This Sunday begins a week that starts with celebration and ends with crucifixion.  It starts with palms and ends with passion.  Now that word “passion” has taken on a whole new meaning since the unveiling of Mel Gibson's epic movie, “The Passion of Christ”.  You now know very well that passion means suffering.  And if you have seen the movie, images of the suffering of Christ have seared a mark on your memory and soul in such a way that it may be difficult for you to get past the violence to find the victory.

 

This is not a time to debate Mel’s movie, only to acknowledge that it was faithful to the orthodoxy of his Catholicism which through Mass and Crucifix continue to keep the suffering of Christ front-and-center while minimizing the empty cross of victory over sin and death.  As we come to this Palm Sunday and enter this Holy Week, we may think of those as two ways of practicing the presence of God.  For in the suffering of all of our lives, we know that God has promised God’s presence, but in the end the power of God is greater than the forces of evil and death.

 

As we move into this week (whether we have seen Gibson’s movie or not) the image which predominates is most certainly the image of suffering on a cross.  But as we think about what it means for us, it is important for us not to get so distracted by the suffering that we forget that Jesus died as he lived “practicing the presence of God”.

 

It is that theme that I want us to meditate upon this morning, not as an act of denial but rather hopefully as a means of revelation to see that all his life and death stood for was to teach us the practice of the presence of God.  For it is that connection with the One who has made us and loves us that will ultimately sustain us through joy and sorrow and into life eternal.

 

We go back to Psalm 1 where we have that wonderful description of what it means to be rooted in the presence of God and when I do I cannot help but fall into the cadence of the King James, “But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.  And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.”

 

It’s about roots, isn’t it?  Spiritual roots!  Nourished and sustained by rivers of water -- what Jesus calls “streams of living water”.  Water is such an important symbol in our faith.  In two weeks we will be reminded again of that primal image for all Christians of the waters of baptism as we baptize our infant children in the name of the One who loved us even before we were born out of the waters of the womb.

 

Marcus Borg tells a wonderful story about a little three year old girl.  She was the first born and only child in her family, but now her mother was pregnant again, and the little girl was very excited about having a new brother or sister.  Within a few hours of the parents bringing their new baby boy home from the hospital, the little girl made a request -- she wanted to be alone with her new brother in his room with the door shut.

 

Her insistence about being alone with the baby with the door shut made her parents more than a little uneasy, but then they remembered that they had installed an intercom system in anticipation of the baby’s arrival, so they realized they could let their daughter do this, and if they heard the slightest indication of a problem, they could be in the baby’s room in an instant.

 

So they let the little girl go into the baby’s room, shut the door, and then raced to the intercom listening station.  They heard their daughter’s footsteps moving across the baby’s room, imagined her standing over the baby’s crib, and then they heard her say to her three-day-old brother, “Tell me about God -- I’ve almost forgotten.”

 

If that doesn’t send chills up and down your spine, I don’t know what will!  It certainly is our faith that we come from God and we are going to God.  But the truth for each of us is that very early on we forget about God.  We forget from where we came.  Those roots nourished by the waters of baptism can dry up if we fail to practice the presence of God.

 

How do we do that?  The poet Wendy Wright offers a haunting phrase that triggers my imagination and touches my heart when she writes, “winter as a landscape of the heart had been long and dreary indeed.”  You don’t live in Michigan if you can’t handle the winters, but there usually comes that time (for me about the middle of March) when you feel that you are hanging on for dear life for those sunbursts of spring that signal brightness and hope and new life.

 

Certainly, it is when winter is looming (as a landscape of the heart) that we most need those disciplines that will help to keep us near to the heart of God.  One of those disciplines is simply to stay awake, to stay alert, to keep attentive.  It was one of the great failures of the disciples that they could not stay awake with Jesus as he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.

 

If you have to ask what difference could that have possibly meant to Jesus since he seemed to be having his own private struggle with God that night, then you have never known what it means to have friends stay awake with you during a long night when life and death hung in the balance.  It is not the words that are said.  It is not even the comfort that is given.  But it is the care that is shown that imparts strength and support.

 

It may not sound like a spiritual discipline but staying attentive and alert to all that life brings us is in fact one of the primary ways of practicing the presence of God.  A few weeks ago The Grand Rapids Press ran a front page story about Paul Novoselick, a 50-year-old Muskegon resident who is in the final stages of a 20-year battle with muscular dystrophy.  Now confined to a bed in his living room his world is definitely getting smaller.  But even as it is getting smaller it seems that his senses are getting more alert to what is happening around him, and he is finding that the little things are taking on greater meaning.  For instance on Valentine’s Day, he snuggled in his hospital bed with his wife Cyndy as they split a pepperoni pizza and watched a Jack Nicholson movie.

 

We don’t have to have life almost taken away from us in order to become alert to the joys of the little things, but given the rush and pace of most of our lives the particular tends to get blurred into the abstract, and so we lose sight of the fact that God is most truly known and shown to us in the concrete, in the particular, in the significance of little things.

 

There is another way to practice the presence of God that may have escaped our notice as a spiritual discipline.  In his famous “Confessions” St. Augustine described the impact of his discovery of the life of St. Anthony, one of the earliest desert fathers.  St. Anthony was famous for his extreme asceticism and his battle against spiritual demons.

 

Since St. Anthony died a mere 30 years before, St. Augustine regarded him as a virtual contemporary.  But what filled Augustine with wonder and admiration was not the so-called holiness of St. Anthony, but rather the proof in the witness of his life that God was present and active “so recently, almost in our own times”.  You see, what contributed to Augustine’s own conversion was the witness of such lives to the ongoing presence of God in the world.

 

This matter of practicing the presence of God is not about making you or me more holy than someone else, it is about tapping into those deep waters of life that nourish and sustain us.  It is a fact of life that we are formed by those whom we admire.  This is not about putting certain people up on a pedestal and creating a new kind of idolatry, but it is about being alert to the ways in which God can come to us to enlarge our imaginations, to supply us with a wider spiritual vocabulary, and to enable us to dream new dreams.

 

There is a story about a peasant who approached a Trappist monastery in Brazil after having traveled a great distance.  He was welcomed at the gate of the monastery, and he asked to see the Abbot from whom he then asked permission to join their community.  In explaining himself and his motivation, he said, “Where I come from I had always been told that there were one or two ways of following Christ.  Then you came and there was another way.”

 

I have to say that is my testimony too.  The exciting thing about this journey we are on is that “practicing the presence of God” is not about a formula.  It can’t be reduced to one part prayer, two parts scripture, or three parts worship.  The beauty of holiness is much more dynamic.  In the words of Robert Ellsburg, “The truth of the gospel is not the same as worldly wisdom; it has absolutely no value in theory.  It is a truth that is only verified in living witness, and it is by such living witness that it remains alive in the world.”

 

Of course, that is what we are about this week called “Holy” for the greatest living witness of all is the one who walked the way of the Cross and in doing so he showed us how to practice the presence of God through suffering and into life eternal.

 

Amen.