Sermon for February 16, 2014
Frances Jane (Fanny) Van Alstyne
Crosby (Obs)
St. Philip’s In The Hills Parish,
Tucson, AZ
The Rev. Vicki K. Hesse
For online access to the readings
click here.
I speak to you in the name of one
God+, loving Creator,
redeeming Christ, and sustaining
Spirit. Amen.
Today we
recognize Frances “Fanny” Crosby.
We know Crosby as a prolific writer of hymn texts and
gospel
songs in the American evangelical tradition
of late
19th and early 20th centuries.
Crosby wrote more than 8,000 sacred texts,
over
1,000 secular poems, four published books of poetry
and two
autobiographies.
Crosby’s contributions to the genre of
American
gospel music was unequaled.
For most
hymn writing, the words come first.
Then the
composer sets the text to music.
Crosby’s giftedness meant that composers
could
take her their tunes and
she
would immediately shape the words to fit the music.
This is
the process that led to her most well-known hymn,
Blessed Assurance.
Born in
1820, Crosby became blind
from an
illness at six weeks old.
Her
father died shortly after she was born,
so her
mother and grandmother raised her.
She
attended and later taught in the NY Institute for the Blind
and
married at the age of 23.
They had
one daughter who died soon after birth.
While
she had many difficulties, her competence fueled her
to compose
six or seven hymns a day,
working on
as many as twelve at once before dictating them.
In spite
of being blind,
or
perhaps because of her blindness,
Fanny
Crosby saw the glory of the living God
with
great clarity in her mind’s eye.
She
modeled how to praise God and
to sing
of God’s love, as noted in the Collect for today.
Today we
also celebrate other female musicians
who in
their own right have overcome great odds
to offer
their gifts to us:
Hildegard
of Bingen, Catherine Winkworth, Elizabeth Poston, Eleanor Daley, Dorothy
Papadakos, and Pamela Decker.(p.15)
Through these musicians and their gifts, we hope to
open up expansive ways of knowing the sacred and
naming God other than “God the Father.”
“God the Father” is a powerful image and
holds great promise and hope for many people.
And, there are many other names of God that might be
used;
for images from human experience and nature
tell of a God who is indeed beyond our naming.
Within scripture, God is imaged as
judge, midwife, dew, gardener, bearer and protector,
rock, fortress, deliverer, comforting mother,
“I am,” good shepherd, lion, leopard”[1]
*pause*
A few years ago, we traveled to
Denali National Park
in Alaska.
On the road into the park, the driver of our tour
bus remarked
how uniquely clear it was that day and said that
at the next stop we might be able to see “The
Mountain.”
By this she meant, North
America’s tallest peak,
Mt. McKinley,
(aka Denali) at 20,000 feet.
As we disembarked the coach, I looked and looked –
it was clear but hazy. There was no mountain in
sight.
Someone offered to take our photo with the mountain
in the background,
and while it was not in view, we agreed.
Embarrassed, I asked if they would point out where
The Mountain was.
That person showed me what I had missed.
I had been staring right at it;
it filled the sky from horizon to sun rays
and yet I had not seen it.
It was gigantic –
so big that it was beyond my comprehension.
Once I saw The Mountain I could not NOT see it.
Perhaps, this is a bit like our experience of
the Sacred.
We need each other to point out
the hugeness of God that is standing right in front
of us.
If we always envision God as Father,
perhaps we miss, or are blind to, other aspects of
God.
Jesus refers to this blindness in our Gospel reading.
This passage allows us to “eaves drop”
on the conversation
between the one born blind and later healed by
Jesus.
And that is where grace happens –
in that intimate Love relationship between us and
God,
in that experience of surrender and of
transformation.
Jesus learns that the person he had healed was
expelled
from the Temple.
Jesus finds the healed one and asks,
"Do you believe in the Chosen
One?"
To which that person replies,
"Who is this One, that I may believe?"
"You're looking at him," Jesus offers.
"The Chosen One is speaking to
you now."
There, right in front of that
person, was Jesus.
The Chosen One, the Divine, was right there.
It was so gigantic –
so big that it was beyond the
person’s comprehension.
“The healed one
said, "Yes, I believe,"
and
then could not NOT see the Divine.
I wonder if that is what happens
when we unconsciously have
God in a box and only look for
the sacred in one category.
Sight and blindness are not
defined by one’s physical sight
but by one’s openness to the
revelation of God.
One of the “boxes” informing our
grasp of the Divine
is the Nicene Creed.
In her book “Gender and The
Nicene Creed,”
author Elizabeth Geitz tells that
“Throughout tradition… God has
been referred to…
as Father because Jesus addressed
God as abba,
which literally translated means
“daddy.”[2]
Through the name abba,
Jesus expressed the extremely
personal and intimate nature
of his relationship with God…
And, while Jesus’ naming of God
as abba is clearly important…
it does not stand alone but with
other images.
For example, in Jesus’ parables,
God is a woman searching for her
lost money,
a shepherd looking for his lost
sheep,
a bakerwoman kneading dough,
the birth experience delivering
persons into new life…
so if we take Jesus’ revelations
about God seriously,
Geitz asks,
shouldn’t we take all of his revelations into
account?
Geitz invites us to be cautious
about using one name
to the exclusion of others.
Doesn’t that distort the image of
the one God
who is beyond our naming…?”
The hazard of using only “Father”
for God,
is that it conveys the message
that God is male,
which is theologically
inaccurate.
It is appropriate, then, to use
female and male imagery
for God
in light of the many revelations
of Jesus.
In Alice Walker’s The Color
Purple,
Celie, the protagonist,
writes letters to God and to her
sister.
Celie is a fourteen year old
black girl living in the South
who has been abused…
One day she says to her friend,
Shug Avery,
“Ain’t no way to read the bible
and
not think God is white.
When I found out I thought God
was white,
I lost interest.”
Her friend Shug responds,
“My first step from the old white
man was the trees.
Then air. Then birds. Then other people.
But one day when I was sitting
quiet and
feeling like a motherless child,
which I was,
it come to me:
that feeling of being part of
everything and not separate at all.”
Being part of everything and not
separate at all
is surely a gift of the living
God!
When we say the Creed, “We
believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,” we can
be aware that
God as Father was only one
revelation of Jesus
regarding
the nature of God.
God as Father does not stand
alone in revelations of God
throughout
scripture and the history of the church.
God as Father is only a partial
picture.
We can expand our vocabulary of prayer and
the ways in which we name the Holy One.
When we do, we bear witness to the fact that
the mystery of God transcends all categories of
knowing,
So, when you feel expelled from God’s presence,
Jesus will find you and ask,
“Do you believe in the Chosen One?”
You might reply,
"Who is this One, that I may believe?"
Don’t be surprised if Jesus
responds,
"You're looking at him…the Chosen
One is speaking to you now." There, right in front of you, will be Jesus, the living
God.
The experience of the living God exceeds our
hope and surpasses our memory.
The experience of the living God is more than
the signs that point toward the sacred,
more than the sacraments that share in it,
more than the stained glass that depicts it,
more than the music that celebrates it.
The experience of the living God is beyond
masculine or feminine.
To paraphrase The Rev. Frank Wade,
the experience of the living God is the
“Holy-cow, what-was-that, where-did-that-come-from
and how-did-that-happen experience.
It is feeling the wind of the Spirit whip around
us.
It is drawing on the invigorating results of
spiritual discipline.
It is seeing doors open where there had only been
walls before.
It is finding still water in a shadowed
valley
of illness or
grief or loss and then
feeling the rod
that comforts, the staff that guides.
It is being drained by intercessory prayer and
rejuvenated by
praise.
It is the recurring miracle of loaves and fishes
seen over and
over by the generous and the vulnerable.
It is in the unfocused eyes of the newly born and
the about to die
who know that the unknown at either end of life
is held in common cause and common embrace. ”[3]
Today, may we experience the living God,
the God that loves beyond all categories,
with great clarity in a sacred, holy, healing way
that is
bigger than you can imagine...
That is blessed assurance, indeed!
Amen
[1] Portions
inspired by Elizabeth Rankin Geitz, Gender
and The Nicene Creed, (New York, Church Publishing, 1995) p. 15-24
[2] Portions
inspired by Elizabeth Rankin Geitz, Gender
and The Nicene Creed, (New York, Church Publishing, 1995) p. 15-24
[3] The Rev.
Dr. Francis H. Wade, former interim dean of the Washington National Cathedral,
offered at the 190th Commencement at Virginia Theological Seminar, Alexandria VA,
May 22, 2013. VTS Journal, p. 41-43.
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