A Reflection for IV Lent All Saints’ Episcopal Church,
Southern Shores, NC March 26, 2017 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Walking With Jesus: Walking Before Us
In the Book of Common Prayer I grew up with there
was a prayer, a Collect for the 17th Sunday after Trinity that read,
“Lord, we pray thee that thy Grace may always prevent and follow us, and make
us continually to be given to good work; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
I thought that the word “prevent” meant “to keep me
from” bad choices, but it was actually an archaic word coming from the French
“pre” = before and “venir” = to come, meaning “to come before”. When I am
thinking of walking with Jesus, I see Jesus leading me, coming before me to
light my path and help me to see what is here. Prevenient Grace is a concept
that tried to bridge the ideas of original sin with the idea of original
blessing. Original sin says everything we do is tinged by sin, and the options are:
a) no matter what we do we are dammed - so eat, drink, and be merry and leave a
good looking corpse, or b) we have is to try to see if we can earn our
salvation with good works and hope that God grades on a curve, or c) trust in
predestination, the doctrine that God chooses those whom God chooses to be
saved before we are born and the rest can just kiss it good bye.
I had a Professor in Seminary who believed in
original sin, and he used to pepper his lectures with, “Well, people are just
no damn good!” Whereas the concept of “Original Blessing” posits that the whole
creation is a blessing, and we are always in a process of growing deeper into a
relationship with all of creation, like St. Francis, by standing in awe of
God’s creation where everything is a gift. Instead of seeing our sin as the
burdensome reality of our lives, we might see that we are beloved beyond all
measure in a continuing creation and each day find a way to grow deeper into
the beauty of God, and when we louse up with our imperfections, we can view it as
Matthew Fox writes:
for people who have
truly learned to trust creation one of the first lessons is how beauty and imperfection
go together. Every tree is beautiful; but if you approach it closely enough you
will see that every tree is imperfect. The same is true of the human body:
every human body is beautiful, but every human body is imperfect. In nature, in
creation, imperfection is not a sign of the absence of God. It is a sign that
the ongoing creation is no easy thing…
For me, Prevenient Grace means that God’s grace walks
ahead of us presenting opportunities to walk with Jesus on God’s way and dance
in God’s joy.
This is the fourth of a five part series of reflections
about Walking With Jesus during this Lenten season. This week the lessons are
on how God, the LORD in the Hebrew Testament, and the Incarnate Spirit of God,
Jesus in the Christian Scriptures, walks before us leading us into the right
way.
In the lesson from 1st Samuel, the LORD guides Samuel to choose
the right replacement for Saul, using not the eyes of his limited human
perception, but seeing with the vision of God. Samuel is a Prophet, a “Seer”
who usually sees with the eyes of God, but in this lesson he is about to be
swayed by the physical approaches and the values of his culture. Saul, for whom
Samuel wants to find a replacement as King, is an egotistical, swaggering
paranoid megalomaniac whom the people had wanted as their leader because they
wanted somebody “tough” to fight enemies and to clear out the Philistines, the
Sea People, who the Israelites saw as threatening intruders. Samuel starts to
move to find someone bigger and meaner that Saul, but the LORD leads Samuel to
choose the youngest and smallest, David, because Samuel, looking with the eyes
of Prevenient Grace, sees how the LORD sees - into his heart. In David’s heart he
sees a young boy who, while he has many weaknesses, has the Spirit of a
Shepherd who cares for the welfare of his people.
Tradition says that the Psalm for today is a song of
David in which the singer uses the metaphor of the Shepherd in a pastoral context
to describe how the LORD, or the King or Ruler as the LORD’s instrument, is
meant to rule over the people as a shepherd cares for the sheep in the
shepherd’s charge. The compassion of the LORD is the mark of the genuine ruler.
The LORD leads them not into warfare and strife but into peace, where the weak
are protected, the poor nourished, and where trust replaces fear. The LORD leads
us even through the valley of the shadow of death, protecting from predators
and those who would despoil the green pastures. The LORD, or faithful Ruler,
leads by example, walking a path of goodness and mercy with the people.
Frederick
Buechner in his novel Godric, a
fictionalized memoir of St. Godric of Finchale, an Anglo-Saxon 12th
century holy person and hermit living a life of Prevenient Grace, offers
another way to translate the 23rd Psalm:
Elric (his mentor) had
studied with the monks. He wrote and read. He knew the Gospels back and forth.
He had the psalms by heart. An oak grew near his cave with one great branch
he'd climb to like a squirrel and perch there till he'd sung them through. He
sang in Latin, but, for me, he put them into speech I understood.
"God keeps me as a
shepherd keeps his flock. I want for nought," he said. " I bleat with
hunger, and he pastures me in meadows green. I'm thirsty, and he leads me forth
to water cool and deep and still. He hoists me to my feet when I am weak. Down goodly
ways he guides me with his crook, for he himself is good. Yea, even when I lose
my way in shadows dark as death, I will not fear, for he is ever close at hand
with rod and staff to succor me."
In the Christian writings, the Community sees the
LORD as Shepherd walking on this earth in the person of Jesus, leading us in
the spirit of David’s shepherding, As Jesus walked into the darkness, we are to
walk with him and become a light to expose the works of darkness. Like him we
are to shine a light on the needs of the poor and vulnerable, to stand up
against exploitation and bigotry, to expose greed and corruption. The writer of
the letter to the Ephesians, who may have been Paul or one of his disciples,
writes a circular letter to all the churches to call them back and remind them
that they were not just sit around and perform religious rituals about Jesus
but to become like Jesus, following Jesus by walking with him into the dark broken
world.
John’s Gospel tells a story of someone who lives in the
darkness of his blindness. Jesus’ disciples want to do a theological argument
about what caused the blindness: was it the idea that God knew that the man
would sin and thereby did a preventative first strike making him blind, or was
it his parents’ sins that transferred divine punishment to the child? Both Ezekiel and Jeremiah quote an ancient
Hebrew proverb: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth
are set on edge.” Jesus has no tolerance for this theology and says that that
the imperfection of the man’s blindness is an opportunity for grace to abound.
In John’s Gospel, the
Community of the Beloved Disciple uses “blindness” as a metaphor for missing
the point, as the “spiritually blind” do not see that Jesus is the creative
spirit of God made incarnate in this world. This story is told with an extended
vaudeville skit as the religious establishment try to find out if the man had
only pretended to be blind in order to be a shill for Jesus. However, the blind
man follows Jesus even if he doesn’t know Jesus by sight.
This story was
remembered by the Community so that it might be told to the generations that
had not seen Jesus by sight but might know him within the community that
follows Jesus on a daily basis. Indeed we really do not know Jesus by our
reading of written documents, but by walking with people who follow the one
whose Spirit comes before us, leading us down “goodly ways” even when we lose
our ways in “shadows dark as death”.
Walking
With Jesus: Walking Before Us
Looking
at my feet, counting one, two, three,
they
clomp along; but the rhythm is so faint
as
I stomp on the sore feet of a fellow saint
fearing
she will, in tears, as song ends, flee.
But
surprisingly she laughs and then smiles,
saying,
“Listen to music which gives the beat
let
your body follow it to use, guide your feet
as
we continue on this way for so many miles,
and
days and years until that one final dance
when
we realize haven’t been dancing alone
but
that holy space between us sets new tone
of
forgiveness which undergirds the romance.
Walking
the paths where grace leads thereof
is only way either of us could ever really love.”
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