This week, I was
watching the trailer for a film being shown next month as part of the Art
Gallery of Hamilton World Film Festival.
The film is titled BridgeWalkers, and it’s about indigenous leaders
around the world who gather to share the sacred knowledge of their people to
help us reconnect with Earth, the Creator and our own deepest hearts. They share their wisdom, their prophecies and
their ceremonies because, as one of the elders – Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, an
Inuit shaman from Greenland, explains, “we know from our ceremony what is going
to happen if only people would listen. The
gift of the red man [and others who still listen to spiritual ceremony] is a
vision that could unite [hu]mankind, to lay the foundation for the new life
that was prophesied and has arrived.”
It’s in ancient
and traditional ceremony with its rites, teachings, wisdom, and prophecies,
that the key to the future is held, that men and women learn how best to live
in the world, that the human heart is opened to the Higher Power, the Divine
Presence, the Word and Spirit of God.
Indigenous people
know this on a global scale. They also
know it on an individual, personal level.
Years ago I heard that the renewal and resurrection of the First Nations
people in Western Canada has been due in part to their high rate of
incarceration in our country’s prisons.
Not that our prison system is designed for spiritual rehabilitation, but
the native community in Western Canada committed itself to providing First
Nations’ elders and teachers to the prison population, and it’s been in prison
that many First Nations’ people have been re-introduced to the traditional
ceremonies, teachings and wisdom. And
it’s helped them find wholeness and a level of spiritual life they didn’t know
before they went in.
I wonder if Jesus
found and gained the same thing when he gathered in the synagogue to share the
rituals, the rites and the ancient teachings of his people. At the heart of synagogue worship was the
reading and veneration of the Word of God handed down among the people from
generation to generation. And the
reading of the Word was surrounded by interpretation of its meaning, prayers
for its fulfillment, and ritual to bring it and the people to life in the way God
intended them to be.
In the midst of
whatever life might be at the moment, whatever state the world might be in, and
whatever the world might be asking them to become – in the synagogue the people
of God gather to recite the One Holy story still unfolding, to remember the vision
of the world that is and will be, and to pray for the power of the future
now. It’s the vision and promise of a
healed and reconciled world, where sickness does not destroy, where community is
not be divided into clean and unclean, where none are excluded or devalued.
And this is what
then comes to be in Jesus. He hears it remembered
and sees it acted out in the sabbath rites, and then he acts it out and
performs it both inside and outside the
synagogue, both in the holy gathering and later in the home of one his friends’
mother-in-law. And as it says in the
reading, “at once his fame begins to spread throughout the surrounding region
of Galilee.” In the words of the Inuit
shaman, Jesus acts out “the vision that can unite [hu]mankind, to lay the
foundation for the new life that was prophesied and has arrived” – what Jesus
calls “the kingdom of God.”
And what about
us? Is it this way for us and among us
as well?
When I studied
theology a generation ago one of the images of worship I learned, is that
worship is a dress rehearsal – or even a little production of life in heaven, and
of the kingdom of God on earth. And
isn’t that true?
Think of the
image in Isaiah 6 of angels around the throne in the temple of God, high and
lifted up. Each angel has 6 wings – with
2 they cover their faces (because who can behold God and live?), with 2 they
cover their feet (because whose walk in life is clean enough to be worthy of
God), and with 2 they fly (because who lives all the time in God’s presence). And they call out to one another, “Holy,
holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of God’s glory” – the
first three words of which are the title of the hymn we used to sing every
Sunday. Isn’t this a description of what
we do when we gather here?
Think of our current
liturgy. We begin with a time and with
words of gratitude for God’s goodness and love.
Then we pray for openness to see ourselves and our world with clarity
and honesty. We take time to reflect on our life of the
past week -- giving thanks for times we were close to God, asking forgiveness
for times we were distant. Then knowing
God’s love and mercy, we offer one another assurances of the peace of Christ,
and take time to open ourselves to what God may want us to know and commit to
for the week ahead.
It’s simple. We do it every week. And isn’t it our way of living out the drama
of heaven and the kingdom of God on earth?
At its best the church’s worship is rich and poor, men and women and
children, young and old, straight and gay, black and white, strong and weak, even
believers and semi-believers – all together through ceremony and teachings and
rituals and ancient wisdom, finding our place again and again in the story of
the world as it is, and as it will be in God’s good will.
Is this, though,
what our worship is about? Is this what
it does for us?
I think our
reading this morning gives us a couple of questions to help us in this
direction. They come from what we see in
Jesus, and how he conducts himself in the synagogue. The questions have to do with the variety of
voices that can be heard, and how Jesus chooses to listen to them.
On one hand,
there are at least three familiar voices that are easy to hear. There’s the voice of tradition, traditional
piety, and the rules associated with it; this is the voice of the Pharisees,
who know what’s been done in the past to keep the tradition alive, and who
think they know what should always be done and not done. There’s the voice of common sense and of
consequence which in this case is the voice of the demons; the little powers of
this world that can capture our hearts, dominate our lives, and make us afraid
of anything unsettling or liberating.
And there’s the voice of self-centredness – in this case, the voice of
Jesus’ disciples and the townspeople who want Jesus to stay just with them and
relieve them of all their problems – be our messiah, and only ours, they say.
On one level all
three of these voices are true and worth listening. It is important to know how to keep the
tradition alive, and to keep the rites and ceremonies true to their ancient
roots. It is true as well that when the
power of God is unleashed, it is unsettling to the order we know and are
familiar with. It’s also true that we
want to be healed ourselves, that the kingdom of God starts at home, and that
we can’t really bear witness to God’s healing and reconciling power if we don’t
experience it ourselves.
But Jesus puts
all these voices in their proper place.
Without denying or disputing what they say, he also knows they are not
the only voices to be heard. Although
true, none of them tell the whole truth.
Even together, they do not tell the whole story.
To get the whole
story, there are two other voices Jesus opens his ears and his heart to. One is the voice of those in the world who
suffer – in this case, the man held in the power of a demon of his time,
Peter’s mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever, the people of the town who
crowd around the house that evening with all their diseases and demons, and
then the next morning in prayer, all the people in sorrow in all the other villages
and countryside of Galilee. That’s one
voice Jesus listens deeply for.
The other is the
voice of God – God’s Spirit of life, God’s Word of reconciliation and healing,
God’s vision and desire for what the world is created to be. Jesus listens intently for this voice as well,
because it isn’t always the same – doesn’t always say the same things as the voice
of tradition, of common sense, or of personal need.
And it’s hard to
know which he listens for harder and more deeply – the voice of the world’s
suffering and sorrowful, or the voice of God’s promise and power. Maybe, with Jesus, they just always go
together.
Whatever the
case, though, two questions to check our own practice of worship are quite
simple.
One: when we
gather in worship, do we put into proper perspective and into their proper
place the voices of tradition, of common sense, and of self-centredness?
And two: do we listen especially hard and deeply for
the voices of the world’s suffering and sorrow, and of God, so we too grow into
a vision that can unite humankind towards new life in the world … so we too feel
the Spirit of God renewed in us …so we too find ourselves learning the lines of
the kingdom of God on Earth that the world longs to hear us speaking and acting
out?
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