Sermon: Walking Sightless Among the Miracles – Rev. Eric Banner

I forget things. A lot. I’ve got systems built in, but even those seem to fail as often as they succeed. If “out of sight, out of mind” was never intended to be a suggestion, it’s certainly worked that way in my life. Maybe yours, too. Though I’ve never been diagnosed, ADHD runs in my family, and I am just as likely to walk through or a door, or open my laptop, and be drawn in by an open tab I meant to read more of, or an item laying on the table as I am to actually do the thing I went there to do.

And then something happens, and it hits me. Sometimes as a note I left myself, and found again, and sometimes as a sense deep inside me that there is something that is off and needs attention. It happened again not long ago. I was in the middle of a lot of things. We’re redoing our kitchen. It’s going about as well as you might expect. Twists, turns, delays. Nothing extreme, and we’re still getting the whole family fed, but it’s taking time and energy and decisions.
Our kids are living full lives, and reaching major life markers that deserve to be recognized, and that takes planning, and work, too. And it hit me. This time perhaps more literally than it sometimes does. I was noticing the way I felt like I was never quite rested or ready, and I sat down with a book I return to from time to time, “Tending to the Holy” by Bruce & Katherine Epperly, and right in the very first pages was a text I had read so many times before, but had forgotten where it had come from.

It was about the spiritual practice of paying attention, and I knew the words. The admonition to pause, and pay attention. I had those words on a barnwood wall hanging, but they weren’t hanging on a wall, not at my office, not at our home. Nope, things had gotten busy and I had tucked them into the wardrobe in my office, intended to get back to them, to hang them up when I had a minute. And then they stayed there.

I think of church a lot like the experience with that book. About the way it is filled with people and teachings that we need, that we know, but need a place to bring into our being, and see them in all their goodness and glory. Life is filled with moments when the holy threatens to break out, but as often as not, and maybe more often even, we rush by on our way to take out the trash, or send another email, or get to an activity we’re already running 10 minutes late for.
I’ve never been comfortable being an example to others. I know my own shortcomings too well. Being a religious professional just amped up the intensity on that another few notches. I tend to think that if I am an example, it’s in my failings more than anything. I don’t spend as much time in thoughtful reflection, or prayer, or meditation, as I should. The Epperlys argue that ministers should always have a study, not an office, to avoid the trap of being an administrator of a medium sized nonprofit, and instead be people who take time to study in deep and meaningful ways, looking always for the new light waiting yet to break forth from this holy world.

So there it was, this sign, in fact. The one on the chancel here. The reminder that the very first spiritual practice comes when we pause long enough to notice. Long enough to see what was always there, but that we had tucked away in the corners of our minds. Or, as they noted in the foreward to their book, we walk sightless among the miracles.
That phrase is from a piece of Jewish liturgy. A prayer, in fact. It says –

Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing; let there be moments when Your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder: How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it!
— From the Mishkan T’filah, “A Prayer for Shabbat”

It reminded me of something we heard in this very room last week. If you weren’t here, our Green First Task Force led the service, and they offered us all a reminder of the difference between dust and dirt and soil. If you aren’t a gardener you might not know that good dirt, good soil, is made up of at least three core parts. The gritty, sandy parts that help let water in, and flow through and around the channels. The organic portion, made of the remnants of the plants that have lived and died to build up the soil for generations. And the clay parts, that hold important minerals, and yet, on its own is just a slippery mess. Clay, that on its own can sit for years without supporting life, but when touched by the power of something more, can become everything from bricks to bowls, from dust to possibility.

Oh, those words stung a little when I saw them on the page. Days pass and years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles.

My colleague, the Rev. Dr. Wayne Arnason, wrote the words of our reading this morning in a sermon he gave many years ago.

“Flowing beneath our two hundred years of distinct existence in America as a liberal faith tradition that has challenged the power of the other religious traditions to define what is holy and sacred for us, there has been a river of experience, an individual and collective experience of the holy, that has motivated us to gather in religious communities and sustain our ways of being religious.”

I need the holy. I need it in my life. My life that is ever threatened to be pulled apart into pieces too small for the goodness of human living that is at the center of it. People are fighting all the time over what is holy, and what the holy is. Does it exist, or are we fooling ourselves?

Truth be told, I don’t know the answers to those questions. I don’t know that I ever will. All I know is that in the moments when I am most at wits end, I am also most in need of the presence of a grounding force, a way of being, that connects me to all that is, and ever was, and ever will be. Though the Epperlys are Christian ministers, and the words on this board are from a spiritual director, Gerald May, who was also a clinical psychiatrist, and a Vietnam conscientious objector, you’ll remember the words of our title this morning are from Judaism. In each of them, these widely disparate traditions, there is this same sense that there is more, much more, if only we will take time to see it. Even the Buddhists know it.

Thich Nhat Hahn wrote about a way of seeing what the Buddhists call Interdependent Origination. It’s the idea that nothing exists alone. That we are all part of Indra’s net. That any time you try to find one thing and pull it apart from the rest, you discover it all tied together.

“If you are a poet,” he wrote, “you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.”

The point is that the holy is not the special province of any one people or place or time. It is available to all of us if we will stop to notice it. To see it. To touch it. To feel it. To know it.

This is a subversive teaching. It takes the power out of the hands of a special class who hold it in places far away, behind doors and curtains, and it brings it into the ordinary, extraordinary places of our daily lives.

Lin-Chi was a Zen Buddhist teacher more than a millenia ago. “What truth am I talking about?” he asked. “I am talking about the truth of the ground of mind, which can enter into the ordinary and the sacred, into the pure and the polluted, into the absolute and the conventional, and yet is not absolute or conventional, ordinary or sacred, but is able to give names to all the absolute, conventional, ordinary, and sacred. Someone who has realized this cannot be labeled by the absolute or the conventional, by the ordinary or the sacred. If you can grasp it, then use it, without labeling it anymore.

This is called the mystic teaching.” And then he went on, in such a very Buddhist way. He said “Now there is an obsession with Buddhism that is mixed in with the real thing. Those with clear eyes cut through both obsession and Buddhism. If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion.”

Bobbing in the ocean of delusion. Wandering sightless among the miracles. Waking up to realize that the holy was present all along, and you did not know it.

This is the challenge of our life. The challenge of too much to do and not enough time to do it in. The challenge of staying present to ground of all being, when it is so easy to feel anything but grounded.

The world is filled with people who profit from our anxieties, from our misdirected attention, from our grasping for solutions that only they can provide in their trademarked and pattened six steps solution available to you for only $19.95 a month, but you don’t have to buy what they are selling. You don’t have to buy anything at all. Not their click-bait. Not their anything.

The holy is everywhere, all the time. And that means something terribly important. It means that every element of our day has the opportunity for us to find renewal and reconnection.

So may you pause this day, and every day, long enough to notice what is, and what may yet be. Long enough to be stretched beyond the limits others would put upon you, beyond the confinement of labels that are less than all of who you are, and who you may yet be. And then, and only then, when you have found the spirit alive in you once more, when you have found yourself, when you have found the miracles that were always present, see them, and see what they are calling you towards. For all that is your life, with thanks, and praise.

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister