“Stand Up and Raise Your Head”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
December 3, 2006

Luke 21:25-28, 34-36

            “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars…” (Luke 24:25).

            If you’re anything like me this kind of astrological reference might seem vaguely unfaithful. Protestants learned somewhere along the line to associate astrology with heresy. What accounts, then, for my horoscope being eerily accurate this past Wednesday morning, as my wife, Ann, read it out to me at breakfast? “Your ideas will be unpopular, but you need to hold the course in the face of opposition.” Yes, I thought to myself, it’s absolutely true. That is what’s going on! Receiving this kind of external validation in some strange way signalled that I was going to be able to deal with it. Strangely, it gave me hope that the current unpopularity of my ideas was a transitory state. It was just a stage within a larger cosmic pattern. Tomorrow, the planetary transits would shift. I might just be as popular as Brad Pitt and my opposition would be throwing me high fives for my brilliant foresight.  It could happen.

            Now, admittedly, there have been other times when my horoscope has been wildly off the mark. Nevertheless, human beings have always looked to the stars and the heavenly bodies to get a read on what’s going on in our lives from a larger perspective. It’s only in the last couple of hundred years, during the era of scientific rationalism, that we regarded such practice as superstitious nonsense. Yet the human spirit yearns to be able the discern wholes within parts, meaning within chaos, purpose in the face of apparent randomness.

            We all know what’s going on in our lives from a literal perspective. A loved one has just died, the earth is heating up beyond its capacity to sustain future generations, two more Canadian soldiers die in Afghanistan, we don’t have enough money to pay the bills at the end of the month (again), we’re waiting for test results, our boss is breathing down our neck at work, and in any case you can’t imagine hanging in their until the pension kicks in. That’s what’s going on at any given moment in our life, but when we have no way of setting these daily woes within the context of a larger perspective, the first casualty is hope itself. Now, please don’t leave here this morning and tell all your friends, or worse my colleagues, that Sanguin is recommending astrology as a way out of despair. And you might want to remind them that it’s Jesus who instructs his followers to look to the sun, the moon and the stars, not me, as a clue to the meaning of these events.

            The author of Luke’s gospel writes these words from the perspective of a concrete historical event, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year A.D. 70. The Jews staged a revolt against Caesar, which Caesar responded to in characteristic fashion, with a devastating show of force. Thousands were massacred. People fled. Jerusalem, the city of peace, was violated in an absolute fashion. It was their 9-11. It had the intended effect of destroying hope in the Jewish people, including the first followers of Jesus. It was as clear a statement from Caesar as could be made about who was in power. And it wasn’t the Jewish God, nor was it some upstart Nazarene Messiah.

            In the midst of this calamity, at least as bad, and probably worse, than anything most of us have had to endure, Jesus tells them “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” (v.28).  This is about as counter-intuitive a directive as you could possibly imagine.  Think of the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. What does your body naturally want to do? I want to hang my head, not raise it; I want to slump down into a chair or go to bed and pull the covers up over my head, not stand up. But here’s Jesus: “Stand up and raise your head”. No, the terrible things that happen to us shouldn’t happen to anybody, if the world was fair and just. Too often, it can appear as though the world is neither. But stand up anyway, admonishes Jesus. Raise your head. What does he know that we don’t?

            Standing up with raised head is the posture of one who is doing what she can to find hope in whatever your circumstances. It is the posture of one who is looking for meaning even when things can’t seem to get worse. To stand up and raise you head and look to the heavens in an apparently hopeless situation is to commit to seeing what it is you’re going through from a larger cosmic perspective. It’s an act of resistance. In a world of scientific rationalism which tells us life is a cosmic fluke, the random, haphazard collision of atoms and molecules, standing up and raising your head in search of a deeper meaning and purpose to it all, is a form of defiance. Richard Dawkins is getting lots of press these days for his new book, The God Delusion, in which he tries to convince us that there is no larger meaning of purpose to life except the arbitrary meanings we generate. There is no actual meaning, no intrinsic purpose to life, but we can always pretend. To follow Jesus is to stand with head held high looking out over the fields of chaos and tragedy, heartbreak and hell itself, onto horizons of hope, from whence comes our redemption.

            One of the most profound books I read this past year was written by Richard Tarnas, a Harvard Phd., and extraordinary historian. His last book The Passion of the Western Mind is already being heralded as a classic. It is a summary of the history of ideas in the Western World. Imagine my surprise, in the midst of reading his latest book, Cosmos and Psyche, when the book takes a turn toward astrology! Risking his academic credibility he traces the tight correlation between the alignment of the planets and historical events over the past 2000 years, (including the birth of Jesus). At no point does he claim that the way the stars and planets align cause events on earth. Rather, they unmistakeably correlate to events. For example, he looked at the major works of Galileo, Isaac Newton, and Rene Descartes. In each case, they wrote their major book when Jupiter was in exact alignment with the position of the sun when they were born.

            Again, this alignment didn’t cause them to write their books, but there was an unmistakeable correlation. This implies that what is happening in the heavens is in sync with events on earth. Now, this shouldn’t surprise those of us who pray the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday. Jesus taught his disciples to pray “on earth as it is in the heavens.” Which is simply to say that there is a coherence in the universe, between the outer and inner, and between the heavens and earth. Call it sacred coincidence. Carl Jung called this synchronicity, when an outer event corresponded to an inner psychological state.

            This intuition that all of life is in sync, from the large scale structure of the universe down to the minute details of our own lives, reflects a spiritual consciousness. This is the mind of Christ. This is why Jesus could tell his disciples not to worry about things, where their next meal was coming from or what they should wear. They were all held within a sacred mystery which transcended the circumstances of whatever they were going through. Bank on it, he told them. Stake your life on it. Purpose is the very life blood of this universe; it’s woven into the marrow of existence.

            So when the Temple came tumbling down, the mind of Christ which came through the author of Luke’s gospel, is able to see through the tragedy into what is really going on. When you see these things happening, he writes, stand up and raise your heads for “your redemption is near.” In other words, you are nearer to the state of wholeness toward which all of creation is heading than you might think. These events, says the Christ, are like the buds on a fig tree in the spring-time, signalling that summer is near, the season of wholeness and fruition for a fig tree. In other words, everything that happens, good and bad, brings us closer to that ultimate state of fulfilment which God intends.

            The research I did for my upcoming book deepened my faith and quickened the hope in my heart. When I examined the evolution of the universe from it’s simple origins 14 billion years ago to the present day, I gained a profound sense of a cosmic coherence which transcends the chaotic, the tragic, the tumultuous, and death itself. Our tradition calls this unifying, integrative, and immanent power Wisdom or Sophia, and Jesus is her child and teacher. The worst and the best is all gathered up into the heart of this same Loving Presence which causes the fig tree to blossom, and will bring to fruition this entire cosmic journey. I mean all of it, every thing and every body, from the genocidal maniacs and murderers to the saints and the sinners; all the animals disappearing into the apparent void of extinction, all our loved ones, every thought and action we’ve ever taken, all of it is gathered up to serve the evolutionary flowering of the universe. Human beings can act as a drag or a catalyst on this impulse to wholeness; it’s our choice to hasten or hinder the full flowering of the cosmos. But flower it will. Our redemption is drawing nearer and nearer. Now we see only in part, says St. Paul, but then we will see face to face.

            In other words, we might have to settle for glimpses and intuitions of the Holy One weaving an exquisite tapestry from the apparently chaotic fabric of our lives. But if we had eyes to see, even now, we would drop to our knees and sing the praises of this Cosmic Artist. Jeff, our beloved student and friend, asked us to bring our old ties. Right now, they just look like of tangled heap of fabric. To the undisciplined eye, they convey no pattern and no purpose. But these will be shipped off to an artist, who will transform them into a stole, symbolizing Jeff’s call to take up the mantle of the living Christ. We are not alone. This worst thing that can happen to us is like one of those ties in Wisdom’s hands. It will be redeemed and refashioned, forming an important thread in the Great Tapestry of Life.

            Christ tells us to “be on guard so that our hearts don’t get weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life” (v.34). A heavy heart can become a habit. We each have our own repertoire of defences to soothe this heavy heart; medication, booze and all manner of addictions. But Jesus counsels us to “be on guard” against all these symptoms. Being on guard is a spiritual discipline we’re meant to practice. Standing up and raising our heads when life seems stacked against us, guards us against a heavy heart. It is to ask the question, in all circumstance, “where is God in this?” It is to turn our hearts to God and ask God to show us Her face.

            Victor Frankl was a brilliant psychiatrist who wrote many books. His psychological and spiritual thesis was forged in the prison camp of Auschwitz. As a prisoner he witnessed and personally experienced unimaginable atrocities and acts of cruelty. But he noticed that the prisoners, who had a combination of something to live for and a strong faith, were the ones who survived. He looked for evidence of a transcendent power in the midst of the evil. He saw it in men who would offer others their own last piece of bread, in the love he never lost for his wife, and in a book he was longing to write. One spring he looked out of his barracks and saw a branch of a tree in bud. Life, he realized would go on long after this travesty had come to an end, and that he was choosing to align himself with the power coursing through the branch of that tree. Hope came to him, when all seemed hopeless.

            Friends, our redemption is drawing near. Stand up and raise your heads. Look for it. We are not alone. We live in God’s world.