The Great Deep

A Homily for the 1st Sunday of Lent

Today, in your hearing, the scriptures are fulfilled! As a preacher I’ve always wanted to get up and make that very dramatic declaration just like Jesus in the Gospel of Luke! But of course, I cannot mean it the same way Jesus meant it… but I do mean it just the same.

In the Gospel of Mark, on this 1st Sunday of Lent, we hear Jesus proclaim: “This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand.” “This” is the time and the time is always “now!” As St. Paul just reminded us on Ash Wednesday: “Now is a very acceptable time; now is the day of salvation.” It’s always about NOW and fulfillment is always NOW. So perhaps this raises a question for us: How do I live in “this now?” Or, more specifically, how might this Lenten Season help me to live in, and witness more boldly to, this fulfillment that is now?

There is a wonderful Hebrew word in the Old Testament: Mesula and it basically means the Deep, or the Great Deep, or the Watery Deep. In the Book of the Prophet Jonah, when he is cast into the deep by the sailors on the ship, he is cast into the “mesula” the very heart of the sea, where, we are told, God works his wonders! I would offer that the “mesula” is also the place to which Jesus invites each of us, when we hear him say in the gospels: “Put out into the deep!” And that is our Lenten invitation: Put out into the deep where God works his wonders and where the time of fulfillment is always NOW!

Death and mortality are really great teachers in this regard, if we are willing to learn from them. And here I do mean both the very real experience of human death and the daily wear-and-tear losses we each suffer. The little deaths that are daily ours. And in the face of death, in its varied forms, we can do at least two things: We can submit to feeling forced to live life rushed or we can choose to live life with urgency. The first is fueled by fear. The second is learned by love.

I have often felt the temptation to live rushed. Fear, in the face of death, is a powerful force. But that fear is like riding the waves of a tumultuous sea. It’s all about living life on its rugged and ragged surface being pushed to and fro, just trying your best to make it all mean something.

Or we can make a free choice. In the light of death, in the light of fear, in the light of our own temptations to live rushed and, by our own lights try to make it all mean something, we can choose to “put out into the deep” and simply sink! We can choose to live with urgency which is not motivated by fear but rather by love. We can choose to live “Deeper” not “Faster.” Because the truth of the matter is life will speed by… it will always go by too fast for us. So we can fight it and flail about on the surface being tossed to and fro convinced that the very experience of being batted about is somehow what it means to “be really alive.”

Or we can put out into the deep, the very heart of life (where God works his wonders) and simply sink. Life will always go too fast, but we can choose to root ourselves in the depths and discover that life can go as fast as it wants and it simply won’t matter, because from the “mesula,” from the very heart of the Great Deep, we realize what seems like “the life of a single hour” is also a life rooted in eternity.

I think this is, at least, part of what Jesus means when he says: “This is the time of fulfillment.” From the Great Deep we realize life, being alive, is always NOW and NOW never ends. And that realization frees us to live radically, love radically, and serve radically without fear.

I know this faith community is focusing this Lenten Season on Transformative Justice. I would like to suggest that how we engage in transformative justice depends greatly on whether or not we live rushed, forced by fear, or we live with an urgency sunk deep in love?

The Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, once wrote about how when we live by fear we are tempted to take up the world’s weapons of domination, violence, and an overweening need to win. But if we live sunk deep in love… in the eternal now, then we live in an urgency that urges us and others to patience, compassion, self-gift and dialogue. All of which leads to the justice we desire to enact.

We live in world where too many people are convinced that to be alive is to live batted about on the rough surface of a raging sea; that to live is to live forced by fear to rush because it’s all going to come to an end. And that fear foils any hope for transformation. But people who live rooted in the Great Deep, who live loved into urgency, they also know it will all come to an end, but endings are only beginnings and the NOW, and the Fulfillment in God, never ends. And that provides the spaciousness, the courage, and the hope we need to sustain the works of justice.

God said to Noah, never again will I destroy the world by flood waters. I don’t think God meant: “I will never flood the earth again!” I think he means: “It doesn’t matter if I flood the earth again, as long as people are willing to learn how to find life in the Great Deep and see it not as destruction but rather as the place where I always work my wonders!”