It is the season of turning. The Winter Solstice is tomorrow when the gradual lengthening of the night’s darkness reaches its peak…the longest night of the year. And the cycle of increasing daylight begins. It is a gradual turning of the seasons to which humans have been attuned…well, since we became humans and probably long before.
The turning of the seasons resonates deep within us and in our poetry and our scripture.
”…To everything there is a season…
…a time to build up and a time to break down…”
Turning is a powerful religious theme.
“When the Lord saw that [Moses] had turned aside to see, God called out to him from the bush.” – Exodus 3:4
Moses turned and the world changed. He had led his father-in-law’s sheep up onto Horeb, the Mountain of God, when he saw a bush burning, out of the corner of his eye. A bush that was burning but not being consumed.
I have to check this out, Moses thought. “I will now turn aside and see this great sight,” that is the language of the King James Version.
So… Moses took his eyes off the sheep and turned toward the bush.
When he turned, God spoke to him:
“Take off your shoes” is what the storyteller recounts God saying.
Actually: “Draw not nigh hither. Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”
You’re standin’ on Holy Ground, man, take off your shoes.
Moses was just tending the sheep…when he decided to turn. And he ended up accepting the assignment to lead his people out of bondage and to the Promised Land.
Rev. Steve Schick writes: “Moses was confronted with a problem familiar to all of us who know we stand on holy ground. If we decide to turn, much will be expected of us, again and again…”
“Serve the people, free the oppressed and the enslaved and I will be with you. I am who I am.” Those were God’s instructions. And God’s promise.
All because Moses turned.
The message here is that turning…the decision to pay attention…to not look away… Turning carries consequences.
Humans have always celebrated the Solstice…this shift from greater darkness to greater light…
Think of Stonehenge and the myriad other locations where human communities gathered long ago to witness the return of greater light to the world.
We think of those earlier humans as pre-scientific…primitive in belief…believers in miracles..…unlike ourselves who are so evolved.
But those humans had brains just as large as ours. They were just as capable. And they had managed those engineering feats, excavated and moved those huge monoliths…into perfect alignment…with just person power… no cranes… And managed the celestial measurements without telescopes…to within seconds…
Those ancients were every bit as smart as we are.
So I am thinking that those smart and resourceful ancestors of ours…well, they may well have used a word for miracle to describe the return of the longer light, the predictable shift that their holy places celebrated…they may have used a word for miracle to describe that change…
But the miracle they celebrated was that the seasons would turn again…their crops would grow and flourish again…they would be fed again…
It was a celebration of stability…or predictability, in any event…faith in the cycle…not a celebration of irreversible change.
Perhaps even better said…it was a celebration of the repeated shifts required for stability.
And so I am imagining that they would also have welcomed the growing dark as a part of a predictable and life-giving cycle.
“Welcome darkness. Welcome Light,” as the Celtic tradition says. Welcome both…
Both the Darkness and the Light necessary, needed.
I should tell you that light and dark imagery can be a test for Black, Indigenous and People of Color.
White and light are esteemed. We moved toward the light at the end of the tunnel. But we are afraid of the dark. Brides wear white. Villains wear Black hats. Angel food cake is…white. Devil’s food…dark.
Can those of you who identify as white understand that many People of Color see these associations as problematic? The weight of the imagery has an impact on us? It is true.
I believe that the strong association of light with good in the western religious traditions has made it more difficult for us to experience the blessings of the dark.
Theologian Barbara Brown Taylor describes an experience she and her husband had while attending a conference at a church camp in North Carolina. The evening program over, they decided to walk down toward the lake. They did not think they would go far and brought no flashlight.
As they walked along the lake, they found themselves facing what she describes as a “mouth” on the path…where the path led through a tunnel of dense Carolina laurel.
Almost daring each other, they decided to try to walk through the tunnel, where even the starlight did not penetrate.
She writes:
“Inside the tunnel, neither of us could see our feet, much less the way ahead, but we knew the path and we knew each other, so we slowed down and shifted into a gear that I had never used before. Without sight, I relied first of all on sound, realizing within a couple of steps that I could hear when I got closer to the branches on either side of me. …
More than that, I could feel the presence of the laurels, the same way I could feel the presence of [my husband]. …When I strayed too far left or right, I could feel the laurels practically breathing on my face, and when I [felt that] I found my way back to the center of the path again.”
“Pretty soon,” Taylor writes, “we were walking by faith and not by sight. The faith was not in an unseen deity, however. It was faith in this exquisite physical fine-tuning that neither of us had known we had…”
Walking by faith and not by sight.
I am not a scientist, but there is a relatively new field called “neuroplasticity” that studies the brain’s ability to reorganize and change itself to adapt to changed circumstances.
Here is an example: A study in 2011 compared the brains of individuals who were born without sight, with those who had “normal” vision. They found that the part of the brain that’s normally “wired” to work with our eyes can instead rewire itself to process sound information. These individuals “see” with their ears.
For many years, most scientists agreed that we use only about 10% of our brain’s capacity.(Turns out that percentage was introduced into the popular discourse by Dale Carnegie, of How to Win Friends and Influence People fame…who quite simply just made it up.)
The brain…almost all of it…is at work almost all of the time. Even when we are asleep.
But…there is remarkable flexibility…plasticity as the scientists say…in how and where the brain processes information.
It seems to me that science is pointing to a truth we know in the religious realm…that it matters what we pay attention to…what we focus on…what we are willing to consider…
It matters where we turn. Yes it does.
And this sermon could turn here. I could begin naming all of the bushes that are burning, that are calling for our attention. I could begin listing the many issues in the political space where major turning is so critically needed. And the personal issues raised by the pandemic that call for our attention.
That would be an easy sermon to preach. But I believe most of us have been keeping our own lists. And I doubt that a list of grievances is the sermon we need this morning. (The short-timer in national leadership seems to have grievance pretty well covered.)
But there is another question for us, just below the surface here. The question is how we think about the changes and shifts that we might all agree need to be made. How we understand the turning that we are called to do.
Do we think about that turning as part of a system of cycles…like the seasons?
“for everything there is a season,” wrote the author of Ecclesiastes. “both a time to love and a time to hate.”
Do we imagine the changes that we need … to be on some political pendulum or even some pendulum in our natures…that swings between war and peace…and back to war; between abundance and want…and back… between oppression and liberation…
…
Cycles keep on repeating, after all.
Even though we may call these changes miracles, even though we may take comfort in understanding and even predicting the swings…even though we may celebrate the reversals in direction when they head back our way…
The pendulum keeps swinging.
This imagination for change actually turns out to accept the way things are…at the 30,000’ level…there is always a return.
The movement toward justice, equity and compassion, the movement toward the Beloved Community…can always be reversed.
That’s one understanding.
But there is also an understanding of change as breakthrough…change as break out…
Change in which the old cycles are overturned, like the tables of the money changers in the Temple…
Change in which long-established patterns are interrupted…and a new direction is set, whole new sets of assumptions put in place.
This is a very different imagination for change.
And the difference for us is not just academic.
Think politics for just a moment. The current national Administration set out to reverse everything that the Obama administration accomplished…everything.
Is the goal of the Biden administration just to reverse march again, just to have the pendulum swing back.
Is that the change that most of us are hoping for?
Isn’t the goal to break out of the cycle?
That’s what Jesus, that zealot for justice, was doing. Interrupting the cycles. That’s what the Buddha was doing.
It is the heart of the religious message for me…that we can choose how we want to live. That we can choose where we will turn.
The mystery is not in the cycles….because the cycles promise predictability…what we know.
The mystery is how we break out of the cycles.
Author Alice Walker, a complicated figure herself, speaks about always being ”on the side of revolutionaries, teachers and spiritual leaders who seek transformation of the world. … [This] is like an inner light, …(an inner light)… a compass we might steer by as we set out across the lengthening darkness.”
An inner light that “comes from the simple … understanding that … it is right to protect rather than terrorize others; right to feed people rather than withhold food and medicine; right to want the freedom and joyful existence of all humankind.”
A Beloved Community…that’s what she is describing.
The breakthrough here is to ground our living and our hopes not in a vison of partial or temporary liberation … for only some, but in long-term liberation for us all…
It is a Universalist vision…at its very core. Be clear about that.
Now, there are so many bushes burning…and progress…real progress seems so hard to achieve.
Could we get to commitments so simple that they might come to pass? Not a political program…we’ll need those too, but moral commitments to guide us?
And practices that keep everyone at the table?
Could we… agree…that it is right to protect rather than to terrorize others. Right to feed people. Right to support empowerment. Wrong to benefit from pressing others down.
These are fundamental moral judgments…
Do unto others…
There is not a thing I am preaching that you do not know. Not a thing I am preaching that I do not know…but I still struggle to hold it.
We have not lacked the information…WE are information junkies.
We have not lacked the wisdom…”do unto others” is not a new concept.
And we have not lacked for prophets to follow…the Dr. King’s, the Dorothy Day’s, the Gandhi’s… the ancestors…but also the current activists and the poets and the musicians…Alicia Garza, Greta Thunberg, Abram Kendi, Common, Amanda Gorman, Valerie Kaur….
They are here in Portland as well. These are the people we partner with at the church. So many.
We have what we need. We have the information. The wisdom even. And prophets to prompt us and hold us accountable…
What has been lacking has been the will.
And what has been all too present has been the willingness to take advantage of others and the earth…
Let me be clear, for most of us that means accepting a system that takes advantage of others and the earth…few of us are exploiters personally.
But many of us have been willing… to not see how we have benefitted…many of us.
What has been lacking has been the will to turn…toward a hope that is not partial…a hope that is not for only the few.
It has been the will to turn toward that hope that we have lacked.
We’ve been keeping our eyes on those sheep and the path directly ahead…rather than turning toward that burning bush and the voice…which is really our voice at its best…calling us toward hope.
And hope, I am coming to believe, is itself not a miracle.
Hope is a choice. Hope is a skill we can develop and nurture in community. Hope is an identity we can claim.
That is what the voices of the ancestors tell us.
Hope is a choice we can make.
We have more capacity than we know…and far more ability to change.
“if the drink is bitter,” as our reading said, “turn yourself to wine.”
The bushes are burning. And the spirit of justice, equity and compassion is calling to us.
Will we turn toward one another and unleash the passion and the power of creativity within us.?
As we approach the holidays that the human family has celebrated for so long, even in the longest dark, may we discover that we can turn…together…toward hope.
Topics: Mystery