Bedtime Stories:

A Reflection for II Lent                                                          All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N C

 February 25, 2018                                                                 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16                             Romans 4:13-25      Mark 8:31-38                          Psalm 22:22-30

Question: How were the stories about your heritage told?

Bedtime Stories

When I was a child, my Father would tuck us into bed and sing songs and tell stories as a way to calm us down and help us to go to sleep. Sometimes the songs were not all that helpful as my Father had a lifelong fascination with trains and he would sing The Wreck of Ol’ 97:  “Oh that brave engineer that run ol’ 97, Is lyin in old Danville dead. Cos he was going down a grade making 90 miles an hour, The whistle broke into a scream. He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle, Scalded to death by the steam.”

Going to sleep with images of scalding to death was not always guaranteed to put us to rest, but the images of Steve, “that brave engineer getting his orders in Monroe Virginia, way behind time, and had to get ol’ 97 to Spenser on time” as the hero who gave his life to follow a code of being faithful was the point of the song. The song was a way of passing on his values to the next generation. 

The stories he told were also of passing on the values of the “who” we were, in the line of the people who had come before us. He told stories of how his father had gone to far-away nations to build projects helping peoples of those lands, of his leaving school early to stow away on a troop ship to Puerto Rico to string telegraph wires, and about he went back and put himself through Johns Hopkins for an engineering degree. When he would talk of his father, whom he idolized, his face would beam with pride of being the son of such a man. My Father wanted to live his life so that his children would have no cause for shame in being a Wilson. 

The legends were passed on from back in history with reminders that we were descended from Robert the Bruce of Scotland, who suffered defeat after defeat against the invading English, until he finally triumphed. How we were really genetically related to Robert the Bruce was left in the mists of legend, but the facts were not the point; the deeper truth was what was important. The stories always seemed to hold on to a theme that being a Wilson meant that life had meaning; it could be rough but no one promised it being easy. 

He would tell stories of when he met my mother and how he treated her with respect and awe as he had been taught to do by his mother and sister and how we should always treat women with respect. He told us stories of working hard and keeping his word. He told us stories of when we were born and how thankful he was to have us to pass on what it meant to be a Wilson in this new world that we were experiencing. We always wanted to have him tell stories of his wartime experiences, but he pointed out that only those who were safe stateside and politicians talked about the glories of war. For him, he was only fulfilling his obligation to the country he loved, and he expected us to follow his example.

Stories and songs about lives lived are the way we pass on our values. Today we started off the service with a listing of the law of the Ten Commandments. The problem is that legal documents have a habit of containing lots of regulations to explain, terms to parse, and loopholes to find. We are fond of laws we do not so much break but rather bend. For instance, the sign says “50 miles an hour speed limit”, but on the Outer Banks, woe to the cars on 158 or 64 who only do 50 when there are no police around because we expect a certain amount of grace above the speed limits and we are annoyed when that grace is overlooked. Stories and songs go deeper into our identity than laws so that we can live into being true to ourselves. The Bible is not a law book but a collection of stories and songs about our ancestors who passed on these stories and songs in the hopes that we would be reminded of the purpose of life.

The Genesis story ties in the purpose of life with names. Abram, which means “Father who is exalted” and Abraham is “Father who is really exalted”. The names tell you that we are entering into mythic territory where the purpose of the story is not about reciting facts but telling the deeper truth of what it means to pass on heritage. 

The Song of the Psalm for today is a song of remembering how God is always with each of us even when we forget from time to time. God remembers the poor; as we should. God keeps the divine promises, as we should keep the vows we make.

Paul writes the letter to the Romans to remind the people of the church in Rome to be faithful so he tells them the story of Abraham who remained faithful over the decades, following God without getting the payoff.

In the Gospel portion for today, Mark has Jesus telling his disciples that following him will not be easy; faithful life is tough for it is about getting rid of our own selfish agendas. This story was kept because the reality of life for Jesus and his followers was to enter into the brokenness of the world by giving self away. The point of a deeper life of meaning is not about an existence of getting but a life of giving.

When I read the Bible or hear stories that people tell or watch movies, I am interested in what the deeper truth is that formed the story to begin with. Why was this story told and in this way? There are a lot of ways to waste time, and meaningless chatter sucks the energy out of living the much-too-short lives we have.

Every day before I go to sleep, I go through remembrances of the stories that I have heard and seen that day which inform my prayers of thanksgiving or intercession. The world is full of bedtime stories all being told. This last week a friend in this church sent me the story of a man sharing how he was the legal owner of an assault rifle who made a decision to destroy that weapon so at least this gun could never be used to kill a child by accident of design. This last week, parents in Florida had to tell the surviving students bedtime stories to pass on wisdom for the days to come. There are refugee parents in Bangladesh tucking their hungry children under the covers and telling them stories of home and hope. Closer to home, there are grown children telling their older parents bedtime stories to remind them of who they were when they told stories. There are spouses who share bedtime stories to remind themselves that each of them is not alone, and if they do end up alone, they remember the stories. There are homeless friends here on the Outer Banks who tell themselves the stories they wished they could hear again or share with others. 

There are stories that use so many different languages and many that are said without words. I think of an abandoned dog on the Indiana Turnpike that my father brought home sixty-five years ago when we were children and named him Rex. I wonder what kind of stories he told himself before and after he lived with us, for we did tell him stories and he looked as if he was understanding them. Decades later, at my daughter’s bedside, I would tell her about Rex and the love he shared and gave. 

Right now there is a pod of dolphins off this beach telling a story of what it means to have life as they share the poems of the currents of their lives. Right now there is probably a three-toed sloth hanging upside down in a tree in the Amazon River Basin who is remembering the song of the planet. Right now there is a three-celled bacterial organism on the surface of an asteroid, close to the third moon of the fifteenth planet of a dwarf star's solar system in a cluster so many billions of miles away that the light has yet to show up in our sky who is hearing the song of the universe. 

There is really only one core story, one song, one poet, and we are telling or hearing variations of that loving story told by the one we call names like Our Father, the Womb from which we came, the Word spoken, or whatever name we use, reminding us of who we are.

What story do you hear? What story is your life telling? 

Bedtime Stories

Now in bed, before we pray, tell us a story

of men who say “honestly” before they lie.

then warn “Don’t do that before you die!”,

But tell us the story with plenty of glory

of times when our ancestors did up stood

against tyrants of many breeds and types

with or without uniform, insignia stripes,

that we should do this whenere we could.

Tell us the story of your father’s derring-do.

Tell us a story of when you fell at the dance

in love with our mother at that first glance,

or when we’re born, you shed a tear or two.

Blankets comes up after all the blessing prayer,

to grow into new stories for our kids to share.

Temple One Tikal-- Refelection and Poem for 18 February

A Reflection for I Lent                                               All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC February 18, 2018                                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Genesis 9:8-17            1 Peter 3:18-22            Mark 1:9-15                Psalm 25:1-9

Temple One Tikal

Question: What decision are you going to make this week?

The Gospel lesson from Mark today is about Jesus making a decision, and it is in three parts:

1)      Jesus leaves the past behind in Nazareth to find his way into his future. He stops by the Jordan River where he sees John inviting people to prepare for the future by putting behind the past in a symbolic way, washing away the dust of his wanderings. Jesus figures, “What can it hurt?” As he comes out of the water, he has a vision of God’s love for him and he decides that he needs to explore where, how, and with whom to make a commitment to share that love.

2)      Jesus does what we all do when we decide to take a new path in our lives - we have to deal with a lot of baggage that we don’t need to carry with us. Mark says that the Spirit drove Jesus into the Wilderness, and my thought was that Jesus did not know what to do with that love he heard at his baptism; it is a fearful thing to be loved and know that you are not alone. Many times we run from love because it calls us to a new path. Here in the Wilderness he struggles: the term that the Gospel writers use is to be “Tempted by Satan”, that force which keeps wanting to burden us with a whole bunch of all sorts of baggage we don’t need. Satan operates through fear by suggesting that we need to take shortcuts to making a full commitment and that we need to hold on to things that don’t work like selling ourselves out to get approval or wasting energy in impressing others, or doing anything else that creates stumbling blocks in the new path.

3)      Jesus makes the commitment to the new path not knowing fully where it will finally lead, but he begins, one step at a time, trusting not that everything will go fine but that God is walking with him and all things will be redeemed. He has seen that John the Baptizer has been betrayed and turned over into the hands of the political and religious power base and that might well be his own fate. He begins his ministry and places his trust in the love which he heard.

If we are to grow in faith and in life, we will be faced with making decisions about facing new paths. If we choose, we all make decisions where we 1) leave behind the past, 2) struggle with the baggage, and 3) make the commitment.

How did it go with you? Where was God walking with you?  Because even if you didn’t feel it, God was. I was reminded this last week of the poem by Francis Thompson, Hound of Heaven, which tells how, while we might want to run from God, God keeps coming with us. It is a long poem of 183 lines - don’t worry, I will not read all of them - but let me introduce you to the first 12:

I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.	5
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,	10
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—

The poet runs away, but God, the “Voice more instant than the Feet”, reminds him that we mere mortals cannot outrun God’s love.

For instance, I know that almost none of you were born on the Outer Banks and yet here you are. What gave you the strength to give up the past? What was your struggle like with the Satans of your hearts? When did you make the full commitment before or after you moved—or still not yet??  Was God with you every step of the way?

I remember a February in Lent 29 years ago, right around Valentine’s Day which was a big celebration in Guatemala where I was on vacation with my mother. I was trying to figure out what to do in my life after I had gotten awfully friendly with an older woman named Mrs. Robinson:

And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson
Jesus loves you more than you will know
Wo, wo, wo
God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
Hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey

My mother had arrived in Tikal, an ancient Mayan city that was in ruins and covered over by the Rain Forest and rediscovered in the 19^th century. It is now a National Park of ruins of temples, pyramids, acropolis, stele, and ball courts surrounded by the rainforest (it rains more than six feet a year) where we could hear the jaguars roar, the parrots squawk, and monkeys howl. I was climbing Temple One, the Great Jaguar Temple, built probably in the 8^th century when London, England had mainly one or two-story buildings. The steps are so steep that you have to walk up or down sideways for about 50 yards up; it slows you down a lot which it is meant to do. There are nine levels of stairs, each a level of the afterlife, Xibalba, House of Fright, so it is a way to contemplate one’s existence in this life. It has a Temple on the top with a burial chamber for the King.

My mother then was about my age now so she left me alone to climb and to think about what I would do with Mrs. Robinson, whom you know as Pat. I was very fond of her, but both of us had been married before and both of us were worried about any future built on the ruins of failure. Looking down from the top of this pagan place where their demons tormented their dead souls in this wilderness, I had to make a decision about moving into an unknown future. I did not know the future but I did know that God would be walking with us every step of the way to strengthen and redeem whatever path we took together..

How about you? Do you need to choose a path? Please know that, whatever you decide, God will be walking with you to redeem any decision you make.

Temple One Tikal

Climbing the Xibalba, House of Fright, nine level Pyramid,

one side step at a time through the layers of Hell to light,

each level with tempting Satans to ignore each to rise right,

until reaching the top to reflect on meaning of what I did.

It’s now time to make a decision on the many paths ahead,

of staying in the past to pretend it was to random wander

with no goal in sight, except a vision of my life to squander

by working and being alone until that day when I’d be dead.

I knew I was loved, but feeling had happened times before

and had not lasted, displaying plenty of fault on every side,

with a hesitation to commit for another roller coaster ride

with a strong possibility of failure; then that recovery chore!

Clouds scatter as the sun shines through the jungle canopy,

Angels saying this journey doesn’t have to end as a tragedy

Receiving Ashes

A Reflection for Ash Wednesday at Outer Banks Presbyterian Church, Kill Devil Hills, N.C.

February 14, 2018 Thomas E Wilson, Celebrant

Receiving Ashes

It is a strange thing for me to be here this day at the Outer Banks Presbyterian Church and doing an Ash Wednesday service with ashes. My Mother was raised a Presbyterian in Youngstown, Ohio in the Scottish Covenanter Tradition. The minister of the church she attended was from Northern Ireland who would find an opportunity in almost every sermon to warn about the Papist threat and the selling out of the Old Covenanter Tradition. There is a story told about when the King of Scotland and England, Charles I, had his Archbishop, William Laud, try to force the Scottish Church to accept the English Prayer Book, Bishops, and the Episcopalian form of Governance. At St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh on July 23, 1637, when the Dean was reading the order from Laud during the Sunday service, a woman named Janet Geddis who was sitting on a three- legged stool stood up, threw the stool at the Dean, and shouted, “Villain, you wanna say mass in my lock; you won’t say mass in my ear.” Archbishop Laud was later executed by Parliament in 1645 with a little help from ticked off Presbyterians and Puritans. My mother’s family remembered with pride that one her family’s Covenanter ancestors, standing up for what he called his “freedom of conscience”, was executed during the “Killing Times” of 1683.

My mother came as a Junior transfer student to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and, within months she fell in love with – horrors - a nice Roman Catholic young man from Asheville and brought him home to meet her parents. They loved their daughter and accepted my father out of that love. His parents accepted my mother out of love. They were married by a more accommodating Presbyterian minister in the rose garden of my grandparents’ summer home in Pennsylvania. After my father came back from service in World War II, my parents split the difference and raised their four children as Episcopalians. Neither set of grandparents ever attended the Episcopal Church when they visited for they held on to their own conscience, but I was taken by my grandparents’ to their Presbyterian church during my summers in Pennsylvania and taken to Roman Catholic Mass at my other grandmother’s church while visiting my cousins in New Jersey. I come to you today not to try to convert you but to share something I love.

In the Jewish tradition in which Jesus was raised, ashes were placed on the head for three different reasons - as a sign of (a) mourning, (b) a sign of repentance and (c) as a sign of humility.

(a)Mourning was grieving in which sackcloth and ashes were used as desolation over all that had been lost. It was used by widows and widowers at the death of spouses, by those who had lost children, and by Kings and leaders during a national catastrophe. The idea was that the outward form should reflect the inward desolation.

(b)Repentance was called for when someone was aware of their need to turn to God, as in the story of the city of Nineveh, that great city, when Jonah called for repentance before the LORD.

(c)Humility was when one wanted to be reminded that, by the love of God, we humans were made out of the dust of the earth and to dust we shall return. It was often a sign of atonement for shows of arrogance toward neighbor or community.

In the early church when people committed sins, the outward and visible signs of choosing to be out of love and charity with their neighbors, they were excommunicated, following the advice of St. Paul to the Corinthians. The offending parties were allowed to rejoin the community after a period of time of public penance, wearing sackcloth and ashes as an outward sign of their inner turmoil. After a period of this time out, they were brought back to communion, and God’s peace was shared with them. At no time was this ever seen as a way to earn God’s love and forgiveness, for love and forgiveness are gifts of grace and as such cannot be earned.

The great Reformer John Calvin wrote in his Institutes that, while he did not approve of Priests being the only ones who could hear confessions, he did speak persuasively about the need for confession:

"To whom do we confess them? To Christ certainly. That is, if with an afflicted and humbled heart we bow ourselves before Him; if in true sincerity, rebuking and condemning ourselves before His face, we ask to be absolved by His goodness and mercy. Whoever makes this confession of heart before God will also no doubt have a tongue ready to confess, when there is need to proclaim God's mercy among the people. And this not only to disclose the secret of his heart to a single person, once, in the ear, but freely to make known his poverty as well as God's glory, more than a few times, publicly and with all the world hearing.”

Micah said, “What does the LORD require of you; to do justice, love mercy and walking humbly with your God.” To me, the accepting of ashes reminds me: (1) that I recommit myself to doing justice in this broken world. Too often I accept the status quo of injustice, exploitation, and greed. I am called to remember my own Baptismal vows to work for justice, freedom, and peace and to respect the dignity of every human being. (2) To love mercy and to care for my family, neighbor, and enemy and to forgive promiscuously as a gift which is not to be bartered for; and (3) to walk humbly to remember that I am loved outrageously by God and by Jesus who gave his life for me.

Emerging church leader Brian McLaren speaks of:

“The belief that God’s sphere of concern is not just the church, but all of creation. The church is God’s agent of transformation and healing for the sake of the world. . . ., the gospel is a transformation plan, not an evacuation plan. It is focused not on airlifting souls to heaven, but on transforming lives so they can be agents of God’s will being done “on earth as in heaven.” Those are easy words to say, but deeply challenging – and unsettling – and liberating – if we take them seriously.”

Now, if you are choosing to receive ashes as a way to show that you are a much better person than any others who did not show up here, then please, for the sake of your immortal soul, wash those ashes off as quickly as you can. We ask God to lead us not into temptation and rushing into temptation by pampering your religious pride is not something the LORD wants you to do, as you may have heard in the Gospel lesson for today.

If you feel pressured to go along with a nice little piece of religious fluff, don’t come up; life is too short to waste time on things that don’t mean anything. I believe in what my Presbyterian ancestors called “freedom of conscience” and, while I invite all of you to come forward, I must say “all may, some should and none must.”

Receiving Ashes

“Dust you are and to dust you shall return”

is a reminder to me of our God’s loving

act in all creation and in me life giving;

it was a sign of free gift not one to earn.

Dust isn’t worth a thing but is gathered

by the potter and fashioned into a vessel

for others to drink from deeply and nestle

into a divine love which is then slathered

onto friend and enemy alike freely given,

even if you didn’t ask for it with a please

or thank you, but with the Spirit’s breeze

sweeping away all so to be fully forgiven.

We’d come together from paths different

while we all swim in God’s same current.

Transfigurations

A Reflection for Last Sunday of Epiphany (Quinquagesima) All Saints’, Southern Shores, NC

February 11, 2018 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

2 Kings 2:1-12 2 Corinthians 4:3-6 Mark 9:2-9 Psalm 50:1-6

Transfigurations

In today’s Gospel lesson Jesus and his disciples have a vision. Visions are those things that we tend to be skeptical about because they are outside of our usual scientific rational mind where things are real or they are not real; there is either an objective reality in which we place our trust or there is a subjective feeling which cannot really be trusted - end of story. When I was a therapist, if someone came in having a vision, I would make the assumption that they were having a break with reality, either caused by stress or by some organic problem. 

 

Now, decades later, I know visions are indeed breaks from reality - our puny concept of reality, when we can see that, not only are some people crazy, but our whole concept of reality is crazy, the world is crazy. Jesus came to point out our crazy tendencies in how we see people divided by class, caste, race, enemies, and kin and about in who or what do we place our trust. In the name of God, people are willing to kill images of God or allow them to suffer because they don’t have enough resources even though there are more than enough to go around if we would only share, where people are treated as objects of plunder rather than subjects of love, where wealth is worshipped and truth is debased. This is crazy but it seems to pass as normal.

Many cultures used to have organized into their culture the idea of a vision quest, where a young man or woman would be pushed to break with what was normal in order to see what is the deeper reality. Now we just spend time hoping our children will adjust and prosper in this world’s insanity where one’s worth is determined by our being in control and by the amount of possessions we have accumulated and by selling ourselves out for the approval of others. 

 

Challenging our concepts of reality is what prophets do. They are see-ers, seers, people who see differently, seeing what God is doing. They tend to speak using mythopoetic language which explodes our narrow view of creation, where God is up there, somewhere far away, and we are safe down here away from divine pesky interference. Elijah and Elisha in the Hebrew Testament lesson from 2^nd Kings have been struggling against the corrupt governments of Israel and Judah that want to act as if God is on vacation and out of communication range and people are thought of as just so much prey at the mercy of the predators in power. Elijah is coming to the end of his time on earth and everybody knows it. Elisha in the vision sees that Elijah’s death is not just the end of his narrow earthly life, but a continuation of his life in God’s reality. They both have a vision about the flaming chariot carrying Elijah into uninterrupted union with God; this is the deeper reality using mythopoetic language.

Paul is writing to the Church in Corinth warning them of the puny gods of this world which try to blind people to the light of Christ. He is saying that the world is crazy but we need to break the so-called reality to see deeper and see the Christ, the image of God, Jesus who was once dead but is in union with the Christ that lives in our very being. Paul himself had visions where he saw the Risen Christ blinding him to the so-called real world in which Paul had placed his trust in order for Paul to see with new eyes the deeper reality.

The Transfiguration story in Mark’s Gospel is also a vision of how Peter, James, and John are able to see the union of this Jesus, who they knew as an ordinary human being, with the fullness of God and of the other see-ers, Moses and Elijah. If we stop the story there, what we end up with is that Jesus was an exception to the rule of God and humans, but the Gospel tries to tell us that Jesus is not an exception but the rule of the deeper reality that all of us are called to be transfigured by having God’s light, the Christ light shine through us. The reality of what happens to Jesus in mythopoetic language is what those of us who claim to follow Jesus will be called to experience in everyday life and not just in church.

Many of my moments closest to Christ happen away from the service times. Let me stop myself with a caution and say that I find the service times helpful to get me ready to want to have moments close to Christ in the larger world. Church is like the dress rehearsal for the performance of the rest of the week.

Here on the Outer Banks I find those moments when I am walking on the beach feeling the quiver of the sand as the waves come in, reminding me that there is a power greater than myself. When I feel that in my feet, I am more aware of the majesty of creation. In my time away from religion when the Priest would say, “The Lord be with you” I would be thinking ,“Not in this place!” I would find the Christ without the Episcopal Church in things like Joan Sutherland singing the first act, first scene aria from Bellini’s Norma , where she follows the Druid Priests in Ancient Gaul who are praying in the Sacred Woods for strength to destroy the Roman Invaders, and she alone sings Casta Diva, Chaste Goddess, the Spirit of the Moon, who she asks to shine over these ancient plants and “spargi in terra quella pace” Scatter peace across the earth. For a good version see: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK2LwLyZAlc] 

 

It is Bel Canto singing at its best with trills and runs lifted heavenward. I still pull it up on YouTube since I wore my vinyl record out playing it. When I hear it I am reminded of my faith to scatter peace over every path I take.

In all three of the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke all lead up to this story with the caution given by Jesus that “If anyone wants to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” If you make a choice to hold on to all the bankrupt delusions of this world, you will miss what life is really all about.

I have a weekly meeting with some people where we discuss three questions: 1) What was your moment closest to Christ since we last met?, 2) How have you grown closer to Christ through study?, and 3)What was your action in this world to share that reality of Christ’s presence? The three questions are part of the classic Christian Spiritually where 1) you try to get a deeper vision other than the world’s delusions, 2) you open yourself up to learn, and 3) you see yourself as operating in union with Christ in healing the world. Each week as I know those questions will be asked I start making choices for those seven days. 

 

Spirituality is fundamentally about making choices with our free will instead of spouting dogma while just going along with an insane culture - about how I will see, about how I will open my mind, and how I will spend my resources of time, energy and money. I have been attending such meetings on and off since 1977 and I am still working on those three questions. There are times when Christ’s light shines through me, and at times I grab ahold of empty darkness in my fears of missing the shiny objects that look so alluring.

Today make your choices in your own free will to answer those three questions; what were the moments closest to Christ, how did you try to learn more about Christ and how did you unite with Christ to scatter peace over your path on earth.

Transfigurations

Today I’ll make choices in my free will

that I will look for Christ in all of things,

like beach walks or Sutherland singing

Bellini’s Casta Diva with notes that trill.

Beaches don’t have many wooden pews

and Norma is singing to a Druid sprite,

but both are giving all without respite

as a way of guiding us by giving of clues

of that which is important to hold on to

beneath all the smoke and mirrors false

that should be taken with a dose of salts

to see clearly what is life’s treasure true.

Today I seek and trust the deeper reality

so might thy light shining as You in me be.