Bridges 2022

 

A Poem and Reflection for Pentecost XV              St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Ahoskie, NC

September 18, 2022                                                 Thomas E Wilson, Guest Presider

BRIDGES 2022

The Gospel lesson for today, Luke, 16:1-13, is a parable that Jesus talks about an audit of a manager who has cooked the books, the financial records, of the owner. Jesus did not do moral fables, he did parables The difference between a fable, an imaginary story where the point is the moral lesson made, and a parable is that the parable contains an action showing God's freedom and the point is in the twist at the end.

If this story had been a standard moral fable, the manager would have been locked up until he repaid every last cent, proving that crime doesn't pay. In the parable, the master laughs, there is no punishment; for the point of the story is not about what you get but who you are. What kind of life are you leading? Is the point of your life to be successful. or is it to be faithful? The audit is not about money but about character. The audit is an invitation to walk onto the bridge to a new kind of living.

I live on the Outer Banks and we have just completed yet another Tourist season, when most of the cars in the Western Hemisphere, filled with people, cross the bridges to pay a small fortune to taste what we residents have every day. Many residents complain about the influx. There are others, in the hospitality business, who know that they must make a profit in this short season to make a living. This year has been rough because the usual influx of summer lower wage workers from foreign countries needed to keep the businesses profitable, have not been available for several years for various reasons, but are not available now, because there is no place the workers can afford to stay since rents are so high. You have to keep wages low if you have any hope for making money. Before the year is up, every employer is going to undergo an audit to determine if she or he can open again next year.

Everything is more expensive. There was an article in the local paper that reminded us who live on the Outer Banks, as if we residents didn't already know, that once you cross the bridges onto the islands, gasoline prices will rise about 40 cents a gallon. The State Attorney Generals in previous years at the urging of candidates for public office, investigated if this was illegal “price gouging”. The rulings were that this is the cost of doing business in the reality of a tourist economy.

We undergo audits all the time, and the audits are always changing, depending on where we are in life.. Playwright, Samuel Beckett said:“In the afterlife, we’ll sit around talking about the good old days, when we wished that we were dead.”

Ego Psychologist Erik Erikson saw life as a series of Eight milestones of Psychosocial development, from infancy through death, which give bridges for who we might become in life. For instance, the first stage of psychosocial development is the time of infancy, from birth to 18 months. There the struggle is between “Trust vs. Mistrust”. Does the world have a welcoming feel to it for the infant? Is there a sense of knowing that there is a certain order that you can trust? Or is it full of mistrust where you are not sure that you can count on anyone? Each child is doing an audit of the world in which she or he lives, everyday; if you hurt; will someone, come to ease the pain? If you are hungry will someone feed you? If you are frightened, will someone comfort you? How far is the infant going to go on the bridge to the next milestone of the Toddler; Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt.

The last stage of Erikson's Psychosocial development is the time, between age 65 to death, the struggle between “Integrity vs. Despair”. This is the stage my wife and I operate out of. We are in the autumn audit of our lives. The view from this Bridge is to ask; “Did we waste the time in how, or where we lived? Are we bitter that some parts of life has passed us by? What do we do with all this stuff? Is this bridge, finally a time for us to get rid of the baggage of not forgiving the sins of others. Are we where we are supposed to be??

40 years ago in Seminary, I read an article in a theological journal about a proposal to build an escalator to make it easier for tourists to get to the top of the Schwedagon Pagoda of the Eight Sacred Hairs of the Buddha in Rangoon, now Yangon, in Burma, now Myanmar in Asia. This was an article that explores two different ways of pilgrimage. The Western way is the Holy moment is the arrival at the person, place or thing being held in worship and strike that off the Life-To-Do list. The Eastern way is the Journey itself is the purpose where the Holy is experienced in each moment from the beginning to the return. The Western solution in the proposal was to get more people to the Holy Spaces in the least amount of time. The Eastern response was slow it all down, taking one holy step at a time, one holy, liturgical, breath at a time. It is like the question of when does communion begin with God in the Holy Communion Service on Sunday Morning at 11:15 AM the moment of getting the wafer of bread? Or does the Holy begin when one gets out of bed on Monday morning, when one wakes up that morning in each step, each breath, that is taken for the rest of the week?

From the reading of that article I vowed to take each pilgrimage as if the journey is more important than the destination. Is the spiritual life found in the bridges we are on? I wanted to walk barefoot up the steps of each of the four terraces of the Schwedagon Pagoda of the Eight Sacred Hairs of the Buddha in Yangon in Myanmar; one step at a time, up four different staircases, where each step is a liturgical step, and one breath at a time where each breath a liturgical breath.

Yet, there was also a desire for fulfillment of an adolescent fantasies sparked by reading Kipling's poem Mandalay. I dreamed of being in Burma, 300 kilometers South to watch Kipling's “Dawn come up like Thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!” or at least “By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea./There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;”. With the present political climate in the place once called Burma; I don't think that is going to happen in my lifetime. But who knows? I can live with the fact that there is no Burma girl who thinks o' me.” Also, I now live on the second floor of a Condo where there are 33 steps, in four runs of: 7 steps and 8 steps, from the parking level to the 1^st floor, 9 steps and 9 steps from the first floor to the second floor. I average a climb up and down about four times a day, 264 steps up, 264 steps down. Two of those trips are walking the dog and usually I am focused on the dog. The other two times, I have learned to slow down, and each step can be a liturgical step, each breath a liturgical breath, to center myself, but I usually have shoes on. And I know “there's a once Toledo girl who waits for me”, who takes the elevator. 

 

This last week, “slow walking over bridges, one step at a time”, is on the news in the Britain, with the long lines of people passing by the casket of the Late Queen Elizabeth, Some are tourists, who want to check off their pilgrimage to do list. However, for many others it is a spiritual pilgrimage to make meaning in their lives. Each step is a liturgical step of facing the preciousness of life, the inevitability of its ending and the hope of something beyond this life.

In this time of Psycho-social development, it is important to come to grips with our relationship with death? Are we afraid of death? I can try to be careful, but we are all on those bridges to keep those Appointments in Samarra; wherever that Samarra may be. In the meantime, none of us are perfect and there is always a litany of mistakes and things “we have done that we ought not to have done, and not done those things which ought to have done. It is one of the reasons we do do confession usually during the Sunday morning service. Examinations of Conscience are not attempts to uncover shame, but to provide a time for an audit of one's days, on the Bridges of life.

In our kitchen at home, there is sometimes hanging a kitchen towel, showing an alluring sexy woman, with a come hither smile saying: “I am going to Hell in every religion.” It is a kind of gift given by friends of the Minister's spouse, so she/he won't take the responsibility too seriously, and to remind her/him that we are, both saints and sinners, in the hands of a loving God, who offers forgiveness for all things.

So, how are your audits coming? Remember, they are graded on an unbelievable curve.

BRIDGES 2022

Magic lines at center of the Wright Memorial Bridge

mark the difference of forty cents a gallon for fuels

from those who are just plain standard visitor fools

and those pegged as neighbors who don't cross the ridge.

It is the casual exploitation of people who are strangers,

you don't ever have to see again due to market forces,

versus awkward contact of neighbor in the daily courses,

like the Temple treatment of pilgrims by money changers.

Every moment and person is a gift not to be squandered,

with less than the full honor as precious gift of the Divine

as if we were placed here together visiting a Holy Shrine

when we into this time and space serendipitously wandered.

Gospel today reminds me, as a manager; I squander so much

by holding back on what I was supposed to cherish, not fudge.

September 11 Keeps Coming

 

A Poem and Reflection On the Occasion of Remembrance of 9/11       September 11, 2022

St. Thomas Episcopal, Ahoskie, NC                                                       Thomas E. Wilson, Guest Presider

Isaiah 61:1-4     Psalm 31:1-5,19-21         Romans 8:31-39          Matthew 5:1-10

September 11 Keeps Coming.

20^th Century Anthropologist and Philosopher, Loren Eiseley, writing in a collection of essays named, Star Thrower, published before his death in 1977, reflected “Ironically, I who profess no religion find the whole of my life a religious pilgrimage.” Another way of saying this is in his 1957 book, The Immense Journey, writing about the evolution of humans, imagined about the development away from mere stimulus then response, to stimulus, then reflection about a deeper meaning and then response.

“For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.”

The contemplation of self and hearing “with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds”, is what is behind the lessons for today, and the remembrance of the events of, reflection about, and response to, September 11, 2001, as a religious pilgrimage. It begins with a break of the stimulus and the response. The primal response to a stimulus of hurt is to hurt back; if you are attacked, then you immediately run away or need to do a bigger counter attack. “Don't mess with me.” If you are a religious dilettante, you can find justification of “an Eye for and Eye.” But as Gandhi and the Dalai Lama remind us; “An eye for and eye brings us to where we are all blind.” If you take the word “religion” seriously, you understand that the word “religion” comes from the Latin word “ligare” meaning to “bind together'”; literally to bind together again, to bind oneself to others, to creation to something beyond oneself.

However, the interruption between the stimulus, be it pleasure or pain, and the primal response is when there is a contemplation, an awareness of “the whisper of the wind”, the mystery outside oneself which we sometimes call “God”, or part of the “religious pilgrimage” of human life. This time of contemplation which interrupts the primal action of stimulus to response is the time when we ask ourselves important questions before we choose to respond.

These questions include:

If God has given us direction to love our neighbor and to take care of God's creation as the core of a religious pilgrimage; how does that apply to this situation?

The person(s) who did this stimulus; who is he, she or them?

What was behind the stimulus given? What led up to it?

Was it an accident?

Is forgiveness an option?

Will my response hurt, damage, or help others?

Will my response be helpful to bring about a reconciliation or a deepening of a relationship?

Where is the Holy Space?

Will my response break open my heart or shut it tight?

What have we learned from similar situations?

The lessons speak Good news to us in the mist of broken times. The Prophet Isaiah speaks to bind up the broken hearted. The Psalmist calls God her “Tower of Strength”. The Apostle Paul thunders out:

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Jesus, in the Gospel lesson from Matthew, has had crowds of sick and broken people come to him looking for healing. They are heart broken and each living creature is contemplating themselves and hearing with their “unaccountable loneliness” the voice of Jesus when he stands up and speaks to them to tell them how blessed they are, for the living God is in the sacred space between them and their illnesses.

19 centuries later, in what is now Poland, Hasidic Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, counseled, “There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.” This is a continuation of when students centuries before asked, “Why did God write all the laws on our hearts and not in them?” The earlier Rabbis said that we can only understand those laws when the heart is broken open, allowing the truth of them to rest in our broken hearts. Otherwise, it becomes just a collection of legalisms. Any true religious pilgrimage begins in the space between between the stimulus, inserting then a contemplation to listen, then the response in light of that contemplation is called for.

I remember September 11, 2001. I was serving in St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Macon Georgia. I left the Rectory on College Street, walking next door to the Parish Hall/ Administration/Education Building, which was originally an orphanage, and arrived at 8:00 AM to check my messages, leave the instructions to the Secretary, pick up the reserved sacrament case from Sunday. At 8:05 I start, that Part of my weekly habit on Tuesday mornings, taking a lovely end of summer- beginning of fall, walk from my office in the Education and office building, walking East quietly and reflectively past the Rectory, and then past the Sanctuary on the corner, turn North down Forsyth street to the next block, to St. Paul's Apartments, on St. Paul's Street, a high rise for independent Senior Living build by the church as part of its ministry. I go in the Apartments' fellowship hall where I would, starting at 8:15 AM, preside over an abbreviated Eucharist with reserve sacrament followed by a Bible Study of the lessons for the coming week. All was right with the world! It was 8:30 AM.

It was during the Bible Study that we received news that a plane had hit a skyscraper in New York City. We thought it was a regrettable accident, so we stopped to pray for this accident and the people involved. Someone remembered that during World War II, in 1945, a B-25 bomber flying in a thick fog had crashed into the Empire State Building. Then the second plane hit the other tower. We did some more prayers and then I went back to the office, changed the phone message to tell callers that the Sanctuary would be open for prayers. Then the 3^rd plane hit the Pentagon. I sent the Secretary home, checked on my wife, looked at the television coverage and the Fourth plane went down in Pennsylvania. I went to be with people if they chose to come to the sanctuary.

I prayed for peace, but part of me was furious about the slaughter of innocents. I thought about the orphans, widows and parents of those who died. In my anger, I wanted to find out who was responsible and wanted to get revenge. My heart was breaking and I went to ring the church bells, slowly in mourning. As the bells mourned I remembered the chorus of the Leonard Cohen song Anthem:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

It would be nice to say that we as a nation entered into a religious pilgrimage after 9/11. But cries for justice were drowned out, as the screams for revenge grew too loud. We went to war with our enemies and then with another enemy, and then with each other. All sorts of wars are still going on as egos get bruised, truth gets twisted, relationships become weaponized, hearts get slammed shut, as we respond unthinkingly quickly to stimulus. What we are doing today is to see our path in the light of a religious pilgrimage.

September 11 Keeps Coming.

On that September day, everything was promised,

a day where I could be a blessing to those in need,

but then turning into day full of whimpering plead.

“Where in hell are you?” cried Doubting Thomas.

To a whisper of the wind in now empty sanctuary,

the gentle whisperer said, “Now you have a choice;

you can listen to your fear or listen to another voice;

Rebbe Kotzk saying broken hearts needn't be scary.

Your Rabbi has said to the broken hearted; “Blessed

are you knowing you're broken, longing to be whole,

but first is the beginning, in the healing of your soul,

so fear and hatred will be removed from your breast.”

Now is the time, past the time, to listen, slow down,

before we forget we are all standing on Holy Ground.

Soaring With Eagles

 

A Reflection and Poem for 12^th Sunday after Pentecost       Thomas E. Wilson, Guest Celebrant

St Mary's Episcopal Church, Gatesville, NC                         August 27, 2022

Sirach 10:12-18     Psalm 81:1, 10-16       Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16       Luke 14:1, 7-14

Dylan Mack Cloutier; Soaring With Eagles

From the reading from the Book of Sirach or Ecclesiasticus; “The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord;/the heart has withdrawn from its Maker.” The Book was a compilation of sayings and lessons from the compiler's grandfather, a Rabbi in Egypt a couple centuries before the birth of Jesus. It was a popular book among Jews and would have been used freely by Rabbis like Jesus, whose mother, on finding she was pregnant, sang a song, the Magnificat, sprinkled with sayings from this book. Jesus probably was aware of the reading for today and used it as the core of his teaching in the Gospel reading for today. Although popular, it was not considered part of the Jewish Canon of Scripture because there was some question if it was originally written in Greek, not Hebrew. The early Christian church accepted it as inspired but there were quibbles about including it as part of the Canon. The Protestant Reformation scholars dropped it for their Bibles, while the Church of England demoted it a quasi scripture category called the Apocrypha.

From the Gospel lesson for today:

Jesus said also to the one who had invited him, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

The lesson is about how pride, self- love born out of fear, gets in our way in following God. We are so worried about what people think of our image, that it gets in the way of loving either neighbor or God. The Early church considered Pride as the Mother of All Sins, the Chief of the Seven Deadly Sins. It was considered an “Original Sin”, so in the Medieval times, at the time of an infant baptism, the Baptizing Priest would pinch the Baby, so that in the resulting scream the Devil would be expelled to come out and the Blessed Holy Waters would cover the child in the healing holiness. Priests also learned that if you are Baptizing a male baby and you dunk the naked male baby in the containers of warm water, and then take him out, you needed to have the male baby face away from you, or the Altar Guild will be ticked off having to clean the vestments.

One of the high points, every time I come to Gatesville to preside of a banquet of Holy Communion; I am driving through the Great Dismal Swamp and I get a chance to see Bald Eagles, nesting and hunting, living free and wild. When I was a teenager, we were being warned about, what Rachel Carson called, “the silencing of the birds”. She pointed out with the overuse of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT, many bird populations were threatened. Action and prayer for changing the way we lived, was a road to the recovery of several species, like Bald Eagles. Every time I come, my banquet was beginning before I ever got to the town limits as I was blessed by the resurrection of the Bald Eagle Population and the sacrifices made to make it happen,. I was their guest, God's guest and the Eagles' guest.

When I drive through the Great Dismal Swamp, I remember how it had a been a haven for runaway slaves, from 1619, when African slavery was first introduced on English speaking soil, all the way to the end of the Civil War in 1865, 246 years of sanctuary. I am driving through Holy Ground, I am an uninvited guest and I am blessed by those who struggle in hope.

By the time I get here, I realize how blessed I am and you invite me to join you in blessing God. I come to the Great Thanksgiving already thankful. Thank you.

Today, when we do the Baptism of Dylan, we invite him as our guest of honor. He has not done a thing to deserve your love, kindness or blessing. For years; he will not be rich or a member of the Vestry. His pledge will not be great. There will be times when he will not follow the sermon. There will be times when he will not operate on your schedule. Yet, he is a gift from God. Your task is to teach by example of word and deed how to love and care for his and your neighbor, his and your environment, his and your church, and his and your Creating, Redeeming and Sanctifying God.

What better place than this area to teach him. This is a place where people, who came longing for freedom, have centuries of history. This is a place where against long odds, Eagles Soar.

Dylan Mack Cloutier; Soaring With Eagles

Dylan's a child whom I will baptize this Sunday.

Saying all the right words, I'll try to get us out in time,

words he (and we) won't understand by reason or rhyme,

but with hope, his heart begins, to break open that day.

Medieval priests pinched a child to let the devil out,

so newly blessed Holy water would cleanse his soul,

as Godparents made promises as a kind of re-sole,

of their boots on the long march against their doubt.

We hope for him to weep for joy as the eagles (bald),

continue to prosper out of town on the Dismal Swamp,

where once they almost disappeared in a past DDT romp,

but now, by prayer and action, that slaughter had stalled.

Make him open. we pray. to live into a new hope,

that into the still promised land, we'll not just grope.

Divisions

 A Poem and Reflection for 10^th Sunday after Pentecost             August 14, 2022

All Saints Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC                     Thomas E. Wilson, Guest Celebrant

Isaiah 5:1-7 Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18 Hebrews 11:29-12:2 Luke 12:49-56

DIVISIONS

The Gospel Lesson for today from Luke remembers Jesus warning about divisions. Luke will write more about those divisions in his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles; between the disciples on who is the greatest, between Jesus and the Jewish religious establishment, between Jesus and the Roman political establishment, between the Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, between the apostle Paul and the disciples in Jerusalem. Paul and others will write letters about the divisions between Christians in their own churches. History, for the next 20 centuries will tell us about the divisions between theologians over the nature of Jesus, (human, or divine, or a “tertium quid”, “a third thing”). Divisions between Creeds, division between different views of scripture, division between different kinds of worship, East versus West, Latin versus Greek, for or against slavery, different views of “salvation”, different views of end time. You name it; the church has had divisions about it, where we fly the banner of the Prince of Peace and work to destroy those who believe the other side of the division.

In my three quarter of a century of life, I have never known a time without division. Tomorrow, August 15^th, is the 77^th anniversary of the announcement by the Japanese Emperor Hirohito of the acceptance of an unconditional surrender by the Empire of Japan. The victorious forces of the Allied Armies started fighting, having open divisions, between themselves as soon as, and even before, the war was over. Divisions over the future of the countries that had been under the rule of Nazi Germany or the Empire of Japan - the losers of the war, or the Colonial Empires of France and Great Britain - two of the bankrupt victors of the war. Divisions between incompatible social and economic systems, systems of economics and governance.

In 1948, my father, who had been in combat in the wars, got a civilian job in El Salvador in Central America. Soon after we got there, there was a coup d'etat where the leader by a rigged election was overthrown by the army, as one garrison on one side of the capital city shelled another garrison on the other side of the city. My parents, their two sons and their infant daughter, fled to a coffee finca on a mountain overlooking the city to be safe and watched in safety the artillery do its work on each other.

Up until two years ago, we as a nation bragged, that we were not a Banana Republic, which attempted coups instead of peaceful transitions of power. So much for that division!

When we moved back to the United States we found a country divided along political, economic, social and racial divisions. My father was a Roman Catholic and my mother was a Presbyterian and the way they settled those division was to raise the children as Episcopalians. However, one way I learned how to be an Episcopalian by singing a song, “I Am An Anglican” about how important it was that we were divided from other Christians.

By the time I went to college, I was trying out being a radical left wing post Christian. I joined a campus debating society and learned how to sneer effectively and score points for whatever side I was on. It made me feel good to hate. Giving me a sense of purpose to sneer. I was with groups that protested the remnants of Segregation and then against our militarization in Southeast Asia. How good it felt to be right and to hate. After my father died, hate wasn't as much fun and I started to return to a Christian view of the world. In the meantime the Episcopalians were fighting each other over prayers books and schisms.

Even my mother tried out a division. When I bought a Subaru, a Japanese import car, in 1981, my mother, who in World War II had stayed in California, near the Marine Base outside San Diego, each day filled with fear that her husband would be killed by the enemy, while my father was fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific from 1941 to 1945, said to me in alarm, “How could you buy that car? Those people ( the Japanese) tried to kill your father?”

Yes, there are divisions. That is a reality but what are we do do with those divisions if we are asked in the middle of the divisions. David Brooks, in a New York Times editorial of July 21, 2022, wrote;

“Sometimes in life you should stick to your worldview and defend it against criticism. But sometimes the world is genuinely different than it was before. At those moments the crucial skills are the ones nobody teaches you: how to reorganize your mind, how to see with new eyes.”

In reorganizing our mind, we learn how to ask questions of the people on the other side of the division. To go even deeper and listen to their pain and their fears. The question for people of faith is to ask where is God in the middle of all this.

In Lincoln's 2^nd Inaugural Address, in the closing days of the Civil War and the country's division, he showed how to reorganize the country's mind and spirit;

“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

A century and a half later after that address, one of vestiges of “the nation's wounds”, Racial Discrimination was addressed. Last month a great injustice was faced, reviewed and fixed when Buck O'Neil, a Star Player and Manager for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Baseball leagues from 1937 to 1955, was formally admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. For decades he was not admitted because he was black, and the white Major League teams were segregated. He became a scout for the Chicago Cubs in 1955 and in 1962 the Cubs named him the first black coach in the Major Leagues, but even then, he was not allowed to coach during the games, as 3^rd or 1^st base coach. He had been turned down in 2006 for admission to the Hall of Fame, but he said at the time:

“God's been good to me. They didn't think Buck was good enough to be in the Hall of Fame. That's the way they thought about it and that's the way it is, so we're going to live with that. Now, if I'm a Hall of Famer for you, that's all right with me. Just keep loving old Buck. Don't weep for Buck. No, man, be happy, be thankful."

What O'Neil did was to demonstrate what St. Benedict wrote in his rules for the Benedictine Community, whose members were to actively listen to each other, “listen . . . with the ear of the heart” and prayerfully consider what was said and then act in obedience to God. O'Neil listened and heard what was being said behind the words. He understood that the official words covered the bigoted, racist fear of the white baseball establishment. He knew the truth of his own God given, and Buck developed, skill. Instead of bitter weeping and fury; O'Neil chose to put his energy to joyfully help others to break the barriers.

When I do pre-marital counseling, I ask the couple to bring in a fight that they had. They usually proclaim that they never fight. But, by the third session they agree that all this wedding preparation and the moving in together plans may have been the occasion of a hard disagreement. As we go through the “disagreement”, I ask them each to share what they felt about, or thought of, or meant in that comment they gave and when did the groundwork for the fight start before the disagreement ever came to the surface. Usually it has to do with how they treat one another in being “right” and did they listen to what was really said. I keep telling them “Good fighters, who listen and cherish each other, make good lovers. Lousy fighters, who only want to win, make lousy lovers.”

Jesus tells us what we already know, we live in communities of division. That is part of being human. Jesus shows us by his life that we have a choice; we can either create battlefields of burnt ground or we live in community with those with whom we disagree by treating the space between us as Holy Ground where we “listen . . . with the ear of the heart.”

DIVISIONS

(One) I'm much smarter, brighter and cuter than you,

far more deserving of an Almighty's approval,

as you can plainly see if you give a fair perusal,

how my side is really the only one that is true.

(Two) The other side gives, “So's your mama!” retorts,

as a way of presenting a full reasoned argument,

aimed to move into sulking silence punishment,

before moving into dueling chapters and verses.

(One) I heard the sound of hurt in you, can't we stop

for a moment and just listen to spaces shared?

(Two) Please let us see there is a power that cared,
that we'd find a way to have arguments drop.

(Three) Lets agree to stop the Cain and Abel stuff,

and agree love is much more than enough.

Sojurning Servants

 

A Poem and Reflection for IX Sunday After Pentecost      Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Nags Head, NC           August 7, 2022

SOJOURNING SERVANTS

Genesis 15:1-6
Psalm 33:12-22
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

There are two references about the Patriarch Abraham in the lessons for today. First from the Book of Genesis, in the Abraham Mythopoetic saga, where Abram is at the end of his faith and about to call it all off unless he can get an outward and visible sign that he can stop his wandering and find a home. As in most of Mythopoetic sagas, the Hero is flawed; he has tremendous courage but he also approaches the border and enters into the land of being, what polite people call, NDG, short for “No Damn Good”.

The second reference is from that is called the Epistle to the Hebrews, but which is not an epistle and not addressed to the Hebrews, but is well named as a polemic for followers of the Risen Christ to continue to hold onto faith. The writer of this polemic sanitizes the hero Abraham and sees him as a model of unshakeable faith: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Abraham lived with his father Terah their home in Ur of the Chaldees, where Terah worshipped other Gods. Terah is called by God to come to a Promised Land of Canaan. Abram, Terah's grandson Lot, and Sarai, Abram's wife, join Terah as far as Haran, where Terah falters, longing for a home and missing the home he left in Ur of the Chaldees. In his longing Terah dies. Abram, buries his father, and picks up his father's mission. And wanders where there is no Mapquest. He cannot return to Ur, nor even to Haran,' He has no home, has no idea where he is going; but he goes. He has more than a few moments of fear where he is afraid that the God who called his family, may have lied to him and he will never have a home. In this lesson, God appears to him and asks him to look to the stars for reassurance of putting his trust in God. In essence God's message is a little like T. S. Eliot's line from Little Giddings, “For us, there is only the trying, the rest is not our business.”

Abram will be a sojourner, a man without a stable home. He makes it as far as Shechem in Canaan where he sets up some altars to God. But as he starts to settle down, there is a famine in Canaan and Abram packs up his family and goes to Egypt where he lives as a alien. While there, he also enters into NDG territory while out of fear, he will lie and swindle; which gets him into trouble there and has to leave to go back to Canaan, where he continues to dwell in NDG behavior, lies again and then gets involved in a Civil War. He will claim a lot of land but in fact, the only land he will actually own will be the plot of land that he buys to bury his wife, Sarah, when she dies. It would be nice to say he always had faith, but he didn't. As broken as he was, as NDG as he is, he ends his life and finds his home in the heart of God

Where is your home?

I was born and spent two days of my life in the hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, then I lived in homes in Rolla Missouri, then El Salvador, then Pennsylvania, then Ohio, then New York State, then Chapel Hill, then Wrightsville Beach, then Raleigh, then Boone, then Danville, VA, then Sewanee, Tennessee, then Blacksburg, VA, then Lynchburg, VA, then Macon, GA, then Southern Shores, and then Nags Head. I found a home in all of those 16 places, and I left them, and will some day leave Nags Head, because, like Abraham, I am a sojourner, a transient, a sometime, more often than I would like to admit, also dwelling in NDG territory, who is just passing though, whose real home is in the heart of God.

In every one of those 16 homes that I can remember, there was always a place where I felt I could be safe from the outside world. I am an extreme introvert and I need to be alone to center myself. There was always a place, an office, a den, where I thought no one could bother me without my permission. I signed bushels of mortgage agreements and paid lots of property taxes; but I never really owned the houses, they owned me and kept demanding to be taken care of. While English Common law suggests that a person's home is their castle; I was not an absolute King over my palace, as my walls were like sieves, because of my sense of wanting to being indispensable, which was my treasure which fed my ego. As Jesus says in the gospel; “Where your treasure is there will your heart be also.” I found that I could get very good at keeping God out, if I got real busy doing lots of things---and if you want to keep God from interfering in your life; get real busy doing church work.

Nineteen years ago, God's spirit brought Pat and I to the Outer Banks and brought us home to a place I had never been before. One of the things we did when we moved to the Outer Banks was to bless the house turning it over to do God's work of welcome. Jesus addresses this issue of trying to keep God out,in the Gospel lesson for today. Jesus points out that God is the owner the house. Jesus suggests that while we may pay the mortgage, we may have the deeds filed in local courthouses; all the houses, and all owners, and all the guests are invited to be in the heart of God. Again to quote Eliot, “For us, there is only the trying, the rest is not our business.”

SOJOURNING SERVANTS

Lives are full of pillows for heads to rest,

but we keep sojourning from one room,

to another until, when our days consume,

we finally arrive at the goal of our quest.

We tried to find homes of concrete, wood,

glass and wires which we'll claim to own,

with papers to prove, placing our own throne,

in order to rule, hopefully for our own good.

Histories tell us those rulers become slaves,

as their palaces gradually start to own them,

keeping up facades as joy becomes numb,

until those hopes for glory inters in graves.

How about, instead of ruling, we do serving

in the larger mansion, working, conserving?

Learning How To Pray

A Poem and Reflection for 7th Sunday after Pentecost         St. Mary's Episcopal, Gatesville, NC

Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant                                       July 24, 2022

Hosea 1:2-10         Psalm 85       Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19)        Luke 11:1-13

Learning How To Pray

From the reading from the Gospel of Luke for today, the disciples want to learn how to pray. Which brings up a question of where did Jesus himself learn how to pray? Where did you learn how to pray?

 Jesus taught them a prayer, which we turned into ritual, often reciting without thinking. But lets look closer. The word “Hallowed” means that the “name” of God is sacred. In the Jewish tradition, and Jesus was a Jew, one of the most important of the Ten Commandments was about taking the “Name of God in vain.” The Hebrew in the Hebrew Testaments was written without consonants. Hebrew Scripture, like all of the Great Sagas throughout the ages, was never meant to read alone but meant to be memorized and spoken out loud in a community of worship.

But there was one word that was never spoken out loud, and that was the “Name of God”, with the consonants YHWH, yodh, hey, waw, and hey. Think of breathing in and out; when you breathe in, your lungs expand, filled with air you cannot produce, there is a sound like “Yah”. Then when you speak with air coming out of your lungs the sound is like “Wey”. In the creation story God breathed the breath of life into the Human being. So the sounds the lungs make reminds them of God's presence, since the name is so sacred, that is not a “name” to be ever said out loud. Whenever the tetragram was to be said out loud, the speaker would substitute something like “The Name”. YHWH was the word favored by the writers connected to the Temple in Jerusalem. It implies that you cannot approach God directly but must have an intercessor, like a Temple Priest or functionary, to speak to and with God, and follow certain prescribed rites and rituals. If your God is the King of the Heavens and Earth who cannot be approached directly, but through intercessors then the purpose of Prayer is to placate God so that you may live in peace and prosperity. Voltaire once said: “ In a word, we only pray to God because we have made him in our image. We treat him like a Pasha, like a Sultan whom one may provoke or appease”

There were at least 6 other Hebrew sacred names for God that Jews considered holy, not names per se, but derivations from earlier Canaanite functional descriptions about their own Gods, Their chief God and the Father of whole series of Canaanite related religious variants was “El”. Some writers of Hebrew scripture used the word “Elohim”, the plural form of EL, meaning that Elohim is the Supreme God, over all other lesser Gods. “Adonai” was from the word for Lord. Shaddai was the word for almighty. Sabaoth means Hosts like armies. Ehyeh is I am, Ehyeh asher ehyeh is I am who I am or will be. These names, descriptive terms of attributes, were used especially by the prophets outside the Temple structures. In Hebrew culture, when someone knew your name, they knew something about you; they had some understanding. However, with God, God the deep mystery, is beyond understanding. Only God understands God. The name of God is sacred, hallowed, because it is beyond our understanding. Even today, when many Rabbis write the name “God”, they will usually write it as “G_d” to avoid writing a name so holy it cannot be erased. They believe to erase God's name is to take God's name in vain

The prophets focus in on a metaphor for a relationship with God; of God as the parent, who created all life and whose spirit walked with the people of Israel. Their metaphor about the mystery which can be used, is “Father”. We see this in the passages from Hosea for today where people are being identified as the “Children of God”. The prophets suggest that one can have a relationship with God if you see yourself as a “child of God”.

Jesus, a prophet, tells his followers that they can use the metaphor of God as parent, the Sacred Father, and have the courage to speak to God, because God is speaking to them all the time, in every part of creation. God is speaking through the Lilies of the Field, the Birds of the air, the love exchanged in mercy to strangers. Jesus is living proof that the living Spirit of God does not stay up in heaven, but lives in the lives of people here and now. The kind of prayers that Jesus gives begins with the acknowledgement that God may have a better understanding of us than we do. As Anne Lamott reminds us, “The difference between you and God is that God never thinks he is you.”

When I was growing up, I respected my own father tremendously. My Father idolized his Father, who us Grandchildren would call “Daddy Wilson”. Daddy Wilson was an amazing force of nature, adventurer, worked all over the world and legend in the family; we were in awe of him. The model my father gave us of the relationship between father and son was of awe and respect. I would tell my Father of things that I had done right while he was at work. I would NOT tell him about the things that I had done wrong, for I did not want to disappoint him. It was the same pattern I used in my prayers with God; reminding God of what I did right and overlooking the things I had done wrong. Part of this behavior was based on the fact that I had 2 brothers and one sister and, in my mind, they were competitors for what I mistakenly thought was limited approval and love. It was only when I went off to college that I started to risk disapproval by disagreeing. My father died while I was still in college and I was devastated. I had no spiritual life, the only prayers I knew were memorized ritual without thought. There is a scene in Shakespeare's Hamlet where Hamlet has an occasion to get revenge on his step-father, but he sees him, kneeling in an act of prayer. Hamlet, afraid that Claudius is in a state of Grace while praying, leaves and postpones killing him. Later, Claudius gets up from his knees and sighs saying, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below, words without thought cannot to heaven go.”

After I graduated, I got married and then worked five days a week, eight hours a day, at a job as a counselor with young people who had made some pretty bad choices in their lives. When I found out that my child was to be born, I was scared. Knowing my own failures well, I thought that I could never be a good father. When the nurses wheeled out my daughter out of the delivery room, I was dumbfounded. How could I ever be a father to a girl? I barely understood boys, but girls were a deep mystery.

A college friend had come into town that morning and while we waited for my wife and child to be cleaned up and rested, we had breakfast and I shared my fears with him. Saying them out loud was helpful. One of the things I said, to my shame, was “What would it be if she grows to be the town slut?” To which Jim, who was homosexual said, “Probably, the same as having your son as the town queer.” Jim knew that his father and mother loved him, no matter what.

When the nurses cleaned her up, they let me hold my daughter for the first time, and I saw her through the eyes, not of my fears, but the eyes of my love. I knew that I would be able to love her no matter what she did or did not do? It occurred to me that my own father, had also loved me in a way that was not tied up with approval.

It was the beginning of my understanding of God. No longer was God “the old man above the sky” to be placated and flattered so as to avoid my just punishment. But God is the river of life flowing through me and all of creation, who knew me and loved me, no matter how far I was from being perfect. I was forgiven long, long before I begged for it; which gave me the courage to forgive as I was forgiven. I had always been amused by Heinrich Heine, 19^th Century Romantic Poem. who was asked on his deathbed if he wanted to pray for God's forgiveness: “God will forgive me; that's his job.” It was then I, made in the image of God, started to realize that forgiving is my job as well.

When I started to understand that I was forgiven, that started to change my life. Before then I carried wheelbarrows full of grudges and I did not want to forgive myself or others; I wanted revenge like Voltaire used to boast: “I have only made one prayer to God. A very short one, Here it is, “ O Lord: make our enemies quite ridiculous!” God granted it”. There is a song, which I did not hear until fifty years later, by Country Music Singer, Iris DeMent, which pretty much summed up my philosophy at that time about forgiveness. The chorus goes:

'cause God may forgive you, but I won't
Yes, Jesus loves you, but I don't
They don't have to live with you and neither do I
You say that you're born again, well so am I
God may forgive you, but I won't
and I won't even try

My baby is now 52 years old, and while there have been a few times over this last half century when we had occasion to disagree, there has never been a moment that I did not love her or cease praying for her in thanksgiving and intercession. The point of prayer is to find a way to live a life like Jesus, faithfully and humbly following the Divine Parent; as C. S. Lewis suggests, that we pray not to change God, but to change ourselves.

I have been learning how to pray for more than three quarters of a century and when I looked back, my memories led me into a poem:

Learning How To Pray

Lights lowered, the blankets pulled tight,

the story read, the day's memories shared,

the final songs sung, few regrets are bared.

Now for the recitation, trying to get it right;

“Our Father” replacing old “Now I lay me … ”,

later by “Don't know if anyone's out there … ”,

then trying out, “Give me strength to bear … ”,

arriving today, “My friend, help me to see … ”.

During the day, with our eyes open wider,

we find reminders of those who need aid,

from us and beyond for whom we prayed,

giving thanks to the strengthening provider.

Prayer is breathing in the air of sacred space,

and the breathing out to live the Holy place.

SINGING IN THE KITCHEN WITH MARTHA

 

A Reflection and Poem for 6^th Sunday after Pentecost      July 17, 2010

St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Ahoskie, NC                     Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant

Amos 8:1-12 Psalm 52 Colossians 1:15-28 Luke 10:38-42

Singing In The Kitchen With Martha

When I reflected on the Gospel lesson for today about the behavior of Martha and her sister Mary. I got into my mind's Time Machine and was wisked back in time to somewhere in 27 AD. I saw the place of women that Jesus knew in Judean society. My imagination saw the configuration of the house in the story, for the courage it took from Mary to sit with the men, to the bitterness of Martha harbored while working in the kitchen alone. Martha was doing all the right things; she was in charge of her kitchen, she was making a wonderful meal but she was filled with resentment because she thought it was all about her. She was, as the editor of Luke writes, “distracted”.

I wrote my poem, “Singing In The Kitchen With Martha” and suddenly I was put back in the Time Machine back to the spring of 1965 and I heard the word “adequate”. Oh, so many years ago, I was an 18 year old, second semester Freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was a Drama major and was cast in my first Carolina Playmakers play. It was not a major part, but I was filled with the desire to make my part stand out. When the newspaper review came out, I was mentioned, by name as playing that Character's name, and there was a one word discription of all my work; “adequate”.

I was devastated, while my friends tried to comfort me by telling me that at least I was not reviewed as “inadequate”. In my shame I went back over my work. I knew that I had done the part right. I had said the words clearly and distinctly, got the accent right, got the emotions right, made the right moves on the stage; but I missed the point. I was so busy trying to prove my competence, that I did not enter into the fullness of the play. All my hard and good work was all about me. I was filling myself up rather, than empting myself out. I was, as the editor of Luke writes, “distracted”. Only when an actor empties him or herself out, dies to one's own ego, entering fully into the new community, can the character, he or she plays, come to life.

Plays are not about talented single actors getting on a stage with other talented single actors, saying written lines and not bumping into the scenery. A play is about people joyfully coming to share their particular talents to work together to create a new reality. The play is not about the lines or action but about the creating a new space between the people in the cast and then sharing that space with an audience. At its best, it is the creation of a community which comes together to invite people to join them.

Jesus tells Martha that Mary has chosen the better part. The part is not the part/role you play; which was Mary as a “student” and Martha as a “hostess”, but about the joy from being the inside of a community instead of being “distracted” in the inside of your own ego. Jesus was in the process of creating a community of a new reality for the world and inviting people to join them in living a different kind of life. A different kind of life, where one dies to one's own ego in order to create a new community. Martha gets busy, which is not a bad thing to do; Work is not a bad thing. The problem is when the work is an excuse to build up one's ego; in order to earn praise, or a sense of worth. Then it is not a relationship, but only a commercial exchange; from where we never seem to break even. That is what Martha is complaining about when she accuses Jesus of not caring enough, paying her enough attention, giving Mary more.

In the Bible we have a theme that keeps coming back, over and over again. In the beginning in Genesis; it starts with God, the community within God's very self, makes a decision to enlarge the infinite love. The Divine community creates and molds forth a human, from the humus. God then says that “it is not good for a human to live without a community'. So a mate is created by losing a part of the human self in order to be in a community, a community united and living into the sacred space between them. So what do the these two humans do to live in a community with God? They become distracted and find a way to distance themselves from God, by not telling the whole truth, by blaming others and by hiding. The story goes on as the couple tries to continue community by having two children, Cain and Abel. Except, Cain gets distracted, kills Abel and then says, “Am I my brother's keeper?” The answer is, of course, “Yes, in God's community, you care for one another, for the sacred space between us is what community is all about.”

This is what Amos, thousands of years later, is thundering about. The people have gotten so distracted they have forgotten that the care for one another is the hallmark of community. The Psalmist for today decries our loving words that hurt, which undermines community. The writer of the Letter to the Colossians urges the people to remember that they are being brought together by a power greater than themselves into a community and not to be distracted from the love that binds them.:

And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him-- provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel.

The theme of scripture from, beginning to end, is that we are meant to live in a community where we take care of God's Garden, God's children, together. We are cast in God's play to care for each other and our neighbors.. But somehow, in our moments of distraction we create, and take parts in, other improvisations of comedies and tragedies to find so many ways to get distracted and to pick arguments with each other and our neighbors.

Imagine what life would look like if we began each day, not with a rehearsal of our disappointments of the previous day but with a Thanksgiving for the day to come, such as with the last verse of the Psalm for today:

I will give you thanks for what you have done *
and declare the goodness of your Name in the presence of the godly.

Or with the thought expressed by a Buddhist Monk,Thich Nhat Hanh;

“Waking up this morning, I smile.
Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment
and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.” 
— The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Broadway Books, 1998), p. 102.

You are members of St. Thomas Church, you live in Ahoskie and you are looking for a new Rector. One of the questions you will need to ask yourself is: “What is the community into which you are called to tend the garden of souls with and for each other together through eyes of compassion?” My hope is that whenever, you find yourself having cast yourself in one of those improvisations, “Singing In the Kitchen with Martha”, which in my experience seemingly only happens in days ending in the letter “y”. Which means every day! I pray you stop and listen to Jesus who is inviting each of you with a smile in his voice as he says your personal or corporate name: “ Oh, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. There is a better part, which need not be taken away from you."

Singing In The Kitchen With Martha

Over the stew, Martha continued stewing;

each paddle stroke thudded at the pot's edge,

spilling on fire sizzling! She made her pledge;

Mary'd be shamed at the dinner; have her ruing

how she had neglected to help out her good sister,

who was so faithful. She'd opt to stay in the kitchen,

muttering away quietly so they'd not hear bitchin,

then play a put upon martyr showing a big blister.

Martha longed to have Mary hear Jesus scold

Mary for her selfish pursuit of a soft life, lounging

with lazy disciples, while in hot kitchens scrounging,

Martha's earning her right to be in Jesus's fold.

How distracting it is to look down on others,

almost forgetting we are sisters and brothers.