" Who Is That Stranger In The Mirror?"

 

A Reflection the 2^nd Sunday after Pentecost                 Church of the Holy Trinity, Hertford, NC

June 2, 2024                                                                  Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant

1 Samuel 3:1-10(11-20          Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17         2 Corinthians 4:5-1          Mark 2:23-3:6

                                        “Who Is That Stranger In the Mirror?”

In the lessons for today I am aware that some of the characters in the stories are strangers to themselves. Part of growing up is finding out who you really are and who you were created to be by God. I want to start off with a quote I ran across this week by Easter de Waal author of Living with Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality: “If I am estranged from myself, then I am also estranged from others too. It is only as I am connected to my own core that I am connected to others.”

Lets take a look at the first lesson from the Book of Samuel. He is a young boy whose mother was Hannah, a wife of Elkanah,a Levite who had prayed to God that she might be able to bear a child. The Levite had another wife, Peninnah, who was a baby making machine and taunted Hannah mercilessly that God had seemed to have turned the Divine back on Hannah. God hears her prayer and she bears a child at last. She sees the child as a gift from God who is meant to be given back to God When He is weaned she devotes him to the care of a Priest named Eli after calling him “Samuel”, which means a gift, a loan from God. Hannah will come back every year with a new robe she would make for Samuel and bless him. She and her husband were to have other children, three sons and two daughters.

Samuel is to find out what it will mean to be lent from God. His life as a prophet will be the person who acts as God's witness, the conscience of Kings, to what needs to be said to leaders like Saul and David. What if each of us saw ourselves not as our own person free to do whatever our ego had a desire for, but saw ourselves as gifts, being loaned from God, during this life on earth.

One of the high points of my being a Parish Priest was to be one of the first people to see a child born to a couple of my parishioners. I would pick up the baby and I would say a prayer of thanksgiving and of hope. I would remember that day when my daughter was born and I held her and I realized that she was only being a dazzling and precious gift being loaned to me. I am so proud of her. In a couple of weeks I will make a trip out to Colorado, where I will be a guest in her home and grandparent to her children and father-in- law to her husband. I am literally her “old man”. She came out East a couple years ago to bury her mother and then last year to help bury her stepmother, Sometime in the future she will the person that people will go to when it is time to bury me.

Back to Samuel, who is living with, Eli a Priest. The problem is that Eli has two grown sons who are also Priests. He loves them, but they are just no damn good. They are estranged from God, estranged from their father and estranged from themselves. They treat offerings meant for God, given by Parishioners, which Priests are supposed to bless and give to God and the poor. But, they confiscate what they want and give the scraps to God. They tend to seduce and exploit women who have come to them for help in their troubles. The sons see the task of being a Priest as being an exploiter of people as objects. They have no relationship with the people as full human beings, nor do they see the need to have a relationship with God. They are rotten no good sons, but Eli, their father loves them and tries to overlook what they do. But God has had enough and he sends a message to Eli to tell him that time is running out for his sons. But Eli, who loves his sons beyond reason, is shutting God out. God wakes Samuel up to have him give the message that Eli refuses to hear. Eli continues to not want to hear, when Samuel gets the impression that it Eli calling and not God. Finally Eli understands that God is warning him that his sons will soon reap the whirlwind of their deeds.

In the Gospel lesson Jesus and his disciples run into a bunch of Pharisees. Pharisees, the name means “separated ones”, are people who the community sees as standouts and are supposed to be the best people in town, looked up and admirer for all the obeying of the religious law that they do in paying close attention to both the written and oral law of tradition. There is another group called the “Sadducees”. The Sadducees, getting their name from Zadok, the First High Priest of Solomon's Temple, were connected to the Temple and mainly followed the written law of scripture. Jesus would have seen himself as a Pharisee but the Pharisees did not trust him, because Jesus had displayed that compassion was the most important attribute of following God. Pharisees saw God as the big law giver in the sky and liked to point the implications of all the rules and God's great abhorrence of sinners; Jesus usually talked about forgiveness based on love. Jesus used to talk about God as the loving Father, the Pharisees tended to see God as ultra strict School master who loves to flunk mediocre students. The Pharisees and the Sadducees did not like each other very much; but they agreed on both really not liking Jesus or the God that Jesus was promoting.

In this story for today, it is the day of the Sabbath, a day when the law said you were supposed to do no work until the sun went down, and to limit the length of travel. You can eat during the Sabbath, but the food needs to be prepared before the sabbath. The Pharisees notice that Jesus' disciples are walking too far,. AND this is a big AND to them; as they see the disciples walking through a grain field, some of the disciples are running their hand over the wheat and unconsciously picking the ears of wheat and rubbing the chaff off to eat the grain; the rubbing is defined as working on the Sabbath and therefore they are grievous sinners. Jesus in essence tells them to get a life. Jesus will refer later that the Pharisees “strain their water though a cloth to keep out gnats but swallow a camel.”

This last week on the Center for Contemplation and Action Blog site, The Rev. Rabbi Sharon Brous wrote “[A] Rabbinic text … from the ninth century declares that every person is accompanied, at all times, by a procession of angels crying out, “Make way, for an image of the Holy One is approaching!”

When I first met my wife Pat; she was working for the Diocese as a Christian Education Consultant to Parishes. I looked at her gathered with a bunch of her friends, who were also angry women who looked at this newly minted Seminary Graduate with disdain. I dismissed her from my consideration as a colleague immediately. It took years, but after working together, I was able to see her not as a thorn in my side but as an image of God. When my eyes were opened to the deeper reality, I found that I loved her. A day does not go by that I am so thankful she was in my life. She taught me how to pay attention to the images of God all around me.

Jesus will point out that the relationship between God and God's people is for us humans to really live into being an image of God showing mercy not sacrifice. Every so often I get an attack of the “Should Ofs”. “Should of s” are when I do an evaluation of others and go though a list of all the “Should Ofs” that they should of done. The things that bug me the most are the things I had done; and in order not to dwell on it myself, I pass the anger on to them That flows into another problem when I see that a person who does something I should of done. or have left out. It is an easy game to play and it usually makes me feel superior. I can say “Well I didn't do that!,” when I saw what another person has done. The problem with my too enthusiastically pat myself on the back is that I tend to dislocate my shoulder and neck.

Last week the churches celebrated the Mystery of the Trinity; in that we are reminded that God is community within Godself. This week we move from that understanding to know that the only way we can really know God is when we enter into community with God and find out who and whose we are. Otherwise, we keep looking at a stranger in the mirror.

Joanna Seibert, from whose blog I stole the De Waal quote ended that blog note with an anonymous quote which I will use as an ending poem:

“I sought my God.

My God I could not see.

I sought my soul

My soul eluded me.

I sought my brother

And I found all three.”