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Wonderful Cool Something
O God, you are my God,
A
sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Third Sunday in Lent, March
11, 2007 This week nine from Mountain Home and nearly 90 whom I’ve gathered from across Arkansas will be leaving for the Holy Land. How about a weather report? It’s been warm and dry weather in Israel for weeks, highs solidly in the 70s. Ah, but forecast shows that when we arrive on Thursday morning we will bring . . . well, to use my title, a Wonderful Cool Something. We seem to be arriving with a cold front that will cool things off by twenty or so degrees and bring a good chance of showers for our first day or two in the Land. While as pilgrims we might not enjoy getting wet on the day we arrive, I can tell you what our guide, David Aarons, will tell us – that for the inhabitants of the land, now as in ancient times, they rejoice and sing “There shall be showers of blessing, O that today they might fall!” Because, you see, from mid- April through the end of summer there is virtually no rain at all. It can be, as the psalmist said, “a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Psalm 63 bears the superscription, “A Psalm of David, when he was in the Wilderness of Judah.” This Wilderness of Judah is a dry and barren landscape, a wonderful place for David to hide in the multitude of crevices carved out by occasional rains. When the showers come the wadis swell and often become torrents, marking the landscape as they carve their way deep into the Jordan Valley to engorge the river as it makes its way to the Dead Sea. Let’s not forget that we began our Lenten Journey in this very same wilderness of Judea, the place where Jesus, after his baptism in the Jordan River near Jericho, ascended into the wilderness to be tempted for forty days. The dry ashes we smeared on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday to begin our forty day period of Lend remind us of our mortality, yes – but they might also remind us of the dry and barren landscape of the Judean Wilderness where Jesus was tempted. Lent, spiritually speaking, can be a dry and weary land where there is no water. Yet, in the midst of Lent, on this 3rd Sunday, our lectionary refreshes us, reminds of the flowing waters, of our soul’s thirst for God. If the spiritual atmosphere of Lent is dry and warm – this third Sunday of Lent brings us the promise of water, of our thirst being satisfied with a Wonderful Cool Something. The words of my title are not mine, but those of a very famous person whose name you will certainly recognize. Let me tell you this person’s story. On June 27, 1880 in the lush countryside of Tuscumbia, Alabama, Arthur Henley Keller, a Captain in the former Confederate Army, and his wife Kate, a tall, statuesque elegant Southern woman, greeted their newborn daughter, Helen. With loving words and excited embraces they nourished their daughter with tenderness and care. Helen’s life was promising indeed. But a terrifying storm would pass over the Keller family in February of 1882. At the age of 19 months, Helen Keller’s world went suddenly dark and silent. Helen had fallen ill with what doctors of that day called “brain fever.” Perhaps today we would call it scarlet fever or meningitis. In any event, the illness left Helen blind and deaf, leaving her to grope in a dreary world, a dark and silent world. After six years, there seemed no hope for Helen. Captain and Mrs. Keller found themselves unable to care for her, growing desperate. But into Helen’s life on March 3, 1887 came an amazing teacher, Anne Sullivan (last Saturday marking the120th anniversary of Anne Sullivan’s coming to Helen Keller). Barely a month after Anne arrived, on April 5, something happened to spark Helen’s dark world with light. The flow of water became the catalyst for Helen Keller’s life of learning, rendering her name still immediately recognized around the world. So stunning was this moment that in 1957 a play called The Miracle Worker was first performed. The highlight of The Miracle Worker was that amazing breakthrough on April 5, 1887, the day of the pouring of the water. Until that day, in mind and heart Helen had lived in a dry and weary land where no water was. But for Helen, the pouring of the water was the Spark of Awareness. “My Teacher,” as Helen came to call Anne Sullivan, held one of Helen’s hands under the pump and poured water over her hand – and in that act, something happened, something worth remembering, something worth pondering lest we fail to comprehend its full significance. A shaft of blazing light broke into Helen’s dark and silent world. Listen to how Helen would later describe that day. “We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word ‘water’, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘W-A-T-E-R’ meant the Wonderful Cool Something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul.” Given now the paradigm of a word spelled in one hand while the thing was experienced in the other, Helen plunged into a new world of Awareness. The thirst of her soul was being quenched. Anne wrote in her diary that Helen learned thirty words within the next few hours. The pouring of the water had awakened her soul, a soul that had been a dry and weary land without water. Now within Helen was a thirst for the flowing stream of language. The pouring of the water was Helen’s Sacred Moment, a key to open the understanding to what had been a mystery. That’s what Sacred Moments do, spark awareness that something is happening, something worth remembering, something worth pondering lest we fail to comprehend its full significance. The two words, Sacred Moment, combine to form our word, Sacrament. Sacraments, such as the flowing waters of baptism, become sparks of Awareness opening us to a flow of new language. Connected to the ancient rite of baptism, we should say, as did Helen – “Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.” Should not baptism connect us to that misty consciousness of an ancient faith, revealing to us the mystery of a new language of the Spirit? The 42nd Psalm is similar in its desire for the Wonderful Cool Something, and speaks of the flowing water as the Sacred Moment of beholding the face of God. “As a deer longs for the flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?” Sacred moments are those moments in which we behold the face of the Other. The 1985 film LadyHawke is about beholding the hidden face. A magical story based on a 13th century European legend. LadyHawke tells the story of two lovers, Captain Navarre and Lady Isabeau, who are cursed by an evil bishop. In his jealous rage, the evil bishop uses black magic to make certain that, if he can’t have Isabeau, they will never have each other. Captain Navarre and Lady Isabeau are cursed to eternal Apart-ness, he turning into a wolf by night, and she into a hawk by day. Both live half-lives, opposite halves, so that they are never able to behold each other’s face. As one is transfiguring into their human form, the other is morphing into their non-human form, a cycle endlessly repeated at Dawn and Dusk of each day. Ah, but those moments are sacred, enchanted moments when, while on their journey to Something Other, the two lovers glimpse each other’s face. One of my favorite clips of the movie is quite extraordinary. It is Dawn, the sun rising above the hills on the horizon. The camera moves between the wolf as it morphs into Captain Navarre, and Isabeau as she transfigures into the hawk. For a split second, which the camera slows and holds for us, both are in human form. In that sacred moment, they behold each other’s face. Isabeau, just before she becomes a hawk, holds her hand up and the morning sunlight behind her streams through her fingers. It is as if she is trying to grasp the flow of time, to make it stand still at that glimmering, cherished Moment of Union. And just as their fingers, shimmering with Dawn’s pure light, are about to touch, the inexorable flow of time moves them past this Moment of Shining, and their dry and weary lives of sorrow, bearing heavy this curse of Apart-ness, continue. The beholding of each other’s face was exactly enough, but it could never be enough. In that Sacred Moment, that sliver of time at Dawn and Dusk, the lovers’ senses come alive. Is that not precisely what the Sacraments should do for us? They are to help glimpse the face of God. They are to give us a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, connecting us to the Source of Life from whom our sins have separated us. They reveal to us the mystery of a new language of the Spirit. To be sure, such Sacred Moments require no official sacrament of the church to be experienced. Surely all of us have experienced those serendipitous moments in which time seems to stand still, when it is as if we have stepped out of time’s flow. In this place we find ourselves gripped by a sense of inexplicable, profound Joy, a moment of deep peace and inner stillness in which we recognize a shimmering Presence surpassing our own. Our reflex, like Isabeau is to catch the flow of time in our fingers, to hold the moment as it rushes by. Yet, we cannot. Still, for that amazing sacred moment, All is Now and All is Joy. And the poet within us knows that such glimpses of the divine are always exactly enough. And never enough. Helen had placed in her hands a wonderful key that unlocked for her the mystery of language. Should not our Sacred Moments likewise place in our hands a wonderful key, opening to us the mysteries of faith? It was for this placing of a key in the hands that Clara Scott wrote the hymn, “Open My Eyes That I May See.” Pay particular attention to the first line as you sing:
Open my eyes that
I may see, glimpses of truth thou hast for me,
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