A sermon preached at Harrisonburg UUA, August 19, 2007
by Rev. John Irvine
A perched hawk can often be seen cocking its head and looking up at the sky with one eye.
It may be estimating the catchability of a bird that could serve as its lunch. More likely, it is cautiously watching another hawk flying over that might dive on it and make it lunch. When I have looked up to see what the hawk is watching, I have often been unable to spot anything up there. Yet the hawk keeps following it across the sky regardless, until the opportunity, or the danger, has passed.
That’s an obvious reminder that much goes on around me beyond my range of vision, that my eye does not have the capacity to see. With the cone cells in their retinas packed together far more thickly than ours, hawks can see about 3 times as far as we can. A bald eagle was once observed making an abrupt right turn, then gliding in a straight line for 3 miles to a lake, where it picked a large fish off the surface. Could you see anything even the size of a large fish at 3 miles? No wonder “eagle-eyed” is a compliment when ascribed to a human!
Physical vision is one thing, but “vision” is also a spiritual term. Spiritually speaking, does your vision’s reach embrace enough? Does mine? My attention was captured recently while reading a book by a theology professor, Douglas Ottati. (Douglas F. Ottati, Reforming Protestantism:Christian Commitment in Today’s World. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995, p. 58.) Describing a person whose spiritual vision had been enlarged by developing a religious belief system and practices, he used the phrase “the capacious eye.” That unusual phrase struck me as a worthy subject for this sermon.
I looked up the word capacious in the dictionary. It means “containing, or capable of containing, a great deal.”
Applying it to our spiritual selves, it could lead us to ask, “Does my present spiritual vision contain anything wide or deep enough to be worthy of a human created by a God who longs for us to be in spiritual fellowship with God and other human beings? How capacious is my `eye of the spirit’? How much am I willing to stretch my capacity for belief; or conversely, how rigidly have I stopped myself from stretching? To what enlargement am I open, and to what am I closed?”
To illustrate what he meant by this phrase, Ottati included brief quotes from several writers. One was John Woolman, a quiet 18th century Quaker who was one of America’s early and effective workers for the abolition of slavery. “In his eloquent `A Plea for the Poor,’ [Woolman] wrote of being enlarged and so regarding all others as `our fellow creatures’ under God.” (ibid, p. 57) Another writer, contemporary thinker Gordon D. Kaufman, calls this a vision of “the interdependence and self-giving which underlies and makes possible all creativity and life.” ( ibid.p. 58)
Sadly, a contrary vision has captured a great many, perhaps most, contemporary Americans. Instead of interdependence, this contrary vision promotes a relentless independence. Consequently, it majors on self-taking rather than self-giving. It depresses our human creativity more than it encourages it. And it deals out death, for example death of the spirit through the glorification of violence while trying to mask violent behavior as real life. This is spiritually stultifying, leaving us with shrunken, incapacitated vision.
The Biblical vision that enlarged such writers, Ottati says, is that of “a world created, sustained, and redeemed by the one God, a universe of integrity and purpose, a world as divine commonwealth on the way toward its consummation.” (idem.)
A newborns`’ vision is not nearly as focused as it will become after weeks and months of loving caregiving. Our physical eyes have the capability to take in more, to grow a wider and deeper vision as we mature.
Similarly, our spiritual vision needs development, perhaps even challenge, to become more capacious. A clear illustration of this can be found in the Book of Job in the Hebrew scriptures. That book is a literary construction of a very high order. For just one small instance reflecting the writer’s intelligence, consider the source of the name Job. It could come from a Hebrew construction meaning “Where is the [divine] father?” or it could come from a verb meaning “to hate”, that is, “the hated one.” Job’s story is so constructed that these two possible sources, “Where is the divine Father?” and “the hated one;” play off against each other and provide the dramatic tension of the book.
You’ve heard of “the patience of Job.” Actually, Job grows very impatient, seeing himself as “the hated one”-Â for Job had lived in a close and loyal relationship with God, but now God has vanished from Job’s radar screen. Job cries out, “Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments…. There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.” (Job 23:3-4, 7)
But Job won’t give up on his relationship with this God. He continues,
“But he knows the way that I take; When he has tested me, I shall come out like gold. My foot has held fast to his steps; I have kept his way and have not turned aside. I have not departed from the commandment of his lips; I have treasured in my bosom the words of his mouth.” (Job 23:10-12)
The 3 friends of Job who have come to visit him in his affliction take turns telling him how bad a sinner he must be. But Job knows that isn’t right. He refuses to buy their analysis..
Any advance in spiritual growth must entail internal honesty; as the 51st Psalm puts it, speaking to God, “You desire truth in the inward being.” (Ps.51:6) And the Bible keeps reminding us, “All we like sheep have gone astray” (Isa.53:6), “There is no one who is righteous, no, not one” (Ps. 14:3, Rom. 3:10) Like anyone deeply committed to a covenant relationship with God,
Job has enough spiritual maturity to know he is a sinner who stands in constant need of forgiveness. Everyone is in that position; that’s a no-brainer. But what Job’s friends want him to buy into is their rigid view
of precisely balanced spiritual rewards and punishments. We might summarize their position like this: “Look here, Job! We know God is absolutely just in dealing out rewards and punishments to people. In order for you to have come to such a bad state as this, it’s self-evident that you have to have been a sinner big-time. Repent of your sin and maybe God will forgive you and heal you.”
Contrariwise, we could summarize Job’s position by saying, “You simpletons, more must be going on here than that. Your neat formula doesn’t work in this case! You say God is just. But my misery is disproportionate! For having been faithful to my covenant with God as I have been, the agonies I am experiencing are not just.” It may be that Job subliminally senses there is the possibility of a deeper vision than the conventional, restricted one of his friends.
And he gets it! Finally, after many pages of superb poetic argument! With a burst of even more majestic poetry, God confronts Job and speaks directly to him for four chapters. Any reader would expect God’s remarks to deal with the substance of Job’s concerns. At least God could tell Job what has been going on in the heavenly council, to which the reader has been privy even if Job hasn’t-but God doesn’t. What God says to Job moves on an entirely different level: one that focuses on God’s creation rather than Job’s salvation. God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind the energy of a tornado is involved here.
It’s fair to ask, what has happened to Job’s sufferings and his sense of being treated unjustly? Has not God “gone off-topic?” Gerald Janzen, whose commentary on Job I find profoundly helpful, writes, “It is as though those sufferings are simply left enshrouded in the mystery of their givenness, their having happened.” God does deny Job’s charges that God is a God of dark purpose and is indifferent to justice, but instead of giving answers, God throws Job question after question in chapters 38-41.
These questions, like those God asked Moses from the burning bush, at their deepest levels have to do with Job’s willingness to fulfill his leadership role among humans in the image of God, even when the implications of that image involve suffering, including innocent suffering.
Furthermore, will Job, like God, be capable of moving forward without having all the loose ends tied up neatly? (J. Gerald Janzen, Job [Interpretation Commentary Series], Louisville: John Knox Press, 1985, p. 225)
At the story’s denouement, Job doesn’t get what he’s been looking for. But he now has developed something better: a more capacious eye, a greater vocation, a deeper and more profound vision of God.
Job answers God’s tide of questions with these words: “You know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted….
Therefore I have uttered what I have not understood, Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…. 1 had heard of you with my own ears, And now my eye sees you! Therefore I recant and change my mind….”‘ (Job 42:1-6; Janzen’s own translation.,ibid, p. 251.)
If God’s self-disclosure in this form strikes you as an unforgivably thin response to Job, you might recall this would not be the only time someone crying out “Why do I have to suffer so?” has discovered a new, more fulfilling calling even though that question receives at best a dusty answer.
Then comes the Epilogue chapter where God justifies Job, restores his family, health, and wealth, and scolds his friends for their shallowness. Here we see a Job whose sensitivity to his own suffering has deepened enough that he becomes an intercessor on his friends’ behalf.
The capacious eye resists lockstep simplicities that would tie God into some human formula, but is willing to dig more deeply, and will find at bottom the need to engage with the suffering of others. And it will go forward despite not having all the answers it wants.
For the capacious eye is capable of coping with the paradoxical character of Biblical truth. Paradox is what holds together opposing ideas or concepts. For example: our spirituality is rooted in our earthiness. Or, the absolute is known in the personal. Or, freedom is discovered in obedience. In Job’s case, righteousness is mysteriously tied to suffering. I don’t remember who said this, but I remember how liberating the idea was when I first read it; maybe one of you can remind me who said it. It goes like this: the test of a first-rate intellect is its ability to hold two contrary ideas in the mind at the same time without insisting that one must drive the other out.
In his new book “The Gospel According to Starbucks,” Leonard Sweet calls paradox “the audacious algebra of the spiritual, the natural language of faith.”
Truth is where opposites become not a battleground but a playground.” (Leonard Sweet, The Gospel According to Starbucks, Colorado Springs: WaterBrook Press, 2007, p. 91, 92).
An eye that insists on clarity and certainty, that is desperate for fixed boundaries like Job’s friends, that takes refuge in homogeneity, is self-restricting and ends up spiritually flattening.
Let me close by bringing this right down to the here and now.
In last Friday’s Daily News-Record, in the Viewpoint op-ed column, Gregory Rodriguez reported on a study by political scientist Robert Putnam on how ethnic diversity affects people. The surprising finding was that “in the most diverse places in the country, Americans tend to distrust everyone, those who look like them and those who don’t…. Whites and nonwhites will have to create a more generous and expansive sense of `we.’ If, as the study suggests, increased diversity leads us to withdraw even from our own kind, we may indeed find some sense of togetherness and common purpose in a truly broad, overarching identity called American. Maybe once we achieve that, we’ll volunteer more, vote more and be more willing to pay to fix our bridges.”
A more generous and expansive sense of “we”? That comes from the spirituality of the capacious eye, which sees more widely and deeply into truth because it has not feared those ingredients of creativity: ambiguity, fuzziness, fluidity, and diversity.