Readings:
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 Luke
4:14-21
We pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations
of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our rock and our
sustainer. Amen.
Our readings today
offer two very different responses from the people of God to hearing the word
of God.
From the first
reading: it is after the exile to Babylon and the people have returned home to
desolation. Nehemiah has been a big part
of the drive to rebuild not just the city of Jerusalem but to rebuild the
people in faith and in hope. The
physical work has been done – now is the time for spiritual building up. And so he opened the Torah and they read from
it – the people listened and were deeply moved by the readings they
rediscovered in the book of law. They
wept as the emotion of the word reached into their hearts and they understood.
It made no
difference that they had heard this word many times – for this time their
hearts were prepared, open to hearing the deep truth held within this holy
book, this truth of God with us.
In Luke, Jesus
begins his ministry – and he returns to his home town to read the words of the
Torah – from Isaiah. And he read these
words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon
me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me
to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let
the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour." And
Jesus claimed ownership of those words – much to the, shall we say, ‘amusement’
of the people who had watched him grow up in their town. Jesus goes on to talk about the prophet not
being heard in their home town. They had
known him as a child, every day, and did not have the eyes, the discernment to
see beyond that. These people were
blind, deaf to the power of the words that would move their hearts and make
them understand the momentous news that was Jesus among them.
Today I want to
talk about the ordinary becoming extraordinary – and the ways that we can deny
ourselves the revelation of truth in the ordinary, the well known.
Joan Chittister,
in her book Called to Question: a
spiritual memoir[1],
titles a chapter ‘Daliness: the gifts of the mundane’.
She talks about
how easily we channel our spiritual resources when we are faced with a crisis –
much as the returned exiles did. Their
very world had been shaken into smithereens, they had had to start from
scratch, it had been hard, their spiritual antennae had to be regrown and it
was pulsatingly receptive as they gathered at the Water Gate to hear the Book
of the Law. Their hearts had been laid
open for the word.
Would they have
stayed in that state of highly emotive response – no they would not. Life would have settled, the clarity of that
moment might have remained but perhaps got a little buried by the mundane?
We all do struggle
with ‘daliness.’ It can wear us down,
limit us, invite us into boredom as we contemplate the long haul of keeping the
faith, maintaining the trust, being in the day to day. But here is what Joan says: Life is not made
up of crises; life is made up of little things we love to ignore in order to
get to the exciting things in life. But God is in the details. God is in what
it take us to be faithful to them. God
is in the routines that make us what we are. The way we do the little things in
life is the mark of the bigness of our soul.”[2]
But, taking this
further, who said that the ordinary has to be a limiter for our encounters with
our God . We know the comfort of routine
and that it has the capacity to make us a bit sleepy so to speak, but who says
it needs to make us blind and deaf. When we are open to knowing God in the
ordinary, the everyday then nothing is ever quite the same.
Rachel Remen in
Kitchen Table Wisdom[3]
speaks of making a quite mundane decision to create a tiny vegetable garden at
her home, she who had bought vegetables from the supermarket all her life. And she successfully raised some lettuces –
she went out to pick the salad as usual and as she suddenly paused with her
hands on the leave and the words of a childhood memory came to her: Blessed art thou, King of the Universe,who
bringest forth bread from the earth.
Those words
changed from a meaningless mumbled ritual to a reality of God as sustainer,
creator, provider of all that is good.
Something quite routine became a moment of sacred connection through an
act most of us would consider quite mundane.
I’ve had a moment
myself recently. I have a favourite saying that is getting a little more
frantic as I get older. I am fond of
saying that in another life I would like to have been a: let me see builder/woodworker, a
self-sustainability guru, a writer of a multitude of PhDs as an idea captured
my imagination, a life long traveller – to be perfectly honest I’m not sure I
ever said it of being a Minister…..
I’m fascinated by
the fact that with no learning or experience something is a mystery but with
some teaching, some hands on the unknown begins to makes sense – well as long
as it is within my capability range. As
I was driving along and found myself musing over a bunch of drainage pipes on a
truck and how the guy unloading them for sure knew what he was doing – it would
be so ordinary for him but for me it was a mystery and then this epiphany hit –
that it is good that we don’t know how to do everything, but that I am a
valuable part of that everything and so is that plumber and so are each one of
us here. And I suspect you know the
verses it brought to mind (which was actually a choice of reading for today) -
1 Corinthians 12: 12 For just as the body is one and has many
members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is
with Christ.
Silly little
thing, not a new thought, but being open to the sacred in the midst of the
mundane gave me a connection, an experience that opened the Word to me in a
lightbulb moment.
So we are to
celebrate and live well for God our ‘daliness’, our routines, the minutae that
makes up our days and our weeks and our years.
We accept that it takes patience and persistence, that we will struggle
with the demands that disrupt and routines that will make us feel trapped but
we recognise that God is in each and all of these places we go, mundane or
not.
If we come back to
the two readings: on the one hand we have the people of the exile who have
lived through immense change and trauma, who have lost everything and so are
incredibly open to the word of God straight into their hearts.
On the other hand
we have the synagogue in Nazareth – settled and ordinary yet blind to this
revelation of God in their presence.
It is
unsustainable and unrealistic for us to live constantly on the edge, those
moment of intense vulnerability which bring some of the greatest truths to us,
yet we do not want to live in the complacency of never being surprised, never
seeing God in the ordinary routine that is life.
So maybe the
answer is to be aware of and open to God in our ordinariness – however that
might be for you. Being aware and embracing
the Spirit of God in the lettuce leaf and the drain pipes, in the soapsuds and
the garden mulch - and the words we have heard so many times, the presence we
yearn for can suddenly, through the most innocuous of things, become a
revelation of God with us.
I finish with the
words of another woman who gets this awareness of the divine in the most
mundane – Joy Cowley in her book Veil
over the light says:
“When we reflect
on the Gospels we see the same [lack of the dramatic] pattern in Jesus’
teaching – ordinary things containing extraordinary insights: flowers, seeds,
sparrows, weeds, candles, yeast, wine, small coins, little fish, children. In fact we can’t find anything in Jesus’s
good news that comes from grandeur and great human achievement. It’s all about encountering God in the little
everyday things around us. All that we
need is awareness…..[and] we begin to see God’s presence all around us.”
So hear the Good
News: the Scripture is being fulfilled in the midst of and through our daliness
if we but have ears to hear, eyes to see, hearts open to receive……. Amen. So be
it.
Margaret Garland
[1] Called to Question: a
Spiritual Memoir by Joan Chittister.
Plymouth, U.K.:Sheed and Ward, 2004
p. 199-
[2]Called to Question: a
Spiritual Memoir by Joan Chittister. Plymouth, U.K.:Sheed and Ward, 2004 p. 201-202
[3] Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal Kitchen
Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal by
Rachel Naomi Rememn. Syndey, NSW, Pan
McMillan, 2002 p. 283
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