Rev. Scott Marrese-Wheeler
July 20, 2008
“The Surprising Presence of God”
“Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other then the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’”
What does a country manse near Vincennes – on a hot and humid summer morning – with the fog hugging the ground so that the treetops look like little islands, a rocking chair on the veranda of Assembly Inn at Montreat with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains above and a cool mountain stream below, the fire circle beside the lake at Camp PYOCA on the edge of the Jackson County State Forest in southern Indiana, and this church have in common?
They are important places to me because in each of these familiar places that I have spent a good deal of time along my life journey I have experienced God’s presence.
I love each of these places even if I only am able to visit some of them now in my memory.
What about you? What are some familiar places that are important to you because you experienced God’s presence?
There are familiar places we all know and feel safe and comfortable in because when we are there – we feel surrounded by God’s love, through the love of others we know in those places. We remember these places because they are meaningful places in our lives that spiritually, help to anchor us in this transient culture we live in.
But these are not the places I want to talk about with you. No, the place I want to talk to you about is a place somewhere between the comfort of here and the security of there.
And that in between place is a place called nowhere. And nowhere is a place we would rather not find ourselves, but we do from time to time in life.
Do you remember a time in your life when you found yourself stuck or stranded or stopped in the middle of nowhere?
Nowhere is exactly where Jacob finds himself.
He has left Beer-sheba the place where his father, Isaac, has now blessed him with the blessing that was meant for his older brother Esau, who as you might recall, Jacob had cheated his brother out of.
Isaac has now sent Jacob off towards Haran, to the home of his mother’s brother Laban, in search of a wife.
But the journey between places is long. The day is drawing to an end and Jacob cannot make it to his destination. He is caught out in the open wilderness stuck in the middle of nowhere and with night approaching.
He is vulnerable to nature’s elements. He is defenseless against unknown dangers that might lurk in the dark. For all Jacob knows his twin brother Esau might be hot on his trail wanting revenge.
But he is also tired. So he makes the best of his situation. He takes a rock and lays down in the middle of nowhere, under the stars, exposed to the elements and the dangers that lurk in the dark and sleeps.
Have you been that tired, tired to the bone, exhausted by your work, by a relationship, by an experience, by life itself that you just finally had to stop, even if you where not where you had hoped you would be at that point in your life?
And when you finally had to stop because you were too tired to go on – the place you found yourself in was like Jacob in a place that felt like it was in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps like Jacob you even wished you had a rock as a pillow?
But in this place called nowhere with a rock for a pillow in the middle of his sleep, Jacob dreams.
I like what Barb Brown Taylor says: “Jacob is nowhere, which is where the dream touches down not where it should be but where he is.”
Of course we all know what Jacob dreamed about a ladder that touched the earth and extended far up into the heavens. On every rung were angels of God “ascending and descending.”
These heavenly beings are not the only ones present in the dream God is also present.
In the dream God is standing beside Jacob, speaking to him. And what God speaks of is a vision of a certain future and a promise of an abiding presence throughout his life.
Jacob, the liar, the cheat, the deceiver, a man on the run from his brother and his past, gets not only the blessing of his father, but now God also is blessing him through this dream.
“Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other then the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’”
Nowhere is not really nowhere. For Jacob, it is where he, much to his surprise, encounters God.
And then he takes the rock he used as his pillow, and marks the spot in the middle of nowhere where he has encountered God. Jacob calls the place Bethel.
Barbara Brown Taylor asks: “Do you know where your Bethel is? The place where the dream of God was so real to you that you can still remember how the air smelled, how the light fell, how your heart beat so hard you thought it might break.”
Do you know where your Bethel is?
One place I would call a Bethel spot in my life was a rest area in the middle of nowhere along I-40 somewhere past Knoxville and the exit for Gatlinburg, Tennessee on the way to Ashville, North Carolina.
I stopped there with my youth group from Monroe on our way to the Montreat Youth Conference. And when you have a couple of vans loaded with teenagers on the way to a youth conference you always stop and well, you know – rest.
But something about the place caught my attention at this particular rest area. Maybe it was the biker’s for Jesus, or at least that is what the back of their leather jackets said.
But then I began to notice the people who like us had also stopped. There were the hippy types in an old VW van with Grateful Dead stickers all over it. There was the older couple in a sedan, one of them using a walker. There were families with small children. There were solitary travelers. All of us strangers, yet not strangers, all of us journeying from one place to another and this was not our destination because it was really out in the middle of nowhere along the interstate.
Why this rest area in the middle of nowhere, I don’t know. But in that place, and in that moment, for me heaven and earth touched for a moment and I was surprised to catch a vision of God’s Kingdom on earth.
What about you? Where is your Bethel?
What about here in this place at this moment? I believe that where we find ourselves at this moment in time and in this place while it is somewhere that is familiar to us – it is also a place that is not familiar to us.
We seem to be stuck in an in between place far removed from the past of what has been but not yet fully arrived at where we hope to find ourselves.
So here we are with more questions then answers. It is not where we want to be but it is where we are.
But even here – even as tired and uncertain as we are about our life, our relationships, our faith and our future – God surprises us.
Like Jacob – God’s promise is just as powerful and filled with just as much promise – “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you will go…for I will not leave you….”
I would like to mark this place with a rock and call it Bethel.
Because in this place, and through your lives – and by your ministry – God has surprised me in ways I did not expect in my life.
What about you?
Where have been those nowhere places or nowhere moments when you have found yourself tired, vulnerable, alone with darkness all around you and then surprise, God appears in ways you did not expect. And in that moment, your life was changed?
What Jacob discovered is what I hope we all discover that the presence of God is everywhere, even in the middle of nowhere.
Amen.
Rev. Scott Marrese-Wheeler
June 8, 2008
“Known Hells and Strange Heavens”
Luke 8:26-39
“Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid.”
Thanks to Garrison Keller most of us know something of the wonderful but quirky people who reside in his mind and our hearts in Lake Woebegone, Minnesota. But are you familiar with another North Haven, Minnesota? No? Well, North Haven is to Presbyterians what Lake Woebegone is to Lutherans.
Author and Presbyterian minister, Michael Lindvall, wrote two books several years ago called: The Good News from North Haven: A year in the life of a small town, and Leaving North Haven.
The stories are told through the eyes of the fictional Rev. David Battles, pastor of the fictional Second Presbyterian Church in North Haven, Minnesota as he interacts with members of his congregation and the community.
In his first book he tells the wonderful story of Lamont Wilcox and his boat.
Lamont was the local town drunk and dreamer. He lived with his wife, Annette, and his dream out on the edge of town in a run down farmhouse. The dream lived in the barn.
Lamont’s dream of building a boat that he could sail off on adventure in the Caribbean began in high school, as did his drinking.
Everyone in North Haven knew this was his dream because each day he took his usual seat at the Blue Spruce Bar and Grille to drink and share his dream. People listened, some even amused him by asking questions, but no one really thought he was building a boat.
His wife had no interest in Lamont’s dream or his drinking, but as Lindvall says: “She bore the burden of Lamont as a martyr wears a crown.” People always pitted her, asking her why she put up with his drinking and dreaming.
For 25 years, this was their routine. Annette would rise early and go to work at the Farmer’s Land bank. Lamont would rise late, headed off to the barn and then the bar.
But on June 21, that all changed. Lamont announced to a very surprised community that the boat was finished and he was about to set sail.
He hired a flatbed truck from Mankato that arrived early on a Saturday morning with the entire community in tow. And much to everyone’s surprise including Annette, Lamont had actually built a boat.
With Lamont standing at the wheel with a captain’s hat on the flatbed semi slowly moved out of the barn, down the road, and off to the Mississippi river. From there Lamont sailed down the river, out into the gulf, and on into the Caribbean, sending reports back to the local paper of his adventure.
The last report came that Lamont’s boat had sunk. He did not return right away, but eventually found work on an oilrig.
In time, Lamont did return – a different person. He had lost weight, cleaned up, and had quite drinking. “A sober Lamont who no longer lived spiritually in the Caribbean was a new creation.” (Michael Lindvall, p. 98)
Back home in North Haven, Lamont finally painted the house and barn, began to till his own fields, and got a part-time job at the local feed mill.
This was all too much for Annette. She divorced him. “A person can only take so much,” she told the Rev. Battles.
Lamont moved to the cities after the divorce, taking a job selling boats. Annette lives alone and brave in the farmhouse, often wondering what Lamont is “now up to?” (Michael Lindvall, The Good News From North Haven: a year in the life of a small town, Lamont Wilcox’s boat, p.91-101)
Like Michael Lindvall’s story of Lamont Wilcox, the writer of the gospel of Luke tells a similar story of life in a small town.
However, in Luke’s story the man is not the town drunk who lives on the edge of town in an old farmhouse. Rather, he lives on the edge of town among the graves because he is possessed by demons.
Life in this Gentile community may have been strange, but it was their life, and even with a demon possessed person living in the cemetery on the edge of town, they had all settled into a comfortable life together. They knew how to relate to one another.
That is until Jesus came along and healed the demon possessed man and threw the whole community into an uproar. Luke tells us: “Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.”
Of all the things they could do in response to Jesus’ healing presence, they ask him to leave because: “They were afraid.”
But this question comes to mind: “Why are the people afraid when they find the demon possessed man now in his right mind, fully clothed and sitting beside Jesus?”
What have we to learn from Luke’s story?
Well one thing I have learned in reflecting on Luke’s story is that the radically transforming love offered to us by God as revealed in Jesus is both inviting, if not longed for by many of us in our lives, yet it scares us as well.
But why does such a transformation in our lives scare us?
Michaela Bruzzese says, “Jesus can threaten our status quo – our way of relating to one another in patterns that are comfortable but unhealthy.”
(www.sojo.net, preaching resources for June 24, 2007 lectionary readings.)
Sam Keen in his book, Beginnings Without End, asks this question: “Why is it that people prefer known hells to strange heavens?”
That is a very good question.
If we are honest with ourselves about our lives, we all have ways of relating to one another in our families or other systems of relationships that while comfortable, drive us crazy, causing us distress and unhappiness if not occasionally frustration and anger.
Living in these systems of relationships, we feel like we are caught in a living hell.
We want to change how we relate to others, but it scares us. To change invites us to live into “strange heavens” yet unknown to us. How will we relate to others if such change occurred within us?
At least now, we know how to relate to others, as they do with us. It is familiar to us.
In this system of relating to one another, we know what to expect from others and they know what to expect from us.
Living together in this way is comfortable for us even if it is not healthy, because it demands very little from us.
But then one day a person says enough! Why? Well, maybe it is a traumatic event that sees your dreams die like Lamont when his boat sank? Or perhaps God comes near to that person as Jesus did when he healed the demon-possessed man? Whatever the reason, that person begins to take steps towards healing.
In beginning to get emotionally and spiritually healthy, they begin to change the way they relate to others in the system.
In psychological terms this is called self-differentiation.
In Christian terms we say: “…if any person be in Christ, that person becomes a whole new creation. The old is dead and gone and in Christ we are made a new creation.”
Of course this is an oversimplification of what is often a long and complicated process that can take a lifetime of not only prayer and reflection but also counseling.
And here is where the fear that seized the people in Genasenes seizes us as well. Once a person in the system begins to gets emotionally and spiritually healthy living into the radically transforming love of God that changes his or her life, well, it causes the rest of us to take a long hard look at our patterns of relating to one another – as individuals, as a church, a community, and as a global community. Such a change in another person invites us to change our lives as well. And thank you very much Jesus, but no thank you, we would rather not change.
Most of us would much rather remain locked in places of death and fear instead of saying yes to the new life that God offers us in Christ.
Is this story familiar to you? I think it is familiar to many of us both in our families and also in our churches.
This was part of what I learned this past week in Madison where I attended a workshop on by the UW-Madison Continuing Education Center with the Alban Institute on – “Leading Change in Congregations.”
Gil Rendle, our workshop leader, said that it takes a lot of courage to step back, or to us his term, “Go up into the balcony” and take an honest look at our lives and our patterns of relating to others not only as individuals but also as a community.
To take such a look at our lives scares us because it invites us into a spiritual wilderness where the way through is unclear, the future unknown and there are not easy answers or simple solutions.
Such a journey is one we would rather not take.
Yet it is in this spiritual wilderness where transformation occurs for individuals and congregations.
In time way opens into “strange new heavens” filled with new possibilities never before imagined that lead us to new life and new ways of relating to one another.
But no matter what God promises, we are not real sure about this transformation thing. Rather then trusting the power of God’s love that can heal and transform us, we allow fear of the unknown to keep us locked in the status quo.
I wonder what would happen in our lives, if we finally did trust God’s healing love to take hold of us and change us?
Lamont lived into a strange new heaven. Annette liked her old life, living hell that it was.
The demon possessed man lived into a strange new heaven. But the people of his community liked their old ways of relating.
Known hells. Strange heavens. Which do you prefer?
Amen.