Going with the Holy Presence

“Going with the Holy Presence”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, October 16, 2011 at NPEM, New York

“God said, ‘My presence will go with you and I will give you rest.’ And Moses said to God, ‘If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth.’” (Exodus 33:15-16)

Give therefore to the emporer the things that are the emporer’s and to God the things that are God’s. (Matt. 22:21)

As part of my work as interreligious officer for the diocese of Rochester, I am engaged in ongoing dialogue with the Hindu community. We meet once a month at the Hindu temple for dialogue and it always proves to be a rich and spiritually stretching experience. As we have deepened our connections with one another, we frequently continue our dialogue throughout the month through e-mail correspondence. Early this week, one of my Hindu colleagues sent around an article from the Huffington Post religion blog, which reported on a recent study of young people and their reasons for giving up on church. The article reported the results of a study done by the Barna research group, which found that young people view churches as “judgmental, overprotective, exclusive and unfriendly towards doubters.” They also were disillusioned with the ongoing battles between some churches and the discoveries of science.

In my response to my Hindu friend, who basically wondered why Christian youth are falling away at such a rate, I pointed out that the type of Christianity that the young people in that study were reacting against is the more fundamentalist variety and that those of us on the dialogue group represent a more liberal and progressive type of Christianity that might not be guilty of quite the degree of judgmentalism, overprotectiveness and the like as our fundamentalist brethren. I opined that the real problem for us mainline Christians, who also find our ranks devoid of young people and young adults, is the intense secularization of our contemporary culture.

The sad truth is that for many of the “20/30 somethings” of today, religion is simply irrelevant. Our culture, while in many ways one that pays lip service to religion and religious belief, is really radically secular and the younger generation has grown up with little or no understanding of the need to nurture and nourish their souls. In our world of highly sophisticated technology and the global interconnectedness that the technology allows, we have lost our reverence for the human soul and our ability as a culture to admit of the presence of something outside ourselves, something sacred and divine at work in the world. What I have come to understand in my work of interreligious dialogue is that we Christians who take our faith seriously, who believe in God and in the spiritual life and the presence of the holy as part of the created order, have more in common with our interreligious neighbors – with religious Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists – than we do with those who profess no religious faith or are only nominally Christian.

In the context of these ongoing dialogues with my interreligious colleagues I found that today’s lectionary provided interesting material for reflection on this conundrum we religious folk face as we live our lives of faith in a deeply secular culture. In the reading from Exodus, Moses is engaged in quite an argument with God, following the incident where the Israelites built and worshipped a Golden Calf, which enraged God no end, and Moses is trying to talk God down, and plead for God to be present with him, Moses, as he continues his job of leading the Israelites through the wilderness. He also boldly asks God to be visibly present to the Israelites as well, so that they will not lose heart or faith, recognizing that in the midst of their struggles in the wilderness they really need to have some visible reminder that God is truly present with them as they proceed towards the Promised Land. Life in the wilderness is tough and the Israelites easily lose patience. You may remember that in the stories of the wilderness wanderings, God is present with the Israelites in the form of a cloud by day and pillar of fire by night. Human beings have always needed something they could grab on to to reassure them of the presence of God in their midst, to somehow mark them as belonging to God.

Then in the gospel story, Jesus has his famous encounter with Pharisees and Herodians who want to entrap him into saying something that will get him in trouble with the authorities. The question they ask about paying taxes and his response about giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s has often been interpreted in terms of how Christians should conduct their financial lives. Yes, we should pay our taxes, but we must also pay our tithe and be faithful stewards of our resources. But Jesus points to something more than money and how we use it. In his statement about giving to the emperor what is the emperor’s and to God what is God’s, he touches on the very issue that infuses the struggles we people of faith have as we live in a solidly secular culture. All of us struggle to conduct our lives according to the expectations of our surrounding culture – our nation, city, neighborhood, our civic duties, our family responsibilities, our job demands. But we also have religious duties and expectations – we entered into a covenant at baptism and the responsibilities of that covenant lay claim to our lives as well. And as both the Exodus text and the gospel remind us, our religious life is not simply about following a set of rules to stay on the good side of a divine judge. It is, at its core, about relationship between the human being and the divine presence we call God.

Relationships call for more than merely going through the motions. A deep relationship requires vulnerability and trust and a willingness to make oneself open to the other in a genuine and authentic way. Moses argues with God because he and God are in a loving and respectful relationship. Moses calls God up short to be the best God can be, as he talks God down from his anger at the Israelites, but he also demands of God that God be present, be really there for him and his people as they struggle in the wilderness. Moses is privileged to see God face to face when he goes up to Mt. Sinai and receives the revelation of the Ten Commandments, and he returns from that encounter with his face shining from the glory of God. But God also protects him as he passes him by in this particular encounter because no human being can grasp the whole of God and live as a human being, and so God protects Moses in the cleft of the rock, by putting his hand out to shield Moses and allowing him to see only the back of the divine presence, which is enough divinity for Moses.

Both Moses and Jesus know God intimately. And the Ancient Israelites who followed Moses, and the disciples who followed Jesus saw in each of them and through each of them the light of the Holy One. Jesus was not referring only to how we use our money in this famous line about giving to the emperor what is the emperor’s. Our love, our passion, our creativity, our generativity, all that makes us human belongs to God. To give to God what is God’s is to give ourselves up to that sacred presence, to acknowledge the holy in the midst of the profane world in which we live, and to allow the reality of that sacred presence to guide how we live in this world. It’s not just about where we go when we die, its much more about how we live while we’re here. And its not just about private, personal matters, but also about how we give to the emperor what is the emperor’s, i.e. how do we honor the secular world of which we are a part and contribute our financial and human resources to it while also living as citizens of the kingdom of God? How do we vote in an election year? What causes do we support with our lips and lives and money? Where do we experience God in the midst of all that we do in our daily lives?

The divine presence is always with us, but like Moses and the Israelites, we sometimes despair of feeling that presence. And like the Pharisees, we can get too caught up in the rules and regulations of both the secular world and the institutional church and lose sight of the divine presence we are meant to be serving and then its no wonder our young people decide that the institutional church has nothing of value to offer them. If they felt the divine presence when they entered our churches, we wouldn’t have to come up with strategies to lure them in and we wouldn’t have to engage in elaborate feats of entertainment and gimmicks to keep them here. We celebrate a sacred mystery every week at the altar, a ritual that brings the divine presence right into our midst on any given Sunday.

Our world is infused with the presence of the Holy One. Depth psychologist Carl Jung had a sign over his door that read, “Bidden or unbidden, God is present.” God is present in the beauty of our natural world, on deathbeds and sickbeds in hospitals and nursing homes, in preschool classrooms and university lecture halls, in the faces of our loved ones and the faces of people who drive us crazy, in the laughter of children and the wise counsel of the elderly. As people who wander the wilderness of earthly life in covenant with the God of Moses and Jesus, may we live in such a way that all who observe our way of being in the world know that we live always in the presence of the holy. May we witness to that sacred dimension in everything we do. When we truly “render to God what is God’s” we will “be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth.” And we just might reconnect our younger generation with the wisdom of the ages while we’re at it. Amen.