Sermon for Visitation to St. James, Texarkana
Stephanie and my recent trip to New Orleans and back, to see our son the brand new lawyer get sworn in by the Bar of the State of Louisiana. After the oath, a veteran lawyer encouraged the mostly young (by which I mean 30-ish) to follow their passion. You often hear something similar in commencement speech. By this he meant to pursue something you care about, which will push you forward even when you’re tired and don’t want to get on the morning street car. The words exhort the new lawyers not to get waylaid from what they think they should do by a shinier offer. Fair enough. But I do wonder where the expression ‘follow your passion’ comes from, and I do worry some about it: sometimes the things we are passionate aren’t worth it, or our passions are split, or they burn down to embers. So, to the confirmands, spoiler alert: my point of this sermon is, basically to agree, but to turn the expression in more directly Christian directions.
To be a creature is to live toward something. If you are a bird or a bee, it’s simple, eat, reproduce, guard your young. What they do to accomplish these isn’t simple: think of those tortoises swimming thousands of miles to get the that beach to lay their eggs. Humans are creatures too, but we can know where we are going, and to think and care about it- which is not so far from following your passion! For we humans are defined by what it is we are living toward. Who you are is what you’re toward. Some of that goal you get from your family, your culture (or, sometimes, rebelling against these!) and some from our own decisions. This brings us to this morning’s psalm, 84. You are a pilgrim and it’s a walking song, like the chants if you were in a marching band or the Marines. Confirmands say ‘yes’ to being a Christian, and being a Christian is being a pilgrim. We can go on pilgrimages like the Camino in Spain to remind us that our lives themselves are pilgrimages (and every Church service it built like a mini-pilgrimage, from outside journeying into Church and up toward the altar).
You are like a bird flying home to the nest! But the difference is that you know where that is, it has a name, and you were built by God to yearn for it. You will go through deserts with wild animals, but God promises to give you the oasis you need to keep you going. But most of all, the place you are headed, the holy city Jerusalem, the Temple where you will meet God, is overwhelmingly beautiful. You see, what we Christians believe, and walk toward, is true. And it is good, which is why our lives should attempt to align with it. But it is also beautiful, a shining city you can already see as you drive toward it at night. So the passion you are to follow isn’t just inside you, it is out there, objectively, with the power to draw you because it reflects the One who made your heart. In a world that is broken, confused, dark mixed with light, a hall of mirrors, you as a Christian are drawn by what lies ahead, which is breathtakingly beautiful, life with God.
Your rector knows a lot more than I do about how Eastern Orthodox Christians pray, but I can tell you that there was a tradition called ‘the Jesus prayer.’ They believed that the Gospel was summarized in brief in the words of the sinner standing in the synagogue in today’s Gospel and saying ‘Lord, have mercy and me a sinner (which are also the words shouted by blind Bartimaeus at the side of the road as Jesus himself walked on pilgrimage toward Jerusalem and his atoning death on the cross). Draw your breath in and say ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God,’ and exhale with ‘have mercy on me a sinner.’ The idea was to pray continuously, embedding your prayer into your very bodily existence, as deep and constant as breathing. To live is to breathe is to call on Him. In a famous book this prayer called ‘The Way of the Pilgrim’ the practitioner said the prayer so much that his tongue went numb, which I do not recommend. But the idea that calling out to God should inhabit all our life is indeed a good goal. But of course in the Gospel story the one crying out is aware that his passion falls short and goes awry, that his prayer does not inhabit all his life, that he feels stuck at the side of the road. But the point of the Gospel reading is not his distress, nor his passion, however frustrated, to get to the temple and the saving waters, but rather Jesus, who proclaims that the sinner is set right, made just. He does this by drawing close, speaking to him and us, then and now in His Word, touching us then, and even now, in the sacraments.
The same encouragement is found in the great hymn, How Firm a Foundation. it describes the struggle and the wandering, things that make us afraid, deep waters, fiery trials, feeling abandoned. And a firm foundation is what the Temple has toward which we move, though we are not there yet. Just the same the pilgrim as a foundation, how, amidst the trials, in the Word, which travels with us like the cloud and the pillar for the children of Israel.
Let me close with a point of personal privilege. It is not only the young who are on the camino, the pilgrim way, but we the old as well, who must be ‘sailing to Byzantium,’ the city of the king, as the poet said. Our experience tells us that as we age, our memories are uneven, fading in part, like the old sepia photo. Leaving, memory, and the uncertainty of what’s yet have been on my mind, as is doubtless true for you who are in my same age bracket. But against that background, what lies ahead, but is at our side too, is brighter, and more beautiful, simpler and deeper: his summoning voice in His Word, grace, the free forgiveness of sins, the promise of the resurrection, the cloud of witnesses close because He is close, Paul tells us that the outer person wastes away, but the inner person is renewed day by day. When we were young, it was already so, but we might have been too busy to notice, but now we have time to turn aside to gaze on the bush aflame but not consumed, the lovely dwelling place toward which we walk, and in which we dwell, for the ark travels with us. May our baptizand, already immersed in this pilgrim life, as well as our confirmands, in the years to come, see more and more how bright, how, real, how beautiful are the things of God before us in Jesus Christ, and take encouragement, and passion, and the strength to walk on, from them.
Amen
