June 20, 2010 Sermon

Holy Chaos! Holy Ground?     (I Kings 19: 9-13a; Mark 2: 23-28; II Corinthians 4: 5-7)

Rev. Sally Harris
    
With hearts open to your Reality nourish us now by your Spirit
that we may bring your presence into the world you love. Amen

In a certain suburban neighborhood, there were two brothers, 8 and 10 years old, who were exceedingly mischievous. Whenever something went wrong in the neighborhood, it turned out they had a hand in it. Their father was at his wits' end trying to control them. Hearing about a minister nearby who worked with delinquent boys, the father and mother decided to ask the minister to talk with their boys. The father went to the minister who agreed to see them as long as he could see the younger boy first and alone. When the young boy arrived the minister sat the boy down on the other side of his huge, impressive desk. For about five minutes they just sat and stared at each other. Finally, the minister pointed his forefinger at the boy and asked, "Where is God?" The boy looked under the desk, in the corners of the room, all around, but said nothing. Again, louder, the minister pointed at the boy and asked, "Where is God?" Again the boy looked all around but said nothing. A third time, in a louder, firmer voice, the minister leaned far across the desk and put his forefinger almost to the boy's nose, and asked "Where is God?" The boy panicked and ran all the way home. Finding his older brother, he dragged him upstairs to their room and into the closet, where they usually plotted their mischief. He finally said, "We are in B-I-G trouble now!" The older boy asked, "What do you mean, B-I-G trouble?" His brother replied, "God is missing and they think we did it."

Something similar happens in the story from I Kings. In Elijah’s mind God is missing. God is missing the point. Elijah has been a faithful witness to God’s power. He has stood on the mountaintop, confronted the enemy and demonstrated the power of God. At the end of this amazing triumph what awaits Elijah is not a transformation of the powers that be… but a threat to his life. Fearful and stressed, Elijah gives up on himself, on God, on his call to wear the prophetic mantle. Elijah experiences a loss of soul. Elijah is burned out. God has seemingly failed and the powers and principalities of this world have prevailed. What’s the use of doing anything anymore? Nothing seems to get better – there just seems to be increasing chaos. God is missing!

Have you ever felt that way? It’s like a loss of innocence, a loss of idealism, a loss of a rescuing, protecting God. The God with a plan seems to have changed the map on us. God has let us down. Don’t we, like Elijah want our God to be the almighty on our schedule? Don’t we, like Elijah, sometimes want vengeance – for God to strike down the powers of greed and violence and vindicate the innocent? Don’t we prefer our God in the wind – shattering rocks, quaking the earth and tumbling down mountains? And when it doesn’t happen fast enough; when it doesn’t happen hard enough – when nothing seems to change it is easy to become despondent and run back into our caves. It is easy to lose focus and passion and purpose. It is easy to lose sight of God and nothing seems to revive us. Even God’s pyrotechnics did not impress Elijah – too little; too late. Where were they when I needed them, wanted them? No, Elijah didn’t respond to the holy fireworks. It was the sound of sheer silence that drew him out of his cave. The sound of nothing. You know that moment when all that has captured our attention, all that has kept us distracted – when it all stops and suddenly there is stillness, emptiness - the sound of sheer silence. It was at that moment that Elijah responds. Intuitively he wraps his mantle, his commission, his call, around his very self and steps out again into the world; onto holy ground.

The Holy known, not in great almighty acts of power and vindication but in the sound of sheer silence. Between the inhaling and exhaling of breathing, in the space between the noise, in the lapse between activities that is where God was heard.

In the gospel lesson Jesus is caught in an act of civil disobedience. Jesus breaks the law in order to raise deeper issues that exist in the land of Palestine. The peasants, the poor, the hungry had no access to food because of the control exercised by the religious establishment over the tithing and marketing of produce. The end result was that the religious law took precedence over human need. Jesus challenged this law stating that the Gospel in fact, the holy, came to meet human need not vice versa. Holy ground is found in the wandering community outside the rules and regulations of the religious establishment.

These two stories seem so separate from each other and yet there is an underlying assumption operating. Elijah and the religious establishment both assumed that the Holy operated on basic orderly principles. Principles such as: the good triumph and the bad are punished. The good are those who follow prescriptive rules and regulations and the bad disrespect the order of the day.

Our world is still struggling with such issues. Everything seems up for grabs. The old rules and expectations are not functioning anymore. Every organization is going through an earth – shattering change that is creating chaos on every level of life. The solid ground we thought we were building on, the solid ground of a predictable God, strong organizations and order are in flux – the ground is shifting – we are experiencing an earthquake or is it a volcano? Leaders of every discipline of science and organizational theory are naming this chaos not as a bad thing but as the way the universe operates. Discoveries and theories of quantum physics talk of chaos containing order. We live in a world where change and constant creation are ways of sustaining order and capacity. Chaos is a necessary step to new creative ordering. Volcanoes create new ground on which to walk… Can chaos create holy ground? Is God in the chaos – the sheer silence of the confoundment of our unknowing?

I remember seeing a bumper sticker once… it said: Faith is seeing a river and knowing there is an ocean. The diversity of rivers and streams, the chaos of rapids and waterfalls show the amazing ability of water to adapt to the changing landscape. Yet behind this adaptability is the water’s need to flow. Water responds to gravity, to the call of the ocean. The form changes but the mission remains clear – flow toward the ocean. How streams find there way through rocks is not predictable, there is no one answer or right practice. Streams have more than one response to rocks otherwise there would be no Grand Canyon. The Colorado River realized there were many ways to find ocean other than by staying broad and expansive. With sparkling confidence streams and rivers know their intense yearning for ocean will be fulfilled, nature creates not only the call but the answer.

I wonder if Paul wrote so many letters to the church at Corinth because this new thing called Christianity was influx, in fact, was chaotic. The issue in his day, like ours, was what constitutes an authentic ministry or what form of ministry most expresses the heart of the gospel? When the creeks of Christianity were finding there way through the rocks, Paul reminds the people that, at the heart of all true ministries there is God - the treasure found in earthen vessels, in clay pots... in us. It is in our stumbling, our searching, our listening, our seeing that God is found. Faith is seeing a river and knowing there is an ocean. Faith is believing that the holy is found in silence, in a field of corn, in clay pots.

Can we believe?

(Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World)

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