If Jesus were still here, in his historical form, He would be "counting the omer," today. Counting Omer is a ritual that the pious did in His day, and still do, today. Each day of the 50 days between Passover and Shavuot, between the anniversary of the Exodus from Egyptian slavery (Passover) and the anniversary of the day when the Torah was revealed on Mt. Sinai--on the 50th day--(Shavuoth in Hebrew, Pentecost, in Greek)--was a day of bringing an offering of grain to be waved before the altar. And the person bringing the grain would pray, "Blessed are You, O Lord our God, Master of the Universe, for You have sanctified us by Your commandments, and commanded us to count the omer offering, of which today is the 30th or 32nd, or 49th day, as we prepare our hearts to Hear Your Voice and Your Will." Seven weeks, or seven days times seven of offering our harvest to God so that we might be worthy,,,or at least in a proper frame of mind...to receive His finest Gift to us: the revelation of His will in the laws He gave us to live by....the 613 commandments of the Law of Moses....given originally on Sinai, 50 days after the Exodus. A ritual of "counting" was done annually--and still is in Orthodox Jewish homes--to focus the mind on the beauty of the Gift that God's Will enshrined in commandments truly is. The Feast of Pentecost, two weeks away, is the anniversary of the Giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai. These days between Passover (Easter) and it, are days of spiritual preparation. I suppose we could say that in a wry way, Jews in a sense, do their Lent AFTER Passover.
So, what happened on Sinai? Much of the New Testament is a commentary on a theology of Sinai, and we would do well to know what the writers were talking about before we begin to see other things in their writings. Of course, we are free to get ANY meaning for ourselves from a biblical text, but it makes more sense to start where they started, to try to see what they wanted us to see, before we try to see what maybe they, themselves, didn't even see, but which is included in their struggling to get their minds around God and His Will.
Back to Sinai! What happened there? An ancient Midrash that was current at the time of Jesus and the evangelists said that when God Almighty spoke at Sinai, all the earth became still. Not a bird flew or chirped. Frogs were strangely sitting in quiet anticipation. Waves and breezes stilled themselves. And in the total and all-encompassing silence God spoke, and what He spoke was the ALEPH, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, for that is the first letter of the word, "I" in Hebrew, Ani. Ani begins with an Aleph. And as God said the initial letter of his name, all creation heard it in the silence. Isn't that a profoundly pious thought? But, what is the sound of an aleph? The aleph is a silent letter. It has no sound whatsoever. So, God's voice spoke silence into silence, but all the earth heard LOUDLY and CLEARLY that God is God and there is no other. The first three commandments which deal with who God is, were included in this speech--the aleph. Then, the thunder and lightening echoed this silent sound, repeating it and reverberating it, and from that "echo" came the next seven commands--on how we are to live with each other--how to treat each other--which makes morality a mirror of how we treat God--which is why when Christ gave his 2 Great commandments, he said "Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and the second is "like" the first--in Aramaic, "the same as the first"...love your neighbor as yourself, for its merely an echo of the first commandment.
The silence revealed God to us, and to this day, God is found in silence, and silence is His language--all other language is a translation. This is what Elijah heard in his cave on Mt. Horeb. He erroneously thought he alone was left in worship of God, and he ran to the Mountain where it all began--Mt. Sinai, now known as Horeb. There he stood in the mouth of a cave, and heard the wind and the thunder and saw the lightening--the echoes of the Voice--but he sensed that God had not yet been revealed to him, and as he continued to stand in silence, he heard "the daughter of a whisper of a voice," which we translate into English, "a still, small voice." He heard the Aleph. The Voice. The silence of God.
This is what Jesus tells the disciples they will receive in the upper room on Pentecost. On the anniversary of Mt. Sinai, the day of silence and its echo, you will hear the still small voice, and after it, the thunder and the wind and shaking of the mountain...in your upper room--like Elijah's cave atop Horeb, you will, in your high room, hear the silence and then the echo...in fact, you yourselves will be a part of the echo...babbling it forth into the world. And you will feel so full!
BUT...I won't be there, physically, like I am now. The silence will be there, and the wind...the echo...but not I. Yet, I will be there, too, in the silence, for the Advocate--the spiritual presence, the wind of God, the soul of the universe will be there...the heart of your heart will recognize my Voice in your own. You will hear your own voice and know it is mine. For I will be in you and you in me, and as the Father is in me, and I'm in you, the Father will be in you through the Advocate's silence and presence, and His love for the earth will go forth from you in your echoing speech.
So, what does this reading tell you? It tells you how to read the story of Pentecost which we will hear two weeks from today. It says that like those first apostles who left the upper room to speak the will and love of God to the world, and whose message was welcomed by the people of every nation, for they heard in the words that came forth an echo of their OWN inner truth--for it was in their own voice and their own language, SO will the words you use be sent out onto the airwaves of the universe, and people will hear them. So.........PLEASE make those words that come forth from you words of welcome and words of blessing. Don't condemn the world, Jesus didn't come to do that. He came to bless it and save it.
We Christians have such potential for goodness. We have a mandate from the God of Love to assure the world that it is loved and blessed, and to call forth the best in it.
But, let's face it, the history of Christianity shows two tendencies: 1) the broken part of us (and who of us isn't spiritually broken in some way?) will twist that into words of condemnation...we will find everything that we think is wrong with the world, and threaten it with God's damnation. But those words come from brokenness, from a bruised place, they do not come from a place that is healed.
And, then, 2) there are those broken parts of us that we cannot recognize for what they are. Though they are broken and sinful, we seem to have to call them good. Then we are so afraid to ask for healing, for fear it will force us to change into something we don't want to be. So, we assure ourselves and the world that all is well, as we look onto a landscape of inner emptiness and out onto a landscape of corpses.
The truth is with neither, according to John's Gospel. The truth is that sin is real, and it kills. It killed Christ. It kills potential in each of us. But goodness is also real, and sometimes it has its day and knows its own quiet triumph. And we have all experienced that. BUT above both sin and grace is a Magnificent God who finds lost sheep and hoists them onto His shoulders and brings them home, and heals them. Above it all is a Father who sees through the guise of a non-repentant prodigal, and before the lad can add perjury to his list of crimes, the Father wraps him in loving arms and puts rings on his fingers and shoes on his feet. The God before whom we stand knows our sinfulness. He doesn't "mistake" sin for goodness, but He knows how to heal sins, and he would rather die than give us up. And, then a 3rd, and spiritually more wholesome path opens for us: we welcome in the sinner, the leper, the woman caught in adultery, the blind, the lame, the broken, those attempting to be good, those who've given up on goodness, and don't know how to find their way. We welcome one and all to the banquet of the King for His Healing Grace is here. Lives are remade and made new, here. This is the place of healing. We welcome those parts of US to the table, and we welcome those parts of others to the table, and we all stand at the foot of the Cross in need of redemption together, and we all sit at the Banquet Table hungry and waiting to be fed.
According to St. Hilary, the Church is never a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners. And such is the promise of the reading today. The Christ we enthrone in our hearts, as the letter of Peter puts it, is the Christ who heals the broken in the silence and the echo of the daughter of the whisper of the Voice. So, come, and listen with us. Dine with us. Heal with us. Let the Voice that all creation heard be heard in your heart, in your own voice. And may our lives, together, broken people that we are, become benedictions of goodness in our broken world. And may God bless you all. +
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