Together in the Midst of the Storm

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, November 9, 2008

after readings from I Kings 19:11-13 and Isaiah 64:1-9

It was mid-May, several years ago, a different season, a more innocent time.  The summer heat was slowly building, but was still welcome after the long, cold winter.  The trees and the grasses in our little part of the world had had enough rain that they were full and green and stretching themselves awake, struggling towards the sun.  The air was calm; the flying insects had not yet grown to sparrow-size and there were no other people around to bother us or turn our attention away from the task at hand, and each other.

We were all out for a picnic, all twelve of us.  We sat at a new red picnic table next to the old grey horse barn on the tip top of the tallest hill in Queeny Municipal Park, looking for all the world like the highest place in West St. Louis County.  We were celebrating another year together in our little Adult Religious Education group we called “In Search Of, Dot Dot Dot,” the ellipsis indicating both our lack of certainty about that for which we searched, and our unwillingness to impose a limit on the nature of the divine we sought.

Over the past few years, we had worked together to read and learn and experience some of the wide array of religious and spiritual traditions in the world.  We would research the ways of a tradition that one of us had some particular interest in, and then we’d try to find or develop practices that would allow us to experience some of the possibilities there.

It was a good way to learn about other traditions, it was a good way to experience the depth and breadth of various modes of spirituality, it was a good way to get to know each other, and it was a good way to be together.

Over the years, we had tried some Buddhist chanting, meditation, and yoga; we had adopted and practiced the daily prayer ritual of a Muslim sect;  we had imitated the discussion format of American humanists.  (We did a lot of that!)  We read many of Joseph Campbell’s works on the similarities of religious expression around the world. We experienced guided meditations of many kinds, even going (in our minds, of course) on a pilgrimage to Medjugore to find those who’d had visions of and visits from Mary, the mother of Jesus.  We shared Native American stories of Buffalo Woman, and performed pagan rituals honoring the Four Directions.  We even spent a couple of evenings attempting ecstatic revelation by doing whirling dervishes in the Kurdish tradition.

We were all searching, individually and apart, for more of a connection: to life, to meaning, to the universe, to the divine – from our studies, this is the same thing religious people everywhere have done throughout the ages.

As we sat together sharing a bountiful feast of bread and fruit and cheeses and wines of all kinds, we began to notice an imminent change in the weather.  The shadows of clouds drifting overhead caught our attention, we noticed a distinct charge in the air, and as we scanned the treetops and looked off over the rolling hills and valleys to our west, we saw what looked to be a vast, black, boiling thunderstorm obscuring the horizon.

In the reading from the book of Isaiah this morning, we hear the writer of the final section of the book of Isaiah asking God to come down to earth in some big and magnificent way.  This writer wants to hear from God, wants to feel God’s presence.  He wants God’s enemies – and by extension, his own enemies - to know that God is, well, God.  And he thinks that by God’s showing up in a glorious blaze of righteous fury that the people will take heart, feel some divine connection, change their ways, and go and sin no more.

Now modern scholarship tells us that this writer is not the prophet Isaiah, or even another called Deutero-Isaiah.  This is more likely a Trito-Isaiah, a third Isaiah, a person writing after the end of the Babylonian exile of the Hebrews, after their return to Judah from that far country, so we’re talking about some fifty years or three generations after Nebuchadnezzar had carried them into slavery in 586 BCE, so sometime after 539 BCE.

Imagine what that must have been like for those Hebrews, first to leave everything you ever knew, to be forcibly carried off from your home and family and community, to set up housekeeping enslaved in a strange and foreign land.  It would have been devastating.  Words would fail.

But then imagine what it would be like, fifty years later, to be told you could just pack up your things and go home again – if you still counted that other land as home after so long a time away.  “Wow!  Yaeh!  I’m outta here!  Except:  Realize that many of the Hebrews we’re talking about would have been born in Babylon, so ‘home’ was a place they’d been told about but had never really experienced.  But the old folks never tired of telling the story, and the young‘uns respected their elders’ experience, and so they packed up all the stuff and lit out for Judah.

The return to the Palestinian homeland had been anticipated for generations.  Yes, everything would be wonderful, the old folks had said, in our little land of milk and honey.  “Home again!  On our land.  Surrounded by people like us that we would always get along with, not in the midst of profane foreigners with no idea how to behave in the world.  No, just us and ours, people of our own culture who know how to behave and who know how to treat each other and who know how to hold to the one, true way.  Our way.”

Well, it must have been frustrating, to say the least, for both young and old to return home from exile to find that life was still hard and that the land was now occupied by the descendants of those few families that the Babylonians had not carried off.  In fact, put yourself in their place, those people who stayed put - I can’t imagine the people who’d stayed behind were any too thrilled to see hordes of refugees flooding back in and trying to take over.  The stresses between people must have been overwhelming.  In these difficult and divisive times, people felt intense separations from each other - people began to lose their connections to the God of their fathers and mothers.  They behaved not like we know that God’s people should, but more like people who didn’t know, people who didn’t care, people who had completely lost their sense of the presence of the divine, our divine, the one divine.

This Isaian writer, this third Isaiah, wants his God to come down and straighten all this mess out, to show people what’s what, to let them know that there is a God, and that I AM is still available to show up when called upon to kick some booty and put things aright and bring people back together.

 

As we watched the storm move across the valley to the west of us, we were astounded at the number of lightning strikes we could see – hundreds, we reckoned - and we began to hear rolling thunder that took many seconds to reach us.  While we watched, we gathered up our picnic stuff and packed it safely away in our cars for the trip home, but then we thought, hey, let’s stick around stay for a while and watch the show.  We sat on the hillside together, moments of quiet passing among us, punctuated by booming thunder and our own expressions of amazement at the size and the power and the glory of the storm sweeping towards us.

The wind began to swirl, sweeping the grasses to and fro and bending the trees in all directions.  A sudden chill made us decide it was time to get going.  But the rain was on us before we knew it, having blown in from another direction.  Rather than run to our cars, we took shelter under an overhang of the barn as the rain came down at first in sheets, then in buckets, and then – I don’t even know what to call it, it came down so hard and so fast.

The lightning and thunder that had been separated by many seconds now came as one event, some of the flashes so close we thought we could hear them sizzle after they hit.  One of the lightning bolts struck a tree near our cars in the parking lot; another strike near us and it was obvious from the shower of sparks and flame that an electrical transformer had been destroyed, and it continued to burn quite spectacularly. 

We were all under cover but we were soaked nonetheless by the wind blowing curtains of rain onto us.  We somehow felt safe, though, not least of all because we were all together.  In fact, this was the group, wasn’t it?, that had been searching for a presence, searching for a connection, searching for God.  And at that moment, in the midst of the storm, we knew we were close to something magnificent, we felt the great power of earth’s weather system, we sensed the smallness and insignificance of our own humanity in the face of that power.  And we were humbled as we felt the presence of God in a big way in the midst of that big storm.

Lest we take our safe and privileged position there on that hilltop as a universal, I want to remember that it is possible to experience a storm quite differently; it is possible to have a different point of view.  For instance, when seen from above, say, from the safety of an airplane, storms can be intriguingly beautiful.  But when embroiled in them, stuck in their fury without cover, they can look pretty horrifying.  And they can be deadly.

Now a story of the horrifying, potentially deadly sort of storm. 

Working as a chaplain in a large urban hospital, I was called to the room of a 30-something man.  I listened intently as he told me his story.  He said he had been in and out of trouble, in and out of jobs, in and out of marriages, in and out of prison.  He last lived with a friend who drank way too much but the friend was now disabled and institutionalized.  The man said he had no family left who would talk to him, no other friends to speak of, and no home to go back to, which was okay because he had no way to get there anyway – no car, no cash, no one who cared. 

But they were discharging him from the hospital nonetheless, so he had to leave, even thought he thought he needed more care.  He lifted his shirt to show me a hole through his skin and his abdominal wall, a wound he said he’d gotten in an altercation with a rotted porch -  he had fallen through some floorboards and had been cut up pretty badly.  He admitted to me that he was still scared to take care of this open wound by himself because it had already been infected a couple of times.  He wished more than anything, though, that he could get back in touch with the sister who had raised him; she had written him off years ago. 

As bad as all this sounded, he said it had actually been worse for him in the past.  Far worse.  His voice got quiet as he continued, “It was a dark night, in a pouring rain, kneeling in an alley between two overflowing and stinking garbage dumpsters.  I was holding a borrowed sawed-off shotgun to my temple, with my finger on the trigger, and thinking, ‘Now I’m really gonna hurt my sister.’”  Then a question through his tears: “How on earth could I have wanted to hurt so badly the one person in the world who loved me so much?”

Where was God for this man?  It wasn’t a question he’d ever thought about, so he couldn’t answer except to say that he thought God was just a stupid idea somebody made up.  Maybe, maybe not.  But hearing the man’s compelling story, I found myself to be a little like our Trito-Isaiah, wishing the divine would show up for this lost man in some majestic way, forcing him to recognize the presence and the power and the glory in his life, saving him from despair and destruction, loneliness and death.  But, as happens so often for so many of us, God remained silent for that man in that place at that time.

 

The Isaian writer goes on to tell God, “Lord, we are the clay, and you are our potter.”  On the one hand, this is to say that God is our creator, and that God makes of us what God will.  Maybe so.  But I must say that I don’t think the ‘potter and clay’ metaphor gives us quite enough credit.  We may be a little like clay – malleable, able to take new forms, sticky when wet, and I know I’m more than a little lumpy.  But, unlike clay, we are far from inert:  we have been blessed - or cursed - with the ability – and responsibility - to make choices.  When thrown on a whirling platter like this earth, we can come to life in so many wonderful and varied ways, though we may screw up sometimes, too.  When we can open up to the possibilities of life, then like the grass and the trees in springtime, we stretch ourselves and struggle toward the sun, longing for a connection with the universe and for some sense of the presence of the divine.

 

Whether on a pilgrimage to a Medjugore of the imagination or to our real Transylvanian Unitarian homeland, whether sitting around a campfire listening to tales of Buffalo Woman or sitting on pillows in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning, whether dancing a dervish until falling to the earth or just quietly nurturing a relationship with someone we love, we may find it possible to partake of a connection that is readily (and already) there, whether you call it God, or the universe, or the ground of all being.  And whether it’s in a storm, in a spiritual practice, or in a still, small voice, we have to be open to it when it presents itself or it just may pass us by.  The book of Isaiah gets it right in its own vernacular: we are God’s people, we are all God’s people, and it is worth something that we are all here together.

So may it be.