Often Visitor

A Reflection for August 18, 2024                   Grace Church, Plymouth, NC and St. Luke's, Roper, NC

15^th Sunday after Pentecost                           Thomas E Wilson, Guest Preacher and Celebrant

1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14 Psalm 111 Ephesians 5:15-20 John 6:51-58

Often Visitor

Thank you for allowing me to be a visitor here again. I have come to you, time and time again – and I come as a person who does not have all the answers. I come as a person who is badgered by questions instead of answers. Last week, six days ago, was my wife's birthday; she was present in my heart, but fourteen months ago, she died. I was both thankful she had been so present in my life and at the same time, I was so empty because she was not with me to build new memories. I had to be content with glimpses of her spirit in my dreams and memories. I wrote a birthday poem about my love for her.

But, in dynamic tension, I had to pay attention to her absence. It reminded me of the Robert Frost poem “Acceptance” when he concludes by accepting;

Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be be.”

In the Hebrew Testament lesson for today, Solomon, King David's son grieving his father, the light of his life, has to come to grips that since his father died, the one from whom he expected all answers to come, was no longer available to provide the answers. God comes to him in a dream, and he talks with God. In his dream, God tells him that God will be with Solomon one day at a time. There is no 5 year plan, no Outline for the future, no perfect answers from the past; only the promise to walk with him one day at a time. It means that Solomon, like every King, or commoner, among us, with have to be listening each and every day to God's questions each and every new day.

If we read the paper, or watch the news, or live life more than half-aware; we see there are obscenities in life that we cannot come to grips with easily. We have so many questions, but we must listen to the deeper questions and provide tentative answers on day at a time. We understand there are so many things that are just outside our ability to fully understand. Victor Frankl, a Jewish Doctor and Psychotherapist posited that “meaning was the central motivational force in human beings.” He and his family were caught up in the obscenity of Hitler's Germany. He and his family were thrown into the insanity of the Concentration camps in 1942. He spent the next three years in four different concentration camps. His father died of starvation and pneumonia in the first, his mother and brother perished in the gas chambers, his wife died of Typhus in a third. He spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of living through that insanity. He wrote:

It is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us—we are the ones who are questioned! We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to—of being responsible toward—life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us. Now everything depends on what is expected of us. As to what awaits us in the future, we don’t need to know that any more than we are able to know it. (Victor Frankl, Yes To Life: In Spite of Everything, 33-34)

I visit with you but I do not know all the answers, I can only share with you the living one day at a time and having to depend on a power greater than our individual selves. Jesus said in today's Gospel lesson, the way forward is to each day eat of him, each day take the Spirit of the Living God into ourselves, one day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time, one millisecond at a time. We do not have all the answers, but we walk by faith, hopefully nourishing, one step at a time with God.

Carl Jung defined God, the daily bread we are offered every day, in this way:

"To this day, God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions then change the course of my life for better or worse.

"Without knowing it," he added. " man is always concerned with God. What some people call instinct or intuition is nothing other than God. God is the voice in side us which tells us what to do and what not lo do-in other words, our conscience."

Tom Ehrich, a retired Episcopal Priest, Writer and Consultant, who we used in one of the churches I served, writes a daily reflection to which I subscribe, read faithfully, and steal from shamelessly. His insights I have plundered, for I guess, more than three decades. Wednesday this week he wrote about being in Prayer with God:

Prayer doesn’t requite six hymns and every verse of every hymn in a relentless display of curated sound. Prayer can be sitting at the breakfast table and letting your head drop, your shoulders relax, your fists unclench, and let your mind be drawn to something outside yourself.   I think we tend to get in our own way, when all that God wants is to sit with us, weep with us, see the light shining through a drop of dew on a branch and not worry about figuring it out. (Tom Ehrich's Daily Meditation, August 14, 2024, Still, Small Voice)

I am your guest preacher today and when you leave this church building, I urge each of us, as Frankl mentioned, “we are the ones who are questioned by life”, to unclench your fists, go deeper than my words and take the spiritual body of Christ into each moment of your lives.

Often Visitor

Every church I enter is so full of fakes,

They're here for all the wrong reasons:

Like only coming if it's in good seasons,

Or sermons won't be about budget makes.

I know, because now I am one of those,

Who only want to come to again hear

Such things like I'm seen as one so dear,

Broken as I am, that I'm one God chose.

Chosen not because I am one really good,

Rather in spite of all my so many failings,

And numbers of times, bitterly in railings

Wanting to taste more sin as my daily food.

I show up because I am one of those fakes,

Who shows up often, praying love takes.