A
Sermon for III Pentecost All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern
Shores, NC June 9, 2013 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Today’s
worship service is different than you are used to. I wanted to share
with you the worship service that we used during the dream retreat
Pat and I were on two weeks ago. It is an adaptation from the Iona
Abbey Worship Book. The Iona Abbey Community, centered on the island
of Iona off the coast of the Scottish Hebrides, is an ecumenical
Christian group heavily influenced by Celtic Christianity. Much of
our Western Christianity is focused in the separation of the world
from Heaven, on hierarchy of power with authority being bestowed from
above, clergy being rulers (that is what the title “Rector”
means) over the lay people, strict order, distrust of women, and a
focus on creedal statements, sin, and punishment.
Celtic
Christianity was in Britain brought by traders from the east who came
for the tin mines used in the making of bronze, before the Roman
Church in the form of Augustine arrived there centuries later and is
focused on the belief that God is ever present, that heaven and the
world are separated only by a thin porous veil called “thin
places”, that authority comes from one’s own interior journey and
relationship with God, on the honoring of the feminine, on all people
being equal before God, and on the emphasis of wider belief
parameters, freer and more interior worship, Grace, nature and
blessings.
I
want you to notice
(1)
that the Affirmation of Faith is not a creedal statement of belief in
theological forums but about living a life of relationship with the
divine.
(2)The
confession and absolution is reciprocal not just from the hierarchy.
(3)
I want you to notice also the blessing. It is not the blessing that
I give to you but the blessings we give each other as we point to all
the blessing which surround us.
The
lectionary stories in our worship service today have to do with an
exposure to a different view of God. Today we have different stories:
one about a widow of Zarephath and her son who is brought back to
life by the prophet Elijah, the second about the raising of the widow
of Na’in’s son by Jesus. These two stories dovetail with Paul’s
introduction of himself in the Letter to the Galatians about how his
faith had been given new life. First of all, you need to understand
about the ancient culture and its view of widows, women, and sons. A
woman was property which belonged to the oldest male relative, her
father or her husband, and in the absence of either father or
husband, she belonged to her son. The widows who are not named - the
writers want to tell you something with that omission - have no real
identity of their own because their sons, their hope and their
comfort in old age, have died. In that ancient society’s view,
widows were fair game to be used by predators.
Elijah,
the prophet we met in last week’s Hebrew Testament lesson, was in
the competition with the Priests of Ba’al. Let’s fill you in on
Ba’al, the deity of the people of Sidon, who was brought in to
Israel when Ahab married Jezebel from Sidon. Ba’al means Lord or
Master, and he was so called because he was considered the Patron of
the city, the God of war and thunder. Ancients tended to use
archetypal metaphors for the most dangerous predators in their lives
to give image to the idea of the numinous. Think of the metaphors
used: the Lion and the Crocodile in Africa, the Thunderbolt maker
Zeus in Greek mythology, the Elephant in Asia, the Killer Whale of
the Pacific Northwest indigenous tribes, the serpent in Mesoamerica,
the shark in Polynesia, even the Eagle in the United States. These
metaphors for understanding the nature of the relationship with God
are meant to demonstrate that we are to live in fear of our Gods, our
predators, and we must placate the Gods or disaster will come to the
people. The metaphors used tell us more about the people than they do
about the deity in whose image they are made.
The
problem with religion is that we spend a lot of time and spill a lot
of blood trying to nail down definitions of that which cannot be
defined, as Voltaire wrote in his notebooks, “If
God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.”
We tend to become what we adore. A God in the form of a wrathful
Judge tends to create wrathful judges. A God of war tends to resonate
with followers who worship violence. Male Gods tend to give the
message that the male is the only acceptable icon of God.
Elijah
and Jesus present a new metaphor for the relationship between humans
and the God that lives within him and in the widows and sons. Elijah
and Jesus point not to a vindictive God who rains famine and
misfortune on those with whom he is displeased but to a divine energy
of healing and wholeness freely given. Paul in the Galatians passage
says that the God he worshiped was one of regimentation and order,
but he was introduced to the God of freedom and love by Jesus.
You
have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently
persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I
advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for
I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors. But when
God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his
grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim
him among the Gentile
Today
we are thanking the teachers of our children not for the dogma that
they taught but for the love they made manifest in their lives of the
children. We give thanks for our graduates who we send off to
college, and we ask them to proclaim God by being open to the Holy
Spirit and by showing love and grace. Anselm in the 11th
century said: “God is greater than that which can be imagined and
if we can define it: that which we define is not God.” Having that
insight, we might want to take a moment to ask “What images do we
use for God?” Jesus never took on the title of God and he always
asked people to look through him to see the God of love, the ground
of his and their and our being.
What
images are you using for God? Whose image are you in?
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