Readings for the Second Sunday after Epiphany
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church in Eureka CA on January 20, 2019.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”[1] By “creatively maladjusted” he meant those who refuse to conform and adjust themselves to segregation, bigotry, militarism, violence and other forms of oppression that can often characterize the status quo. He meant those who are willing to draw and color outside of the lines, especially when they are lines of segregation and unjust exclusion. He half-jokingly suggested organizing the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. “Through such maladjustment,” he said, “we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of inhumanity into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”
I see this morning’s Gospel as an example of the creative maladjustment of Jesus Christ, who refused to be driven by other people’s anxieties and expectations and timelines and who drew outside of the lines by creatively inaugurating his messianic ministry by miraculously bringing more wine to a wedding party. This Christ did not conform nor adjust to the expectations of those who believed that the Messiah would look more like the ascetic and self-denying John the Baptist, who wore camel’s hair and ate locusts in the desert. Christ creatively claimed for himself the rich Jewish tradition that compared the Messianic Age to a glorious wedding feast that overflows with abundance and beauty and joy and love, an image that the poetic prophet Isaiah used in our reading this morning. I believe there was a bit of a bon vivant in Jesus Christ, especially since Jesus was accused of eating and drinking too much, of actually being a glutton and drunkard (Matt 11:19). Although he was certainly not a glutton or drunkard, he did not deny that he enjoyed eating and drinking. Jesus celebrated and relished the fruits of his Father’s beautiful creation; and Jesus participated in his Father’s continual creation by tapping into his own divine creativity, even if that meant occasionally drawing outside of the lines of other people’s religious expectations. Jesus changed 175 gallons of water into the most exquisite wine because he tapped into his own divine creativity. Anglican poet Richard Crashaw (1613 – 1649) explained this first miracle of Jesus beautifully by saying, “[At Cana], modest water saw its creator and blushed.”[2]
The other Scripture readings this morning also invite us to celebrate and relish God’s beautiful creation and to tap into our own God-given creativity. The Psalm compares God’s righteousness to the strong mountains and his justice to the great depths, while inviting us to drink from the river of God’s delights. And in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he invites us to discover our own unique gifts of divine creativity, given to us by the Holy Spirit: gifts of wisdom, knowledge, healing, prophecy, discernment, interpretation, and the working of miracles, and perhaps also art and poetry. In what ways are you being invited to be among the creatively maladjusted? How is God inviting you to use your gifts of creativity to change water into wine? To change the bleak midnight of inhumanity into the bright daybreak of freedom and justice?
This last Thursday, as I was reflecting on this Sunday’s readings, I learned of the death of one of my favorite poets, a fellow Episcopalian named Mary Oliver.[3] It is hard to think of anyone else who relished God’s beautiful creation and tapped into her own divine creativity more than Mary Oliver, a person whom I would certainly count among the creatively maladjusted, in whose hands lie human salvation. I have heard people say that her poems have saved their lives. They have certainly been life-giving for me as well.
I was introduced to Mary Oliver’s poetry 15 years ago by an Episcopalian whose brother is actually now the dean of Trinity cathedral in Portland OR. Her poems liberated me from a Christianity that seemed mostly concerned with prohibitions. A Christianity that said, “Don’t enjoy yourself too much. Don’t have too much fun. And don’t get too attached to the beauty of this world because, very soon, it’s all going to hell in a handbasket.”
Mary Oliver did not adjust well to this kind of Christianity. Like Martin Luther King Jr, Mary Oliver knew that there were indeed parts of this world marred by sin and injustice, but she also saw in this world the most sublime magnificence and wild creativity of our God, who longs for us to bask in the beauty of his mind-boggling creation. In a poem titled “Good Morning,” she writes, “It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.”[4] In another poem titled “The Gift” in which she hears some hints of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies spilling through the sputter of a mockingbird’s song, she writes, “How happy I am, lounging in the light, listening as the music floats by! … And mostly I’m grateful that I take this world so seriously.”[5] In yet another poem titled “When Death Comes,” she uses wedding imagery much like Isaiah and St. John as she writes, “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it is over, I don’t want … to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”[6] This is why her “Instructions for living life” are simply “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”[7]
Mary Oliver was in love with this world not in a sinful and idolatrous way but as a bride enamored with the God who wooed and wowed her through the mysterious movement of swans and black bears, through the bizarre way a grasshopper eats sugar,[8] through the oaky taste of Blackwater pond, through blue irises,[9] through the way the morning sun would blaze over the hills like a million flowers on fire.[10] She knew how to drink from the river of God’s delights. True to her Anglican and Episcopal identity, Mary Oliver understood the importance of the Incarnation: God’s love made flesh in the world around us. With this sacramental understanding of all of creation, Mary Oliver invited her readers to expand their understanding of prayer and to tap into their own God-given creativity. She said, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”[11] And in a poem about blue horses, she writes, “Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside of each of us.”[12]
In 1 Corinthians, St. Paul invites us to discover that piece of God within us, that gift of divine creativity that can illumine us “to shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory,” as we prayed in our Collect. Mary Oliver hears that same invitation in creation, specifically in the trees. She writes, “When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. …Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, ‘Stay awhile.’ The light flows from their branches. And they call again, ‘It’s simple,’ they say, ‘and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”[13]
Christ calls us to follow him and be among the creatively maladjusted, to sometimes draw outside the lines when the lines are violent and oppressive, to celebrate and to take seriously God’s wild beauty in creation and to tap into our own divine creativity so that we can transform the bleak midnight of inhumanity into the bright daybreak of freedom and justice, like Martin Luther King Jr.
So what darkness is God calling you to shine through with the glorious daybreak of Christ? What is the water in your life that can blush into wine when it sees that piece of God within you? And how will you tap into your own divine creativity by celebrating the mind-boggling beauty of God in creation? I want to conclude with some words from yet another Mary Oliver poem titled “Six Recognitions of the Lord” from a collection of poems titled “Thirst.”
I know a lot of fancy words.
I tear them from my heart and my tongue.
Then I pray.
Lord God, mercy is in your hands, pour
me a little. And tenderness too. My
need is great. Beauty walks so freely
and with such gentleness. Impatience puts
a halter on my face and I run away over
the green fields wanting your voice, your
tenderness, but having to do with only
the sweet grasses of the fields against
my body…
Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with
the fragrance of the fields and the
freshness of the oceans which you have
made, and help me to hear and to hold
in all dearness those exacting and wonderful
words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying:
Follow me.[14]
[1] Martin Luther King Jr., “Don’t Sleep Through The Revolution,” speech delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in Hollywood, Florida (May 18, 1966).
[2] Richard Crashaw, Selections from the British Poets from the Time of Chaucer to the Present, compiled by David Lester Richardson (Baptist Mission Press, 1840), xxiv.
[3] Mary Oliver was close friends with Bishop Tom Shaw, for whom she wrote a poem titled “For Tom Shaw S.S.J.E. (1945 – 2014)” in Felicity (Penguin Press: London, 2015), 35.
[4] Mary Oliver, “Good Morning” from Blue Horses (London: Penguin Press, 2014), 21.
[5] Mary Oliver, “The Gift” from House of Light (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 36.
[6] Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes” from New and Selected Poems: Volume One (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 10.
[7] Mary Oliver, “Sometimes” from Red Bird (Boston: Beacon, 2008), 35.
[8] See “The Summer Day” from House of Light, 60.
[9] See Blue Iris: Poems and Essays (Boston: Beacon, 2004).
[10] See “The Buddha’s Last Instruction” from House of Light, 4.
[11] Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures (New York: Mariner, 1995), 7.
[12] Mary Oliver, “Franz Marc’s Blue Horses” in Blue Horses (London: Penguin, 2016), 43.
[13] Mary Oliver, “When I Am Among the Trees” from Thirst (Boston: Beacon, 2006), 4.
[14] Mary Oliver, “Six Recognitions of the Lord” from Thirst, 26.
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 