Practicing the Presence of God

Psalm 111 Marianne Niesen January 29, 2012

     Once upon a time a man had car trouble near a monastery. He knocked on the door, and tells the monk, “My car broke down. Can I spend the night?”
     The Monks receive him with great hospitality. They feed him a wonderful dinner and even fix his car. They show the man to a guest room for the night.
     As the man is about to fall asleep, he hears a strange sound. It’s a sound like nothing he’s ever heard. It’s a sound that draws him toward it.. He can’t sleep, wondering where that sound is coming from and what can be making it.
     The next morning, he asks the Monks, “What is that sound I heard last night?” The Monks reply, “We can’t tell you. You’re not a Monk.”
     The man leaves but cannot forget the sound. Years later he returns and pleads with them to tell him. Again, they refuse: “We can’t tell you. You are not a Monk.” He demands, “Well then, tell me how I can become a Monk.” The Monks answer, “You must travel the earth and tell us how many blades of grass there are and the exact number of grains of sand. When you find these answers, you will have become a Monk.”
     The man sets out to complete the assignment. After years of searching, he returns, gray-haired. He knocks on the door of the monastery. A Monk answers. The man is taken before a gathering of all the Monks and he said, “In my quest to find what makes that beautiful sound, I traveled the earth and have found the answer to what you asked. By design, the world is in a state of perpetual change. Only God knows what you ask. All we can do is know ourselves and that requires that we are honest and reflective and willing to strip away all self-deception.”
     The Monks reply, “Congratulations. You are now a Monk. We shall now show you the way to the mystery of the sacred sound.” The Monks lead the man to a wooden door, where the head Monk says, “The sound is beyond that door.” The Monk gives him a key to the stone door, only to find a door made of ruby. And so it went as he needed keys to doors of emerald, pearl, and diamond. Finally, they come to a door made of solid gold. The sound has now become very clear and definite. The Monks say, “This is the last key to the last door.” The man is so excited and anxious. He’s lived his life desiring to discover the source of that beautiful, captivating, seductive sound.
     With trembling hands, he unlocks the door, turns the knob, and slowly pushes the door open. Falling to his knees he is utterly amazed to discover the source of that haunting sound….

But I can’t tell you, because you’re not a Monk. . .

Human beings, since the beginning of time, have sought fulfillment. We call it by different things – enlightenment, salvation, wholeness, holiness, peace. We are seekers. This week, as I pondered Psalm 111, I found myself thinking about the Hebrew people who first composed and prayed those words. Like us, those men and women were seekers. They didn’t ‘have it all together.’ Their lives were different from ours but only in specifics. They were like us in that they had joys and sorrows, challenges and pain, illness and death. They worried, as do we, about children and taxes and jobs and the future. These psalm-prayers were part of a package for learning and living the faith they claimed. They were about helping people live godly – holy – lives in the midst of an often un-holy fragmented world. And the psalms did that not by providing answers to all life’s questions but by helping people lean in the right direction. Toward God. Toward the ‘sound’ of grace.

That’s faith. Faith is leaning toward God who leans always toward us. Often people have come to synagogues or temples or churches wanting answers. Knowledge. Some of us would like just a bit more clarity about life’s big issues. That’s not a bad thing but more knowledge does not guarantee more faith. Faith is not about facts. Rather, as one preacher said, it is “about betting your life on a God whose promises are trustworthy. And the only way to ‘know’ they are trustworthy is to risk living by them.”[1] Faith is leaning toward God. That is what the psalms are designed to help us grasp. The Lord provides . . . the Lord has shown . . . the Lord is mindful and faithful and just. As the Hebrews gathered to worship, they recited those words and the words ‘worked’ on those who said them. They formed people. They helped people lean into God. And they still do – by reminding us that God has been God for a long time and hasn’t quit yet. Even though sometimes it may feel like it!

There is a particularly interesting phrase in today’s psalm. It’s a phrase that is often repeated in other psalms. We are to live with a ‘fear of the Lord’ which is the ‘beginning of wisdom.’ But this ‘fear of the Lord’ does not mean terror. Too often I meet people whose faith is based more on fearing what God might do to them if they don’t believe, than on trust that God believes in them. That is not the meaning of this ‘fear of the Lord.’ God should not fill us with anxiety and fear. Though God is above us and beyond us, God is also ‘for’ us. This is key to faith. We do not need to fear what is behind the door – but we do need to long for it. Lean toward it. So, for the psalmist, ‘fear of the Lord’ is about having appropriate wonder, awe or familiar respect. It is about remembering that God’s ways are not our ways – which can be frightening because we don’t control God - and yet, at the same time it is assuring because this great God of ours is always present, always for us and always faithful. No matter how it looks. No matter what we face.

A little girl was flying her kite on a windy, March day. The dark clouds were hanging so low and she’d let out so much string, that her kite had disappeared in the clouds. A man came along and asked the little girl what she was doing. She said, ‘I’m flying my kite.” The man replied, “I don’t see it. You can’t see it. How do you know it’s there?” She answered, “Every so often it tugs at me.”[2]

A life of faith is about attending to the tugs – even when we can’t see the source. Sometimes tugs happen at worship or on a walk or in a talk with a friend. Sometimes, we have a sense that something is missing in us that we cannot provide ourselves, so we set out to discover it – like the man with the monks. The good news that the psalm proclaims is that, whether we know it or not, we’ve been held by and embraced by God all along. God is with us and for us. Faith is not so much about knowledge as it is about trusting that faithfulness. And sometimes that is easier said than done!

A man about to push a wheelbarrow over a tight-wire over Niagara Falls asks a bystander if she believes he can do it. The woman says yes. The man responds, “Then get in the wheelbarrow.”[3]

Trust is hard. And yet, at the heart of our faith is the proclamation that God has not forsaken us. God wills good – and that good can even come from bad. The cross itself is a symbol of God’s triumph over evil. The powers of the world said ‘no’ to Jesus but God said ‘yes.’[4] That message is fundamental to the Christian story. God can be trusted to be at work salvaging good from every human experience. Divine love, self-sacrificing love is at work. It never ends. But when life challenges us personally – with illness, death, disappointment, job loss, fear, anxiety – this stuff quickly moves from pious platitudes to the work of faith. And work always requires practice. Spiritual writers through the years have called it ‘the practice of the presence of God.’[5]

     The story is told of a king in Africa, who had a close friend with whom he grew up. The friend had a faith that no matter whatever happened to him, he could say, “This is good!”
     One day the king and his friend went hunting. The friend loaded the king’s rifles, so the king should shoot the game being hunted. One time the friend must have loaded the rifle wrongly, so that when the king fired, it blew off one of his fingers.
     The friend exclaimed, “This is good!” The king was so angry, he threw his friend in jail.
     About a year later while the king was hunting he was captured by some cannibals, who were very pleased that their dinner that night was home delivered. As they were preparing the fire for the barbeque, they noticed that the king was missing one of his fingers. Being superstitious, they refused to eat anyone who was less than whole. So they let the king go.
     The king remembered his friend in jail and went to apologize to him. The friend responded, “Don’t give it another thought this is good. If I’d been with you, they’d have eaten me!”[6]

I just finished a book I bought only because the title intrigued me. Flunking Sainthood. The author writes: “I didn’t set out to write a book about spiritual failure. This project originated as a lighthearted effort to read spiritual classics while attempting a year of faith-related disciplines like fasting, Sabbath keeping, chanting, and the Jesus prayer. It culminated in a year-end meeting with my editor . . . in which I tried to steel her for the fact that I had fallen short in every single spiritual practice I’d tried. I felt dejected – what kind of loser fails at the Jesus prayer? I mean, it’s twelve words long and takes about four seconds to recite. (The editor) helped me see the value in a different kind of book, one about the wild acceptability of failure itself.”[7]

In the book, Jana Riess recounts her attempts to practice various spiritual disciplines. And she relates honestly how difficult the practices were and how often she failed to do them perfectly. She reads spiritual how-to books and follows them and wonders why they don’t work or why she hasn’t succeeded. As I read, I felt strangely comforted – because I’ve tried a lot of that stuff, and I’ve failed also. I’ll bet we all have. Our moments of success in the spiritual life are often nestled amid lots of ‘less-than-perfect’ moments. Here’s my insight: that’s why we call them spiritual ‘practices’ rather than spiritual ‘successes.’ We are called to practice faith, to practice prayer, to practice generosity, to practice hospitality, to practice forgiveness. Riess writes:

“In a culture that stresses perfection, I’ve often hear the maxim that ‘good is the enemy of perfect’; in other words, when people of faith aim for anything short of godliness we miss the mark. I’ve learned the reverse is true: perfect is the enemy of good. I may have spent a year flunking sainthood, but along the way I’ve had unexpected epiphanies and wild glimpses of the holy I would never have experienced without these crazy practices. A failed saint is still a saint.”[8] In other words, in the life of faith, we can take some assurance that practice doesn’t make us perfect. It just helps us be faithful. Come to think of it, it even says that in the psalm! The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who practice it have a good understanding. Not perfect, mind you, but good.

We who seek to live faithful lives are not called to do it perfectly, just persistently. We are called to practice. That’s what the psalms were about. Practice. That’s what prayer is about. Practice. I encourage us all to find something this week that helps us remember God’s love. Remember God’s presence. Pray a psalm. Pause to notice the sky or the wind or the snow. Give thanks for life. G. K. Chesterton wrote: “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip my pen in the ink.”[9] After reading this whole book, that’s the practice I found myself drawn to. I can do that – say grace more. And yet, even as I say that, I know I’ll forget as often as I remember. The trick is to trust that even imperfect practice is enough and that God’s faithfulness does not depend on mine. God’s faithfulness is the song, the promise, the breath that endures forever. That’s good news. And, I suspect, that may have been the source of the haunting sound behind the door at the monastery. (Because, you see, they didn’t tell me either – I’m not a Monk!)

[1] Quote found on www.esermons.com in a sermon by Mike Ripski: Theology 101. I found some of his ideas helpful as I developed this sermon.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] I remember that point in some of Marcus Borg’s writing.

[6] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., p. 171.

[9] Ibid., quote found on p. 109.