I Pass On What Was Passed On To Me (Easter)

A Reflection for the Feast of the Resurrection All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC April 1, 2018                                                     Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 10:34-43 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 Mark 16:1-8

I Pass On What Was Passed On To Me

Paul writes to the people in Corinth who are wasting energy over conflicts about who is right in the squabbles they have with each other. Paul says “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received.” He then passes on what is known as the Kerygma, the core of the message being proclaimed by the early church. That core message that was passed on to Paul which he shares with anyone who will listen is “I am living with you in a new age which is ushered in by Jesus’ birth, death, resurrection and union with God as the Christ, the Messiah who has lead me and will lead all people back to a relationship with God, through the Spirit which he gave to me and to all who place their trust in him to lead a new life where forgiveness, reconciliation and union with God are given as a gift of love.”

Paul says that was passed on to him when he was an enemy of the early Christians and a gift of loving grace was given to him, a love so great that he was forgiven before he even asked for forgiveness, brought into fellowship with those who were once his enemies, and with whom he shared God’s Spirit, reaching out to others in loving forgiveness so together they work for rebuilding the broken world.

Kerygma is a body of personal stories shared not by professional theologians but by ordinary people who have grown into a deeper awareness of a life of grace. Kerygma is not an orthodox Creedal substitute that you have to profess in order to be let into communion, rather it is thanks from the heart said by word and deed in many different ways.

Peter, in the reading from the Book of Acts, is telling his take of the Kerygma. As a disciple to the earthly Jesus, Peter had been a stumbling block to Jesus’s teachings over and over again, and by his denial of Jesus, had been complicit in his crucifixion. Peter finds, however, that the resurrected Christ speaks of love and forgiveness to him, and he realizes through his experience that there is nothing you can ever do, nothing that you can ever be, that is greater than the gift of God’s love for you. Peter passed on what has been passed on to him.

In the Gospel lesson from Mark for today, women come to the grave as an act of love to anoint the body of the man who had loved them. They are passing on the love that they had received. There they met a “Young Man”, who is not named, dressed in a white robe. Two chapters earlier in Mark’s Gospel there is another unnamed “Young Man” who runs away from the arrest of Jesus, and when the guards try to arrest him, they grab his linen cloth and the “Young Man” flees away naked. The “Young Man” who flees in shame might be the one now given the robe of purification as he was forgiven, and he passes on to the women what has been given to him, that there is no reason to hold on to shame, no reason to be afraid, for the author of all love is alive and his spirit will never leave us. Some of the commentators suggest that this “Young Man” might be John Mark, that person who tradition tells us might be the author of this Gospel.

What has been passed on to you and what do you then pass on to others as your Kerygma? What did you learn from your parents?. . . your schools? . . your friends?. . . your elected leaders? . . . your media figures? . . . your church? What have you chosen to pass on from what you have received?

One of the things I enjoy at All Saints’ are our Ministry Moments where a lay person speaks about how their faith has been nourished by working in a particular ministry of helping others. Rather than issue a call for needed volunteers for these worthwhile projects, I ask them to pass on what they have received.

The way that Christianity grew in the first couple of centuries was by people sharing their lives, personally sharing what had happened to them. In sociologist Rodney Stark’s book, The Triumph of Christianity, which was based on his previous studies of modern religious movements such as Mormonism, he looks at the growth of the early church from the 20 or so followers of Jesus at the time of his death around 32 AD to the Declaration of Constantine as a most favored religion in the Roman Empire in 312 AD. If we assume that the Roman Empire in the 4^th Century had about 60 million people and about 10% of them were Christians, that would mean there were 6 million Christians of many different theological stripes. This assumes an annual rate of 40% growth which is possible if people share their stories with others by word and deed, demonstrating what living as a Christian was all about. It was not about teaching theology but about sharing.

After Christianity starts getting legal and being fed at the government trough, it changes from being spread by people sharing real lives to a cultivation of a clerical caste of Priests and Bishops who tell people what to do, with Creeds telling them the official position on what to believe, coercion with punishment after death for sin and punishment in this life for being a heretic. It moves from being a life-giving force to being a way to fit into the larger community of the state. It becomes a place to do officially-sponsored rituals instead of neighbors sharing the joys of God in their lives and the ways they found strength to meet the difficulties in this broken world.

I admit that I am one of the members of the priestly caste and, for the first several years of my membership, my main way of preaching was to teach theology and to straighten out thinking. It was fun and I enjoyed the delusion of being the smartest person in the room with the right educational credentials. I have come to realize that doesn’t work and I have moved from lectures and sermons to reflections with a lot more sharing, passing on, of what I have received.

As you know, I am retiring as the Rector of this church at the end of this month. I will take some months off trying to figure out how I may faithfully live as a Christian without being paid and to continue to pass on my Kerygma of what I have received.

What have you chosen to pass on from what you have received?

I Pass On What Was Passed On To Me

I pass on what was passed on to me,

listening to spaces between words,

as I would to hear the songs of birds,

being still as she’s asking me to see

what are her deep hopes and fears

before I even dare to say; “Oh yes,

I have shared some of them I guess,

but don’t be afraid, for over the years

I have learned to trust that the power

greater than ourselves is not shirking

the promise to redeem our working,

giving us strength thru that last hour,

when we come face to face with the one

who greets us when all our work is done.”

Easter Vigil

A Reflection for Easter Eve Vigil       All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC 

March 31, 2018                                   Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Easter Vigils 1982 Through 2018

Thirty six years ago I participated in my first real Easter Vigil. It was during my first year in Seminary and we had been involved in church services since Palm Sunday to learn how to do Holy Week. Saturday night came, and we went to bed and took a nap. At about 1:30 AM we woke up, gathered my daughter out of bed, and went over to St. Luke's Chapel where we joined the other seminarians and their families. My daughter carried her pillow and found a space at the end of a pew where she could continue to nap, leaning her head and pillow against the wall. The families came in by flashlight from the married students’ housing and other places on the Domain. The unmarried students came from their dormitory, getting rid of their last beers of the evening. Mothers carried their very young, fathers had their toddlers slung over their shoulders, and teenagers were evenly divided between grumbling sleepy zombies and supercharged extroverts connecting with friends whispering in the semidarkness of the chapel. Many of the families had noise makers, horns, drums, and the like.

Outside the chapel some of the seminarians gathered, and those on the Chapel Rota had their tasks to do while the rest of us were taking it all in. Some of the aged Boy Scouts swapped opinions about the best way to start a fire without a match, if we were to really be authentic; the partisans for the efficacy of flint and steel outnumbered the friction-based procedure of rubbing sticks together. The female seminarians just rolled their eyes about the constant ways we men tried to compete against each other as part of the manhood stuff. So much of what we do is tied up into our ego concerns.

We waited in the dark and in that dark I, and maybe others, faced the shadows of our lives which we were so anxious to deny because we all wanted to be seen as especially “Holy” by our faculty. Passing the courses was going to be hard enough as we had found out that first semester, and if we worked and studied hard enough, we could get a degree, but we also needed to get a faculty vote recommending ordination and that was based not on academics but if they felt as if we might be the kind of Priest they could go to. Many of us, with the exception of the insufferable, arrogant ones with dreams of being a Bishop (which whom I wanted to belong) had feelings that we could be “holy enough” people. We knew the darknesses of our own hearts and secretly wondered if we could ever live into the vows of our Baptism and Ordination.

The darkness was not our enemy but our friend in that we could let go of those ego needs and realize that we were not alone; it was not all up to us. We had come here because we loved Jesus, and we kept the small flame in our soul that God was not in a tomb somewhere out there, but alive and loving us, even if we failed as the disciples had all done. In that love, while we knew that there would be many new opportunities to fail in the future, we also knew that all things are redeemed. We may not end up being Priests but maybe we might be better followers of the Resurrected Christ.

It was now time to start, and the fire was kindled and came to life. The Paschal candle was lit and the procession torches sheltered to keep the wind from blowing them out. The prayers began, the one holding the Paschal Candle started off down the center aisle, the cantor started the singing of the Exsultet, and the acolytes carried the procession torches. The acolytes stopped at every pew to light the candles, the flame passing from one candle to another until the chapel was a sea of small flames. The torches were placed at the lectern, but the Altar Candles were not lit. The lessons began, nine of them each followed by a canticle or psalm sung. There was a sermon followed by the renewal of the Baptismal Vows and then some silence, as our handheld candles were getting dangerously close to burning our fingers.

Then the first light of sunrise would hit the stained glass windows of the Disciples and Apostles. I seem to remember that it lit the face of the window of the Beloved disciple, a soft-faced, long-haired, rather hermaphroditic John, which I thought sent a wonderfully subconscious message that the Ordained leadership of the church ought to be both male and female. If not, it should have because it told me that I didn’t need to waste time trying to impress others. The Resurrection was proclaimed, the bells and noisemakers exploded, the sleeping babies screamed, the lights went on, the candles were extinguished, and we all shouted, “The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia!” We then began the second part of the service as the sunlight, or as the Liturgy said “the Morning Star that knows no setting” flooded our souls. We would then have breakfast or head off to the field places of our churches.

After I was ordained I found that there was not that much enthusiasm for waking up at 2:30 AM in any parish I worked. The students at the colleges liked a midnight service, and the regular parishes wanted something earlier, around 8:00PM after it got dark. Sometimes we would do a much shorter sunrise service, but I have always missed the darkness where our lover Jesus whispers to our souls.

May God speak to you by word or dream, in the night that is still to come, so you can begin a new day living into the Divine promises and leave the past behind.

Easter Vigil 1982

A few glimmering lights show the way to empty pews,

sleeping toddlers slumped over the father shoulders,

blanketed mother arms act as swaddled infant holders,

few whispering words as one last pre-service schmooze.

The lights are dimmed further to dark as river Styx

as outside the grown up boy scouts try to remember

how flint and stone jump a spark to light the tinder

racing to be the first competing with rubbing sticks.

Finally, it all comes together kindling a Vigil light Fire,

the new big candle is processed to the ancient sound

of time past, lighting the small candles passed around

till it reaches a place where angels sing with the choir.

The Morning Star that knows no setting is set to shine

after the lessons of promises are heard one more time.

Maundy Thursday

A Reflection for Maundy Thursday                           All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC

 March 29, 2018                                                                Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Foot washing in 1^st Century Palestine was a way of welcoming honored guests to supper at a rich person’s house. The honored guest would be greeted by the host who would give them a kiss of Peace, Shalom, anoint the guest’s head with oil, and escort them to an honored place to recline around the table, eating their food with their right hand. A lowly servant, or wife of the host if there were no servants, would go around remove the guest’s sandals and washing his feet. It was a gift of honor. If the host felt the guest deserved fewer honors, upon entering he would be welcomed by a slave, given a bowl of water and a towel to wash their own feet, and shown to the main room. If the guest was thought to deserve no honor there would be no water, no oil, no kiss, and no welcome. 

There are two stories of Jesus and foot washing in scripture. The first ( Luke 7) was when Jesus was invited to a meal as a curiosity, to see what made this wandering Rabbi tick, and treated with no honor, but then a fallen woman snuck into the house and shocked everybody by weeping, washing Jesus’ feet with her tears, and drying them with her hair. The host laughed to himself thinking that Jesus was being made unclean by the touch of a fallen woman. Jesus called him on it and pointed out that the host, who was a big shot in his own mind, had done nothing to make Jesus feel welcome, but this woman, who realized she was broken, emptied herself out in love. The host knew nothing about forgiveness but the woman did. Jesus says she is forgiven of her many sins: “Your faith has made you whole; go in peace.”

The second story (John 13) was when Jesus had gathered his disciples for their last supper together, and he begins with his stripping down to a towel and washing the disciples’ feet as a sign of humility and love. His commandment was to love one another and he said he was their teacher and Lord, and as he washed their feet, he was setting an example of how they were to do the same for each other. The word “Maundy” comes from the word “Mandatum” meaning commandment, for what Jesus says: “A new commandment I give you that you love one another even as I have loved you.” He washes the feet of all his disciples, even Judas who he knows will betray him. He empties himself out in love as a sign that he will do that empting out on the cross for all.

In a world in which honor is given only if it is deserved, Jesus shows that all are honored, even sinners. The church kept this ceremony of foot washing as a way of reminding people to empty themselves out for all of God’s creation. Sometimes it became a tableau where Kings, Bishops, Popes, Abbots and Priests would show humility. The "mandatum" from 1600 said the custom was for bishops to wash, dry and kiss "the feet of 'thirteen' poor people after having dressed them, fed them and given them a charitable donation." Queen Elizabeth I was said to “keep her maundies” by washing the feet of twenty women. Pope Pius XII in 1955 laid down the law that it should be limited to 12 men symbolizing the 12 disciples. We are fortunate that Francis has changed that pattern.

In the passage from John, Peter initially says that he will not allow Jesus to wash Peter’s feet. When I started this practice, I was hesitant because while I had no problem washing someone’s feet as a sign of my humility, I had real problems with allowing someone to minister to me. In the Lenten program last week, we were talking about people having spiritual directors and it was agreed that we Americans feel like we ought to be self-reliant, able to do it all without help.

 I remember at an earlier church I kept an hour on Saturday afternoon for the Sacrament of a Reconciliation of a Penitent, or Confession.  Over the months I found that it was one of the quietest hours in my week because no one wanted to admit they sinned or needed help. I understood because for many years I want to give the illusion of being perfect and I did not need anyone to see my own brokenness. I still do not like it, but when you have ugly feet you have to admit that you are not perfect. My brokenness goes from the soles of my feet to the soul of my being, and it is only by grace that I receive more than I deserve.

The act of foot washing is not meant to be limited to a ritual once a year, but it needs to be a symbol of the inclination of our wills to open ourselves up to one another - and empty ourselves out for one another.

Maundy Thursday

Foot models are paid to make shoes look good,

slender ankles and toned legs setting the style

to sell the brand which makes investors smile

but that’s not a living ever open to me if I could.

Years of rough neglecting do tell different tales

of knowing that it was easier to hide my faults

than claim them as mine but treat them false,

pretending I don’t care about ugly toes and nails.

Maundy Thursday washing feet is humbling task,

not in doing washing of others but to them allow

to know the brokenness I usually hide and avow

that I’m perfect and for forgiveness I needn’t ask.

Healing in a community begins as we admit who

we are, accepting a loving laying on of hands too.

Poem for Holy Week 2018

I Will Not Pass On What I Have Received

A hurtful insult which at him was leveled

along with a gratuitous mother comment

with spit that did hit true in that moment;

crowd hoping to make him feel bedeviled,

He strains to hold back the human desire,

tit for tat, and do exchange hate for hurt,

and stand up for his own dignity to assert

that he could condemn them all to hellfire.

But he prays to accept that peculiar honor

sharing pain suffered by unknown brothers

and sisters who also were beaten by others

driven by fear to make them blame fodder.

Jesus, help me love to turn my other cheek

that I’ll find your strength in seeming meek.

Reflection and Poem: When I Don't Wish To See Jesus

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

March 18, 2018                                                  Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Jeremiah 31:31-34        Hebrews 5:5-10          John 12:20-33             Psalm 51:1-13

When I Don’t Wish To See Jesus

In the Gospel lesson from John for today, some Greek-speaking Jews attending the Passover Festival come to Philip, whose Greek name implies that he could speak Greek, and say, “Sir we wish to see Jesus.” I think since they may not have spoken Hebrew or Aramaic, they wanted to have Philip to be the translator for them in their discussion. 

Nothing has changed in the last couple thousand years; we still feel like we need a translator to speak with Jesus and a lot depends on who we choose.  For instance, in the last election there were groups who said their political agendas were based on “Biblical Christian Principles”.  They said that abortion was hated by Jesus, although Jesus doesn’t seem to get around to mentioning it in the Bible; the same with a strong national defense, the death penalty, Supreme Court nominees, law and order, locking up or beating opponents, favorable national trade policies, economic systems to promote wealth, fiscal responsibility by cutting back health and welfare programs, our love of violence using guns, and stopping immigration. The things that Jesus did get around to saying, a lot, indeed they were at the center of the Gospel, were interpreted as peripheral. The thing is that we have this tendency to translate Jesus to fit our own agendas.

This is not new. When Christianity was young and was persecuted, their main argument was that they needed to be tolerated as one would tolerate any religion in the Roman Empire. They argued for mercy and peace. However, once they got to be a legal, and even a favored religion, they changed their viewpoint and called for death for heretics and for wars to conquer pagans for the true faith, all in response to what they said they were hearing Jesus telling them to do. They would go see Jesus at church on Sunday and they would get their marching orders with a blessing of slaughter and discrimination the rest of the days of the week. The church had lost reliable translators of Jesus and good ones were few and far between. But God kept calling people forward as translators like Benedict, John Chrysostom, Francis of Assisi, Julien of Norwich, Catherine of Sienna, William Penn, John Wesley, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen and others. Who is your translator?

A mark of a good translator is the person who wishes to see Jesus translated into language of this world, a person who listens carefully and spends time finding the meaning behind the words. Sometimes the meaning in the act of translation is lost because of either incompetence or fraud. Last year when Hurricane Irma came through Florida, the public safety authorities grabbed this man who had a deaf brother and asked him to translate for the deaf at the televised press conference. The man knew a little bit but he was way out of his depth and ended up signing gibberish. 

I remember thirty years ago when I had a group of hearing impaired parishioners, I decided to learn sign language - but it was harder than I thought. For example, when I would wish them “The Peace of the Lord be with you”- the sign for peace is two hands coming together so that the right palm is placed on the left palm and then turned so the left palm is on top and then both palms down, and move down toward the side. It comes from the shaking of hands to make peace. However, what I was doing - since I was congratulating myself - I got excited and I cupped my hands like I was making a hamburger and so I was saying, “The Hamburger of the Lord be with you.” They laughed and signed back rubbing their palms together as one who would press cheese - “And with Cheese!” 

Five years ago when President Obama went to South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s funeral, there was a fake sign language translator who knew no sign language and was schizophrenic.  He was paid beforehand, was not vetted, and signed gibberish like “hand me the fork.” The big giveaway for a fraud in sign language is that they are not really listening; good translators are either mouthing the words with facial gestures that match the words or looking slightly downward in order to pay closer attention to the tone of the phrases.

There is a scene in the movie “Get Out!” written and directed by Jordan Peele that I was really impressed with. The hero, Chris, who is black, knows something is not right when he visits his white girlfriend’s parent’s house. There is a black maid, Georgina, who is hypnotized so she says the right words, but at a deeper level she knows she is lying and it rips her apart

Chris;   All I know is sometimes, when there's too many white people, I get nervous, you know?

[pause, Georgina laughs creepily with tears in her eyes]

Georgina: Oh no, no. No. No no no no no no. Aren't you something? That's not my experience. Not at all. The Armitages are so good to us. They treat us like family.

Jesus was a prophet in the same vein as Jeremiah, who in his writings for today said God’s covenant with humanity to love us was still in effect, even though we keep breaking our part of the agreement. He hears the hope of God saying:

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” 

There are good people and there are also frauds and incompetents who act as translators for those who wish to see Jesus. Good translations are about lives rather than words. There is a song from the musical, My Fair Lady, where Eliza is so tired the Professor’s hectoring and Freddy’s words of affection that she explodes:

Freddy
Speak and the world is full of singing,
And I'm winging Higher than the birds.
Touch and my heart begins to crumble,
The heaven's tumble, Darling, and I'm...
Eliza
Words!
Words! Words! I'm so sick of words!
I get words all day through;
First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do? 

When I was doing that service for the deaf thirty years ago, the problem was less my competence but my arrogance. I wanted to show them that I could do anything. I did not wish to see Jesus in the space between us but to show my competence.  As Jesus warns in today’s lesson, “Verily, verily I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies. It remains a single seed; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Their kind laughter told me that they wished to see Jesus between us and they helped us create Holy Space. I studied harder because I wished to see Jesus with them.

There are days when I don’t wish to see Jesus because I am so absorbed in making sure that the pews are filled, the budget made, and that people are impressed with all the religious language I speak. This changes only when I really listen to what Jesus said: “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will be my servant also.” 

There are people all over the place wishing to see Jesus and looking for translators. I would suggest that if you wish to see Jesus, listen and empty your own egos out and don’t get bogged down with religious words or words you feel compelled to say.  Show them that is not all us blighters can do. 

When I don’t wish to see Jesus?

I don’t wish to see Jesus when I am right

and the person I am angry with is wrong.

I wish to see them beg and sing a song

of being sorry for they now see the light.

I don’t wish to see Jesus when I am rich

because I wish holding on to my wealth,

knowing that it will ensure better health

living longer and not ending up in a ditch.

I don’t wish to see Jesus when he looks at

me with sorrow in his eyes for my hiding

from his love, preferring to go on riding

roughshod on neighbor like a spoiled brat.

But anyway Jesus sees right into my heart

and lovingly invites me to live into my part.

Snake Eyes Poem and Reflection for 11 March 2018

A Reflection for IV Lent                          All Saints’, Southern Shores, NC March 11, 2018                                        Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Numbers 21:4-9 Ephesians 2:1-10         John 3:14-21                Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Snake Eyes

Today we have a couple stories with snake imagery, and as I keep telling you, the Bible is not interested in facts but in a deeper truth and uses symbols to tell stories. Let’s take a look at snakes - and I can see that many of you don’t want to really have a look at snakes. Is it because they are reptiles and have cold blood? Is it because they are possible disrupters to business as usual? Is it because they have scales rather than skin? It is because they are a symbol of change with the shedding of their skins and we rather like not having change? Is it because they swallow things whole and we are afraid of being of being reabsorbed into something greater than ourselves? Is it because they are close to the ground and we walk upright, away from the ground of our being? Is it because they have a bad image in the Bible tempting us to sin? Or is it just irrational? Think of the terms we use: “real snake in the grass, slimy, cold-blooded, slither, forked tongue.”

When my daughter was a teenager, she had a snake which I could never warm up to, but I would have to feed Sammy the Snake when she went off to a Christian mission trip down in Panama or an Episcopal Youth Convention in Wyoming. I think I probably told you the story about when we were trying to sell the house and Sammy got out and found his way upstairs to the bathroom light fixture to get warm. Luckily when she went off to college, Sammy found a new home.

   Snakes were part of the healing of people who would come to the Temples of the God of Healing, Asclepius, where they would sleep and face their dreams while non-venomous snakes slithered on the floor. Snakes also had a reputation as tempters to brokenness as in the story of the Garden of Eden where the snake tempts Eve to be like God and know good and evil. Lamia was a Greek legend about a snake-like monster who tempted men to forget themselves.

   Keats wrote a Poem, Lamia, about a man who was magically enchanted by a beautiful snake who took the form of a woman. He wrote it in his love letters to Fanny Brawne whom he would praise for her beauty, but he lived in fear of losing his freedom as a poet. He would die before they were married. She is in his sonnet “Bright Star would I were as steadfast as thou art”.  The last two lines of the sonnet are:

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

In symbolic language the snake is often a symbol of the wisdom of the unconscious because it is a creature who lives underground away from sight. In the story from Numbers for today, the Hebrew children are grumbling, blaming Moses for taking them off the easy road into the wilderness. They make Moses the scapegoat for all their frustration, saying that if it wasn’t for him, they would have a good life. They had been in Egypt in captivity, and while they said they wanted to be free, freedom had a lot of problems. They wanted freedom without responsibilities, sort of like a teenager who wants to blame their parents for all of their problems. Listen to one of their comments: “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”

So which is it? Is there no food or is it that they are tired of the gift of the manna which gets them through one day at a time in the wilderness and they want to have more than they need? They are getting tired of depending on God and want to be in charge as their own little Gods.

The unconscious thought that keeps coming up time and time again for them is that they want to take short cuts to the Promised Land or avoid it all together:  “Why do we have to trust this God of Moses? Can’t we just build a golden calf to worship? Can’t we just go back to Egypt and maybe work out a better arrangement with our slave owners?” 

The pattern is like the symbol of a snake biting its own tail, in a constant circle, trapped over and over again to repeat the same behavior. They are denying that this is happening because they will not stop complaining long enough to pay attention to their unconscious. But the snake of the unconscious desire to return to the safety of a destructive past is not content to just keep them from growing in their faith, but in this story, snakes will bite them outwardly as well. They complain that the outward and physical snakes are their problem rather than going deeper to find the real snake.

Moses hears a solution from God to make a symbol of the snake and lift it up so that the people face the deeper snake and come to grips with the problem that is not out there, but in here, inside each one of them. Only when we honestly face ourselves are we able to make the changes necessary for real change. The fact that the journey of the Exodus is to take forty years is a reminder that facing the snakes inside is a lifelong commitment to bring unconscious compulsive behavior to light so we can deal with it.

John’s Gospel passage for today has Jesus revisit the symbol of the snake in the wilderness when he says, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Eternal life is not that you will (future tense) live forever, but that we are (present tense) living in the Eternal, participating in God knowing us intimately and seeing us as God’s children, and sharing that vision as God’s beloved. To be God’s beloved brings us Freedom and it carries responsibilities to grow fully into the image of God’s love.

Jesus is saying he came so that we would have to face who we are. He would be lifted up as a scapegoat on the cross so that we might see the repetitive, cold- blooded, compulsive pattern of our lives when we try to be our own little Gods. He is lifted up so that we might see ourselves trapped in a circle of violence which we love, which we say with our lips that we do not want, but which we keep making sure that continues because it take too much energy and commitment to change. But when we see who we are, both sides of who we are, then this is the beginning of learning how to receive forgiveness and how to give it to others and to ourselves in the light of God’s love. No longer will we unconsciously project all of the things that we don’t want to face - our shadows - onto another person, but we will be able to face our unconscious, our shadows, our snakes, our cold-blooded grounding and follow the Risen Christ into a full life.

The writer of the Ephesians lesson has traditionally been seen as Paul or one of his disciples writing in Paul’s name. You remember the story of Paul who was going to Damascus because he had projected all of his problems on the Christians. And while on the road he is thrown off his high horse and is forced to come face to face with his own blindness in truly seeing God and himself. When he was healed, scripture says, that it was like scales that fell from his eyes so he could see anew. No longer would have to see life through the scales of snake eyes, but with the eyes of the Risen Christ. The passage for today underscores the message:

“All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”

Snake Eyes

S-ay; don’t like that s-nake in the grass

the way he pass-es judgment so eas-ily

grabbing more than his s-hare greedily,

having fantas-ies s-educing every lass.

Why is he with me every breath taken,

always in my thoughts, at me his-sing

dares, taunting my danger of miss-ing

and every move I make seem mistaken?

I come to see that man is a true mirror

of all those things I wish not to claim,

but repudiate, absolve myself’s blame

and move to be seen as to Saint nearer.

But I am who I am as is the snake man

together we're both loved in God’s plan.