Sermon, February 23, 2002
Arkansas Diocesan Convention
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas

Acts 9:1-22  Saul's Experience on the Damascus Road

Gospel -- John 1:1-14 The Prologue to John

When John wanted to reach out into the culture of his time and share God’s good news, he engaged the secular and religious thought of his day. He listened to their language and their metaphors. And he opened his message with their language and their metaphors. "In the beginning was the logos, ...the light [that] shines in the darkness."

The Greeks knew what John meant. From Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the Greeks had a developed logos philosophy as well as metaphors of light. Jewish listeners could connect with John’s message. They had a tradition of logos as the Word of God as well as the prophetic voices announcing the coming of God’s light. The practitioners of the esoteric mystery religions had a place for logos in their experience of the divine and an elaborate conquest of light over darkness. So with logos as the divine light revealed in human form, John takes the early church’s experience of Jesus and interprets it successfully to a wide and diverse world. What great evangelism. His words and his metaphors helped change the world.

It’s significant to notice what John didn’t do. He didn’t bind his presentation of the logos coming as light only in the traditional language and metaphor of Biblical Judaism. He didn’t even follow the outline of the Gospel of Mark which had become a template of the Jesus movement by his time thanks to its adoption by both Matthew and Luke. (It was as true then as it is today. A tradition in a church is anything we do twice if somebody likes it.) John created his own Gospel, creatively different from the others.

He connected with the world that he engaged. Greeks, Jews and Mystery cults – all could hear their truth connected with the truth of this logos as Jesus.

During college I had a friend whom everybody called by his last name, Curtis. Curtis was a wild man. He enjoyed his seven and a half years in quest of a bachelor’s degree. He transferred to Ole Miss as his third school with nearly sophomore hours. At Tennessee his freshman year, Curtis took Economics 101 and got a "D." He was disappointed in his performance, so he took it again the second semester to raise his grade, flunked it and lost his three hours.

I used to hire Curtis to help me with my part-time job as a radio sportscaster. I did the play–by–play and Curtis kept the stats. I paid him with a six pack of beer.

One day we were driving home from our broadcast of a Little League tournament, and we got into one of those conversations about religion. "Do you believe in heaven?" he asked me. I was in my pre-skeptic period then, and I answered him "Yes." "What in the world do you think heaven is?" Curtis said. "I mean I don’t want to sit around with sissies playing harps forever and ever. That would drive me crazy!"

"Well, Curtis," I said. "That’s not the way I think about heaven." I said, "You know how hot it can get in Mississippi in August when the humidity and the temperature is in the nineties? Have you ever had to cut the grass on one of those sweltering days, when your leg drips down your socks and you wipe the stinging sweat out of your eyes to see? You know after you’ve been mowing for a while how some of the dust from the mower catches in the back of your mouth and you’re so dry and parched that you can’t swallow it away? Now imagine you’ve been doing that for a couple of hours, and then you stop. There in front of you is a cooler of cold beers buried in ice.

You reach down in that shivery cooler and pull out a cold one. It smokes in your hand as the chill rises from it. You pop the top and watch the amber fizz explode into the air. Then you put your head back and let that frosty brew flow into your mouth. The exquisite explosion of feeling you get when that liquid hits the back of your parched throat – imagine that feeling forever. That’s what heaven is.

"Oh, yeah!" Curtis shouted. "I could get into that kind of religion." That Sunday Curtis brought three of his friends to St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Oxford, Mississippi and had a great time. Though he was a little disoriented when the usher walked up to him looking inquisitively at him. Instinctively Curtis said to the usher, "Table for four?" ...It was all right. He ate. He drank.

How do you put the gospel into the language of today and tomorrow? A creation defined by quantum physics and fractals and chaos theory demands a new interpretation of the logos. A culture that worships appearance, affluence and achievement needs a new light in its darkness.

Churches that have the creativity of the author of the fourth gospel will study the words and metaphors of the culture, and recreate our message and our service in response to our world. The revolution in physics and information in general has made this an incredibly exciting time to be alive. It is fun to be religious in a quantum world.

Scientists are telling us that everything in the universe is connected to everything else. A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo and it effects the weather in Pine Bluff. They are telling us that there are no absolutes, only probabilities. There is an openness at the heart of reality, an uncertainty principle. And there’s no such thing as an objective observer. They are discovering something like consciousness at material levels that we’ve never thought of as being able to process information. And what looks so solid is really nothing. All of the matter of the universe could be collapsed into an infinitely dense point no bigger than my hand.

Creation is open, free and evolving. It is alive. It is not a machine with parts, it is a living organism with everything related to everything else. The further one looks into it, the deeper one goes into a place where the only appropriate human response is awe. Science now points us to mystery.

I think all of that is exciting, especially for Anglicans. We have always been open to ambiguity and resisted the fundmentalisms of certainty and control. Our sacramental worship is a metaphor of mystery in relationship. At our best, we have honored wisdom, beauty and goodness whatever its source, and not insisted on our exclusive copyright to salvation and truth. When I was a child our church worked for the inclusion of all races into the full life of our society. Now in my generation of leadership, I am glad that the church seems to be listening to the claims of gay, lesbian and transgendered Christians and recognizing their gifts of the Spirit. This church has a heritage of being open, free and evolving, just like reality itself.

If we are to be healthy participants within the future of the universe, we will continue to nurture the interrelationship of all people within the creative life of God. In other words, we will respect the dignity of every human being. If we are to be healthy participants within the future of the planet, we will advocate for the care and nurture of our ecology and environment of this our fragile island home.

This is the language of our times. You talk this way and people who have written off the church as hopelessly anachronistic begin to look again. If they look and discover that we are indeed a living organism, their energies will combine with ours. People want to experience God, they don’t want a bunch of words about God. They don’t want to learn about the Damascus Road, they want to experience the presence of God on their own road. People need the tools to become open to mystery. We’ve got the tools; it is our spiritual inheritance. We know how to help people enter the silence. We know how to teach people to contemplate. We know how to nurture the intuition, how to listen to dreams, how to awaken to synchronicity. We know how to listen to people’s moments of transcendence and assure them they’re not crazy. We know music and poetry and what it is to experience the divine within the concrete. We call that sacrament.

We can touch and anoint and pray and heal. We can ask questions that are so big that we can live in the tension of the continuing question. We can invite people to grow and mature, not just memorize pat answers and freeze. We’ve been around longer than the economy or the nation, and we can confront the idolatries of addiction to appearance, affluence and achievement with the deeper values of wisdom, compassion and freedom.

There is nothing more fun or exciting than to be religious in a quantum world. We’ve got what the world wants and all we need to do is give it away – living drink for parched throats. And I feel so grateful to be part of a church that nurtures and satisfies me.

Every time I come to Diocesan Convention, I will have at least one moment, usually more, when my throat chokes with thankfulness and when grateful tears try to well up, because I look around and am overwhelmed by the goodness I see. Often it’s at worship. What a privilege it is to be able to connect with God in such a simple mystery as this bread and this wine. How wonderful. Sometimes its when I look around at these marvelous and good people, and I feel so lucky to be part of all this, to belong. Sometimes it’s the music. Sometimes it’s the laughter. Maybe a familiar prayer or scripture. And I want to pinch myself; its so good. I am so fortunate.

I think that’s what God feels like from the inside. More refreshing than a cold beer on a sultry day. I want that for me. I want that for you, and for my congregation, and for my town, my diocese, my world. Because I think those moments when experience our connection to everything are the most real moments of our lives. Logos and light come to life. The wings of our Spirit flap and the spiritual energy in Tokyo is charged. We are free, open and evolving; touching the hem of mystery. We are awake, alive – breathing God. This is what we are given. This is what we can give away. How wonderful it is to be alive in a world as wondrous as this.

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