A Descent of Angels

We have entered Great Lent. A few days ago we observed Clean Monday. We sweep away debris and clutter that have accumulated throughout the year. This "sweeping" and "clearing away" is the meaning of the Greek word sotería, which stands behind our English word salvation.

In the early days of the American Colonies and, later, Republic, this clutter-removal day was observed annually as a social ritual. New wooden spoons and bowls were distributed to symbolize making a new start. The old and tattered from each home was carried out and thrown on a bonfire in the town square. This day was known as the busk, a word related to bush pointing to the bonfire, suggesting the spindly, woody material that kindled it. That is, a fiery bush lay at the heart of this ritual, a fiery bush whose message was, "The old life ends. A new life begins." (As we read about Moses in the Epistle lesson appointed for today.) Incipit vita nuova Dante wrote. "Here begins new life," which in turn points back to the ancient Hebrew thought-world.

Moses' life was choked with clutter. He was raised as a prince of mighty Egypt. But then he was called, called away from privilege, luxury, and all its clutter. And in the wilderness to which he was called he encountered a fiery bush. Before this encounter, people called him "unlikely," "the stutterer," "the stammerer." After his encounter with Divine fire, the towering figure of Moses emerged.

Do you know the tale of the young man born with a silver spoon in his mouth or of the little girl who is raised to believe she is a princess? .... you see, people who did not depart from clutter. Everything in life is handed to them. They need strive for nothing. You know how the story ends: theirs is the case of arrested development. And their later years are not pretty ones, for they will have become grotesques of the competent, balanced, even magnificent people they might have been. You know the signs of this shallowness: petulance, impatience, over-hasty judgment, thin-skinned, egotistical .... ill-equipped to live in the world .... in any world.

The purpose of demand and struggle in God's design is that we bloom and grow into noble creatures lying just beneath the surface in every one of us — that the gifts God has given us be summoned into the daylight, where they flourish and develop. Through all of this, all of this demand, this fire, our in-born vocations are revealed, and we come to full stature.

The word vocation is from the Latin, vocare, "to call." Ours is a calling God, and our vocation is God's intention for us. I do not mean job nor career but rather our role in God's great design. You know, Wallace Stevens worked in the insurance industry in addition to being one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. T. S. Eliot worked at Lloyds' Bank, London, in addition to being one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. I do not mean job, but rather vocation.

And unless we play our role, God's work goes undone. How far the Kingdom of Heaven was advanced in T. S. Eliot's poem, The Four Quartets! If we do not attend to God's call, His work goes undone within the far-reaching sphere of each of our lives as we travel the globe. And we never become the expansive creatures that God imagined when He made each one of us.

I beg pardon for this anecdote. But, you see, I must confine myself to what I actually know. I only present facts as well as the life I have seen with my own eyes. Else, these scribblings would ring false. And I cannot refer to my own life, for even I would become quickly offended.

I knew a a Franciscan nun, who was a modest and unassuming creature. She deferred to others. She was always the last to speak. She sat quietly at the table. I believe as a girl people called her "Little Dove." She never disagreed with others .... at least not vocally. And I have never heard say an unkind word. She went about her quiet life of prayer in the wee hours far from the sight of public notice, absolutely faithful. I suppose most people called her "retiring" or even "shy." But, then, a demand was made on her. A nascent ministry was placed in her hands — a large health clinic to be constructed, a small institute of epidemiology to be founded, a staff to be hired in the uneducated Fourth World. Then there would be a school to establish, a nutrition program to inaugurate, a ministry begun for clothing people in rags. And than again far from the sight of others, she would go from hovel to hovel dispensing encouragements and little favors.

In her quiet way, she recruited others to help her. In time, a very wealthy man notice this .... competency? That word fails. He noticed this marvel of a truly humble woman doing mighty works. And in this chaste and blameless life, he placed his trust, presenting her with a check for one million dollars (worth roughly twice that today). His only proviso was that she would oversee the work it could do herself. You see, he didn't trust anyone else.

When I served in the Fourth World, we were surrounded with con men: orphanages that did not exist, programs to feed children that were no more than pictures on the Web. I worked for a man who had founded a charity. He was accosted in an airport by a man seeking donations. This man then showed my employer pictures of his own minstry!

But a wealthy donor saw with his own eyes. The Franciscan nun accept his check and built another institution, an imposing "Center of Hope" to safeguard women who are so much at risk in the primitive world during pregnancy and early child rearing.

As the years passed she had developed the largest NGO in Southwest Haiti. with the help of the team she recruited. And along the way this principal lifeline within the expansive sphere of her life would mean countless other demands. And she rose to these many occasions, one after another without pause. This was God's program to form her, to develop her into full stature He had envisioned when she was conceived.

This is the way with vocation. When we answer God's call, everything changes. His holy fire burns down our whole worlds. New life begins, often dominating our every minute and hour. It is a fact that the Franciscan nun slept three or four hours a night I never heard her complain. And she never appeared to be exhausted. She responded cheerfully to every emergent need. "When you fast, wash your face and anoint yourself that men not see your fasting" (Mt 6:17).

Without question, her former world had been burned to the ground. No loving and adoring husband. No children. No place of honor in a beloved hometown. But where all this might have stood, God's holy fire of compassion, of mercy, and of providence shone brightly.

God is constantly scanning the earth for the ones He can trust, who will be faithful, who will endure to the end. And when He finds these acceptable instruments, He exercises them beyond what they thought possible. We must never forget that our God-given gifts belong to God. He knows what they can do. He has already built the sufficient engine, and He will provide all that is needed. But we must live into it!

A former parishioner came up to me one Sunday and said, "Father I petition every single day that God will answer my prayers!"

"Where to you pray?" I asked.

"Oh, in an easy chair in the living room."

"Do you not go out and attempt to work towards these hopes and dreams yourself?" I asked.

"No!" she said. "I trust in God!"

"But Madam," I replied, "You must go out and roll your wagon forward. Then God will guide it!"

We often pray the Gospel prayer, "O God! Without You we can do nothing!" (Jn 15:5). How sobering, then, to realize that without us, He can do nothing. He will not take over the reins of this world or even of a single life. He is not a mere puppet-master. He is not an MIT student who constructs programmed robots. He has given us our freedom, and He must abide by that inviolable gift. Yes, of course He supplies unseen assistance. But God's work to bring about a godly world is mainly up to us.

And when her work was done (after twenty-five years), the Franciscan nun packed all that she owned in one suitcase preparing for a quiet car ride to the airport. But as the car slipped out of the campus, which she had built, a police escort was waiting. Multitudes had turned out to say "thank you." Along the route people were thronging to see her, weeping as she passed by, and everywhere hearts knowing that a saint of God had touched their lives with goodness, simple virtue, and, yes, holiness.

All of this had grown from a little seed, which was the demand that she accept an assignment. This seed would receive the warm sun of God's call, of His demands, stirring it to sprout. And it would receive God's nourishing rains bringing it to full stature.

Is not this the way with all the human creation? Our lives in God's sight lie sleeping within us. It is only our response to God's call, and trusting in that, that stirs to us to life. Without question, ours is a calling God. If you are human and you were born into the world, then you may be depend upon the fact that God is calling you even now, as you hear these words. Our part is to attune ourselves to this call. We must ponder the "stories" unfolding around us — its many and varied characters, its different settings, and its plots and subplots — which we unceremoniously call life. Some of us, living in the trance of sleep, consider life to be "random."

But we awaken when we read our own lives and the world around us as literature, having spiritual significance, having "a moral," and seen against the backdrop of final judgment. God will commonly "intrude" into the story with His use of timing (what we call coincidences), for as the Son had told us, the Father is the Master of all timings (Mt 24:36). Echoing themes will appear, and soon a coherent story will emerge where only recently we saw a mish-mash of undifferentiated details.

The first question, of course, is, "What is our calling?" First, God calls us to Himself. Isn't that what we see in our Gospel lesson today? He wants us to know Him. The greatest earthly miracle is that God has willed to reveal Himself to us. He has revealed His nature — His creative powers, His love of beauty, His marvel of making — in the Creation He has laid all around us. (We have spent untold trillions of dollars shot into space only to discover what we already knew: our beautiful planet Earth, breathtaking, is unique in all the universe.)

But, above all, He has revealed Himself in His Son, the character, Jesus of Nazareth, Who is the great protagonist of all stories. Almighty and Omnipotent God actually entered our lifeworld as one of us, frail, vulnerable, .... human. People actually met Him and spoke with Him and loved Him and received His love. And we have been bequeathed the most precious heirloom of these stories, which we call the Holy Gospels. Other Scriptures surrounding these Four Books are illuminated by that central brilliance.

All of this is to say, that our first calling, our primary vocation (no matter what else we do), is to meditate on these Holy Scriptures. We are called to ponder. The Scriptures themselves insist on this sacred obligation. Our teacher, Jesus, has placed stories before us enjoining us to ruminate over them, to re-read them, and to meditate on them some more. In a lifetime of these meditations, I have discovered that these mysterious books are bottomless pools, which I shall never fully plumb. Nonetheless, we must underline sentences. We must circle words. We must write notes in the margins. We must compose essays (a word that means attempt) to make them coherent in our minds and souls, to make them real within our selves. We must memorize as much as we can. Certainly, our love for them will secure many passages to memory just as the love-struck man or woman fills his life with images of the beloved.

Jesus explains that in His teachings, mysteries are set before us. Kings and sages of history longed to know them (Mt 13:11). St. Paul reveals that the Scriptures are "oracles" placed in our midst (Rom 3:2, Heb 5:12). We are to be "stewards of God's mysteries" (1 Cor 4:1).

One of my professors at Yale, Lamin Sanneh, walked into Marquand Chapel, an imposing building built upon high on a hill on Prospect Street, and saw students slouched back in the pews with their feet resting on the book racks before them in the rainy season of spring. He dislodged a Bible from one of these racks, covered with mud and footprints, and he said, "This is the living word of God,

"And you trample it under your feet?!" In my country of origin, people have died and will die for this book.

My brothers and sisters, if we do not reverence the Holy Scriptures, if we do not hear every word proceeding from these holy passages, understanding them to be a sacred oracle, a Divine mystery, God's own fire, then we discount it and, in that sense, trample it under our feet.

During this Great Lent of 2023, let us bow before God's call. I propose that we read and contemplate the lectionary passages appointed for us with a sense of new godly fear and awe. Let us read and re-read and discern and ponder and understand that its deepest depths though they will always elude us.

What shall become of us if we give ourselves over to this daily occupation? Remember, the Kingdom of Heaven comes about through each of us. To become the intimate familiar with these books is to become the familiar of the Lord Jesus. Alternatively,

exhorted the Latin Father, St. Jerome.

☦

Our reading this week is the Gospel passage par excellence concerning vocation. It is the Theologian St. John's account of God calling His earthly Disciples. The telos, the blueprint, within each of these men is that He is an Apostle to be sent into the world. The scene before us, therefore, is global — these men are called eventually to establish God's Church to the ends of earth (Mk 16:15).

The scope of this same reading is also cosmic. For immediately preceding our passage, John the Baptist says,

Indeed, our reading this morning is only forty verses or so into the celestial first chapter of St. John's Gospel, which is self-consciously patterned on Genesis 1, whose matter is the marriage of Heaven and Earth. This is the setting with which we must reckon: from the the furthest reaches of the Heavens thence to God's Son walking amongst the characters of the human characters of our story thence to the entire eastern shore of the Mediterranean, which, St. Peter, referring to John's baptism, likened to a second Flood engulfing the whole Levant thence to the calling of the Disciples, who will eventually be called back out to worldwide apostolates.

Do you see the funneling effect of the Evangelist's narrative construction? The gradually zooming in from galaxies down to a particular town slowly bringing us to pin-point our scene today in Capernaum, on the northern shore of Lake Genneseret. There the Lord of Heaven and Earth stands calling local boys (as it were) to become future Apostles.

A sense of place pervades these opening verses of St. John's Gospel. Our passage this morning bristles with place names:

We surmise this takes place in Capernaum, a large town on the coast. In the sentence after that we hear, Bethsaida (under the Tetrarchy of Phillip), and the sentence after that, Nazareth. When Jesus see Nathanael, He greets Him as an Israelite.

Why Galilee? Certainly, we hear good-natured jesting, depreciating Nazareth in the context of the greater coastal towns of Bethsaida and Capernaum. But aren't such rivalries the very stuff of regionalism? My high school was also situated in a coastal town. In that same jesting spirit, we referred to our inland counterparts as "a bunch of farmers." They returned the favor by calling us "a bunch of clam-diggers." In this we affirmed our region .... in the shadow of North Jersey and its nearby empire, New York — an unpleasantness we did not speak about.

In this exchange among the Disciples, the elephant in the room is their New York: Jerusalem, once closely allied to the Mesopotamian empire, whose customs it continues to follow and whose language it continues to speak (Aramaic). But in our scene to the far north this all sinks into a pool of silence.

Of greatest significance, in the rising action of the narrative, Nathanael exclaims,

He does not say, "You are the King of the Jews!" King of the Jews?! That would be unthinkable. For in the minds of Israelites, who are without deceit (Jn 1:47), the Son of God could only come out of the tradition of the Patriarchs, out of the ancient Hebrew tradition. And we recall that angels are also called sons of God, and talk of angels is forbidden by the Temple authorities.

No. The Son of God could never out of the culture of Mesopotamian hybrid religion, which (in their minds) is the heart of darkness and deceit. Are they not presenting to the world the counterfeit? The religion of their invention?

"Here indeed is an Iraelite, who is without guile!" Jesus exclaims when He sees Nathanael. He is surrounded by sincere, searching young men, who like all young men yearn for the real and the authentic. Wasn't that also true of us as teenagers? We hated hypocrisy. We hated phoniness. We wanted only the authentic.

As we considered last year on the First Sunday in Lent, the calling of the Disciples is a "Northern Kingdom" affair. Aside from Judas (whose name signifies Judah and its religion Judah-ism), the Disciples are all from the region of historical Israel. The towns and districts in our lesson read out like posters and signs at a political convention, a gathering of Israel.

To carry this metaphor a little further, let us ask, "What are the planks of the party platform?"