Proper 11 A

Genesis 28.10-19. I suppose my mysticism comes from the influence of the late medieval mystics on Calvin. This is a rather unsung feature of Calvinism that the more stolid burghers who more generally represent my tradition have missed. But it is there. Mystical moments come as fleeting instances of insight incapable of verbal reproduction. You need to be there. Three mystical experiences, more intense, rivalling Jacob’s vision of angelic traffic, were all from my young adult years. Two of the three were induced by literature rather than by what we have defined as strictly orthodox religion. The earlier experience came the first time I heard Alan Ginsburg read. It was Wichita Vortex Sutra in a huge auditorium of a lecture hall in Indiana University, as arid a place as the wilderness at Luz where Jacob stopped for the night, but crowded to the rafters with desperate undergraduates who had, like me, grown up spiritually hungry in the small towns and farm communities of Midwest America. It was an incredible experience, as if I had been transported to a nowhere emptiness like West Texas or as if Ginsberg’s incantation had raised me several removes from ordinary earthbound experience. The second experience came as I finished reading Melville’s Moby Dick for the first time. I was sitting on the floor in the late afternoon by a roaring fire. And then it was like a second later the room was dark, the coals in the fireplace had gone cold. In between time, any sense of ego had disappeared as who I was merged with the universe. That is the only way I can describe it. Clearly, I hadn’t fallen asleep, as when I returned to ordinary consciousness I was still sitting erect on the floor beside the fireplace, now gone cold, hours later.

The third experience occurred following my first real experience of desperate poverty on the twelfth floor of a public housing project in South Side Chicago. I don’t need to go into the experience itself, only to say that when I returned to my flat I sat there in a trance for the whole weekend, eyes wide open but not really seeing anything as the wheels of my consciousness slowly reconfigured themselves.

Jacob’s experience of the angelic traffic at Bethel gives a clue to a patriarchal narrative in which the main characters are not so much free agents as they are figures in a bigger story for which God is the protagonist. We saw this most vividly in the story of Abraham and Isaac at Mount Moriah in which it is clear how little Abraham understands about the story he is caught up in. Here at Bethel we get the connection that explains what is happening, and what is happening is what all mysticism opens a window to. The story in which we have always considered ourselves to be the heroes are not, in fact, our stories at all, but God’s. This is the mystical vision. For all Jacob’s efforts to throw the dice in his favour, at the end of the day it is the grace of God that shapes his life. Jacob, unsure what to say, says that if God sticks with him, providing for his subsistence (“bread and clothing” was shorthand for the provisions given to slaves and seasonal workers—“daily bread” as we say in the prayer), then this cairn he has set up will be the God’s dwelling place, Bethel (house of God). He doesn’t even have to say this. God will stick with him, willy nilly, and this is God’s abode, a “thin place”, as George MacLeod described Iona, where earth is in easy access of heaven.

I remember with great embarrassment the time earlier in my sojourn here in the UK when I was reading this lesson from Romans (8.12-25) when I was still getting my bearings with British pronunciation, learning to say “garage” with the accent on the first syllable and “controversy” with the accept on the second. Over here, we pronounce the “h” speaking of a “herb” (it’s silent in the States) and often don’t when speaking of an “horse”. How were we supposed to do it when we said, verse 17, “and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and join heirs with Christ”. It certainly did sound odd when I gave “heirs” a hard “h”. All three times. How stupid. This has noting to do with explicating the actual lesson. I just wanted to confess it.

It continues to fascinate me that Paul unfolds the meaning of Jesus as the Messiah by bringing our own spiritual experience in line with his—sonship with God Is something we share. As last week’s lesson spoke of the same Spirit of God that raised Christ from the dead (at his conversion, at his baptism?) being within us to raise us to new life (at our conversion, baptism?), so this week “all who are led by the Spirit, they are sons of God” (Romans 8.14). We, like Jesus, are adopted as God’s sons (and daughters)—Paul’s language is much more in line with Mark and John, and he seems to know nothing of the kind of birth narrative we have in Matthew and Luke.

There is a big “if” qualification here. If we suffer like him, we will be glorified like him. Suffering, here, is a broader, more essential condition of our humanity than the specific, historical experience of persecution, but it is nevertheless a stance taken and a witness made. For Paul, the great visionary, any mystical experience like the exuberant sense of entering into adoption as a child of God at baptism is lived out practically, and here this is a suffering taken on as solidarity with creation itself, a fundamental one-ness with a world that is always in a state of becoming, as Aristotle would say, or a state of flux, more Platonically conceived. In order to grasp what Paul is on about I think we have to get into the messy, eclectic mix of Hellenistic philosophical discourse. For the Stoics, for instance, the spiritual goal was to rise above the essential “suffering” the self (ego) experienced in the world through the pursuit of an inner harmony and self-control that in turn resulted in public responsibility and civil order. Paul takes a different tack. We are to suffer “with [Christ]” as a way of living in solidarity with all who can only hope for a better future. There is this sense of companionship that is there from the very beginning, or lived out from baptism, as we live out a sense of oneness with the Spirit of God that is inseparable from our sense of oneness with others and with creation itself. This solidarity is of course the key to that future we hope for but do not see. In a sense, it is already the fulfilment of that hope, though the realisation of that may only come in fleeting visions, like Jacob’s fleeting vision of the traffic of angels between earth and heaven.

The story in Matthew is the story of the weeds sown among the corn in Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43. Think about what this parable may have felt like had it not been so awkwardly interpreted by Matthew’s follow-up allegorical explanation, allegory being a mode of interpretation foreign to Semitic practice. What if the original parable had gone something like, “The kingdom of heaven is like what happens when the farm workers refrain from pulling up the weeds lest they inadvertently pull up the corn in the process." Clear judgement will come. But the emphasis is thrown not so much on the weeds and the evil one as it is on the sense of forbearance, a fundamental Christian virtue. Those who refrain from condemnation have the mind of Christ, who was a servant of all, who suffered in solidarity with all. To refrain from judgement, then, is to live in a sense of oneness with the Spirit of God that flows through who we most deeply are. Todd Weir has a brilliant take on this reading, quoted on The Text This Week website: "The psychologist Carl Jung would have approved of the parable of the wheat and tares. Jung explored the nature of the unconscious “shadow” that lives in each soul." Several weeks ago I explored Jung’s concept of the unconscious “shadow” in terms of the process of individuation and the sense of accepting ourselves as whole persons, shadow, warts and all. The parable invites us to see as God sees, to open our lives to God’s world- and self-transforming Spirit. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ. This is an extraordinarily difficult lesson to learn about ourselves. Sometimes it takes a bit of a mystical vision, to get the whole picture.