A sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, July 7, 2024. The scripture readings are 2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10, Psalm 48, 2 Corinthians 12:2-10, and Mark 6:1-13.

Summer can bring an all-out assault on the senses, if you think about it. To walk outside is to be hit with a bright light and our skin feels the difference between standing in the sun, resting in the shade. Though it gets dark later, once it’s dusk, the lightening bugs come out and put on their own version of fireworks. Our ears hear fireworks, and church bells, traffic and birds, and tourists who are tired, and hot, and lost.

A neuroscientist, Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett has suggested that we have much more beyond our five senses of seeing, hearing, touch, smell and taste. She writes about various receptors our bodies have that detect information beyond what is normally imagined. For example, she explains that our retinas are, of course, portals for the light waves we need for vision, but some retinal cells also inform our brain if it’s daytime or nighttime. This ‘day/night sense’ is the basis for circadian rhythms that affect your metabolism and your sleep/wake cycle. Who knows what else there might be?

The scriptures today invite us to think about our senses, but also to think about the way they stop short of something else. Together they help us ask the question, “what does it mean to walk by faith, not by sight?” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

Jesus runs up against people who look but don’t see. They listen, but they don’t hear him. In today’s Gospel he runs into local opposition. The very people who know him best can’t reconcile the Son of Mary with the Son of God. It’s doesn’t compute. It’s doesn’t flow. It’s as though their senses are all clogged up, somehow closed off from God.

When they look, all they see is Mary’s son, Joseph’s stepson. What they hear just sounds like the same old stories. To perceive Jesus as the Christ, to receive Jesus as the Son of God, come to redeem us and live in us and be with us through death and into everlasting life— this takes faith. As Jesus moved through Nazareth, he was “amazed at their unbelief.” And he and his disciples could accomplish very little there. And so they moved on to places and people who were open, who could perceive, who dared to live by faith.

In today’s Epistle reading, Paul tells the people of Corinth about someone he knows who had a particular religious experience. He says that “this person” was caught up into what Paul calls the third heaven. Whatever that “third heaven” was or is, Paul means to convey that the person had an experience beyond the normal senses. Paul covers a lot of ground in the life of faith as he points to this person who has known God through a sublime, rare, spiritual experience, and Paul himself, who most days has to seek God in the kingdom of here and now, of aches and pains, of thorny people and situations and thinking… who knows what Paul refers to here, but whatever it was that afflicts him, he uses it to remind him to turn again and again to God.

Paul knows about the senses. His first encounter with Jesus Christ was an overwhelming of his senses, as he was blinded by a vision, and “in the darkness of having no sight [he] is led across the boundary of what, for him, had not been credible: faith in Jesus Christ.”

So God’s grace comes in ways that work through the senses and in spite of the sense. God’s grace brings forth faith from us— grace reaches into us to pull out faith, like the sun reaches into the earth and brings forth green things that sprout, and grow, and blossom.

Martin Warner, the Bishop of Chichester, has a little book of meditations for Holy Week that connects our senses with the presence of God. Warner says we’re drawn into a relationship with God through the experience of our senses, “but also through the challenge to leave them behind. It’s like “diving into the sea,” he says. “a new world emerges in which we feel strange and unfamiliar with what governs it and how we inhabit it.” (Martin Warner, Known to the Senses, viii.)

Through the ages, people searching for God have been led through the senses into deeper faith. In the 3rd century, men and women left cities and went into the desert to fine-tune their senses. The Desert Mothers and Fathers, and all who tried to learn from them since, have sometimes prayed for the lessening of the senses so that faith might be developed more strongly.

Some have maintained the “custody of the eyes” so that one’s gaze might be directed more upon God. (In a culture as saturated with appearance and presentation as ours, that might be a good practice from time to time.)

There is the tradition of fasting, so that one’s hunger might be less, say, for carbohydrates and more for Christ. (By noticing our emptiness, we can make better choices about what fills us.)

There is the tradition of silence so that the inner voice of God’s Holy Spirit might be heard.

In these ways, Christian ascetics have taken seriously this spiritual training of the senses—the training, itself being a kind of faith—so that a deeper faith and reliance upon God might be developed and sustained.

Certainly, God works through what we see and feel and taste and hear, but also, there comes that place beyond, that other “sense.” That sense beyond all sense that we call faith.

As we move through this sensual season of summer, may God quicken and deepen the sense beyond sense—the faith, that is in us. May we take time out this season—times in which we allow our over-stimulated and over-used sensibilities to vacate our bodies, so that we might be newly open to faith. Whether it’s through long walks, visits to quiet places, a retreat or even silence in the midst of a crowd, may we take time this summer to practice training our senses, that me might not always depend upon what we see or hear or taste, reach in faith. And may the Holy Spirit develop within us the kind of faith that allows God to work wonders, make miracles, and do mighty works.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.