A Reflection for IV Pentecost (Proper 6) All Saints Church, Southern
Shores, N.C. June 16, 2013 Thomas
E Wilson, Rector
We have two stories before us one of an evil man and
the other of a good man who both miss the point of life. The evil man is Ahab
in the story from the Hebrew Testament lesson for today. He was part of the
House of Omri line of Kings of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Omri had over
thrown and murdered the King who reigned for seven days after he had murdered
the precious King. Fear is passed on through the generations and Ahab, the son of
Omri, did not murder his father so he succeeded to the throne lawfully but he
did not trust the law and was ruled by fear and his wife Jezebel. Ahab and
Jezebel believed that the only way to conquer fear was to make other people
fear them. I don’t think he was born evil but he became so.
Part of my belief system is I think we are all born
out of the ground of our being in the image of God with the intension of living
fully into that image of playful creative imagination, loving deeply and
working joyfully; which is my definition of living into the divine Trinity;
Creator, lover and worker. In our growing up our egos work hard to create a
life of stability and we tend to start to ignore and repress parts of us that
don’t seem to fit in as we try to succeed in the world’s definition of life.
There is an apocryphal story that I like about a
very young child whose mother overhears whispering to the new baby sibling, “Baby,
tell me what God feels like, I am starting to forget.” As we grow up we tend to
become strangers to our true self, deep inside us, as we try to go along with
getting along in this world. But the true self, which Jung at one point
identified as the “Christ within us”, does not give up and keeps sending
messages from our unconscious and the collective unconscious to our outer self
so that we might grow and be healed into wholeness. The
messages are usually in symbols which are projected so that it can bypass the
usual Ego defenses. Part of the dream conference which Pat and I attended operated
under that assumption that dreams can be a way that God speaks to us to move
into wholeness as the symbols are projected onto the screen of our dreams.
I think what happened to Ahab in the story for today
was that he saw Naboth in his vineyard and saw a projection of the kind of life
that he unconsciously longed for to create something to pass onto the world, to
love and work in peace. He saw it and was moved and wanted to partake of
it. If he had taken that message into
his own consciousness, he might have been moved into healing. But when he was
refused, his threatened ego drove him into depression and he was so enmeshed
with Jezebel so that they were an undifferentiated ego mass, that she arranged
for the murder of Naboth. God sends a message to Ahab through his alter ego,
the prophet Elijah, to repent. Ahab recognizes the threat to his own ego and
calls him “enemy”, but Ahab repents. But the repentance is short lived and new
opportunities are pushed back into the unconscious.
In the second story from the book of Luke, Simon the
Pharisee, a good man invites Jesus to dinner. Pharisees are good people, the
best people to have as leaders of a religious community. Simon was born good
but the deeper Self, the Christ within, became a stranger to him as he replaced
that image of playful creative imagination, loving deeply and working joyfully
with a fear of doing the right thing which is covered over with an image of smugness
being right about things and judgmental about people which he projected to the
world. Simon invites Jesus as the beginning of a movement to claim his deeper
Self. However, Simon’s Ego, which is fearful that things might change is
threatened and starts to work by suggesting that Simon doesn’t need to get too
close and welcome as one would welcome someone who could change his life, and
somehow Simon just doesn’t get around to really welcoming Jesus.
At
the dinner party Simon sees a woman who has a shady past but who knows how to
love and she loves Jesus by anointing his feet with ointment and washing them
with her tears. Simon’s true self shows him this symbol of love and if he had
been able to integrate it into his conscious he might have been able to have
compassion and move into healing. But his ego sees all of its work of being
right threatened and goes to work and projects onto Jesus his own shadow of
being a person who does not know what is going on. Jung said: “The best political, social, and
spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto
others.” It is always
the way that the things that most tick us are the shadow we refuse to
acknowledge; but as Jung advised us “Everything that irritates us about others
can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Jesus who does know exactly what is going on calls
Simon to become like this woman who finds release from the being a stranger to
the Christ living within her.
We do not know what happens to Simon the Pharisee
but the woman was made whole. Later on in the Bible we have the letters of a
Pharisee named Saul who was a stranger to himself and unable to live into the
image of playful creative imagination, loving deeply and working joyfully and
projected all his fear on the followers of Jesus, until he met the Risen Christ
and rediscovered the Christ within him and became Paul. In today’s passage from
his letter to the Galatians he underscores that understanding; “For through the
law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with
Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And
the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved
me and gave himself for me.”
Each of us has been born in the image of God, the
ground of our being, to playfully create, love deeply and work joyfully. The
Christ within us is always speaking to us to bring us into wholeness of the
consciousness of the presence of God. When something stirs in what we see like
Ahab who sees Naboth in his vineyard, or Simon sees in Jesus and in the woman, or
as Paul on the road to Damascus, or in a dream- don’t reject it, don’t let your
ego which tries to keep everything from changing be fearful. Ask what is God
saying to you and be open. Echo what the Psalmist sang for today: “In the morning, LORD, you hear my
voice; *early in the morning I make my appeal and watch for you.”
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