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"Leaving Home For Another Country" |
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Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin |
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“Abraham left home for another country”.
Abraham didn’t leave home for practical reasons. It wasn’t a career opportunity. He didn’t have fiancé waiting for him in a foreign land. As far as we know, his parents didn’t throw him out. Neither were Abraham and Sarah visiting relatives. He heard God calling him to go to another country in order to be a blessing to the world. The biblical story deals with this little piece of information in about two lines – but there’s a great back story involved. What kind of person has the lightness of being, the sense of adventure, and the spiritual inclination to follow his intuition? He hears: he leaves.
This theme of leaving home for another country is archetypal. It’s a pattern of human experience that is lodged in our collective unconscious, and an ever-present yearning in our heart. Think of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Quest for the Holy Grail, the stories of the great explorers of the 15th and 16th century, the recurrent theme of the hero’s journey in the mythological literature of the world, the biblical account of the exodus and the exile, and Thelma and Louise (sorry!). We love road stories!
Do you remember when you first left home for another country? My first major leave-taking for another country was when I decided to go to Europe with three of my buddies after high school. This trek to do Europe on five dollars a day was pretty much an obligatory rite of passage among my generation.
Of course, it’s possible to travel to another country without actually leaving home. It’s called tourism and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with it. But the psychological and spiritual journey of leaving home for another country is leaving-taking on the interior dimension. This is another kind of hero’s journey. I remember the dream that signaled I was leaving for another country psychologically speaking. In the dream I brought home a little puppy dog to share with my family. When I walked in the door, my family dog, a big black lab in the dream, jumped up and grabbed my puppy by the throat and began to shake it wildly. I knew that I only had two choices: kill my family dog and save my puppy; or save my family dog and little this new little life die. I choked our family dog to death, picked up my new puppy dog, and walked away, knowing that I couldn’t stay having committed this terrible crime. I had left home to nurture the new life that was growing inside of me.
I have come to believe that we are always in the process of leaving home as human beings. We have romantic fantasies of finding a place to call home, to put down roots, raise the family and live happily ever after. But does that ever happen? Really? It seems to me that what actually happens is that we find a place to call home, find the perfect partner, put down roots, and then an inner restlessness sets in. We just get to the place in life where we’ve finally “found” ourselves; we are defined by our jobs, our interests, our commitments, and no sooner have we got this self-definition in place than we wake up one morning asking ourselves what’s next. Something within wants to tear down a wall, call in an architect, recalibrate, and rebuild or just move on. Human beings are meant for the road, metaphorically. We’re always leaving the home of “self”.
This is why pilgrimages never go out of fashion. The pilgrimage is a physical expression of this inner intuition that life is a journey toward an ever more expansive wholeness that will never be realized completely because the journey is toward the infinite, the heart of God. Our own Ruth Wilson will be offering a course on pilgrimage as spiritual metaphor next year. This season of Lent itself is a spiritual pilgrimage as we walk with Jesus into the heart of his own calling. There is a time and a place for rest, but Lent is a journey, a leaving home for another country.
Now, let me be as clear as I can about what I’m saying. I’m in no way advocating leaving behind family commitments just because you are restless, or leaving behind perfectly good jobs, or leaving behind the kids and hitting the road with some new and improved version of a husband or wife. We often interpret this inner restlessness too literally - as the need to change partners, or jobs, or homes. Sometimes, this kind of change may be unavoidable, but don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. We are meant to grow and evolve – and when we choose this path of conscious evolution, we’ll always be metaphorically leaving home. So, you had better find a vocation that allows you to grow. You had better find a partner who welcomes your evolution. You had better establish it as a family norm that family members are going to strike out in directions you could never have predicted. Your job and the job of our loved ones is to make room for unexpected departures. But you don’t always have to leave home to leave home, if you know what I mean.
This is a high and holy calling that never ends. We leave home on all lines of development: psychological, emotional, physical, intellectual, social and political levels. We are continually in the process, as long as we are alive, of re-making ourselves. For what end? Hopefully, as this biblical story suggests, we are re-making ourselves in the shape of an ever-expansive blessing for the world.
This leaving home is an evolutionary impulse. It is built into the fabric of the universe. When we look at the large arc of the evolutionary journey we can trace the presence of a dynamic the Greeks called Eros. To be struck by cupid’s arrow was to awaken, often through erotic love for another, to the allurement, the sheer abundance of life that had been lying dormant prior to the arrow piercing one’s psychic armour. This is the true meaning of Valentine’s Day by the way. It is to recognize, through the allurement of another, a strange and foreign country that beckons you to leave behind the safety of home and explore this land of abundance. The intimate other awakens in you that cosmic yearning to discover uncharted territories of your inner landscape and the frightening terrain of intimacy. In this other country, a new you emerges that you didn’t even know existed in order to help you negotiate the challenges associate with the country of love.
But Eros is not even primarily about erotic love. It’s the force that drives the evolutionary process of life. Trace the arc of this 14 billion year universe we call home and you can’t help but notice a bias toward increased complexity, consciousness, and beauty. It’s not a linear, unbroken march in this direction, but the overall arc points toward an inner power that both pushes and pulls us toward fuller realization of our purpose – to be the fullest expression of the blessing God intended us to be. We are accustomed to thinking about evolution as a biological force – as something outside of us that we study in high school and maybe in university. But do we really imagine that this evolutionary power doesn’t function in the human species? On the contrary, we are the species that is able to consciously cooperate with the arrow of evolutionary Eros toward more abundant life. It is therefore accelerated in those who enter into a conscious relationship with this power.
I am developing a new kind of theology and spirituality based on the scientific reality of evolution. Theologically, I associate Spirit with this life force – Eros. The universe is the expression of Spirit’s yearning for perfection in space and time. Spiritually, we need to develop an evolutionary practice. Evolution is not something you study. It is something you do. And the more you practice conscious evolution, the more capacity you acquire. The more it burns within you. We are meant to be an evolutionary force, centers of creative emergence. This is what it means to be a blessing to the world. This evolutionary practice is not merely an idea. It is something that you feel going on inside as you open to it.
One way to understand the call of Abraham and Sarah is that they tuned in to this ever-present evolutionary urge that is of the Spirit. And when the Old Testament (First Testament) tells all those wonderful stories about God accompanying the ancient Hebrews on their historical journey to the Promised Land, don’t take it literally. They needed a way to talk about their felt sense that God was walking with them. We experience God accompanying us on this journey as an interior desire and actual power that sustains us as we fulfill our calling to be a blessing to humanity. The Promised Land is not a place on a map that we’re going to arrive at one day and stick our flag in the ground – it is a place of inner abundance and blessing.
The title of Paul Hawken’s new book is The Blessed Unrest. The phrase is taken from Martha Graham’s letter to her friend Agnes de Mille. She writes,
“There is vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique…You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open…There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the other.”
At one time, I felt sorry for Jesus when I read that part in the New Testament where he says that he has no place to lay his head – the fox has a den, the birds has a nest – but he has no place to rest. But he wasn’t feeling sorry for himself, and he wasn’t fishing around for sympathy. Rather, he was totally apprehended by this blessed unrest that motivated him to bless the world with this divine presence. He had no home, because he was always in the process of leaving home for another country. Perhaps this defines Jesus’ divinity as well as any other traditional images. He is the one who had developed such capacity to tap into the evolutionary power of Spirit that he became one with this power. He created, now and now and now, new worlds, fresh expressions of the Spirit, with every encounter, through every healing, in every parable, and even his crucifixion was little more than a transition to a fuller, more glorious manifestation of Spirit. Death and resurrection for him didn’t happen on Good Friday and Easter. His life was a continual death and resurrection, being born again and again and again, a perpetual exiting of the shelter of the past in order to inhabit fully the present and make preparations to set out for that country we are co-creating called the future.
I believe that the church of the 21st century, what I call the “emerging church” in my new book, will be one that recognizes that there is no place to rest our head. We have been so busy building permanent structures and unchanging beliefs systems, that what we have lost the nomadic sense of adventure of our leader and friend, Jesus of Nazareth. As we follow him, we will always be discovering new countries, new ways of imagining the future, new ways of understanding our lives and their purpose, new ways to worship, new ways to be a blessing to the world. This much will never change – that the Spirit who infuses the universe with pilgrim-purpose calls us to be a blessing to this one earth community.
You know, when Nicodemus decided to make the secret pilgrimage to rabbi Jesus, he was leaving home. To be in Jesus’ presence is to arrive in a new country. The borders are less clearly defined, the rules all shift to fit an ethic of love and justice, the Spirit blows more freely and is less willing to be confined by the structures and beliefs he associated with “religion”. Nicodemus needed a new identity for the new country he had entered. He needed to be born again, but he didn’t have a clue what this might mean.
Think of your walk to the table this morning to receive the bread and cup as a pilgrimage. You are leaving home for a new country, the blessed unrest that is the heart of Christ. That country will be different for each one of us. But there is bread for the journey, and a cup of blessing that we might in turn be a blessing to this holy and hurting world.
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