Glimpses of Mystery - Light for the Journey

Mark 9: 2-9

Roger C. Lynn

February 26, 2017 

Transfiguration Sunday

(click here for the audio for this sermon)

Within Celtic spirituality there is an understanding of “thin places” – locations and occasions when the veil between the everyday, ordinary world of our senses and the extraordinary, expansive world of sacred divine presence grows thinner (more accessible). I am intrigued by this idea, because it resonates with my own experience of the world. It is still not clear to me if the “thinness” is connected to particular places or if it is related to how much we are paying attention. And, quite frankly, I’m not really sure it matters. In Thomas Cahill’s “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” when speaking of the faith which Patrick brought to Ireland, Cahill writes, “The world is holy, not just parts of it. The sacred dance of the sacramental life, a sacramentality not limited to the symbolic actions of the church’s liturgy, but open to the whole created universe. All the world is holy!” St. Catherine of Seina put it this way, “All the way to heaven is heaven.” By whatever means the “thinness” comes to be perceived, there certainly seem to be those times when we become particularly aware of the presence of the sacred surrounding us. And when such experiences find their way into our lives, one of the first things we discover is that we simply do not have enough words to adequately describe them. We resort to poetry and metaphor in an attempt to at least scratch the surface. 

Waiting in the Dark

1 Samuel 3: 1-10

Roger Lynn

February 19, 2017

(click here for the audio for this sermon)

Sooner or later, I suspect that all of us have an experience of “waiting in the dark.” Sometimes it’s frightening, like when we are small children who need a night light to keep the monsters at bay. Sometimes it’s unsettling, when we can’t see far enough down the path to know what’s coming next for us on life’s journey. Sometimes it’s humbling, when we don’t realize how dark it got until someone turns on the light. We know what it is to be in the dark, and we know what it is to come into the light. That may be why the experience is so often used as metaphor to describe spiritual and existential reality. Isaiah write, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.” (Isaiah 9:2)

Certainly the writer who gives us the story of Samuel’s call recognizes the power of the theme. Over and over again he drives it home, just to make sure we get it. “. . . visions were not widespread . . . Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see . . . the lamp of God had not yet gone out.” (leaving unspoken but certainly implied “but it won’t be long”). He is writing to people who need to know that there is hope even for those who find themselves “waiting in the dark.” And the story has endured because the list of those who find themselves waiting in the dark includes all of us.  

Letting Go of Fear – Opening Up to Blessing

2 Samuel 6: 1-19

Roger Lynn

February 5, 2017

(click here for the audio for this sermon)

Last week I preached a sermon which I called, “Learning to Tell a Different Story.” The sermon this morning could be “Part 2.” Like the story of David and Goliath, the text for today provides us with a dramatic illustration of what happens when we get distracted from the reality that God is the God of love and abundance. 

I remember reading this story back in the days when I still thought that everything in the Bible had to be taken literally and at face value. Within those parameters I couldn’t make sense of this story. Why would God kill Uzzah just because he touched the Ark while trying to prevent it from falling off the cart? I had not yet come to the understanding that for the Bible to have relevance and value it needs to be read through a variety a filters, including the one labeled, “It says this was God’s doing, but that doesn’t seem to match up with everything else I know about God.” It hadn’t yet occurred to me to question the basic underlying premise, that God would kill anyone for any reason. But even so, I was left in a quandary, the solution to which was to assume that I must be missing some piece of the puzzle – I just didn’t understand enough. I am now convinced that I did, in fact, understand enough. Even then I was beginning to catch glimpses of the basic problem. When we see the world through a filter of violence, the pieces just don’t fit. It is not who we are created to be. It is not the framework in which the world makes sense. Sometimes the lesson of scripture is to show us what happens when we lose sight of God’s true nature, and our true nature as well. Sometimes the lesson of scripture is, in the words of Rick Lowrey, “Don’t do this!”