The Gift of Being Thunderstruck

SCRIPTURE TEXT: Job 37:1-5

Rev. Dale Tremper

Reading from Susan Orlean’s book, The Orchid Thief: "There’s a certain orchid that looks exactly like a certain insect so the insect is drawn to this flower- its double, its soul mate- and wants nothing more than to make love to it.  After the insect flies off, it spots another soul-mate flower and makes love to it, thus pollinating it.  And neither flower nor the insect will ever understand the significance of their lovemaking.  I mean, how could they know that because of their little dance the world lives, but it does.  By simply doing what they’re designed to do something large and magnificent happens.  In this sense they show us how to live, how the only barometer you have is your heart; how when you spot your flower you can’t let anything get in your way." 

Intro:  Spotting your flower, hearing the thunder, seeing the lightning: all these are images of the means by which God finds ways to break through the tedium, the normalcy, the confusion and the traumas of our lives.  Our guide through the Dark Wood, Pastor Eric Elnes, points out that every culture in the ancient Near East depicts thunder and lightning in a “similar fashion: as instruments for conveying the voice of the highest deity”. 

We do understand that sometimes God speaks in a quieter, less bombastic voice, like the “still, small voice” that Elijah heard as he was hiding in a cave, on the run from a tyrant and attempting to hide away from life.  I pray that as we share this moment together, we will open ourselves to the gifts that God may have for us here this day.  

Prayer:   Gracious, loving God, Source of all life, even as you quiet our noisy hearts, awaken our deeper spirits, that we might come alive to your word for us this day.  Amen. 

I loved having my sleep punctuated in the wee hours of Tuesday morning by the thunder and the lightning and the sound of a considerable amount of needed rain falling.  Of course, we know that for our friends who sleep outside, the storm was not so welcome or enjoyable.  But for all of us, it was an experience that we might join in calling “awesome”, a break from our usual experience.   

There is probably nobody here who thought that they were literally hearing the “voice of God” in the storm.  The writer of the book of Job didn’t think that, either.  In fact, in our noisy, cluttered lives, we are probably far more likely to “hear” God speaking in our rare, quiet moments.   

I have heard God’s “voice” many times in my life, but never more vividly than way back in 1973.  Four days before I was looking forward to graduating from Princeton Theological Seminary, Sherron and I had taken a drive up into New England to visit a replica of an early colonial village.  At dinner on the evening before, she had felt uncomfortable, thinking she was experiencing some kind of digestive disorder.  Maybe it was a return of the parasites that she had brought back from her time in the Peace Corps in El Salvador?  She did not sleep well that night.  In the morning, after breakfast, we entered Old Sturbridge Village, going back in time.  Not long into our journey, Sherron told me that she needed to go to the rest room.  After having waited for her a long time, I went to find her.  Just then, she was being rolled out of the Ladies Room on a gurney to the ambulance waiting nearby, with its lights flashing.  I joined here there, as we raced off to the nearest hospital.   

She was experiencing what is called an “ectopic pregnancy”, a rare condition in which a fertilized egg gets stuck in a fallopian tube, implants there and begins to divide until it breaks through the tube.  She hadn’t even known she was pregnant.  Looking up at the surgeon from another gurney, in great pain, she asked him, “Am I going to die?”  He replied, “We are working as hard as we can to prevent that, but you are losing a lot of blood.”  She had her own, life-changing experience with God in the operating room, but that is her story, not mine this morning.   

A few days later, she insisted that I drive down to Princeton to not miss the ceremony, while she began to recover.  I did so.  Just the other day, I found my group graduation photo.  I’m not in it, because I didn’t get there in time for it.  But I did get to graduate and hurried back to be with Sherron.  It took her a month at home to regain her strength.  We had plans: we needed to drive 3,000 miles across the country to Los Angeles, where I was to begin my first post-graduate pastoral assignment.  We made that trip in the summer heat in our non-air-conditioned car (remember them?), stopping frequently along the way.  We enjoyed some time at the Mesa Verde National Park, entranced by the beauty of the ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings, a sacred and mysterious place.  That night, we checked into a rustic motel that consisted of little log cabins in an isolated forest in Northern Arizona that was operated by a nice Mormon family.  Of course, there was a Book of Mormon in every room.  Since she was exhausted, Sherron fell asleep early and I walked outside into the quiet of a very dark night.  Finding a clearing in the trees, I looked up and saw stars I had never seen before.  (I’ve been a city guy all my life.)  The sky was absolutely brilliant.  I was thunderstruck by the galaxies laid out before me, the vastness and beauty of a universe in which I played a small part.  The message to me was obvious to see, as in the words of the Medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich, the deep conviction that “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”.   

You see, we don’t even have to use religious language to describe those moments of goodness and beauty when it all becomes clear to us.  We just know it.  We experience the Real and it changes us.  When was the last time you experienced the “newness” of life, the Really Real?  (Do you see how language fails us, as we consider the experience of the Spirit breaking through?) 

I was thunderstruck in a different way a month ago, as I was driving to church on a Sunday morning.  As usual, I was listening to NPR “Weekend Sunday Morning” (1/24/16).  The host, Rachel Martin, was interviewing a man named Bruce Lisker.  When he was 17 years old somebody murdered his mother in their home.  Based on no DNA, no evidence, the investigating officers saw a long-haired kid and framed him for the murder.  Bruce spent 26 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit!  While he was doing time, an investigator who had been a cop began to look into the murder, spending years during which he wasn’t even paid, found a police sergeant to help him and eventually proved in court that Bruce was innocent.  Bruce has been out of prison for six years now.  Among other things, he teaches creative writing to kids in juvenile detention.  Of course, he sees himself in them.   

Rachel Martin asked Bruce, “How do you negotiate anger?”  He replies: 

Well, yeah, that’s going to come up, isn’t it?  I don’t do recrimination.  I don’t do bitterness.  I don’t do, you know, carrying that around because that would damage me.  And I came up with something that I repeat as often as I have a voice: “It’s impossible to travel the road to peace unless you first cross the bridge of forgiveness.”  And, you know, the only hope of peace and happiness that I have is to, the minute something like that comes up – and it does…  Forgiveness is not a light switch; it’s a dimmer.  And, you know, somebody keeps sneaking over and turning it up.  But you have to be- you have to be mindful.  You have to not go to the fear, not go to the anger, not go to that side, but go to the love of yourself, of your family. 

Words themselves can be gifts, can’t they?  Sometimes we can be thunderstruck, even in church.  Listen to what happened several years ago in San Francisco to a thoroughly atheistic, bisexual, young activist writer named Sara Miles.  (Sara Miles, Take This Bread, 2007, Ballantine Books): 

Early one winter morning, when Katie was sleeping at her father’s house, I walked into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco.  I had no earthly reason to be there.  I’d never heard a Gospel reading, never said the Lord’s Prayer.  I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian – or as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut.  But on other long walks, I’d passed the beautiful wood building, with its shingles steeples and plain windows, and this time I went in, on an impulse, with no more than a reporter’s habitual curiosity. 

The rotunda was flooded with slanted morning light.  A table in the center of the open, empty space was ringed high above by a huge neo-Byzantine mural of unlikely saint figures with gold halos, dancing; outside, in the back, water trickled from a huge slab of rock set against the hillside. Past the rotunda, and a forest of standing silver crosses, there was a spare, spacious area with chairs instead of pews, where about twenty people were sitting… 

I walked in, took a chair, and tried not to catch anyone’s eye.  There were windows looking out on a hillside covered in geraniums, and I could hear birds squabbling outside.  Then a man and a woman in long tie-died robes stood and began chanting in harmony.  There was no organ, no choir, no pulpit: just the unadorned voices of the people, and long silences framed by the ringing of deep Tibetan bowls.  I sang, too.  It crossed my mind that this was ridiculous… 

I still can’t explain my first communion.  It made no sense.  I was in tears and physically unbalanced: I felt as if I had just stepped off a curb or been knocked over, painlessly, from behind.  The disconnect between what I thought was happening—I was eating a piece of bread; what I heard someone else say was happening—the piece of bread was the “body” of “Christ”, a patently untrue or at best metaphorical statement; and what I knew was happening—God, named “Christ” or “Jesus”, was real, and in my mouth—utterly short-circuited my ability to do anything but cry. 

All the way home, shocked, I scrambled for explanations.  Maybe I was hypersuggestible, and being surrounded by believers had been enough to push me, momentarily, into accepting their superstitions: What I’d felt was a sort of contact high.  Probably my tears were just pent-up sadness, accumulated over a long, hard decade, and spilling out, unsurprisingly, because I was in a place where I could cry anonymously.  Really, the whole thing, in fact, must have been about emotion: the music, the movement, and the light in the room had evoked feelings, much as if I’d been uplifted by a particularly glorious concert or seen a natural wonder. 

Yet that impossible word, Jesus, lodged in me like a crumb.  I said it over and over to myself, as if repetition would help me understand.  I had no idea what it meant; I didn’t know what to do with it.  But it was realer than any thought of mine, or even any subjective emotion: It was as real as the actual taste of the bread and the wine.  And the word was indisputably in my body now, as if I’d swallowed a radioactive pellet that would outlive my own flesh.  (pp.57-59) 

And there you go—the Word of God in our bodies like a radioactive pellet.  Of course, that was just the beginning of the story for Sara Miles.  She has gone on to shake up that church, shake up her city and be shaken up, again and again.  Changed, transformed, awestruck, thunderstruck.  Maybe that’s just where we need to be today.  Can you remember a time when you have felt a resolve about a decision, had an “ah-ha” or simply a time when you were awed by God’s presence through nature, through a person or through an incident, and you experienced peace and joy, if only for a moment.  Reflect on that experience.  Better yet, write it down so you can think about it more later.  Peace be with you. Amen.