Dearest Lord, we ask that
you would open us to you, so that the words of my mouth and the meditations of
our hearts might be pleasing to you. Amen.
Friends, before I share
some thoughts on the Scriptures, I hope you’ll allow me a short church-nerd
lesson. You all probably know most of this already, but we have this opening
prayer at the beginning of our service, and it changes every week. It’s called
the “Cóllect of the Day”. (Just a tangent: when I first became Episcopalian I
outed myself as a newbie by continually calling it the colléct.)
The name cóllect comes from the Latin collecta, whose foggy origins seem to
mean “the gathering of the people”, the collecting up of many prayers into one.
What’s reeeally interesting to me is that these Collects are paired with
particular readings throughout our yearly lectionary.
So! The lectionary, at
its best, places some of the myriad Biblical voices in conversation and
counterpoint to each other. And the Collect acts as a kind of moderator,
offering an opening remark to focus our attention. I’ve often found that the
Collect raises questions in me, which find their answers or echoes in the
readings.
I explain all this
because tonight’s a good example, and I want to share some thoughts on the
question the Collect raises. Here it is: O God, whose blessed Son made himself
known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith,
that we may behold him in all his redeeming work. Open the eyes of our faith
that we may behold him. Open the eyes of our faith.
What are we asking for,
when we ask to have the eyes of our faith opened? What are we asking for, or
waiting for? And how does God respond—how
does He open our eyes to see Christ?
The authors of Acts,
Revelation, and the Gospel of John all have very different answers to that
question.
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| Caravaggio's Conversione |
This scene in Acts says
that God opens our eyes in startling, strange unexpected signs. Saul is approaching
Damascus when,
“suddenly, a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and
heard a voice saying, ‘Saul Saul why do you persecute me?’”. This light blinds
him for three days, and he’s “led by the hand” to Damascus, where he prays until God sends the
disciple Ananias to heal him and fill him with the Spirit.
I love all the paintings and
drawings that have been made of this bizarre moment on the road. Sometimes Saul
is shown flying off his horse, knocked by a blaze. Or Christ is leaning in from
a cloud, and Saul has his ear turned toward him. Or Saul is falling forward before
Christ in humility— or, like in the Caravaggio painting in your bulletin, Saul
just lies there, stunned. Stunned silent, even, maybe still stunned long after
the voice of Christ has left his ear.
Saul continues on where
he’d been headed, but now he goes “led by the hand.” Later, he receives the
power of the Spirit from Ananias, but only after he has been made powerless.
God opens Saul’s eyes, but only only
after they have been stunned shut.
When God opens our eyes
in this way, it may not knock us off our path, but it’ll change the REASON
we’re on that path. When we see Christ in this way, we might not turn around,
but we walk on in a very different way than how we started. And, we might need
a word and a prayer from someone who God sends to us, to explain what has
happened.
This is one way God opens
our eyes. How else does God open our eyes, to see Christ? In the Revelation to
John, the narrator’s eyes are already privileged in one way, because he has been taken into heaven, he’s
seen the one seated on the throne who looks like carnelian, and the sea of glass,
like crystal. But a crisis comes, and John weeps because no one can be found to
open a scroll. An elder says, “Don’t weep, see, the Lion of the tribe of Judah
has conquered,” and he is worthy to open the scroll.
John looks up, and
instead of a lion, and sees a lamb,
literally, “a little lamb,” “standing
as if it had been slaughtered.” I imagine John is confused for a moment—can
this be Christ? But then the voices of the creatures and the elders sing that
this Lamb has “ransomed for God saints from EVERY tribe AND language AND people
AND nation.” Then, comes our reading—a moment when ALL THESE who have been
ransomed and redeemed begin to sing—and there are myriads of myriads, and
thousands of thousands. And then, as if they could not help but join, “EVERY
creature in heaven AND on earth AND under the earth AND in the sea, AND all
that is in them,” sing, “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be
blessing and honor and glory and might for ever and ever.”
John had already seen
God, had seen heaven, but couldn’t understand what Christ was, until it had
been explained to him in the voices of myriads of myriads of saints. John’s
eyes were opened by the voices of every people and nation proclaiming the truth
of God, and by the whole chorus of creation singing the truth of Christ’s reign
and redemption.
For many of us, God opens
our eyes to Christ in the singing voices of others—in the saintly lives led by
others, in the glory of the created order. We may think we have seen God on his
throne, we may think we know the Lion
who has conquered, only to have our eyes opened by another’s song, our ideas
upended by the Lamb.
But how ELSE does God
open our eyes to behold Christ? Our Gospel reading, interestingly, has a couple
different ways God opens our eyes. In this story, the camaraderie of the
disciples and their friendship with Christ is still evident. Peter decides to
go out for a round of nighttime fishing, and his friends join him. At daybreak,
after a fruitless—or fishless—night, a distant figure on the beach shouts,
“Boys!” (The Oxford Annotated says this is a better translation than
“children”.) As a master of understatement, this figure suggests they’ll find
“SOME fish” if they throw their net on the other side.
The sudden absurd weight
of fish in their net seems to be what opens John’s eyes to see that it is
Jesus. He turns to his friend Peter and says, “It is the Lord!” And THAT seems
to be what opens Peter’s eyes to Christ’s presence. The Gospel says, “When he had
heard that it was the Lord,” he put on his clothes and impulsively dove in.
So God opens John’s eyes in
this almost comical experience of abundance, and he opens Peter’s eyes through
the words of a friend. And these aren’t judgmental or explanatory words—simply,
“Look! It is the Lord!”
By the time the rest of
the disciples get to the beach, and Jesus invites them to eat, their eyes have
all been opened, and no one needs to ask, “Who are you?” God opened their eyes,
they are beholding Christ, and they sit down to have breakfast on the beach at
sunrise with the Lord.
So Acts, Revelation, and
John tell us what it means to have God open our eyes to behold Christ. I wonder,
then, how God has opened your eyes, our eyes? Perhaps he did this gently,
in the breaking of bread or the voice of a friend? Perhaps he opened your eyes with
a great light or a great catastrophe? Or with the holy lives of people you’ve
read about, or with the singing beauty of nature? Perhaps he opened your eyes
with a sign of abundance and plenty in your life, a loving family, a good
friend? When has God opened our eyes? When have we seen Christ, and heard him
say, “Tend my sheep. Follow me.”
O God, we praise and
bless you for your mysterious ways. We look for you in the world, we try to
understand you and how we should live, but we can’t do it alone. Open the eyes
of our faith, so that we may behold your son, the risen Christ, in all his
redeeming work, and know you.
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