3EpiphanyB: January 22, 2012
Jonah 3: 1-5, 10 / Psalm 62: 6-14 / Mark 1: 14-20
God has spoken once, twice have I heard it (Ps. 62 v. 13).
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Think back to the last time you went dancing. All dancers listen for the beat of the music in order to know how they ought to move; all dancers follow the music. Three beats to a measure, for example, signal a stately waltz. A more syncopated 5,6,7,8, tells you that this next song is a tango. Good dancers are physically agile, and they mind their posture. Moreover, they are very good listeners. Every person mentioned in today’s scripture lessons - Jonah, the Ninevites, the psalmist, Andrew, Simon, James, and John - are all good listeners. That makes them good followers, too, and people from whom we can learn. These disciples show us that following God’s call is a lot like dancing. God’s voice - like music - fills the universe. If we want to know how God is calling us at any given moment, we listen for that divine rhythm.
Listening for God’s music requires a special kind of listening. In that old movie, Oh God! John Denver hears God’s voice transmitted through his car radio. If only tuning into God were as easy as turning on the radio! Though sometimes – by sheer gift or grace or luck or whatever you’d call it – a person might once or twice in her life discerns a message from God almost as effortlessly. Maybe a dream startles someone awake with its clear-as-a-bell meaning. Or a word from a friend offers sudden clarity. More often, listening to God requires some intentionality.
Local priest and author, Tilden Edwards, says that we are more likely to hear God when we listen from the place inside us that he calls the spiritual heart. The spiritual heart is that place deep within each person that is mystically united to Christ. It’s the in-most place where God dwells, where God’s music plays (Tilden Edwards, Living in the Presence).
The Apostle Paul talks, too, about this in-most place where we are united to Christ (Romans 8). This connection to Christ is ours no matter what we do or what happens to us. We might wander into a far country like the Prodigal Son, and still we are connected to Christ. We might lose our abilities, even our mental competency, as we age. Still we have this connection.
Most of us, most of the time, do not listen from our spiritual heart. When we listen to people and the world around us, we are far more likely to listen with our egos. We constantly scan the environment, listening for potential threats to our self-image. We speak and act in order to defend our sense of self. On better days, we might listen and respond to the world from our intellect - from the rational, analytical parts of ourselves. While our egos and our intellects are gifts from God, we’ve privileged them above all else. It’s as if, Edwards maintains, many of us have removed the spiritual heart from our chest. This is a great loss because it is into the spiritual heart that God speaks, that God’s music plays (Tilden Edwards, Living in the Presence).
The spiritual heart lies below the surface of ego and intellect. Listening to the spiritual heart is a deeper kind of listening. It is listening with the heart of Christ (Ibid).
Let me be more specific. Listening with your spiritual heart might mean listening more deeply to a person with whom you’re having a conversation. If that person should make a barbed comment, for example, listening from your spiritual heart might mean listening for the deeper need underlying the words expressed. Then we can respond to that instead of dishing back our own angry retort.
Or listening from the spiritual heart might mean that when you have a difficult phone call to make, instead of reflexively picking up the phone and dialing, you first take a few moments of silence, and you use that silence to find your spiritual heart. A person making a sales call, for instance, might then be freer to set aside the ego’s worries about rejection and the outcome of the call and find within himself instead a desire to connect with the person who picks up.
16th century mystic, Theresa of Avila, described this listening as the Christ in me listening to the Christ in you.
Listening from the spiritual heart – from the place where God plays a loving serenade – helps us hear the needs of others that before we were deaf to. And once we hear a need in someone else, we’re far more likely to respond. That’s when we begin dancing to God’s music.
Dancing to God’s music means letting God lead. For God alone, my soul in silence waits, declares the psalmist. Waiting on God means living in the moment. God is in the now. Listening from the spiritual heart means that despite our plans and preparations, we stay alert to changes in beat and tempo. Say you’re having coffee with a friend. Not your best friend, not one who feels like family. After listening, though, you realize she is in a dark place. Your intellect and ego tell you to keep the conversation moving, ignore the troubling things that she’s said, and spare her (and you) any embarrassment. Accessing your spiritual heart, though, you risk telling her that you love her and that God loves her. Not at all the words you planned when you made the casual coffee date. But they are the right words at the right moment, spoken because you listened to the music God was playing in your heart.
Listening from the depths of our heart, from the place where God dwells, helps us know the next step to dance, the next right words or the next right decision. The next right thing is not always what we scripted. When two people dance, one of them will make a mistake or an unplanned move. A skilled partner adjusts in the moment.
So following God’s call is not something we do only when we come to a major crossroads and the spotlights shine on us. Following God is more about establishing an ongoing partnership forged by daily deep listening and deliberate attempts to live in the present.
Perhaps Simon, Andrew, James, and John are pulled toward Jesus precisely because he listens and responds to them from his heart center. When Jesus meets hungry people hungry, he gives fish and bread, to be sure, but he recognizes a deeper hunger. Though the society in which they live tells them that they do not matter, Jesus tells them that they really do matter. Their lives have meaning, and God loves them. When Jesus meets wealthy people, people who have platters of food to eat and servants who prepare it, he recognizes that they are hungry, too - hungry for love and meaning. Jesus feeds both rich and poor with words and signs of love that come from that place within him where his Father speaks, where God’s music plays.
Unlike Jesus, we often live on life’s frothy surface. We speak and act reflexively, automatically. We are deaf to God’s music and deaf to the real concerns of our own hearts, let alone the concerns of others. Jesus shows us how to listen from the deep within our hearts, which is where God’s music plays.
For modern people accustomed to listening mostly to the discordant noise of our own ego or the predictable drum of logic and long-range plans, it is not easy to hear God’s symphonies. Luckily, we can practice listening from our spiritual hearts. We can practice living in the moment. Some people put something in their pocket – prayer beads, a cross, or even a polished stone or shell – something that when they reach into their pockets reminds them to find their spiritual heart. This pattern of returning again and again to the place where God dwells is the highest form of prayer. It is something a person can do wherever he finds himself – in a meeting, at the airport, or during a family dinner when someone spills the milk.
A few days ago, NPR spotlighted the creative people who make movie trailers. An important part of any movie trailer is the musical score that plays while scenes from the movie roll. A musical score, the makers of these trailers explained, evokes emotional responses more powerful than any visual cue. Music can trigger in us a variety of responses including fear, an adrenaline rush, or heart-rending pathos. Anyone who has heard the themes from Jaws, Mission Impossible, or Terms of Endearment understands.
When we listen from our spiritual hearts, we hear God’s music, and we can respond how God hopes. Depending on the moment, depending on the music, that might mean speaking your mind in a meeting, it might mean writing that check to Samaritan Ministry, or taking a run on your lunch break. It might mean saying yes to a request for you to serve in some way, or it could mean saying no so that you can attend to your own needs or those of your family.
I want to leave you with an image from an Episcopal Church in San Francisco. There, painted on the walls of the church are icons of the saints. The Virgin Mary is there, along with Moses and other patriarchs, prophets, and sages. You can find Francis of Assisi and Joan of Arc. Newer saints are portrayed, too: Queen Elizabeth and even Rosa Parks. There are perhaps 100 saints, and they’re all lined up, in procession, and when you look, you realize they are dancing. Jesus heads the procession. He has one foot in the air, and you can see he’s leading the dance.
God’s music has been playing since the beginning of time. Whatever music plays in your heart, God hopes that you will join the dance. Amen.
Yes Dancing in the Moment! The only time is the present.
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