THROUGH COMPLETE STILLNESS

Let us pray:

Most gracious God
out of all the words
that will now be spoken and heard
may it be your Living Word
that stays in our hearts.
Give us the grace to receive it
and give us the charity
to let all the other words
slip away.
We pray this in
the Name of Jesus Christ.
Amen

Three weeks ago
I was in Nashville Tennessee
for the funeral of one of the dearest people
I will ever know in my life:
David Lowes Watson.
He was my pastor,
my teacher, my friend, my colleague.
His presence in my life was quintessential;
his absence from my life is
strange and unsettling.

The timing of his funeral was
extremely inconvenient.
August 8^th is the day
Jessica and I were married in 2014,
and three weekends ago coincided with
a rare reunion
with Jessica’s family from California.
It was painful
to miss those moments of family intimacy and joy.

But as I sat with my feelings about David’s death,
I experienced an inarticulate
yet inescapable
feeling:
that NOT being at David’s funeral
would cost me more pain
than NOT being at all the other things
our family had planned.

In the end,
just a few words
sufficed:
I’m sorry to miss our family time.
I need to be there.
Jessica simply nodded.
She understood my need.
Nothing more needed to be said.

While in Nashville,
I stayed with a dear friend
who had sat side by side with me
in the chancel choir
at West End United Methodist Church
for eight years.
After many delays leaving Grand Rapids,
Leon picked me up from the airport
in the middle of the night
and brought to his home
north of Nashville in Gallatin.
The following day
we breakfasted together, we listened to music,
we talked over the news,
we sipped coffee,
and we went to see Christopher Nolan’s
adaptation of Homer’s epic tale:
The Odyssey.

Musing on David
and the lessons I had learned from him
over the years,
something in the story and movie
struck me:

To have life
at the expense of other life
is a kind of self-annihilation.

Leon and I talked about this
for the rest of the day . . .
and the next day . . .
and we’re still talking about it.

There is something essential in this.
To live in a way
that takes life from others
is wrong.
I know it
deep in my heart
as an ultimate truth
and saying it out loud
feels cheap.

Ultimate truths
cannot be spoken;
they can only be experienced,
and they cannot be confined.

We find Peter struggling
with this
in the Gospel according to Matthew
today.

He has discerned who Jesus is—
the Son of the Living God—
but his assumptions about
what the Messiah of Israel
is supposed to do
obscure his perception.
Peter cannot imagine that the

Kingdom of God
must be revealed in the
Cross of Christ.

Peter cannot reconcile
his religion with
the ultimate truth
that the highest of the high
will only reveal the Divine Glory
through self-emptying love
for the lowest of the low.

“God forbid it, Lord!
This must never happen to you.”
Peter exclaims, chastising Jesus
and unintentionally revealing
that he has his own plans for the Messiah.

But Jesus of Nazareth
is the Incarnation of that same One
who said to Moses
at the burning bush:
Don’t ask me for a name…
I am who I am; I will be who I will be.
I am the God of Abraham
of Isaac, and of Jacob.
The history of my faithful love
is my Name forever.
You can only know my Name
by sharing my life.
Now come, I will send you
to Pharaoh.

Like Moses before him,
Peter doesn’t understand—yet—
that the Living Word
cannot be managed
or even reasoned with.

God’s honor is not increased
by our worship.

God’s honor is not decreased
by our neglect.

God’s love does not increase
when we do right.

God’s love does not decrease
when we take life.

God’s being cannot be pinned down
in a name.

God’s Name is the history
of God’s faithfulness.

Human wholeness
has to do with entering into
the unfolding truth
of this History:
of this divine, faithful,
creating
LOVE.

In complete surrender
to LOVE’s embrace . . .

through complete stillness
in the face of calamity . . .

within the ultimate truth
of God’s eternal love
we no longer “see evil
as a force to resist,
but simply as . . .
a state of self-absorption
which is in disharmony
with the universal process,
so that, as with a dirty window,
the light can’t shine through.”[1]




Returning to my friend Leon,
with whom I stayed while in Nashville . . .

Leon’s beloved wife, Jewell,
died about two years ago
after a long battle with cancer.
Their home is still populated
with a lifetime of books,
and Leon instructed me
to take one,
any one that I wished.



I reached for a slender book
obscurely tucked in between
two imposing volumes of fiction.

It was the Tao Te Ching
translated by Stephen Mitchell.

The Tao Te Ching
was composed
by the ancient Chinese spiritualist, Lao-tzu,
about whom almost nothing is known,
but whose poetry remains
one of the greatest achievements
of human wisdom.

As I settled in on the plane going home,
resigning myself to another set of delays,
I opened to poem 56:

Those who know don’t talk.
Those who talk don’t know.

Close your mouth,
block off your senses,
blunt your sharpness,
untie your knots,
soften your glare,
settle your dust.
This is the primal identity.

Be like the Tao.
It can’t be approached or withdrawn from,
benefited or harmed,
honored or brought into disgrace.
It gives itself up continually.
That is why it endures.

Lao-tzu’s poem
sounds a lot to me
like the slightly less ancient wisdom
of Paul:

Let love be genuine;
hate what is evil,
hold fast to what is good;
love one another with mutual affection . . .

Rejoice in hope,
be patient in suffering . . .

Bless those who persecute you . . .
Rejoice with those who rejoice,
weep with those who weep.
Live in harmony . . .

Do not repay anyone evil for evil . . .
Do not be overcome by evil,
overcome evil with good.

Neither Lao-tzu nor Paul nor Jesus
were afraid of words,
but they used words
merely as stepping stones
on the way to an experience
of what cannot be said.
To understand them,
we have to follow the Living Word
and let all the other words
slip away.



Those
who want to save their life
will lose it.

Those
who employ their life
in the history of Love’s Incarnation.
will find it.

There is no religion here.
Jesus calls us to
a way of being in the world
in which we experience the mystery
that the more life we give away
the more life we have.

Believing the words of Jesus
doesn’t make them true.

Ignoring the words of Jesus
won’t make them false.

Living them will guide our feet
into the way of peace . . .
like Moses his servant,
and Aaron whom he had chosen.

Sometimes our hearts are on fire
and yet . . . they are not consumed;
listen to the voice in the fire
in complete stillness
you may hear God say:
Come now!  
I will send you to Pharaoh.

[1] Stephen Mitchell, “Forward” in Tao Te Ching (Perennial Classics: 2000), page ix.