"Holy Inquiry"

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
January 27th 2008
 Psalm 27, 1, 4-9

If you were able to ask just one thing of the God of the universe, what would it be? No three wish scenario, here. You have one shot and one shot only. This sharpens the focus considerably. What’s it going to be? Well, I suspect that if you asked every person here this morning, you’d come up with a different response. We would make our request based on our stage of development, our level of consciousness, and the circumstances we are in at the time the question was being asked.

Einstein is reported to have said, “I want to know the mind of God. Everything else is just details”. This exercise surfaces what for each of us, genius or no, what is our ultimate concern. This would be an excellent exercise to take on a spiritual retreat. Spend a couple of days, a week, or a month, just honing in on the one thing you would ask of God. At the end of this exercise you would have discovered your ultimate concern.

I am intrigued by the Psalmist’s single request of God. “One thing I ask of the Lord, that I will seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of God, and to inquire in God’s Temple” (Psalm 27:1). Let’s break it down. Note the maturity of the Psalmist’s request: the writer not only asks this of God, he intends to be fully involved in the realization of the request. This is not The Secret or the Law of Attraction in their most naive expressions. Yes, he puts out his intention into the universe. But then he doesn’t sit back and expect it to magically materialize by the power of his thought. “One thing I will seek after”, is followed immediately by, “that I will seek after”. Included in his intention is a willingness to consciously participate in his singular desire to live in the house of the Lord all his days, to behold the beauty of God, and to inquire in God’s Temple. So, ask God for whatever you want, but then get involved in making it happen.

As for the content of his desire, it may be that the writer imagined himself literally taking up residence in the Temple in Jerusalem – “to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of his life”. In his day, most believed that God actually resided in this structure. But let’s take this as a metaphor. To desire to live forever in the house of God is to yearn to enjoy perpetual awareness that the universe houses God’s very being. “Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God”, is how the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it. This is what the psalmist wanted – to be able to dwell in the awareness of the sacred presence that permeates all of reality.

The psalmist associates dwelling in the house of God with beauty. He wants to dwell in the house of God in order that he might behold the beauty of God. This is the source of our fascination with beauty. Beauty breaks through our dull perception. It is a door into the house of God’s Being. We look across the Burrard inlet and see the fresh snow on the mountain and it has the power to stop us, to break us out of our everyday routines and rest in the mystery of beauty. It is an intimation that indeed earth is crammed with heaven. Every glimpse of beauty, wherever we notice it, is a Sabbath for the soul.

Not the 24-hour variety that has come to define Sabbath time. It may only be 2. 4 seconds, in fact. That may be all it takes to lift us up out of the mundane and transport us to a transcendent realm. Beauty, like the Sabbath, is a foretaste of eternity, wrote Abraham Heschel, the Jewish philosopher and theologian. It is a momentary, fleeting glimpse of the perfection that has been promised to our soul, and that our soul seeks after.

Beauty beckons us to see the face of God. “Come, my heart says”, the psalmist writes, “seeks God’s face. And then, he writes directly to the Holy One: “ Your face, Lord, do I seek”.  That’s all he wants. That’s his Lottery 6/49 winning ticket. The only freedom the psalmist is interested in cannot be bought. It’s the freedom that comes from knowing in your heart that the whole universe is the face of God smiling at us, and that we also are a face of the divine. When we choose to look upon the world, as the face of God, we become beautiful ourselves – a source of the divine beauty for others. Here’s a second spiritual exercise. Be in the world for a couple of days seeking only the face of God, with all your heart and mind. Yes, you will come across grouchy, mean, and cynical faces. But continue to seek the face of God behind the many faces of fear. Imagine the smile behind the scowl, the eyes of compassion behind the frowning judgment. Seek the face of God, with the psalmist. Here’s a third exercise. Spend a day or so being the face of God for the world. As the saying goes, if there is joy in your heart, please notify your face! Rather than looking at another with judgment and cynicism gaze with the eyes of grace upon souls whose face has been twisted by fear.

There are three parts to the Psalmist’s single request of God; the first is to dwell in the awareness of God’s presence; the second is to see the beauty of God’s face in every thing and everybody; the third is to “inquire in God’s temple”. To inquire in God’s temple, that is, from the awareness of the presence of the divine, is to ask a whole different set of questions than one would normally ask. In our culture, (what could be called a money culture) we want to know how much money we’re going to need to retire; what is the secret of financial wealth; how can I be successful; how can I get others to respect me? But once you are dwelling in the awareness of God’s presence you shift the ground of inquiry. A whole new set of questions emerges.

You already know you are loved and that you yourself are love at the deepest level. You know that you will always dwell in the house of God, so there is nothing to strive for – you have all the wealth you could ever want. To inquire in the house of God is to seek spiritual wisdom. Your questions shift to: how then shall we live with each other, and not how can I get ahead in this world; how may we persuade ourselves to share the earth’s resources, and not how may I accumulate more; how may I serve the world, and not what can I get from the world; how can I live in such a way that I am able to see the face of God, and not how can I put my best face forward; how may we collaborate with others to walk more gently upon the earth, and not how will I make my mark in life. We’ve marked the planet enough with our projects of self-aggrandizement

“God is my strength and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? God is the stronghold of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid?” (1:1) Our vocation as disciples of Christ is to abide in the house of God to such an extent that we begin to lose our fear. Fear is the basis of an economic system that perpetuates massive disparities in wealth. Fear is the basis of police states and the military-industrial complex that exist to make sure that the unfair distribution of the world’s wealth and resources will be entrenched in perpetuity. Fear is what causes one person or one nation to want to dominate over another. Fear is what keeps us from changing our lifestyles even though we know we are destroying the earth. Remove the fear and you remove the basis of our allegiance to these systems. Remove fear and the domination system, within and without, begins to topple.

Ann read an article from the Globe and Mail to me yesterday. It was from the Travel section. It concerns the decision of Doug McMeekin to buy some land in the Amazon rain forest, at the edge of the Napo River, in order to save it from Oil Companies. Then he built an award-winning eco-tourism lodge. Guests interact with the people of the local village. He then set up a school for the 140 children of the village, so that when the oil runs out the children will have other options for employment. And then, he signed the 3000 acres he had purchased in the rainforest back to the local people. He now works for them.

We’re all at different places in our journey toward fearless living. What matters is that we take the next step in our journey. We’re not told what it was that enabled those first disciples to shed their security systems and follow Jesus. All they knew was that he was, for them, the face of God. Jesus was a dwelling place of God. The story says they were mending their nets when they decided to drop what they were doing and follow him. Jesus offered to mend the hole in the center of their being. They were fishermen we are told. Jesus offered to teach them to take those skills and use them to cast the net of God’s loving presence to all who cared to listen, and to bring them home to the awareness of divine presence – what Jesus called the Kingdom God.

“One thing I ask of the Lord, that I will seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of God, and to inquire in God’s Temple” (Psalm 27:1). What is your question of God? How will you now seek after it? Come to the table, my friends. This is a banquet of God’s presence, for you.