BLESSED BE LIFE

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

March 23, 2008

SERMON
The intersection of 4th and Walnut Streets in Louisville, Kentucky – the place where the Trappist monk Thomas Merton had what he describes as his epiphany, that moment recounted in the words you heard Mark read from Merton’s journal earlier – is, I can assure you, a location of no great moment. I can assure you of that because I was just there. I was part of a delegation of seven from our congregation who attended a four-day conference in Louisville last weekend convened by the Unitarian Universalist Association to bring together leaders of the largest churches in our association to be inspired and renewed and to trade best practices in our church life. You’ll be hearing more about that in the future.

As an old newspaper hand, it is my practice to pick up the local daily wherever I am staying just to get a sense of the community. So, on the first day of my stay there I picked up the Louisville paper and discovered from an article that what is now this past Tuesday would be the 50th anniversary of Merton’s epiphany and that the city would be holding a celebration at the spot. Intrigued, I got out a map from promotional materials I had received and discovered that the location was just three blocks from our hotel. So, I put on a coat and walked out on a rainy morning to see if I could find the place.

When I arrived, I wasn’t sure at first that I had found it. I had had the impression from reading the article that the spot had somehow been set off, but it seemed to me an ordinary street corner. I walked around a bit, but then I found it: an unobtrusive, iron historical marker sign that recounted Merton’s experience. And so I stood back and took in the unremarkable buildings set against a dull, grey sky that was spitting rain with a few early morning pedestrians scurrying by.

Merton’s Louisville epiphany came fairly late in his career as a monk. He had joined the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, not far from Louisville, at the age of 26 in 1941 and for many years had occupied himself with the contemplative life. His journal from his early years at the monastery showed little patience with the outside world. At one point he wrote that so much of the world felt like it was, in his words, “infected with moral corruption.” The monastery was a place to shut himself away from such corruption and to dedicate himself to what he felt was his calling from God. And as for Louisville, after a visit in 1948, he wrote, “I wasn't struck by anything in particular.... Louisville was boring. Anyway, the whole thing was obedience. It meant losing a day's work.”

Ten years later, it was a routine errand to a print shop that brought him to Louisville, and his response was very different. Nothing particular had changed about Louisville. What changed was the lens through which he chose to view it.We gather today on Easter Sunday, the high point of the Christian year, the moment when, so the Gospels say, Jesus, who had died three days before on the cross, rose from the dead to become the Christ, king of kings, promising to all who hove to his word to an eternal home in heaven.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. The Gospels, in fact, vary quite a bit in what they say happened in those first days after Jesus’ death. At one end we have Mark, the oldest of the gospels, which tells that when Jesus’ followers came to the cave where his body had been laid they encountered a young man they didn’t recognize dressed in white, who told them simply that Jesus was no longer there and that they should look for him back at the Sea of Galilee. At the other end we have John, the latest of the Gospels, which tells of, first Mary, and then the other disciples meeting with the risen Jesus and receiving directions for their lives and ministries.
Those who have worked through the Gospels and sought to sort out what is most likely historical, what, given what we know from other historical sources and other clues within the text, we can have some confidence truly could have taken place, throw up their hands when they get to the Easter story. To say the least, we have no reporting of a 1st century Palestinian Jew rising from the dead. In fact, in the melting pot of cultures that Judea was at that time in history we have any number of fantastical reports of prophets and Gods intervening in history in many ways, yet nothing in the way of conclusive evidence to support any of them.

Yet, in all the gospel testimony of events surrounding Jesus’ death, we do have at least one story that we know to be true, if not in its detail, at least in its tenor. And that is the passage in the Gospel of Luke often entitled “The Walk to Emmaus.” This passage tells of two of Jesus’ followers walking from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus the day after Jesus’ death.

Along the way they discussed all the events they had witnessed in the last week: the capture, trial and execution of their leader. We can imagine the conversation as each recalls different events, different snippets of conversation. As the conversation goes on they recall teachings they remember and incidents from the past, and this person they saw die on a cross only days before comes to seem more and more real. The gospel story says that eventually the risen Jesus himself joined their walk, disguising himself so that they couldn’t recognize him at first and then when they are about to catch on to his identity, vanishing from their sight. We don’t need to accept all the details of this story to recognize that in essence it is true: Jesus’ death did not end his ministry. His life and teachings awoke something in his followers that inspired them to a new way of looking at the world.

Two millennia later we still have a hard time discerning what the essence of that message was. We know that political agendas and other influences over the centuries shaped the ways that his followers framed Jesus’ teachings. We are left ultimately to choose for ourselves what, if anything, to make of this prophet’s teaching.

In our Unitarian Universalist tradition, while we arose from within the Christian church, we have not for some time regarded ourselves as part of what I call the Christian consensus, the group of religious bodies that puts the figure of Jesus at the center of their lives. At the same time, the life and teachings of this prophetic figure remain a challenging context within which to come to terms with our own religious understanding. So, we gather on this day, not with lilies and Biblical proclamations of resurrection, but with wondering how this story of renewal might awaken our own.

There are many ways of viewing these teachings, but the one that I find compelling, that is grounded in some of the best historical and textual analysis, focuses on Jesus’ preaching on behalf what he called “the Kingdom of God.” This was a radical vision of egalitarian peace made all the more powerful because its imagery reversed the state of affairs with which most of his hearers were familiar. Kingdoms in the minds of those people were associated with oppression, but Jesus’ words turned that image around, imagining a kingdom that raised up the poor and the weak.

There is also good reason to believe that many of Jesus’ interpreters misunderstood his teaching of the arrival of that kingdom, that it was to come, not in a blaze of apocalyptic glory but in the conversion of each heart to an understanding of radical love. “The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed,” reads the Gospel of Luke in what scholars consider one of the passages that reflects most authentically what Jesus may have taught. “For, in fact, the Kingdom of God is among you.”

One place where this vision is reflecting most directly is in those passages known as the beatitudes, The reading I favor considers these blessings as offered, not so much as a form of consolation, but as a way of to invite his hearers into a different way of viewing the world. Blessed are the poor, the meek, the merciful – people of apparently little power in the world – who we are bid, instead, to value and esteem. From my perspective, what is interesting about the Easter story is not the myth of a prophet’s physical resurrection but what it might teach about the kind of spiritual renewal that we all need. And so I am drawn to this notion of blessing.

The physician Rachel Naomi Remen says that in working with critically ill people this idea of conferring a blessing often comes up. “A blessing,” she says, “is not something that one person gives another. A blessing is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth.”

To give a blessing takes us to the heart of what is true for us, the source of our strength and the locus of our integrity. Similarly, to receive a blessing requires that we open ourselves to being influenced by another, to being touched. In that moment, Remen suggests, we are not simply blessing each other, we are blessing life. We direct our own life energy in a way that acknowledges the inestimable value of what is before us, that regards it as worthy and good.

This brings to mind Thomas Merton, secluded for many years deep in a life of contemplation behind the walls of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, driving to Louisville on a routine errand. Who can say what it was – a face in the crowd, the glint of sunlight from a particular angle – but suddenly he found himself, as he writes, “like waking from a dream.”

“I met the world,” Merton writes, “and I found it no longer so wicked after all. Perhaps the things I had resented about the world when I left it were defects of my own that I had projected upon it. Now, on the contrary, I found that everything stirred me with a deep and mute sense of compassion. . . . I went through the city, realizing for the first time in my life how much good are all the people in the world.”

The experience had a transformative effort on his life. Soon Merton became a tireless social activist: opposing the Vietnam War, joining the Civil Rights Movement and writing tirelessly for a broader, more sympathetic vision of the world.

Standing on that street corner a little over a week ago I wondered what it might take to bring about such an epiphany of my own, what might help me banish this dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation and see myself as one with all, something that I truly believe is so.

It occurs to me that it might just be through blessing that we will do this. Today you took the time to focus your thoughts, your hopes, your good wishes on a child in this church community. You not only sought to wish him or her well, you brought the goodness that is within you to bear on another life. We are unlikely to know the results, if any, that these acts will bear, and to be honest I’m not interested in making any cosmic claims for them beyond here.

All the same, just having done that we have each taken a step outside of our own self isolation. In simply reaching out in this way we have admitted another, even if just for a moment, into our orbit of concern. What might it take to repeat that act and extend those moments over and over again?

These days every day I look out mountain landscapes fills me with happiness. Just overnight it seems that the Bradford pears have exploded in a profusion of white. Daffodils are firing off like ground rockets, a reddish haze is appearing on the maples and the willows are starting to leaf out. The annual miracle of spring is upon us and it couldn’t come too soon for my tastes.

The world is awakening, and it reminds me, as the great Indian poet Tagore wrote, as Ruth read earlier, that this vast stream of life that I see around me in numberless blades of grass and tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers runs through my veins as well and dances in rhythmic measures. I do indeed feel made glorious by the touch of this world of life. Living amid it I can almost feel the life-throb of ages moving through me as it is through everything else I see. It fills me with a sense of possibility in my own life and the larger world.

Tagore’s words remind me that awakening, transformation is not a unique, miraculous event. It happens all the time, sometimes in the smallest ways in the least likely places: on a random street corner, say, or a dusty road in the company of another. Perhaps all that is required is our attention, the moment we take to appreciate the wonder that we walk in each day, the way in which our lives are interwoven with so many other lives on this green earth.

It may be that all that is required is some few words:

Blessed be this place,
blessed be these people,
blessed be life.