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Listening For the Divine Voice |
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Written by Everett J. Bassett
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Sunday, 12 January 2003 |
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Mark 9: 1-13 A man was driving through the countryside, and took a wrong turn, and got lost; and, being a man, he drove around a couple hours before he asked for directions. (That seems to be something many women don’t understand: just because you’re lost doesn’t mean you ask for directions; that’s something you only resort to when you’re hopelessly lost – there’s a difference.) But anyways, he saw this old farmer out in the field, so he stopped and walked over to him and asked; and all the old man said was, “Mister, if I wanted to be a-getting there, I sure wouldn’t want to be a-standing here.”
That’s something like our lives. We don’t want to be a-standing here; we want to be a-getting there. We want to be a-getting there to a place of peace, but instead we’re a-standing here with these terrorists and people named Saddam and Osama and Kim. We want to be a-getting to a place where all are able to prosper, but instead we’re a-standing here with growing unemployment, and billions starving, and children dying for lack of medical attention; we want to be a-getting to a place of justice for all people, but instead we’re a-standing here where women still struggle for their rights, and gay bashing and racial profiling are still strong, and the poor are always with us. On a more individual basis, we want to get to a place of inner peace, and meaningful living, but instead we stand in a place where the daily grind and the routines and the frustrations of our lives bear down on us. We can see this place we want to be, but we don’t know how to get there.
The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible says that God has placed eternity in our hearts. And I suppose that can mean many things; but what it means to me is that when we look at our lives, our breathing and our daily timeclock punching, something inside us tells us there is something more to it – there’s a different place to be if we could only find the road to get there from here.
We’re here today because our faith tells us that God has given us the road. One of the disciples asked Jesus how we could ever know the way to God, and Jesus responded, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” Jesus is the road God has given us to get to that place of joy and salvation we want to be. Jesus taught the disciples that if they wanted to get to that ‘something more’, they had to travel with him. And he spent most of his earthly ministry trying to give them the signs along the way to lead them on their journey.
Our scripture lesson today is a key moment in the disciples’ road trip with Jesus. Jesus took Peter, James, and John up a mountain, and there they saw an amazing vision – Jesus was transfigured into a dazzling white figure, and was conversing with Moses and Elijah. There was a great cloud, and out of the cloud a great voice, saying, “This is my Son; listen to him.” And then, just as suddenly, there was nothing there, except, as Mark describes it, Jesus alone.
You may remember that last week’s scripture ended with a strong statement from Jesus that the journey of faith would involve suffering. This is a suffering world, and the Saviour of this world would suffer with it. And we who would journey with him must be prepared to suffer, too, for the sake of others and the sake of the journey itself.
But it’s as if Jesus right away wanted to assure his disciples that suffering was not the whole journey. There was also the mountaintop, and the mountaintop, throughout the Bible, is the place where the glory of God is seen. The mountaintop is the place where the voice of God is heard. And here is a vital activity for people who want to journey in faith – Listen for the divine voice, and watch for the divine glory.
There is, in our world, a serious lack of a sense of glory and beauty. A while back, the syndicated columnist Anna Quindlan wrote about what she called “the coarsening of American society.” She wrote about how our daily lives are getting coarser and coarser. For example, language is coarser – if you go out in public these days you had better be reconciled to hearing coarse language – it is everyday language at the mall or in the grocery store. We are getting used to it, and our children learn it at a very early age.
Our art is getting coarser – there is a great debate going on about the display of art that has all kinds of in-your-face images – more ugly than beautiful. Music is full of hard edges and harsh lyrics. Shocking and offending is the name of the game.
Our treatment of one another is getting coarser. Common manners are a lost art; a relative who works at a local store talked about the displays of Christmas spirit he witnessed on the part of holiday shoppers: things like one woman emptying another woman’s shopping cart on the floor and stealing it; another customer cursing out a cashier for an innocent mistake; two parents arguing over an extra item in an express lane. This is not unusual behaviour these days.
And then there is the coarseness that takes place on the wider plane of public life: the manipulation of the public by advertisers and political spin doctors; the dishonesty taking place in boardrooms and backrooms; the mudslinging that passes itself off as politics; the ugliness of tabloid journalism, and talk radio, and shockjock radio, and reality TV. I think the topic the other day was Women Who Beat Up Their Boyfriends. Public life has grown coarser and coarser.
One of the things that can really stuff our journeys; one of the things that can make it seem impossible to get there when you’re standing here, is that we can become overwhelmed by the harshness and coarseness and ugliness – and forget that there is a mountaintop where glory can be seen, and that there is a divine voice speaking to us, and that there is incredible beauty in this world, if we just know how to look for it. Jesus wanted to show his disciples what was on top of the mountain, so that they would be able to hold on to the glory when they were traveling down in the dark valley.
So they could see what the real world was like. You see, we look around at the darkness and harshness, and we think this is the real world. But this is the temporary world; this is the scenery we pass through on the journey. And it is important; we have to take care of this world, it’s part of us. But the real things, the eternal things – these are the things of God that break through from time to time and remind us of the joy of the mountaintop.
People who journey in faith are people who cultivate a keen eye for the glory that is present all the time. We need so desperately to help each other notice those things. Franz Kafka once wrote that those who know how to see beauty never really grow old. And how true it is. We’ve all known folks who may be advanced in years, but who are youthful at heart because they see glory in everyday life. Glory in nature; glory in children; glory in friends; glory in beautiful acts of kindness; glory in laughter; glory in every person they meet.
The Bible is filled with people who had that gift. Paul and Silas are thrown into prison, and what do they do? They sing hymns! Stephen is stoned by his persecutors – and while they’re doing it, he prays and calmly goes to sleep! Paul is beaten and persecuted in every way – he writes, “Rejoice in the Lord always!” Were these people insane? No. They had seen the glory of God, and no matter where they were, it was part of them.
One of the great examples in recent times was Mother Teresa of Calcutta, that great saint who gave her life to helping the poorest of the poor. She lived her life surrounded by ugliness – the ugliness of abject poverty, of disease and death, of the squalor and stench of the streets. Yet, she was so in tune with the divine voice speaking to her that, as one close to her said it, it was like she lived all the time balanced ‘between Earth and Heaven.’ She had seen the glory of the Lord, had heard the divine voice, and it was part of her, wherever she was.
When she was asked about how she could be so spiritually alive when surrounded by such darkness, she talked matter-of –factly about living in holiness. And she explained that holiness is not the luxury of a few people who study religion. It’s a ‘simple duty of all. Holiness is for everyone.’ And someone wrote about her that she had this quality that attracted people; and it was that whoever she was talking to at the moment was the most important person in the world. A gift. A glorious work of art. In fact, Mother Teresa said that she looked for the Christ in everyone. Listening for the divine voice. Seeing the glory of God everywhere.
There is no way to overstate how important this is. It effects everything. A psychiatrist was asked how someone could plot something so deadly and terrible as the 9-11 attack. He responded that one of the things you have to do is ‘desanctify’ the innocent victims. In other words, forget that those 3000 people who died were, each one of them, a sacred, beautiful reflection of the glory of God. Every one of them was precious. Wasn’t it a powerful, powerful signal to the world, on the first anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, that we took hours to read and listen to the names of every single victim? In a world where people are thrown away like objects all the time, we gave witness to the fact that every one of them was sacred – God’s glory was in each one of them.
And God’s glory is in everyone around us. This journey of Jesus that is described in Mark, chapters 8 through 10, is sandwiched between two healings – the healing of a man in the middle of chapter 8, and another man in the closing verses of chapter 10. And I don’t think it is any coincidence that in both cases, it is the healing of a blind man. Because what we need more than anything along the journey of life is to have our eyes opened to the glory of God all around us. And our ears open to the divine voice. There is beauty everywhere, if you will just look.
This past year, George Harrison, the ex-Beatle died of cancer. And as the cancer was advancing, he was working on a CD about his own journey, and it was truly a spiritual one. One of the songs he wrote is entitled “Any Road”. Part of it goes like this: “I’ve been traveling through the dirt and the grime/ From the past to the future through the space and the time/ Traveling deep beneath the waves/ In watery grottoes and mountainous caves/ But oh Lord we’ve got to fight/ With the thoughts in the head, with the dark and the light/ No use to stop and stare/ If you don’t know where you’re going, Any road will take you there.”
We know where we want to go, and there is only one road there, and God has given it to us by sending his Son. There is suffering; it’s a coarse, hard world. But “no use to stop and stare.” We can journey with Jesus. And he will show us the mountaintop; and God speaks there. And that becomes part of who we are. And transforms everything. So that every person is an opportunity to see Christ. Every day is a new step on this exciting journey. Every task is a chance to serve God and others. And God is speaking everywhere.
Isn’t that the way you want to live?
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 29 October 2006 )
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