near freezing.

Some whales are known to dive almost two miles down (9,500ft).  That’s the fifth line. 

At the sixth line—10,000ft--you start what is known as the abyss.   ¾ of the ocean bottom is that this level and the average depth of the ocean floor is 12,000ft down—That’s the seventh line here.  Very little life can be found below this line--starfish and tiny squids.  The pressure is too much for anything else.  So even fish cannot typically exist this deep; only a few can.  Think of how empty that makes the oceans—vast areas of dark nothingness. 

The eighth line represents the beginning of the last layer, which extends from 19,686 feet to the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean.   These areas are mostly found in deep water trenches and canyons. The temperature of the water is just above freezing, except where you might find deep ocean vents releasing boiling hot sulfuric gases and waters from the lava and magma beneath the earth’s surface crust.  And the pressure is an incredible eight tons per square inch.  That is approximately the weight of 4 cars squeezed into a square inch.

In spite of the pressure and temperature, life can still be found here.  Invertebrates such as starfish and tube worms can thrive at these depths, sometimes living off of the gases and heat produced by these vents, which would be toxic for us to be around, and way too hot for us to survive. The water at these vents is over 750 degrees Fahrenheit.  

More people have visited space than this part of Earth.

The surface of the ocean comes with its own sense of mystery, and a back-and-forth between serenity and danger.  Gentle breezes give way to storms and hurricanes, turning the surface from placidity to rhythmic waves, to roiling seas and crashing waters.  Far beneath the surface silent earthquakes in the deep come to the surface as tsunamis, pushing the water to high waves that crash flood into land.

The ocean—the deep—the seas of the world have always captivated people.  Ancient cultures would have been familiar with strange beasts washing up on shore—imagine seeing a beached whale for the first time, and wonder what to make of such creatures.  They knew the sea was dangerous from storms and shipwrecks.  They knew that there were depths they could not sound.

The point I wish to make with this pole is to show we do know quite a bit more, but we also know that we do not know everything.  Every deep sea dive shows us a new species.  Fish long thought extinct occasionally wash up on our shores.  Shipwrecks and natural disasters still haunt us.

The seas are mysterious.  They have inspired—and continue to inspire—mythologies. 

They represent chaos and danger, they are easily imagined as having character and life all on their own.  Think of the many stories of literature that use the sea as setting and character.

One such story is the creation story of the Enuma Elish, the creation story of the Babylonians.  Tiamat is the goddess of chaos and of the ocean.  She was the mother of the gods, but she was murdered, and her body was divided to become the rest of the universe. 

And we might be so conditioned to hear our own creation story as creation from nothing, but the deep was there from the very beginning. 

Did you catch it?

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 

The words for “formless void” in Hebrew is tohu vabohu, also meaning “waste and wild.”  It means that at the beginning, there was nothing only in the sense that it was not yet a thing.  But this means that for the Word of God—Christ, which in the beginning was with God and was God and was the one through whom all things came into being—for the Word, there was something to speak to in order to bring things into existence.  And the Holy Spirit swept over the face of the deep.  From chaotic nothingness, the triune God made space for things to become what God would call good. 

The deep waters also play a role throughout the Bible.  Whenever the deep appears in the Bible, it is often a metaphor for trouble, for chaos.  Jonah—famous for being spewed from the mouth of a large fish-- prayed aloud to God, saying

I called to you, O God, out of my distress, and you answered me; *…

You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, *

and the flood surrounded me;

all your waves and billows passed over me.

Then I said, “I am driven away from your sight; *…

The waters closed in over me, the deep was round about me; *

weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains.[1]

Imagine if you were at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, looking up. Well, you couldn’t see it—it’s too dark— but imagine you could.  Like Jonah, at the roots of the mountains—the walls you would see would be seven times the height of the walls of the Grand Canyon.

Can you hear that sense of depth, of being in over one’s head?

Psalm 130, one of my favorites, begins

“Out of the depths I call to you, O Lord, consider well the sound of my longing soul.”[2]

It brings to my mind the vision of drowning.  The sputtering, the useless kicking that never seems

to get us to the surface.  The panic that threatens to shut down our mind and our breathing.  The troubles in our lives sometimes feel like drowning; and the Biblical writers created a tradition in which the image of the mystery and power of the sea—and the deep and drowning—are sometimes the most powerful ways to explain and describe what we may be feeling.

Think of how often you hear others speak of being in “up to their neck.” 

And in a world so expansive—we haven’t even talked about the expanse of space and the universe—we could ask of God along with the psalmist today: 

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, *
the moon and the stars you have set in their courses,

What is man that you should be mindful of him? *

With all the troubles in this world, and even that experienced by the people within this room, we could even ask with the disciples in the midst of the storm on the Sea of Galilee, “Lord, do you not care that we are perishing?” before Christ calmed the storm.[3]

In one translation of the Bible, Psalm 139—another favorite of mine—has the simultaneously comforting and frightening title “The Inescapable God.”

O Lord, you have searched me and known me. 
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
   you discern my thoughts from far away…
Where can I go from your spirit?
   Or where can I flee from your presence? 
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
   if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. 
If I take the wings of the morning
   and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 
even there your hand shall lead me,
   and your right hand shall hold me fast. 
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
   and the light around me become night’, 
even the darkness is not dark to you;
   the night is as bright as the day,
   for darkness is as light to you. 

Even in the depths, we are faced with what may be both a comfort and a frightening prospect:  God is present to us, no matter where we find ourselves, in our physical bodies, anywhere in this universe, no matter the darkness.  Even the Marianas Trench. No matter the darkness of our minds or circumstances in which we find ourselves. 

Why would this be frightening?   I suspect there are a few reasons, but the one I am acquainted with most is this:   until we trust that the power of God resides in love and not pitiless judgment, the idea that we may let God all the way into our lives is a level of vulnerability we may fear.  But silly us; God is already there, for we profess a God who is not absent from any molecule, membrane, thought, heart, or depth.

There is nowhere God is not.

There is nowhere God has never been. 

The God who lovingly made space for creation set the boundaries of the deep and is with us in the midst of calm and chaos. 

This God, in the incarnation, sent the Son to testify to this love, and show this love’s self-giving and redemptive power in a human life. 

This God, in a procession of power through the Spirit, sustains creation, and gives life to the Church.    

Indeed this triune God is the one who encircles us behind and before, when we find ourselves in trouble, or when we seek the way forward while wading into the deep.  This triune God is the one enfolds us within and without, giving us the courage to step into the abyss and testify to God’s presence in places considered God-forsaken. 

That phrase— “God-forsaken”—if there ever was a heresy, that one is the most dangerous and heartless. 

This triune God also makes us a promise.  The sea shows up one last time at the very end of the Bible, in Revelation 21.  John the revelator tells us he saw:

…a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them; 
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’

This is the promise of a God whose love can conquer all.  We are not there yet, but we see slivers of this promise.

Like our oceans, so much of life is unexplored. 

So much remains a mystery. 

So much is always wavering between calm and chaos. 

What makes such life possible are the very gifts of the God who is everywhere present. 

Curiosity to encourage exploration. 

Courage to step out of the shallows of sentimentality and generalities to risk the hazards and rewards of the depths we cannot yet fathom. 

Resolve when all we hoped was stable gives way. 

Gratitude for the journey we share with others.

May God give us an abundance of these gifts,

and may we see God even in the trenches of our lives.

Amen.

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[1] Jonah 2.

[2] Ps. 130, paraphrase.

[3] Mark 4:35-41, Luke 8:22-25 and Matthew 8:23-27.

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Truths that Harbor Lies

Sermon on Easter 7

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, Tempe, AZ

Acts 1:6-14 
Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36
1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11
John 17:1-11 

Being a campus minister means I pay somewhat more attention to when higher education comes into the news, but it was hard to miss that just over a week ago, six students at the University of California at Santa Barbara were killed by a 22 year old man who went on a shooting spree. The killers as Elliot Rodger, who left various video and written manifestos saying that he was seeking to kill sorority women and others at the university as revenge for the way he felt women had rejected him.  I watched some of his videos in which he justified his actions by saying that his plan was retribution for women not giving themselves to him, even though he was a "supreme gentleman.”  Additionally, almost a month ago, a student my spouse Laura taught in Connecticut was stabbed by her 16 year old classmate because she refused to go to prom with him.

These two events made national news in large part by their gruesome nature. However, these events are part of larger patterns of social forces, namely sexism, misogyny, and male entitlement. The common thread in these two events is a sense of male entitlement--the notion that men are owed something by women, such as time, availability, obedience, or deference.

In the wake of these events, millions of women have taken to twitter to tell their own stories of experiencing belittlement, condescension, cat-calling, cow-calling, stalking, harassment, abuse, threats, and violence at the hands of men. The project goes under the name #yesallwomen, so-named because immediately after these women have posted these stories of harm many men responded that “not all men are like that.”  The collective response of these women has been “yes, not all men are like that, but all women have experienced these acts in some form or another.”  Millions of these stories can now be found:  stories of everyday cases of sexism all the way to what are easily the most significant and damaging traumas in the lives of these women.

In the spirit of this movement, I wrote a blog piece about my own experiences of sexism against women—the sexism and violence friends have experienced, the things I have witnessed, as well as patterns of sexism I have participated in.  Not long after I published my writing, I witnessed it being shared, and women began to get in touch with me to share their stories. 

I’ll come back to this in a moment, but I’d also like to set a stage with a tidbit of literary and theological history.

In the late 1870s Leo Tolstoy of War and Peace fame was disgusted with war in Russia—and furthermore, disgusted with the Orthodox Church’s sanctioning of the war.  After already achieving notoriety as an accomplished novelist, he undertook to write a book entitled An Investigation of Dogmatic Theology. Only the introduction exists, but of the project Tolstoy wrote “In the churches they were praying for the success of our weapons and the teachers of the faith looked upon this murder as the outcome of Faith…At one time I would have said that all of it was a lie; but it is now impossible to do this… I have no doubt there is truth in the doctrine, but there can be no doubt that it harbors a lie; and I must find the truth and the lie so I can tell them apart.”[1]

I have been fascinated by this idea of how the truth can harbor a lie.  Part of this is the idea that affirming Christianity does entail the need to disbelieve some things—either things that we are told by the way the world operates, or by our traditional and current Church teachings.  This gets to the heart of something known as faithful disbelief in Christianity.  It is attested to in scripture in the words of the First Epistle of John where it is written:  “do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God (1 Jn 4:1).”  Whatever truth there is in Christian doctrine harbors a lie whenever the faithful disbeliefs the doctrines entail go unrecognized.  A teaching that maybe true when heard in one context with one understanding can be false when heard in another context with another understanding. 

With this in mind, I believe we need to apply this principle of faithful disbelief to some ways in which the church has traditionally read our second lesson today:  the first letter attributed to Peter.  I think therein we discover a lie that the truth harbors. 

And I want to make the claim that the kernel of truth in the Christian story is that God wills suffering *only insofar* as doing Her will has consequences in going against the ways of this world.

By simply looking at the letter, there are some signs of considerable problems faced by the community who received this letter.  This is a letter to a people under significant, sustained persecution.  And it is no wonder.  At the time it was written, to make the claim that Jesus is Lord was not simply to believe that an emanation of God walked the earth, it was to make a claim about who was in charge.  In short, to believe in Christ as the Lord meant to deny that Caesar was the Lord.  And, for an empire that could tolerate a remarkable amount of religious diversity, the claim that someone other than Caesar was Lord was considered sedition.  The nascent Christian community quickly found themselves on the wrong side of political power.  Further, this community was not a powerful group of people.  The author is writing to those downtrodden by society; he directly addresses ordinary men and women, and slaves, with instruction on being a Christian in times of hardship.  But notably, he never addresses anyone in power within the empire.  No prefect.  No judge.  No governor.  In short, while the author writes to encourage his flock to endure all injustice, not once does he—I’m going to say ‘he’ … historical likelihood—not once does he assume he’s talking to someone who metes out justice within the Empire.  I think the omission is significant, and if it does not represent the reality of community’s population, it certainly represents the author’s conception of the community.

That being said, this first letter attributed to Peter has some baggage.  It has been understood as contributing to the solidifying of women’s second class status, and has been used to legitimate slavery. For instance, chapter 2:18 reads “slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh.” Chapter 3:1 reads “Wives, in the same way, accept the authority of your husbands, so that, even if some of them do not obey the word, they may be won over without a word by their wives’ conduct, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.” 

Although, it is worth noting that even with the inherent sexism in the letter, considering women to be the “weaker vessel”, the admonition in the letter for husbands to “show consideration for your wives in your life together…since they too are also heirs of the gracious gift of life” is in itself a movement in the direction of softening the cultural mores that held women as inferior and more akin to property.  More notably, men are supposed to show this consideration “so that nothing may hinder your prayers (1 Pet 3:7).”  That’s the fascinating part:  something about the way the world treated women could hinder the prayers of Christian men if they followed the world’s example. 

The early Christians understood suffering, and the author of this letter is writing to keep Christians alive.  Christians were a group reviled by those around them, and the author significantly contributed to how Christians came to understand the pervasiveness of suffering, and how suffering could be a vehicle of God’s work in the world.  His advice was to live peaceably, give the people no just cause to suspect Christians, and honor the emperor and the Empire’s way of ordering social life.  The author seems to want to keep the community alive with the appeal that respectability in the eyes of the Roman Empire could possibly prevent bloodshed.

Scarcely could the author of First Peter have imagined that the persecuted faith he knew would become the same faith that christened the Roman Empire, and started to put the stamp of the holy on all that the empire did.

In the switch from Christianity as a persecuted sect to the official religion of the state, this text went from being a call to survival by respectability to sanctifying a comfortable status quo regarding the treatment of women and social class.

This matters.  A lot.

The truth of God’s presence in the midst of suffering began to harbor the lie that suffering is good and inevitable.

But the author still knows that suffering is often unjust and he points out unjust suffering all over the letter.

Crucially, nowhere in the letter is suffering a good thing in itself.

Suffering can be a consequence of bad decisions and evil acts.

Suffering can be result of the way our natural world operates with sickness, decay, and disaster.

Suffering can be redeemed by God who heals, for the author that is undeniable.

Suffering can be vindicated by God who judges with righteousness and above all mercy, that is the author’s hope.

Suffering, however, is not a good in of itself.

And the idea that suffering was good in of itself, or as a vehicle for the sanctification of others, became a convenient way for the truth to harbor a lie.  The truth of God’s presence in suffering legitimated the lie that the alleviation of suffering—and the questioning of how society contributed to suffering—was not a priority for the Church in relation to the political structures of the world. 

This is how a letter that desired to keep women safe by counseling obedience to non-believing husbands who might not react well to having a Christian (meaning subversive) wife became the centuries’ old excuse for women to stay in abusive relationships.  This is how a letter seeking to keep slaves alive by counseling them to not anger their masters became the tool of preachers used to keep slaves docile in the American South.

Unjust suffering was held up as the ideal and the natural order of business in a world that had pretensions to call itself Christendom.  The tools that needed to keep a small sect alive were perverted and used to legitimate unjust systems as the lot in life of others, particularly the poor, women, and slaves, instead of doing the hard work of taking the radical nature of the Gospel seriously.

Even with some gains, the work of radical appraisal of the world through the lens of the Gospel is still difficult.   Years after the transatlantic slave trade has ended and there is a general consensus that slavery is evil, there yet remains a lucrative slave and sex trafficking trade in all parts of the world.  Even though women are no longer technically counted as property in our nation, they are often thought of as possessions and prizes by men in ways both overt and subtle.

And it is worth remembering that major opposition to the ending of the slave trade and the equality of women are rooted in the very religious texts we study, and through which we seek to understand God. 

So, what do we do?

Take heart.  As the author says “rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings.”  In humility, with eyes open to injustice that goes under the title of normalcy, live a life in which the love of God shines through in ways confusing to the rest of the world.  Perplex others by refusing to believe narratives of the inferiority of others, knowing all to be loved by God.

Be of courage.  The author of 1 Peter realizes that suffering is not an excuse for abandoning the core commitment to living a Christian life, in imitation of Christ.  The existence of suffering does not authorize us to trade the command to “do unto others as you would want them to do unto you” for “do unto others as they do to you.”  Instead, the author counsels us to persevere in patience as Christ did through adversity.

Another aspect of Christ’s suffering was the fact that his very way of being in the world challenged the way the world works.  Christ was crucified for a reason.  He upset balances of power.  He called the ways things worked into question, always pointing to a Commonweal beyond what was readily apparent.  Those claims of allegiance to a Kingdom glimpsed in slivers were considered seditious before they were coopted by power; and those same glimpses of a kingdom of peace challenge our comfort in a world in which millions of women experience forms of belittlement and violence as part of their everyday life.

Let us take stock of lies and truths..

The lie is that such a world as ours is the best we can hope for.  A world in which the stories of women’s pain is marginalized in addition to any number of ways in which problems and people are dismissed in expediency.  A world in which the dignity of many is expendable for the comfort of a few.  The lie is that God sanctions suffering as indiscriminate tests of our mettle.  The lie is that we are not responsible to a mission of alleviating suffering by imitating Christ’s compassion, drive to heal, and urgency in heralding a Kingdom that indicts the very existence of how we arrange our societies. 

The truth is that the kingdom of Heaven is our hope and our guide.  The truth is that we do not get to take the shortcut of ascribing suffering to others as something they take on for their benefit.  The truth is that we do not get to deign suffering as the lot of anyone’s life, especially if we are looking to absolve ourselves of the responsibility for the creation of that suffering.  The truth is that God’s will for the world will put us at cross-purposes with this world; and suffering and reproach may result as we challenge business as usual.  The truth is that we bear this mission in the world, as we bear Christ and seek to serve all as the beloved of God.

How might we move further into living in the truth?

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[1] I owe these insights to Christopher Morse, Not every spirit: a dogmatics of Christian disbelief (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1994).