A Reflection for XIX Pentecost (Proper 24) All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern
Shores, NC October 19, 2014 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
The
Old Man and Joshua
The Old Man sat down on a boulder for he was tired.
The Young Man, Joshua, came up to him with a look of concern.
Joshua said: Moses,
what is the matter?
Moses: I
am not able to keep up anymore. My body is giving out on me and I can feel the
end of my days coming.
Joshua: Stop
that! You are not too old - and we can help you and carry you until we reach
the Promised Land.
Moses: No, I have a destiny with death and
I am not going to run away from it. I spent so many years of my life running
away from things. When I was a young man, I killed an Egyptian overseer and
buried his body as a way of running away from my responsibility. Nothing ever
stays hidden and when that body was found, I tried to keep as quiet as
possible. But the truth came out and I ran away to the land of Midian. However,
no matter how far away I ran, I could never run faster than the God who was
living inside me.
Joshua: Like
the Song goes, “Where can I go from your Spirit; where can I flee from your
presence?”
Moses: That is the one.
Joshua: So
God does that with you too?
Moses: It
is part of being human; we are all God-haunted. For years in Midian I tried to
ignore this God inside my very self, my soul, and I did all the things I needed
to do to succeed. I defined myself by what I did for a living and the place in
which I lived. But the deeper part of me belonged to Her, and She was like a
pest who would not take the hint, every place I looked I kept seeing Her. She
finally revealed herself to me in the burning bush in such a way that I could
no longer ignore Her. She entered into
my daily life and I could no longer run away. We have been so intimate. Every time I breathe, Her spirit enters into
my body and fills me with Her presence. God knows these places.
Joshua: Do
you know all of God’s places?
Moses: No I don’t. She is to me like I am
to Zipporah, my wife. She knows me as well as any human can, and yet there are
places inside my heart, places of such despair and fury, that she would never
understand. There are times of such joy that I cannot find the words to share
them with her. I love her as much as I can love any human, but there is part of
me that is a mystery to her. I love God, but there is so much of God that is
way beyond my understanding. I once asked God to show Herself to me, and all I
could get were glimpses.
Joshua: I
feel the same way. Everything I say about God is so inadequate. He is way
beyond my understanding. It is funny, you refer to God as “She” and I say “He”,
but they are the same. God comes in so many disguises.
Moses: I don’t think they are disguises as
much as they are inadequacies of our imagination and language. God is always
the same, but when God deals with us and lives within us, He She is not a cookie
cutter, chronic undifferentiated deity. We see different facets of the same diamond,
and the more we experience, the more we see. Yet despite all of our talk, we
come to the awareness that every time we attempt to define and say the phrase
“God is”, as if God has left the room, then we miss the point.
Joshua: So
the greatest blasphemy is to speak of God in the third person instead of the
second person “You”; to speak of God
instead of to God.
Moses: That is our first attempt to run
away from God, when we keep God as an intellectual proposition, a theoretical
abstraction. When asked if he believed in God, someone replied, “I do not
believe. I know.”
Joshua: But
what about that other line from that song you quoted earlier, “Such knowledge
is too wonderful for me; it is too high I cannot attain to it.”
Moses: Knowing God is not about what is in
my head but about the intimacy of knowing within the depth of my being. This is
the basic truth of my life - that I am God’s beloved and chosen by God, not by
word alone but by power and God’s Holy Spirit which claims me to live into
whose image I was created to be. Back to the song: “I am wondrously and
marvelously made.”
Joshua: If
I could live life like that were true every moment of my life… But I keep beating myself up for things that I
have done or not done. I look at myself and say things like “I hate myself!”
Moses: If you look at yourself and say
those things about yourself, then you will say and think those things about
others. The God who dwells within never says that He She hates us, but that we
are God’s beloved. If we are in the image of God, the God that we have inside
us is the human we present to the world. In order to change ourselves, we have
to listen to the God who in love “created my inner most parts and knit me
together in my mother’s womb” as that same song goes.
Joshua: You
seem stuck on that song?
Moses: I
am an Old Man and hold on to things. But it is time for me to let everything
go. I will not see the Promised Land, but I will enter into the fullness of God
soon, as, I pray, we all will. But as for you, still on your journey .
. .
Joshua:
Let me stop you there, and as I have said before and I’ll say again, I am not
going back to slavery in Egypt.
Moses: After I am dead and you enter the
promised land, say to the people who will want to go back to the old ways
something like, “If you decide that it’s a bad thing to
worship the
LORD, then choose a god you’d rather serve—and
do it today. Choose one of the gods your ancestors worshiped from the country
beyond The River, or one of the gods of the Amorites, on whose land you’re now
living. As for me and my family, we’ll serve the LORD.”
Joshua: “I’ll write that down.”
The
Old Man and Joshua (Poem)
Feeling the end of my days,
Spending years running away
But She always gets there first.
We humans are so God-haunted
Spending years running away.
Every time I breathe Her spirit enters,
We humans are so God-haunted.
I ask Her to show Herself to me.
Every time I breathe, Her spirit enters
But all I could get were glimpses.
I ask Her to show Herself to me,
She in third person is blasphemy
All I could get were glimpses
As She always gets there first.
She in third person is blasphemy
As I feel the end of my story.
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