“By Streams of Water”
“By Streams of Water”
Deuteronomy 34:1-12 Psalm 1 Matthew 22:34-46
Year A, Reformation Sunday and All Saints Day observed
October 29, 2023
Pastor Andy Kennaly, Sandpoint, Idaho
God shows Moses the promised land, but an entire generation had to die, including Moses, before the people could enter that land. This passage involves Moses going up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo. From there he had a viewpoint, and on the horizon he could see the land God showed him. But between him and the land there was a boundary, a line he could not cross.
This story is an illustration of consciousness, an allegory that shows the movement of the Mental Structure emerging from the Mythical Structure. It is an evolutionary glimpse in terms of one type of humanity dying in epochs of the past, while another carries on into the future as consciousness unfolds.
The Psalmist echoes this as we see trees planted by streams of water as their leaves never wither, while the way of the wicked will perish. Tap roots go deep to reach the moist soil where the nutrients are shared. The delight of sharing involves meditation day and night as time merges in the influential unity of past, present and future in ways that are unseen, much as an underground stream in what to us may look like a desert, yet Life is there.
In Matthew we see Jesus tested by a Pharisee, a lawyer, on the technicalities of religious Law. But Jesus also goes deeper and invites humanity to follow him into Love’s transformation at the center.
These are lectionary passages, the scripture readings for today. Reformation Sunday, recognizing the movement of history and the eruption of the Protestant Reformation for good and ill in the 1500’s. This Wednesday is also All Saints Day, which honors that great cloud of witnesses who have come before us. We observe today our connection to these loved ones, and that saints are closer to us, more imminent to our experience than it may seem, like a tree sustained by what is under the surface.
Interesting how All Saints Day brushes up against Halloween, with scary stories of ghosts and encounters with death, like a headless horseman galloping through a cemetery in the dark of nigh, Ichabod Crane never seen again. Sleepy Hollow. Does that story ring a bell? Washington Irving’s 1820 story takes place in the New York village of Sleepy Hollow, in Westchester County.
There is another Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, and it’s in Concord, Massachusetts. Shawna and I visited there on the Sabbatical last summer. In that cemetery we went to Author’s Ridge and saw the large, white rock of a grave stone marking Ralph Waldo Emerson’s place of burial, along with the family plot of Henry David Thoreau, with his grave marked by a small, simple stone that has his name, “Henry” etched on the front. Someone had placed pencils next to the stone. His family ran a pencil manufacturing business in town and Henry was the person who developed the numbering system based on the hardness of graphite. A number two pencil, for example, is a measurement of hardness.
Henry David Thoreau kept journals. On April 24, 1852 he writes, “I know two species of men. The vast majority are men of society. They live on the surface; they are interested in the transient and fleeting; they are like driftwood on the flood. They ask forever and only the news, the froth and scum of the eternal sea. They use policy; […] They have many letters to write. Wealth and the approbation of men is to them success. The enterprises of society are something final and sufficing for them. The world advises them, and they listen to its advice. They live wholly [totally] an evanescent life [which means brief, passing], creatures of circumstance. It is of prime importance for them who is the president of the day. They have no knowledge of truth but by an exceedingly dim and transient instinct, which stereotypes the church and some other institutions. […] It is impossible for me to be interested in what interests men generally. Their pursuits and interests seem to me frivolous. When I am most myself and see the clearest, men are least to be seen; […] and that they are seen at all is proof of imperfect vision.” Two species of men, the majority, as he describes.
Contrast this entry with another from a few days before, on April 19, 1852. He says, “Stopped in the barn on the Baker Farm. Sat in the dry meadow-hay, where the mice nest. To sit there, rustling in the hay, just beyond the reach of the rain while the storm roars without, it suggests an inexpressible dry stillness, the quiet of the haymow in a rainy day; such stacks of quiet and undisturbed thought, where there is not even a cricket to stir in the hay, but all without is wet and tumultuous, and all within is dry and quiet. Oh, what reams of thought one might have here! The crackling of the hay makes silence audible. It is so deep a bed, it makes one dream to sit on it, to think of it.” (both quotes from The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, edited by Odell Shepard, Dover Publications, New York, 1927, 1954, 1961, pages 86-88).
Henry David Thoreau was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it was wonderful to learn more about both of them on that Inspirational Author Tour to Concord, and Walden Pond. Emerson was at one point a minister but then became an author and lecturer. He wrote in Circle, in 1841, about circles. He says, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” Emerson and Thoreau are Transcendentalists, both of them recognize the divine presence revealed in nature, the transcendent within the imminent, and for Emerson the world is God’s revelation. He says, “We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. […] Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on the mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. […] The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.” (Meditations of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Into the Green Future, compiled and edited by Chris Highland, Wilderness Press, Berkeley, CA, 2004, pgs. 90-91). How far will you go? Or do you deceive yourself about your own inner truth?
As Jesus shares the greatest commandment to love God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, he also links a second commandment and gives it equal focus as he says, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. We make big assumptions if we assume that we know what all our mind is, or all our soul. These are not mentally quantifiable, not scientifically verifiable; not ever exhaustible.
Like Emerson’s circles in circles, or Thoreau’s depth of quietness, Love has an unending eternality, rooted in God’s infinity. And this Love lives within us, even as it permeates all that is without us, or on the outside of us, as if there is any differentiation between inside and outside when we’re held in Love, and Love holds all things.
Jesus embodies this love, and as he says You shall love your neighbor as yourself, he is critiquing illusion of separation, dismantling the subject-object concept. God, neighbor, self, Law, Prophets. Circles within circles, unending depths that makes the Silence of stillness audible.
To help us experience this faith lesson, I’d invite us to follow a practice that Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation describes in a podcast. He talks about his morning routine and how part of this involves sitting by the window and looking out at a massive tree. To gaze out the window. This does not involve a glare or a glance, which are the things we usually do. An extended gaze, one that invites awareness as God’s reality is revealed and we swim in the Living Christ like a fish in the water. Like Thoreau in a hay barn during a rain storm, take the time to notice what wants to be noticed. And as we gaze at God’s revelation all about, we offer love as our response to Love revealed within. As we join Love’s unbroken circle, may God be glorified, now, even as forever. Amen.