We’ve been growing some wild invasive trees in our backyard. Wonderful flowers. Not sure what it is called. The hummingbirds love them. But they are shading out our Indian Hawthorn shrubs. They are slowly dying back, more and more each year. They are gradually losing what keeps them alive. They are wearing out.
Life can wear us down.
Sometimes it is harsh.
Sometimes it is lonely.
Sometimes it’s just boring, on and on and on…
There is this idea, ancient, back to the roots and early days of Christianity. It is in seeing God, in beholding the revealing of God that we are held together, this vision keeps us alive. To lose sight of this vision is to wither and cease existence.
Kind of like how most plants need sun light.
The other part of this idea is that the revealing of God is literally busting and bursting out everywhere. In creation. In one another. In history. In God’s people. In all people. And especially in the person of Jesus, in whom God is revealed in full glory.
The question then becomes: What obscures this vision? What could possibly stop us from beholding the radiance of God soaking and dripping from everything?
What is shading out the vision of God that showers and pours down around us beyond abundance?
How do we lose sight of wonder, and awe and that holy fear in which we have nothing else to fear?
We lose sight. We forget to look. We no longer remember to attend. And so we linger in the shade and slide into darkness.
Today we hear stories of radiance and glory and blazing light.
A chariot of fire and the transfiguring of Christ, dazzling.
Mysterious clouds, the voice of God. A prophet shaking with elation and grief and blithering apostles confused and afraid.
There was no losing sight this day, no chance to forget that God is revealed everywhere. If anything it was too much glory, too much light, burned like plants exposed to an overdose of direct sunlight.
Most of our lives we struggle to maintain or find that sustaining vision of God.
Our scriptures speak of times of spiritual famine when visions were rare or when the people yearned to return for the fleshpots of Egypt where things were more sure and predictable even if the price of this certainty was slavery to Pharaoh. They were tired of the dry times in the wilderness, always having to search out God, where the future was unknown.
Of course scripture is even more full of instances of God’s unavoidable presence. Moses had to hide in a dip in rock so as not to be burned alive as God passed by, Jonah ran from God and God’s crazy plans to save the evil empire of Nineveh. Elisha screaming at the empty sky, tearing his clothing in two. The disciples falling to the ground with fear.
It seems we have too much or too little of God. We don’t hear much about having the perfectly balanced diet of spiritual enlightenment. Scripture has no patience for new age peace filled gurus. There are no tranquil spiritual consultants in the bible. Only patriarchs, prophets, apostles, disciples, characters and scoundrels who are all flawed and off balanced, never satisfied, never settling for things, not even settling with God. There isn’t a well balanced, perfect or moderate personality among the motley assortment.
It’s either drought or flood. Too much of God or too little. Either way it involves the fact of suffering, unexplained, unjustified, just the fact.
The perfect, the pious, the well adjusted are simply absent from the story of faith. Not one of them showed up. They are only present as hypocrites and liars, foils to God.
We can find comfort in the fact that we are in good company. The company of the clueless and the confused, this is our story. These are our people, God’s people.
We begin Lent this week, a time of wilderness wandering where we become very aware of the flood and drought habits of the vision of God.
It always takes us to the cross, to the mystery of both divine and human suffering, where we will become even more clueless and confused, because at this cross the drought and flood become the most acute, the most agitating, both at the same time, at the same place. In the Godless absence and betrayal of the cross, we find the fullness of the revealing of God.
This is where we find the return of wonder. There it is. The wonder and confusion of the cross, it transfigures everything. The draught and the flood, they overwhelm. Wonder.