The Living Daylight
Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons
March 27, 2016
Every month about 43,000 men go out and buy a Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. They buy it despite the fact that it’s expensive, gets poor gas mileage, can’t seat many people, and despite the fact that the Car Talk guys, when they were on the air, used to say, “Unless you are picking something up, a pickup truck is a ludicrous car to drive!” I’m pretty sure that most of these guys are not picking anything up except, they hope, a date. Here’s how the Silverado is marketed: “THE NEW FACE OF STRONG. Strength. Reliability. The new Silverado pairs brains with brawn to build upon the legacy of the most dependable, longest-lasting full-size pickup trucks on the road.”
How can you blame these guys for wanting this? Who among them doesn’t want to be strong, reliable, have brains and brawn, and be long-lasting and full size? This is the essence of the traditional ideal of masculinity and it is an ineffable, elusive quality of the spirit. Sometimes men want this so badly, they do things like buy an impractical, expensive object in hopes that in an almost magical way, they’ll be able to access and embody that spiritual power through that object. (Now, if any of you happen to own one of these trucks, please know that I’m not meaning to dis you personally or the Chevrolet Silverado in particular.) Everyone does this kind of thing. People of all genders, all religions and ethnicities. I do it; everyone in this room does it.
Think of how facial products are marketed. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai carrying the tablets of the Ten Commandments, it is said that his face was glowing – radiant from his contact with God. But we in the modern world don’t have to talk to God to get that glow. We can use what are called “luminizing” beauty products like Amazonian Clay Illuminating Moisturizer, Avene Timeless Radiance, Skin Illuminator in Peach, Liquid Luster in Gold… there are hundreds of products that will give us the glow of spiritual inner light on our faces. Or if we’re hurting and lonely, Sephora has a product called “Nurture Me” with the tagline, “soothing crème cushions skin with nourishing vitamins.” With this cream, we can be soothed and cushioned and nourished – nurtured like a mother would nurture us. These products promise direct contact with some form of the divine. And so we buy them.
You might be tempted right about now to lean over and say to your neighbor, “Um… isn’t this supposed to be an Easter sermon? Do you think she forgot? What does any of this have to do with Easter?” I haven’t forgotten; I’m getting there. But go with me on one more detour first and then we’ll get to Easter.
In the Torah, when Moses is up on Mt. Sinai getting his facial with God, the people down below are freaking out. It’s taking so long. What’s he doing up there? Is he ever coming back? Come to think of it, they don’t know if this God of his is real to begin with. They’ve never seen or heard this God. And Moses himself had just heard a voice coming from a burning bush – what does that prove? And when Moses had asked who the voice was, it had just answered with these weird obfuscations like, “I will be what I will be.” Or just, “I am.” It was all just too abstract. So they say to each other, “We need a God. Like, a real God. One we can see and touch and pray to and perform rituals for and make sacrifices to.” And so they melt down all their fine jewelry and build an idol – a golden calf. And they pray to it and perform rituals and sacrifices to it.
In the story, when Moses finds out about this, he is so enraged that he smashes the Ten Commandments tablets down on the ground and breaks them. “I offered them contact with Being itself! How could they have fallen for this cheap substitute?!” God is also enraged. But God, being God, eventually calms down and figures out a way to compromise with the people and help protect them from the temptations of idol worship.
God tells Moses, “Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do: Tell the people to build a house for me… sure, with fabulous gold and royal draperies, go ahead. Make it complex inside, with concentric layers and inner chambers. (Now, you know and I know that I don’t need a “house,” but they seem to really need a place to go to connect with me.) And tell them to perform sacrifices and burn incense and say specific prayers. (You know and I know that I don’t really care about rituals but they seem to really need something to do to connect with me.) And tell them to place in the innermost chamber two cherubim, like angels, facing each other. Tell them that in the space between these two cherubim, that is where my spirit will dwell. (You know and I know that I am everywhere, but at least this way, if we say that I’m in that negative space between two things, they might not be so tempted to reduce me to a thing.)” And so the people build this moveable temple in the desert, like a wifi hotspot to connect with God.
Now fast forward to the Easter story. Jesus, like Moses, has come down from a mountain with his face glowing and his body beaming white light. He’s high from his contact with God. He is all fired up about transmitting the crystal clear teachings of his tradition about the Source of Life: You can’t grab it, you can’t name it, you can’t make images of it because any name you might give it, any image you might make of it wouldn’t even come close representing one iota of its cosmic reality. It is pure spirit. It’s existence itself; it’s the living daylight all around us, bigger than anything we can possibly imagine. He’s ready to go to Jerusalem, ready to preach to the people: take no shortcuts, make no substitutes, accept no imitations. Just put God in your pipe and smoke it!
But Jesus approaches the temple in Jerusalem and the text says he weeps. The temple is a giant stone edifice — an opulent caricature of the moveable temple in the desert. It’s lavish. Palatial. Priests wearing fine robes are scurrying around performing rituals, swinging incense. Somewhere in the deep center of the compound is the “holy of holies,” the supposed dwelling place of God, separated from the rest of the world by a thick veil. Poor peasant Jews from all over the land come to offer sacrifices. But they have to buy the pigeon or dove for the sacrifice in the currency of the temple, which they don’t have. So they have to go to the moneychangers who will – for a fee that these people can’t afford – give them money in the right currency. The temple gets rich this way. Jesus sees this and flies into a rage, just like Moses having seen the idol worship. He drives the moneychangers out, overturns their tables, and cries, “It is written that my house is to be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves!”
Jesus realizes that this temple and all its rituals, which were originally intended to facilitate people’s encounter with God, are now actually replacing God. His religion has become idolatry. Religion in general – all religions – do this time and again throughout history. We take a live moment of connection – an experience of union with all that is – and we encode it in text and ritual, a specific place and time. Franz Kafka describes the process poetically. He writes: “One day a leopard came stalking into the synagogue, roaring and lashing its tail. Three weeks later it was part of the liturgy!” We do this. We put the leopard in a cage and we lose its fierce life force. This is idolatry – the practice of fixing divinity into one person, one thing, one tiny aspect of divinity and calling that God.
You could say that we Unitarian Universalists actually don’t do this. We have no sacred texts, no particularly holy places, barely any rituals. We believe in one God at most. And it’s true – the most consistent defining feature of Unitarian Universalism over the years has not been rituals, dogmas, and theological beliefs, but the progressive shedding of them. We’ve always resisted the meddling mediation of churches and priests. The Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson said things like, “The Highest dwells within us… there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens.” In this, Jesus was very much a Unitarian. (Or maybe Emerson was a Christian, depending on how you want to look at it.)
So we may think that we modern liberals don’t have to worry about idolatry. But then there’s the Chevrolet Silverado. And the Avene Timeless Radiance Cream. And the Nurture Me Moisturizer. And the money we try to accumulate in hopes that we will feel like we’re worth something. And the sex with someone we don’t know in hopes that we will feel loved. And the workout regimen, the diet, the hair color, the new dress in hopes that we will feel beautiful. And the team we root for in hopes that we will feel like we belong. And the title we seek in hopes that we will feel strong. And the affair we pursue in hopes that we’ll feel young again. And the success of our children onto which we project our own dreams. In all of these and so many more, we try to impregnate something finite with the power of the infinite. And it simply doesn’t work.
We get scared because what we really yearn for deep down – that love, that spiritual power, that direct contact with our Source – sometimes feels unreachable. Like it was to the people waiting at the foot of Mt. Sinai. (It’s taking so long. Is it even real? Is it even possible?) And so we substitute a golden calf. We build modern day temples where we worship things and people. The problem with this is not only that it doesn’t work. Moses and Jesus would not have been so bent out of shape about idolatry if it were merely an ineffective strategy. The problem is that our idols actually form a barrier – they become a wall that blocks out the living daylight. To let the light in, for Spirit to be able to flow freely into our lives, for us to become channels for love in the world, we first need to take the scary, vulnerable step of letting go of our idols. We need to release any substitute, incinerate anything that’s masquerading as everything. We need to sacrifice our idols themselves.
This, I believe, is the dramatic teaching at the heart of the Easter story. Jesus realized that he himself had become an idol to his followers. His movement was just starting to coalesce around him when he knowingly, intentionally sacrificed himself. And the tradition insists that even his body disappeared from the tomb. His followers were asked rhetorically, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” It was a radical insistence that, no, we don’t get to reduce God or Reality itself to one representation, one person, one body. The living Jesus, the hotspot connection to the great I Am, was resuscitated when the idol – in this case, the person – had died. At that moment the leopard was let out of its cage.
You’ve each received a small piece of paper. This is a special kind of paper called flash paper that combusts immediately when you touch it to a flame. We’re going to do an Easter ritual together that I believe is also a quintessentially Unitarian Universalist ritual of letting go of our idols. Let your piece of paper represent whatever idol you might be worshipping – whatever finite, concrete thing or person in your life you are imbuing with Godlike importance. Whatever you are holding on to that’s getting in the way of what you truly yearn for. Whatever has become dogma in your life. Whatever has become rote or ossified. Whatever leopard you have caged. If you have a pen or pencil you could even write it on the paper. Then I’ll invite you to come forward to one of our three stations with lit candles. Create an intention to release that idol and open your heart to the living daylight. Then touch your paper to the flame and cast it up into the air.