The Wild Geese: Tattoo Sermon Series #4

Act 17:22-32

22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. 23 For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26 From one ancestor[a] he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27 so that they would search for God[b] and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28 For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,

‘For we, too, are his offspring.’

29 “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. 30 While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

32 When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed, but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” 33 At that point Paul left them.

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

***

Now, before you make a quick judgment, just hear me out a second. 

What if you didn’t have to be good? 

What if you could stop all the striving and the struggling to do the “right” thing and be the “right” person and just let yourself glide and soar on the currents of the wind? What could you do? Where would you go? What risks would you take if you knew that instead of being good, you just knew, right to the marrow of your bones that you already were…that you already were good? 

I mean, just imagine, soaring above all the expectations, all the requirements, all the shoulds and the rules, letting the jet stream take you wherever it will? 

For some of you, this sounds terrifying.

For others, this is an invitation to the freedom you’ve longed for your whole life.

Now, of course I’m not saying that we’re all completely, 100%, already “good.” I'm a Presbyterian, after all. I’m just saying that there is good in us, and when we tap in to that goodness, more goodness comes. Maybe, when we tap in to the goodness that is ours, we don’t have to hurt each other? Maybe, If hurt people hurt people, what could healed people do?

Have you ever encountered a wild Canadian goose? They can be pretty saucy. They’re not afraid to defend themselves or their territory, even if it’s just a space on the side of the river where they’ve chosen to rest on their way home. Sometimes, I encounter them on my runs, and if they surprise me and I get too close, they fluff themselves up, they get big, they expand their wings and stick out their tongues and squawk threats at me like a, well, like a threatened Canadian goose. “Don’t mess with me,” they say, “my whole self is drawn to what I am called to, and I’ll be damned if I let anyone keep me from it.”

But these are not solitary birds. They aren’t hyper-focused on a reclusive pursuit of some unique heart’s desire. They share it. It’s a different kind of desire. It’s something different from self-indulgent. It’s still sacrificial. But they’re all heading home together. Have you ever noticed as they lift themselves from the river, one and then the next and then the next, first a confusion of wings and stretched necks, and then, slowly, they form a V, they fall into line, they trust and they follow the heart of the one who leads them. And then they invite even more into the fold as they cross the landscapes. And that first heart, that heart in the lead, will take the brunt of the wind and the storms and the scorching sun, until they tire, and someone else’s heart is ready to take over, to take the lead. They trust their communal desire. They trust that what the one longs for is what will lead them home, too. There is this ingrained pull that draws them, and they trust it, they move with it, and they soar above every other machination that has been set up for their lives. It’s not the blind following of one leader. It’s rather, the recognition that the good in me is also the good in you. It’s the acknowledgement that maybe someone else might have an answer that I might not have, deep inside themselves, in the same seeded place where I find my own.

Meanwhile, down below, the philosophers are having arguments over who’s got God right. They’re positing theorems about what God looks like and what God wants, what God’s nature is, and how God is. They give God blue eyes, or blond hair, they give God a gender and they encase God in stone. This is God, they say. And you can walk from one shrine to the next to get a different picture of God. A different idea of what God is like. Except the problem is they’ve taken all the “likes” out of the equations. Instead of saying, “God is like an emperor,” they’re saying, “the emperor is God.” Instead of saying, “God is like the lightning,” they are saying “the lightning is God.” They’ve moved from spiritual, liminal, metaphorical language, to the absolute, concrete, either/or language of certainty and rigidity that has us puffing up our feathers and expanding our wings and squawking threats at each other. They’ve begun to say, “I don’t have to be good, I already am God.” 

So in walks Paul. He looks around. He makes a note of what he has to work with. And what he has to work against. And he notices something. Isn’t it strange how all these gods seem to look just like the people worshiping them? Same faces. Same bone structure. Same wavy hair and demure looks. Funny, how when we make our own gods, god starts looking just like us. All these folks are milling around, arguing with each other that their version of God is the right version of God, when really, their version of God just happens to be a mirror put up against their faces. Like Narcissus reflecting on his own image in the pond, they begin to worship the gods that they create, the gods reflected back at them, the gods that look just like them. “You’re “good” as long as your God looks just like mine,” they seem to say.

But Paul looks around at what he’s got to work with here, and he finds one shrine that doesn’t reflect anyone. It’s not an image at all. It’s a shrine made to hedge our bets, just in case we’ve missed one. A shrine to an unknown God. A place to worship something that humans haven’t created with their own hands. A place that looks nothing like them. And, Paul thinks, “now we’re cooking with fire, now we’ve got something to work with.” He tells the Athenians that they’re on the right track with this shrine. They’ve swung and missed again and again, but with this shrine to an unknown God, they’ve at least hit a single. See, God isn’t something that we make. God is the one who makes us. We don’t build God. God builds us. We don’t create God. God is the one who creates it all. We don’t have to be good, because God is.

Stop making God up as you go along. And let God make you.

Stop worshipping the god who looks just like you. And let God transform you into being more like God.
So what I think I mean, and what I think our poet means, when she tells us that we don’t have to be “good,” is that we don’t have to take someone else’s image of God and make it our own. The good is already there. We just have to access it. We just have to stop ignoring it. This good is hard to define, and amorphous, and unclear, and, well, unknown, but it’s there, simply by virtue of the One who makes us. 

It’s both a huge and a subtle shift. 

God doesn’t live in the places we build. God lives in the places that God builds.

God isn’t a place where we go. God is everyplace.

God isn’t a being we visit. God is the ground of all being. 

“Listen to your poets,” Paul says. “God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being. 

God is not out there. God is everywhere that God has made.”

Paul frees us up to stop making God in our own image, and he ministers to our searching for a God who is in and through and around and with all things. Listen to your poets, Paul says. “Let the God in you, the God who has created you, love what it loves,” because God is there. You’ve been made by God, and so, God is here. In you. Not somewhere out there, not in some thing that we humans have constructed with our hands or our minds or our rules or our hurt, but right in the thing that God has made. Right here. And here. And here. 

So what is at the ground of your own being?

What does the soft animal of your body love?

What is that instinct, that gravitation, that pulls you toward home?

That’s where you’re going to find God. Because that’s where God has made you.

It’s not about following rules. It’s about following the love.

Real love. Love that is sacrificial. Love that is patient and kind and doesn’t boast and isn’t rude or resentful, love that’s the opposite of the arrogant Narcissus worshiping his own image and calling that God. Love that makes us. Love that is God. Love that is unknown to us until we let it in, until we search for it, until we listen to that God-planted seed in all of us that points our way toward home.

We don’t make God. 

God makes us.

And then God plants a seed in us that leads us back to God.

We were never really lost. We’ve just been too busy making God up out of our rules and divisions and morals and righteousness to see that God has been here, right here, all along.

So protect that seed. Don’t let anyone take it from you. Fluff up your feathers and widen your wings and stick out your tongue and hiss and charge at anyone who would dare to take what God has made in you. To anyone who would dare to make God in their own image. 

Gather with your friends and protect each other. Take turns leading each other through the clean blue air. Take turns breaking the headwind against the scorching heat and the blinding rain. Take turns leading each other back home again. You know the way home. God has planted that seed in you from your very beginning. 

As God is making you, God will be revealed. 

As God is creating you, this thing that feels so unknown to us will suddenly become known. 

Let God create you, and you’ll know what you need to do, you’ll know where you have to go.

You do not have to be good. 

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let love what God has planted in you to love.

When you do, you’ll discover how God is making you, right here, right now. 

And God is always present in the things that God makes.

God is calling to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, announcing your place in the family of things. 

Thanks be to the one in whom we live and move and have our being. 

Thanks be to God.