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Voices whooping in the fog
Reflections on the lessons for the 2nd Sunday in Advent
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:7-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a,18
Mark 1:1-8
I'm thankful to have a congregation that allows me lead the kind of life than can have a day in almost every week to study and read and think about things I want to think about.
Maybe it's because of our website and it's Amazon.com connection. I've been doing my bit with Christmas presents and impulse buys for myself. I count 11 (unread) books from the site piled up in my living room. And more are on the way . And there have been some uncertain number of recordings on top of that.
So, what book did I light on to re-explore?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn!
I read it when I was 12. And when I was in my twenties. And now - skimming - one more time. I wonder if Amazon has a better copy than the yellow and crackling paperback I've got. Yes, 237 versions ranging from an 1885 first edition for $1500 through audio versions, software, and interactive DVD versions down to a very affordable $3.95 copy of the same Signet paperback I have from school.
In the story, Huckleberry and his friend Jim run away one night.
There was really nothing in Hannibal to keep an orphaned drifter and a slave there.
They build a raft and take off down the Mississippi.
Jim is on his way to the Ohio River where he can catch a steamboat to the Free States.
Huckleberry just wants new horizons.
One night, a thick fog comes in and Huck gets off the raft in his canoe taking a line along.
He's going to paddle over to a little island and tie up the raft for the night, but the current pulls the raft right past the island and Huck loses the line, the raft, Jim, and everything in the dark and fog.
So, Huck frantically starts
paddling toward the raft.
Trouble is, he doesn't have any idea which way he's going.
"Away down there somewhere I hears a small whoop and I went tearing after it."
But then it seemed to come from the right. Then the left. Then from behind, but that whoop didn't sound much like Jim. And that whoop, too, kept coming and changing its place.
"I couldn't tell nothing about voices in a fog, for nothing don't look natural or sound natural in a fog."
People are trying to stick together as they wander through a fog in search of THE Free States.
There are voices whooping from all sides in the fog,
in the wilderness
And we listen to them -- unsure, really,
where we are,
where we came from,
where we'll end up.
And we call out, too.
Whooping at whatever gods might be out there.
Some voices say
we originated along with the rest of the universe in a Big Bang and that we gradually became a higher form of animal destined to become extinct along with the rest of it all on the last day.
And that's fine.
It answers the questions of the intellect. It is a direction that cannot be ignored. Disregarding science and the mind makes the fog much, much worse.
But there are other voices crying in the wilderness.
Some sound just as befogged as we are ourselves.
But they have things to say to the heart.
And I think we all want to arrive someplace where the heart and the mind can be together instead of separated.
Maybe the very young still believe in love at first sight.
But, excepting that, I tried to think of other places where adults tend to expect instantaneous results.
And the only thing I could come up with is the area of spirituality, religion, the church.
It's no more reasonable than expecting to be "discovered" at the soda fountain by a movie studio. But many, many people do expect that God comes to us in a big flash . . . . or not at all.
And that's a pity!
The Second Letter of Peter is the newest --latest, most recent -- writing in the Bible.
It's a strange breed: A sermon on the flow of time through history and human lives written in the form of a last will and testament.
Very simply put, Peter says that God's time perspective is different from ours. And thus our notion of time ought to be refined by God's understanding of it.
The thing that John the Baptist calls the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and Jesus calls the Kingdom of God, and Mark Twain calls the Free States is not the event of an electrifying moment.
That mystical state is
borderless,
timeless,
reached out of the fog
on the current of a dark river
over the course of a lifetime.
One of the ideas of Zen practice is that if we "sit" long enough we will recognize that the "now" encompasses the past and the future alike.
And that understanding certainly is one of the Free States.
Jesus offers another Way.
The comparison may sound silly,
but it does strike me that the coming of Jesus
- John emphasizes this big
Advent theme -
on the heels of the ancient Jewish tradition is
God's new start.
I thought of those black footprints on Arthur Murray dance diagrams and how I just couldn't figure them out.
And if the diagrammatic laws of the Old Testament weren't working anymore, then God decided to come to us as a live instructor to show us what the dance really can look like.
Sitting,
dancing,
drifting,
paddling furiously -
we move through time on our way
to the Free States we're searching for.
And of all the voices whooping in
the fog, the voice that God's people do well to follow is
the one that tells us
through holy scripture and
from so very many other directions
that we are indeed the offspring of a gracious creator
whose whole intention is to entice us
across one horizon after another
even the horizon of death itself
so that in crossing them
and then crossing again
we become ever more divinely gracious beings ourselves.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.