Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

King James Bible         Philippians 4:8
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report;

if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
 

“They saw the world with the eyes of God.”

That is what the famous Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco wrote concluding his study of medieval culture. He is the man who wrote the novel “The Name of The Rose.”

Those words, “They saw the world with the eyes of God” might be words to think as you begin a meditation.

“I want to see the world with the eyes of God” could be an affirmation, an intention, for a meditative walk, even on a labyrinth.

When you walk the labyrinth you can enter its circular spiral with a mental intention. While the original purposes of this ancient patterned walk remain shrouded in mystery many people now, as a part of a spiritual practice, will enter the silent rhythmic time with a sentence, or a word, or an image, chosen as a hope to be lived into or a problem to be resolved.

Labyrinth walks are roughly circular in space, and in terms of time they are like a three act play: an entering time, a centering time, and a returning time.

In the structure of this sermon let us set our entering intention with the words of Umberto Eco’s philosophical conclusion as to the purpose of medieval aesthetics. Let us walk into the sermon time with the leading words, “They saw the world with the eyes of God.”

We could change it to “I want to see the world with the eyes of God.”

Of course the metaphor “. . . the eyes of God . . .” does not speak to everyone. It might not even be a desirable intention.

There are other words that indicate such a setting of a spiritual intention, words that could define our deepest hopes the highest vision. It could be that “still point of the turning world” that T.S. Elliot penned, that place which he said is neither flesh nor fleshless, neither from nor towards; at the still point, he revealed, is where the dance is, is where past and future are gathered, where there is neither ascent nor decline. Without that point there would be no dance and there is only the dance. We could enter thinking on the “still point.”

(summary of Burnt Norton from The Four Quartets.)

But maybe such poetry gets us further from what “the eyes of God” might be. Maybe we are closer in the work of the cosmologist Stephen Hawking and his hunt for the theory of everything, in which micro sub-atomic particle physics and macro astronomical cosmic physics play by the same rules. This is a synthesis he once said, at least in the movie, “The Theory of Everything,” existed in the mind of God.

But whether God has a mind or eyes, or even exists or not, we all also know that we personally desire a resting place, a balm in Gilead, a place of whole and contented rest, peace, shalom, both intra-psychically, inter-relationally, and internationally, and also with nature. Complete peace is a worthy intention, maybe even a divine vision for life.

And along with poetry, with science, with personal hopes, religion also has its version of the deepest and highest intentions, its way of expanding on the idea of the world as seen through the eyes of God.

For five years or so, some time ago, I went most Friday evenings to a little white clapboard sanctuary to join a very small gathering of Jews to worship in a Reformed synagogue. Sometimes there were only 5 or 6 of us, plus the Rabbi. We used a hand-stapled printout order of worship. It opened with these words, “A thought has blown the market place away,” words that set our intention for the service.

It was part of short meditation written by Abraham Joshua Heschel, the famous mystic, theologian and ethicist who once marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. I was fortunate to have him as professor for a short while at Union Theological Seminary.

And what was that thought that blows away the market place? The concept, the idea, of the Sabbath: The Biblical injunction to join God in rest. Suddenly, with that thought, time is not money but a piece of eternity. In Sabbath time life is not about getting but about receiving, not about doing but being. We may not see the world with the eyes of God, but we live in the world as if God is everywhere and God is the only presence. We do this not by work but by rest. Maybe we join God, as was his custom, to walk in the cool of the garden in the evening. Sabbath is such twilight consciousness, and in that garden we can also find a labyrinth.

Sabbath is religion’s contribution to the hope and vision we are defining, first in the medieval mind, then in poetry, then science, then psychology, then religion.

To see the world with the eyes of God may not be so foreign an idea after all. We find the God’s eye point of view in the novels we love to read, even detective stories. The novelist plays God in some way and makes a world for us to enter. The little I know about James Joyce was that he took that task of cosmos-creation so fully that wrote in a nearly new created language. “Ulysses” is thought to be something like applied Aquinas. That is the name of a book about Joyce, “Applied Aquinas.” In other words, the cosmology of the greatest medieval philosopher theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, is redone and re-applied to the world as James Joyce saw it.

So this can be our great human hope—to see the real world as sacred. We find that hope in our history. Think of the Shakers. In their view the real world was seen as sacred both in their art and in their society. Their settlement in Maine, Sabbath Day Lake, is not just the name of a place where Shakers lived, it defined a reality they believed they lived in: the reality of living next to a lake defined by the Sabbath Day.

A book about their furniture has the wonderful title “Religion in Wood.” That was their way of seeing the world through the eyes of God, to see—as the Shakers believed– that your chair is a chair a saint or an angel will sit in, and will want to sit it. So as you make it you make it with that real truth in mind. You make it just so.

Also when you sweep the floor with your newly Shaker-invented flat broom, you not only sweep out dirt you sweep away the devil.

So as we enter a labyrinth walk, setting our mind upon the words, “To see with the eyes of God” we join a common human quest not unlike the Japanese Tea Ceremony, where each movement and moment can be meaningful and beautiful and sacred. On a labyrinth or meditative walk something sacred can be found in the details of that common task, the task of walking.

And now let us turn to the details, those things we have thought and felt and heard as we have come to center of the labyrinth, our second act in the three act movement of a labyrinth walk. The center is place where you pause as you turn around to return home. All walks have that point of beginning to return.

How could those thoughts and perceptions, feelings and sensations be sacred? Do we have a grammar for such meaning? In the medieval mind, Eco tells us, symbolic imagination saw nature as a kind of divine alphabet. If we had time, as in a workshop, we could explore such an alphabet, build such a grammar, an alphabet for a language to help us see with the eyes of God walking meditatively, whether on a labyrinth, or down a country road, or along the shore.

“R” could be for Red, as in Red Cardinal Bird, a spirit bird who shows up in moments of need, times of doubt. A spirit bird can express the presence of a holy spirit and it can seem magical, certainly unpredictable, and benevolent, bringing a feeling of faith.

“B” could be for Brave, as in the Indian Brave who runs to the canyon edge to pray-up the Sun each morning. His heart and mind is filled with the magnitude of his role in the universe. To have an essential role in the universe is a gift of the spiritual life. That is a gift denied us in the market place, the material world, oftenin the public square. We know, of course, that he is mistaken, the sun will rise without him. But what a valuable mystery he lives in and we do not.

“C” is for Chartres, a Cathedral in France, where the shroud of Mary was home to a relic that decided a battle. That is quite a story for our grammar. Chartres is also the place where I had a nano-second spiritual experience, a miracle sacred vision. A longer story for another time.

Such an alphabet could lead to a language for spiritual visions rooted in the everyday, where the details become symbolic.

The first grammatical rule of this language is that everything that you experience on your walk becomes a metaphor for your life. Everything is suggestive. Each feeling, each thought, each perceived image, becomes an applicable idea, like a color in the stained-glass window of your psyche, a shaft of light down into the cathedral of your unconscious, or a musical sound moving your heart like the chanting of a choir.

The logic of this grammar has been called, by the contemporary French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, the logic of a Second Innocence.

This is not the First Innocence of magical thinking, it is not irrational belief, it is not crazy delusion, nor is it dangerously childish as is so much sentimental religiosity we see in some religious circles.

It is a temporary experience of the medieval mind. We long for and need the unity and the vibrancy of such experience. As dark as the Dark Ages were the medieval love of light and color was their most values aesthetic and spiritual experience. Eco tells us this, Henry Adams writing about Chartres tells us this as well.

Piety of the First Innocence is dangerous. It is what many people think religion is. Magical thinking is when public officials, after a shooting, tout prayer without thinking also about gun laws and social injustices. When many Americans pray all they are really doing is shutting their eyes. Magical thinking is when people think that God is a doctor or that doctors are God.

We begin a labyrinth walk, or any meditative journey, by setting certain mental and emotional intentions. We can begin a day or begin a walk with a valuable thought. In psychology we call this Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. In spiritual life we can call it Sabbath Affirmation wherein “a thought has blown the market place away.”

Now as we leave the second act, the center of the labyrinth, and return to the so-called real world it is useful to know the context of the words we opened with, the real world in which Saint Paul wrote his letter to the church at Philippi—the first Christian church on European soil.

What is useful here is that we, like Paul and those early Christians, live in astonishingly troubled and darkening times. This sermon is an intentional counterpoint to the news.

I believe one thing we share with the angry right wing is the cry, “Is nothing really sacred anymore!?” We pick very different sacred losses to decry, but we all are sharing a season of secular discontent. We are not in an optimistic progressive period of history. It is harder and harder to feel that change can be our friend.

The ancient role of religion in life is to help us change the world but also to be able to endure the world. Today I’ve wanted us to focus on endurance and the power and peace of a wider vision and deeper hope.

Saint Paul most likely wrote the words we heard this morning when he was in prison and about to be executed, beheaded in fact. He wrote like a Zen master, “I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound.”

He wrote “. . . in any and all circumstances I have learned the secret to facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want.”

He asked this congregation the he had founded to find a common mind. He says that the mind of God in Christ was a mind that emptied itself. In religion, especially Buddhism, we call this “kenosis”—the self-emptying of the mind.

Paul says that is how the mind and heart of God work, emptying itself into the creation with love. He then suggests what we might put into our emptied minds. He declares mental intentions for our mind.

Like the medieval mind he implores them to think upon the highest, the brightest, the most beautiful and glorious things, even in the midst of suffering and loss. In the medieval mind the principles of science were beautiful, maybe they still are; all virtues were necessarily joyous, maybe they still can be; and beauty was both high and transcendent and as visible as the be-jeweled cathedral glass in the west facing rose window. Maybe we can still hold that in our minds.

To think, then, in Paul’s words, about things that are honorable, to think about things that are just, to think about things that are pure, that are lovely, are gracious, there is virtue and praise, there is peace, in such a thoughtful mind, temporarily emptied of the market place, the public square, and our personal sufferings.

Let it be so.