A Homily for IV Epiphany All Saints
Church, Southern Shores, N.C. February3, 2013 Thomas E Wilson,
Rector
It is good getting home again. I am at
the age of my life that getting home is no longer a trauma. I
remember when I came home from college, face to face with what
therapists call “Family Systems theory” which states individuals
cannot be fully understood outside of the systems in which they live
and move and have their being. Families, and other institutions, tend
to move toward “Homeostasis”, an internal balance where roles
and rules are maintained in order for the system to remain the same
even, and especially when things are changing and the individual will
face the need to enter the roles and obey the rukles of that system.
A child going to college is a difficult transition as they leave and
especially when they come home and no longer want to be the obedient
(or even disobedient) child they once were in the family dance. In
dysfunctional families and institutions so much energy is wasted on
wanting to force back members into familiar patterns of behavior. I
know my parents breathed a sigh of relief when their bearded hippie
son went back to school at the end of the summer and when the next
year I announced that I would be working at a play 13 states away for
the whole summer.
Decades later, when I came back for a
High School reunion and was offered the opportunity to preach and
celebrate Eucharist at the church of my youth full of nice people, I
seemed to do a good job and the search committee cornered me to ask
for a meeting. Part of the reason I said “No” was the fact that I
would have to fight the same battles all over again of little Tommy
Wilson, both the good sweet acolyte and Youth Group member and the
bad kid who just didn't seem to understand the way the community
wanted to return to a nostalgic past, even though the whole world,
and I, had changed.
I think that is what is happening in
the Gospel lesson for today as Jesus the good little boy is all grown
up and the whole desert, baptism and holy spirit experience has
changed him utterly. He has adopted a whole new understanding of what
family, neighbor, enemy, God and the purpose of life is all about. He
sees himself as a prophet in the mode of Jeremiah, not someone who
sees the future but whose eyes have been opened to see God's vision
for the present. We hear in the Hebrew Testament reading for today:
God reached out, touched my mouth, and said,
“Look! I’ve just put my words in your mouth—hand-delivered!
See what I’ve done? I’ve given you a job to do
among nations and governments—a red-letter day!
Your job is to pull up and tear down,
take apart and demolish,
And then start over,
building and planting.”
“Look! I’ve just put my words in your mouth—hand-delivered!
See what I’ve done? I’ve given you a job to do
among nations and governments—a red-letter day!
Your job is to pull up and tear down,
take apart and demolish,
And then start over,
building and planting.”
When he comes back home to Nazareth the
community is threatened because he calls for a new dynamic of seeing
the expected rules and roles. The system of the small town of
Nazareth is used to the “victim” mentality. “Oh poor us, we
have the Romans abusing us and the Temple crowd In Jerusalem making
us feel like second class religionists. All we can do is hunker down
and ask the God who seems to be napping above the clouds to redeem
all this after we are dead and give us our reward when we get into
heaven.”
Jesus says, “No, God is acting right
here and right now as the prophesies of old are being fulfilled in
your hearing. The power to turn us from victims into lovers is
available, but we are going to have to be open to change so that we
might appropriate the power to form a new reality.”
The people say to each other “ What
does he mean “we”? Who does this uppity boy think he is?” Then
they proceed to give him the bum's rush out of town based on the
systems theory response that this boy doesn't understand the rules
and therefore they need to protect themselves and their institutions.
In Luke's Gospel this story is a
leitmotif which will repeat itself over and over again in the Gospel
and in the 2nd part of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles.
Jesus, or the apostles, come into the communities and challenge the
conventional systems' rules and thinking about reality, and they are
either shunned, killed, imprisoned or run out of town. I think Luke
is trying to tell the church itself that it needs to understand that
it is here not to adjust to the world but to challenge the world with
another way of living.
We see this challenge especially in the
Epistle lesson from Paul in the 13th chapter of 1st
Corinthians where the church in Corinth had been acting as if the
central principles of life were power, pleasure, success, “being
right”, and control. Paul suggests that there is another way to
live in this world, where Love, which had been demonstrated by Jesus
is the only faithful avenue of spiritual maturity.
When the church got legal in the Roman
Empire, surprise, surprise, instead of choosing love as the option,
the institution chose to adapt to the world and we became the
systems who shunned, killed, imprisoned or run out of town those
people who challenged the mindsets of the systems that wanted things
to remain the same.
This week some of us will go to the
Diocesan Convention. My prayer is that we, your delegates and the
convention as a whole, will be open to the Holy Spirit's view of
reality instead of being trapped into the maintenance of the
institutional system as our primary response. The next week the
vestry will gather for their retreat, which has been put off because
of illnesses. Keep the vestry in your prayers so that we will not
fall into the trap of seeing the homeostasis of the institution
first, instead of what God's spirit might be saying to us.
Pray for me as well for I am part of
the institution, and God forgive me that in my heart of hearts I want
to settle into the way in which I am used to, because that is what I
know and can do. The world has changed and while Sunday morning
services will stay with us, we need to see other and additional
options to be “the church” outside of the reliance on the
liturgical hours which mean so much to me. As Jeremiah heard:
God reached out,
touched my mouth, and said,
“Look! I’ve just put my words in your mouth—hand-delivered!
See what I’ve done? I’ve given you a job to do
among nations and governments—a red-letter day!
Your job is to pull up and tear down,
take apart and demolish,
And then start over,
building and planting.”
“Look! I’ve just put my words in your mouth—hand-delivered!
See what I’ve done? I’ve given you a job to do
among nations and governments—a red-letter day!
Your job is to pull up and tear down,
take apart and demolish,
And then start over,
building and planting.”
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