The Experience of Religion
Propers: The Second Sunday after the Epiphany, AD 2024 B
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
We all want to be known. We all want to be understood. We all want to be loved. And we all want to be reassured that we are not alone. Religious experience is the realization or fulfillment of these natural human desires. For some it comes as a flash in the night. For others it develops over decades of patience, prayer, meditation, and struggle. But the spiritual person, the spiritual life, is one that sooner or later outlives fear.
All this religious talk of salvation, liberation, enlightenment, eternal life, is all at root our attempt to put into words that indescribable experience, that transcendent revelation, that we were never alone, that we have always been loved, and that we are better known than we could ever know ourselves. And with that comes joy and peace and love and release. Sometimes we only get glimpses, as though in the shards of a shattered mirror. But that moment of communion, that flash of religious ecstasy, keeps us going, and we constantly try to get back to it, to see ever upon the horizon of life the dawning of eternity.
The singing, the Sacraments, the stories, the service that we offer to each other and our community, all of this churchy stuff is the Christian attempt to break eternity into time, to live with the remembrance of religious experience in every moment of every day. It’s not easy. But we do it because it’s real, more real than anything else. We do it because it’s true, and good, and right, and beautiful. We do it because it makes us human.
And we stumble, of course. We falter; we fail; we fall. We do not always live up to our calling to witness to our world this truth at reality’s root. Our inability to be infinite, to love as we are loved, to forgive as we are forgiven, we call sin, literally “falling short.” Yet this does not change the truth: that we are known, we are loved, we are forgiven, we are home. And so each night before bed, each Sunday before worship, we return to the promise, to the waters of our Baptism, immersing ourselves in eternity.
And we rise again: absolved, resurrected, renewed; ever trying to live out the promise of our faith; ever failing to infuse adequately into our words and our works the Spirit who burns in our breast. Failure is part of the program, you see: finite creatures attempting to express infinity. Yet somehow the Spirit gets through. Somehow the Word works nonetheless. And even our most majestic failures God can redeem in His grace.
That to me is the most wearying part of Christianity, of religion writ large, whether you’re cleric or lay or what-have-you: to taste that perfect, ineffable Truth, only then to return to the daily grind, to slogging it out within a fallen broken world, within a fallen broken flesh. The holiest of us resolve this seeming conflict, harmonizing heaven and earth. They see how in faith they are one and the same, how the finite contains the infinite: God in a splash of water, God in a bite of bread. The rest of us must ever turn to fall and rise again.
Without going into detail—and so that you are not tempted to cart me off to the funny farm—I must confess that I have seen wondrous things in my ministry and in my life. I have seen what I know to be miracles. I have seen creatures that weren’t supposed to be there. These experiences were as real to me as this one is here and now, standing amidst this congregation, preaching this sermon. They were the sort of glimpses of a deeper world for which believers and skeptics alike might pray or beg to have.
And yet! When they were over, they immediately began to fade from my mind, like a dream upon waking. One starts to rationalize, to explain away, to misremember. We inundate the miraculous with the mundane. I have to remind myself those things were real. And so we can all know, truly know, that we are infinitely understood and infinitely loved and eternally never alone. And yet we seem to forget. How easy it is to live as though religion were not true! As though we were unloved and unlovely and all by ourselves.
We know that isn’t true, and yet we live as though it were! We must support each other. We must remind each other. We must forgive each other, be Jesus for each other. We have to give ourselves the Christ for in the Christ is God!
Our psalm for this morning, the hundred thirty-ninth, is ancient: 2000, 3000 years old. It is also timeless. Jewish legend, Jewish tradition, holds that it was written by Adam, and Adam of course is us all. We all sing this psalm, in our souls, in our lives. We always have.
O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.
For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you.
You are known, better than you know yourself. You are understood, by the One who formed and framed you, every sinew and synapse. You are loved, more deeply than you could ever comprehend. And you have never been alone, not before birth, not even after death. And most importantly, you know this. Down in your soul, in the divine spark of the Spirit, in the quiet of your heart, you know that this is true: that power and property, fame and shame, are fleeting and hollow within. Everything you need, you have, you have always had.
That’s why Nathanael seems so gobsmacked in our Gospel, when Christ tells him what by rights he oughtn’t know. It isn’t about some fig tree; it’s about the revelation, the revealing, the remembering, that Jesus knows Nathanael, and loves him, that he has never been alone. And he responds in religious ecstasy. “Rabbi, you are the Son of God!” he cries out. “You are the King of Israel!”
And Jesus replies with that knowing smile, “You will see greater things than these. You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” I have such plans for you, He says, and this shall be only the start.
We are here today, my brothers and sisters, together to remember, together to reveal, together to reaffirm the promise, that God has called us by whatever means to witness to His truth, to live His life of love, to show the world a human being who has no fear of hell. I know how easy it can be for us to forget, to get bogged down by the daily grind, to grow discouraged at the news and the state of our society, to be broken by our losses and our grief. Hear me! You are known. You are loved. You will never be alone.
And you already know this is true. In Jesus, it has always been true.
Cling to that, and you’ll outlive the world. Cling to Christ, and you can never die.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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