Paradoxes

Photo of The Very Rev. Dean Terry White by The Very Rev. Terry White, Dean

Preparation for this homily led me to an article written almost three years ago by James E. Person, Jr., for The News & Observer. The subject of the article is author Reynolds Price and what was his latest book at that time Letter to a Godchild (Concerning Faith).

Mr. Person writes:  An accomplished man of letters, Reynolds Price is also a lifelong Christian pilgrim who can articulate his thoughts on faith in a clear, simple and convincing manner. Price takes delight in the paradoxes of Christianity: That one must become poor in order to become rich, surrender in order to triumph, and recognize that the ravening Lion of Judah is also the sacrificial Lamb of God.  (Today’s lessons point to other paradoxes.)

A professor of English at Duke University, Price enjoys only distant relations with "organized religion." But he displays a profound knowledge of the road he has traveled, the cost of traveling it, and where it leads. It is this knowledge he shares with his godson Harper.

To Price, life itself is a miracle and a series of mysteries. Perhaps the largest mystery he faces lies in the fact that for 22 years he has been wheelchair bound, paralyzed from the waist down as the result of a cancerous tumor that wrapped itself around his spinal cord.

A medical procedure that would have freed him of the deadly growth, and not affected his ability to walk, was developed two years after undergoing the treatment that left him in a wheelchair. A man of faith who daily faces such knowledge in the midst of unremitting pain has much to think about. Price has pondered the nature of God and why things happen as they do, and has accepted the truths found in the Book of Job: God's ways are such that we cannot know the wherefores and whys. We can only grab hold of what we do know, understanding that on this side of heaven we perceive only partly what God is about.

There are two brief visionary experiences Price recounts in his book. The second is of particular interest. It occurred shortly before he was to begin daily treatments for the cancer. Lying in bed one morning, he suddenly found himself standing on the shore of a huge lake. He was invited to wade into the water by a man he immediately recognized as Jesus. There, Price says, Jesus began to gently wash "the foot-long wound from the surgery that let him paralyzed." Jesus assured Price that his sins were forgiven and that he would be healed. Then the vision ended.

Price is convinced that “the experience was in some crucial sense real. I was essentially healed. I was repaired in the sense that Jesus guaranteed me a long stretch of ongoing vigorous existence. The fact that my legs were subsequently paralyzed... was a mere complexity in the ongoing narrative which God intends me to make of my life."

Price tells young Harper that such paradoxes are often finger-signs along the road of life pointing toward God.  (James E. Person Jr., The News & Observer,  http://www.newsobserver.com/1127/story/454170.html)

Among the paradoxes of faith that Mr. Price refers to, are the stories we heard today.

Of all the sons of Jesse, the runt of the litter was anointed King of Israel, because God sees what humanity fails to see.

Using the rich language of parables crammed into eight verses, Jesus speaks of seeds, grow, harvest, and a mighty shrub. The farmer sows the seeds of the word, then does he water, fertilize and weed?  No, he goes to bed, rises and sleeps paying no more attention to the seeds. God gives the growth.

The mustard seed, not unlike David the shepherd boy, grows into a mighty shrub, not because of human effort, but because God designed the mustard seed to grow just that way.

We can expend every resource, every ounce of energy, every moment of time within in our power, and the mustard seed will always produce the shrub God designed in creation. And any genetic engineering humanity adds to that seed also comes from God.

Women and men can do mighty works, and in other ways influence how others look at them, but those have no impact on how God sees us.  What is in the heart, and how the heart directs our engagement of life is so very precious.

Trusting completely in God, being utterly dependent on the Lord, loving God with all our being – that is how we fulfill what God has designed for us.  Immense talents on the one hand, legs that do not work on the other, belong to the complexities of life which is the story the Lord wishes us to live out.  Almighty God has a design, a vision, for creation and for the Church which involves each of us.  The paradoxes we must face as we seek to live out God’s vision are gifts where holy wisdom and unconditional love and the divine presence are especially found.

Reynolds Price said that next to food and drink, our most basic human need is story.  (Brinton, New Proclamation 2009, p97).  May the stories of our faith, the paradoxes Jesus sets before us, inspire, enlighten, entertain, and in other ways cause us to embrace God’s vision.  All humanity is made in God’s image, and we were created and redeemed and baptized in order to love and serve God in one another. We, too, live with the complexities of life. A key is that such challenges and realities not define us. Rather, that God’s love, given in baptism and renewed in the Eucharist, defines, shapes, and feeds us.

Into the death and resurrection of Christ we baptize Sophia today. May she be inspired by the stories of David and the mustard seed, and learn from her parents and god-parents that life is a mystery, that paradoxes are places where she can catch a glimpse of God’s design, and that when God looks at her, God is always looking at her heart.   In this child lives the hope of the world, the hope of the Church. For in the heart of this child is the love of Jesus Christ. Who lives in us all, and who reigns forever and ever. Amen.