Galatians 1:11-19
Psalm 146:6-10
Luke 16:19-31

When God Appears

The gospel which was preached by me is not man's gospel. For I did
not receive it from man. ...when He called me through His grace,
I did not confer with flesh and blood, ... but I went away into Arabia;

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

When God appears, what do you say? What do you do? Yes, God is ever present numbering the hairs on your head, knowing the state of your heart and your soul, but I mean something else. What do you do when He appears to you? When He turns your world upside-down? When He bids you cross the boundary from the world to Him?

Consider the Gospel reading. A rich man is very much in the world. We might say that the world revolves around him. And then it does not. Suddenly he is removed. Says Father Abraham to him,

between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that
those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none
may cross from there ....

We realize that the rich man had already separated himself from God — indifferent toward God and His ways, uncaring for others. And now this separation has hardened into an identity and an eternal home. Our choice for the afterlife, after all, is just this simple.

The rich man protests that no one warned him begging to tell his brothers that a similar fate awaits them. But Abraham replies, "Did they not have Moses and the Prophets?"

"If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will
they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead."

What shall we say of ourselves? We too have heard the witness of our faith; we have seen the examples of the saints. If we have encountered God but have not loved Him with all our hearts, with all our souls, with all our minds, and with all our strength, and not loved our neighbor, then, like the rich man, are we not separated from God? A brilliant clarity comes at our deaths, when we shall see ourselves as we truly are in the face of Jesus, "no longer through a glass darkly but face-to-face" (1 Cor 13:12).

Saul of Tarsus was in the fullness of life:

brought up in [Jerusalem, trained] at the feet of Gamaliel, educated
according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, being zealous
for God ... (Acts 22)

In a sense the world revolved around him. He tells the Galatians (from our Epistle reading this morning),

I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people
and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. (Gal 1:14)

And He tells the congregation at Philippi,

I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If any other man
thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised
on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a
Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor
of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless.

Separated from God?! This man?! Separated from God?! Saul of Tarsus! This proposition would have seemed preposterous to his contemporaries.

His encounter with God on the Damascus Road could not have been his first divine appointment, though, to be sure, it was a vivid one. We know that he was there when St. Stephen was martyred, when "the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:58). And there had been, no doubt, many other divine appointments, for this is God's nature. From the time we are children, God and His angels write messages to us on the walls of our daily experiences, if only we would pay them any mind. We are summoned to myriad divine appointments throughout our lives. But do we hear them? Do we keep them?

Saul was as a very busy man, an important man, and well-connected. But God swept away his whole life and world in a single stroke: all that he had strived for, all that he had studied and labored for, all his hopes and dreams, swept away with a single pass of God's hand. His sight was taken from him signifying the end of his religious life as he had known it, for Judaism is a religion of scholarship, of commentaries, of reading and writing. He was helpless. No doubt, those around him had thought, "How could God have permitted to this happen? Is this justice?!"

But God saw what Saul could not see: that the pivotal moment of human history had been revealed — the appearance of God among His people — and Saul had missed it! Let us ask, what in our lives is more momentous than losing God?

How did Saul respond? We know the two possibilities. The impenitent thief responds with bitterness and resentment. In Saul's case, he chooses to leave the world. He descends into Jonah's great fish, we might way, for it might as well have been at the bottom of the sea: Arabia. Arabia of the first century precedes Islam by more than half-a-millennium. It was distinctly a world set apart from every other. To borrow the words of the greatest recent scholarly work on the subject,

Regions such as Arabia Deserta presented formidable natural barriers,
as did rivers, mountains, and other natural obstacles. .... It was in such areas
that Arabs encountered monks and hermits, who had moved away from the urban
settlements of Palestine in search of solitude. (Greg Fisher (ed.), Arabs and Empire Before Islam (Oxford, 2015))

Across the Jordan ... where Jesus had gone into the wilderness. The wilderness of wildernesses.

Like the rich man gazing from across the abyss, St. Paul sets himself apart in every way. Into Jonah's fish he descends and on a timetable scaled to Jonah, not the symbolic three days, but three years (Gal 1:18). He leaves the world.

The world. In first-century Palestine, this phrase was not the abstraction or spiritual category it is today. It was a matter of clear boundaries. The forbidding and endless sea lapping upon Palestine's western shore was named for it: Mediterranean, the Sea in the Middle of the World. And the Early Church was founded upon it. The Five Great Patriarchates were coastal cities on the Mediterranean: Alexandria (that scholarly capital of the world), Jerusalem (God's city), Antioch (capital of the Seleucid empire), and the two capitals (eventually) of the Roman Empire: Constantinople and Rome. To depart from the Mediterranean basin was to enter no man's land. To journey into the Arabian peninsula was to enter the wasteland of all wastelands.

The encounter with God is always already a repudiation of the world, for the world is the great and implacable enemy of God. Its animate life, its beauty, its holy shimmer remind us that God alone could have made it, yet its human lifeworld is everything God is not ... by its own choice. Two ways there are, life and death (Didache, 1). And the choice for God alone is the choice for His unique property and power, which is life. When Noah encounters God, he and his family are gathered with their little lifeworld into an ark, and they depart from the world. Like Eden, a definitive departure. From the Garden to the World, then from the World to ... no world.

When Abraham encounters God, he leaves behind the glittering city of Ur of the Chaldees, that legendary and most beautiful place, a Wonder of the World, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, where he lived princely life. When Moses encounters God, he sets his face against the royal life of Egypt where he is Prince. And now St. Paul also follows this well-marked path: encountering God then choosing life and not death. As he would say many times in later years, the old man had to die, Saul of Tarsus, so that a new and permanent life might be created, St. Paul.

I do not know why people believe that God wants us all just to be happy in the world. Would-be Christians pour out their material wealth to flim-flam preachers who promise that God will give them material riches in return. But the opposite principle is constantly attested in the Sacred Scriptures, and our own lives confirm the truth of it. We must not lapse into seeing these principles as being mere theological abstractions from the Bible. No matter how many feel-good movies are made about how God prospers our material lives, we must not fall into this pit. Else, like the rich man, we would miss the only important appointment in life.

♱

Compromise is not what God has in mind. Needless to say, members of my family soon entered the conversation. "God does not want to ruin your life!" they said. "He wants you to succeed, to fulfill all your dreams, to achieve all your achievements!" And I realized that this is the common view of God: that He exists only to help us fulfill our selfish aims, like some kind of "super genie" safely bottled up in a magic lamp.

What a reversal of all that is true! To relegate God to be a menial assistant and for us to decide, without reflection, that God should conform His only-wise will to our selfish and self-aggrandizing impulses!

Impatiently, I replied, "Does one say No to God?! Is this really an option for humans? To turn one's back on the living God?" And I took a book off the shelf, not a Christian book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell), the chapter entitled Refusal of the Call, and began reading about the faithless man:

His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones...
Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death ...
All he can do is create new problems for himself and
await the gradual approach of his disintegration ...

Because I have called, and ye refused; ...
I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh ...
... as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind;
when distress and anguish cometh upon you ...
For the turning away of the simple shall slay them,
and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them. (Prov 1:24-32)

And finally, from Joseph Campbell's great book, this ancient Latin proverb:

Time Jesum transeuntum, non revertentem.
Dread the passage of Jesus, for He does not return.

.... not as our Savior and Friend.

You see, only in Him do we have life.

What is my message this morning? Am I exhorting all men and women to leave their jobs and enter a hermitage? Well, for some of you that may very well be the only right decision. But religious life under vows is not the normal state of Christian life for most people. I will leave off this subject by pointing to St. Augustine's De doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine). If you realize that God is Spirit (Jn 4:24) and that He needs us to be His hands and feet and face to the world, then you will use the things of this world according to His purposes. This is known as the Use Doctrine. But if you should use the world and its things for your selfish pleasure and private fulfillment, then you will have entered a separation and alienation from God, called the Abuse Doctrine. It is not more complicated than that. Discerning what is His. It is that simple. And one more thing: everything is His.

I will close by sharing that the Hermitage is life for me, where I may help the Sisters provide solid nourishment for the poor and where we may live godly life. The world outside the Hermitage? I share privately that for me it is a place of disease, of chaos, of alienation, man from man, and nearly all from God.

For in Him was life. And the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness
comprehended it not.

My brothers and sisters, do not be taken by the sunny promises of liberal theology, that somehow God wants us all to enjoy our lives in the world. — that no matter what we do, God in His radical forgiveness sweeps us all into Heaven. It is the constant message of the Holy Scripture that life only in Him is life indeed, and all else is a trap, a wasteland of dry stones and a house of death.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.