Be Thou Our Vision
This week we explore the unexpected situations that shift our perspective: a marriage-jeopardizing trip up a Colorado mountain road, and a parable from scripture that we both love and hate. What does it truly mean to see the world, our situation, and ourselves differently? What will it cost us and what are we willing to sacrifice for perspective?
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
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Transcript
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Good morning.
Just a few thoughts this morning on this fourth Sunday in Lent. You may know this, but this is one of those days—two kind of strange days each year, the third Sunday of Advent and the fourth Sunday in Lent, which are known as Rose Sundays. So if you’re at certain parishes, they’re becoming rarer and rarer, they have the pink set. So if you ever go to a parish and they have pink, that’s what it is. We could have just not told you that and just had you make up a whole story around why people have on pink vestments.
If you look at your bulletin on the front cover, you’ll notice that during this season of Lent as we have traveled through these days, that beginning on Ash Wednesday, we added this series of photographs. So here’s where they’ve come from. They actually came from me. During the weirdest day of COVID-19, when we couldn’t really come inside, I basically lived in the woods behind our house. I reverted to my feral childhood days. And there’s wonderful trails at Cherokee Bluffs Park, and so I would walk out there and just spend hours walking down these trails, and I would build different stacks of stones that I think you saw on Ash Wednesday and just take different photographs and I, I can’t go back there. It’s one of those strange things because of all that went on and I spent so much time there that, now that we’re in this space, I haven’t been able to go back and hike in those trails. I had to move to different ones.
But this photograph comes from one of the scariest moments of my life. So, several years back, Lisa and Evelyn and I went to Aspen and Snowmass on a family trip. We went back after I was there to go study with different ones in 2017. On the drive back in our rental car outside of Denver headed back, we started seeing these signs. That you could go and there was this place called Mount Evans, and at the top of Mount Evans was an observatory. And I kept reading on these signs that you could drive all the way up there. And I thought, and I turned to my wife and said, “we must do this.” At which point she said, “we don’t have to.” And I said, “no, let’s do it. Let’s do it. We’ll never be back in this part of the world. I mean, you know, let’s go for it.” So we stopped at a gas station, got gas, made sure we had enough gas, and we headed up the trip. It’s the highest paved road in North America. Goes up to over 14,000 feet. I thought this was a good idea.
Around nine or ten thousand feet there’s a ranger station that you can stop and rest and stretch your legs. And I should have known that something was up when I looked and all of the trees like this, you know, that one type of cedar tree and pine tree, they all looked like this. They all were bent in the same direction and they were gnarly and short. But still, I said, “let’s go higher.” So we got in the car, kept driving up, you pass a lake, you keep winding up, and it is paved all the way up. We got almost to the top.
We were above 14,000 feet and I could see around one final turn the building right there at the very top where you would go and you would just do a loop and you would come back. And I froze. And I said, “Lisa, I can’t drive anymore.” At which point she said, “oh, yes, you can.” She said, “well, we can’t switch drivers now. So you’re going to have to figure out something to do.” And I said, “I can’t go any higher”. So I said, “I know. I’ll do a three point turn.” She said “at 14,000 feet? You are a smart one.” So I did, I did a three point turn at 14,000 feet and when I backed the car in and went forward. You could see the curvature of the earth. And I said, nothing about this moment is normal.
And I managed to go back and get back in line with the cars and I realized something I had not known going up. Going up, you’re tucked against the side of the mountain. Going down, you’re not. And you would look down and there were no guard rails on any of those roads. There were just a few boulders that I think had fallen from somewhere. We got back to the gas station at which point I was like Pope John Paul II coming off of a plane. I wanted to kneel down and kiss the ground and just say ”thank you, Jesus.”
But I’ve thought about this whenever I looked at this text when Paul writes his second letter to the church in Corinth and he has that line, “we no longer regard anyone from a human point of view.” And here’s what hooked me: How do we get the view that we have? What happens to us when we are moved or taken to a new view? And what does that move cost us? Because it costs us something. In this case, it costs me almost my marriage. But it did cost me this sense of Security? Safety? Sanity? All of these things. So I’ve thought about that a lot.
It came up at another point this past fall when Meg and Brandon and I took a small group of youth to New York and we were going to go up to the stop of the Empire State Building and look at the view. And Meg walked up and she Googled it on the phone and she said, “oh, it costs too much. It costs too much to do that.” It was outside of our budget. So we went to other things. But a new view will cost you. It will cost you.
So we asked and said, what does it cost us? It costs us the stories that we’ve had, the stories that we’ve lived by, sometimes it costs us our ignorance. Sometimes we don’t like to know certain things that are going on. We prefer to stay in the dark and suddenly we’re not in the dark anymore and that’s cost us something. We have to live in a different way. It costs us our sense of complacency. It costs us our sense of control. We’ve lived a certain way. We’ve acted a certain way. We control our environments as much as we think that we do that. And then suddenly we’re thrust, we’re thrown, we’re led, whatever the case may be, into a different perspective. We see the world at a different angle. Maybe we would prefer not to, but we do. So we have to adjust. And we struggle to do that. We struggle to do that. We want to get back down to that sure footing where we knew how things would be, things were predictable.
You see that in the gospel text as well if you look at it in front of you. This is one of those fascinating stories. It’s really well known. On Wednesday when we looked at this in the small group at the Wednesday noon service, it was one of those where immediately when we opened it up just to talk and see what it was, two people in the group said, “I hate this story.” And two people in the group said, “I love this story.” So we talked about that. Where does that come from? Where does that view come from? What is it about us, about this story for some of us that we just loathe it, we despise it. It stirs up. Guess why? Because our view, we identify with whom? The older brother. People who identify with the older brother can’t stand this story. Because we grew up our whole lives as the older brother. We were the responsible ones, predictable ones, dependable ones. We weren’t the ones like others in our family who lived in dissolute living. They know who they are. Guess who loves this story? The ones who lived in dissolute living.
So the way we even view this story affects what we get out of it. We’re blocked from seeing certain parts of this story based on the story that we bring with us when we step into it. The fascinating thing about this story is that it actually has multiple titles. The title that it gets is The Parable of the Prodigal Son. But it has equal names that it doesn’t really get known by but are equally valid. And I wonder if I read these names out loud, if I say them out loud, how does it shift the view that we have of this story to stay? Instead of saying the parable of the prodigal son, what if we said this? It’s The Parable of Two Struggling Brothers. That opens up a different space. That’s a different story. Or at least it highlights part of a wider story so that we can see something different about ourselves in it. What if it says about this, The Parable of a Forgiving Father? That opens up another layer of the story and we can see perhaps a part of ourselves in a different light and we see each other in a different light.
So shifting our view costs us. It costs us convenient stories. That maybe we’ve held for a long time about ourselves. Maybe that’s what it costs us most of all. Convenience stores. Stories that have blocked us from stepping into new spaces that the Spirit is calling us to step into. Because the narrative, our loop that we always go back to, sounds like this:
“I couldn’t possibly.” “I couldn’t possibly do that.”
“What would everyone think if I did that?”
“My whole life I’ve done things this way and it’s worked out just fine.”
“What would I think about myself if I stepped into life a different way and took a risk and listened maybe to the Spirit’s call?”
All of that gets stirred up in us in stories like this.
So our challenge, our spiritual practice, of course, at the end of the day, is to see the world not through the lens of our own limited story, but to see the world through the lens of God’s eyes. God’s love, God’s presence, God’s transforming spirit that opens up for us new ways of living. That’s what we’re called to do. For that to be the eyes through which we see the world and see ourselves. So I want you to open up your hymnal, page 488. And there’s a hymn, of course, that speaks to this. When we talk about vision and we talk about view, when we talk about the way we see the world and how we’re challenged to have a more expansive view, let us read this together and listen to the word, read it slow, listen to the poetry of it, to the rhythm of it.
Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
all else be nought to me, save that thou art—
thou my best thought, by day or by night,
waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.
Be thou my wisdom, and thou my true word;
I ever with thee and thou with me, Lord;
thou my great Father; thine own may I be;
thou in me dwelling, and I one with thee.
High King of heaven, when victory is won,
may I reach heaven’s joys, bright heaven’s Sun!
Heart of my heart, whatever befall,
still be my vision, O Ruler of all.
*This transcript was created using AI and human editors, and as a result, may contain errors.