Rosemary: Reflection and Poem for Rosemary Rosenburg

A Reflection on the Occasion of A Memorial Service for Rosemary Rosenburg

June 19, 2017              All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC

Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 40: 1-5, 28-31               Psalm 23          John 10:11-16

Rosemary

Usually I start off with many quotes from the Bible, but today I want to start with a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 4 scene 5, where Ophelia has died after going mad with sadness over death of her father and her rejection by the Prince Hamlet.  Queen Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, mourning her, comes in carrying flowers and says “There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.”

Today we come together for a service of remembrance of Rosemary. The family has shared with you some thoughts and pictures; they have known her their whole lives, and they know her better than me. They know what it is like to need her and to be needed by her. They know what it is to live with her day in and day out and to fight with her sometimes. I have not known her my whole life, and I have never fought with her. I have only known her for what seems like too short a number of years. She did not unload all her history with me,  and I could see she kept many things inside herself because she did not want to burden people.

When I saw her, she was always worried about other people, acutely aware of the pain and suffering in others. I saw her when she was with friends offering them a listening ear instead of dominating the conversation. When she would fill in at the office, she would turn on that dazzling smile and make people feel welcome. The way she dealt with interruptions reminded me of a conversation I had with a retired Priest when I was in the first year of my ordained ministry. I was complaining that I was getting behind in my work because I had so many interruptions from parishioners, and Herb Myers - I later was to call him “Uncle Herbie” – said, “In ministry the interruptions are the work.” Rosemary was a minister, but the church overlooked her, underestimated her, and never got around to ordaining her. 99% of the real Christian ministry in churches is done by lay people.

In the lesson from Isaiah for today, the prophet is telling the people coming home, back from exile in Babylon, that the LORD would be with them as they walked that perilous journey:

 “Creator of the ends of the earth does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Rosemary had a tough life, but her strength was renewed every day, and while she may have looked faint at times, in the quiet moments with her, we knew that her faith allowed her to soar like an eagle through things that would have hobbled others.  When she fell off that kitchen stool when she was trying to get things off the upper cabinets, I lamely joked with her at the hospital that she must have been trying to fly. As in all humor, there is a hidden truth; she believed that, whatever happened, she would not be ruled by fear. She was, as I told her using the totally inappropriate comment, “one tough broad”.

I see the pictures of this beautiful woman taken more than three score years ago, the pictures after she had many moments of hard times and before she faced so many obstacles, disappointments, losses, and abuse, and I could see that Rosemary of so many years ago in the woman I last saw several weeks ago, looking weak but full of inner strength. Rosemary knew that the Good Shepherd was walking with her through the valley of the Shadow of Death. She lived a life of being a Good Shepherd, laying down her agenda for others.

It was her ability not to hold grudges that set her free to save her energy for the important things like helping others, as in developing and strengthening food banks to feed the less fortunate. It was her knack for refusing to dwell in the past that left her free to thrive in the present and have hope in the future. Anyone who loves to plant flowers like she did has to have hope for the future. She planted flowers and she raised children and cherished friends because she believed that God’s creation should be a place of graceful blessing rather than a bitter habitat of weeds. 

We come together to thank God that she is free from her distress and has finally come home where she can rest in the Divine arms. We come together to mourn that she will not be with us. But the deeper reality is that she is still with us in the space between us. My theology is that in communion, that service of the remembrance of Jesus' love as he gave himself for us, she is on the other side of the table, eating the bread of heaven with us. She is here whenever we have the strength to forgive and to love, for she taught us by her life how to do those things. She is in the middle of the laughter of a well-told story. Her invisible arms are comforting us in our sorrows and strengthening us in our resolution to go on, to soar like eagles. When we remember Rosemary, it is not meant to be a mere intellectual exercise of recollection of facts and stories but a spiritual experience of seeing her and the gifts she had still living in our lives.

“There's Rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.” 

ROSEMARY

The best poet has Hamlet’s mother say:

“There’s Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

Pray you, love, remember.” 

As if our days from her would stray?

Forgetting that shy smile and soft laugh?

Her arm entwining welcome as wing of bird?

That solid dependability to keep her word?

Those words “I love you” when she would leave.

with laughing reckless promises to see us again?

That easy forgiveness while dismissing her hurts?

That courage to pick herself up and try again?

We take all of her members, reconnecting them

together, holding, encircling them in our hearts,

no mere mental exercise  but an act of defiance

of death which has no power to rob us of her love.

She is in the Divine arms and in the between us

as we tell the stories, giving thanks for the tears

and the laughter mixing the hope to see her again.

“There’s Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

Pray you, love, remember.”  As if we could forget.

Father's Day Poem: William E.Wilson Father

William E. Wilson Father

If you had lived to today, a half century after you died

you would be ninety and nine and laughing as we’ll

share concerns about how your children grow up still

while granddaughters and grandsons and greats stride

on journeys to live into your giving approval and love.

Oh if you had only lived to know them, see those swans

who once been clumsy ducklings, now redeems wrongs

as you tell them tales of family generations take hold of 

passing on unique wisdom of what makes us who we are

rising from our failures and disappointments, off brushing

the shame of falling short but without need to be blushing,

for we did our best as we held on to in memory a fixed star

of your sacrifices made, even when far from being inerrant,

you were and are still in me living as way of being a parent.

 

Trinity Sunday 2017 Reflection

A Reflection for Trinity Sunday All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores June 11, 2017 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Genesis 1:1-2:4a 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 Matthew 28:16-20 Psalm 8

Trinity Sunday

It has been good having Stephen here for his summer field placement for his seminary training. I remember when I did my intern summer in the mountains of North Carolina, I was anxious to see how I would do in a parish. I had been attending Episcopal churches, serving on the vestry and as Senior Warden, Sunday school teacher, youth group leader, college ministry team leader, lay reader, Lay Eucharistic Minister. But I had no real interest in serving as a parish priest, having seen how parish priests were sometimes mistreated by the projections of some usually really nice people in good churches. I had served as a chaplain in a hospital the summer before, but this was the first time I had served as “The Not Yet Quite And Far From Reverend Wilson”. I found that one of the things that helped my anxiety was to go out in the early morning or the late afternoon and retreat to a hilltop in the mountains and look at the view while I reciting the opening lines of the 121^st Psalm - “I will lift my eyes to the hills; from whence cometh my salvation? My help cometh from the LORD, the maker of Heaven and Earth.” Now that I am at the shore far from the mountains, I go to the beach and watch the tide going in and out and recall the words of the 107^th Psalm - “Some went down to the sea in ships, and plied their trade in deep waters; They beheld the works of the LORD and his wonders in the deep.”

I can tell you the scientific and psychological explanations for mountains, hills, valleys, beaches, and oceans, but that will not help me to understand what happens to me when I enter into communion with them. I find I need to be in touch with creation when I am in danger of losing touch with my deeper self, my soul, my very being.

School is out for the summer and we will have a bunch more visitors to the Outer Banks on a regular basis because they want what we have. I love living here and I know that I will have to share the beach with so many other people. Sometimes I resent all of those people, but it is not mine to hoard, even in my imagination.

God gave us this beautiful creation. The story of the creation is told in two different stories in the first two chapters of Genesis. One of those stories we read as our first lesson for this day, the Feast of the Trinity. The stories are both pieces of poetry and myth and not an attempt at science. Wesley said that the Bible was not written to give us details of the past but to lead us to God. The clue to the messages of the stories is to affirm that all creation is a gift and it was made good, very good, and we, made in the image of God, are integral parts of God’s dream for Good Creation, to be in a deep relationship of awe and working together to keep all things sacred.

 

I could give you a sermon on the nature of the Trinity, but as one wag used to say, “You will need all of your mind to understand the Trinity and you will lose your mind if you try to explain it.” I can give you some analogies that work some of the time for me, but I find that they have their limits. However, at the center of the concept of the Trinity is that God is relationship, and God is like all true relationships in that they cannot be comprehended and fully understood but can only be entered unto.

Let me give you a human analogy. In the same way, I love Pat Wilson and I have known her half of my life. She is my legal wife, my fashion consultant, the co-signer of my property, my part-time cook, my argument partner, my conscience, but I could not fully describe or understand her completely. She is a gift wrapped in love, a mystery not to solve but to encounter in real life.

It is the nature of the living encounter with God that is important, not the abstract theological or philosophical thinking about God as a thing we can take apart with our mind. We begin and enrich our encounter with God through Creation, the loving gift from God, which as St. Bonaventure said was "not to increase his glory, but to show it forth and to communicate it." God proclaims Creation good not because it is something that can be used for our own glory but because it is how we can communicate with God and with our deeper self.

The problem is that we no longer see Creation as a gift of which we are stewards, but in our darkness we reduce creation from something of which to be in awe to only a thing, without deeper meaning, a mere storehouse of resources from which we plunder to create short term benefits. We have allowed our values to be shaped by our short term interests - “What is in it for me.” We rape nature to become rich, pawning our souls for that “which rust and moth consume and thieves break in and steal.”

When Native Americans make the stand against an invasion of progress for our benefit, they say things like, “This is sacred land.” The media treats those ideas as quaint and so far behind the times saying, “Sacred, schamcred, we want what we want. It is about the survival of the fittest and the strongest. That is the nature of the world; we are here to exploit nature not to mollycoddle it. We are sure that some technology, yet to be born, can save us from our excesses, but in the meantime, it is business as usual for the benefit of the chief stockholders.”

What happens in this view is that we extend the understanding of us as masters, owners of creation, so that we turn our fellow creatures into things whose worth is determined by their utility to our agendas. People become things out of which we get as much as we can, and those who have nothing left to give to our agendas we consider as, to use a chilling phrase so popular today, “collateral damage.”

To go further, we look at ourselves and our relationship and determine the worth based on utility. “What am I getting out of this?” When we enter into the process of reification, the turning of subjects into objects, just things, based on approval or disapproval, useful or un-useful, we become strangers to others and to our deeper being.

To read the Creation stories of Genesis presents us with a challenge - not the surface challenge of science versus faith, because the stories are not meant to be taken literally (for what is called in today’s newspeak “Alternative Facts”), but for the deeper truth that creation is a gift from God calling us to an alternative way of dealing with creation, not as a fearful greedy taker but as a grateful joyful steward. As St. Augustine suggested, we tend to “battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture”

Students are graduating and families going on vacation. Our prayer for them is that they might learn what is not covered in school, where worth is determined by performance, but that the world is full of gifts from a loving God gracefully given even to those who do not deserve it or who do not benefit our short term interests. Perhaps we will learn by being in awe of creation that our purpose in life is not to consume but to be faithful stewards of the gifts we have been given.

Trinity Sunday

She looked at the creation and said that it was very good

but I looked asking was it good enough to be good for

something to profit me adding to my possession score

or at least pro -vide me a piece of quo to get a rich quid?

What's in it for me? How can I trade in an infinite beauty,

a complex ecosystem, so that my stocks add a dividend

building up short term gain, having someone else spend

their health and treasure to clean up after me as their duty?

Yet, what if it wasn't mine to give it away or to cash it in,

supposing that I was not the owner or thief, but steward

who was to care for it for our children, and avoid hubris

in order to pass it on even better than when it was given?

There aren't magic solutions or even science in the wings

only changing our nature to love nature more than things.

The Given Gift; Reflection and Poem for Pentecost Sunday 2017

A Reflection for Pentecost Sunday All Saints Episcopal and Immanuel Lutheran Churches June 4, 2017 Thomas E. Wilson, Preacher

Acts 2:1-21 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13 John 20:19-23 Psalm 104:25-35, 37

The Given Gift

Did you ever have a gift given to you that you didn’t know what to do with? You know it is a gift given with love that somebody thought you would like but you aren’t really sure. You don’t want to hurt the giver yet it is not something that you are used to. What would you do?

I can think of several choices:

Option one: Try the gift out a few times out of love and thank them for the opportunity.

Option two: Thank the giver by writing a note and place the gift in your closet until the giver actually asks about it and then out of love you use it or wear it and then it goes back in the closet.

Option three: You thank them for the thought and the love behind the gift, then apologize and ask if they can make someone else happy with their generous gift.

Option four: You take the sales receipt and exchange it for something that you feel would really work for you being upfront with the giver thanking them for the opportunity to use the love behind the gift.

Option five: You approach the giver, thank them for the love and then ask what were they thinking and have a good laugh about it.

I’m sure there are other options but these are the ones that I have had some history with as either the giver or receiver throughout my life when a gift has been given or received out of love. The older I get the more I see that I live in a universe of loving gifts without number. From the morning when I get out of bed and take the dog for a small constitutional before I do my exercises the gifts keep coming. I leave the house where I know that I have been gifts of love the day before. There is gift of the breeze that comes from the ocean, the sight of the stars and moon, the sound of the animals in the dark woods, the songs of the birds as dawn breaks, the fact that I am in the Outer Banks, the neighbors and friends and ministry. If there is a storm I know of the gift of the house that Pat and I are buying and the fact that we were able to find it. All day long I see gifts. Some gifts are better than others I have gotten out of bed and so the day is a gift and my task is to find the gifts I can give real thanks for. I can echo the psalmist’s opening line from the selection for today. I am going to use the Robert Alter translation where he follows the King James Version: “How many are Your deeds, O LORD, all of them You do in wisdom. All the earth is filled with Your riches.” The Hebrew word for “creatures” in the Prayer Book translation also means “acquisitions”, which I see as gifts shared.

I can be a prisoner of my own ego, held captive to my own agendas, living in a mental and spiritual gulag as my own warders keeping me away from Grace or I can see all the world as Grace and say; “Yes and thank you.”

I think of the disciples in John’s Gospel how they are afraid of the day and loaded down with guilt and in the middle of the fear so that they are locked in and they hold the only key. But the Risen Lord comes in, needing no key, and breathes on them, giving the strength to meet the day ahead without fear, to no longer be their own prisoners by giving the gift of the spirit to forgive as he has lovingly forgiven them. There is a joke about guilt that it is the gift that keeps on giving but I think that it is forgiveness that is the gift that really keeps on giving in a richer life.

When Paul writes to the Corinthians he is telling them that there are many gifts that God has showered on the community and all of the gifts have in common the opportunity to build up the church of faith. But the Corinthian community has been prisoners of their own egos as each one is in competition to see which has the best gift. Paul suggests that their gifts were not given to them to hoard as ransom for their low self-esteem by the Spirit had given these gifts so also they are to use by them to put into play the greatest gift; love. The importance of the gift is not what it does for the recipient but for how it might be used to build up the community in love which underscores every gift. He is telling them this in the 12^th chapter of his letter and he is leading up to the point of the letter, the 13^th chapter which begins:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

I think of the apostles locked in their room in the reading from the Book of Acts. Jesus, in the time between the resurrection and ascension, had sent them out into all the world and what did they do? They gathered together to figure out what to do next. I think they are praying to God asking God what did God think she was doing, for they were prisoners of their own timidity; afraid of making a mistake, afraid of failure. The spirit in the midst of their uncertainty gives them the gift of setting them free so that whatever is said is said with love. The gift they needed was love which was there all the time; all they needed to do was to act on that love. The gift that was given, the marvelous gift of tongues, was probably not a gift they asked for or knew what to do with, but it was the love behind, in, under and through was what was the miracle, as it still is for us today.

We gather together today as two communities of Lutherans and Episcopalians, we have different gifts, we find many things that divide us yet there is one thing that unites us; the realization that we were all given the gift which we did not ask for nor deserve but makes all the difference; the love which God showers on us and which we can best use by using it to feed our souls in order to be set free so that we will give freely that love to this broken world.

The Given Gift

Thanks for the gift God. Now what do with it

during the time after I did not ask to be born

til unable to avoid dying; of my breath shorn

and the last line of my obituary is finally writ?

Don’t turn the question back to me! You chose

that gift when another could have done better

to give me more of power, prestige and worth.

Now supposed on special occasion bring it forth

to show how good you are,? Or just write a letter?

Why don’t you, like the others, just stroke my ego

or send me some money to buy my heart’s desire?

Instead you give it to me to build up people higher,

closer to you, instead of stranded on archipelago

of gulag of our own construction and design

we set up to hold the idols of our own shrine.