Enmegabowh
Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
May 15, 2007
Last week my son Oliver introduced me to the weekly Alan Watts podcast. For those in the younger set, Alan Watts was an author and lecturer in the 1950s and 60s who specialized in introducing Eastern spiritualities to a Western audience. I am a lifelong fan of Alan Watts, and you can imagine how my admiration for him increased when I learned that he graduated from none other than Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. Anyway, of the many things I heard on last week’s podcast, this is the statement which caught my imagination: “You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.” Now I know that taken out of context, that remark sounds a bit new agey, but it is set in the larger context of a talk on Taoism. “You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.” In a talk given before any theologians had latched on to small particle physics or chaos theory, Alan Watts was on to something about the interconnectedness of all things.
Now at first
glance, Alan Watts’s meditations on universal flow seem to have nothing
to do with John Johnson Enmegahbowh, an Ottawa Indian from Canada who spent his
life for the better part of the 19th century as a missionary to Minnesota’s
Native American Community. Enmegahbowh means “the One who Stands
Before his People,” and he was the first recognized Native American priest
in the Episcopal Church. He was also, like Alan Watts, a graduate of Seabury. They
had very different ministries, but both spent their lives at that difficult place
where cultures intersect, and both tried to make the truths of one religious
tradition accessible to another. But that’s not why my mind went
to Alan Watts when I first thought about Enmegahbowh. Rather, it’s
because of this curious phrase which I’d never really noticed before in
the sixth chapter of Luke’s gospel: “And all in the crowd were trying
to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.” [Luke
6.19]
In last Friday’s
daily office readings we had the familiar story from the eighth chapter of Luke
about the healing of the woman with the twelve years’ flow of blood. “Some
one touched me,” says Jesus, “for I perceive that power has gone
forth from me.” And then this morning: “And all in the crowd
were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.” Whether
we are used to hearing it or not, there is something Taoist (or if you want a
Western cultural source, Heraclitean) about this experience of power as flux. “You
are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something
that the whole ocean is doing.” Something is flowing in and out of Jesus,
and it seems that if we want to be in touch with that something we are going
to have to learn, as they said in the sixties, how to go with the flow.
One of the
reasons we celebrate someone like Enmegahbowh is that all of us, now, who preach
the gospel do that at the intersection of cultures. Some, like Alan Watts,
move between East and West. Some of us will learn to move between varying
racial and ethnic cultures and subcultures. All of us have to learn how
to talk to people formed by the culture of late capitalist consumerism about
the counterintuitive truths of the Gospel. The days are pretty much over
when one can leave here and become a chaplain to the established order. All
of us are missionaries in all senses of that word.
One of the
cultural divides I have seen most clearly in my own life is the one framed by
Alan Jones of Grace Cathedral. Alan talks often about the tension between
the church’s proclamation of a religion about Jesus with his
own attraction to living the religion of Jesus. Alan Jones is a nuanced
thinker, and so he does not set up a neat and easy dichotomy here. But
it does seem to me that we are often so busy trying to explain why the Nicene
Creed still makes sense that we forget to address the questions Jesus addressed. People
care about healing, forgiveness, blessing, justice, community, and food. They
want, like the people who came forward on Luke’s plain, to have some of
Jesus’s power flow into them. They’re not as interested as
we are in that power’s ontological pedigree. Anyone preaching the
Gospel in the 21st century is going to have to figure out how to preach it to
people who speak a different cultural language than we do inside the church and
who are attracted more to the faith of Jesus rather than the faith about him.
The day after
tomorrow is Ascension Day, and it is a case in point. As we reach the 40-day
mark in the great 50 days, we approach a story about Jesus that
can, if we let it, make almost no sense at all to anyone except ourselves. You
and I and those who have lived intentionally through this Easter season have
a sense of what it was for the earliest Christian community to have recovered
the risen Christ and the panic that losing him must have set off in their midst. But
I’m not sure that those nuances are apparent to your average churchgoer. And
that is a shame, of course, because Ascension Day celebrates an event which could
give great joy to most people if we could help them make sense of it: in ascending
to the Father, Jesus has been taken up into God’s divine life. And
if Jesus has been taken up, then the logic of the Incarnation suggests that we
have been taken up, too. Who we are, what we suffer, what we know and love–all
of that now matters in a new and different way because all of it is part of God
and God’s experience. Or, as Alan Watts put it, “You are something
the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the
whole ocean is doing.”
We give thanks
today for the life and witness of John Johnson Enmegahbowh, and we do that with
that line from Luke’s gospel resonating in our ears: “And
all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed
all of them.” Our job, as Christian preachers, is to let what flows through
Jesus flow through us so that the people who see and touch us will see and touch
Christ. What Enmegahbowh’s witness shows us is that there is no clerical
secret in having a ministry like that. One does it simply by letting go,
ceasing to grasp, and letting, as Jesus did, the workings of the universe roll
through you like a wave. May all of us, in whatever setting we find ourselves,
find grace and freedom to do just that. Amen.