A Sermon
for XXV Pentecost (proper 28) All Saints Episcopal, Southern
Shores, NC November 18, 2012 Thomas
E Wilson, Rector
Sandy Briggman in her Servant Ministry Moment talked
about how she is called to volunteer with the Guardian ad Litem program and be
there for children whose face a unknown future. Everything the children have
ever known is being changed, many of the structures they had come to trust are
in rubble. So now, what do you do? You
search for a new future without trusting in the past. We did not plan the
lessons for today to correspond to her talk but God has this way of showing up
despite our plans for the lessons have as one theme the breaking from the trust
in the past in order to be set free to envision a new future. There is an old
joke about the Episcopal Church: “How many Episcopalians does it take to change
a light bulb?” There are two equally
true answers (1) Four- one to mix the drinks and do it and three to talk about
how good the old one was.” And (2) “Change? My grandmother gave that bulb!”
In the lesson from 1st Samuel, Hannah is
breaking from the tyranny of the past and the present. She was the childless second
wife, the trophy wife, of Elkanah. In Israel at that time, if you were a second
wife and had no children you were to be pitied. The community assumed that you
had displeased God and it was thought that God had closed up your womb as a
punishment. Without children, which were their Social Security, if you grew
older there would be no one to look after you, and as a woman in that culture,
she would not be able to inherit anything from her husband. The first wife
despised the second wife because she was a rival for her husband’s attention;
and in the story that leads up to Hannah’s song, the first wife never misses an
opportunity to show her contempt. Her husband gives Hannah extra rations as a
way to placate Hannah’s hurt feelings; but as my wife tells me, husbands
usually just sort of miss the point about what is important for a woman. Hannah
has no future and she goes into the Shrine to pray and place her trust, not in
her husband but in the strength of God, the one greater than herself and her
husband. The reading is the song she sings in thanksgiving for her prayer;
strikingly similar to a song that the young girl Mary sings a thousand years
later as she faces an unknown future.
Mark in his Gospel remembers Jesus warning his
disciples not to put their trust in buildings, institutions and other things
built by humans; the future may be uncertain but it is open. In the Hebrews
passage the writer speaks of the whole sacrificial system of the Temple which
has been destroyed as the Temple was turned into rubble in 70 AD; they are free
from the past and able to enter into a new relationship with God through
Christ.
Keeping things the way they are is a comforting
illusion. Living things never remain the same; life is about change. What are
the things in the past that you trusted? I remember growing up in Upstate New
York and we knew that we could always count on the local businesses to provide
employment. Look at the companies—there was Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company-
everybody is going to need shoes right? Except they make them somewhere else
now. There was Link Aviation which made Trainers for aircraft- everybody is
going to need flight simulators? Except they went through 5 different buy outs
and take overs and are now in England. There was General Aniline & Film (GAF)
which made dyes and chemicals, View Masters, Ansco film and cameras and
everybody would always need film right? There was IBM and there was a whole new
market for room size computing machines and they said they would never leave
their beloved home in Upstate for we were a friendly place for business; until
they sold off those divisions. Everything was going fine until I started to
finish college and looked for work and saw that in the years I was at school we
started to enter the Rust Belt as the manufacturers closed down.
Each morning we would also say the Pledge of
Allegiance to the Flag and we trusted our government to be supporters of
freedom and democracy as opposed to those Godless communists. Until that day
when we looked at all the corrupt dictatorships that we supported in their
abuse of their people because at least these crooks were our crooks and they
hated communism. Until that day when we saw the face of Sen. Joe McCarthy of
Wisconsin and saw naked Demagoguery.
We trusted the government, who we thought would
never lie to us; until that day when President Eisenhower stood up and told the
world that the U-2 plane was not on a spy mission but on a routine weather
information gathering flight when it was shot down while off course over Russia
and then had to admit he lied. Until that day when President Kennedy lied, until
that day when President Johnson lied, until that day when President Nixon lied
and so on.
We trusted our government who told us when a nuclear
attack came all we had to do was get under our desks and cover our heads and
then go home, take a shower and live under ground for a couple weeks. Until we
saw films of Hiroshima which suggested that no desks were big enough to get
under for safety and our military considered mega million deaths acceptable.
When I was growing up every morning at school we
said the Lord’s Prayer. Jewish kids were allowed to keep silent during the
prayers but it had to be a “respectful” silence, the Roman Catholics had to do
the “respectful” silence during the Protestant ending but that was what it
meant when you knew that the WASPs (White Ango-Saxon Protestants) ruled and
they would always have a majority. On top of the Wasp hierarchy was the
Episcopal Church which we knew was on its way to being the unofficial National
Church. There was a National Cathedral being built to be a place where the
nation worshipped. We knew that Episcopal men had the key leadership positions
in business and government, good Episcopal women could stay at home and do most
of the church work while the Rector took the credit, and live off the
generosity of their successful Episcopal men. All we boys had to do is memorize
a bunch of stuff, avoid the big sins, and don’t rock the boat and we would
ascend to our places of privilege and the church would continue to grow because
the masses would be attracted to liturgy done well; until that day when the
church started to get totally irrelevant. We knew there would always be mothers
at home and at church meetings, until that day when they had to go to work in
order to keep food on the table and they discovered they were full human beings.
We knew that there would always be newspapers to
give us the unbiased news, until that day they started dying. We learned that
only faithless bad girls got pregnant before marriage and only sick deviants
became homosexuals; until that day when we saw good girls get pregnant and
healthy people come out of the closet. So many things we thought we knew but
they are in the past and it needs to die so that we can move on.
William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun wrote of his troubled characters trapped in subjective
time: "The past
is never dead. It's not even past."
The Good News is that things change and the past can die and set us free
to place our trust into the one greater than ourselves. The Bad News is that we
have to let it die in order to be born again into the new future. The Bad News
is that we have to be ready to change where God leads us. The Good News is that
we can be ready to change where God leads us.
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