Sermons

“Radiance”

  Seminarian RJ Lucchesi

                                      Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – May 6^th, 2018

I’d like to finish my time here, mirroring some elements from my first message almost nine months ago. With a story of a similar experience, a similar struggle, yet with a different outcome and different lesson. Maybe a more profound one. Bear with me if it feels like it overlaps a bit.

So, there I was again, in the grips of an anxiety attack. I remember not being able to move this time. Every muscle in my body frozen. From my brow to my toes I laid in a state of clenched dread. My racing mind seemed to energetically consume my entire physical body, preventing me from taking the deep breaths necessary to loosen the constrictive hold of the surging anxiety. I remember at the time trying to slow down the panic as it started to build within me, seemingly erupting from nowhere, but felt everywhere. Every part of me – mind, body, and spirit. Yet these attempts at self-preservation only quickened the incoming terror. And for those of you have experienced anxiety in this way, you, like myself, understand the feelings of helplessness that comes with it, and all the futile grasping at solutions that follows. Of course, as a person of faith, part of this attempt at calming the overflow welling up within me was an appeal to God. Petitioning God for miraculous healing. At first, I did this with a knowing that God would heal me in the moment, would take this anguish away. I was certain in fact, as this was my understanding of God, my frame of reality, my truth at that time.

But as these repeated pleas went unanswered, that reaching out to God slowly transformed into questions and conclusions that were increasingly shot through with anger – “Why isn’t God answering? Why is God allowing this to happen? Why is God causing this to happen? I don’t understand. Does God even exist? If God does, which somehow I intuitively feel is true, then I don’t understand God. If God hears me, sees me, feels me, then God is punishing me. For what? I can’t think of what I did to deserve this. Maybe God just doesn’t care. That’s’ it. And if God doesn’t care then I don’t care for God. I don’t need God. I don’t want God. I reject God.”

A few weeks ago, I was reminded of this moment in an unexpected way while watching a movie called Solaris. It’s a 2002 film directed by Steven Soderbergh, and based on a 1961 novel by Polish philosophical science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. The movie stars George Clooney and Natascha McElhone, and is set in the future on board a faraway space station on a scientific observation mission. The mission is one of studying a curious planet named Solaris, that seemingly has a reactive presence to the scientists who observe the planet from its upper atmosphere. Being almost fifteen years removed from the personal experience I just described, I can’t say this memory was on the forefront of my mind as I watched this extremely heady and abstract, yet tragically beautiful and poetic film, but it was something I reflected on in the days that followed, for several reasons.

In the film, the main character is Kris Kelvin, who played by Clooney, arrives on the station as a psychologist on a solo mission to convince the recently self-isolating crew to return from the station, as something has clearly gone awry from the perspective of the earth-bound and mission-sponsoring corporation. What he finds there, is disturbing and filled with mystery. Some of the crew is inexplicably missing from the sealed mechanical vessel, some are deceased, and the two crew that remain are each uniquely wrestling with the yet unexplained situation – one with a strange aloofness, and the other with a demeanor not unlike my own from what I’ve shared this morning. Rightly so, Kelvin is unnerved. After gathering bits of the remaining crew members disjointed interpretation of the happenings on board the station, he retires to his own quarters and falls asleep.

During this scene, the artistic power of the movie really shines. The director cuts back and forth from a sleeping Kelvin, to memories of a woman, to the electrically churning surface of the planet Solaris. Which is being shown as clearly reactive to Kelvin, or maybe better put, is somehow relating to him, in relationship with him. Clearly, something is happening here, but what? What follows this scene is Kelvin waking up to a woman’s arm gently scooping over his shoulder. Startled, Kelvin jumps up and out of the bed to stare into the eyes of a woman who can’t possibly be there in that room. In his confusion and angst, he tries to wake himself by clapping his hands together hard and pounding the wall behind him. But as he realizes this is no dream, he begins to question the woman – “How are you here? How are you here right now? Where do you think you are?” – as the woman calmly answers – “What do you mean? At home of course, with you.” The woman Kelvin is speaking to, is his deceased wife, who has been gone for years. Not knowing what to do amid questions with no answers, an assumed reality shattered and far from anything he previously understood as truth, and with his own racing thoughts, tense body, and broken spirit leading the way, he tricks his newly resurrected wife into getting on board an escape pod, and coldly jettisons her into empty space, presumably to her own re-death. In his own moment of encountering the deeply unsettling unknown, flying in the face of what he thought he knew, Kelvin rejects his wife. He rejects this expression of reality. He is lost.

In the opening verses of the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews, which as a letter is some of the most theologically rich scripture in all of the Bible, the unknown writer references Christ the Son in chapter 1 verse 3 in a very specific way, declaring that, “He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.” This description follows the way the Gospel of John describes Christ, echoing verses such as John chapter 14 verse 11, where Jesus is recorded as saying, “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me,” or in chapter 8 verse 42 where Jesus states, “For I came from God and now I am here,” or again in chapter 1 verse 18, where the Evangelist writes, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” These verses are just a few of the examples of this mutual immanence, this mutual togetherness, of God the Source/the Father/the Mother, and Jesus Christ, the earthly representation for which we can know that source that Christ flowed from.

Although sharing the understanding of John, the poetic language of the Hebrew reference specifically holds extra meaning that resonates uniquely deep for me. I find comfort in knowing that this resonance is one that has extended throughout Christian history as many of the well-known theologians through the centuries have likewise meditated on these words. Noting that the Greek for “reflection,” apaugasma, is often translated as “radiance,”[1] fourth century Cappadocian Father and philosophical theologian Gregory of Nyssa beautifully interprets the verse in the following way:

“The majesty of the Father is expressly imaged in the greatness of the Power of the Son, that the one may be believed to be as great as the other is known to be. Again, as the radiance of light sheds its brilliance from the whole of the sun’s disk…so too all the glory which the Father has is shed from its whole by means of the brightness that comes from it, that is, by the true Light. Even as the ray is of the sun – for there would be no ray if the sun were not – the sun is never conceived as existing by itself without the ray of brightness that is shed from it. So the apostle delivered to us the continuity and eternity of that existence which the Only Begotten has of the Father, calling the Son ‘the brightness of God’s glory.’”[2]

Following the thought of Gregory of Nyssa and the author of Hebrews, it is in Christ that we know God, and in Christ – the human Jesus, his experience of the world being in the world – that God knows us.

If there is ever a film that represents this dancing radiance lighting the way to the unknowable source, it’s the film Solaris. This relationship of mutual expression between God and Christ, and the knowing of one that comes from knowing the more familiar other, is what occurs for Kelvin in his encounter with his resurrected wife Rheya, as she has also emitted forth from her own source in the mysteriously conscious planet entity Solaris, as a reflection of itself, its radiance. Literally, the setting of the space station is artfully depicted as residing within the expansive rays of light emitting from Solaris’s surface, aligning well with the imagery of Hebrews and Gregory of Nyssa. And like the love of God sending forth the Son that we heard in the first reading today – “For God so loved the world that He gave his only Son” – Solaris is shown to be similarly motivated, as its own radiant manifestation is in the form of Kelvin’s lost love, who eventually in the story is re-re-resurrected, to a much more accepting and welcoming Kelvin. Like God felt the world in Christ, indeed feels the world in us, and creatively acted out of responsive love for the world by sending His Son, resurrecting His Son, Solaris felt the yearning mind of Kelvin as he slept and dreamt, and did the same, working to communicate to Kelvin through the tender elements of a form he would recognize, and that somehow was the same as Solaris, and yet also unique. As the Christ is to God. A radiant messenger with a powerful Word we could grasp a bit more than God herself.

And like the world treated Christ, Kelvin did not fully understand, initially reacting harshly out of his confusion and fear, killing this radiance in his misinterpretation. Which for both the ancient world of Christ and this character Kelvin, their overreaction isn’t surprising given the complete dismantling of what they all so strongly understood to be true. When they all encountered a reflection of the ultimate. But like early followers of Christ eventually would come to know God via its radiance in the life of Jesus, Kelvin eventually knows the symbolically divine Solaris as well, through Rheya. His and our encounters with these manifestations of the divine are made real in this way, made meaningful, and made way making.

For the story of Christianity, this radiance sparked what we now know as the church, forever altering the course of history. Even in our unknowing, in our anxieties and harmful misinterpretations along the way, we have still continued the movement of Christ’s energy through the ages of history. The light of Jesus has continued to project through us all via the life of the church, shining into the unfolding of a commonwealth of God that we yet cannot begin to imagine. For Kelvin, this sparked his own journey to a mystical union with his wife Rheya, and her source in Solaris, finding his own personal everlasting kin-dom of love, peace, and beauty. Something we as Christians may call heaven.

Coming back full circle to the young man struck with a very real issue, and from that experience had his entire belief system unravel in front of his eyes, there have been lessons learned through his own becoming of self that mirror the artistic rendering of Kelvin’s journey. And despite my own misinterpretations of the ultimate unknowable as a source of a quick fix solution, based on theologies projected onto me, and thus projected onto God from me, I eventually grew to know the nature of God in a deeper way, by journeying in my relationship with Christ. From that journey, I now recognize how God was there with me all along, indeed felt those feelings with me, and in God’s feeling, knew me, held me, loved me, sustained me. Probably saving my earthly life through that long season. And over time, and through the ups and downs of seeking a deeper knowing of God’s radiance in Jesus Christ, through the continued conscious affirmation of “Yes, Lord, I want to grow in my relationship with your Son Jesus,” those unsettling, seemingly unanswered prayers have become more of a beautiful mystery, supported by the trust I have in the example of Jesus.

The example of his very human experience of life, with all its friendships, betrayals, family relationships, doubts, certainties, service, praise, suffering, rejoicing, healing, fear, confidence, mission, miracles, prophetic witness, death, and resurrection. All of it serves to speak to the nature of God. The pattern of Jesus’s life, shows us the pattern of God. Through this knowing, my faith has unfolded into the peace, truth, adventure and zest that flows from this patterned reflection. Truly, opening a path for myself and all of us towards a continual becoming of a reflection of the reflection, a radiance of the radiance, a light in the world, striving to increasingly serve humbly at the feet of others, even with some accompanying uncertainty, as Jesus did, and had.

We can trust in this process. This process has personally led me to ministry, to seminary, to this church, despite so many meanderings. Where it leads from here is yet to be realized, but as I am lured into an undetermined future by God, I know the co-creative process in its finer moments has the potential to extend that radiant legacy alongside my human family, so that those in our world may continue to know as much as we can about the unknowable that reaches out to us, and through us. Because as individuals, as church, as humanity, as beings that have been called into existence by the Source of existence itself, we are the continuing light beam of God’s radiance – this field of energy as the body of Christ – we are to continue to shine this light through our radiant love, being a force of salvific action in a world gripped in the anxiety of the unknowable nature of reality, and our uncertain collective future of the world.

How can we live up to such a tall task? Simply, but also not always that simply, we are to follow Jesus. What does that look like? I’ll admit it looks different for all of us, but there are some common themes that we can name. I’ll leave you here with some themes to meditate on, themes that will be painted as words in the radiating light of Christ on our mural that is currently in its own becoming, words like love, which we can embody, hope, that we can seek comfort in, justice, in our proclamation of it, community, as we are present to one another in relationship, welcome, in our inclusion and affirmation of all into our community, service, as we meet the many physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of our wider neighborhood, joy, in the filling of our cups as we do these things, and peace, as we can walk through this life knowing that God walks alongside us, because of the Son, Jesus. May we all forever have the courage to radiantly shine these values with increasing intensity, calling forth a harmony worthy of the vision that the original radiance in Jesus Christ gives us in the kin-dom of heaven. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn it, but to save it. Amen.

Bibliography

Heen, Erik M. and Krey, Philip D.W., ed. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Hebrews. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2005.

[1] Erik M. Heen and Philip D.W. Krey, ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Hebrews (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2005), xxv.

[2] Heen and Krey, Hebrews, 10.