Sermon preached by Carly Osborn, Sunday Nights@Columba
August 2, 2015
Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend into heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there Your hand shall lead me,
And Your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, "Surely the darkness shall fall on me,"
Even the night shall be light about me;
Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You,
But the night shines as the day;
The darkness and the light are both alike to You.
Reading that Psalm got me thinking about opposites. Because the
Psalmist uses all these figures of speech around opposites: God can
see me in the dark, darkness and light are the same to Him; He is
present in both heaven and hell; up or down, here or far away, God is in
all of it.
Another word for opposites is dichotomies. I know it's kind of a nerd
word, but it's been a helpful word for me so I'd like to share it with you.
A dichotomy is when you take two things and say, these are opposites,
they are completely separate and different, one is by definition not the
other. Like up and down, or black and white. Dichotomies can help us
think in an orderly way, like when you're a kid you learn left and right.
But dichotomies can also be untrue.
Dichotomies have been a huge problem for me in my spiritual life. I'll
give you a couple of examples.
Sacred vs secular, or holy vs worldly. I used to think that going to
church and reading the Bible were, like, 'holy' things to do, and having
coffee with a friend was a 'worldly' thing to do. And the idea of Christian
life was that it was okay to do some worldly things, as long as you kept
up doing the holy things.
Then I started reading the Beat poets and novelists, like Jack Kerouac
and Allen Ginsberg, and they wrote about having spiritual experiences
in pretty 'worldly' environments. Like the ecstasy of listening to Charlie
Parker play the trumpet in 1950s jazz clubs. Or seeing God reflected in
the weary but peaceful attitude of hobos on freight trains.
And I realised that I was having experiences like that, too, all the time. I
realised that being around a table with my friends, laughing, was a
moment soaked through with the presence of God. That my action of
carrying a cake to the table for them was a holy action, at least as holy
as the action of standing up in church to say a prayer.
Which brings me to my next dichotomy, which is kind of related: spiritual
vs. physical. I think we're taught that spiritual things are invisible and
non-material. You say a prayer and it floats off invisibly, in some other
dimension, to God. Meanwhile your body is just along for the ride. It's
irrelevant at best, and probably actually getting in your way, because if
you're hungry it's hard to concentrate, not to mention the whole problem
of lust-your body being excited about another body-so physical, this is
pitched to us as the opposite of feeling spiritual! But this dichotomy of
physical vs. spiritual isn't found in Jewish thought; St Paul said a few
things about not letting your body rule you, but he didn't say the body
was the opposite of the spirit; this extreme view developed later in the
church, with thinkers like Augustine and movements like Puritanism. But
I think it's misleading.
Having a body is great. My physical senses are how I experience a lot
of the world. Sure, I think I've experienced God by 'tuning in' my
internal, spiritual radio-receiver, to feel Him in that spiritual way. But
what about the sensation of biting into a fresh nectarine? It's glorious!
And I think if anything's glorious, that glory is a taste of God. And we
use our bodies to be God's presence to each other: if my Mum comes
over and hangs out all my laundry, why is that less holy than saying a
prayer? We're not just disembodied spirits, going through life with
spiritual senses, and we're not just physical bodies either. We're both, in
every moment. And if we don't see all our physical experiences as
simultaneously spiritual experiences, I think we'll miss out on 90% of the
ways we can encounter God.
So we're spirits, and bodies, and also minds. Which is my last
dichotomy: faith vs intellect.
I grew up in a church that dismissed the intellect as a way of finding
theological truth. I was told, 'brains are okay for, like, science and maths
and stuff, but for God, turn your brain off and just receive magical
revelations from God. And if they don't make any logical sense, just
accept them, your brain is just getting in the way. You need more Faith.'
I don't think you need to be an intellectual to have faith in God, or to
know Him. Not at all. But if, like me, you are quite nerdy, and like using
your brain to discover the world, being told that your brain is
incompatible with your faith is a problem. Because if something is true,
you should be able to hold it up to the most intense scrutiny, and test it,
and refine it, and it will stand up. It's easy, as a young Christian, to be
afraid to ask questions because you've been taught that Christian Truth
is so fragile, a little bit of intellectual scrutiny might knock it over, and
then, 'oh no, you've broken it, no more faith for you, get out.'
So it was a huge relief to me to discover that actually, there are
thousands of years of tradition of Christian intellectuals, who have been
ripping into theology with all the philosophical tools they had, and
exposing flaws, and refining methods, and-thank goodness-finding
Truth that is solid, that you can explore without fear. And use your brain
to go deeper, and into more detail, and find more Truth.
Why do we do it? Why set up these dichotomies, these false opposites?
We like opposites because then you pick a side. It feels good to have
Your Side, and The Other Side. This is right, and this is wrong.
Christianity has often set up a dichotomy of Us vs Them, the spiritual
people vs the worldly ones. I can't believe I used to think that a person
who has loved a child, or even eaten a fresh nectarine, was living
completely outside of the presence of God.
The philosopher René Girard taught me that this kind of thinking is at
the heart of so much destruction and violence. The Girardian theologian
James Alison has done amazing work articulating a theology that is
about embracing complexity and difference and all the Truth that is
revealed by this approach.
In that Psalm we read, God isn't on one side of the opposites. In fact,
the opposites don't seem to mean much to Him-dark or light, heaven or
hell, He just bowls through it and is in all of it.
Getting rid of dichotomies doesn't mean there's no right or wrong, that
everything is meaningless. We can still make value judgements, and
say, this is good, this is bad. But we do so with a sense of the
complexity, and the interconnectedness of things. We have to be more
careful. We can't pigeonhole things, or people, into simple categories.
We become sensitive to the beauty of complexity.
And that's something I hope we can do, in this space, on Sunday nights.
I don't want this time to be an escape from the world, like, leave the
secular things out there, and come in here and be spiritual for forty
minutes.
I want us to come here to be reminded that we are spirits, and bodies
and minds, all the time. That God is present across it all. That's why I
haven't distinguished between so-called 'religious' and 'secular' music
and art that I've used. I want us to encounter God in Monet's colours, in
Nick Drake's guitar chords.
In this service we'll use our physical senses, we'll engage with thinkers
and ideas, and we'll use our spirits in prayer and meditation. And then, I
hope, we'll go into the week sensitised to the holiness in all of it.