October 20, 2013
Pentecost XXII (Proper 24)
All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC
Let
me warn you ahead of time that I was hoping that Nancy Rementer would
be preaching at both services, so I used the time which I usually
spend in preparation reading some more stuff from Frederick Buechner,
a Presbyterian minister and author. It started off when Hilary West
in Mexico sent me a long quote from Buechner about dreams, an area
which we have talked about over the phone. I used the long quote for
my Tomes for next month’s Trumpeter, and it inspired me to look at
some of his books that I have and underline quotes from him on the
net. So fair warning. There are three quotes from Buechner coming up
- one in the beginning, one in the middle, one in the end. This is
the first one, and it is from in one of his autobiographical works,
The
Sacred Journey:
"All theology, like all fiction, is at its heart
autobiography."
It
is hard to be an unjust judge, it takes a lot of energy to go against
who you are, but I don’t think the story that Jesus is telling in
the Gospel is about judicial ethics; rather it is about ontological
resonance- being who you are. Notice that there is no name for the
judge and so we are invited to try the character of the judge on for
size. Jesus is telling this story as he is on his way to Jerusalem
where he is meeting his destiny, becoming who he is and his purpose
in life. In looking at dreams we make assumptions that all the people
of the dream are all parts of the one person of the dreamer. I think
this story is Jesus’ internal struggle of living into himself as
well as the personal and corporate struggles of those who follow
Jesus, the struggle of incorporation of the whole person, being true
to oneself instead of just being on the surface of ego expediency.
 |
| Paul at age 3, sister Anne at 7 months and me at age 2 down in Salvador- he is further back from camera so he just seems smaller. Paul is wearing a straw hat like our gardener Amadeo |
I
had a brother Paul who was a year older than me, and I was in awe of
him and I thought I could never catch up to him and be as big or
strong or bright or popular or cool or good looking as he was. He was
built differently than I was with dark black hair, ruggedly handsome,
having a darker skin shade that never got sunburned like I did, and
he moved with such grace that he was voted the “Handsomest Boy in
the Senior Class” in our High School. When we were children in El
Salvador and the maid took us for walks, the women would rub my
copper red hair for luck and say, “Ay que Lindo!” because I was
different and cute. But they would look at Paul and, not touching
him, would say with an intake of interested breath and a whole
different tone of voice, “Ay, que macho!” People always said he
was “God’s gift to women.” I envied him because I thought he
was indeed God’s gift.
For
years I wanted to be more like Paul, but I was not created to be a
Paul doppelganger. I was created to be who I am and that is different
- not better, not worse, but different. Like the unjust judge I was
not called to be an un-Tom Tom. Just like you are not to be an
“un-Judy Judy” or an “Un-Steve Steve”, God wrote down God’s
divine dream for each of us in the core of each of our beings.
Jeremiah, in today’s Hebrew Testament lesson, says that God “writes
God’s law on our hearts.” The law is not a series of statutes and
ordinances, but a deep relationship with the divine and our true
selves. We violate this law when we forget the relationship, when we
forget the presence of God, when we forget who we are. It took me
years to find out that I was also a gift from God and to find the joy
of my heart when I am whom God dreamed me to be.
Today
we will baptize Joshua Emanuel Erazo, and we will say that he is
God’s gift to us. All I know about Joshua so far is that he is
loved, he likes to snuggle, he has dark black hair, ruggedly handsome
and won’t get too much sunburn. I know from his genetic makeup he
will be strong, and he will inherit the inner strength of his
parents, Jesus and Maricela. And we are here to make promises that we
will help him and his parents and his sister, Diana, grow in their
faith. “Growing in faith” means living fully into who you were
created to be when God dreamed of each of us, being a contributing
citizen of this world , a creature of flesh and mind, and a living
home of the spirit of God. Buechner, again from The
Sacred Journey
, wrote "You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on
your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on
your own."
Becoming
fully human means to grow into the image of God in which we were
created. The old phrase, “We are only human” is wrong - it should
be that “We are marvelously human, fearfully and wonderfully made.”
In the Gospel story from Luke for today, the unjust judge is out of
balance with who he was created to be. In response to the presence of
the Holy within his very being, symbolized by the widow’s constant
badgering, he says, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect
for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant
her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming."
I
think the point of the story is that, without coming to an awareness
of the full person each of us is - the physical, the relational, the
spiritual, an interaction of common purpose in the trinity of our
being - we will have no peace. The judge has no peace when he denies
his central identity of being fully and compassionately human. Jesus
is telling the story from the core of his imagination about the
struggle to find peace with his central identity. There is an old
phrase about what happens when we forget the indwelling of the Holy
within ourselves. It goes “No God = No Peace, Know God= Know
Peace”.
Look
at Joshua Emanuel’s name, and we are given a reminder of what we
are about. The name Joshua comes from the Hebrew of “Yeshua”- or
“Yahweh is our salvation, our deliverance” which is translated to
the Greek as Jesus in the New Testament. Emanuel comes from the
Hebrew “El = God and Emanuel = God is with us”. Our promises that
we make in our Baptismal Covenant are to help Joshua, and each other,
know God through us so that we might know Peace within and between
us. We do this as much for ourselves as we do it for Joshua. Again to
quote Frederick Buechner, this time from his Wishful
Thinking:
“The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the
world's deep hunger meet."
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