Three journeys
 Sunday 16th January - Epiphany 2 - Andrew
Three journeys this morning. We’ve got the journey of the space probe to Saturn’s moon Titan, the Buddha’s journey to enlightenment, and Isaiah’s pilgrimage of faith (which is in part what today’s Old Testament reading was about).
And, as we try to get our heads round these journeys, the crucial question, as always, is what’s this got to do with me now? In other words, how do these travelogues help us to see our own journeys through life?
A twenty year project. A two billion mile voyage that lasted seven years. The mothership, Cassini, was programmed to collect all the data transmitted by the probe before beginning transmission to earth. Travelling at the speed of light, those first three photographs took 67 minutes to arrive. By which time, the mothership had long since sailed over the horizon, leaving its child to die alone in the alien landscape, 750 million miles from home.
Clever people have managed to rein in these massive space and time dimensions.
Not only that, Titan, so we’re told, takes us back to the conditions that probably existed many millions of years ago here on earth. We look at our televisions in the comfort of our own homes and see what planet earth probably looked like when it was but a callow youth. Space and time are concertinaed up, as we’re given a glimpse of the great beyond and the long before.
Two and a half thousand years ago, or more, a young man from a wealthy family, set out to become one with the world and to reach beyond it. His first two teachers taught him different meditation techniques. And, sure enough, with practice and determination, he learned, and learned extremely well.
But it wasn’t enough. He then spent six years indulging in serious self-mortification. Still didn’t do the trick. Only then did it dawn on him that chasing after enlightenment didn’t work, it was about being open to it coming to you. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Don’t forget, we’re not really concerned this morning with Saturn’s moon Titan, or the Buddha. Time and space travel and enlightenment are not really what it’s about either. What’s important is our own pilgrimage through life, and the stages we go through.
The moments when the penny drops.
The things we spend ages planning for which finally fall into place. Or not.
That leap of time: looking at old family photographs and suddenly seeing something of our own children in our great grandparents when they were youngsters.
The huge effort and conviction and energy we put into something and the dawning realisation that that’s not it, that there’s something else, somewhere.
Dying words and pictures that open our eyes.
Letting go.
About the same time as the Buddha, give or take a couple of hundred years, there was Isaiah. In today’s Old Testament reading, we are into yet another cosmic dimension: the coming together of mortal and immortal. Here is a person who believes himself called by God. All of us, like Isaiah, are called by God. It’s a calling that is spelled out in our baptism. Isaiah was called by God to carry out a particular piece of work. And, despite his best efforts, he feels he has failed: I have laboured in vain, he says, I have spent my strength for nothing.
God doesn’t rap his knuckles for failing, he doesn’t say fair enough you gave it your best shot. What he does is up the ante – not only does he refuse to let Isaiah give up on bringing the Israelites back into the fold, he now gives him the additional job of enlightening the entire world.
Raising up the tribes of Jacob, restoring the survivors of Israel is peanuts, says God. I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation will reach the ends of the earth. Do local, go global.
And with great relief you and me can give a great sigh of relief. By no stretch of the imagination has God called any of us onto that world stage. Which of course is missing the point.
Whatever our own starting point might be, whatever our calling as baptised children of God, as disciples of Christ, might be - God is forever upping the ante.
Well, maybe forever upping the ante is an exaggeration. But at least every now and then we are faced with greater and harder demands – at home, at work, even here at church.
And God, at least in this instance with Isaiah, is unrelenting. The moment we admit our failure is precisely the moment that God demands more from us. And, in that same moment of demanding more from us, God promises more divine support and upholding. All of which takes some believing, especially when, like Isaiah, you think you’ve hit the bottom.
Takes some believing….
It’s hard to believe some of the stories of the Buddha’s path to enlightenment. It’s hard to believe the earthling achievement of taking photographs 750 million miles away that may well show us what this fragile earth, our island home, looked like when it was just a child.
It’s even harder to believe that God has called each of us, has called us as a group of people, as Stockton Parish Church, to be today’s Isaiah, to be a light to the world, to carry the light of Christ into today’s great darknesses. But, that’s the deal.
Then again, maybe that’s not the deal. There is a strange arrogance in presuming that we have something that others don’t have, that we might choose to give to them. Arrogant, because that way of thinking puts us in charge, puts us before God.
It could be argued that what with Isaiah doing as he was told, and then with the coming of the Christchild, who is the light of the world, that that work has now been done – that that divine light is now already here in all the world.
There is nothing exclusive about divine light – that’s what’s being said in the Old Testament reading today: it’s for all the nations.
And if we believe that that work has already been done, by Isaiah and Jesus, then that light is already here, flickering, blazing, incandescent, dying – in every nation, in every person throughout the world. Here to be seen, here to enlighten us and warm us.
Our calling, then, our journey of faith, is the commitment, the courtesy, to see the light of Christ in every individual person. It’s a journey that will take us beyond the stars, beyond those first bold steps taken by the Buddha.
In the ordinary is the extraordinary. In the everyday is the cosmic. Utterly human, we each have the divine within us. May God give us grace.
|
