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mm hmm. Bye. Now. You know, because you've been sitting in this chapel weekly for the past 67 weeks that the faculty has accepted for itself . The assignment of preaching on the theme Luther's.

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Well, we'll get to that in a minute. Here I stand, supposedly on april 18th 15 21 martin, Luther stood before the holy roman Emperor Charles the fifth to defend himself against charges of heresy.

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And as he rose to his conclusion, he said , well, here's the problem. He didn't say here, stay ish. Is context unders God health me. Here, I stand. I cannot do

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otherwise. God help me. Problem is he didn't say it. All the records available from the day indicate that Luther actually launched into a fairly prosaic description of how he had not been convinced from scripture or

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the light of clear reason of the need to recant his published views, and therefore he politely but respectfully declined to do so. Whereupon the pope excommunicated him . But since when have the facts bothered us,

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let's rewrite history according to the more dramatic tastes we all have. So as I suppose, no small sense of irony that I stand before you under the banner of words Luther never said to say to you

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here, stay ish. Here I stand to tell you the truth. It's actually the next phrase that really fascinates me convict unders I cannot do otherwise the way we tend to read those words, they are

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a defiant declaration. There are martyrs confession there, the lone rebel spitting in the imperial and papal I and that is indeed one way to translate them. But since Luther never said them and since it's possible

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to read them more than one way I'm choosing to read them differently. Peconic standards can also mean I have no other choice as though one's back was against the theological and existential wall. And all of the

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available options have fled The subtitle for this series is what I believe and why? Probably a mistake for me. I think that works pretty well. If what you mean by believe is something near to think

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or perhaps agree with there's a certain intellectual elbow room in that you can state a proposition, defend it with the best arguments you can muster, give a little ground here and there as necessary in order to

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give credit to one's interlocutors and come away from the whole thing with a sense of having made one's point . I think, although I don't know that most of us think about believing in something like that way

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. But of course not me, for me believing is not an intellectual exercise. It's not even a faith claim. Rather it's an involuntary reflex. Something internal that up wells in me and quickly, oh

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, so quickly gets out of control. Increasingly, I don't think I believe in anything when I say Peconic Sanders. I mean, I have no other choice. About six months ago I wrote a poem

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, some of you know that I do that periodically , I get punished for it, but I do it anyway. Ted was kind enough to print that or use that poem and a sermon he preached in

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this very pulpit Madison Andrews was kind enough to publish it in Cairo's. So they're at least three of us with the absence of good sense. The title of the poem was Mr H's ordination. In my

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mind, Mr H's ordination is a kind of internal ordination examination of the sort that every presbyterian minister has to stand at least at some point in his life or hers. And if you're unfortunate enough, 3456

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times, perhaps it's between broken down old me relic of the ecclesiastical wars of my lifetime And 25 year old me, fresh faced graduate of union theological seminary in Virginia in 1979. If you can believe that

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such a creature ever existed. In truth though, old me does all the talking. Never lets young me get a word in edgewise. I think what I'm really doing here is trying to tell myself the

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things I wish I had known all those years ago about what believing means and what it will cost. The poem begins with the first question everyone ordained in the Presbyterian Church usa answers. It's an important question

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. It asks you what you believe. Do you trust in jesus, christ, your savior, acknowledging Lord of all, and head of the church and threw him believe in one god, father, son

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and holy Spirit, to which the crotchety old character answers, Well, do you? It's not a choosing or being chosen. It's not a choice but the end of choices. It's the wild mounting desperation

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of holding your breath underwater until the will submits is overcome by the mindless lungs, irrational demand. Even if it drowns you like a rat. Do you trust like that? Mr H. I think that's

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about as close as I can come to what it means to believe, believing isn't thinking. It isn't choosing a position, believing, as the question suggest , is trust, but trust itself is not something

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I choose to do. Rather. It's a reflexive eruption of self investment in God or in someone I love. It is as mindless and unrestrained as that in electable desperation to breathe. When you've tried to

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hold your breath underwater too long and you just can't hold it anymore. You can't not breathe even if it drowns you like a rat. I can't not trust, even if it does and it has meant

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harnessing my life to a God far beyond my control who takes me places. I would have given my soul and spirit not to go. I think that's why I love Mark's story about the woman with the

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hemorrhage. You know the one who passes who touches jesus garment him as he passes in the crowd. I think she's a metaphor for what it means to believe. She doesn't know jesus and she doesn't have

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the medical where with all to have any idea what effective treatment there might be for her condition. She does know that all the things she's tried haven't worked , but she can't prove that touching jesus him will

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. But she does it anyway because she has no other choice because there is no other course of action left because something in her persuades her that this hail mary of a cure will accomplish its purpose when every

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other one has come a cropper. So she sneaks up behind him and brushes the hem of his garment . And mirabelle Dick too. She is cured. And jesus turns around and says to her, your

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faith, you're believing has made you. Well, actually, what he says is your faith has saved you. It's the same verb. How did that work exactly? How do you get from hemorrhage to

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him to healing? I don't know. And I suspect she didn't know either. She trusted even when there was no reason to do so, because there really was nothing left to do connect. Anders I

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have no choice. The notion that believing is an involuntary thing, a thing beyond my control has taken root in my poems. Poetry is a curious thing . If you hadn't noticed, I find I can

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get closer to the marrow of things, what I really mean in verse, then I can in prose , including in sermons. A lot of my poems , maybe even most of them our attempts to come

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to terms with the question, what does it mean ? Really mean to believe? What does it mean at its most basic elemental levels? We embed our faith in church lee vocabulary. We use words like

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Love and Justice and grace and throw them around as though we know what they mean, as though we were as confident of them. And as Annie Dillard once observed as mohawks along a strand of scaffolding,

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having long since forgotten the danger we are in. But what if that vocabulary is stripped away? What if we have to rely on naked experience and maybe even on silence to answer that question? Well,

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I've dived into that depth a little. And what I've discovered is that I am increasingly impatient with our church Leewards for and about God, words we use to commoditize faith and justify our politics. But if

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you take all that language away, what is there left to say? I think that's what I'm struggling with. When I get down to the third stanza of Mr H's ordination the sands, it begins with

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a central doctrine of the christian faith, but it pretty quickly moves from the sublime to the subterranean who is the only trinity we trust three and one and one in three an axiom of theology, but the

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only trinity we trust is world and death and fire has often smothered as smoldering in the pitch black cave dark, we intuit light reach out and touch the Tryon rock creations basement our prison and reprieve. Is

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that what you believe? Mr. H. World and death and fire are I suppose another way of talking about the trinity, our experience of the tribune god God who creates the world, christ whose death

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delivers us, the spirit whose fire ignites the witness of the church. I don't deny any of that . It's all important vital language and yet somehow or another it's still on the surface. It's the it's

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the woman with the hemorrhage. Again, it's not her theology that saves her, it's her down in the gut trust. Sometimes the only trinity I trust is not the God of rarefied glory but rather the

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one visible in the grit and grime of the world . Mhm. The one whose grisly death is but my own death writ large. The one who's fire burns beneath the boiling pot of my anger no less

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than it shines in the sun rises of my inspirations most of the time. That's the God I know Not the beatified trio on the Russian icon. That's the God I know connect unders. Once 1000 years

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ago I went on a Boy Scout camping trip. We went to the Cumberland caverns just outside McMinnville. Tennessee. If you've never been to McMinnville, you haven't missed anything. The group of us made our

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way through the main entrance of the cavern and down the path into a well lit chamber, a high vaulted chamber full of rock and we were told to sit down and turn off our flashlights. And we

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did. I happen to be sitting near the edge of the group, right up next to the chambers rock wall without warning. The leaders of the group , I think probably demonic turned off the lights.

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We froze. That is except for those of us who started screaming. Yeah, I suppose I should say I froze because the time to tell you the truth. I don't know what anybody else did.

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I couldn't see anyone else. I couldn't see anything as far as my eyes could tell. I was alone in infinite darkness. All the light was gone . All the light was gone and there was only

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the fast fading memory of light, the flickering fleeing hope that there might be light. The darkness was palpable. It was as though I were submerged in a vat of black paint. It was a living

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thing, monstrous, absolute uncompromising. I remember put my hand up to my face and I felt a bolt of terror when my own fingers touched my own nose. Because in the blackness I could not imagine

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the approach of my own hand. I felt like I was falling through endless empty space. I began to feel like I was losing my balance because all of my reference points were gone. And so instinctively

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I reached out, my hand touched the rock wall of the cave and the rock steadied me. It calmed me, pacified me and I knew in that moment that I was saved. In that moment I

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learned to believe in the dark light is only an intuition in the cave with all the lights turned off and dark is as dark as dark has ever been . I put my hand on the rock and the

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rock was the only God that mattered. This, I think is what I believe, stripped down to its most basic level. I don't believe in anything . I trust the rock in the darkness economic Saunders

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. But there is more to say sorry, I can't leave you there these days when I think about trusting God, I also think about co hell it , you know, Coachella, that brutally wise sage

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and realist who writes the words of Ecclesiastes. Everybody knows the famous poem about times and seasons. For every time there is a purpose under Heaven. A time to be born. A time to die.

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Time to plant a time to pluck off. If you're a certain generation, you're hearing the birds singing now and you're back in the middle of Vietnam War protests. Everybody knows that poem, but nobody knows

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the next part. The very next paragraph, a little paragraph about the futility of human efforts. The grumpy old sage can't leave us with anything joyful. Instead he has to stop and say what gain has

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the worker from all his toil. And if that weren't enough then he drops this little bomb God has made everything nrs this is suitable but beautiful is a better word beautiful for its time. Moreover, he

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has put a sense of past and future into their minds yet so that they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end, the Hebrew verb that we were rather that we translate with

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that rather clunky english phrase, A sense of past and future is olam and those of you who have been through hebrew already know that it's meaning is open to some interpretation. It generally means something like eternity

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. The step to agent translates it with the greek word, Cosmos, world, universe. We can argue about this later if you want, but for now I like the sense that God has placed in

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us the capacity to imagine the vastness of time and the emptiness of space, or the darkness of the dark in the darkest part of a cave and yet has limited us in such a way that we cannot

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clamber over the barriers of our bodies and our brains to experience it. They cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. Now there's a sentence for the ages, coherent knows that

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our language and for that matter, our capacity for thought and reason will always fail us in the end , that they will never carry us as far as our imagination can envision going. There is always a

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darkness at the edge of the light, and the darkness is. And in the darkness the only faithful response is to put your hand on the rock co hell! It isn't done yet, though he goes

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on, I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves for as long as they live. Moreover, it is God's gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure

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in their toil. I know that whatever God does endures forever, nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done this so that all should stand in awe of him once

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he's touched the rock. The sage seems to suggest that the Trust can be a starting place, a kind of foundation, a baseline commitment or rather contentment with not knowing, even if we don't know what

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we're trusting, even if the trust means nothing more than touching the Tryon rock in the darkness, it will be enough. Just eat your bread, drink your wine, do your job, just be,

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that's enough. That will be enough. And what's echoing in my head right now are the words that Julian of Norwich heard christ say in the midst of her anguish over the sin and death, hers and

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the rest of the world. But all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, not right, mind you , or just or happy but well, all manner

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of things shall be well. It is enough. I was trying to say something like this, although admittedly in a twisted sort of way. When I wrote the poem, I seek the shining darkness.

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Here's a part of it from the beginning and the end. I seek the shining darkness the basement path beneath believing way that knows but is not known. I seek the dawn of the second day, not

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the day of witnessed passion, nor when they found the body gone, but the last pregnant day of possible uterus of a new creation with cervix of eternal stone deep inside the shining darkness, believing dies and

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trust unborn unknown and knowing waits alone, as you might have guessed. The image of the second day holy saturday. The day between good friday and easter sunday is an evocative image for me. The second

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day is the sabbath, at least in all the gospels, except john it's the day of in activity and rest. It's the day after everything we believe in has died, and the day before it even

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occurs to us that it might be possible to imagine a new creation. It's a day of suspended animation , a day spent in the tomb in darkness. But it's a shining darkness, a darkness brimful with

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possibility, even if that possibility is ill defined and unknown, and waiting for us there in that shining darkness, is you guessed it trust When everything else is stripped away trust. Is there one last passage

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and a poem tucked in the back of the psalter , amid all the loud lamentations and chorus hallelujahs that bring the psalter to its conclusion? There is this gentle little lullaby of psalm 1 31 born of humility

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and I like to think contrition. The psalmist seems to underscore co hell. It's basic message of trust and contentment with the not knowing as a piece of english poetry. By the way the translation is an

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unpretentious little masterpiece, perfectly balanced, alternating pentameter and Quattro. Ammeter lines. Reading this poem over and over, much as we have done this morning has become a sort of resting place for me and I

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offer it to you. zero Lord! My heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high. I do not occupy myself with things too great and marvelous for me. But I have

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calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother. My soul is like the weaned child that is with me. Oh, Israel Hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. Last

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june I was Sitting on my back Porch one Saturday morning paging through my collection of e e cummings poem and I stumbled across. Well, no, I was actually looking for it. That gorgeous little poem

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with which we began this morning. I thank you God for most this amazing day. The poem that contains that delightful little phrase that Betty read for Debbie read for us. The leaping greenly spirits of trees

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only cummings writes like that. Yeah, it was after a storm in the middle of the night. And I've been thinking about comings and I've been reading psalm 1 31 and the grass in my backyard was

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the shade of green. You can only see in the morning sunlight after a rain. And I began to write the poem is green. Green is the truest color. It does not lift its eyes too

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high. It does not hate like red nor rage with orange, nor put on purple's kingly pretense, nor like cerulean make promises it cannot keep. It has a pulse like a spring swelling spilling over moss

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covered stones, or a tree planted alongside waters grown wise in wisdom's way. It does not boast, but knows green is not the last word. There will be urgent warnings red and orange before the knights

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of ice and brown when gray winds growl it bare of truth, they are oil away and two. It knows a calm, slow turning toward morning. The leeward side of fury. Not yet, but

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when deep inside the heart wood darkness their births. Another green still furled, waiting to be true. I think that's where believing begins deep inside the heart wood darkness waiting for a new green to be true

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. The wait may be long or short. Green will come in its own time and on its own terms. But come. It will, and our job is to trust if your current and nick Saunders