Preached by the Reverend Dr. Kathleen Bishop at the Sunshine Cathedral at the 11:10 am service on Sunday, September 24, 2006.
The Phoenix Affirmations: # 4
The Path of Jesus is found where Christ’s followers make sincere and vibrant worship of God as central to the life of their community as Jesus did. We…affirm artistic expression as a way of reflecting God’s creativity, joy, and prophetic voice in what may be seen, heard, felt, tasted, sung, and spoken .
Bhagavad-Gita
I am glory, prosperity, beautiful speech, memory, intelligence, steadfastness, and forgiveness. I am the divine seed of all lives. In this world nothing animate or inanimate exists without me. I am the strength of the strong; I am the purity of the good. I am the knowledge of the knower. There is no limit to my divine manifestations. Whatever in this world is powerful, beautiful, or glorious, that you may know to have come forth from a fraction of my power and glory.
John 4:3-21, 23-24 (CEV)
3Jesus left Judea and started for Galilee again. 4This time he had to go through Samaria, 5and on his way he came to the town of Sychar. It was near the field that Jacob had long ago given to his son Joseph. 6-8The well that Jacob had dug was still there, and Jesus sat down beside it because he was tired from traveling. It was noon, and after Jesus’ disciples had gone into town to buy some food, a Samaritan woman came to draw water from the well.
Jesus asked her, “Would you please give me a drink of water?”
9”You are a Jew,” she replied, “and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink of water when Jews and Samaritans won’t have anything to do with each other?” 10Jesus answered, “You don’t know what God wants to give you, and you don’t know who is asking you for a drink. If you did, you would ask me for the water that gives life.”
11”Sir,” the woman said, “you don’t even have a bucket, and the well is deep. Where are you going to get this life-giving water? 12Our ancestor Jacob dug this well for us, and his family and animals got water from it. Are you greater than Jacob?”
13Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will get thirsty again. 14But no one who drinks the water I give will ever be thirsty again. The water I give is like a flowing fountain that gives eternal life.”
15The woman replied, “Sir, please give me a drink of that water! Then I won’t get thirsty and have to come to this well again.”
16Jesus told her, “Go and bring your husband.”
17-18The woman answered, “I don’t have a husband.”
“That’s right,” Jesus replied, “you’re telling the truth. You don’t have a husband. You have already been married five times, and the man you are now living with isn’t your husband.”
19The woman said, “Sir, I can see that you are a prophet. 20My ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say Jerusalem is the only place to worship.” 21Jesus said to her:
Believe me, the time is coming when you won’t worship God either on this mountain or in Jerusalem. 23But a time is coming, and it is already here! Even now the true worshipers are being led by the Spirit to worship God according to the truth. These are the ones the Eternal is seeking. 24God is Spirit, and those who worship God must be led by the Spirit to worship according to the truth.
The Sunday School teacher was holding the class spellbound. “Think, children,” she said, “in that far-off land there are millions of square miles of land without a single Sunday School where little boys and girls can spend their Sunday mornings. Now what should we all try and save up our money to do?” One little fellow shouted, “Go there!”
Our affirmation today says:
The Path of Jesus is found where Christ’s followers make sincere and vibrant worship of God as central to the life of their community as Jesus did. We…affirm artistic expression as a way of reflecting God’s creativity, joy, and prophetic voice in what may be seen, heard, felt, tasted, sung, and spoken .
Thank goodness you did not have to go halfway around the world to find a place to make sincere and vibrant worship of God.
Do you know where the word worship comes from? It comes from an Old English word meaning “worth”. As we begin to understand our own worth and our connection with the living God we begin to worship in a different way; a more powerful way because we are worshiping from our own divinity. We are worshiping not from our intellect but from our heart, our love, our right brain, our emotions and our feelings.
E.E. Cummings the great artist and poet said, “love did no more begin than love will end…” The love that he speaks of is the love of God for you. When you were born you were born with all the love that God is and that love is expressed as your specialness.
The God within urges some of us to be poets, others musicians, others great parents or grandparents or great entrepreneurs or scientists. The love of God working through us — as us — is what brings us our greatness. And when combined with our love of God we have the potential to be greater then anyone the world has ever known.
To do this we must discover the love and the artist within us. We are not all made to be poets and I surely am one of them. Here is a sample of his poetry, one of my favorites:
i thank you God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable you?(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)— e.e. cummings
Mine, needless to say, was nowhere near this good!
I should have remembered the sage advice from the great poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he wrote:
Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool,
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.
Over the centuries people have created religions and rituals that express the cultures from which they came. Those religions expressed their individuality and their experiences with the divine and their love for the divine.
The Sufi’s expressed their religion and their love for God with poetry and dancing and the Whirling Dervishes. One of the most influential founders of the Sufi order was the Persian poet Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, who, in addition to composing poetry and other works, instituted devotional dances, particularly those of the whirling kind. The aim of The Sufis is the removal of all veils between individual and God, Lover and Beloved.
Here is a beautiful example of God and Love expressed through Rumi.
“Alchemy of Love”
You are the master alchemist,
Through your loving
Existence and nonexistence merge.
All opposites unite.
All that is profane
Becomes sacred again.
The Native Americans do it through sacred dancing, drumming, rituals, ceremonies, and Native myths, legends and stories. Bobby Lake-Thom a Native American healer known as Medicine Grizzly Bear and author of several books writes in his book Spirits of the Earth, “Our survival as a species depends on whether we progress with intelligence, meaning ‘whole intelligence’, or whether we continue to remain limited. Most people are never taught how to use the unconscious, the intuitive-spiritual side of the brain.”
To be an artist you must be whole brained, you must be intuitive, you must be in tune with your spiritual self, in tune with nature, in tune with God as well as being in tune with your intellect.
As Albert Einstein said, “The greatness of an artist lies in the building of an inner world, and in the ability to reconcile this inner work with the outer.”
Today is a good day to begin to express your specialness, to find the artist within you and to show it to the world. To be the person that God has sent you here to be. Each of us is a valuable part of God which the world be worse off if we had not come here to express God’s love through us as us.
Last night at the Rosh Hashanah Service we were invited to read these powerful words:
“Therefore was a single human being created: to teach you that to destroy a single human soul is equivalent to destroying an entire world; and that to sustain a single human soul is equivalent to sustaining an entire world.”
Do not lose sight of who you truly are “you are the world”. What does your world look like?
Let us close with a short prayer of affirmation from Medicine Grizzly Bear:
May there be good health and healing for this Earth,
May there be Beauty above me,
May there be Beauty below me,
May there be Beauty in me,
May there be Beauty all around me.
I ask that this world be filled with Peace, Love and Beauty.
Amen
And this is the truth as I see it…
