Encountering God's Presence
2 Kings 2:1-15
Psalm 114
Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16
Mark 6:45-52
Tim
Christoffersen
St. John's Oakland
July 27, 2003
Good morning. I hope Molly will not regret inviting me to preach this morning. She and I met several years ago when we were doing clinical training in the same small group at John Muir Hospital in Walnut Creek. We also have the shared experience of a business career.
Let me ask you a question. If you were asked to tell a story about encountering God’s presence in your life, what would that story be about? I would like to share several stories that for me are about God’s presence in our lives.
The scripture readings this morning gave us several dramatic stories of encountering God’s presence in biblical times. The 114th Psalm takes us back to the Israelites leaving Egypt and wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. “The sea looked and fled, the Jordan turned back.” “Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord…who turned … the hard rock into springs of water.”
The story of Elijah being taken up into heaven in a whirlwind is even more dramatic. But the heart of the story is again water and God’s presence. Elijah and Elisha have stopped at the edge of the Jordan. Fifty men of the company of the prophets stood at a distance and watched. “Elijah took his cloak, rolled it up and struck the water with it. The water divided to the right and to the left, and the two of them crossed over on dry ground.” This encounter for many of us brings to mind the parting of the Red Sea by Moses as the Israelites fled the oncoming chariots of the Pharaoh of Egypt and also the water that sprung forth from the rock that Moses struck in the wilderness of Sinai when the Israelites were wandering for 40 years after fleeing from slavery in Egypt.
Elisha then asks Elijah for a double portion of his spirit before he is taken up. Elijah says “you will have it if you see me when I am taken up”. And shortly thereafter, a chariot of fire and horses appeared, separating them, and Elijah is taken up in a whirlwind.” Elisha picks up the cloak of Elijah that has fallen from him and went to the bank of the Jordan, struck the water with the cloak, and said, “Where now is the LORD, the God of Elijah? And the water divided and he crossed over. The prophets who were watching said, the spirit of Elijah is resting on Elisha.”
The gospel story is yet even more dramatic. The disciples have just left the event we know as the feeding of the five thousand on a remote hillside. Jesus had made them get into a boat and leave ahead of him, while Jesus remained to dismiss the crowd. Strong winds suddenly come up later in the night as they are out in the middle of the lake. They struggle to row the boat. Suddenly, all of them see Jesus, walking near them, on the water. They think he is a ghost and they are terrified. Jesus tells them not to be afraid and the winds die down. Importantly, Mark tells us they had not understood about the loaves that were multiplied to feed the people and that their hearts were hardened.
So, in a way, the stories about encountering God’s presence shift to us. Symbolically, we are a little like the disciples in the boat in the midst of the storm. We too are skeptical about how the loaves of bread were multiplied. We are certainly likely to be skeptical about Jesus walking on the water and calming the storm. You might say our hearts are not too open or even that our hearts are hardened.
We live in a society and culture in which mystery has almost no room to exist, not even a decent sized corner off on the side. Our world is narrowly circumscribed by our subservience to rationality and our ego. We are inclined to limit reality to what we can see, taste, smell, hear or measure. Even our churches fall victim to human pride. I am a hospice chaplain and I often find patients have a wonderful sense of insight. Last week, a patient told me about her experience when she changed churches after her family had moved. She said, “I was hungry for the Word of God and what I got was the word of man.”
Do any of you know of Rachel Naomi Remen? She is a medical doctor who is also a professor in the medical school at Stanford. She has done much to introduce spirituality and spiritual healing practices into the medical world. She works with many terminally ill persons and her best know book is Kitchen Table Wisdom. She suffers from Crone’s disease and had been told as a young person that she would not live much past thirty.
She tells a story that for me is about the mystery of encountering God’s presence. The story comes from a man who was 14 at the time the encounter took place. His father had been progressively deteriorating from Alzheimer’s disease for a number of years. He had not spoken a word in over 8 years. He and his older brother were finally old enough to stay with their father to give their mom some break time from constant care giving. One day, the two brothers were watching television. Their father, who sat in a wheelchair, suddenly clutched at his chest and fell forward onto the floor. The older brother said go call 911. Suddenly they heard a voice from their father who had not spoken for 8 years. “Don’t call 911. Tell your mother I love her and I will be all right.” Then he died.
There is a deep connection between mystery and our encountering God’s presence in our lives. Let me share with you an encounter that spoke to me as God’s presence in my life. This happened several months before my ordination as a priest in December 2001. The background is that one of the potential stumbling blocks for me to be an effective pastor is a decided tendency to be judgmental. I had just gone to bed and was quite awake. I suddenly experienced a strong sense of white light in the room. I “heard” a voice that said simply, “Don’t be judgmental.” I won’t comment on how well I have listened, but the message was unambiguous! More seriously, an encounter with God’s presence will undoubtedly change your behavior.
Another connection between mystery and encountering God’s presence for me has been my work as a hospice chaplain. The work Molly and I did together at John Muir was the opening for me. Part of my training was being a chaplain to trauma patients and their families. This opened my heart to hospice work. Friends reacted to my interest in hospice by saying to work with dying persons would be really difficult. But the mystery has been the deep sense of joy I experience in being with hospice patients. Almost all of them have no masks, no personas to protect them from contact with the world. I think of Jesus’ words in Matthew 18 where he responds to the question who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. “Most certainly I tell you, unless you turn, and become as little children, you will in no way enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” These patients are as little children in the sense conveyed by Jesus. They are simply and directly present. And their simple presence encourages me to respond in kind. I am granted the gift of looking into the eyes of a human soul. I treasure these visits. For me, God is unquestionably present in these encounters. For me, it is the direct proof of Jesus’ words, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I also.”
Let me close with a story that I love. Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian and mystic of the 20th century wrote a little book called Who is Man? At the end of the book Buber tells the story of a famous 17th century, Hasidic rabbi who is speaking to a group of learned men. The rabbi poses the question “Where is the dwelling of God”? The learned men are shocked and think what a silly question. They respond, “Is not the whole world full of his glory?”
If we see the world only with our intellect we are likely not to see or encounter the mystery of God’s presence. If we see also with our heart, if we are open to the mystery of God’s presence in our lives, we are likely to answer the question in the same way that the Hasidic rabbi answered his own question.
“God dwells wherever man lets him in.”
Amen.
