Scripture: Exodus 17:1-7
Speaking to you this morning about our trip to Scotland seemed to me a little bit like the sermonic equivalent of inviting you over to our house to see the slides. I had thought I would spare you that this morning. I found though that as I thought about what I wanted to say this morning that I kept gravitating back to my experiences over the last couple of weeks, particularly the week we spent on the island of Iona. So I guess I need to spend some words reflecting on some sights and sounds that are quite remote from Charlottesville. I guess I’m not completely home yet. My apologies.
Iona, actually, is quite remote from just about anywhere. You have to really want to go there, and many people do from all over the world, by the thousands in season, although at the time we were there it was more like by the tens. Many come as tourists to see the sights listed in the guidebooks, the place where Christianity was brought to Scotland, a restored ancient monastery, and the supposed burial place of MacBeth. Many people, it is said, come as pilgrims, meaning that they invest the island with some personal religious significance.
Then there are people who come, as we did, to spend a week on the island living in community with about forty people, sharing chores and meals, programs and worship services. Clearly, we weren’t typical tourists, getting off the ferry, heading for the places with markers, snapping a roll of film, browsing the gift shops, maybe bedding down for a night and heading off the next morning. Clearly all those who came to stay for a week came for something more than to be tourists, though what each person came for was not entirely clear, and as people tried to get to know each other around a dinner table, the typical first question would be, “Where are you from?” and the second would be, “And why did you come to Iona?”
Everyone had a sort of stock answer to that question—why did you come—but for many people I’m pretty sure the answer was deeper or more complicated than could be said in a few words across a noisy dinner table. For some, the answer may not have been fully known even to themselves, and a few may have discovered that they had come for a different reason than they had at first thought. When people from the Iona Community, who were our hosts, asked the question of why people had come, it was often followed with a third question: “And is Iona living up to your expectations?”
I may have been reading things in to this question, but I sometimes felt that it was being asked out of some considerable experience of people coming to Iona with hopes or expectations too large for reality. I’m guessing that among the many people who come to sojourn with the Iona Community, a fair number do not find what they had hoped for, and are left with some level of disappointment. Iona Community members have probably had some experience encountering unrealistic expectations from people who come, especially who come some distance, to be there.
Iona is one of those places sometimes referred to in Celtic cultures as a “thin place”, meaning that in such places the distinction between heaven and earth, between the sacred and the profane is not as firm as it might be elsewhere. It has the reputation of casting a spell of spirituality over people, of providing people with a kind of otherworldly feeling, and to some extent it comes by that reputation honestly. A one by three mile island where the ocean can be seen and heard from everywhere, looking just the way the postcards promise it will look, inhabited for 1500 years by the spirits of saints. It would not be surprising—it would be surprising if people did not—come with some expectation of being transported onto some different spiritual plane just by being there. I expect people often come looking for something like an experience of peace, or wonder, or holiness. And although I was aware of the danger of expecting too much, and tried not to come with too many preconceived notions of what Iona would be like, I probably had some of those hopes myself.
I remember my reaction to one of the morning worship services. Worship takes place twice a day at Iona, 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. every day of the week and is offered for the guests of the community and anyone else who happens to be on the island. It takes place in the abbey, which is part of the restored 12th century monastery that is the central part of the landscape on the island. The abbey church is not terribly large, but it’s in the shape of a medieval cathedral, and it’s made out of stone, and sound reverberates through the worship space, so that a Gregorian chant has just that mystical sort of quality to it you want it to have.
One morning in particular I think I was especially wanting to be washed in some combination of music and silence. Instead, a few minutes into the service, a mother arrived with a small child. They sat in the very back of the church, but the child was quite distressed, and because of the acoustics of the place his cries of distress were amplified quite effectively and it became hard to hear anything else, much less concentrate on anything else. Instead of the ethereal tones of a chant wafting over us, a screaming baby drowned out any attempt to make music and made soothing silence impossible. The mother succeeded occasionally in calming the child down, but then he would start up again, so that pretty soon even when he was quiet your attention was focused on him, wondering how soon he would start to cry. Finally she gave up and left, probably having been there only about ten minutes but since it was the middle ten minutes of a thirty-minute worship service, it seemed like the whole half-hour had been filled with a crying baby. I felt cheated of the spiritual experience that I had hoped for, and I made some comment to Ava about how it would have been nice if the mother had realized a little sooner that this just wasn’t going to work today. I was out of sorts the rest of the morning.
This incident came back to me in the middle of our plane flight back home. Somewhere over the Atlantic it occurred to me that this might be a kind of parable of my experience of Iona, and maybe of more than my experience of Iona.
In all honesty, I had not experienced Iona as a holy place. I had not just been bathed in spirituality for a week. Iona is a beautiful place. I met some people I was very grateful to have met. There was lots of music led by some very talented people. There were times that were fun and times that were relaxing. Iona was a good place to be for a week.
But it was not, for me, a holy place. It was a very human place where the newspapers that lay on the tables displayed headlines with words in them like bombing and anthrax…
…a very human place, where people who didn’t know each other found it hard to break through to each other and thus where anonymity continued to prevail…
…a very human place where the clearest goal for each day might be the chopping of vegetables or the cleaning of toilets…
…a very human place where the movement I had long admired for its efforts to bring a new language to worship based on theologies of liberation was still using worship materials where God is referred to in overwhelmingly masculine ways…
…a very human place, where prayers were often perfunctory and most often read out of books, where truly worshipful times were not so easy to come by, and where children cried—loudly—during the times designated for holiness.
But then, I thought, what if the holiness that I think we are all probably seeking in some way or another—what if that holiness is to be found not so much on some distant island or by making closer contact with some distant God; what if that holiness is not to be found so much in some special sacred space, some well-formed phrase or enchanting piece of music, or at least what if the holiness we seek and need is not found only in those places but precisely, also, in the cries of a child?
Not that I would recommend crying children as a great way to have a meaningful worship experience. The net effect will always probably be, as it was the day that I described, a lot of jarring voices, all competing unsuccessfully for attention. But what if we just play with a thought for a moment?
What if instead of trying to carry on with the worship that morning we had all just stopped what we were doing—put down the worship books, close the Bible, let the music go silent, give up what had become a very strenuous task of trying to pray in silence when there was no silence, just quit whatever holy activity we were trying to carry on with and stop and listen to a baby crying, and give the mother permission to try to offer real comfort to the child and not just find some trick to keep the child quiet for a few moments so she could have some time to worship?
What if the official worship were allowed to stop and for those few moments we listened to the crying of a child? What if we heard for a few moments within the crying of that single child the crying of all children? Maybe the child was hungry. What if we heard in her cries the cries of all children who wake up hungry in the morning? Maybe the child was tired. What if we heard in her cries, the cries of all God’s weary children who need rest for their bodies or rest for their souls? Maybe the child was bored. What if we heard in her cries the cries of everyone whose lives have come to be filled with sameness and dreariness? What if we heard in her cries our own cries that come from our yearning for wonder, or healing, or holiness?
My thought this morning is fundamentally a simple one. We do not discover or re-discover that quality of sacredness in our lives that we so much need by seeking it out in some blessed place, some blessed atmosphere, some blessed moment, some experience set apart from the ordinary stuff of our lives. Sometimes, by the grace of God, holiness is offered to us in that way, but more often if we are to find it at all, we must find it from within, from within ourselves and the people we have been given to share the journey with, and from within all the daily experiences that go to make up our lives.
Over the centuries Christians have been known to argue with each other, excommunicate each other, even kill each other, over the question of “the real presence”. Is Jesus truly present in the communion bread, or just symbolically present? In one sense I have never had a really hard time answering that question. For me the bread is symbolic of Jesus’ presence, and when he first gave it to the disciples saying “This is my body broken for you”, he was speaking poetically, not literally. I’ve always been pretty clear about that.
But in another sense I do believe in the real presence of God in the bread of communion, a real presence that is released when the bread is broken and shared. And I believe in the real presence of God in me, a real presence that is released when who I am is broken and shared. And I believe that if each one of us were to look into the eyes of the person sitting nearest, that we would all see in that person’s eyes the real presence of God waiting to be broken and shared.
In a desert wilderness, we are told, in a dry and weary land, among a people who were asking whether the Lord was truly among them or not, Moses struck a rock with his staff and broke it open, releasing water for a thirsty people, enabling them to continue on their journey. In an upper room, in another time of testing, Jesus took bread and broke it and shared it with his disciples, nourishing them for a journey they had only just begun. Following Jesus, we break open bread so that it may be shared, bread to nourish us in our journeys, bread that is meant to set our hearts toward the vision of a world where bread is shared among all God’s people. As we take up that journey again, may we know in ourselves and in one another the real presence of God, and may we do our part in setting that holy presence free upon our world. Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 4, 2001