How precious is your love!
Whether creatures of heaven or children of earth,
we all find refuge in the shadow of your wings.
We feast on the bounty of your estate,
and drink from the stream of your delights.
In you is the wellspring of Life,
and in your light we become enlightened. – Psalm 36 (Inclusive Bible)
Luke 6: 12-19
Jesus Chooses the Twelve Apostles
12 Now during those days he went out to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God. 13 And when day came, he called his disciples and chose twelve of them, whom he also named apostles: 14 Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, and James, and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew,
15 and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Simon, who was called the Zealot,
16 and Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.
Jesus Teaches and Heals
17 He came down with them and stood on a level place with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon.
18 They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases, and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured.
19 And everyone in the crowd was trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
Quote from a mystic: “Our biological rhythms are the symphony of the cosmos, music embedded deep within us to which we dance, even when we can’t name the tune.” – Deepak Chopra
Quote from a researcher: “Our tears register our awareness of vast things that unite us with others. Our goose bumps accompany notions of joining with others and facing mysteries and unknowns together. Today we may sense these laws of bodily awe when moved by a favorite musical group, or in calling out in protest with others in the streets, or in bowing our heads together in contemplation. And in such rushes of tears and chills… we may glean a sense of what our souls might be.” – Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life
I am thinking, or trying to think, about all the Imponderables for which we have no answers, yet endless interest all the
Range of our lives… Mystery, after all, is God’s other name…But, but—excuse me now, please; it’s morning, heavenly bright, and my irrepressible heart begs me to hurry on Into the next exquisite moment.~ Mary Oliver from “Trying to Be Thoughtful in the First Brights of Dawn” in SWAN
In recent weeks, we have turned our attention to the ways in which focusing on the gift of wonder may enrich our spiritual lives.
We live in a time of information overload and so many of us, so many across our country are bearing the ill effects of that…with daily stress, anxiety, depression, division, fear and suffering in the day to day. One would think that as a civilization, we would be making progress in terms of quality of life, but sadly, it seems that we are going in the opposite direction and people are grasping for ways to restore their peace of mind and spirit. The news is hard every single day and we feel overwhelmed, our hearts are heavy, our souls may feel lost. It wasn’t that long ago that we only heard about the hard news either by reading the newspaper in the morning or by watching on the evening news, but now, people have it pinging into their phones and heads all day every day. And so, like people at all times, we seek new ways of being, new ways to calm our spirits even as we hold the suffering of our others in our prayers. Today, we think about the ways in which moments of delight lift us up and remind us that our God is a God of joy and beauty and wonder and consolation and we must not lose sight of that. Let us pray,
I remember when our son Liam was about 3 or 4 and we had bought him a beautiful new bike for his birthday one year. I remember it was shiny red and had the motif of the movie Cars on it. He loved that little bike and was ready to ride it without the training wheels. The bike was probably just a little tall for him even with the seat lowered so he tried and tried but just couldn’t support himself without those training wheels and he became a bit discouraged. Then one morning, I had an idea. Our daughter Emma had this little bike too and since she isn’t much older than Liam, it sat even lower to the ground and she loved tooling around on that bike and speeding up and down our street. And so I suggested to Liam on a beautiful morning in late spring that he try Emma’s little bike with the banana seat. Any of you who’ve helped a child learn to ride will remember running along side them holding onto the back of the seat until they were ready for you to let go and so I ran side by side with Liam and then he took off flying down the street with a huge grin on his face. His look of delight was so joyful and the delight in my heart is something I still carry to this day. That morning will always be a precious, precious memory for me. Can you recall a moment of great delight in your life?
Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg writes that, “One of many marks of well-being with our souls is the capacity for delight. Delight is a sibling of joy, and a sibling of for wonder, which are also marks of well-being with our souls. Now, some of the other marks of spiritual wellness include things like compassion, like responsiveness to suffering and openness to sorrow. Delight need not deny any of this. Delight is not a frivolous or superficial quality. Delight does not require denial of what is painful or sad.
Delight can live along with grit. And we’re better off when it does. Growing in spiritual maturity through the realities of life does not mean we need to be grim all the time, especially if the moment isn’t calling for it. In fact, we can tend to our spiritual and emotional resilience through tough times by keeping our eye out for the sunflowers that burst out of the trash heaps on the side of the railroad tracks, and allowing ourselves to take delight in them.
We share this beautiful reading from the Psalms this morning, inviting us to take refuge in the shadow of God’s wings and to delight in the beauties of creation. The Psalmist gives us tangible language to describe God’s abundance. And that means that the spirituality of Delight is a spirituality that enjoys, appreciates, and experiences the actual pleasures of the creation God has made. God’s love is precious to us because God’s love for us encourages us to delight in God’s creation! Our spirituality is meant to be grounded in the present life we are living. Spirituality isn’t simply a way of thinking deep, reflective thoughts; it is a lived, tangible, experiential practice.
The delights God has given us are tastes of the greater delight, the “wellspring of life.” All that is good and delightful in creation is a taste of the actual incomprehensible goodness and delight of YHWH!
In our passage from Luke, we remember how Jesus would spend the night up on a mountain to pray. If you’ve ever made it to the summit of any mountain, there is a wonderful feeling of satisfaction and peace or pure delight that often accompanies that moment. The mountains were a place where Jesus chose to go to feel the delight of creation–the awe-inspiring vastness of vistas and valleys from above. Jesus often went at night, it is written. He would pray all night long. Can we imagine this scene? Climbing up and up, he turns around to see the land stretched out in front of him, the evening falling, the sea perhaps glistening in the sunset, and finally the stars appearing. We can imagine he delighted in the solitude, the quiet, the ability to simply “be.” Perhaps it was on the mountaintop that he could sense most deeply that intimate Oneness to all things holy and human.
We all have places where we sense we are closer to God. We get a “feeling” from these places–a sensation, a very real physical phenomenon like goosebumps or breath “taken away” or a deep longing filled. This was certainly one of the ways that Jesus cared for his own wellbeing in the midst of the work he was doing and the way he had to have been taking in the suffering of the people around him as he ministered to the poor and sick and dealt with the oppression of empire and the push-back of religious authorities who were often none too thrilled with him.
One antidote to despair in the face of all there is for a caring person to despair about in this beautiful and broken world, is our capacity for delight. (In addition to all the other virtues of humanity and sanity). Delight is a gift through which we get glimpses of a God’s eye view of the world. So it’s good to care for it, to tend to its needs.
The poet Ross Gay set himself the practice for a year of writing each day a little something about a delight he discovered that day. He published a book about his experiences called “A Book of Delights.” And one of the things he spoke about is that it’s negligence if we don’t take the time to honor the things that bring us delight, and more importantly, we need to share those delightful moments with others. If you don’t do that, there’s a loss there. You have to do it to achieve humanity. You have to share delight. Who among us hasn’t had a moment of incredible delight and felt the deep desire to share it with others?
Ross Gay wrote about his daily practice saying, “It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.” (from the “Book of Delights.”)
So let me ask you this morning, What brings you delight?
What helps you to be open to delight? What gets in the way of your ability to feel delight? Would you want that to change, if it could? How could it change? How could you invite more delight into your life? And importantly, how may all of this be connected with the well-being of your soul? Perhaps we might spend a little time allowing ourselves to drink from God’s streams of delight” as a way of following in the practices of Jesus, getting closer to the Divine, and closer to being very, deeply, spiritually well.
Resources: Wise and Delightable by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, The Dandelion Way.
Marcia McFee, Worship Design Studios