The Face that Turns Winter into Spring

 

Years ago, I was staying with a friend in an isolated farmhouse in Nova Scotia. The first night, I awoke at 2 am to an ominous rattling sound. I was alone on the first floor of the house, and the room in those wee hours was pitch-black. The only light came from the moon outside, positioned so that it vaguely outlined a tall silhouette outside one of my partially-open windows. As I saw the silhouette move, I heard whoever was out there jiggle the screen that was propped in the window, as if they were trying to open it. As you can imagine, my teeth started clattering right along with the screen. My heart thumped and my mind raced: Should I hide quietly under the covers? Or should I try to scream for help? I decided not to move. After what seemed an eternity, I heard the gravel crunching as the intruder moved back away from the house. Remembering every horror movie and detective story that I've known, I spent the rest of the night listening in fear for this person to return on some evil errand. In our culture, nothing good ever comes from a stranger sneaking around in the night.

          The next morning, we called a neighbor to help us look around outside. Lo and behold, he found hoof prints in the gravel outside my window, either from a deer or even a young moose.  The terrible stranger at my window was nothing more than a curious animal, checking out the new arrivals in town. Whenever I read the words from today’s lesson in the Song of Solomon, I can’t help but chuckle, imagining a love-sick Canadian moose: “Look, he comes … bounding over the hills … Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

          The Song of Solomon is love poetry, pure and simple. I invite you to read the whole book sometime … Believe me, you’ll wonder what on earth it’s doing in the bible. For centuries, though, its descriptions of passionate, longing love were seen as the key to unlocking the whole of scripture! Read as an allegory, The Song has represented for Jews the love between humanity and God. For Christians, it has depicted the love between Christ and the Church. One scholar writes, “This book of love poetry, in which no body part is left uncelebrated, no fragrance or taste undescribed, was once a devotional text par excellence. This book, which nowhere mentions God, once functioned as a cherished path to profound intimacy with God.”[1]

Today, if you’re like me, you might squirm when this erotic language is used for God. And yet, what better metaphor do we human beings have for divine love, than human love? As embodied creatures, what better language do we have for spiritual longing, than powerful physical longing? Why can’t the lover at the window, impatiently rattling the screen, inviting us to come away, inviting us to be transformed from winter into spring, be our ever-loving God? Why can’t God come to us in the night, mysterious and hidden, yet as devoted and intent as a young lover?

My favorite C.S. Lewis book is Till We Have Faces. It’s a Christian retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, a myth as full of erotic imagery as the Song of Solomon is. In this myth, the god Cupid becomes a young girl’s unseen husband, visiting her only at night, when she is unable to see his face. Lewis’ title comes from the end of the book, when the narrator, placed in a kind of trial before the gods, realizes that all of the self-justifying words with which she has covered herself during her lifetime, are meaningless. In a moment of revelation, she says, “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”[2]

For true relationship with God, it isn’t God who must become visible, but we ourselves. Theologians often accuse James, the author of today’s epistle, with preaching works righteousness, with forgetting that we are saved by God’s grace and not by what we do on our own. But I believe that, in today’s reading at least, James is pointing out what the old woman in C.S. Lewis’ novel is making clear: To act upon God’s invitation is to take responsibility for knowing who and whose we are: to love as Jesus did, to love one another, God, and the world, in the passionate, outpouring and embodied way that God loves each of us. It's Christ’s face that we are to adopt as our own. It’s Christ’s voice with which we must learn to speak. It's by caring for the poor and outcast in their distress, says James ever so plainly, that we take on the face of Christ.

In my spare time, I’m busy studying the writings of Elias Neau. In the late 1690’s, Neau, a French Huguenot ship captain, living as a refugee in Boston, was captured on the open seas and returned to France. There, he was condemned for his protestant religion and sentenced to life on the king’s galleys. Because he kept singing psalms to God as he rowed, authorities transferred him to the Chateau d’If, an infamous prison near Marseilles. Because he kept singing psalms to God in his cell, they transferred him to an isolated dungeon. There, he sat for years in almost total darkness. In his dark prison, Neau could still hear our loving God panting at his window. Neau hung onto the embodiment of divine love that he knew in the words of the Song of Solomon. In response to God’s call, he created poems that he sung to the Huguenot psalm tunes of his tradition. In one poem, Neau sings back to Christ, his unseen Lover: 

Come kiss me with your mouth / You, my only love / For I smell the scent of your clothing when I touch you … May my mind embrace you in your silence / Come, the only Author of my being, to transform me into you / Come to make yourself known and to make me love you / May I taste in your embrace your ravishing love / that forms me in your image.[3]

 

Neau’s prayers were answered. Once liberated from his dungeon, Neau returned to America, gave up his career as a merchant, gave up his membership in the French Church to join the established Church of England, and spent the rest of his life ministering to the enslaved Africans of New York at Trinity Church,Wall Street.

What about us, today? Can we hear God knocking longingly in the night? Can we hear God’s invitation, “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away?” Can we look through the shadows at others, at ourselves, at life itself, with the compassionate eyes of Christ? Can we find
beauty everywhere we look, in darkness and in light, like passionate lovers who receive the whole world “with love and awe and praise?”[4] God pleads patiently: Come out from underneath the covers! I’m here, and I love you. Taste the Beloved in the juiciness of a ripe peach. Hear the Beloved in the supplications of the sick room. Reach out to the Beloved in need on the streets, in the pleading of a refugee. Embrace the Beloved within the shadows of your own soul. “In me,” God offers, “become the Face that can turn even winter into spring.”

 

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[1] Stephanie Paulsell, “Old Fashioned Love Song.” The Christian Century. September 2009. Found at https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2009-09/old-fashioned-love-song

[2] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (New York: Harvest Books, 1980), 294.

[3] Elias Neau, “Cantique V.” In Histoire Abregee des Soufrances du Sieur Elie Neau sur les Galeres et dans les Cachots de Marseilles. Ed. J. Morin (Rotterdam: Abraham Acner, 1701), 260. My own translation from the original French.

[4] Paulsell.

Where to Build our Nest?

 

When I was in the sixth grade, I got a little autograph book for my birthday. Back in the early ‘70’s, you would get your classmates and teachers and family to write something cute and funny in your autograph book—the kind of things that people these days write in school yearbooks. Well, when I gave the book to my parents to sign, my father jotted down something sweet and comforting. But my mother, O my mother …. She pulled out a little poem from her well-worn devotional notebook, full of cut-out prayers and inspirational quotes. She wrote: “’To every man there openeth, a way and a ways and a way. The high soul treads the high way and the low soul gropes the low, and in between on the misty flats, the rest drift to and fro. But to every man there openeth, a way, and a ways, and a way. And every man decideth the way his soul shall go,’ Love, Mama.”

         I remember rolling my eyes in my best pre-adolescent-
girl-way when I read this. I thought, “O come on, Mother, it’s just an autograph book—Lighten up on me, please!” And yet, that little poem in that little autograph book had a profound effect on my life. Against my will, it somehow stuck fast in my memory. After 50 years, I didn’t even have to look it up today to write it in my sermon. It made me painfully aware of the importance of my choices. When I would stand at a fork in the road, I would picture those words in my mother’s familiar handwriting. I would know that, even though I had a choice, the high road was the way to go. Sure, I wasn’t always able to take that road in my life, but I knew which one it was and that I belonged on it.

In today’s Gospel, the disciples, too, are presented with a life-changing choice. Do they remain good, faithful Jews, following the Law, remaining true to their safe understanding of God, or do they continue to follow the difficult, different, and dangerous Word that Jesus presents to them—a Word that every day seems to be growing more confusing and more threatening to their old way of life. It’s a difficult choice that they must make, and according to our Gospel lesson, “many of [Jesus’] disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” Even some of his own family turn away. Peter, however, standing at the fork in the road, finds that he has no choice but to throw up his hands: “Lord, to whom can we go?” he sighs. “You have the words of Everlasting Life.” Realizing that he has seen the Holy One in Jesus of Nazareth, Peter knows that Jesus is the only path to Life and Truth.

I imagine that most of us here today have at least seen glimpses of the Holy One in Jesus Christ. If we hadn’t, we probably wouldn’t be sitting out here on the patio with masks—or peering into a computer screen-- on this lovely Sunday morning. Perhaps you’re here because you taste Life in the mystery of the Eucharist? Perhaps you’ve heard whispers of meaning in the strange Words of Scripture? Perhaps you’ve met Jesus in the loving deeds of another Christian? We, like Peter, are here because the Truth of God in Jesus Christ has hold of us by the scruff of our necks. We have experienced that, having opened ourselves to just a sliver of God, a hunger for more Truth continues to gnaw away at even the easiest and most attractive lies within us.

 The temptation for us today, though, given the difficulty of the journey, is to want to hold out at the entrance to the path of discipleship for as long as we can, without really entering it. It’s the same for Peter. Peter acknowledges here in chapter 6 of John’s Gospel that he’s compelled to follow Jesus. It’s not until much later, however, after he has denied Jesus three times to save his own skin, that he truly becomes the “Rock” upon whom the Church is founded, the one who feeds Jesus’ sheep, the disciple who follows Jesus to his own death on a Roman cross. It takes Peter awhile to enter the path that he reluctantly chooses in today’s Gospel. Like Peter, it can be hard for us to take the plunge, as well. It’s especially hard these days, when the things that make discipleship fun are few and far between. It seems like we’ll never get back inside the church; potlucks are a no-no; contagion lurks in a hug; we are too few to accomplish easily all of the tasks that need doing; the future is still a puzzle.

Why can’t the Christian life involve less tedious nest-building? Why can’t it be more like the life of a bird soaring through the skies? Swooping through the heavens, close to God, as free as a bird, going where I please, looking from afar at the troubles and traps of the world down below? How great it would be if we following Jesus meant zipping into a community of faith and back out again, unattached? O, to grab a bit of God, to sip a bit of Truth as reinforcement for my continued solo flight!

We can try to put off the moment of decision, but choose we must, for we can’t spend our lives in flight. Even birds have to land sometime. Our Psalmist cries, “The sparrow has found her a house and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young; by the side of your altars, O Lord of hosts … Happy are they who dwell in your house… whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.” Jesus says over and over in John’s Gospel that we are to abide him, and that he abides in us. Abiding isn’t like flitting through the heavens. Abiding is like building a nest, settling down for the long haul, making a place into our home, come what may. To choose Christ is to make our nests in Christ, to curl up to live—and die—in his ways.

To find life in Christ is to drag all of the scraps and pieces of our world into Christ and to form them, painstakingly, into our spiritual home. To enter the path that we have chosen is to dwell in God in a concrete way—to make the rhythms of our life, God’s rhythms: to rebel against our fast-paced world and to take real Sabbath rest; to worship regularly enough so that we live consciously into the circle of the Christian year, from Advent to Incarnation, to Lent, to Easter, to Pentecost; to pray throughout the day so that our prayer structures our very life. To enter the path that we have chosen is to dwell in all the messiness and discomfort of Christian community: to serve together with others, to serve together with God, to give of ourselves to Christ and to one another. These faith practices are challenging—too challenging to navigate all on our own. We need the help and support of community. A nest finds its strength as it is tightly woven from many individual strands.

          At Stewardship time, when we start talking about giving a sizable percentage of your income back to God, I know that it sounds an awful lot like a tricky way of saying that St. Ambrose needs a new heater. I know that when I call you and ask you to be an usher or to be on the Vestry, that it sounds an awful lot like I am just desperate to get yet another job done in the parish. Yes, we do need money to run St. Ambrose, and we do have lots of jobs that need doing, but truly—and I am being upfront with you, I promise—that is not why you should give your valuable time, talent, or treasure to any parish. We don’t build a nest out of duty and obligation. We don’t build a nest just to keep everything the same. We build a nest because the nest is where we are born together into new life in Christ. We build a nest in Christ because nothing else will suffice.

Several years ago, I found that some birds had built a nest in the running shoes that were sitting on a shelf in my garage. Not much of a runner, I didn't wear the shoes very often. But a bird’s nest in there?! That was a shock. This compact little nest, balancing in my empty shoe, was a mess. It looked scruffy and abandoned, and there was stray grass and straw scattered all over the place. I decided that I didn’t like sharing my shoes. Since the nest was empty, I carefully removed it and tossed it outside. I then moved my running shoes to my closet, for good measure. Much to my dismay, a few days later I came into the garage and found several little blue eggs sitting on the shelf right in the spot where the nest used to be. The birds, apparently confused because their nest was no longer there, didn’t know where else to lay their eggs. Where else were they to go?

          We are blessed. We know where we can lay our eggs so that they will come alive. We know the difference between running shoes and the tallest cedar branches, between the low road and the high road, between life in the world and life in God, between self-centeredness and beloved community, between the flower that fades and the God that abides forever. It would be sad for us to fly around afraid or undecided until we drop with exhaustion onto a shelf in the garage: “To everyone there openeth, a way, and a ways, and a way.” It is time for us to start building our nests where our hearts are already set.