Sand, mosquitos, silence and sinking

A God-might-be-anywhere sort of sermon

Emma and I were sitting with Juniper at the edge of California last week, just a stride or two from the Pacific Ocean, taking in the majesty of the ocean. Witnessing the constant strength of the waves and the tides. Beholding the vast reach of the horizon.

In that moment, that place was imbued with divinity. Full of the divine.

In that moment, I looked at Emma, and smiled.

Emma smiled back.

And we both looked down at Juniper.

As Juniper took one tiny—yet substantial—handful of Pacific coast sand, paused a moment, then scooped it into her wide open mouth.

Our girl has now taken in mouthfuls of both the Pacific and the Atlantic sandy beaches.

And apparently none of us have learned our lesson.

But I kind of love it.

I can’t speak directly to her experience (though her face does betray considerable surprise after chomping down on a mouthful of sand), but Juniper is not wrong to want to take that moment—that place that is saturated with the divine—and find some way, any way, to feast on it.

God does, after all, tend to show up in unlikely places.

The other day, after a full day of getting settled back in from our trip out west, I got out of the house right at dusk to go for a run on the trails in our neighborhood woods. You see, during vacation I started a new spiritual practice of taking just five minutes each day for some breathing exercises and meditation. And I wanted to keep that practice going upon my return home. So on my run I stopped at a picnic table in the woods, sat down, set my timer, closed my eyes, relaxed my shoulders, and drew a deep breath.

Then another.

Then another.

Then an... *slap*

(Mosquito on my neck.)

Okay. It’s okay. Gather your composure.

Deep br... *slap*

(Mosquito on my forehead.)

*slap slap slap*

(Two on my tricep. One on my calf.)

I mean, what do I expect, huh? I am in the forest, at dusk, sweaty, sheltered from any breeze, in Maine, in the summer. Looking for God to show up in the sweet quiet of this… *slap*

I won’t tell you just now whether or not I succeeded at intimacy with the divine in that particular moment. But, you know, that is the sort of unlikely place where God just might turn up.

Because God almost always shows up in upside down ways.

There were two stories about God doing that in the lectionary readings this week.

One from the Hebrew bible where the prophet Elijah is on the run.

Where he lives, there are lots of different gods, lots of different things and ideas that people give their lives to, and many of them are spiritually toxic. (Sound familiar?) But Elijah is devoted to an uncanny God who doesn’t follow the rules of the local religious authorities.

You might remember the story that comes just before today’s story. Where Elijah goes head-to-head with those other religious leaders, in a battle of whose-God-is-more-powerful. And suffice it to say that Elijah proves to everyone watching that his God is the God who fights with fire.

But now Elijah is on the run because the wealthy benefactor of the lesser gods is not pleased with Elijah’s new-found dominance. She’s out to take him down. So Elijah flees to the wilderness, figuring that he’d rather perish out there than at the hands of his enemies.

He kind of seems to think that he is going to die there in the wilderness. So he cozies into a cave, and gets ready to resign from this mortal coil.

And that’s when God shows up.

A rock-rending windstorm blows by, but God is not in the wind. A fierce earthquake rips at the cave all around him, but God is not in the quake. A wild fire tears through the wilderness, but God is not in the fire.

Then, after all of the demonstrations of power and might and dominance, there is the sound of sheer silence.

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A still small voice.

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The presence of God arrives in a whisper. And this prophet who has made himself famous battling against enemies with fire and asserting dominance in the name of his god, experiences an actual encounter with God for perhaps the first time.

Because you can spend your life devoted to an idea of god, but you may never actually experience relationship with the nature of of the divine unless you are willing to surrender to the truth that God tends to turn up where she’s least expected.

Which is how the spirit of God shows up in the life of Jesus, in the gospel of Matthew, when that same divine whisper, calls Jesus away into the wilderness for a night of vigil after a miraculous feat of nurture.

This story comes on the heels of Jesus feeding thousands of people.

After that extraordinary picnic, he sends his team of students on ahead to prepare a boat for their trip across the water to the next town on their itinerary, and he himself clambers up into the hills (maybe finding a cozy cave) for some solitude and spiritual grounding, before returning to his work of healing and teaching and nurture.

By the time he finishes his vigil, it’s late, and the boat that his students had prepared has been swept out to sea by a storm, and they are battling the waves and the wind to keep the ship upright.

And as every good sailor knows: Struggling against the wind is futile.

And as these followers of Jesus will learn: Faith does not mean trying to overpower the storm. Faith means finding power in surrender.

But that lesson comes hard, especially to young men.

And these particular sailors grew up believing that god reigns over the weather and the wind; that the storm clouds come from Yahweh. They grew up believing that faith in god means you have the power to manipulate storms and overcome chaos. So, mustering as much muscular faith as they can, they heave and they hoe. And they’re blown further and further from shore, not realizing that god is not in their efforts to overpower the weather and the wind.

God is in the man who has quieted his spirit and attuned his heart to the subtle whispers of silence. God is in the man who saunters through the storm.

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At the end of the story they conclude: “You are the Son of God!”

But I love that Jesus seems uninterested here in any sort of exclusive claim to the attributes and qualities and capacities of that title.

When Peter asks if he can join in, Jesus says: “Sure! Get out here. There’s plenty of God to go around.”

And that goes for us too, there is plenty of God to go around. It’s just a matter of being perceptive to the ways that God shows up.

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Of course, it’s easy to get distracted by where we think God should show up, or where we might want God to show up. When we get distracted we tend to start sinking.

Some of us sink, like Peter, into the busyness and noise of trying to prove that we are worthy of intimacy with the divine.

Some of us sink, like Elijah, into resignation and despair when God’s power doesn’t come through for us in the ways that we think it should.

Some of us sink like me, into the sincerity of my practice of stillness and silent meditation, expecting God to show up in my five minutes of quiet.

Elijah got a whisper. Peter got wet up to his waist. I got mosquitos.

God almost always shows up in unexpected ways. And we get to tune in to those ways, because the point is not that God is only in the silence and never in the storm. The point is: Are we hungry to experience God? And willing to consider that God might turn up where we least expect?

When you live in that attuned relationship with the ways of the spirit, you’ll find that you end up getting invited to show up in similar ways. You too end up turning things upside down.

That’s what it means to live a life of active faith: To be resilient when despair is expected, as we see with Elijah crawling down from the cave. To be humble and vulnerable when fear is expected, as we see with Peter reaching out for support. To be courageous and imaginative when caution and hesitation are expected. Just like Juniper.

That’s right: We see you Juniper.

“That sand isn’t so far off from soil, and soil is best when it becomes blueberries—so who’s to say that this sand won’t be blueberries by the time it reaches my mouth??”

I wonder: Are we willing to be moved by that kind of imagination, expectation, and appetite for the ways that spiritual bounty might show up in our days? and in our world? and through our lives?