Journey to the Passion: Hungry Hearts

Sunday, March 23, 2025, Lent 3 – Isaiah 55:1-9, Psalm 63:1-8, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9

Every religion, Christianity included, has a mystical tradition that speaks of those who have had direct encounters with God. We already know many from the Bible, including Moses meeting the burning bush, Jacob’s vision of the ladder and its angels, Elijah hearing God’s “still, small voice,” Jesus’s baptismal vision of the Holy Spirit’s descent upon him, and Paul’s blinding vision of the risen Christ.

Modern psychologists have studied religious or mystical experiences and they’re often very powerful – even life-changing.

They wake people up to a deeper and more beautiful view of Reality where they feel unity with God and the greater cosmos.

These experiences are authoritative and foster a feeling of deep inner knowing, and they’re usually ineffable or almost impossible to put into words.
That’s why many mystics express their experience through ecstatic poems (Zach Beach writes about them here) that are often sensual and describe an experience of God that is intimately loving.

Our psalm reads like mystical poetry.

O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water… My spirit is content, as with the richest of foods, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips, when I remember you upon my bed, and meditate on you in the night watches…My whole being clings to you; your right hand holds me fast.”

A 16th century Hindu woman named Mirabai was a devotee of the god Krishna, and wrote this poem:

I am mad with love
And no one understands my plight.
Only the wounded
Understand the agonies of the wounded,
When the fire rages in the heart.
Only the jeweller knows the value of the jewel,
Not the one who lets it go.
In pain I wander from door to door,
But could not find a doctor.
Says Mira: Harken, my Master,
Mira’s pain will subside
When Shyam [the God, Krishna] comes as the doctor.

One of my favorite mystical poems is by Kabir, another Hindu born in the 15th century. He often refers to the Divine as “the Guest” and wrote,

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think…and think…while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.

If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
Do you think ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
Just because the body is rotten –
That is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
You will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
You will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
It is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
Does all the work
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

St. Augustine, a Christian preacher, theologian, and bishop of north Africa born in the 4th century, wrote “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.” Before he awakened to the beauty of the Christian tradition, Augustine lived a wilder life, forming a relationship with a lover who then became pregnant with his son. Though he never married, after he converted to Christianity, he wrote this in his Confessions:

Belatedly I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new, belatedly I loved thee. For see, thou wast within and I was without, and I sought thee out there. Unlovely, I rushed heedlessly among the lovely things thou hast made. Thou wast with me, but I was not with thee.

These things kept me far from thee; even though they were not at all unless they were in thee. Thou didst call and cry aloud, and didst force open my deafness. Thou didst gleam and shine, and didst chase away my blindness. Thou didst breathe fragrant odours and I drew in my breath; and now I pant for thee. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst. Thou didst touch me, and I burned for thy peace.”

Mystical poetry is often about our hunger for God, who is our Beloved.

But when we’re asleep we devour all the wrong things and are never satisfied. That leads to emptiness or what Kabir calls “an apartment in the City of Death.”

In our gospel, Jesus talks about repentance and perishing, and asks the people if they think those who suffered by execution under Pilate or unfortunate accident suffered because they were somehow worse in their sin. We hear the same kind of nonsense today when preachers tell us that natural disasters are sent as punishment by God. He tells them no, but that “unless you repent you will all perish just as they did.”

We could just as easily read that to say that unless you wake up to the only One who can satisfy your hunger, you will live in your own apartment in the City of Death and continue to starve.

My all-time favorite mystical poet was a Persian Islamic Sufi mystic named Rumi, and one of his many poems goes like this:

There is a worm
addicted to eating grape leaves.
Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.
He is the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that does not need to devour.

We are not cut down because of our fig-tree sinfulness and lack of fruit, but we die because our hearts and minds have separated us from God. We must awaken to the truth to receive God’s nourishment and the blessing of the covenant.

To help us wake up to the reality of our inseparable relationship with God that is our grace-full and true given condition, I’d like to teach you a song that I just learned the other day. It’s by Erin McGaughan and was arranged by Chanda Rule for Music that Makes Community.

I Am Here in the Heart of God

I am here in the heart of God,
God is here in the heart of me.
Like the wave in the water and the water in the wave,
I am here in the heart of God.

I am here in the breath of God,
God is here in the breath of me.
Like the wind in the springtime and the springtime in the wind,
I am here in the breath of God.

I am here in the soul of God,
God is here in the soul of me.
Like the flame in the fire and the fire in the flame.
I am here in the soul of God.

We are here in the heart of God,
God is here in the heart of us.
Like the earth in my body and my body in the earth,
Like the flame in the fire and the fire in the flame,
Like the wind in the springtime and the springtime in the wind,
Like the wave in the water and the water in the wave,
We are here in the heart of God.