Month: September 2023

The Virtues of Umbleness

"I suppose you are quite a great lawyer?" I said, after looking at him for some time.
"Me, Master Copperfield?" said Uriah. "Oh, no! I'm a very umble person."
. . .
"I am well aware that I am the umblest person going," said Uriah Heep modestly, "let the other be where he may. My mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in an umble abode, Master Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for. My father's former calling was umble; he was a sexton."
"I suppose you are quite a great lawyer?" I said, after looking at him for some time.
"Me, Master Copperfield?" said Uriah. "Oh, no! I'm a very umble person."
. . .
"I am well aware that I am the umblest person going," said Uriah Heep modestly, "let the other be where he may. My mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in an umble abode, Master Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for. My father's former calling was umble; he was a sexton."

I’m indebted to Doug Bratt, who in his reflection on today’s epistle reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians notes an interview between Adam Bryant of The Times and Laszo Bock, senior vice president of Operations at Google, reported by Thomas Friedman in the NYTs on February 22, 2014. Bryant and Bock’s subject concerned the nature of emergent leadership – and this is what caught my attention. In contrast with more traditional hierarchical models of leadership, Emergent leadership is not a fixed status command and control role, its more a flexible function [my words]. It’s situational – arising and receding according to the demands of the situation. Bock explains that emergent leaders face problems as members of a team. At the appropriate time they may step forward to lead – but just as critically step back and let another team member take the lead:

Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power (Bock).

Humility seemed to be a key component in Bock’s description of emergent leadership. Explaining how humility and leadership go hand in hand:

It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. Your end goal is what can we do together to problem-solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.

It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools’ plateau. Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure [Bock].

Bock stresses that without humility no learning can take place. Every institution of higher education should have his words emblazoned over their gate posts.

Emergent leaders don’t take the personal credit for success, neither do they blame others or conditions for failure. Emergent leaders argue fiercely for their point of view but have the ability to accept how the introduction by someone else of new facts changes the situation. Bock notes: You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.

It is interesting to note how much Google’s concept of emergent leadership is so contrary to the thrust of American academic, business – and might I add -political culture – where talent and leadership is about being the brightest, the highest paid, or when it comes to politics, the most shameless star in the firmament – all the while like Uriah Heep protesting umbleness. The problem with encouraging a prima donna culture – particularly in business and politics – is that it’s the antithesis of collaboration. An individualistic culture will celebrate narcissistic models of leadership – and we wonder why things don’t work out as intended.

The Philippians had sent Paul a gift delivered by the hand of Epaphroditus who subsequently had fallen ill. Paul is writing from imprisonment – most probably house arrest in Rome to reassure the Philippians that Epaphroditus had made a full recovery and that Paul is returning him to them in good health. This letter allows Paul to express his deep gratitude. Thanking the Philippians for their love and concern he addresses the current tensions in Philippi – news of which has reached him from Epaphroditus’ mouth to his ear.

Philippians is just one of his Paul’s more personal letters written during this period of house arrest. It’s during this period that he pens his opus magnum – his letter to the Romans – in which for the first time he seeks to collate a systematic theology – responding to some very thorny issues around inclusion and exclusion, righteousness and judgement, human intransigence and the faithfulness of God.

This is an anxious time for Paul. Will the result of his impending trial lead to an acquittal or his death? Facing into the uncertainties of the future, Paul is at pains to encourage the Philippians to take the humility of Christ as the blueprint for holding together in the face threats to their faithfulness to Christ.

Paul draws on the language of a familiar hymn extolling as the model for Christian community relations Jesus’ humility in his relationship with God. Paul asks that the Philippians practice having the same mind as Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. Being born in human likeness – he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – and not just any kind of death – but the most shameful of deaths – death on a cross. In this manner Paul encourages the Philippians to work out their salvation with fear and trembling – recognizing that it is God who is at work in them.

By fear and trembling Paul is not advocating some kind of fearful submissive Uriah Heep like groveling. Paul is showing the Philippians that only humility enables the Holy Spirit to work in and through them to achieve God’s good purpose. Our context and cultural issues may differ from those of the Philippians, but the underlying truth of the message remains the same because human nature does not change much over time.

The Classical World of the 1st Century in which Paul is living and working was a world in which success and power were celebrated and in the ultimate case of the Emperor, worshipped. For the Roman man – to have power and social prestige was literally to have unquestioned power over – the right to dominate others with few societal or personal moral restraints. Might was right and humility was the ultimate sign of weakness!

Although we live in a society that in many ways apes Roman norms – where might is right continues unchallenged in many instances, yet unlike the Romans, a lack of humility is for those of us with normal levels of narcissism a guilty secret we try to hide. For we know that might is not necessarily right in the moral sense. What changes with the death and resurrection of Christ is that powerlessness and humility become the ultimate expressions of power. After Christ – as we see in Paul’s teaching – the exercise of crude power is – regarded from a moral and ethical perspective – subject to judgment by a higher set of values embodied by Jesus on the cross and vindicated by God in his resurrection.

Because Judao-Christian legacy has fundamentally shaped the secularism of the democratic West – humility stills echoes in our society even though for many it’s no longer tied to the practice of Christianity as a religion. Nevertheless, humility is still admired – we can say nothing better of a person than to ascribe to them the virtue of humility. We value humility as a cardinal virtue – despite or maybe even because for many of us – our struggle with humility is a guilty secret we try to hide from others.

Our greatest contribution when any of us might find ourselves in leadership roles is to know when and why to relinquish power. In leadership as well as in ordinary life – in Google speak – each of us needs both a big and small ego in order to be able to live collaboratively and work effectively or as Paul puts it to work out our salvation with fear and trembling – to come together to find collaborative solutions to shared problems.

The only adequate response in the face of the overwhelming mystery of God is one of humility – allowing power to flow in and through us – in pursuit of God’s good purpose.

I wonder if Google recognizes in their model of emergent leadership a contemporary reworking of Paul’s encouragement to the Philippians?

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Who’s talking Fairness?

The Thomas Avenue Home Depot car park in Phoenix AZ around 5am. Men squat in ones or twos or small groups seeking whatever shade the sparse Acacia trees of Phoenix’s ubiquitous car park desert plantings can provide against the merciless sun – which even at this hour of the day grows hot. A pickup truck drives slowly by – stopping at a group of men. After a brief exchange of words – the men climb onto the back and the pickup drives off. Maybe the driver of the pickup is in construction. Maybe he’s a farm foreman. Either way – he’s on the lookout for day laborers who abound at any number of pickup points in the carparks that dot not only the Phoenix landscape but towns and cities across the Southwest.

At whatever time of day, you can find scatterings of such men –seeking the only work easily available to them as below minimum wage undocumented day laborers. Numbers throughout the day fluctuate, yet, even towards the end of the working day some still patiently wait for the ever-decreasing possibility of finding a day’s hire. What of those who are not hired as the sun sets?

Manual work – now there’s an expression! It means to work with one’s hands. Unskilled day laborers who have nothing but their labor to trade have always been and remain vulnerable to the dehumanizing conditions we impose on those who have no power, no voice, no country, no other marketable skills.

Even skilled workers who like the members of the United Autoworkers Union – or the Writers Guild of America – workers whose manual labor takes the form of an application of necessary knowledge and skill are forced to strike for an equitable share of the huge profits generated from their labor. It’s odd how even today capital refuses to recognize that the most valuable commodity in the creation of profit are the workers whose labor produces it.

And so it was ever thus as we plainly see from Jesus’ parable in Matthew 20 – in which he addresses the economic plight for a class of Jewish tenant farmers and small landowners who had become the losers in the 1st-century global economy. In the 1st-century – Galilee was a cosmopolitan mishmash where Syro-Phoenicians, Greeks, Roman incomers, and Jews mixed freely. It was the most fertile and productive agricultural region in the Middle East. Therefore, Galilee was also at the heart of the socio-economic upheavals that accompanied an agrarian revolution in which Jewish tenant farmers and small landowners were being displaced by the influx of Roman new money.

The Roman new money wanted to amalgamate land holdings to create larger farms to form more economic units to maximize profit for the landowners through scaling-up agricultural production to feed the Empire’s rapidly increasing population. As a story this one is not an unfamiliar one from the pages of history – where page after page evidences the eviction of tenant farmers and small landholders reducing them to the status of day laborers. Jesus would have encountered men standing idle in the marketplace – an ancient Home Depot carpark – awaiting hire to work the land they had once farmed.

This story opens with Jesus describing it to his listeners as a parable of the kingdom of heaven. In other words, he’s telling them that this is a story about God. Jesus’ stories about God take the form of parables – that is- stories that draw on the familiarity of the hearers’ everyday experience to expose them to an unexpected and somewhat disturbing conclusion – a kind of sting in the tail ending.

Read from our 21st-century perspective this parable about a landowner presents him as a man with a strong social conscience. He acts to do what he can to stem the tsunami of injustice afflicting his society. He not only pays his laborers above the daily minimum wage but is concerned for the plight of those who as the day progresses have still not been hired. He goes out at intervals through the day and hires them in batches – promising them the same daily rate as those he had engaged in the early morning. So far, so good.

But the surprise comes when at the end of the day, he pays everyone the same amount regardless of the hours worked. I mean, who does that? How can this be fair – we cry?

Both Jesus’ 1st and 21st-century hearers are confronted – if not affronted by this man’s behavior. How can it be fair to pay those taken on late in the day – working only and hour or so – the same amount as those who have been toiling since 7am? But remember, this is a story about God. The employer – standing in for God counters – why accuse me of being unfair when I am actually being generous. Those who have worked since sunrise receive exactly the wage I’d promised. In effect, my generosity is my own business and not your concern.

Wow, can God really be like this? Where’s then – the incentive to work hard and do the right thing if God is so indiscriminate in the distribution of their generosity? This story assails our cherished distinctions between the deserving and undeserving – those entitled and those with no claim whatsoever.

Jesus’ parables – his stories about God – are at their heart stories about justice. If aliens from outer space were to observe how we Christians talk about God, they might conclude that the thrust of God’s concern as evidenced in Jesus’ teaching is about personal sexual morality. They would be correct because that’s what most Christians and non-Christians believe.

Closer reading of the gospels reveals that Jesus never speaks about personal sexual morality in social life. The closest he comes is in his parable about the woman taken in adultery and we know upon whose heads his judgment is heaped here. The other example is his teaching on the indissolubility of marriage – but this is a teaching honored mostly in the breach. 99.8% of Jesus teaching directly addresses the societal and religious issues of his day reframed through the lens the kingdom’s justice revolution.

What is justice? Jesus shows us that justice is love in action. Justice has little to do with fairness and everything to do with generosity. Thus the right to earn our daily bread through the dignity of human labor is an aspect of justice viewed through the lens of the kingdom revolution – where Justice requires the dignity of human labor honored by the equitable distribution of both risk and profit.

On a baptism Sunday, we hear Jesus opening words The kingdom of God is like. He sets the expectations of the kingdom within this parable about an employer’s seemingly – to us – unfair remuneration of his laborers. Through it we learn that God is not interested in fairness at all. God is only interested in generosity. Like all stories of the kingdom revolution our conventional expectations of the way things should work – are upended.

We live in a world in which so much is governed by the principle – first come first served. In the workplace it’s enshrined in notions of reward for seniority – protections for length of service– and corresponding vulnerability of the last in to being the first out the door when downturn strikes.

The task of the Christian community is to reflect less the values and arrangements of the world and more the expectations of the kingdom’s justice revolution. In the kingdom there is no such thing as seniority nor greater reward based on length of service. In the Christian community there should be no discrimination according to status. Among us, there is only the status of the baptized. Baptism is the common denominator that elevates us all to the same level of significance in God’s eyes. Whatever distinctions we enjoy in the world – whatever lack of privilege and disrespect we suffer in the world – all inequality is leveled through baptism.

When Lucca is baptized in a moment – he will be admitted to a community of equals – taking his place with the rest of us who sit in the front row in the House of God. For my generosity is my own business and not your concern – says the Lord.

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Sealed in Blood

Image: Arthur Hacker (English Pre-Raphaelite painter, 1858-1919), “And There Was a Great Cry in Egypt” (1897)

With the story of the Passover in Exodus 12 we leapfrog forwards from the lifechanging encounter between Moses and Yahweh in Exodus 3 which takes place beyond the wilderness. Last week I explored the dynamic of finding our way beyond the wilderness – wilderness being a metaphor for life’s status quo. To reach beyond the wilderness is to risk following our curiosity – curiosity that is triggered by the glimpse of something  in peripheral vision – out of the corner of our eye. The encounter between God and Moses beyond the wilderness was life changing both for Moses -obviously – but also for God. Life changing, how exactly?

For Moses it was an experience of being called; of finding his identity radically reshaped. But called from what and called to what?

The place beyond the wilderness is a metaphor for an experience bereft of the signposts that keep us corralled within the familiar. It is a place empty of the signs and markers that normally keep the unfamiliar at bay – for in the unfamiliar thar be dragons. Beyond the wilderness Moses is called from his uncalled life – his life amidst the familiar routines and expectations shaped by life as business-as-usual. By turns – Moses is terrified and yet curious, he’s stripped and exposed and yet empowered – he’s shaken not stirred into a new identity – an emerging new sense of self and purpose.

But the encounter with Moses is also life changing for God. Moses is not the only one whose identity is shaken not stirred. God – I AM WHO I AM – a God of memory of the past becomes God -I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE – God now defined by future actions that refashion God’s identity to become the God of liberation, the warrior God, who gets their[1] hands bloody in the messy affairs of human history.

In today’s reading from Exodus 12 we catch a glimpse of just how messy things had become.

Between Chapter 3 and 12, Exodus chronicles a series of skirmishes in the war Yahweh – to use God’s Hebrew name – has provoked with the Pharoah over his refusal to let the Hebrews go. In pursuit of his new role as liberator – God has donned the identity of the warrior. One interpretation characterizes this conflict as a trial of strength between Yahweh and the Gods of Egypt. Whether this is a cosmic struggle or simply a struggle between the divine will and recalcitrant human resistance, need not overly concern us, here. Save to remind ourselves that the Pharaoh’s opening salvo – his command that all Hebrew male infants be killed at birth has now found its echo in Yahweh’s ultimate response – that is to strike all firstborn – human and animal – in the land of Egypt as a judgement not only against the Pharaoh but upon all the gods of Egypt. Yahweh asserts his right to do this terrible thing – for he proclaims I am the Lord – that is -I AM WHO I WILL BE.

Yahweh instructs Moses on how the Hebrews are to prepare for and commemorate the angel of death’s passing over the land shrouded in the darkness of night. This is to be a unique event- an event like none other – therefore it is to be remembered as a perpetual anniversary – a commemoration of Yahweh’s involvement in the liberation of his people from bondage.

On the night of the angel’s passing over the land – the Hebrews encounter their God in a lifechanging event that will henceforth forge them into a people. On this night the Hebrews will be changed from a community of slaves into an Israelite nation – identified and protected by the blood of the sacrificial lamb smeared on the doorposts and lintels of their houses..

Down the centuries the Jewish people have continued to commemorate the night of the angel’s passing over. Passover or Pesach is not only a yearly commemoration but also a weekly family meal of remembrance on the eve of Shabbat – the Sabbath day. At the Shabbat meal a question is posed by the eldest to the youngest person present: why is this night different from all other nights? This question triggers collective memory enshrined in the unique customs of this commemoration where food is the focus. A meal of unleavened bread – for there was no time for the dough to rise. A meal seasoned with the bitter herbs of adversity, eaten in haste – eaten in a state of readiness for flight.

The Passover and flight from Egypt mark a reset in the measurement of chronological time – it becomes the beginning of months. It’s on the 10th day of the first month that the festival of Passover is to be commemorated.

How we measure the passing of time is interesting. As a Church community, we measure our year according to three different cycles. Some aspects of Church life follow the dictates of the chronological calendar year – January to December. The Lectionary and calendar of greater and lesser festivals of the Christian year run from December to November – beginning with Advent Sunday and concluding with the celebration of the kingship of Christ. Yet we have a third way of measuring the passing of months in the Program year from September to July. The Program year is a particular – and in my experience – a unique feature of American Church life.

September is the first month of the Program year. Homecoming is the first Sunday of the program year and by a quirk of chronological time – this year Homecoming occurs on the 10th day of the first month. I wrote in E-News this past week about what we can expect in the new Program year at St Martin’s. To give the briefest overview, we can expect a creative and energized application of the principle less is more. If you are interested to read what I mean by this, you can find it here.

The first covenant between Yahweh and Israel was inaugurated on the night of the Passover and sealed in the sign of sacrificial blood. The second covenant between God and the second Israel – that is – an Israel now extending beyond the blood boundaries of the Israelite nation – has also been sealed in sacrificial blood – this time not the blood of a sacrificial lamb but the blood of Jesus the Christ – the Lamb of God.

I need to say here that in using the language of first and second covenants and racial and extended Israel – I am not in any way suggesting that the second covenant has replaced the first. God does not abrogate their promises – nor abandon their faithfulness. Therefore, both covenants remain in force and are conduits for God’s continued presence with God’s people -Jew and Gentile. Neither am I suggesting that the extended Israel – the nonracial Israel – has supplanted the Israel of blood and circumcision. Extended Israel – usually referred to as the New Israel is an extension of God’s promises to Abraham – which through Christ – now encompass – potentially – the entire human race.

The parallel continues. As with the yearly commemoration of Passover and its weekly echoes on the eve of Shabbat, the New Israel of the second covenant – the Christian people of God – likewise commemorate Jesus’ with the symbolism of the Passover meal. We read On the eve of Passover Jesus took bread and gave thanks; he took the cup  giving thanks and saying …..

The yearly celebration of Easter therefore coincides in the same Luna calendar cycle as the Exodus Passover. So as with the weekly celebration of Pesach on the Shabbat eve – Christ’s Passover – the passage from life to death to new life – is celebrated by Christians on the first day of the week.

On that fearful night when Yahweh’s angel of death passed over the land of Egypt – the identity of a new people was forged through the experience of deliverance at the hand of Yahweh now the warrior God – sallying forth in defense of a chosen people. The promise made to Abraham becomes renewed as God cherishes once again an exclusive human relationship with Moses. The Jews rightly remember this night as the lynchpin of their identity as a community liberated to become instrumental in God’s plan for the liberation of a world – a world still ensnared in Egypt’s bondage.

Egypt represents in any age our entrapment in the uncalled life in which we continue to connive with the forces of oppression – be they political, social, or environmental. The promise made to Abraham became renewed in the sacrifice of Christ as Passover lamb. The blood of Christ – no longer a sign smeared upon our door posts, is now seared into our hearts.

On the night before he died, Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples. Over the following three days the angel of death passed over him. In his passage from life to death to new life – those who follow in his name were forged into a new community liberated to become instruments in God’s plan for the liberation of a world still ensnared in Egypt’s bondage.

On the 10th day of the first month of the Program year – Homecoming Sunday we celebrate Christ our Passover as the lynchpin of our identity as a community liberated to become the willing instrument in God’s plan for the liberation of a world still ensnared in Egypt’s bondage.

Deliverance is the lynchpin in identity. We can only pray that as Episcopalians – we might take our identity as seriously as our Jewish friends and neighbors across the street from us on the corner of Orchard place and Orchard Avenue – do. That together as Jew and Gentile we might work tirelessly in the divine dream for the healing of the world. Amen!

[1] My use of the collective pronoun for what the Tradition often views as a singular God reflects an affirmation that God’s nature  is communal not singular, and also beyond the immediate associations with human gender.

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Encounter

Robert J Warren, the Vicar of All Saints, the Anglican Church in Rome, has a witty turn of phrase. He writes: 

Moses was doing his best to lose the Egyptian accent that people had remarked on when he first landed in Midian (Exodus 2:18-19). It was an accent worth losing.  First, it was a lie: he wasn’t Egyptian.  He’d been a Hebrew child raised like a dirty secret in the heart of the Egyptian court.  Second, it provided a clue to his past misdeeds.  The child became a man back in Egypt.  His identity crisis sharpened and caused him to snap.  He’d killed an Egyptian overseer who was beating a Hebrew slave and thus became a fugitive from Egyptian justice.

Warren somewhat amusingly, yet concisely, summaries Moses’ story so far.  Exodus chapter 3 opens on Moses’ day-to-day life after having fled across the Gulf of Aqaba to Midian – an area that took its name from Midian who had been one of Abraham’s many illegitimate sons. Time has elapsed since his flight – time enough for the ever-resourceful Moses to have not simply found sanctuary but to have married the daughter of Jethro, the priest of Midian.

One day while absent-mindedly leading Jethro’s flocks Moses wanders into a region described as beyond the wilderness. It’s not an incidental detail that beyond the wilderness lies at the foot of Mt. Horeb – sometimes referred to as Mt. Sinai – or the holy mountain of God. It seems that the later Deuteronomist scribes who compiled Exodus sometime in the 6th-century BCE seem to have had a hazy grasp of geography. Midian is situated on the eastern shores of the Gulf of Aqaba – modern Saudi Arabia – yet Mt. Horeb sits at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula – so Moses has indeed been wandering far from home.

It’s helpful to picture Moses as daydreaming as he walks along – because his attention is alerted by a mysterious phenomenon which he spies in his peripheral vision – out of the corner of his eye so-to-speak. Focused concentration narrows the range of our peripheral vision. It’s only when we are not concentrating on anything closer to hand that our peripheral vision expands to take in a wider panorama. Out of the corner of his eye Moses spies something that arouses his intense curiosity. Driven by curiosity Moses leaves the beaten track and sets off across country.

In his peripheral vision Moses had caught sight of a mysterious phenomenon. Driven by curiosity – Moses arrives at his first encounter with the living God – a momentous encounter that will upend his life as he knows it.  

This encounter is not only life changing for Moses but from the perspective of God’s biography it’s also direction changing for God as well. In this encounter with Moses – we hear God speaking again for the first time since his relationship with Abraham.

Throughout Genesis’ long epics of the Patriarchs after Abraham, God has remained silent. The Patriarchal cycles are stories that focus on human action in which God is assumed as background but plays no direct role. In warning Moses to take off his sandals for he is about to tread on holy ground – we hear God speaking directly to a human being again. God speaking – is the prelude to a personal relationship with Moses who for God becomes a new Abraham – that is- a human being with whom God can form and intense and personal relationship. Through his relationship with Moses –as in the days of Abraham – God once again emerges as the primary actor in the unfolding story.

Moses’ encounter with God before the burning bush is an extended metaphor which illuminates the nature of own spiritual journey. Hidden within the rich theological-biographical detail – is a story of rediscovery, of remembering, and of reset.                                                                                                             

As Exodus chapter 2 winds to a close we witness a startling recovery of memory for God. We read: 

After a long time, God heard the Israelites groaning and remembered his covenant with Abraham. God looked upon them and God took notice of them.

We might ask why has God taken so long to act? Is there a suggestion here that the enslavement is the result of God having forgotten his people? Their servitude comes to and end only when God notices their plight as he recovers his memory of Abraham. We shall never know but it is interesting to speculate.

In remembering Abraham God seems to become aware again of a need for relationship – something he last enjoyed with Abraham.  This is also a story of rediscovery, remembering, leading to a reset now with Moses as God’s chosen partner.

At the heart of this story is the surprising revelation of God’s name. God has until this point been the God of ancestors – for the Israelites a God of distant memory. In response to God’s request – Moses pressures God for something more personal in the form of a name rather than a description.  God replies: tell them I AM WHO I AM has sent you.

The English is incapable of conveying the pulsating quality of the Hebrew letters YHWH -which shimmer with ambiguity of meaning. I AM WHO I AM – can be read as a statement about who God is and has always been – a God associated with the past. But it also can be read as a statement about who God will now become – I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE. The nature of who God will be – becomes revealed in future action where God is to become known as Liberator.  This is material enough for a whole sermon series yet to come.

However, today I want to focus on the element of the story captured in the phrase beyond the wilderness. I interpret this to mean – a place beyond conscious recognition – outside of the boundaries of familiar imagination.

The process of noticing what’s hidden in our peripheral vision is often best demonstrated in crime fiction where the chief witness is subjected to some kind of hypnotic process taking them back to the scene of the crime – during which they recover details of the crime lodged in peripheral vision – details that had remained hidden – inaccessible to their conscious memory.

Through the cultivation of curiosity, we begin to consciously register elements otherwise unrecognized in the peripheral vision of our daydreaming.

To venture beyond the wilderness is to leave the beaten path – the constrictions of the familiar. Matthew Syrdal – is the pastor of The Church of Lost Walls – a wild theology church in Denver, synthesizing theology and ecology. He has referred to the beaten path as the uncalled life. He bemoans that as pastors and spiritual leaders we spend too much time tending the uncalled life of the flock – by which he means:

The business-as-usual, relatively autonomous existence we often lead. In the uncalled life, Syrdal notes that: Most of us typically experience no major intrusion to speak of, nothing disrupting or redefining our identity and role in our communities, yet also no appearance or message — no larger conversation with the Holy.

He likens our uncalled life to the Israelites slavery in Egypt. In the uncalled life we are silently crying out – unknown and uncalled. In other words – being unable to notice the call of the Holy within us and around us – we remain unconsciously encapsulated in our distress – a distress emanating from the fixed and closed pattern of our lives.

Syrdal further suggests that our unconscious distress finds collective expression of the storm surges of racism, fear, and terror – forces currently in play – powerfully disrupting our civic life today.  He writes:

At times, it might seem as if the whole of western culture is enslaved in a cultural pathology — the City that Egypt represents in the Exodus narrative. The City, egocentric civilization, is almost by definition structured as a defense mechanism against the natural world and the threat it represents. In our times, Egypt is that which slashes and burns the old growth of a forgotten World, that which consumes the Earth’s resources with an insatiable appetite. We are largely, and mostly unconsciously, enculturated from early childhood with the incipient imperialism of Egypt. Moses, as a type, represents for us an awakening from the imperial dream to something like the dreaming of the Deep World.

The story of Moses and the burning bush is a story of theophany – to use the technical term. Theophany is a story or experience of divine revelation – and from the perspective of God’s biography – that is – God’s personal story -a self-revelation – a new learning for God about being God.

Theophany occurs – never in plain sight, nor along the familiar path – but always beyond the wilderness – meaning – off the beaten track hidden in peripheral vision. The trick for us is to catch its glimpse out of the corner of our eye.

Like Moses, we become changed by an encounter with the Holy – only when our lives become decentered enough – disturbed enough – to reshape our expectations, stimulate our curiosity, and pay attention to what’s happening out of the corner of our eye.

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