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Sunday
We are currently spending the weekend with our dear friends Sue and Dan Schmidt, both of them pastors who live in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Sue has contributed a number of Sunday posts to this blog so I pumped her about the sermon she will be delivering, which we’ll travel to Harrisburg to hear. Sue said she will talk about how Jesus’s message to humankind is that we are put on earth, not only to glorify God, but to be glorified by God. In other words, when we appreciate God for creating the world, we come to value that creation, and vice versa. This creation, of course, includes ourselves. This double appreciation, Sue and I agreed, is captured by Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.”
More on Oliver in a moment. First I note that the theme of double glorification runs through all of today’s lectionary readings. First there is Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:34) foreseeing the day when people will no longer have to remind themselves to “know the Lord.” That’s because they will automatically know, feel, and experience God with all their being. As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
Then there is “Letter to the Hebrews” (5:5-10) in which Paul–or someone writing like Paul–tells his readers that God glorified Jesus in this profound way, telling him, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” Jesus did not set himself up to be glorified, Paul adds, which is what sets him apart from, say, Milton’s Satan. The egotistical and narcissistic archangel of Paradise Lost thinks glorification only goes one way—he wants others to glorify him—but that means he is coming from a space of inner lack. Only in the act of glorifying do we come to appreciate how God has glorified us. “[H]aving been made perfect,” Paul says of Jesus, “he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”
To become that perfect source, however, “reverent submission” was required. One cannot, as Milton’s Satan, Adam and Eve do, set oneself up to compete with God. Instead, we can follow Jesus, who was glorified because he followed God’s lead. This is the lesson Jesus tries to teach his followers.
The lesson becomes clearer in today’s Gospel reading (John 12:20-33), where Jesus tells a crowd that his life and death are for their sake, designed to teach them this path to glorification. To gain it, they will have to abandon materialistic self-gratification:
Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
In short, Jesus is not on a ruler-of-this-world ego trip. Rather he is showing, by his example of being lifted up, how his followers can themselves rise.
All of this mutual glorification, I acknowledge, can seem fairly confused, which is why I love Oliver’s “Summer Day.” In the past I’ve quoted Sewanee theologian Rob MacSwain observing that Episcopalians do theology through literature, and the Episcopalian Oliver makes clear through “Summer Day” how glorification works.
She begins by alluding to the Biblical creation story, in which we are repeatedly told, “And God saw that it was good.” Although she then turns to one of God’s seemingly insignificant creatures, she creates such a sense of wonder as to have us agreeing that God’s grasshoppers are indeed “good.” And if mere insects can arouse such a sense of wonder, think about what feelings the “wild and precious” lives of humans can arouse.
To fully appreciate God’s creations, whether grasshoppers or people, Oliver advises prayerful meditation:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
In his book Green Gospel, which our church has been reading for Lent, author John Gatta says the most important part of the Genesis creation story is how God glorifies what He/She has created. In doing so, He/She inspires us to do the same. We can approach swans, black bears, grasshoppers and ourselves, not out of ego, but out of a grateful sense of wonder.
Once we have done so, the next question becomes, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” One answer is to celebrate it and thank God for the gift.
The Summer Day
By Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?