Silence

A sermon by Andrew Colman

From the book Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird

“Union with God is not something we acquire by technique but the grounding truth of our lives that engenders the very search for God.

Because God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and creator is such that by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent, the fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition.

The sense of separation from God is real, but the meeting of stillness reveals that this perceived separation does not have the last word. The illusion of separation is generated by the mind and is sustained by the riveting of our attention to the interior soap opera and the constant chatter of the cocktail party going on in our heads. For most of us, this is what normal is. We are good at coming up with ways of coping with this perceived separation. (consumer-driven entertainment culture takes care of much of it.)

But some of us are not as good at coping, so we drink ourselves into oblivion or hurt ourselves so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside. The grace of salvation, the grace of Christian wholeness that flowers in silence, dispels this illusion of separation, for when the mind is brought to stillness and all our strategies of acquisition have dropped, deeper truth presents itself. We are and have always been one with God, and we are all one in God.”

Martin Laird. He’s a catholic monk who is kind of a modern-day St. John of the Cross, meaning he is a contemplative. His whole spiritual world revolves around the act of contemplative prayer.

The kind of prayer where ___ in silence and stillness  - let the chatter, or soap opera of the mind, as he calls it, drift away until there is nothing left other than you and God.

It is something that we are, in fact, quite familiar with here.

There are silences woven into our service - long ones where we speak the truth of our lives, knowing that God is merciful and just and that we will always be brought home.

Sometimes, during the prayers of the people, we hear a prayer reminiscent of this poem by Edwina Gateley.

Let Your God Love You

Be silent.
Be still.
Alone.
Empty
Before your God.
Say nothing.
Ask nothing.
Be silent.
Be still.
Let your God look upon you.
That is all.
God knows.
God understands.
God loves you
With an enormous love,
And only wants
To look upon you
With that love.
Quiet.
Still.
Be.

Let your God—
Love you.

—

Let's move one step over for a second and turn our attention to this week’s Gospel reading.

Jesus clearing the temple.

Jesus making a whip of cords to drive the cattle and the sheep out. Which would have sent their vendors chasing after them to stop their inventory from running away completely or damaging something they might have to pay to repair.

Jesus told the dove vendors to take their cages out of The Temple of God.

Jesus overturning tables of the currency exchangers, spilling the Gold all over the floor.

The pharisee running up demanding a sign, maybe a miracle or a perfectly quoted piece of scripture and all he said was a cryptic prophecy that nobody could have understood… tear this temple down. It will be rebuilt in three days.

Eventually… the chaos… the soap opera will have come to an end.

And then, for at least a few moments, while people would be trying to figure out how and where to start cleaning up.

Silence.

Stillness.

Evidence of chaos, of course, always…

But Silence and Stillness.

—

A contemporary and good reading of this event is that Jesus walked into the temple and saw the people with money taking advantage of the pilgrims who would have travelled far to make their sacrifices at the temple. The money changers were charging an extra few percentage points on the exchange, leaving these devout and pious people without a choice but to pay the inflated prices. They were taking advantage of their love of God in God’s house!

Don’t get me wrong, that is very much worth overturning tables for.

—

But maybe what Jesus was even more upset about was that these pilgrims, these people who loved God, had just spent days coming to be with God in the temple. They had just spent days contemplating things done better left undone and the things they’d failed to do. They had spent days thinking about all the things that they were eternally grateful for. They had spent days travelling to the place where God’s Glory, where the presence of God resides… and they ended up in a mall wondering if God could be in such a place of contradiction!

Remember Martin Laird - our sense of separation from God is the Great illusion - God does not know how to be absent. God is there, God is present, make no mistake.

But so is the inventory of the sacrifice vendors. The cows, sheep, and doves were reduced to purely human transactional objects being sold in the most convenient, cost-effective place possible. No longer sacrificial but transactional.

We first see these laws of sacrifice in Leviticus - a few of us were talking about this last Wednesday after the Lenten series. In Leviticus, there would have been no vendors; the Israelites were still in the wilderness. So when it was time to make a sacrifice, you had to walk out to your flock, inspect the animals for a blemish, tie that animal up and walk it back to your home, then walk it to the opening of the tent and offer it to the priests.

There was nothing convenient about it. But it was not meant to be convenient - it was meant to give the person time with God, time to contemplate all that's gone wrong, and all that’s gone well. Time walking through the fields, just you and God, time where God could look upon you and love you.

That was the purpose of going to the temple - and then when these pilgrims showed up after their long, inconvenient, hopefully somewhat contemplative journey,

to the place where God is closest…

a mall, price gouging, bartering, clanking coins…

But this week - Jesus cleared the temple for us - leaving it as a space to be with God and God alone.

—

We are now in the depths of Lent. We’ve been invited to wrestle with our temptations, we’ve been invited to stand in the place of Peter and have our own ideas of how the world should work rebuked.

This week, we are invited into the moment in the temple after our temptations have been driven out after the tables of our desires have been overturned.

We’re invited into the moment after because the driving out and the overturning was not the point; it was not the end that Jesus was after. It was the means.

The end is that the Temple was brought back to rights. The temple was once again made a place where people could come and be silent and still with God.

But he takes it a step further. That temple of stone will no longer be the only place where God dwells. God in Jesus is the temple. God in the Holy Spirit will be present with us. Long journeys and sacrifices, though they may be helpful, will no longer be necessary to dwell in the still silence with God.

This week, we are invited into the moment where the evidence of all of the chaos is still around us, yet it’s just you and God.

This week, we are invited, having been tempted and rebuked in the midst of the wilderness of Lent, to

Be silent.
Be still.
Alone.
Empty
Before your God.
Say nothing.
Ask nothing.
Be silent.
Be still.
Let your God look upon you.
Let God Love you.
Be.