Voices from Heaven
M5
Gen. 9:8-17
Ps 25:1-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mk. 1:9-15
“And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased…” Mark 1
I know for sure only that it was ordinary time and that angels were there. Colored light on a summer afternoon streamed through stained glass windows in patterns on the floor. The people in the world who most loved me handed me back and forth. Then my grandfather held me in his large hands and looked into my eyes (in the way I have come to be blessed by the newly baptized myself). Then he poured water on my forehead and God’s song entered my heart.
I have to be honest with you. There have been times when I have not heard that song. There have been periods in my life when I could only hear the demands of my own ego, times when my anxieties and fears made me not listen to this song. I have done things that have made me not want to believe in God or at least that made me try to forget God’s justice. Like you perhaps there have been moments when I have been so tempted by despair that this melody sounds infinitely distant. Tragedy with my lack of faith has made me forget that in every place God brings forth the new.
But that song has never left me. It makes me more likely to notice what is good and beautiful. It gives me confidence and a sense of purpose. The greatest things I accomplish in my life arise out of that song. I have been blessed by my godparents and by other Christians who fill in for them. They have learned this song so well that when I am lost they help me to find my place in the music.
Today’s gospel has haunted me this whole week. Using the simplest Greek words Mark has compressed lifetimes of symbolic meaning into only five short sentences. What is heaven, repentance, belief, the dove, baptism or Satan? What does the father’s voice sound like? What does the spirit look like? Was Jesus surprised? What does it mean to fulfill time or that the kingdom is at hand? How can Jesus be tempted and why is it in a wilderness with wild animals and angels? How did he feel when he learned that his cousin John had been arrested? What does Jesus’ proclamation of the good news have to do with us?
The song, your hopes at baptism and this story all concern what makes us spiritual beings. And this has a real effect as we decide who we are trying to become. Many people do not believe in the spiritual life or that at baptism God puts a song into our hearts.
I wonder if Thomas Midgley, Jr. believed in this song. Midgley has the dubious distinction of being the single living organism that has had the most destructive influence on the global environment. In the 1920’s refrigerators killed people because they used toxic gases. Midgley worked to create a gas that was stable, nonflammable, noncorrosive and safe to breathe. He brought the world chlorofluorocarbons or CFC’s. Overnight CFC’s came to be used in thousands of different products from aerosol sprays to car air conditioners.
It took fifty years to realize that CFC’s were completely destroying the ozone layer of the earth’s protective atmosphere. We only now understand the fragility of the processes that sustain life on this planet. If the ozone that we depend on was distributed evenly throughout the stratosphere this layer would only be one eighth of an inch thick. The problem is that one pound of CFC’s destroys seventy thousand pounds of atmospheric ozone. At the time of his death we didn’t understand this, but Midgley did comprehend the dangers of his other invention.
God must see some amazing connections and coincidences in the human carnival. One of the most extraordinary is that the same person who invented CFC’s also brought us the idea of adding lead to gasoline. Because the dangers of lead were already well known this was a controversial move from the very beginning (that was why they called the gasoline additive ethyl rather than lead).
In human beings lead lasts forever. Lead that you swallow or breathe is not excreted but becomes more and more concentrated in your bones and blood. It is a neurotoxin. Symptoms of overexposure include blindness, insomnia, kidney failure, hearing loss, cancer and convulsions. In acute forms it produces terrifying hallucinations and madness.
Immediately after its introduction, workers in lead gasoline additive plants started suffering from lead poisoning. In only five consecutive production days at one plant five workers died and another thirty-five were permanently afflicted with brain damage. When employees at one plant developed irreversible delusions a company official disingenuously told reporters that, “These men probably went insane from working too hard.”
For forty years the only scientific studies on the effects of lead on human beings were funded by manufacturers of lead additives. Perhaps this is part of the reason we failed to realize what we were doing. Before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere. Since then quantities of lead in our air have sky-rocketed. Almost ninety percent of it came from automobile tailpipes. When lead was removed from all gasoline in 1986 lead blood levels in America fell by 80 percent. But because lead lasts forever most of us still have 625 times more lead in our blood than people did a century ago.
The inventor of ethyl additives Thomas Midgley did understand the effect of lead. He himself had been poisoned only a few months before he gave a demonstration of lead’s safety at a press conference. He poured tetraethyl lead over his hands, held a beaker of it up to his nose for sixty seconds claiming that he could repeat this daily without any harm. The truth was that Midgley recognized the danger of his invention and stayed away from it when reporters weren’t around.
If you don’t believe in the song that God puts into your heart at baptism it makes it a lot harder to hear your conscience. I try to imagine what led Midgley to lie so blatantly in order to cover up the danger of a compound that he was about to introduce into the tissues of every animal on the planet. Perhaps he feared being called a failure. Maybe like all of us, he just wanted people to admire him. We do this all the time. We become gods to our self.
One of the most famous teachers at Harvard Divinity School was Henri Nouwen. He gave up the prestige of academic and public life to live with and care for mentally disabled people at L’Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto. He once said that many of the people he lived with there heard voices. These voices said, “If you want to be loved, you had better prove that you are worth loving.” I hear that voice and I wonder if Thomas Midgley did too. Nouwen goes on to describe the spiritual life as a process of gradually learning to listen to the voice that says instead, “You are my Beloved.” This is the song and the promise given to us at baptism.
The Buddha in his teaching draws our attention to this phenomenon. He believed that we would be happier if we acted as if we did not have a self that needed to be pampered, protected and asserted. He reasoned that without an overriding consciousness of the self we would no longer hate or feel greed or be anxious about our status and survival.
He called this state of nonattachment, nirvana. Nirvana means literally “blowing out,” like a candle after supper. It signifies the extinction of the ego, total freedom from the self that is the source of all unhappiness.
I might be inclined to more fully believe this if I didn’t hear the song first given to me at baptism. That music whispers to me that I do not need to extinguish my self, but that I don’t need to protect it either. Everything I have, everything I am, comes as a gift from God. That gift becomes real when I give out of that life to others.
On Friday our children Micah and Melia and I were leaving Cooper Park when they saw a woman struggling painfully with crutches. Our daughter asked her at great length what had happened. And after she finished explaining, I could see that my children wanted so badly to help her. Our son spoke right up and told her that I was a priest and could give her a blessing.
It was an amazing moment for me. I love what I do. I feel awed and humbled in that moment when I pronounce a blessing. Somewhere along the line our children have learned what this means to me.
But this calling from God does not come to me alone. All of us through baptism receive the song that will change the world. The barrier separating you from heaven is torn away. God’s spirit dwells in you. You are the location where God happens to other people.
In conclusion, I have tried to express what this song means to me and the way that ignoring or hearing it changes our lives and the world. When it comes to this music all of us are part Thomas Midgley, part Buddha, part Henri Nouwen, part Micah Young. I believe that listening to this song and living it is what Jesus means when he calls us to repent.
If you dare, I invite you to shut your eyes and imagine the song that God put into your heart. It is not loud because it is intimate, in the deepest part of you. It sounds like this: “You are perfectly loved as my beloved child. You belong to me, and I belong to you. I give everything to save you and draw you to myself. You will be safe. Trust this gift that you are to the world.” Amen.
_____________
Although this idea comes from a google search of Midgley, the rest comes from Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (NY: Broadway Books, 2003), Chapter 10.
“The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow… by about a hundred thousand metric tons a year, mostly from mining, smelting, and industrial activities. The United States also banned lead in indoor paint, “forty-four years after most of Europe,” McGrayne notes. Remarkably, considering its startling toxicity, lead solder was not removed from American food containers until 1993.” Ibid., 159.
Henri Nouwen, “The Life of the Beloved,” 30 Good Minutes, Chicago Sunday Evening Club, 1991. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/nouwen_3502.htm
Karen Armstrong, “Is Immortality Important?” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Vol. 34, No. 1 (December 2006), p. 24.
This arises out of Henri Nouwen’s “The Life of the Beloved.”
Gen. 9:8-17
Ps 25:1-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mk. 1:9-15
“And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased…” Mark 1
I know for sure only that it was ordinary time and that angels were there. Colored light on a summer afternoon streamed through stained glass windows in patterns on the floor. The people in the world who most loved me handed me back and forth. Then my grandfather held me in his large hands and looked into my eyes (in the way I have come to be blessed by the newly baptized myself). Then he poured water on my forehead and God’s song entered my heart.
I have to be honest with you. There have been times when I have not heard that song. There have been periods in my life when I could only hear the demands of my own ego, times when my anxieties and fears made me not listen to this song. I have done things that have made me not want to believe in God or at least that made me try to forget God’s justice. Like you perhaps there have been moments when I have been so tempted by despair that this melody sounds infinitely distant. Tragedy with my lack of faith has made me forget that in every place God brings forth the new.
But that song has never left me. It makes me more likely to notice what is good and beautiful. It gives me confidence and a sense of purpose. The greatest things I accomplish in my life arise out of that song. I have been blessed by my godparents and by other Christians who fill in for them. They have learned this song so well that when I am lost they help me to find my place in the music.
Today’s gospel has haunted me this whole week. Using the simplest Greek words Mark has compressed lifetimes of symbolic meaning into only five short sentences. What is heaven, repentance, belief, the dove, baptism or Satan? What does the father’s voice sound like? What does the spirit look like? Was Jesus surprised? What does it mean to fulfill time or that the kingdom is at hand? How can Jesus be tempted and why is it in a wilderness with wild animals and angels? How did he feel when he learned that his cousin John had been arrested? What does Jesus’ proclamation of the good news have to do with us?
The song, your hopes at baptism and this story all concern what makes us spiritual beings. And this has a real effect as we decide who we are trying to become. Many people do not believe in the spiritual life or that at baptism God puts a song into our hearts.
I wonder if Thomas Midgley, Jr. believed in this song. Midgley has the dubious distinction of being the single living organism that has had the most destructive influence on the global environment. In the 1920’s refrigerators killed people because they used toxic gases. Midgley worked to create a gas that was stable, nonflammable, noncorrosive and safe to breathe. He brought the world chlorofluorocarbons or CFC’s. Overnight CFC’s came to be used in thousands of different products from aerosol sprays to car air conditioners.
It took fifty years to realize that CFC’s were completely destroying the ozone layer of the earth’s protective atmosphere. We only now understand the fragility of the processes that sustain life on this planet. If the ozone that we depend on was distributed evenly throughout the stratosphere this layer would only be one eighth of an inch thick. The problem is that one pound of CFC’s destroys seventy thousand pounds of atmospheric ozone. At the time of his death we didn’t understand this, but Midgley did comprehend the dangers of his other invention.
God must see some amazing connections and coincidences in the human carnival. One of the most extraordinary is that the same person who invented CFC’s also brought us the idea of adding lead to gasoline. Because the dangers of lead were already well known this was a controversial move from the very beginning (that was why they called the gasoline additive ethyl rather than lead).
In human beings lead lasts forever. Lead that you swallow or breathe is not excreted but becomes more and more concentrated in your bones and blood. It is a neurotoxin. Symptoms of overexposure include blindness, insomnia, kidney failure, hearing loss, cancer and convulsions. In acute forms it produces terrifying hallucinations and madness.
Immediately after its introduction, workers in lead gasoline additive plants started suffering from lead poisoning. In only five consecutive production days at one plant five workers died and another thirty-five were permanently afflicted with brain damage. When employees at one plant developed irreversible delusions a company official disingenuously told reporters that, “These men probably went insane from working too hard.”
For forty years the only scientific studies on the effects of lead on human beings were funded by manufacturers of lead additives. Perhaps this is part of the reason we failed to realize what we were doing. Before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere. Since then quantities of lead in our air have sky-rocketed. Almost ninety percent of it came from automobile tailpipes. When lead was removed from all gasoline in 1986 lead blood levels in America fell by 80 percent. But because lead lasts forever most of us still have 625 times more lead in our blood than people did a century ago.
The inventor of ethyl additives Thomas Midgley did understand the effect of lead. He himself had been poisoned only a few months before he gave a demonstration of lead’s safety at a press conference. He poured tetraethyl lead over his hands, held a beaker of it up to his nose for sixty seconds claiming that he could repeat this daily without any harm. The truth was that Midgley recognized the danger of his invention and stayed away from it when reporters weren’t around.
If you don’t believe in the song that God puts into your heart at baptism it makes it a lot harder to hear your conscience. I try to imagine what led Midgley to lie so blatantly in order to cover up the danger of a compound that he was about to introduce into the tissues of every animal on the planet. Perhaps he feared being called a failure. Maybe like all of us, he just wanted people to admire him. We do this all the time. We become gods to our self.
One of the most famous teachers at Harvard Divinity School was Henri Nouwen. He gave up the prestige of academic and public life to live with and care for mentally disabled people at L’Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto. He once said that many of the people he lived with there heard voices. These voices said, “If you want to be loved, you had better prove that you are worth loving.” I hear that voice and I wonder if Thomas Midgley did too. Nouwen goes on to describe the spiritual life as a process of gradually learning to listen to the voice that says instead, “You are my Beloved.” This is the song and the promise given to us at baptism.
The Buddha in his teaching draws our attention to this phenomenon. He believed that we would be happier if we acted as if we did not have a self that needed to be pampered, protected and asserted. He reasoned that without an overriding consciousness of the self we would no longer hate or feel greed or be anxious about our status and survival.
He called this state of nonattachment, nirvana. Nirvana means literally “blowing out,” like a candle after supper. It signifies the extinction of the ego, total freedom from the self that is the source of all unhappiness.
I might be inclined to more fully believe this if I didn’t hear the song first given to me at baptism. That music whispers to me that I do not need to extinguish my self, but that I don’t need to protect it either. Everything I have, everything I am, comes as a gift from God. That gift becomes real when I give out of that life to others.
On Friday our children Micah and Melia and I were leaving Cooper Park when they saw a woman struggling painfully with crutches. Our daughter asked her at great length what had happened. And after she finished explaining, I could see that my children wanted so badly to help her. Our son spoke right up and told her that I was a priest and could give her a blessing.
It was an amazing moment for me. I love what I do. I feel awed and humbled in that moment when I pronounce a blessing. Somewhere along the line our children have learned what this means to me.
But this calling from God does not come to me alone. All of us through baptism receive the song that will change the world. The barrier separating you from heaven is torn away. God’s spirit dwells in you. You are the location where God happens to other people.
In conclusion, I have tried to express what this song means to me and the way that ignoring or hearing it changes our lives and the world. When it comes to this music all of us are part Thomas Midgley, part Buddha, part Henri Nouwen, part Micah Young. I believe that listening to this song and living it is what Jesus means when he calls us to repent.
If you dare, I invite you to shut your eyes and imagine the song that God put into your heart. It is not loud because it is intimate, in the deepest part of you. It sounds like this: “You are perfectly loved as my beloved child. You belong to me, and I belong to you. I give everything to save you and draw you to myself. You will be safe. Trust this gift that you are to the world.” Amen.
_____________
Although this idea comes from a google search of Midgley, the rest comes from Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (NY: Broadway Books, 2003), Chapter 10.
“The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow… by about a hundred thousand metric tons a year, mostly from mining, smelting, and industrial activities. The United States also banned lead in indoor paint, “forty-four years after most of Europe,” McGrayne notes. Remarkably, considering its startling toxicity, lead solder was not removed from American food containers until 1993.” Ibid., 159.
Henri Nouwen, “The Life of the Beloved,” 30 Good Minutes, Chicago Sunday Evening Club, 1991. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/nouwen_3502.htm
Karen Armstrong, “Is Immortality Important?” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Vol. 34, No. 1 (December 2006), p. 24.
This arises out of Henri Nouwen’s “The Life of the Beloved.”
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