Comfortable in Waiting?

A Reflection for XXIII Pentecost (proper 27)                       All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC November 12, 2017                                                                Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25             Psalm 78:1-7               1 Thessalonians 4:13-18          Matthew 25:1-13

Comfortable In Waiting?

One of the themes in the lessons for today is about waiting, so the question I asked myself, and asked you in the question for meditation in the bulletin, was “How comfortable are we with waiting?” 

In the Hebrew Testament lesson for today, Joshua has led the Hebrew children into the Promised Land and calls a meeting in Shechem to make a covenant. In this mythic story, the people have been waiting forty years as they wandered across the wilderness. Their leader Moses had died, most of those who had left Egypt had died on the way, a whole new generation had come and gone waiting. The old joke is that it took them forty years wandering in the wilderness because they were being led by men and men never ask for directions. The wait had been long, frustrating, and painful, but the waiting was not passive but active waiting,  and the time was spent in growing into the people who were ready to say along with Joshua: “As for me and my family; we will serve the Lord.”

The Epistle lesson is Paul writing to the Thessalonians about 20 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. They had been waiting for the Christ to return. Some of the people who were faithfully waiting had died during this time. They had suffered persecution and they waited. It was not a passive waiting but a time of active growth becoming the body of Christ in the Greek province of Thessaloniki. Paul writes to his friends there to thank them for their fruitful waiting. He tells them that even those loved ones of their community who have died in the waiting process will rise from the dead to welcome the Lord on the day of his return.  Paul uses the euphemism “falling asleep” as a circumlocution for death when he talks in the letters about those who have died

There is an old Gospel song called “Stepping on the Clouds”  based on this passage. The chorus goes:

STEPPING ON THE CLOUDS WE'LL SEE JESUS
RISE TO MEET HIM IN THE AIR
STEPPING ON THE CLOUDS HE WILL GREET US
OH THE JOY TOGETHER WE'LL SHARE
I'M GONNA LEAVE THIS WORLD BEHIND ME
GOING WHERE THE DEVIL CANNOT FIND ME
I'M GOING HIGHER, HIGHER, HIGHER
STEPPING ON THE CLOUDS.

I remember listening to that song and singing along with it. I was dating Pat and driving home to Lynchburg from her home in Roanoke late on Sunday nights. I needed to get back because I knew that some of my parishioners were watching my apartment house to see if I did make it home. It was always dark and I usually had the radio set to public radio, but on Sundays they played  “Music From the Hearts of Space” which was meditative music. I would switch to the Gospel music station and open the windows and sing out loud to stay awake.  Sundays were busy. I had the 8:00 service, the 9:00 service for the deaf, the Sunday School at 10:00, a Sung Eucharist at 11:00, some home visits, and then I’d hightail over to Roanoke because I could not wait to see her. We would have dinner and spend time together, and I would leave about 10:00, listening to loud Gospel music for the hour-long drive. I knew the song was about how people in Thessaloniki  longed to be united one day with the one they loved and Paul telling them that wait could be a time of growth and that love would find a way.

I remember my mother talking about how she had married my father in Ohio right after she graduated from college at Chapel Hill in 1941. My father, one of those veterans we remembered in our prayers who “ventured much for the liberties we now enjoy”,  had been sent with the Marines to California and from there to the South Pacific. They loved each other and waiting while they were apart was horrible, but they both grew in their love. When his unit had been called back to California to prepare for the invasion of Japan, she took a leave from her job in Youngstown to take the train to San Diego to be with him for what might have been the last time. My older brother was conceived on that visit - they still planned for the future even when the odds were not in their favor, such was their love.

The Gospel story from Matthew about the ten bridesmaids is about waiting. All of the bridesmaids took the oil with them, all the bridesmaids waited until long after the bridegroom was expected, then all the bridesmaids fell asleep. Remember the phrase that Paul uses about death, “falling asleep”? So maybe this is not just a story about packing some extra oil but about the Christian community joining the wedding banquet, having faith beyond this life.

I did a play years ago called “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett.  The play is about two tramps, waiting for an absent being named Godot; they wait and ponder the meaning of a life of waiting. Two others come on the scene and they see continuing the waiting as an exercise in the absurd. A line is “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." Beckett has stage directions like “Pause followed by silence followed by a pause.” We actors would enter into these directions and, depending on what we found in the pause and silences, the running time of the play would lengthen or shorten by a half an hour. We are all waiting, but it is in how we wait that gives us meaning.

Later, when I was a therapist, it was the silences and pauses that gave me clues to what was happening with my client, and I had to learn to keep my mouth shut and let them play out. In my prayer life I find that there is a lot of waiting, and the waiting is an opportunity to go deeper into the longing for God's spirit. Instead of longing for more of whatever we are waiting for, we have an opportunity to long for God and to use the eyes of the soul to turn to God.

Simone Weil, a French philosopher and Twentieth Century unbaptized Saint, wrote in Waiting for God;

“We do not walk vertically. We can only turn our eyes toward God. We do not have to search for God, we only have to change the direction in which we are looking. It is for him to search for us.  . . At the center of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world . . . The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation .  . .  It is mistaken if it thinks it is anything else. The Incarnation alone can satisfy it”

Years ago I was introduced to the idea of a breath prayer. In Hebrew the word for breath, “Rurah” is the same word as wind and Spirit. In Greek the word for breath ,“Pneuma”, is the same word for wind and spirit. We see this word play in scripture beginning with God’s breathing life into Adam to the Gospels when Jesus is dying on the cross  saying,” Father to you I commend my spirit.” and then breathing his last, to the Resurrection when Jesus breaths on his disciples telling them to receive the Holy Spirit, to the disciples in the Upper Room and the mighty wind comes driving  them out into the word full of the Holy Spirit.

The Breath Prayer is a concept from the Eastern Churches where the person tried to follow the Biblical admonitions to pray unceasingly. There are two parts to breathing; to breathe in and to breathe out. The suggestion is to breathe in with a word or phrase that corresponds to that part of God of whom you wish to be in the presence and the breath out with the word of phrase of what is the desire of that prayer.

The classic line from the Russian Church is to breath in with “Jesus, son of God” and hold your breath and then exhale with “Have mercy on me a sinner.”; as the breaths continue you reduce it to “Jesus” in  and “Mercy” out. There is even a theory that the Ancient name of God, “YHWH” was itself a breath prayer with a breathing in of “Yah” and breathing out “Weh”,  to summon the presence of God, the God who is always here but often we forget.

The Poem I wrote to begin my work on this reflection is called Comfortable in Waiting?, itself  began with a breath prayer waiting for God’s strength.  I use the word “Comfortable” as in the old Prayer Book of “Comfortable Words” which is not about a nice easy chair of vowels and consonants, but is from the old Latin of Cum = with and fortis= strength. Do we get our strength from waiting? What are you waiting for? While you are waiting, where are your eyes looking?

Comfortable in Waiting?

It's not that I'm uncomfortable with waiting

for us to join, but it won't come to pass I fear

and all my wasted time ends by time of tear

dripping down ego's losing face devastating.

The longer I wait, greater the fears it seems

your time and promises of love and worth

only end by me suffering times of dearth

then being aware it's only fantasy dreams.

But all this time I struggle to be faithful

and not lose hope to feel your arms on me

entering a future which we'd once foresee

where we dance together to song graceful.

Be still my heart and help me begin trust

that the waiting makes the time more just.

From Hero To Host

A Reflection for the Feast of All Saints (transferred)          All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores  

November 5, 2017                                                               Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Revelation 7:9-17 Psalm 34:1-10, 22 1 John 3:1-3 Matthew 5:1-12

From Hero to Host

American writer William Stafford was born in 1914 and drafted in 1940. As a result of his status as a conscientious objector during World War II, he worked in civilian service projects in work camps in Arkansas and California. After he and other writers got off work for the day, they were often too tired from their work in the Forest Service to write, so they would get up before dawn and write before breakfast, a habit he continued all of his life until his death in 1993. One of his poems is called Allegiances which starts off:

It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.

A couple weeks ago I attended the Diocesan Clergy Conference, and our guest speaker was Jill Mathis, Canon for Transitional Ministry for the Diocese of Pennsylvania, on the need to change in the changing times. She borrowed heavily from Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze who wrote a report called From Hero to Host: A Story of Citizenship in Columbus, Ohio. In that report and other research, they pointed to the dangers of hierarchy where the Leader is the hero with the vision and who works tirelessly to bring the vision to life, depending on his followers to obey orders. High risk means high control; which works for a while in a strict hierarchical model like the military. Heroes tend to burn out, and when that happens, the people tend to flounder until another hero comes forward. It is hard for heroes to make changes because they are always fighting the war they know instead of engaging when the battleground changes.

Some of you may have seen the recent documentary on the Vietnam War. There were many heroes there, and the tragedy was that they were fighting the war they knew in the past instead of understanding a different battlefield, fighting to return to a rehashed past instead of moving to a new future.

We live in a complex world with complicated issues suggesting a change from heroes to hosts. A host gathers people from different disciplines to look at the situation from different perspectives and gets them to work together, sharing their different skills to build a new future. The issue is not problem-solving, but moving into a new future. Hosting is a four part process: (1) Hosts have to learn to be present instead of focusing on their own agenda. (2) They have to practice conversation, not only conversation with others but also the conversation within themselves, of the different parts of themselves. (3) They have to learn how to host conversations, making sure that others know that their contributions are heard and deepened. (4) Hosts have to be part of the co-creation of a new future instead of a rehashing of the past.

In the Gospel lesson for today from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus urges a shift from hero to host. The story begins when Jesus gathers his disciples away from the crowd and teaches them the new rules of engagement. You remember Jesus has gathered all sorts and conditions of people together - some fishermen, a tax collector, a zealot - the kinds of people who see the world differently. He teaches them by example that the only way to be happy, fortunate, and blessed in the Kingdom of the Heavens, the Kingdom of God, is to be humble in spirit, to be able to mourn, to empty themselves out in humility, to work for justice, to be merciful, to train their hearts to be centered on God, to work for peace and to accept loss gracefully. This is how to live on earth as it is in heaven.

The ministry of this new community is not to be a hero of the faith demonstrating how to lead a life of perfect following of the law, but to host the Holy Spirit in the space between people to heal the world by living on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus was not trying to be a new Moses, a new lawgiver who, like Moses, does not get to enter into the Promised Land, but instead trying to be true to his name sake, for the Hebrew form of the Greek “Jesus” was “Joshua”, the one who leads others into the Promised Land. The Jesus community will continue to host God’s Holy Spirit and each other and welcome strangers into the conversation for the next couple of centuries. From the beginning, the members of this heaven-on-earth conversation were called “saints”, people who were hosts in the conversations with God and others. These saints were flawed people, not at all perfect, but they were people who were present, conversed and listened and co-created a community of faith.

However, the Jesus community gets co-opted by Rome and becomes an official religion of the state. They gave up hosting conversation and returned to being heroes pushing agendas for the good of the institution, with a strict hierarchy speaking from on high for strong internal control over the people and issuing marching orders on how to be soldiers for the stability of the Empire and the church. Stability became the norm and the future, the heaven, was pushed off to the time after each of us died. The name “Saint”, with a Capital “S” was then reserved for the heroes of this army and applied only to those in the past who had shown heroic action.

I entered the ordained ministry hoping to be a hero and I tried my best to tie into this ego goal. I spent a lot of time leading campaigns, issuing marching orders, and hewing to the party line. I tried to be the best Priest in the history of Christendom to feed my own ego, never letting go of my agenda. I spent a lot of energy covering up my shortcomings by finding fault in others while excusing my own missteps. I overworked and create a model of unhealthy living and blamed it on God. It was years before I was able to figure out that my vocation as a faithful priest is to pay attention to what Stafford calls in poem Vocation, “The dream the world is having about itself”. He wrote the final line of that poem: "Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be."

My salvation from being literally a successful “damned” Priest was to come to this place where the name of All Saints suggested that we did not need to be heroes but saints hosting conversations with God and others. We did not have a past where we wanted to be mired in a stable nostalgia but rather work together for a new future. We saw change, from the small things to the big things, as facts of life rather than threats. We were not here to solve problems but have fruitful conversations with the community, ourselves, and God. Today we rejoice with Jesus Recinos and Maricela Zaldivar as their daughter, Alaia, is baptized into this ongoing conversation.

One of the things I like about the Vestry is that we start off our meetings with people sharing answers to a question for meditation. We begin our business with listening to what God seems to be doing in our lives. I have tried to send out my sermon/reflection and post it a couple days before the service to give a chance for conversation instead of springing on you and speaking from on high on Sunday where there is no time for conversation. Speaking of that - I wanted to use the question for meditation as a way to encourage parishioners to be present and have internal conversation before the service, but there is so much noise as people are having conversations with each other. I have had to get used to not being in strict control, and it is not all bad. All Saints is the place, and the people, where and who are, as Stafford says in his poem: “time for all of us common ones/ to locate ourselves by the real things/we live by.”

From Hero to Host

Walking before a morning sun arises

we have a chance to ponder a choice

to live into the being a hero or a host

in a play that the Holy extemporizes.

Historical Big “S” Saints are heroes

snarling with defiance against devils

tempting them to surrender to revels

worldly, staring them down to zeroes.

The little “s” saint is the host to holy

emptying out all of that glory thirst

so that they might make Higher first,

not themselves, but like Jesus lowly

becoming one with the blessed meek

who rely on a power greater to seek.

Reflection and Poem for Reformation Sunday

Reformation Sunday Service of Emmanuel Lutheran and All Saints Episcopal        Reflection October 29, 2017            Southern Shores, NC              Thomas E. Wilson, Episcopal Rector

Jeremiah 31:31-34       Psalm 46          Romans 3:19-28            John 8:31-36

Re-Form-Ation

The question for today for meditation is “How are you continuing your re-forming of your relationship with God and neighbor?

Years ago, before I had my mid-life crisis, a kind of reformation, which led to my going to seminary, I was teaching Social Work and Counseling in a College. It was about this time of year, mid-term, when I would have a “Come–To–Jesus” session with my students on how to do essay questions, especially in one class, “Social Welfare As A Social Institution”, that I taught every fall semester. In it I had a section on 12 ways of dealing with the poor that has been tried throughout history, from Number 1: “Let Them Starve, by Happenstance or Design” to Number 12: “The British Health System”, where societal equal vulnerability during the World War II Bombing Blitz led health care to be seen as a right not a privilege. Every midterm I would have an essay question asking students to compare and contrast three of the twelve ways; the three changed every year. 

This was a question that called for analytical thinking about the purposes and consequences, advantages and disadvantages, of each approach. However, many of the students had been taught in high school to memorize things they heard any person in authority say and regurgitate them back on tests. Or, they unthinkingly parroted their parents’ opinions that people were poor or unable to afford food, shelter, or medical care or to have good marriages because of their own laziness or sinful predilections or God’s Social Darwinism of thinning out the species of the weak members. I was not asking them to feed me back the company line of either me, their parents, or anybody else, but to think, to have a coherent response to real life, to use the brain that God had blessed them with. As the 6^th century BC Poet Theognis of Megara commented: "It is easier to beget and rear a man than to put good sense in him.”  Yet we try, against the backdrop of what passes for education calling for the parroting back of the slogans of the conforming order of the dominant culture instead of learning to ask of, struggle with, and honestly answer questions of worth. My employer being a Baptist college, I would quote Scripture, Paul from his Epistle to the Romans: “Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

In Romans, Paul posits transformation sets us free from the past, which the Gospel of John passage for today echoes. Martin Luther was especially indebted to the Book of Romans. Martin had a Confessor, Johann von Staupitz, who saw Luther as imprisoned by the old form of sinful shame. Luther was reported to say that if it had not been for Johann, he would have “sunk into hell”. He was so conformed to the company line of sin and hell that he spent hours trying to follow that company line to perfection, dwelling in the hell of his own making. Von Stupitz saw an opening, a release from the old form of damnation, by arranging for Luther to teach students to re-vision Scripture from a book of law to a love song from God. With his students' help, Luther, by the re-forming of his thinking and his faith, transformed his life and the history of the world. This re-formation of thinking led him to confront the conforming party line of the larger powerful Church, He had not been the first reformer; there had been many over the centuries, and some had been incorporated by tolerance into the larger church. St. Francis, for instance, was a reformer several centuries before Luther, but he did not mess with the church’s sources of money or power; he found a way into the heart of God by reforming himself away from the love of money and power and did not waste his time by picking a fight over who was right. Francis became, as one writer affirmed, “… the most admired and least imitated saint in the church.”

Most of our heroes are those who get into fights about who is right, and Luther was one of those. Insisting on dualistic thinking of “right and wrong” leads to conflicts of intellects, of persons, of nations, religions, and civilizations where one side wins a Pyrrhic victory and everybody loses. Erasmus, who was an early admirer of Luther’s scholarship, wrote warning Phillip Melanchthon, Luther’s Deputy, in 1524: 

I know nothing of your church; at the very least it contains people who will, I fear, overturn the whole system and drive the princes into using force to restrain good men and bad alike. The gospel, the word of God, faith, Christ, and Holy Spirit – these words are always on their lips; look at their lives and they speak quite another language.

Luther’s insights in theology, as well as the other Reformers like Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, and the Counter Reformation on the other side, were hijacked by political figures who had their own agendas for power and money, where the world was treated to spectacles of brutality as different followers of the Prince of Peace tortured and slaughtered each other to get their version of God’s approval. 

The problem with the Reformation is that it did not go far enough. Jeremiah has a vision where God sings of the time of a new covenant which God 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,”

The Biblical word “know” does not mean an intellectual understanding, like I know that the City of Omaha is in Nebraska, not Kansas, but the kind of “knowing” of an intimate nature, the joining of hearts and bodies into one where questions of intellect become irrelevant. Knowing is about love, vulnerability, joy of discovery of differences, respect of the other, working toward a common goal, the awareness of our own flaws, forgiveness, and the grace that flows between, in, over, under, and through us.

Today we have an opportunity as Emmanuel Lutheran and All Saints’ Episcopal come together for a Luther-palian service of Communion and Baptism. The child that the Episcopal Priest and Lutheran Pastor will baptize together has an Episcopal father and Lutheran mother, and they have been going back and forth between the two congregations in two different parts of the building complex on the same campus. Whose book in which this child’s name is enrolled is irrelevant because both congregations, in the name of the Savior who is greater than the both, is us combined, and we will give our promises of support.

Reformation is not something that happened 500 years ago. It is something that we are called to continue daily in our own lives and our churches so that we and our places of worship might be transformed into being the body of Christ in this world and the next.

Re-Form-Ation

The old form for us was Jesus is dead,

killed by the long ago far away others,

not only the people that Jesus bothers

but all the thoughts dwelling in my head

that slithers out to become sins of mortal,

as opposed to the ones of nature venial

only calling for some actions remedial,

kills grace, calls for soul’s death immortal.

New form is re-visioned in images of dove

changing the threat of shame and hellfire

to living Christ burning within holy desire

entering into union; omega point of love

as undying spirit writes new manuscripts

on hearts, setting us free from our crypts.

Seeing God's Back Poem for 22 October

On 22 October our summer seminarian is back for the service in which we will have a baptism. He will preach. If I were preaching I would talk about the lesson about Moses wanting to see God face to face but sometimes we can only see God as God moves away. This is the poem that came to me when I reflected on this lesson and on a pastoral session.

Seeing God’s Back

Moses asks to see God’s glory face to face.

But a voice said, “No, you can’t handle it,

rather let you see  full when a scene is quit

and action done, leaving the candle of grace.

The young man came in, a boy of once ago

that I lifted high in the air, but now his feet

stray in no-man’s land, one step from street

living while he  wrestles with an ancient foe.

We talk, I listen, scriptures is once again read

of Jesus wrestling with those selfsame doubts

of light or dark and which to follow its shouts

to walk its path through this life until we’re dead.

God’s breath was shed by our breaths in prayer,

leaves blessings for walking on holy ground fair.