Quotation

Jesus is at his hometown preaching in the local synagogue. These are the people who remember him when he was just a kid, running around the neighborhood and playing soccer on the local pitch. But now he’s back as an up and coming rabbi. Word had also gotten around about the healings he had done in neighboring villages. You can feel their anticipation as Jesus took the scroll from the Prophet Isaiah and began reading from it. We didn’t hear that part today—it was last week’s gospel lesson—so I want to remind you of what he read.

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John tells us that some Greeks—some foreign born practicers of Judaism—have made their way to Jerusalem to take part in the upcoming feast of the Passover.  While there, they seem to have heard about Jesus and his teachings and the miracles he has done.  Maybe they saw him when he came into the city riding the donkey amid the shouts of “Hosanna!”  Perhaps they overheard someone at the local coffee shop talking about Jesus raising of Lazarus from the dead, which happened just couple of days before.  Regardless of how they found out about him, these people know they want to meet Jesus in person.  So they seek out Philip, the most Greek sounding name out of the lot, and make their request.  “Sir,” they say, “we wish to see Jesus.”

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Philip finds Andrew, and they in turn go and speak to Jesus. Instead of replying to their request—John doesn’t tell us if those Jewish Greeks met with him—we hear Jesus respond that the hour has come for him to be glorified.  He then uses a metaphor from agriculture to tell us what he means, describing how a grain of wheat—a single seed—gets buried in the earth and dies.  If we stop and think about it, we know this about seeds in general.  Seeds of any kind—be they apple, sunflower, or pumpkin—dry out and are useless, unless, of course, they get planted into the ground.  And once they get planted something miraculous happens.  With moisture and sunlight, a single pumpkin seed can produce a whole vine full of new pumpkins—anywhere from six to twelve per seed.  In turn, each of these pumpkins themselves will produce about 450-500 more seeds. Through the single seed dying, a tremendous amount of new life results.

Continue reading Love Rather Than Violence

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I have to begin today with some background in order to help us understand our gospel.  Matthew almost certainly writes to a Jewish Christian audience living in or near Palestine, and that these early Jewish believers were experiencing intense persecution from the Jewish religious authorities.  A number of aspects in the gospel point to this audience, including the focus on the Torah—the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures—along with a number of symbols and allusions to Jewish history. Jesus can be seen throughout the gospel as partaking in the tradition of Moses, and Jesus’ teachings and miracles keep hearkening back to that leader of the Exodus.

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However, Matthew’s Jesus also often gets very confrontational with the religious leaders, likely because his readers are also experiencing that conflict.  Jesus has been in their sight for some time, and now it’s reaching its climax. It’s the Monday of Holy Week in our reading.  The day before, Jesus rode on that donkey, and was hailed with praises and waving branches.  On this Monday, he comes into the temple and has been asked by whose authority he teaches. The leaders are trying to trap him, of course.  But Jesus is a bit tricksy himself, and asks them an unanswerable question too.  He then tells a parable that those religious types know casts them in a bad light, and they can’t say anything.  Our reading this morning is how Jesus continues speaking to these leaders.

Continue reading Stones, Dragons and Vineyards

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The great gift of deserted country to us is solitude, the chance to be alone before God. This gift may also be the desert’s greatest terror, however….  We are left by ourselves, and suddenly we are faced with the question of what that self really is…. The desert lacks everything except the opportunity to know God.” — David Resenberger

[featured-image single_newwindow=”false”]Phil LaBelle, 2017.[/featured-image]

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It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.

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It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”

Cheryl Strayed from Wild

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All of my reading on desert and wilderness spirituality speaks of the necessity of dying to self. No one wants to do this, of course. No one wants to see the image they have of themselves—their identity and all they hold close—to be destroyed.

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And yet, if they want to grow, if they want to become the people God wants intends for them to be, death is on the docket.

This quote from Kerry Walters puts it well. He’s been looking at the ideas of Simone Weil and Catherine of Genoa as they ponder the need for death. He writes of Catherine’s thoughts, “When the soul lands in the purgatorial desert, the painful process of dealienation begins. In the desert, the self progressively loses its destructive attachment to [according to Catherine] ‘the things of the intellect, will or memory, and in no manner tends more to one thing than to another. Quite still and in a state of siege, the me within finds itself gradually stripped of all those things that in spiritual or bodily form gave it some comfort.’ … Weil and Catherine, as well as may other chroniclers of the desert journey, remind us that recreation is frightfully agonizing—not because the God of the desert enjoys inflicting pain, or even because there’s intrinsic value in suffering, but because the pretender self’s alienation is so engrained. Entrenched habits are stubborn, addictions recalcitrant. Once a foothold is established, the grow cement-hard. Purgative death in the desert is violent because nothing less can crack the casing of a soul enmired in entropy.” (Soul Wilderness, pg. 81)

I know it’s not what I want to experience, and yet I also know that unless I die to the false self—the one that relishes in praise from others—I will never truly grow. I don’t want it, but I know it’s the only way that leads to true life.

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The mountains comfort me with the promise that if the heat down here becomes less endurable I can escape for at least two days each week to the refuge of the mountains—those islands in the sky surrounded by a sea of desert. The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the dessert more easily bearable. Mountains complement the desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.

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A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska, for example, but I am grateful that it’s there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.”

—Edward Abbey from Desert Solitaire

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Trails can be found in virtually ever part of the vast, strange, mercurial, partly tamed, but still shockingly wild world of ours. Throughout the history of life on the Earth, we have created pathways to guide our journeys, transmit messages, refine complexity, and preserve wisdom. At the same time, trails have shaped our bodies, sculpted our landscapes, and transformed our cultures. In the maze of the modern world, the wisdom of trails is as essential as ever, and with the growth of ever-more labyrinthine technological networks, it will only become more so. To deftly navigate this world, we will need to understand how we make trails, and how trails make us.”

Robert Moor from On Trails.

[featured-image single_newwindow=”false”]Phil LaBelle, 2017.[/featured-image]

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God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.”

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“A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.”

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

From John Muir.

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What most moved W.H. Auden about limestone was the way it eroded. Limestone’s solubility in water means that any fault-lines in the original rock get slowly deepened by a process of soft liquid wear. In this way, the form into which limestone grows over time is determined by its first flaws. For Auden, this was a human as well as geological quality: he found in limestone an honesty—an acknowledgement that we are defined by our faults as by our substance.” —from The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane

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