A couple of weeks ago I read an intriguing book review. Actually, what caught my eye and drew me to the article was a picture of an octopus, which is hardly a common sight on the front page of a major metropolitan newspaper! It was a review of The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss by Claire Nouvian. I read the article and ordered up a copy. It arrived just before I left on this trip.
This large-format coffee table book is absolutely crammed “full measure, pressed down, and overflowing “with color pictures of sea creatures, even some that might remind you of Leviathan, whom God made to sport in that wide and deep sea. There were pages and pages filled with things I recognized, squids and octopuses and fish and jellyfish and other amazing creatures that I’d only seen as wrinkled and deformed, often colorless blobs preserved in formaldehyde. Here were full-color images of living creatures, taken in their native environment, from submersibles! Squids and octopuses with tentacles extended, others with light organs displaying, anglerfish with their lures at work. When I left oceanography that mode of investigating the deep was only just beginning to be used regularly, even though folks have been exploring the deeps in diving bells and bathyscaphes for centuries “Leonardo da Vinci even designed one.
Those pictures moved me in the depths of my being, and brought tears of joy to my eyes “a reminder of the kind of passion that had brought me to oceanography years ago. It’s the same kind of passion that we pray for when we baptize someone “that this new member of the body may have “the gift of joy and wonder in all [God’s] works.”
That same kind of joy and wonder led a lot of you to this place, and has sustained you through the years of study we’re here to celebrate. God speaks to us all in different ways, and finds different lures to beckon us into relationship “just like those anglerfish, God is also fishing in the depths. God is at work in myriad ways, inviting us to explore “and the wonders of creation are just one entry point.
Today is the feast of Justin, who spent the first part of his adult life exploring as well “searching diligently for knowledge, understanding, and wisdom in the realm of knowing called philosophy. This lover of wisdom tells of taking a walk on the beach in Ephesus and being told by a stranger about the Christ. Not the first one to meet Jesus in a stranger on the beach, he says, “straightway a flame was kindled in my soul, and a love of the prophets and those who are friends of Christ possessed me.” That flame kindled in his soul is a sign and expression of the spirit at work.
Justin discovered that the world’s wisdom is not the fullness of things. In some small measure, he discovered in a few short minutes that the searching of his life had not brought the wisdom that is evident in the absurdity of the cross and the overpowering lure and love of God.
The world’s wisdom is not empty, but often we do invest an inordinate amount of energy trying to clutch its wind, insisting that now we know all that God has done or intends to do. God continues to reveal the divine intention and will all around us, in creation, in scripture, in our neighbors, and even in those we find difficult to call neighbors. In the midst of all our searching, God’s foolishness often turns out to be wiser than human wisdom.
As Christians, we have executed neighbors, gone to war, and disposed of siblings all in the name of God. How often, at some remove, have we discovered that God’s wisdom was far greater than our tiny glimpse of it? Galileo showed us a new way of understanding the relationship between earth and sun, yet the church continued for a very long time to insist that God certainly would not have created the world in such a foolish way. As an Anglican Communion we are wrestling with similarly challenging ideas. Yet it is not until we are able or willing to see in a new way “it is not until we get the new mind of metanoia, that we can begin to see God’s wisdom at work, and foolishness in the world’s eyes turns out to be God’s wisdom.
A lot of my time and energy as an oceanographer was spent discriminating among the squids and octopuses that sat pickled in my lab. What species were there? How were they related to each other? Were the specimens I was looking at the same as species that had already been described, or did they represent something entirely new? One of the surprises of looking at this spectacular book was the discovery that some of the old familiar things had new names “the taxonomists have apparently decided that some now belong in a different genus. That’s actually a fairly common occurrence. I think salmon and trout have been reorganized at least twice since I started learning their Latin names.
But the gospel says something even more surprising to those of us who earnestly try to follow Jesus. His wisdom is apparently not interested in discriminating among sorts and conditions. He says, “I’ve come to bring light, so that those who believe in me won’t stay in the dark.” That all sounds pretty familiar, but the next bit is rather a shocker: “I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.” He does go on to say that ultimately the word of God will judge, but Jesus himself isn’t going to waste his time on that just now. “I am here to save the world, not to judge it.” Now all of you who are graduating from this place are undoubtedly sitting there thinking, “well, Jesus is the Word of God, and he’s the one who’s going to issue judgment anyway”¦” That really does not seem to be the point here. Judgment is for later, light-giving is the task of this hour. God gets to decide which species are part of this vast sea for fishing, and what their names will be. Somehow God seems to manage to say to each one, “oh, how beautiful and good “you must be another beloved one”! Jesus seems to be saying that even if someone isn’t apparently listening to his voice, he’s going to keep on bringing light and worry about sorting it all out a great deal later.
The latest installment of Religion and Ethics Newsweekly has a story on Sara Miles, who runs the food bank at St. Gregory Nyssen in San Francisco “in a ministry that is more than full time. A couple of years ago she was a strident atheist and a journalist who first walked in the door because she was curious about what was going on inside. She found a community that feeds people, at the altar on Sundays and at a meal and with sacks of groceries on Fridays, no questions asked. She reports her first experience like this, “And then a woman put a piece of fresh bread in my hand and gave me a goblet of some rather nasty, sweet wine. And I ate the bread and was completely thunderstruck by what I felt happening to me. So I stood there crying, completely unsure of what was happening to me. Got out of the church as quickly as I could before some strange, creepy Christian would try to chat with me, and came back the next week because I was hungry, and kept coming back and kept coming back to take that bread.”
It was the lack of judgment that invited her into that community, where she continues to feed people herself. She goes on to say, “I think what I discovered in that moment when I put the bread in my mouth and was so blown away by the reality of Jesus was that the requirement for faith turned out not to be believing in a doctrine, or knowing how to behave in a church, or being the right kind of person, or being raised correctly, or repeating the rituals. The requirement for faith seemed to be hunger. It was the hunger that I had always had and the willingness to be fed by something I didn’t understand.” (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1039/profile.html)
That hunger is the anglerfish lure of God. Jesus is literally bread to the hungry, and we are going to affirm and experience that once again right here. Jesus is light to those in darkness, bread to those with empty stomachs and lonely hearts, and wisdom to those who yearn to know. And the meal we make both satisfies and keeps us coming back for more.
It is that hunger that you are being invited to feed. Your task is not to expect to satisfy that hunger. Your task is to point to the one who can, and your task “indeed the task we all share “is to encourage that hunger. That may seem a most foolish thing, but it won’t be the first time, or the last, you will think your vocation has something to do with holy foolishness.
Go and feed that hunger “in yourself and in your neighbor, in your enemy and in the stranger.
Hunger for knowledge “and the vulnerability to see what you once knew changed.
Hunger for fullness “and the emptiness that will keep you coming back for more.
Hunger for wisdom “and foolishness.
May you find the blessing and presence of God in the midst of that holy, yearning hunger.