Thich Nhat Hanh, who was known as Thay, the great Vietnamese Buddhist spiritual leader and teacher, died this week at the age of 95. He was very active in interfaith dialogue, like the Dalai Lama, like Thomas Merton, like so many saints and sages throughout the last century in particular. He spent his life promoting practices shared by people of all kinds of faith backgrounds: of the cultivation of joy and real peace; of activism in the face of suffering in order to bring relief freedom and true justice; of celebrating and embracing the underlying humanity that binds all of us together on this planet.
One of the things Buddhism is known for is its attempt to address the problem of suffering. We don’t often frame it that way, but so did Jesus. Listen to the portion of Isaiah he chooses to read in our gospel this morning:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
Those words are stirring, hopeful, joyful. But the words after Jesus sits down are our discipleship moment. Here’s what he says: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
The fact is, Jesus proclaims the good news of God’s reign by naming specific areas in which human life and human systems fall short of that kingdom—the creation of poverty, oppression, captivity, willful blindness and self-delusion are all named there, having been named by the prophet Isaiah hundreds of years before Jesus. The bad news Jesus names is the necessary foundation to the good news he proclaims. In naming these sources of suffering, he, as God’s son, also then challenges us that these are not simply “the way it is,” but they are barriers to God’s kingdom here on earth. Barriers, but not insurmountable. The good news is that Jesus also show us the way to dismantle those systems of suffering and degradation. Through the Way of Jesus, we are also empowered to confront those systems by working alongside Christ as his witnesses and his disciples to choose to abolish them.
One of the core practices of Buddhism is something called “mindfulness,”—and to be honest, it’s something at its most basic that is good for all people to practice. Mindfulness in Buddhism is built up through meditation, which centers on the breath. So it is both ephemeral, and yet it is filled with repeated grace—the grace to start anew in each moment. And of course, we can act in the moment once we become fully alive to that moment.
The power of God’s kingdom is the power of now, and the opportunity it gives us to be agents of change for good.
Here’s is part of a teaching that Thay shared with an audience a few years ago about being centered in each moment as an empowering practice:
“Anyone who knows the practice of mindfulness knows to go home to the present moment. When you go home to the present moment you can find two kinds of situations. The first kind of situation is there's so many conditions of happiness available in the here and now. When you breathe in and bring your mind home to your body, you're establishing the present moment, and you notice there are so many refreshing and healing elements available in the present moment-- so many conditions of happiness available in the present moment… and you can nourish yourself by being present with those opportunities.
The second situation is that when you go back to the present moment you might encounter a feeling of pain-- a feeling of a painful emotion that is in you. But when that pain begins to manifest, we don't like to be there. So we try to run away, pretending that it’s not there, so no one is there in order to take care of the pain feeling, the painful emotion.
Now, none of us like being in that moment when we feel helpless, when we feel the pain of uncertainty or suffering. Notice now how Thay addresses the solution there within the problem of pain:
So in going back to the present moment here is no longer to recognize the element of joy and happiness, but to have a chance to take care of the pain in ourselves and to transform it. So even if the moment the present moment is unbearable, to go back to that moment is the only chance for us to do something you know that calm it down and to transform it.
Most people don't do that, because they’re afraid that when they come home to themselves and touch their pain inside, they will be overwhelmed by the suffering. And that is why their practice is to run away, to imagine something about the future, to go back to the past to forget. But the past and the future they are like images --not reality. Only the present moment is real.
There is an undeniable biological truth in that observation. We are fully alive in each moment—and only in each moment. The past trails away, the future hangs before us as remote as the full moon that you tried to grab when you were little and laying on the grass in your back yard. In this moment, I take a breath and give thanks for that breath--- and for the opportunity it presents to me to use it for the benefit of myself and others. And we can still be a people of hope and a people of faith while grounding ourselves in the power of that “Today” that Jesus proclaims anew to us, not just 2000 years ago but in every moment.
I think it is a beautiful thing, especially now, to remember how the last two years have sometimes made us shy away from the beauty of breath, to be distracted from the gift and grace of breath. COVID has made us fear breath as a spreader of illness. Yet that perspective allows fear to rule, and to divide us.
It is while we are breathing that we can also choose to claim our agency for love, and to act out of that love. To claim our breath is to claim our power as disciples in God’s kingdom. And God’s kingdom does not hang tantalizingly in the future. No, Jesus reminds us in our gospel today that God’s intended reign of justice begins now. Jesus’s great prophet, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., also noted the great moral imperative of now when those around him complained that those in the civil rights movement were not being patient enough, that they needed to stop stirring up the now by looking to some future time of justice—a time that a century after the abolition of slavery still had not arrived. The Christian promise of salvation, likewise, doesn’t wait for us in the future. It begins now-- when we reclaim the power we hold right now to work as disciples of Jesus to proclaim the good news—and then enact it with each breath we take, in ways both great and small.
Because here’s another secret: the same word Jesus used for breath was also the word for the Spirit of God. Thus each breath is a reminder of how God empowers us as God’s children to care for ourselves and each other. And each breath happens in the now. The Spirit, likewise, meets un in this moment, right now, and challenges us to use the treasure of now to be Christians in deed as well as word. Right now. Then we too can hear Jesus say “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” It becomes fulfilled when we decide, right now, to work alongside Jesus as his disciples, as our inheritance as God’s children.
But it is in the now that we act. This is a truth that rings out as true, regardless of our spiritual journey and how we identify ourselves, Buddhist or Jew or Muslim or Christian.
Breathe, believe, and then act. Breathe, believe in the power of God’s love working within you in ways great and small, and then act to bring about God’s kingdom Jesus proclaims THROUGH all of us.
AMEN.
Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church on January 23, 2022 at the 10:30 am online worship due to the surge in omicron cases in the COVID pandemic.
Citation:
Thich Nhat Hanh, “ Staying in the Present Moment,” at YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiaxqGsyld8
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