Joy In The Morning: Reflection and Poem for June 5, 2016

A Reflection and Poem for Pentecost III (Proper 5)  All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC 

June 5, 2016                                                                  Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

1 Kings 17:8-24)                 Psalm 146            Galatians 1:11-24              Luke 7:11-17

Joy In the Morning

When each of you got out of bed today, I am sure that you didn’t think, “Oh boy, nobody in this church has died this last week; no funerals. Summer is coming, and school is coming to an end. The reflection will be upbeat and full of life because Tom is not going to talk about death!”

Hey - I didn’t pick these lessons; they were the ones that were in the Lectionary. But the lessons are not about death, they are about new life. The Elijah story follows the story last week about Elijah and his triumph over King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. But what usually happens after you win a victory over the rulers of your country? Usually you have to find a place to hide. But in this part of the Elijah story, the country is in the middle of a drought and there are very few places to hide and feed yourself.  Elijah is sent to someone who does not have the means to help him, but God makes it possible that she is blessed by having more than enough food and in raising her son to life, restoring him to a weeping mother.. 

The Psalm is a song about giving God thanks for saving the singer from the dead: “You have lifted me up!” The Hebrew word is daloh, which is the word used in drawing up a pail of water out of deep well. The well, the singer says, is Sheol, the Pit, the place where the dead are united, and he was there among the dead, and he was pulled out to a life where “weeping may spend the night but joy comes in the morning.”

In the Galatians passage, Paul speaks of how he dies to the old life when he meets the Risen Christ, and he begins his new life a changed person, but also the one who he was called to be in his very being is born again. Paul had so focused his life neurotically obsessed with obtaining perfection that he lost touch with God. His “joy in the morning” was when he found he did not have to weep any more because now he knew that he was loved and didn’t have to earn that love..

In the Luke passage, Jesus and his disciples are going through the countryside where they meet a small group in a funeral procession carrying a body on a bier on their shoulders. A widow and her few friends are weeping because her son has died and they are on their way to bury him, to place him in the pit, the place of the dead. She is a widow and this was her only child, so she will now begin her descent to the dead.  There are no other male relatives to take her, and her friends have barely enough to feed themselves, so she will probably starve to death. She weeps for her son and for herself. Jesus reaches over and touches the boy’s body. He is a Rabbi, and he is supposed to keep himself ritually clean and, in the religion of the people, he becomes ritually unclean by touching the dead. Yet as he touches death, he brings life and the weeping ends. 

I do a lot of dream work, and often in dreams, death is a symbol for a new beginning; so it is with our faith, and yet we weep. What is it like to weep for our children? I remember in 1964 when my parents took me to Carolina to drop me off for my freshman year. They had met and fallen in love in Chapel Hill, so it was a place of great joy to them. I was 17 and more than a little immature, and I was now 600 miles and 5 states away from home and I knew that I would not see them again until Christmas. As they drove away on their way to Nags Head for a vacation, my mother started to cry, and my father turned to her and said, “Stop crying; he is in for the best four years of his life!”  I maintained the family tradition as, in 1988, I cried after I drove off leaving my daughter at James Madison University which was in the same state and only 100 miles away from her home, and I was planning to go up there the next month.

I was talking with a friend, and she told me how she cried when she dropped her son off for day care. I sometimes see or hear that same kind of quiet crying from the parent dropping  the child off for the first time at All Saints School as parent and child are entering a whole new dimension of life. Today we remember one of our children who is graduating from high school this week. I first met him the summer before he started kindergarten as his parents were helping unload the moving van that had brought us here. Although he has changed over the years, I will always keep the image of his and his sister’s welcoming smiles to this stranger.

Today we honor the teachers who gave the welcoming smiles to the nervous children as they entered into a new way of being in church. They were the ones who helped turn weeping that spent the night into the joy that comes in the morning.

Joy In The Morning: 1988. (Poem)

We finished unloading the car with all of her stuff

crammed into that battered dorm room looking so

small; the room not her. Shanon's all grown up and

almost as tall as me, no longer the baby I once held

in wonder as she snuggled after the bottle feeding or

the walking for colicky hours murmuring all songs

that I could remember. Now she tells me not to sing

for it embarrasses her how uncool I am. Rolling her

eyes now as we go through awkward goodbyes. This

part of her life is ending, there is a new beginning. I

did weep  then but joy did show up after a mourning.

I should get better at endings and beginning, It is not

like that  by this time I haven’t done enough practice,

clinging in hope to the Psalmist morning joy promise.