4th Sunday after Epiphany Year B sermon

4th Sunday after the Epiphany-Year B February 1, 2015 What a wild and wonderful week it has been! I am so happy to be here, and I am deeply grateful for the incredible warmth and generosity of your welcome for me and my family! Our scripture readings for today are an interesting beginning to the conversations with scripture and each other that we will have over the coming years. We see in Deuteronomy Moses articulating God’s promise to the children of Israel to raise up for them a prophet from among them. Paul writes to the Corinthians about how the spiritual practices of individuals can have an effect on others in the community of faith, and how we are all bound together in our responsibility to each other. And Mark gives us the story of the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry in that gospel. Jesus has just been baptized by John and called his disciples, and Mark tells us that immediately, he heads to Capernaum where he teaches in the synagogue and is confronted by an unclean spirit that is possessing a man there. It’s important for us to note (but certainly not emulate!) that Jesus’s first public action in Mark’s gospel is to engage in a confrontation (or as another writer put it, to pick a fight with an unclean spirit). That’s important and it sets the stage for Mark’s gospel, which will show us, again and again, “how Jesus has come to oppose all the forces that keep the children of God from the abundant life God desires for all of us…God wants the most for us from this life and stands in opposition to anything that robs us of the joy and community and purpose for which we were created.”i This past week, I read a reflection from the United Methodist elder and artist Jan Richardson. Jan writes this week about a small collage that a friend had given her that she carries around in her purse all the time. In the center of this small collage is the word “wholehearted.” She reflects about how each reading for this week gives us a glimpse of what it means to live whole-heartedly, to have a whole heart, “to live in a way that recognizes that broken though we may be, God sees us as complete and is about the work of helping us live into that completeness, not just for ourselves but for and with one another.”ii I’ve been reflecting on this notion of wholeheartedness this week, and it has been comforting to me as I have felt somewhat scattered, full of joy with this new beginning and yet fragmented as my husband and children stay behind in Gulfport. And as I reflected on all this, I remembered a conversation I heard with Krista Tippett, the host of the NPR show On Being, and the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, who is known best for his book Anam Cara. I went back and listened to this conversation as I was driving up here this past week, and I was struck by how O’Donohue talks about this wholeness or this whole-heartedness. He started off by quoting his old friend Meister Eckhart, a German mystic from the middle ages, saying, “‘There’s a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch” and [he continues], I really thought that was amazing and what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography and there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness, where there’s a seamlessness in you and where there’s a confidence, a tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is to visit now and again that inner sanctuary.”iii It is both a comforting and powerful notion that there is a place within each of us where God dwells that is truly whole, unbroken, where we go when we pray and when we worship and when we love! But it also bears mentioning the reality that I think we all experience and that is illustrated in today’s gospel reading that even though we all have this place within us, we spend much of our lives, much of our time being possessed by forces outside of us. I read a great article this week by a woman named Courtney Martin titled “The myth of multitasking: longing to be absorbed wholly” that really highlighted for me this contrast between wholeness, whole-heartedness and whole-hearted living and possession. Martin quotes William James, American philosopher and psychologist of the late 1800’s who wrote, “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” Martin goes on to cite modern evidence about how multi-tasking can actually be damaging to us because it “creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop ‘effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.’ It also increases production of the stress hormone Corisol, as well as the fight-or flight hormone, adrenaline. In other words, all bad things. Things that make you feel out of control. Things that make you anxious. Things that make you sick.”iv If multi-tasking and the addiction to busyness isn’t something that possesses you, I invite you to reflect, this week, on what does possesses you? For many of us, it is money and possessions. This is part of why we fill out and turn in pledge cards in the life of the church every year. It is to seek to loosen the hold that money has on our souls by acknowledging gratefully that all that we have comes from God and offering back a portion of that to God’s service. But there are also other outside forces that possess us and keep us from dwelling fully in the whole-heartedness that God offers: power, fear, food or drink, substances, the past, others’ expectations are just a few. I invite you to join me and spend some time in prayer and reflection this week with a gentle gaze toward what possess you these days, being mindful of that place in you where God dwells and where you are fully whole. One of my favorite artists is a man named Brian Andreas. He makes whimsical prints coupled with short stories that go with them. I’ll leave you with one that I saw this week titled Nothing More: “If there is any secret to this life I live, this is it: the sound of what cannot be seen sings within everything that can and there is nothing more to it than that.”v

i. http://www.davidlose.net/2015/01/epiphany-4-b/ ii.http://paintedprayerbook.com/2015/01/25/epiphany-4-blessing-for-a-whole-heart/ iii. http://www.onbeing.org/program/inner-landscape-beauty/203 iv. http://www.onbeing.org/blog/the-myth-of-multitasking-longing-to-be-absorbed-wholly/7259 v. http://shop.storypeople.com/products/nothing-more-remix-prints?variant=781169905