Imminence and Transcendence

“Imminence and Transcendence”

1 John 3:1-3         Matthew 5:1-12

Twenty Second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 26, Year A

November 1, 2020

First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho

Andy Kennaly, Pastor

          Today we’re doing many things at once, taking a layered approach in worship.  One part of our focus is All Saints Day, remembering we are part of that Great Cloud of Witnesses.  We honor the life of those who’ve died as we remember them, even as we anticipate our joining them in the sweet by and by, when our life here is ended and we die as those who go forth to live.  In Christ, we unite with Love’s eternal expressions.  God’s creative power has a cosmic scope, beyond all time and space; this is transcendence.

Another thing we’re focused on is taking our next breath.  Whether we’re thinking about it or not, as long as we’re alive, that next breath always comes.  This is one example of immediacy, of the importance of what’s before us, right here, right now, of what’s imminent.

The Western Mind, Americans included, has a tendency to focus on externals.  Individualism puts a human person at the center, and everything else in life is in reference to that perspective.  This person-centered, egocentric, self-referential living is the default mode of our culture, society, worldviews, and religious experience.  We even put God on the outside, and many people have an image of God not too unlike Santa Clause, a gray-bearded man, someone ‘up there’ keeping track of things, making lists, knowing if we’re naughty and hoping we’ll be nice.  Reward, punishment, judging, it’s all there.

With this tendency to put ultimate value in externals, it doesn’t take much to rock our world, all you have to do is mess with the externals.  Throw in a pandemic, or a bumpy election process, or movements of society, anything that brings change or disruption to perceived stability, anything that threatens the image of God you project.  When things get shaken up, outside of our control, our anxiety goes up and fear takes hold.

What we really need is to build our lives on a foundation that doesn’t shake, to get centered, not on ourselves, but in something larger than ourselves that is trustworthy and dependable.  This dependable Source can be accessed on the inside, no matter what is happening outside.  This is Christ.  The Christ in me, the Christ in you, the Christ in and through whom all things, seen and unseen, are created and sustained.  The Living Christ, both transcendent and imminent.

So today we’re focused on that which is beyond us, and that which is at our core.  Welcome to the Beatitudes of Matthew 5:1-12.  This is a passage where Jesus is on the mountain, that biblical image of theophany, where God meets people on the mountain.  Just the setting tells us that God is doing something amazing and we get to be in on it.  As Jesus sits, taking the stance of one who wants to teach you something important, the disciples gather ‘round and we are with them.  God speaks through Jesus as he teaches, but it doesn’t take us long to figure out that this list of blessings can’t be captured by words.  Poverty, humility, mourning, meekness, hunger, thirst, righteousness, mercy, peacemaking, persecution, suffering.  These are things that can only be lived to understand.  So our challenge today is to give voice to something that’s beyond voice, to try and explain something that is unexplainable and can only be experienced.

Transcendence, the big picture, above, beyond, and through on a cosmic scale; and imminence, as immediate and direct as the breath we take, right now.  These might help us.  Transcendence and imminence, two aspects humanity has tried to multi-task ever since there were people.

How do we find focus when we inherit the legacies of generations, living the tensions and paradox of imminence and transcendence?  Some have focused on externals so much that they are out of touch with any sense of inner peace or inkling of inherent, loving presence in their own heart.  There are churches that teach people to mistrust their inner life, to be suspicious of any kind of mystery.  Others are in touch with their inner life, grounded, centered, focused, but missing the connect to the outer world, not able to translate gifts of grace into transformative justice.  The joking critique puts it like this: those who are heavenly minded are of no earthly good.  Even the tradition of Christianity often succumbs to the temptation of eschatology, putting all our hopes in the train bound for glory, all our eggs in the heavenly basket with sweet pie in the sky for the by and by.

Heaven, the very place God dwells, becomes an external, detached and futurized.  But again, this is largely in order to satisfy our ego and the limitations of dealing with struggle and pain, or anything else we can’t get our minds wrapped around with clear certainty.

So here we are on All Saints Day linking the imminent with the transcendent, seeking to live our life connected with God and all things.  Yet rather than have the Ten Commandments or some other external list we can post up, we’re given the Beatitudes as Jesus shares his mission statement.  If only these words were as easy as posting a list on the church lawn hoping other join our club because our faithfulness is so obvious.  But these words are just that: limited words.  How do you express a life in Christ?  How can you truly describe love, forgiveness, mercy, suffering, death?  These experiences of life are too big for cognition to handle, and there is no way an individual can carry the burden of sin or weight of glory on their own, let alone by mere mental belief or conceptual thinking.

Let’s try something.  Let’s use our imagination.  Let’s trust our inner experience just a bit.  Feel free to close your eyes if you’d like to (you don’t have to).  I invite you to picture in your mind a blank color, like a blue screen, a white sheet, something fairly blank, whatever the color, like an empty canvas, ready for painting.  Now, on that canvas draw, or picture, a triangle.  A triangle.  Just three lines, with three angles.  Maybe it’s equilateral, with lines all the same length, or maybe the lines are different lengths and the angles obtuse or extreme.  Whatever triangle, it has three lines, three angles.  Nice.  Ok.  Good job!  You just engaged your imagination.

Let’s not stop there.  Let’s do one more.  This time, on another empty canvas.  When you have that blank slate, make a circle.  A circle.  A line that curves all the way around until eventually you don’t need to keep track of where it starts or ends.  The circle might even be a sphere, multi-dimensional, or maybe just a circle.  Round line.  No sharp angles, and no straight lines.  An unending, rounded movement.  Ok.  Nice.  Once again, your imagination is engaged.

Before we did this, this activity did not exist.  By using your imagination, you engaged creativity, you became a creator.  What you created came from something, someplace; you had a reference already to what a triangle is, or a circle.  You drew from your experience and the shape took on characteristics of your perspective.  It appeared as you invited it, in your own, unique way.  Now that you’ve made it, you might remember it from time to time.  What you’ve chosen to give energy and focus, has become, at some level, a reality.

Another thing you just did, by the way, is explore the history of art.  This exercise gave expression to two major streams of art, both creative processes that express perspective, each coming from unique experiences of life.

One time I flew from Spokane to Seattle.  Driving down from Sandpoint to the airport in Spokane, the snow went from over a foot deep to a few inches.  Spokane was cold, the sky gray; it was late winter and dirty snow piles looked tired.  From the air, the frozen landscape of the Columbia Plateau showed farmland sleeping, sage brush on rolling hills likely munched on by wildlife getting thinner by the day.  The Cascades, the high peaks and the volcanoes of Rainier, Baker, Hood, all shiny in the sun, snowcapped peaks still a long way from open trails and flowing water.  On the descent, things changed.  On the West side of the mountains the Evergreen State took on a new look.  I was really shocked when, on approach to the runway, I looked down and saw people golfing on green grass, and you could tell they were not layered up in bulky clothing.  A whole different world.  A foot of snow in my yard and golfing in the grass by the Puget Sound.

That’s the difference between triangles and circles.  That’s the two streams of art history.  The triangle, very rigid in structure, a human construction coming from a tough existence that faces continual resistance.  Angles and straight lines, in the history of art, get traced back to the Northern people where nature is harsh and survival is a struggle.  When it’s perpetually cold and your forced to pay attention to externals, clean lines and simple angles help you survive.  Nature is not trusted and people seek to detach from it.  Even in that sentence, I called nature an “it,” showing how even our language reflects a pattern of objectification in the Western mind.  A linear perspective dominates this type of thinking, so a triangle creatively expresses this linear perspective.

The circle reflects that part of human history and experience that has more luxury in the relationship with nature.  When it’s warm, life is easier.  Gardens grow, plants expand, clothing is simpler and movement more freeing.  Other creatures show up when food is more abundant, and relationships create connections.  A circle, more organic, flowing and connected, is like life itself.  A triangle and a circle, two streams of art history coming from two experiences of life, yet both creative processes, both expressing perspective.

Earlier, I mentioned in passing that heaven is the very place where God dwells.  Like the beginning of that prayer, “Our Father, who art in heaven.”  We tend to equate God’s living presence with heaven.  Would you please use your finger and point to wherever it is that God does not dwell?  What part of existence, seen or unseen, is beyond God’s presence, God’s knowing, God’s love, God’s grace?  Is there anyplace devoid of these things?  Again, welcome to the Beatitudes, where blessings abound if something exists, even in its poverty, it’s humility, it’s imperfection or suffering.  Whatever the perspective or experience, it exists because God wills it to exist.  Not that God wants trauma, for example, but even in the midst of trauma, one can discover God’s grace upholding through the trauma, of leading beyond trauma, of healing from trauma.

God’s heaven is both transcendent and imminent.  God dwells in heavenly realms, and as close as each breath, in our own hearts, in our soul.  Our inner experience is a place to connect with God, a place with more depth than the deepest sea and more expansive than any galactic measurement.

Ann and Barry Ulanov write in “The Healing Imagination: The Meeting of Psyche and Soul,” asking, “Who is there?  What do you want of me?  How can I be for you, be toward you?”  Then they write this:

“Our soul is that objectively existing opening in our subjective life that knows about God and goodness and evil, about the transcendent and its reach into the ordinary, into our daily life, into everything.  The soul registers with special pleasure our experience of mystery and its source, and wants above all else to know better that source, that ultimate other in our lives.  Soul is willingness, even desire, to correspond to that other as it makes itself known to us.  The soul’s imaginings dwell on who this other is, who this God is that comes to us.  Soul asks, Who is there?  What do you want of me?  How can I be for you, be toward you?"

(Ann and Barry Ulanov, The Healing Imagination:The Meeting of Psyche and Soul, 1991, quoted from Suzanne Guthrie’s At the Edge of Enclosure website, http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/allsaintsabc.html).

As we experience changes in seasons, either on a 45 minute flight or over several months; as we use our imagination to creatively welcome into existence that which helps us give expression to our unique perspectives of life; as we gather around Jesus who sits on the mountain, in the midst of God’s Presence, sharing consoling words that validate our experience in hopeful ways; as we become more and more aware of God’s transcendence and imminence, may we learn to trust the inner experience of our soul as God’s eternal heaven is revealed, in Christ, to deepen our faith and inspire us to love in ways that change everything.  Once you experience the Ultimate, everything else is relativized, and nothing satisfies our deepest, spiritual longings except the eternal, Divine Love of God.  Where ever we’re at, we are part of that Great Cloud of Witnesses giving glory to God, who is living everywhere, and as our life, both NOW, and forever.  Amen.