Ecstasy

(note--this is a precis of a homily delivered on Sunday May 17/6 Easter--Acts 10: 44-48 was the main text)

Not long ago at a monastery in the Midwest, the novice master in charge of the newbie monks noticed that his guys were looking depressed. He called them together and, after a moment of silence, asked them, "What is it that you love about this life?"

They answered, "The ecstasy we feel when we are in the fields working, late morning or late afternoon. God feels so near, permeating everything--we feel in touch with the divine in all things."

The older monk then asked, "What's the worse thing about this life?"

They answered unanimously, "Standing in church at 3:00 AM chanting Psalms, 7 days a week. Then over and over again throughout the day, every day."

The old monk thought for a moment, then said, "Very well. For the next couple of weeks, you do not have to come to church for any of the prayer Offices. In fact, I order you not to come."

After four days the newbie monks came to the novice master and said, "We didn't come here to be farm hands, in dresses." They asked for permission to come back to the daily prayer Offices, 3:00 AM and all.

The novice master asked, "What happened to your ecstasies?"

The young monks replied that they had faded and disappeared after the first couple of days.

The old monk observed, "I can't be sure, but it sounds like your ecstasies in the fields in the sunlight were connected with standing in the church at 3:00 AM chanting Psalms."

Ecstasy can be spontaneous. But more often it is the gift of a life lived, a commitment honored.

We all desire ecstasy--it is a hard-wired human need. "Ecstasy" literally means "out of one's being", being taken out of our skin as it were, out of the little bounds of our routine and the ways in which the marvels of the world seem common and dull to us. Somehow we inhabit another place, or perhaps we are seeing the place clearly for the first time. Bliss, rapture, deep peace--this is all ecstasy. The experience can be very personal--one young woman says "dance" in answer to the question of what is her ecstasy, another older woman says "gardening." Any ecstasy has the breath of the divine about it--it is God who draws us out of our own skin and the skin of what we think is the everyday, and calls us into larger vision, larger joy and abandon, larger life.

To ask "What is my ecstasy?" is a spiritual exercise. There we will detect the whisper of God.

A community too can experience ecstasy, and perhaps not in the visibly enraptured ways that we may expect.

We forget that the early Jesus movement was thoroughly Jewish and probably more stern in its observance than the Pharisees. A Jewish Messiah had come to fulfill the ancient promises to Israel. When the expected fulfillment of Jesus' promise did not come and the Temple and Jerusalem were destroyed, the new movement may well have come to an end, just another enthusiastic little sect disappeared in the dustbin of history.

But the early community chose ecstasy, and this is how. Today's tale tells how Peter and the good Jewish guys from Jerusalem made a journey to talk to some Gentiles, those pork-eating, Greek-speaking, statue-worshipping, sexually randy Gentiles. These folks were off the salvation map, out of the question, despised. But Peter and the boys saw the same ecstasy in them as they knew in themselves. So Peter committed ecstasy--he chose to climb out of the skin of what he thought God was about and who he thought God loved and reached out his baptizing hand to these goyim, these Gentiles. And that is how the Jewish Jesus movement not only survived but spread and grew--an act of ecstasy, climbing out of their own skin of theology and prejudice and narrow imagination to see that God was greater and God was wiser and the people of God were far more diverse and God's desire was outrageous. And they were invited to participate in the ecstasy of God who strains to embrace all people, all the cosmos.

How are we to participate in the ecstasy of God? How are we to be that community of ecstasy, and climb out of the skin of who we think we are and what we think is the plan and desire of God?