Spiritual Experience
(Proper 13, Year A: Genesis 28:10-19a, Romans 8:12-25, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43)
Up until the story that we have from Genesis today there is very little about the life of Jacob that has any connection with spiritual experience. He’s portayed as a “mama’s boy,” as a little bit lazy, as intelligent but selfishly cunning. He has just cheated his older brother out of his inheritance. He has run away and is going to find a wife. He’s not looking for God. But “he came,” it says “to a certain place and stayed there for the night.” And he had his dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder…”Jacob’s ladder” we call it, but it’s more likely that it’s God’s ladder, since God then stands by Jacob and gives him the blessing. “Surely the Lord is in this place,” he says. “This is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven.” Beth-el.
Let me read a few other stories.
About 600 years after the time of Jacob, Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest at Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses.” And he said, “Here I am.” And God said, “Do not come near. Put off your shoes from your feet for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” Horeb, Sinai…And Moses brought Israel back to that place to receive the law.
And then, 600 years later, in the year that King Uzzaiah died the prophet Isaiah saw the Lord, sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the Seraphim; each had six wings; with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory.” And Isaiah heard the voice of the Lord saying “Whom shall I send and who will go for us?” And Isaiah said, “Here I am. Send me.”
600 years after that, Jesus took Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain apart. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments were white as light. The three apostles saw Elijah and Moses talking with Jesus. And when a bright cloud overshadowed them they heard a voice from the cloud saying, “this is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.”
Spiritual experience is central to our Biblical tradition and essential in sustaining a true life of faith. Morality, theology, church structure all come after that original, immediate, existential experience of God. They are responses to religious experience, ways of understanding, attempts to organize and encourage it, even to control it to a certain extent. But the experience come first.
That’s not “supernaturalism.” The world is not a "normally" a non-spiritual place into which God intervenes in abnormal circumstances. Everything that happens is in some way a miracle. The spirit world is all around us all the time. It is, in fact, the material world seen in its wider reality, its deeper significance. Although we in the modern world believe in progress, and we think that all our progress has made life easier than it was for Jacob or Moses or Jesus, that’s not really true. We may have made life more comfortable. We may have a better chance of surviving a little bit longer. But comfort and survival are not the same as life. As we’ve focused more and more on mere survival, our lives have, in fact, become much more stressful, and we’ve traded away in the process many of the things that make life meaningful and worth living...like spiritual experience. The calculative, linear, materialistic, non-imaginal way of thinking that has brought us the world we live in has limited our access to the reality of God, the life of God. And since I believe that God is foundational in life, by definition, then our trade off is not even a very good trade. Without a spiritual foundation the comfort and survival won’t be around very long anyway. (Witness the escalation of our global ecological crises.) Our society is in the position of the builders that Jesus was talking about, building their house on sand instead of solid ground.
What I’ve dedicated y ministry to, what I think the Church needs to be about, what is the guiding call for Saint James Monterey is to enable, encourage, and enhance spiritual experience in the midst of a materialistic culture.
The tradition of the Episcopal Church offers us great resources for that calling. First of all, our church passes on to us the treasure of the sacraments, the ritual and tradition of sacred action in the Eucharist (communion), in baptism, and in other sacramental acts. In these we put aside our intellectual focus and just reach out our hands. We eat and we drink. “This is my Body. This is my Blood.” Sacramental religion is subversive of materialism, because it takes material things and sees through them to the spiritual. It takes ordinary experience and sees through it to the holy. And then, in a second way, a very different way, the Episcopal Church offers a wide intellectual range of deep, spiritual ideas. We are not confined by the limits of too much dogma. We are inclusive and open to wherever God may manifest.
But I want to pint out especially three aspects of enabling, enhancing, and encouraging spiritual experience that strike me in this story today about Jacob, and the other stories I read about Moses, and Isaiah, and Jesus as well, that may be helpful in our life here together.
All of these experiences, first of all, happened in aparticular place. On mountains, in temples, at special places where we dream we can be closer to God than at other places. Materialistic thinking treats all places the same, as coordinates on a map, or GPS data for a Garmin. Spiritual thinking sees it as more complex than that. Most of my academic work for the next few years will be focused on understanding this place, this church, McGowan house, this “property” from that spiritual perspective. When you drive into the parking lots or walk down the walkways, come into the buildings you are standing on holy ground. You can keep your shoes on, but this is a house of God, a gateway to heaven, and I hope that you can feel that. And, of course, there are other such places too. We discover them in our lives although we may not always identify them that way…certain places in the countryside or the wilderness or in parks or our own back yard, in rooms in our houses or just corners of our rooms that we’ve set aside can be places where that membrane, that usually separates us from the holy, becomes very permeable. We can sense the angels ascending and descending. So pay attention to such places and treat them with respect. And help open up and develop this place to be that kind of place for all who come here, for all who are called here.
The second thing is attitude. It too has to do with angels I suppose. Jacob didn’t just get up from his sleep and say, “Wow, what a weird dream/” He treated his experience as having real meaning. I think, in fact, we all have spiritual experience much more often than we think we do, but we write them off. We filter them out. Sometimes we even take medicine to make them go away. What I’m hoping for here is that we all can become aware of the dimension of spirituality and meaning in our lives, become aware that everything, everyone, and everywhere in life has this subtext that connect us with God. Jacob and Moses and Isaiah and Jesus were all open to hearing the voice of God, discerning God’s hand in the world around them. It’s not a huge thing. The voice, as Ezekiel said, isn’t in the earthquake or the wind or the fire, but in the “still small voice.” It doesn’t sound like Cecil b. DeMille or bill Cosby. It’s more usually like a thought that just crosses your mind…but one that has a kind of shimmer to it, a clear truth about it, that, when you think about it, doesn’t just come from “inside” you. Don’t be too afraid. Don’t be dismissive. Don’t be too cynical. God is present for you and me as much as Go was present for any of these people in the bible, including Jesus. That’s one of the main points of Jesus, and Jacob and Moses and Isaiah.
Finally there’s community. That’s the third thing here. Spiritual experience usually happens alone. It’s a very personal thing. It’s very intimate. Only Peter and James and John at the transfiguration, out of all four of our examples, were with anyone else when these experiences happened. And my hunch is that even for them it happened in individually patterned ways. But all these people came down from the mountains, came out of the temple, went on with their lives, and then used their experience to reach out to others and invite them into a life with God. These special holy experiences in these special holy places are our link to heaven. But we, in each of our wider lives are a link for those communities in which we live to that kind of experience. Being that kind of a link can be carried out in many ways. You might invite someone, that you think is ready, to come with you to church. Or you may tell someone, whom you think might listen, of the reality that you’ve discovered that’s a part of the world, but beyond its materiality. Community isn’t why we come to church, but community is essential for what we carry out from here
So with all these resources to enable, encourage, and enhance spiritual experience I think we have a very good chance of creating for the world something that it desperately needs; a new sense of the spirit, a broader vision of reality, and a true connection with the life of God. And I don’t think we’ll have to wait 600 years to get there.
Thanks be to God.
