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19 July 2009 I Samuel 3:1-9; Mark 4:1-22 The Summons To be summoned: to be called into presence, to be called forth to do something. It has a momentous sense about it, the word summons, however much the word has shrunk to mean a document you’d rather not get that a sheriff has brought to your door. We know our very lives do depend upon a welcome summons from someone. Look at how hungry we all seem to be, checking our email and carrying our cell phones with us everywhere. We wait for contact, for a sign that another remembers. I don’t know about you, but I’m often disappointed by these little bites. I wonder what would happen if we were waiting, instead, for a summons from God, for God’s voice calling us as it calls to Samuel, Samuel, Samuel, for Jesus’ voice as he calls to his disciples, listen to me, let anyone with ears to hear listen! The call of God: singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter in her song “The Calling,” asks, who is calling out “on a dark lonesome highway,” calling out so powerfully that we can’t “turn away,” so powerfully that we know there is “no other way.” So deep in us is this longing and so much a part of our theology: that God, the only one who really knows us and remains with us always, comes to speak to each of us. As Carpenter puts it, if we are so called, “life would mean more/than one’s name on a door.” Paul, as we heard last week, was so called on his dark highway to Damascus. James and John were called while fishing with their father. In a heartbeat everything changed in them. Who would want to turn away from such a summons? Who would not want to believe one could come to us at any time? Perhaps it already has for you. And yet a lot of us, I for one, are I suspect also a little nervous, suspicious even, of anyone who claims to actually hear God’s voice. This is particularly so when the message reported as, “God is on my side.” We all know people, some powerful people, who have acted on a summons we know could not possibly have come from a loving God. We humans are capable of much self-delusion. And so even Samuel at first is reluctant to imagine God is calling him in the night. It’s good that he asks someone older, reliable, Eli, did you call me? We in the long curve of our reformed tradition have favored attending to the quiet voice, the deep, internal, steady voice of God in us, the slow burn. We’ve had a few warm, revival moments, even in this church in the 1700s, as Becky’s sermon spoke of last week. But it is our inner ponderings, our inner questionings, that usually guide us in listening to God’s summons. We may feel we lose something, something electrifying, something dramatic. But we gain a deep steadiness, God within. For us in our tradition, conversion is not a single dramatic event, a single moment of hearing, but a lifetime of internal conversation with God. We’ve been given, every one of us, a faculty to help sustain our interior slow burning being with God. We must, however, remember that this faculty in us even exists. We must remember it and care for it, nurture it. What is this special faculty in us, the sacred place, really, of the patient God voice? It has a name, an endangered name: it is called our conscience. Our conscience. So forgotten is this word that few of my students over the years seemed to be able to distinguish between it and consciousness, at least if one used their spelling as a guide! Conscience: I like to think of this faculty as a kind of waiting receiver in us, sort of like an internal cell phone waiting to ring when we sense we’ve got to do something, show our love, be our best to each other and be our best to ourselves. How many times each day do we feel that inner hesitation about a situation, or something we’ve done or said or thought. We should listen to that voice, the voice of conscience in us. One of the often unfairly maligned architects of our Protestant tradition, John Calvin, says that the conscience holds the sense of deity inscribed in the hearts of each of us. The sense of deity and, that old-fashioned word, duty. The conscience holds God in us. Christian philosopher and theologian Paul Ricoeur says that when we attend to our “conscience,” we are reminded of the limits of our individual selves and reminded of things of ultimate concern; the limits of our individual selves and things of ultimate concern. Our “conscience” is our interior faculty that tells us about our true place in the world, and that is that we live with each other and before God. When I subject something I have thought or done to the gaze of my “conscience” I am asking, how does this thought or this action impact others, me with others, and how does God see it? Yet remembering that we each have a conscience is only the beginning. We also need to nurture it, give it good ground for flourishing. Jesus in this morning’s parable suggests that the word of God, falling on us, in us, needs a place. It needs a suitable landscape. We can think of ourselves as a field. If our inner field is filled with rocks, or if it is beset with distractions, we will not be able to ponder the word of God. We will not be able to listen. So many of us have watched our vegetable seeds this season rot. The ground wasn’t right, too wet. Our inner ground is even more precious than this. There’s a good reason for thinking of our inner receiver, our conscience, as seated in a ready field within us. It suggests our inner lives are large, in some ways far bigger than we are. I suspect some of us, I know I have, have at times gotten hung up on some worry about something we failed to do, or some hurt that we have caused another. It’s easy to brood about it, perhaps even obsess about it, want too much to be perfect. It’s easy to forget to forgive ourselves. It’s the Christian disease and deep quiet guilt is the Protestant strain of this. God has said, “wherever two or three are gathered;” we need to be in community with each other as we weigh God’s will, for our church work, yes, but also for our individual work. Thinking of ourselves as having an inner field reminds us of our whole lives with others and not just our individual life. How often we get guidance from each other, while making coffee, talking before committee meetings, gardening, working at the White Elephant Sale. How often we let go of our own sense of failings when we arrange the flowers, practice in the choir, knit a prayer shawl for another. We may not talk openly about the internal deliberations of our conscience, but we are always getting cues from each other, from our weekly worship, and of course from our prayers for each other. In this way we keep our field open and fertile, healthy and shared for God’s word to fall and grow in us. But there are other communities than church that we are a part of that keep the field fertile in us for God’s summons. These are the communities created by works of art. Art, literature, drama, dance, music. We have had this powerful experience this morning and we will have another one tonight, thanks to our Palestinian guests. It is true that when we come together to experience an art work, it is a one-time meeting, not a weekly one. And certainly the content of the performances we attend might not always seem to have much to do with God. And yet we know we have had such powerful experiences with art that we sense we are in the presence of ultimate reality. We should never underestimate art’s power to move us emotionally, even politically, but also spiritually. In opening our imagination art brings others into the very marrow of us, others otherwise seemingly far from us. There we stand face to face with the other. Our love and our responsibility then flow in us like water. Now I know some of you might be a little uneasy about these high claims for art. Many people, even religious people, have and still do distrust art, work of the imagination, as a space for opening the God field of conscience in us. Despite Keats’ claim that beauty is truth and truth beauty, we’ve too long separated “art” from “truth.” This is one of the terribly impoverishing consequences of our Western Enlightenment culture, which prized reason as our highest organ, not the imagination. For a long time we have exiled the imagination. Many people still see literature, art as unreal, a fantasy, a fiction, and so going to the theatre, for example, is seen as merely a pastime, and not an ethical, even holy activity. Having taught English literature for years, well I know the status of that field of study, and it is, for many, not important. An English Major, huh? Our unenlightened so-called Enlightenment even afflicted our Puritan ancestors. They closed down the theatres for a while in England because they felt the art was leading people off the path. But this was an extreme reaction. By the time the Puritans came to America and produced our greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards, preacher in Northampton, Mass. in the early 1700s, he reclaimed imagination as a deep channel for God. Edwards believed that through sensuous images, images of flowers and bees, and music, God makes a powerful way through to us. Edwards celebrated not just thoughts, but “images of divine things.” In fact Edwards claimed that an image moves us more deeply and more permanently than a thought. Art may do more to move our conscience and our compassion than a treatise. A dance, a picture, a play, is worth more than a thousand words. Shakespeare himself knew how powerful images, works of art, could be for stirring, for pricking our conscience. The plot of his most famous play hangs on it. Somewhere in the middle of Hamlet, prince Hamlet decides he has to know once and for all whether the ghost of his father who has appeared to him has really told him the truth: did his father’s brother really kill his father in order to marry his mother? Hamlet wants to be sure. Prince Hamlet decides to stage a play before his step-father, now King, a play which enacts the scene his ghostly father has reported to him, a scene of one brother pouring poison into another brother’s ear and so killing him. Hamlet’s plan to is watch how his stepfather reacts. Hamlet’s famous line about his play is, “The play’s the thing wherein to catch the conscience of the king.” In Hamlet’s mind, his stepfather’s guilt is written all over his face as he watches the murder scene. Hamlet knows that his step-father won’t be able to hide from art. His conscience will, as they say, “out.” Now we’re not in Hamlet’s nor the king’s position, thank goodness! We’re not being set up by suspicious directors looking to find us guilty. The plots of most plays aren’t even closely aligned with our individual lives. But there is something both aesthetically and, as well, theologically powerful in Hamlet’s assertion, “The play’s the thing wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Art may mirror life, but art also mirrors, reveals, directs, chastises, even as it sometimes comforts the soul and makes it laugh with joy. Art’s effects on us are mysterious and powerful. Art can comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. When we hear about the cellist in Sarajevo sitting by the bread lines and playing his cello, we here are afflicted with our passivity, but surely those who stood in those bread lines and heard him were comforted. Art can also quiet, still, and redirect anger into wiser courses. Ritual killings in fairy tales, ritual trials as in today’s play, release the anger and frustration of those afraid or persecuted, and so create a space for measured and purposeful action. Art also takes us into others far more deeply than life often can. Because we are only witnesses, precisely because art is art and not life, safe, we often will travel very far into people we otherwise, in real life, might not befriend so readily. Art, when we just let it be in us, suspends our often too ready and too narrow judgments of others and opens wide our sympathy and love. And art can refocus us on ultimate reality. When we stand with the naked and bereft and crying King Lear on the heath, we know we are in the presence of God. And so let us treasure our God gift, conscience, and let us keep our fields ready for God’s summons. Let the play begin. Amen.
The Rev. Eileen B
Sypher
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