Whether it’s a birth or a death, a change in leadership or a societal shift, there’s something to let go of and something to embrace. A vibrant spirituality can help us cross through whatever transition is before us with awareness, intention, and openness to what-has-never-been-before. It’s been said that if we don’t learn to bend, we may well break. So, what is it that can keep us flexible, open, and able to enter the new? How can we find meaning, insight, and a sense of being grounded so we don’t wander aimlessly?
“This Brave and Startling Truth” is a sermon based on Isaiah 6.1-8 and an excerpt of Maya Angelou’s “Brave and Startling Truth.” Preached on May 30, 2021, Trinity Sunday.
1.
“When we come to it,” the poet, Maya Angelou, says—when we come to embrace this “brave and startling truth,”
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely . . .
When we come to it, we will rise up into the possibility that we can, together, create something that has never been before.
What is it that can take—
this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
[whose hands can hold a gun and strike down coworkers in San Jose]
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
[because from some remote location a soldier can push a button and let loose a rain of bombs on children in Gaza]
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing,
[where frontline workers have risked their lives to offer such]
irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
[such a transformation can happen, does happen in our world, and is happening where people make it unequivocally clear that #blacklivesmatter and there will be #noasianhate in our town]
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
[we are neither Republicans nor Democrats, Jews nor Palestinians, Hindus nor Muslims, white nor brown, male nor female, old nor young]
When we come to it, what we never thought possible becomes possible, because:
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman . . .
and every child, no matter who they are, can flourish.
When we come to it,
[this brave and startling truth]
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
2.
We must “come to it” if we are to survive on this “wayward, floating body,” if the human experiment isn’t going to be some flash in the pan of a short-term species that held such promise but failed. Yes, Maya Angelou, “We [human beings] must come to it.”
Isaiah came to it twenty-eight hundred years ago, “In the year that King Uzziah died.”
Moments of transition are threshold moments. Whether it’s the death of a king or a change in administration, a birth or a divorce, a job change or the re-opening of our society after a long, beleaguering cocooning of our lives during this pandemic, moments of transition can be moments of unveiling.
This scriptured story about a prophet tells us that in the midst of a turbulent threshold moment long ago in the Middle East, a man named Isaiah experienced something that helped him not only get though it, but, in Maya Angelou’s words, “come to it.”
The King dies. Competitors vie for power. Conspiracies arise. But Isaiah sees, beyond all their petty power plays, something bigger. Isaiah sees God “sitting on a throne, high and lofty.” Isaiah experiences a presence so vast that seraphs, six-winged mythic creatures, fly around God’s throne, a presence so big, the temple contains only the hem of God’s robe, and the whole place shakes as the seraphs sing “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, / the whole earth is full of your glory!” and the place is filled with smoke. Isaiah sees all this and falls on his knees in awe.
A time comes when we need to see something so big that all our smaller fears fall away. That’s what awe is for. Unfortunately, the word “awful” in our modern world is associated with something unpleasant or negative. “The place smelled awful.” Or “I look awful in a swimsuit.” Or “I feel just awful today and can’t come to work.” Centuries ago, the word “awful” referred to something that inspired reverence, wonder, and humility. Our ancestors would have used the word this way: “Isaiah had an awful experience of God that changed his life.”
There’s been plenty these few years that’s been “awful” in the modern sense of the word, but not “awe-full” enough in the ancient sense of the word.
Awe-full in the ancient sense of the word is what the story teller wants us to experience. Awe-full in the ancient sense of the word is what Maya Angelou says we all must “come to,” if—
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman . . .
and every child, no matter who they are, how they look, where they live or where they’re from, who they love or what they seek, what they worship or the language they speak, every person is holy, precious, and necessary for the wellbeing of the world.
3.
Howard Thurman knew the awe-full reality of God.
Thurman was the grandson of slaves. Born before the advent of the automobile, he died the year IBM shipped the first personal computer. An author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader, Thurman’s awe-full vision of God is of the One who is in all, through all, and who unites all things. To live into the fullness of our humanity, he preached, we need an experience of this oneness of spirit and matter; when we’ve encountered that, the experience serves as a threshold, or doorway, out, from our souls and toward the world, opening us to the vast mystery of God’s oneness with everything and everything’s oneness with God. This “awe-full” experience, in the older sense of the word, is what makes it possible for us to do the work necessary to, in Maya Angelou’s memorable words, “fashion for this earth / A climate where every man and every woman [and every child, no matter who they are]” can thrive.
In his classic book, Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman argues that when we have an experience of the oneness of God we will also feel deeply in ourselves the wounds of our battered world and the suffering and cries and needs of those “with their backs against the wall”—the marginalized, dehumanized, and ostracized.
Mysticism, the religious experience of divine union, isn’t an escape from the world into some interior, private navel-gazing. No, when we have touched the reality that all-is-one, inaction is no longer an option. There is a direct path from prayer to politics, meditation to mediation, silence to social action. The awe-full experience of divine union challenges all dualisms, every ideology that pits one against another, anything that fosters competitiveness rather than cooperation, exceptionalism instead of egalitarianism.
This overcoming of dualisms, this challenge to every notion of independence, division, and competitiveness, is what the Christian teaching about God as Trinity is about. When we say traditionally that God is three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—or in new trinitarian expressions like Mother, Wisdom, and Sacred Fire—each member of the Trinity sharing the same essence, we are saying that God as Trinity is a pattern for the community inherent between all things. All things, in essence, are one. When we speak of God as Trinity, we’re saying that God’s very nature is dynamic not static, unitive, not divisive.
Simply put, I like to say that the Trinity urges us to believe that if the three members of the Trinity can get along as one, then we can too; if God is indivisible, then we are too; if there is no hierarchy in God, there is to be no hierarchy among us; if all parts of God are equal and necessary, all of us are equal and necessary.
This is the “brave and startling truth” that laid Isaiah low in awe. He heard the seraphs say, “The whole earth is full of God’s glory.”
4.
Isaiah’s mystic encounter with God laid him low with an awe that overwhelmed all the other fears that crushed in upon him “in the year King Uzziah died.” But that encounter also overwhelmed his humanity. This vision of God’s immensity and the glory that indwells everything made him feel not only puny but ridiculous in comparison.
If you’ve ever stood in awe at the night sky, the panoply of stars shining their light from zillions upon zillions of miles away and suddenly found yourself saying, “Oh, my God, what am I in light of all that?” then you’ve had a mystical encounter. You might have brushed it off, gone back inside to an episode of Schitt’s Creek or finished off a gin and tonic and ignored what just came to you because it was too big, too grand, too humiliating to take in.
But if you stayed with it, or if you stay with it next time, it just might carry you in the direction you need to go. And you just might find some wing-ed seraph flying toward you or a meteor streaking across the sky before you or a barn own swooping past you or a little voice inside your head whispering to you, then, like Isaiah, you might hear something like, “Yeah, you’re right. From your usual vantage point, you’re not much next to all this, not much at all. But here’s the deal: I’ve made you one with it all. You are made of the stuff of stars and planets, trees and seas, rocks and rivers. And that means you have a calling, a divine vocation. You now know this ‘brave and startling truth:’ all is one and I am one with all. I want to send you from this experience to do something good in our world. Will you go?”
Isaiah said, “Here I am; send me!”
What will you do with this “brave and startling truth”?
“We must proclaim the truth,” preached Howard Thurman, “that all life is one and that we are all of us tied together. Therefore it is mandatory that we work for a society in which the least person can find refuge and refreshment. Lay your lives on the altar of social change, [environmental stewardship,] so that wherever you are, there the [fullness] of God is [made manifest, and goodness and beauty and justice will come]!”
In the year of the Insurrection . . .
In the year of Inauguration . . .
In the year Derek Chauvin was declared guilty . . .
In the year of the vaccine . . .
In the year we took off our masks, went out for dinner again, met with our friends again, went to the theater again, and went back to church again . . .
In that year, let us say, “We saw God. We saw that God is one and one with everything and that everything is one with God; and because of that, as Maya Angelou prophesies:
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
and every child, no matter who they are, how they look, where they live or where they’re from, who they love or what they seek, what they worship or the language they speak, every person is holy, precious, and necessary for the wellbeing of the world.
When we come to it, says Maya Angelou,
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world . . .
because in this year of such massive transition, this threshold to what has never been before, this moment of such possibility we saw a vision of the interconnected nature of all things and said, “Here I am” to this “brave and startling truth;” “send me.”
After this sermon, a friend of my sent me this link to a video meditation by a friend of his. It’s an exquisite witness to just what I’m talking about in this sermon. Watch when you have eight minutes to rest in the vision it offers.