Together in the Midst of the Storm

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, September 30, 2009

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

It was mid-May, several years ago, summer coming on but still welcome after a 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 - no flying insects out as yet - and there were no other people around to bother us or turn our attention away from the task at hand, or from 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 top of the tallest hill in Queeny Municipal Park, what may be 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 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 therein.

It was a good way to experience the depth and breadth of other traditions, it was a good way to get to know each other, 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, going (in our minds, of course) on a pilgrimage to Medjugore to find those who’d had 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 – 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 a vast, boiling thunderstorm obscuring the horizon.

 

In the reading from the book of Isaiah this morning, we hear the writer asking God to come down to earth in some big and magnificent way.  This person 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, 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 some three generations after Nebuchadnezzar had carried them into slavery in 586 BCE.

Imagine yourself in the place of those Hebrews, first to leave everything you ever knew, to be forcibly carried off from your home and family and community, to be enslaved in a strange and foreign land.  Devastating, at best.

But then imagine what it would be like, fifty years later, to be told you could just pack up and go home again. “Wow! I am so outta here!”  Except:  Realize that many of those Hebrews would have been born in Babylon, so that other ‘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.  So 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 the few Hebrew families that the Babylonians had not carried off.  In fact, put yourself in their place:  those folks who’d stayed behind couldn’t have been 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.  They behaved not like God’s people should, but more like people who didn’t know how to behave anymore, people who didn’t care anymore, people who had completely lost their sense of the divine.

This Isaian writer, this third Isaiah, wants his God to come down and straighten all this mess out, to show people that there is a God, and that I AM will still 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 at once.  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 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 destroyed an electrical transformer that continued to burn spectacularly. 

We were all under cover but 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’ for lack of a better term.  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 and its 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.

 

Now a story of a storm of another sort. 

Working as a chaplain in a large urban hospital, I was called to the room of a 30-something man who wanted to tell me his story and ask some questions.  He said he considered himself a religious person but 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 he said 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 though 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;  he said she had written him off years before. 

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 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 his question for the universe through a veil of tears: “How on earth could I have wanted to hurt so badly the one person in the world who loved me so much?”

In the face of such an unanswerable question, after a long silence I asked a question of my own:  Do you ever feel the presence of God in your life?  Even though he’d said he was a religious man, in his pain he said he thought God was just a stupid idea somebody made up.  Maybe, maybe not.  But as I sat holding his hand and listening to his story, I found myself to be a little like 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, God remained invisible for that man in that place at that time, only quietly represented by a fellow traveler.

 

Our Isaian writer goes on to tell God, “Lord, we are the clay, and you are our potter” - which is to say that as our creator, God makes of us what God will.  Maybe so.  But I don’t think the ‘potter and clay’ metaphor gives us quite enough credit.  We may be a little like clay – malleable, a little lumpy, able to take new forms.  But, unlike clay, we are far from inert:  we have been blessed - or cursed - with the ability – and the responsibility - to make choices.  When thrown on a whirling platter like this earth, sure we screw up sometimes but we can come to life in so many wonderful and varied ways, , too.  Sometimes we can open ourselves up to the possibilities of life, and 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 going on a pilgrimage to a Medjugore of the imagination or to Paraguay, Argentine, and Brazil; 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 down 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, if we don’t keep ourselves open to it when it presents itself, then 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.

These things are particularly important to remember when we’re faced with difficulty or loss or change in our lives.  And I hope you’ll ponder all this in your hearts as together we struggle toward a new future for this community, doing the best we can for our kids, and re-envisioning the church’s Religious Education program.

So may it be.