Third Sunday in Lent

Yesterday was Russell White’s funeral. He died at the beginning of the pandemic when he was 93 years old.

Next Sunday we’ll hold a funeral for Al Watts who died last week at 98.

And…today we’ll baptize Augustine Wilder Dodson, who’s just shy of 7 days old.

The Welcome and Inclusion team is struggling to find a date to welcome all the new members who want to join the church – there’s too many of them to find a common day that works for everyone.

What a gift to be the church – to be part of a community that spans the ages, to be able to hold Augustine in our arms and feel his new, soft skin, to hand the gift of a basin and towel to a new member, to drop a handful of soil over Lynn Shaub’s ashes, that we’ll be interring in the Memorial Garden later today.

Such a gift to belong to one another in this sacred arc of life, to this mysterious arc of life.

In her late 90s, my grandmother would sit on her porch, day after day, patiently studying the slow movement of the clouds. I was her care giver at the time, often busy with the normal routine of running a household. But I’d look in on her throughout the day, and – when she saw me come out – she’d give voice to her inner musings. It was always the same: “I wonder what it’s all about. I wonder what it’s all about.” At 22, confident of my faith and my doctrine, I was happy to enter into this existential dialogue with her, to greet my atheist grandmother with compelling truths.

Which, I imagine, I would still do. In my way.

But as my own years increase, as I march further on in this arc of life – more and more – I discover myself companion with her and her musings. I, too, wonder what it’s all about.

It’s not that I’m joining her “on the dark side” of atheism. But, rather, who I believe God to be won’t stay still. “God” keeps growing beyond the places I’ve carved out for him. He won’t be bound by the tidiness of my doctrine. He keeps escaping the church’s preferential claims on him. He won’t stay safely distant in heaven, or even peacefully tucked into the privacy of my heart where I’d welcomed Jesus as a child in Sunday School. God keeps popping up in surprising and unexpected places. And even the words we use for God, our language – the metaphors and pronouns we give him (or her, or them!) – they’re all too small, it turns out. Even the word “God” is suspect, saturated and encumbered as it is with centuries of defining that so vastly misrepresents the divine.

But what are we to do? We need words. We rely on language.

And none of this is to say our heritage or tradition is wrong. It’s simply to say that anything we can conceive of God – in our finiteness – must be vastly insufficient to hold the infinity of who God truly is.

Which is why, more and more, I find myself so captivated by the name God chooses when meeting Moses at the burning bush: “I AM WHO I AM,” Says God. “You shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.”

What words does God use? How is God to be known to us? Referred to by us? I AM. Our language will always be but a mirror reflecting true reality. But within its limitations, the words that get closest to naming God, to showing us God, is I AM. It is a verb. It is a verb of being. Neither past, nor future, but forever present. After all, the past no longer is, the future does not yet exist. True reality is the present. And that present, that presence, is God, the I AM. Forever present, ceaselessly attentive, the being in all things. This is our God.

When we weep at the death of a loved one, we weep not alone, but with the I AM who is with us, and who remains the I AM with the one we have lost, so that within the I am, there is no chasm between us.

When we bear witness to the baptism of Augustine, he is being baptized into the I AM in which we and millions have also been baptized.

And the water itself – if it too is the eternal abode of the eternal I AM, then can we dare to say that every river, every ocean, every drop of rain, every waft of fog, every molecule of water coursing through every stem and leaf, through every drinking, peeing creature, is the ceaseless abode of I AM?

Everywhere. Always. Without boundary. Without division. Without haste or conclusion. I AM.

As I’ve found myself drawn to such an elemental, everywhere-present, I AM God, I’ve been experimenting with focusing my prayers on the I AM. I was praying the other day, and I found myself simply saying in my spirit, over and over again, I AM, I AM. At one level, it was a mantra of sorts – a way of centering my spirit. But it was also, certainly, a deliberate address to God, using the name God has given us, as the one on whom my attention and desire was directed. But it went deeper. The name itself became something of an icon – a portal to meet God where God was. And where is the I AM? In every place, in every thing, in every manner of existence, I AM. Which meant, I soon discovered I was likewise making a declaration about myself. I am. I am, too. I exist. I am a desired part of God’s creation, in which God dwells, no less worthy than anything else in existence.

Such that Jesus’ prayer, shortly before his crucifixion, suddenly takes on such poignancy and allure. Over and over (if you’ll remember) he weaves a kind of spell: “that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, and I am in you and you are in me and the Father and I are one and you and I are one.” In and out, these twisting, plaiting strands of I AM. I AM.

Which brings us to this breathtaking conclusion that if indeed there is no division within the I AM, then there is no division within us, for we are in God and God in us.

And it is into this oneness that Augustine will be baptized. That is why we use the language of Trinity – when talking of God and baptizing in the name of God – that the three are one and the one are three. And Augustine is woven into that union of being. Such that, when he learns to speak, he can rightly declare, “I am, for I am one with the Great I AM.” And so, too, he is one with Russell and Lynn and Al, members of his church that he will never know. But they all belong to each other.

And though this spirit of oneness may truly be the reality of all existence, it is not to deny the falsehoods that masquerade themselves as reality to us: the self-centeredness, the fear, the violence, the greed – everything (in essence) that divides us – all these false I ams that we so readily obey.

Many years ago, a friend of mine moved into a neighborhood in the inner city with his wife and several friends. Their church was in that neighborhood and they wanted, by the way they lived with each other and their neighbors, to be true community, practicing the values of the Kingdom of God. One day there’d been a shooting nearby, someone was killed, and as had become their all too frequent practice, they gathered some candles and went to keep vigil where the man had been shot. It was no one they knew, but it was their neighborhood, so they prayed in solidarity. But a friend of the guy who’d been killed was there – wailing in a kind of raw, furious grief. And when he saw my friend, all his anger turned on him, “What’s that white dude doing here,” and he chased him, and tackled him, and beat him up – knocked him unconscious. Later that week, still reeling from the attack, a drunk driver crashed into his car that was parked in front of his house, then and sped away. A little while later that week, he was riding his bike and was hit by a bus. It was simply this hellish week.

And in the months that followed, he realized he was dealing with a form of PTSD. He wasn’t sleeping well. He was angry and anxious, and frightened. And, interestingly, all his trauma was consolidating in a repeated fantasy of kicking the crap out of the guy who wrecked his car! But this fantasy of revenge was doing nothing for his soul. The trauma was simply perpetuating itself.

Several months later, still struggling, he went on a kind of spiritual retreat. And at one point he was in a pool. But he wasn’t really swimming. He was just kind of floating, in this deliberate posture of prayer and meditation. And as he was floating and praying, he had a kind of vision. He saw the drunk guy coming towards him, and there was a kind of glowing light in his chest. And my friend looked down and saw that he, too, had the same light glowing in his chest. And when the guy got to him, he raised up his hands, and hugged him. And my friend hugged him back. And in that moment, the trauma ended. It was that real for him.

And I tell this story today, because it becomes for us a kind of baptism story. Floating in the waters – the cleansing, healing waters – true reality entered in. God was in the drunk man. And God was in my friend. And the God who is one, who makes them one, brought them together with an embrace.

Yes, my friend had really been beat up. Yes, his car had really been wrecked. But it was a lie to believe those men were his enemies, that the painful, divisive circumstances of this life should have the final word on who we will be together. Why not “love” be the final word? Why not “forgiveness” be the final world? Why not “grace?”

For indeed, those are exactly the final words that our God chooses.

I AM love.

I AM grace.

I AM forgiveness.

And I am yours. And you are in me. And I am in you.

And as I am, so you are.