A
Reflection and Poem for V Pentecost (Proper 7) All
Saints Church, Southern Shores, NC
June 19, 2016 Thomas
E Wilson, Rector
RETURNING
HOME
From
Luke’s Gospel for today:
The man from whom the
demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away,
saying, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” So he
went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.
How do we return home? Like Robert Frost suggested;
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in.”
Thee Psalm appointed for today is the 22nd Psalm and we only did ten
verses because it is a long Psalm. But Jesus sang the whole thing when he was
on the cross. It begins “My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?” and continues as the Psalmist describes all the bad
and all the redeeming things that have happened and it ends: “My soul shall
live for God, my descendants shall serve him; they shall be known as the LORD’s
forever. They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn the saving deeds
that he has done.”
The lessons for today have with people coming home
after a time when they felt forsaken and they return to declare what God has
done for them. Elijah has spent time in the wilderness fleeing from Ahab and
Jezebel, and God has ministered to him in the wilderness and now Elijah has to
go home to declare what God has done for them.
Paul writes a letter to the Galatians after he hears
so many of his students had fallen for the tricks of the boys from the
Jerusalem home office that keeps pushing another Gospel which excludes Grace
and emphasizes law. At this time Paul cannot come home at this point but he
writes a letter to proclaim again all the things that God had done for him.
The Gospel lesson from Luke for today has a man
addicted by his demons living as if he had died in the place of the dead. In
that God forsaken place he encounters Jesus. Indeed sometimes it is only when
we find ourselves powerlessly camping out in what seems like a God forsaken
place that we find the only sane option is to turn to a power greater than ourselves.
He is healed and the demons are sent to drown with the swine. He has found a
new home with Jesus, but Jesus sends him back home to proclaim the things that
God has done for him.
Today
we have had a presentation from Breda Thacker from an Inmate Program at the
Dare County Detention Center, working with inmates so that they be able to
eventually return home. I remember the old days when the thinking was that
inmates should have no programs at all and actually suffer deep deprivation as
a sign of society’s disapproval. I remember when the authorities were
satirizing any attempt for rehabilitation as a making of the jail the “Manteo
Hilton”. I remember that in the four churches in three states I have served, I
visited jails and prisons where some family of my parish had a member as an
inmate dealing with the demons of addiction or alienation. I visited people
convicted of, or being held for trial, for murder, violence, robbery and all
sorts and conditions of crime, even some were innocent but they were all
children of God and I tried to show them that whatever they did they were part
of our family and whatever church I was serving was still a place that they
could call home. It is part of my job description as “Father”. Whenever I would
visit them, one of the songs I would sing to myself as I was driving up to the
prison of jail was the old Hymn, which we will sing together for the Offertory
Hymn:
Come home, come home,
Ye who are weary, come home;
Earnestly, tenderly Jesus is calling,
Calling, O sinner, come home.
Ye who are weary, come home;
Earnestly, tenderly Jesus is calling,
Calling, O sinner, come home.
I remember how Jim MacDonald spent a lot of his time
and energy helping inmates deal with their addictions and alienation Jim focused
on young men who live God forsaken addicted lives, living as if their souls
were dead, for them to find that they are not forsaken and to find a new way of
living so that they can grow into men who can make their own home centered on
Christ and be true fathers of children who teach them that they too can return
to their own home to proclaim the things that God had done for them.
Some of us who are not in jail keep living as if we
were dead souls, having no connection to who in whom we live and move and have
our being. To live as a person who is a dead soul means that one has sold his
reason for being to something that is not God. Some try to mold a God in their
own image, a God of death who calls for death of those who are different. Last
week we again, one more time when we said that we would work to make sure that
it would not happen again, had one more alienated person grab a weapon of mass
destruction, a weapon whose only purpose is to slaughter as many of God’s
children as possible in as short a time as possible in order to follow the
demons that have taken possession of them killing their own souls as they kill
others.
One of my favorite books is a novel by Nicolai
Gogal, called Dead Souls, written in
1842 before the Emancipation of the Serfs in 19th Russia. The main character Chichikov, whose name comes from a Russian word for “sneeze”, is a
schemer who goes to visit landowners who pay taxes on how many serfs, how many
souls, they owned according to the last government census. Since census taking
was infrequent some of their serfs had died and they still had to pay taxes on
them. The schemer wants to “buy” the Dead Souls, so he can then turn around and
take a loan from a bank with the Dead Souls for collateral, for which he will
forfeit when he defaults on the loan. The Dead Souls were the dead serfs, but
they were also a way of looking at the landowners who lived empty lives
addicted to their own wants, desires fears and resentments as the center of
life, missing the full riches of this life.
Many of us know what it is like to put something at the center of our
lives that is not a loving God. Carl Jung suggested that is part of the modern
disease in his book, Man And His Symbols,
where he writes:
Yet in
order to sustain his creed, contemporary man pays the price in a remarkable
lack of introspection. He is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality
and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his
control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got
new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions,
psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco,
food and, above all, a large array of neuroses.
Part of how I see my profession is to keep harping
on the idea that we don’t need to walk around as dead souls addicted to
focusing only on our own wants and desires or agendas of resentment and fear: there
is loving presence beyond ourselves as the center of the universe. I harp on
this message because I need to hear it myself so that I might come to my true
home and proclaim the things that God has done for me.
The
Preacher Returns Home
He strutted away from
the lectern, silently
awarding top marks on
work he had done;
himself, nobody else, his
charm, cleverness,
brains, insight,
scholarly aptitude: all his.
And yet, the ego miasma
fetid, that solo run
felt like a MacKenzie
walk amidst of tombs
where dwelt scores of Eleanor
Rigby graves.
He had been willingly
seduced into thinking
it was all about how he
shines not what God
shines through him away
from the holy dance
floors and spotlights
and costumes and props
to where invited demons
share lunch of tripe
with him just now when
he snatched defeat
from opportunity for
cross shaped healing.
Again, the old
shackling pattern of youth
misplaced worth into
the hands of others,
by refusing exorcism,
that emptying touch
of freedom. He stopped,
suddenly tired of
living in ruins, and
vowed to return home
declaring, “Not I, but God
had done for me.”
Today he prays his need
for new day where
possessed swine take
swim in ancient lakes.
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