January 15, 2017: "From Chaos to Mystery" Fr. Carey Stone


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Epiphany 2A’17

15 January 2017

John 1.29-42

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

North Little Rock, Arkansas

The Rev. Carey Stone

 

O God of mysterious love, take our chaos and convert it to mystery that we might be transformed into your likeness and then invite others to come and see. Amen.

 

When I was a teenager I used to love to watch a TV program called “The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Mysteries.” It starred Parker Stevenson, Pamela Sue Martin, and teen heartthrob Shaun Cassidy! In the opening credits there was the image of a huge maze symbolizing the dark corners of mystery that the young sleuths would be exploring in that nights episode.

 

In one episode someone was actually trapped in that life sized maze and wandered in chaos aimlessly for hours. To be physically in a maze is a good symbol for what the chaos of our lives is like – filled with twists, turns, dead ends, and back tracks - lost!

 

In trying to deal with the chaos the message offered to us by the increasingly secular world is to find a ‘quick fix’ and to somehow get back ‘in control.’  Our egos do not like to be out of control. Thus billions of dollars are spent each year on diet plans, gym memberships, (especially during January and February) basically anything that can help us to get control of our health and wealth so that we can control our physical and financial destinies. It would seem that Control is the answer to the chaos of our lives. But is control just another ego-centered strategy that takes us deeper into the maze of options of our own making.

 

Jesus on the other hand doesn’t’ offer us a quick fix so that we can be back in control but he offers us a gentle path that over time converts our chaos into mystery, leading us to submit our lives to a power greater than ourselves that can sustain us through all that life can throw at us. 

 

The Gospel reading from today is quite mysterious you have the prophet John the Baptist who sees Jesus and calls him the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Next, the Spirit descends like a dove upon Jesus. Then two of John’s disciples are standing next to him and once again Jesus walks by and John says, “Look, here is the Lamb of God” and these two disciples take out after Jesus.  Then Jesus, not in a hurry to gain new followers asks them what they were looking for.  Jesus went deeper and rather than give them The answer he asked them a question that spoke to the greatest need of their hearts, but then they have a peculiar response, “where are you staying?” And since the passage tells us it was four o’clock they were in effect inviting themselves for dinner – a rather rude thing to do in most cultures. Once again Jesus doesn’t offer them any real answer other than to say “Come and see.” He invited them into the mystery of following him and they wind up at his house all without knowing what it would mean for their future lives. He was inviting them into the first phase of a whole new way of living – a way of living in faithful trust that God was the God over all chaos. He was going to take the maze of their chaotic lives and transform them into divinely directed mystery. It was no accident that stories of the Christian faith that were dramatized in the village streets and on cathedral grounds during the middle ages were called “mystery plays.”

 

We have a special treasure right here at St. Luke’s that is a symbol of the divine transformation that happens through the spiritual journey– our labyrinth. It is often incorrectly called a maze but it isn’t a maze at all. When you enter a labyrinth you soon discover that there are no wrong turns, no dead ends, no aimless wandering. What you will find is that you cannot get lost in a labyrinth, you will experience a forward path and ever winding path that will take you very close to the center and then just as you believe you have arrived at your destination with God, out the path will take you to the outer edges of the labyrinth. But, the good news is no matter where you are in the labyrinth you are never lost, if you simply stay on the path you will arrive safely at your destination the open place in the center where God dwells within.

 

All the way back, beginning with Father Abraham to the disciples in the Gospels to the modern disciples of today the journey into the light is one of mystery but it is a divine mystery. In the encounter with Jesus at the home where he was staying one of the disciples, Andrew is so filled with joy that he had to go and get his brother Simon. He rushes back to the house and presents his brother Simon to Jesus and something even more wonderfully mysterious happens, Jesus changes his name from Simon which in Greek means ‘snub-nosed ’, to Peter, which in Greek means “rock.” Jesus saw more than a snub-nosed, big mouthed fisherman, when he looked at Simon he saw his true soul he saw Peter, a rock, someone who would later become the founding apostle of Christ’s Church! When Simon handed over the reins of his life to Jesus it was as Richard Rohr says, “a giving up of control to receive a free gift and finding a new kind of “control.”[1] John Greenleaf Whittier had a poetic way to communicate the journey of faith:

“Nothing before, nothing behind;
The steps of faith
Fall on the seeming void, and find
The Rock beneath.”

 

Mystery and giving up control – I don’t think these two things are very popular – yet it’s the way of faith that leads us to our true selves – that self, made in God’s image.

 

When we experience this we too will become like Andrew and reach out in love with the message of the Good News that the Christ who knows us better than we know ourselves, who knows what will make us truly happy invites us to look into the divine mystery of faith. Today Jesus invites us once again to exchange our maze for a labyrinth, our chaos for His divine mystery, wont you “Come and see?”

 

 

 

 

 



[1] Rohr, Richard Breathing Under Water