From malcolm at ccla.us Fri Jan 13 15:42:59 2012 From: malcolm at ccla.us (Malcolm Young) Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:42:59 -0800 Subject: [Sermons] Killing Time Message-ID: <6D20D384-A7DA-4AFD-877F-36E5982DB949@ccla.us> Dear Friends, What a magnificent new year! Below is the sermon from Sunday. I hope this finds you well. Yours, Malcolm ______________________________________________ This sermon comes to you from Christ Episcopal Church in Los Altos, California (www.ccla.us). If you think that this would be helpful to someone you know please forward it to them. Other sermons in written and audio form can be found at www.malcolmcyoung.com. If you would like to subscribe to this mailing list send e-mail to Sermons-join at mail.ccla.us If you would like to discontinue these mailings simply send e-mail to Sermons-leave at mail.ccla.us _____________________________________________ Malcolm Clemens Young Gen. 1:1-5 Christ Church, Los Altos, CA S1 Ps. 29 1 Epiphany (Year B) Acts 19:1-7 Sunday 8 January 2011 Mk. 1:4-11 The Mark of Our Beginnings ?In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters? (Gen. 1). When did you begin? At what point did you come into being? Perhaps this is the story of when you first burst out of the womb into the daylight of existence ? how you were almost born at Red Sox baseball game at Fenway Park when your mother started feeling contractions (and your father frantically searched for a first-aid station). It could have been in a Pasadena taxicab on the way to Good Samaritan hospital, or on a farm in West Texas during the Depression. Maybe you would tell a story from even earlier. You would talk about that blizzard when the roads were all closed and your parents passionately came together mixing the genetic material that would become you. Your story might begin with two people separated by World War II, or the simple observation that you always looked so much like your mother. Your story may have its beginnings long before your parents even met: in the experience of Irish immigrants in New York, or the collection of English families that first started farming Fresno in the 1840?s. Maybe with the help of the Internet you trace your beginning back as far as your distant relative William the Conqueror. At the same time, the story of the beginning of you may be younger than you are. We understand what Henry David Thoreau means when he writes, ?How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.?[1] The person I was before I met my wife Heidi is almost unrecognizable to me now. Most clergy I know do not really remember what it feels like to be a layperson. Anthropologists write about origin stories shared by whole peoples (for instance, how the god Maui pulled up the Hawaiian islands with the magical fishhook manaiakalani). The point of these stories is not what they tell us about the past but how they help us to understand who we are right now, and what it is that we should be doing. This week at our Twelfth Night service and this morning we are celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany. It has a strange collection of mystical meanings that sometimes baffles me. Epiphany has something to do with the Magi, the learned leaders from the distant East who seek out the Christ by following a star. It is the story of Jesus? baptism and his new consciousness of God?s power and love.[2] At a more primal level Epiphany reminds us of the light shining through the darkness of the universe. It illuminates our hearts even when there seems to be no hope. This morning we have two powerful stories about the beginnings from the first chapters of Genesis and Mark. We share these beginnings as brothers and sisters in Christ. 1. When there was only the formless void and darkness God looked into the face of the deep. ?God said, ?Let there be light?? there was evening and morning, the first day? (Gen. 1). A heretic once came to Rabbi Akiva and said, ?Who created the world?? ?The Holy One, blessed by He!? answered the Rabbi. ?Prove it,? replied the doubter. The Rabbi told him to come back the next day. When the heretic returned the Rabbi asked him, ?Who made the clothes you are wearing?? ?The weaver,? he answered. ?I do not believe you,? the Rabbi replied, ?Show me evidence.? ?How could I prove this to you? Do you not know the weaver made it?? ?And do you not know that the Holy One? created the world?? replied the Rabbi. The heretic left and the rabbi said, ?Just as a house declares there is a builder, and clothes declare there is a weaver and a door declares there is a carpenter, so, too does the world declare that the Holy One? created it.?[3] That there is a God seems just this evident, natural and inevitable to me. I do not know for sure exactly what God is like, but I do know what God has created. I cannot imagine not believing in God. You have probably noticed that the stories of the Bible were not written in the same order that we read them. No one was there taking notes on the days when God created the world. In fact, the first chapter of Genesis was probably set down in writing after parts of the Bible that came later. Modern experts in the Old Testament believe that the first five books of the Bible came from several sources (scholars have named them: the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist and the Priestly writer). Each source uses a different vocabulary, has a unique style of writing and had his or her own theological and political agenda. There are several different accounts describing how the world came into being. In this one attributed to the Priestly writer, God sets to work re-forming something that already exists which previously had no meaning or distinctiveness. God makes this something beautiful. Creation in this model means grouping like things together, making distinctions, creating order out of chaos. The point of the story is not to provide a scientific or objective account of light and darkness but to show how God makes something even more profound. God does not just make light. God creates the possibility of our being. God makes time itself. The story is about how we should exist in time ?as people who keep the Sabbath holy, who have time for more than just work, entertainment and communication. The story is about the source of our existence, about God coming into a conversation with us, and perhaps more specifically about how we are to use the most valuable gift we have been given ? time. The genius of the Bible is in its timelessness and timeliness. Right now what it means to be human is changing radically and more quickly than ever. I just finished Stephen Levy?s book on Google.[4] He describes how massive data centers distributed around the globe are creating a new kind of artificial intelligence. We have the technology for a computer to recognize and name just about any object or face that you will encounter in an industrialized society. Computers can drive cars that navigate the roads of the Bay Area. Because Google?s computers have already sifted through massive amounts of data they can provide translations and function as editors for news reports. They can transcribe spoken language, detect fraud, and prevent us from disaster. All the books in the world, maps of every place are all available on your cell phone. You might never get lost again. For the first time Extrasensory Perception exists. Through the computers in our pocket we can remain constantly connected to each other and to all of humanity. These wonderful tools change everything ? our habits, how we spend time, our relationships, even the way our brains and attention work. Although I believe in many ways these tools are forces for connection which humanize us, the ubiquity of cell phones and the states of mind that come with them also can leave us cut off from the quiet we need to experience God. We need a Sabbath more than ever. The first story of creation in Genesis reminds us that we will never be satisfied with anything apart from really belonging to the God who created us. Coming to church, setting aside time to behold the miracle of our existence and to be reminded of our responsibility to the world makes us more completely human. The Sabbath is how we remain part of an ongoing conversation with God that started when God looked into the deep. 2. The other foundational Epiphany story before us today reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the baptism service. After a person has been baptized the priest anoints her with oil and says, ?You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ?s own forever.? We understand what this mark means through the story of Jesus? baptism. Imagine what that was like. Jesus goes down into the ordinary river water of the Jordan. But when he comes up the heavens open, the spirit descends upon him and he hears a voice declaring that he is God?s beloved son and a source of pleasure for the Divine. To be a follower of Christ means to have the audacity to believe that although we do not deserve it we are God?s children too. Although we do not please God in everything we do this can never separate us from the love of Christ (Rom. 8:35). This is the invisible mark of baptism that we share with the one who went before us. We can forgive other people because we have the experience of being forgiven ourselves. We can love others because we ourselves are loved. Through Jesus, God is at work reordering out lives, sorting through us and creating goodness. I want to tell one last story about a man whose beginning happened when he started to share an experience that you might recognize. When he was in his twenties a friend of mine named Phil was a surfer addicted to drugs. He seemed to slip from woman to woman without any attachments to anyone or anything. On the outside he simply did not seem to care, but in his heart he was miserable. The mother who had abandoned him as a child came back into his life. She invited him to church. He sat in the back. Although he felt like a total fraud, he kept returning as he learned this simple prayer ? ?come into my heart Lord Jesus.? Eventually these words did something for him and he was born anew, born from heaven, yes, born again. This was his beginning. Stories about beginnings are not chiefly about the past but about where we stand now and about what we should be doing with our lives. I pray that you will find words like these and that you will become conscious of and strengthened by the Word that dwells within you. Where did you begin? When did you first sense the spirit of God sweeping over the darkness of your life? In this season of Epiphany how will you keep the Sabbath holy and claim your birthright as a child of God? Let us pray: Most Blessed One, you brooded over the waters and brought forth light and time itself. Help us to not kill time, but like all your good gifts to multiply it by sharing ourselves with the world all for the sake of your son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. [1] Henry David Thoreau, The Illustrated Walden with Photographs from the Gleason Collection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 107. [2] In this church season, the Ethiopian Church celebrates God?s gift of the Ark of the Covenant, the Ten Commandments and the promise of a new ethical relationship between God and human beings. [3] David Haddad, Ma?asei Avos: Stories and Teachings from the Lives of the Sages of Pirkei Avos, Including the Test of Tractate Avos with Commentary (Nanuet NY: Feldheim Publishers, 2007), 227-228. [4] Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Things, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2011). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: