Sermons at St. John's Presbyterian Church

god’s glow light: water and the senses

        Walking on Water 2

Transcribed from the sermon preached March 13, 2011

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Song of Solomon 4:10-13, Psalm 23

Last week we began our series Walking on Water with water in the original creative act.  Now you might expect me to jump to the fall, to the sinful and fallen world, where storms and tsunamis might conveniently come into theological play.  But thematically I am sticking in the garden for another couple of weeks and focusing on what Matthew Fox calls “original blessing”.  There has been a tendency, especially in Roman Catholic and Calvinist theology to focus on original sin.  We forget that we were created and God called us good.  We forget that God Created and enjoyed creation as a blessing to God’s self.  We are a blessing to God.  Creation is a blessing to God. 

The result of a focus on the fallen world has been a dualistic, hard line separation between Creation and Creator, between the sacred and profane, heaven and earth… so that the Divine Spirit and grace are sucked from life on this planet and it is left dehydrated of positive value.  As God is relegated to heaven and earth is sucked dry of sacred meaning, no wonder we have a hard time caring about what happens here on earth.

But scripture is loaded with reference to the presence of God with us: “In Him we live and move and have our being.”  “There is one God who is above all, through all and in all…” “Christ is the one who holds all things together.”  So our issue is not separation from God, but blindness to the presence of God in, through, and around us.  By the grace of God, we once were blind but now we see.

Meister Eckhart goes to the heart of original blessing, original grace and wisdom in describing the ancilla animae, or spark of the soul, that is in each one of us.  He writes that hidden in all of us is “something like the original outbreak of all goodness, something like a brilliant light that flows incessantly and something like a burning fire, which burns incessantly.  This fire is nothing other than the Holy Spirit.’”  (Fox, Matthew.  Original Blessing. Pg. 5)

Back in the summer of 2005 my family and I took a trip down to Southern California to stay with our friends Bill, Peggy, Danny and Michael Bennet at Peggy’s mom’s house on the beach in Encinitas. The kid’s were little back then and the cold, big surf of Northern California was still a bit intimidating.  So it was great to get down to the warm, calmer water where the boys could play with confidence.

It was also a special trip because Bill had just finished a long protracted battle with throat cancer.  The third and last day of our trip was the best.  As we came into the shade of the house to eat and rest at midday, I laid down in the hallway outside the bedroom where Bill practiced.  What a nice added perk to the vacation.  Not only was Bill alive, but I could drift away on the dream of his music.

Then as the sun set and the moon came out, we noticed that the red tide was glowing.  The glow of the red tide comes from one-celled organisms known as Noctiluca.  Noctiluca is a dinoflagellate that is found throughout the oceans.  When it is disturbed, two chemicals inside the cell (lucifren and luciferase) combine and emit the most efficient light we know of.  That is, more light, less heat.  This is the same chemical reaction that allows fireflies to flash their lights, deep- sea fish to show off their pattern and some jellyfish and even mushrooms to glow.

As we sat on the balcony on the cliff in Encinitas with friends, the clouds cleared, the wind died, and we watched the golden sunset turn to glowing, moonlit sea.  I thought of psalm 23 I know we weren’t exactly in a green pasture, but I still thought,

He leads me beside still waters;
[3] he restores my soul.  He leads me in paths of righteousness
for his name's sake.
[4] Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil; for thou art with me;

The crescent moon reflected bright green through the water.  And every time a wave crashed it lit up in the most beautiful, florescent blue green.  We decided to climb down the 100 feet of stairs to walk on the beach.  We ran skipping and screaming along the water’s edge, watching each drop we kicked light up around us for three or four seconds.  The kids picked up sand, rubbed it together and watched their hands shimmer stars like they were little gods holding a galaxy.  And just to keep us from getting to sublime, the boys tried to write their names in pee.  “Now and then we had the hope,” said Twain, “that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.”

We played like this for a long time; like children, everyone shifting from noisy group joy to individual contemplation and back again.

Then someone said, “It would be fun to go swimming.”  The conditions were just right.  The air and water were warm; the surf was small.  Our only excuse, which Peggy was quick to point out, was that we didn’t have bathing suits. 

Now my friend Dave had just arrived by train that afternoon from Santa Barbara.  Dave is a granola Episcopalian preacher’s kid turned naturalist who has no problem telling grape farmers and real estate developers that they have to build around that old growth oak.  Back in college I went from San Diego up to visit Dave at UCSB.  He had decided that semester he would live at natural environment temperature and left his dorm window open all day and night.  That night I visited there was a winter storm coming in and we got to sleep with 45-degree wind gusts blasting around the room. Dave eventually shut his window but remained a naturalist and, as you might imagine, the granola Dave said, “We could go skinny dipping.” 

Now it was dark and warm and clear and beautiful, so before the adults had finished discussing the matter, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and friends were sprinting for the sea.  We knew they had arrived when the water lit up around them.  There was a primordial garden innocence to this experience.  Something archetypal about it, a deep reminder of original blessing when shame and exploitation where not issues.   

Now we know more than ever to be cautious and protective of children, and we are leery of basically everyone.  We have laws and expectations and boundaries that anyone working with children should not cross.  And we are appalled and embarrassed by the abuse by ministers and priests and expect them to be prosecuted to the fullest both within the church and in civil courts.  And I do not believe as conservatives wish to think, that abuse is something new in the Church.  What is new is that feminists have decided that the victim will no longer remain silent.  And as one or two have come out to speak and been listened to, others have gained the courage to join them.

Ironically, the church has been so ashamed of sexuality and sensuality that it has broken out in unhealthy ways.  And just as ironically, as American culture has decided it will be so free, open and yet still sexually obsessed, nobody is free or graciously confident enough to wash the sweat off their bodies after PE or football practice.  One of the reasons surfing almost died in Hawaii was the missionaries insisted that if one were to become a Christian and avoid hell, one needed to cover up with Western dress.  Surfing was too much fun with too little clothes.  God couldn’t approve.

My first job as minister was in sweltering hot Houston, TX.  I realized the first summer Sunday I put on my suit to preach: somebody a long time ago in foggy, blustery England decided a suit and tie made a man look more intelligent and gentlemanly.  But a man wearing a suit and tie in tropical heat or the warm beach just looks like a stiff- necked fool.   Even James Bond looks like a dork with a suit on at the beach.  And then, to make our uptight, over-clothed selves more comfortable, we have to stay locked indoors and run air conditioning at full blast.  We have grown afraid of God’s Creation.  We have lost knowledge of our environment, our bodies, ourselves.     

Now with all the caution needed for a fallen world filled with bad men and law suits, let me just lay this out there: at some point and time in your life when it is safe and clearly appropriate, maybe in a sierra meadow with a few buddies, or on a secluded beach for your honeymoon, or in a backyard pool when nobody is home, you ought to have the experience of skinny dipping.   Small children know this, and there should be safe, protected, not uptight opportunities for them to tap into this garden experience, this original blessing. 

As we swam and body surfed that night in Encinitas, the water moving around our bodies created a glowing, liquid silhouette.  As one would body surf across the breaking wave, and the lip peeled over their head, you could see this shining smile framed in God’s glow light.  It was a mystical joy.

There seemed to be a magical balance of opposites, synchronicity, yin and yang!  Light and dark, great and small, power and softness, freedom and unity, calm and exhilaration, complexity and simplicity, the physical and the cosmic united.  For a moment, chaos and order kissed and made peace.

An absolutely spontaneous, unplanned evening felt paradoxically as if the entire destiny of the universe brought us to that very moment to do this very thing.  Less than a year before Bill was so sick from cancer and chemotherapy that he couldn’t sleep for a week.  He was in great pain, coughing up phlegm, hallucinating.  He was close to death.  We were seriously wondering whether he would have another chance to play music or once again swim with his kids in the ocean.  It was a great storm of difficulty, and no doubt he was terrified of not making it to the other side.

Yet here we were, on the other shore, friends and family together, with Bill looking and feeling wonderfully healthy, bathing in God’s glow light…surfing a fiery sea that did not burn.

Both Buddhist and Christian thought would want us to bring such enlightened awareness to each and every moment of life.  Those baptisms, whether our religious experience is in water, music, at a birth or driving through the desert, these resurrection moments give us the power to stay open to God’s grace and beauty even in the humdrum of everyday life, even when the surf is flat and you have to wear a suit and go to work in a sterile, closed building.  Each moment includes every other moment; each living thing is connected, encompassed into each other.  This is the eternal present.  And so, even in those truly trying times we can remain present in pain, and yet know that good prevails.  We can affirm life with gratitude, even in the face of death. 

This is the enlightened “Yes” that the street evangelist tries to get at with his question, “If you die tomorrow, are you certain you would go to heaven?”  But the yes is not a formulaic affirmation of a petrified Jesus, but a sense of gratitude to the Living God.  Eternity is not something we escape to.  In grace, God, the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, comes to us, in our time, in our moment, in our body, and sweeps us up, encompasses us, washes over us, sets us a glow.

[5] Thou preparest a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
thou anointest my head with oil,
my cup overflows.
[6] Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life;
and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD
forever.