Making A Home

A Reflection for the 6th Sunday of Easter St. Mary’s Church, Gatesville, NC Thomas E Wilson, Guest Preacher and Celebrant May 26, 2025 Acts 16:9-15 Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5 John 14:23-29 Psalm 67 Making a Home I am a very lucky man, I get to drive about a hundred miles one way, close to 2 hours, in order to get here on Sunday morning. By Sunday morning, I should have already written the sermon and emailed a copy to St. Mary’s so they can make a copy I can read from. The drive gives me two hours to leave the sermon alone, forgetting the whole concept of perfection, and just have moments of awe about how beautiful this part of this country is. The roads are not too crowded in the early morning, so I can think about how blessed I am. It gives me a chance to keep some friendsin my heart with prayer. While I have to keep my eyes open in that kind of prayer, I don’t crowd out my thoughts with words, but keep thinking of old friends of mine, like one whose wife is dying, being surrounded with graceful peace. He is my age and I met him when I was invited to volunteer at an Addiction Treatment Center as a Chaplain, to help the addicts to go deeper into the Serenity Prayer. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference; just for today” I did the volunteer work there because my older brother had been an addict and he refused to get help. He committed suicide when it got too much for him. His two teenage sons came to live with me and my wife for a time that summer. I realized I needed to help people who were not parishioners, and was given the opportunity to help addicts there at the center. As I prepared for the Sunday sermon, especially, I was swimming in the words from the Gospel Passage from the Book of John’s Gospel, for this Sixth Sunday of Easter: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them.” I am praying that my friend and his wife will find that the Holy ( Father, Son and Holy Spirit) are making a home with them. “Making a Home” There is a difference between being a guest and making a home with someone. I have been a guest in many homes. In a couple of weeks I am going to Colorado to visit my daughter. She is putting on a full court press to get the old man to move to Colorado. She informs me that her husband has already connected with a real estate person who will be taking me around to look at properties. I love my daughter, my grandsons and my son in law. I will be a good guest, but at this point I am not yet ready to make my home with them. My daughter is a wonderful person; she is in her 50’s, but she is still my baby. I will enjoy my time snuggling with them. I will take them out to dinner, and I will pay for my grandsons’ drinks. We will laugh and perhaps cry together. We will share special moments. We will make meals together. We will use the same bathrooms: to the naked eye we will share a property; but it is not yet making a home with them. My home is on the Outer Banks, it is the place where my wife and I lived; until she died two years ago. Every day I walk into that Condo we shared, and while she is not physically there, I relax and tell the empty space the news of what is going on at the places and the people I have visited that day. In the home we shared, I will tell her I miss her and share what is going on with our friends. I was reminded of Carl Sandburg’s poem Home Thoughts THE SEA rocks have a green moss. The pine rocks have red berries. I have memories of you. Speak to me of how you miss me. Tell me the hours go long and slow. Speak to me of the drag on your heart, The iron drag of the long days. I know hours empty as a beggar’s tin cup on a rainy day, empty as a soldier’s sleeve with an arm lost. Speak to me … When I speak honestly to my wife; her spirit is there with me. The same is true of my Lord Jesus. When I speak honestly with my Lord, I indeed know he is with me, making a home when I share my heart. It is not the words we use, but the hearts we open. Prayers are not the words we memorize and recite, but the heart we share. With churches, there is a difference between going to a church and making a church home. One of the problems of the Book of Common Prayer, is that we are tempted to speed read through the service. If we only say the words out loud with our mouth, but don’t engage our souls to share with our Lord and our fellow parishioner, or visitor; we miss the whole point of prayer. As a Priest, I have to empty out my pride and remember that I am only a servant taking part in a mystery beyond my understanding. As a Preacher, I “make with a message” by going deeper than the surface of the words I would read in the scripture lessons and prayers for the day, echoing in my heart, under scoring with God’s Spirit lived out in the lives of my neighbors, parishioners, friends and family. As a Parson, I am called to listen to Parishioners and neighbors who struggle to be faithful to their church, their community, their family, the people in the other pews, and the promises they make and have made throughout their lives. I have been fortunate in that the four and a half decades in the churches I have served as a Priest, when they dared to believe in forgiveness rather than perfection. Thank you for allowing me a chance to come into your heart.

New Commanment: Love One Another

A Reflection for the 5th Sunday of Easter May 18, 2025 St. Luke and St Anne’s, Roper, Grace Plymouth Thomas E Wilson, Guest "New Commandment; Love One Another” Acts 11:1-18 Revelation 21:1-6 John 13:31-35 Psalm 148 From the Gospel of John for today: “'Where I am going, you cannot come.' I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." I had an older brother when I was growing up. He was a year and four days older than me and athletic and handsome as all get out. As we were growing up, he was always going to be taller than me. We got into a lot of fights with each other; most of which I lost. My mother, who had been an only child growing up, longed to have a brother or sister and could never understand why we were wasting our energies competing against each other. As we grew older, he was held back a year in High School and he and I graduated together. I went to Chapel Hill to college and he went into the Marine Corps. We got into heated discussions over the War in Vietnam, but that Christmas, as we were both on leave, he took me out for my first legal beer the day I turned 18. We had missed each other and we learned how to disagree. Two years later, when our father died, we realized how much we loved each other and life was too short. When he got out of the Corps and I graduated from college, he asked me to be the best man at his wedding. We both had many flaws, and over 20 years later he died. My mother asked me to say a few words at his funeral, and I spoke of how much time we lose letting differences get in the way of love. Life is too short not to love. The lessons for today are about needing to remember to love. Love is not meant to be restricted to people with whom we agree, but to go way beyond approval and about loving the neighbor, even loving the stranger, and even attempting with divine help, to love the enemy. The writer of the Book of Revelation reminds us God does not look down from a far off heaven: "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. In the Book of Acts, Peter is relating about his trying to show how pure he is; so pure that he will not associate with the uncircumcised, meaning Gentiles, or 99% of the Roman Empire. This is the reality in which he lives, choosing rigid conformity instead of open love for neighbor. These are the people who are beyond his compassion. But the new vision of Grace that Peter is given is of a radical expansion of what family means. Our brothers and sisters are those in the much larger human family. In my senior year in High School, sixty one years ago, I was a confirmed member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Upstate New York. I had been confirmed by Bishop Peabody and one day, two months before graduation, we gort news that Mrs Peabody, the Bishop’s wife, was arrested for being with a group of black and white people who were attempting to integrate a restaurant in St. Augustine, Florida, after attempting to integrate the local Episcopal Church whose ushers had refused to admit her and her friends. It was considered scandalous that she acted out of a love that went beyond accepted social, and even legal, boundaries. When I graduated from High School that year and went to college in North Carolina, I stopped going to church, because I had felt that the Episcopal Church had become a clique rather than a church. It was more a fit of pique, a disappointment that the church I loved had let me down. In my second summer, in 1966, I took a job working in an Outdoor Drama in St. Augustine, “The Cross and Sword”. One Sunday morning that summer, I stopped in front of that church and in my bitterness, I refused to go in. The next year in March of 1967 my father died while he and my mother were visiting my mother’s parents in Daytona Beach. After I graduated in 1968, she moved down to Daytona Beach to help take care of her father. She placed my father’s ashes in the Veterans Cemetery in St. Augustine. Every year I visited my mother, I would always stop by St. Augustine, visiting his grave, but it took me almost two decades to stop at that church. It was only after I graduated from Seminary that I had enough faith to forgive. Forgiveness is not given to people and institutions to forgive because the offenders deserve it, but forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves to let go of our hate and pain. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1967 in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here, is about hope in the midst of disappointment and bitterness; “These reactions poison the soul and scar the personality, always harming the person who harbors them more than anyone else. The only healthy answer lies in one’s honest recognition of disappointment even as he still clings to hope, one’s acceptance of finite disappointment even while clinging to infinite hope.” We end with the words of the Psalmist for today, where we end up praising God in the middle of the lives which we live: Young men and maidens, *old and young together. Let them praise the Name of the Lord, *for his Name only is exalted, his splendor is over earth and heaven. He has raised up strength for his people and praise for all his loyal servants, * the children of Israel, a people who are near him. Hallelujah!