A Relection on when "all hell is breaking loose"

A Sermon for I Advent                                  All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC December 2, 2012 (8:30)                           Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Jeremiah 33:14-16      Psalm 25:1-9   1 Thessalonians 3:9-13                      Luke 21:25-36

Today we are using the Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Bible, The Message. We have 12 kids being confirmed when the Bishop shows up for the 10:30 service, and that is the version they have been using. The Bishop will preach at that service while the 8:30 crowd has to put up with me.

One of the reasons I like the Message is that it uses vivid language - street language - because the New Testament was written in Koine Greek, the street language of that time, instead of the more classical Greek of the Philosophers and Tragedians.  The King James Version of the Bible was slanted in translation to remind listeners of the Majesty of God and, by extension, of God’s representative on earth in England, King James. James was tired of being a Presbyterian over in Scotland, being told what to do by Presbyterian preachers using the Geneva Bible Translation, and he wanted the pomp and ceremony of the Anglican Church when he came south to England. Listen to the way his translators did the first two verses of the Gospel lesson for today:

And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.

 
Majestic isn’t it? Yet, its beauty removes the immediacy. Now listen to how Peterson translates the same two verses: “It will seem like all hell has broken loose—sun, moon, stars, earth, sea, in an uproar and everyone all over the world in a panic, the wind knocked out of them by the threat of doom, the powers-that-be quaking.”

The King James Version has the beautiful language opening the Psalm, “Unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul. O my God, I trust in thee: let me not be ashamed,” which is lovely and oh so religious. However, the Message has “My head is high, God, held high; I’m looking to you, God; No hangdog skulking for me”, which has to do with daily life.

All the lessons for today are set in times when ‘all hell is breaking loose” in daily life. Jeremiah is writing during the time when the Babylonian Empire is threatening to destroy the country he loves. The Psalmist sings of how his enemies are surrounding him. Paul is writing to the Thessalonians who he had to leave so suddenly years before because of persecution. Jesus is on his way to his death in Jerusalem. So, what is it like to be in a situation when it seems like all hell is breaking loose and so many of the things in which you trusted seemed to be letting you down?  Do you remember moments in your life when everything seemed to be falling apart? Let me prime your pump of remembrance.

Do you remember November 22, 1963? On that day I was a 16 year old senior in high school, and the announcement came over the PA system that President Kennedy had been shot and we were to go home. I remember crossing the bridge over the Chenango River with the freezing wind blowing down the valley, so that my tears and snot froze on my face. How could we possibly survive as a country? A few years later I was in Chapel Hill when I got the news that Bobby Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King were gunned down by our love affair with violence. Then there was Watergate and so it goes through September 11, 2001 when we answered violence with violence and in which, eleven years later, we are still mired down. Yet, in the middle of human violence, I hold on to the strength of the Prince of Peace to work for peace, beginning with me. When “all hell breaks loose” is when we need glimpses of the presence of God, heaven; not the place in the sweet by and by, but the awareness of the presence of God on whom to hold. 

We trust a lot in money as a power to get us through. I remember in 1968 when I graduated from College and had a rough couple months while I was way ahead of the current trend by not being able to find a “real” job.  I worked in a restaurant for the time being, and then the manager of the restaurant skipped town with the money and we had to close down. I found work pumping gas, and then I ended up in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer.  So then I was married, out of work, and owing money to the hospital as well as the university. Years later, after that marriage fell apart and I was a Priest and Pat and I had a home, I took a job at a place where they had a Rectory. We finally sold the house and invested the money we made in the stock market, because the stock market was going great guns especially in dot-com stocks. I should have listened to Mark Twain and his advice on investing in the Stock Market - “October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.”

When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, I took the remains of the investments and took a job here where I had to find a house when there was a real estate bubble in play, so housing was much more expensive, but, I thought, it was a fool-proof investment! That bubble burst in 2007 and helped usher in the financial crisis in which we still find ourselves.  It is real interesting to see your paper financial worth dwindle. Yet, in the middle of that loss, I know that my true worth is not dependent on my portfolio, or my performance, or my job, but on Christ’s love for me. I have made lots of bad choices, but I resonate with the opening of Psalm 25: “My head is high, God, held high; I’m looking to you, God; No hangdog skulking for me.” I continue on because I know that all things lost - be it security, money, jobs, reputation, health, even life itself - is redeemed in Christ. My prayer is always the same: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Just for today.”  

Today at 10:30 there are 12 kids being confirmed, a couple babies being baptized, and a few receptions and reaffirmations.  The thing is that they will all find moments in their life when “all hell is breaking loose”. I know all of you in this room have been through those moments, and your task, the task of the church, the parents, the friends, the neighbors is to remind them by witness of your life, by word and deed, that all things are redeemed. “God, grant them (and us) the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, the courage to change the things they (and us) can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”  Just for today.

Reflection of Moonlight in the pre-dawn

The last couple mornings have been generous with the setting moon so that as I would wake up, the moon just brightened up the time before the dawn. I walked across the grass and see my my footsteps in the white dew left by the cool night air. Not only then but last night before 9:00 the moon was paired with the planet Jupiter, and I marveled at the beauty - paired and yet independent. Diana and Jupiter conversing in the night sky as they passed by -- but we were the ones who were passing by- hurtling through space at  >69 K MPH! Doesn't that boggle the mind? It looks like we are standing still..

 I think if I had not been blessed with being raised as a Christian, I would have made a good moon worshiper; following something like the Virgin Artemis ( or Diana) of Ephesus. The experience of the worshipers of Ephesus helped to lay the ground work for the Virgin Mary Cult but the awe of nature was stripped form the pagan cult and replaced by the emphasis on purity by the male dominated  church leaders who had problems with  uppity women.

The Christianity that  Jesus followed was based on the prophetic strain of Judaism, especially the prophet Micah: "God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"  Part of the problem with Christianity is that the Establishment of the church as an "official" religion reduced worship to buildings, the medieval church focused in on sin and guilt rather than thanksgiving and awe, the Enlightenment reduced  faith to the acceptance of  intellectual propositions and modern times reduced commitment to mental and emotional cathexis to an institution. Through through those process we have domesticated God and removed the Divine from daily life.. 

We have forgotten about a commitment to justice, we have gotten used to a hardening of mercy as we develop a condemning stance on those who disagree with us and we have lost our capacity for humility by forgetting to be filled with awe. We have isolated praise of God to the Sunday morning hour as long as it doesn't take too much time from our own agendas. I think of the lines from Alice Walker's The Color Purple :
Shug: More than anything God love admiration.
Celie: You saying God is vain?
Shug: No, not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off when you walk by the colour purple in a field and don't notice it.
Celie: You saying it just wanna be loved like it say in the bible?
Shug: Yeah, Celie. Everything wanna be loved. Us sing and dance, and holla just wanting to be loved. Look at them trees. Notice how the trees do everything people do to get attention... except walk?
[they laugh]
Shug: Oh Miss Celie, I feels like singing!  

One of the joys of looking at the sky  and seeing the moon or walking on the beach is that I "feels like singing" in praise of God.

Reflection on choices

I love movies- the whole idea of pictures moving to tell a story as a product of a collaboration of artists, artisans, and journeyman laborers pooling their considerable talents and agreeing on a vision they can share. I saw four (4 !!) during the Thanksgiving break- two on Netflix and two at the theaters.  Three were examples of that collaborative effort and one failed based on the choices that were made.

The three joys were Ang Lee's Life of Pi,  and Spielberg's  Lincoln in theaters with stunning visions and choices - not all of them worked but a little like a comedian's monologue where the jokes that fail are forgotten in the joy of laughing at the jokes that work. These movies, the images, the questions,  the interactions between actors, they all stayed stayed on in my mind long after the lights had come up. I will be using scenes from these pieces of art for a long time to come as I reflect on scripture for sermons.

Still of Gérard Lanvin, Gilles Lellouche and Claire Pérot in Point Blank

On Netflix Point Blank :This is no brilliant great movie that will last for all time- it is pure hard work by some people  who trusted each other to create a roller coaster ride thriller. Not great art but good film making so that you care about the characters while you are being thrilled by the work. 

The one miss was Main Street and it had everything going for it- topical story about a community in decline searching for a solution, it is set in Durham, NC, a city which I knew well once upon a time, a neat twist of comparison of the poison of tobacco which built the town and the new poison of Hazardous Waste that promises to rebuild the town -- pick your "poison de jour"-  Horton Foote writing the screen play, a world class stage director, John Doyle, a brilliant cast who do fine acting Colin Firth, Ellen Burstyn, Orland Bloom, Patricia Clarkson, Amber Tamblyn  -- how could it go wrong?  Well - the director made choices and each actor had good scenes to strut their stuff - and they did- the problem was the script was like a stage play with "acting class" written all over them and each actor seemed to act independently of each other. The plot seemed to have gaps which you could drive a semi through-- indeed the wreck of the fleet of trucks carrying hazardous waste seems like a perfect icon of the movie. The camera work was restrained in order to give the actors room but it looked as if the director lost interest in telling the story and more in giving his actors their free rein. By the end of the movie with the characters telegraphing their changes in their lives- I thought that the director had had enough and wrapped it up since his money had run out.


 What are the kind of choices we make that create art with others by giving our best give our best to create a community vision that invites others to join in? I think of a film as a metaphor for the church; lots of good and talented people but are we uniting around a shared vision, are we giving our best, do we all participate in living the underlying story in our lives or are we just play acting our roles?

sermon for Christ the King

A Sermon for the Feast of Christ the King All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC November 25, 2012 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 Psalm 93  Revelation 1:4b-8 John 18:33-37

Today is the Feast of Christ the King when we proclaim that the one for whom we are waiting in Advent is not a cute little baby, or even a sage teacher, but Christ the King. The lessons underline the metaphor of Christ as King, ruler of our lives. In the Hebrew Testament lesson, Daniel in his dream, or night visions, sings:

I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.

The writer of the Revelation sings of the Christ: “To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.”

In John’s Gospel, Pilate asks if Jesus is the “King of the Jews”, to which Jesus responds that Jesus’ Kingdom is not of this world. Jesus changes the definition of what it means to be King. So, what do we mean by King?

One definition of “King” is from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King Arthur and Patsy ride through the town and meet the Large Man, the Dead Collector, and a peasant woman:

Large Man: Who's that then?

Dead Collector: I dunno. Must be a king.

Large Man: Why?

Dead Collector: He hasn't got s**t all over him.

King Arthur: I am your king.

Peasant Woman: Well, I didn't vote for you.

King Arthur: You don't vote for kings.

Peasant Woman: Well, how'd you become king, then?

[Angelic music plays... ]

King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.

Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Arthur: Be quiet!

Dennis the Peasant: You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

For us Kings are relics of Days of Yore and, like Dennis the Peasant, we find it hard to take Kings seriously. In our modern society Kings are well-dressed people, or as the Dead Collector says, those who don’t have excrement all over them, before whom we carry out nostalgic ceremonies, giving the appearance of paying deference to royalty. But a King is only a figurehead about whom we will say nice things as long as he benefits the agendas of those who have the power in that society. I think of the Olympics and the Royal Weddings in England this past year and how the Royals were trotted out and everybody liked them. But were we going to listen to a thing they said? Are we going to follow them or just put them on a shelf while the “adults” do the business? Kings have some economic benefit in that their doings and swellings increase tourist dollars when they are trotted out for civil ceremonies. Is that the kind of King Christ is?

This weekend started what is known as the Christmas shopping season, the time when we say publicly things like “Merry Christmas”, as if Christ is King. I start to shudder when the merchants and municipalities put up Christmas decorations to encourage more sales. It is the time when we dress up images of Christ as King and make sure no excrement is sticking to the one who was born in a barn and perform ceremonies to increase that agenda.

I read in the paper that the city of Santa Monica, California has made the decision to cancel the 60th annual Nativity Square display at a local park. The city had a complicated lottery system to determine which of the competing religious institutions would be allowed to have displays each year. The paper said:

The trouble in Santa Monica began three years ago, when atheist Damon Vix applied for and was granted a booth in Palisades Park alongside the story of Jesus Christ's birth, from Mary's visit from the Angel Gabriel to the traditional crèche. . . . Vix hung a simple sign that quoted Thomas Jefferson: "Religions are all alike -- founded on fables and mythologies." The other side read "Happy Solstice." In 2011, Vix recruited 10 others to inundate the city with applications for tongue-in-cheek displays such as an homage to the "Pastafarian religion," which would include an artistic representation of the great Flying Spaghetti Monster. The secular coalition won 18 of 21 spaces. Two others went to the traditional Christmas displays and one to a Hanukkah display.

"It's a sad, sad commentary on the attitudes of the day that a nearly 60-year-old Christmas tradition is now having to hunt for a home, something like our savior had to hunt for a place to be born because the world was not interested," Hunter Jameson, head of the nonprofit Santa Monica Nativity Scene Committee, said in advance of the hearing.

Mr. Jameson is quite right, the world was not interested in hearing the Christmas message when Jesus was born, and it is still not interested. The message is not about something that happened 2000 years ago but what is happening in our hearts right now. Is the Kingship of Christ something to be found on public land as an unattended display about tradition to help the economy and tax base, or is the Kingship of Christ made alive by how we live out God’s love in our daily lives? The world has its own agenda, but our King Jesus’ agenda is to change the world, not redecorate it, by changing us.

As the Peasant woman said in the Monty Python skit, “Well, I didn’t vote for you!” It is about voting for Christ as my ruler - not with a ballot, but with the dedication of my daily life. Do I do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God - or do I waste energy and decorate public monuments for figureheads? Either Christ is my ruler in my life or I am playing a charade. On the Feast of Christ the King, it is a good idea to make a decision.

Reflection on sweating away

Jack Taylor of Grinnell College.

I was doing my usual daily 5:30 morning workout, which pays some penance for my sins of gluttony. I am not there alone in the pre-dawn hours, for there is a couple who are usually in the gym at the same time sweating along with me on the elliptical and weight machines. We are pleasant with each other and exchange some information but when you are working out meaningful conversation is limited. The high point was a mutual sharing of a reaction to the news story on the tube that a 5’10’’ basketball player, a guard!!,  had scored 138 points, on an average of 3 shots per minute. We laughed in admiration but continued on our own agendas.

Today was different. As they were finishing up, the husband asked me if I knew that his wife had been diagnosed with cancer and was to begin chemo the next week. This led to a change in paying attention. I listened as they talked about the discovery and the planned treatment. I listened without trying to fix what was outside my competence and allowed the space between us to become filled with a non-anxious presence. The simple courteous facade slipped away and we got into the real important things of life. They, who are not parishioners, asked me to keep her in my prayers –which can be a standard way of ending conversation with a clerical type. To which I, in my usual response, agreed. But something had changed and I asked if they would be offended if we prayed together right now. So, three standing, sweating, vulnerable people, in a public place, held hands drawing near to the throne of Grace and prayed quietly - I did the talking but the words were less important than the sacred space.  Then we hugged and they left, and I went back to the machines.

There are so many people walking around in our lives filled with so many concerns. It is special when we spiritually bump into each other discovering common ground.

Reflection On Take This Waltz

 

After an exhausting but rewarding day I settled into watching a Netflix disc Take This Waltz a brilliant and disturbing film about the emptiness within each of us humans. Written and directed by Sarah Polley who also helmed Away From Her, another disturbing exploration into a different kind of emptiness, about the pain of losing someone to Alzheimer”s Disease. I had watched that 2005 film because I wanted to see Julie Christie back in work and was awed again by her talent but I was stunned by the direction which used the Canadian cold and snow as a metaphor for the winter inside oneself. Ms. Polley knows how to use women!

After an exhausting but rewarding day I settled into watching a Netflix disc Take This Waltz a brilliant and disturbing film about the emptiness within each of us humans. Written and directed by Sarah Polley who also helmed Away From Her, another disturbing exploration into a different kind of emptiness, about the pain of losing someone to Alzheimer”s Disease. I had watched that 2005 film because I wanted to see Julie Christie back in work and was awed again by her talent but I was stunned by the direction which used the Canadian cold and snow as a metaphor for the winter inside oneself. Ms. Polley knows how to use women!

In this 2011 film which takes as its theme and title from the Leonard Cohen song, some of the lyrics are:

Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on it's jaws
Oh I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lily
In some hallways where love's never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay . . .

And

Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz it's been dying for years
There's an attic where children are playing
Where I've got to lie down with you soon
In a dream of Hungarian lanterns
In the mist of some sweet afternoon
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow
All your sheep and your lilies of snow
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay

The movie reflects the hope and illusion that there is someone, a person, place or thing that can fill the void in the core of our being. At its core it is a spiritual struggle as we choose different ways to escape the pit we fear, instead of befriending the emptiness and finding our true self where we meet the infinite. But we are so afraid to go into that space- what the Michelle Williams character Margot labels as that fear of being stranded between connecting flights.

Oh Williams! She of Brokeback Mountain and My Week With Marilyn gives a naked performance- yes her body - but more importantly she offers glimpses into her soul, and its similarity to us makes us feel naked as well; we want to run into the defense of using our rational explanation and offering trite advice to the pained soul. The shower scene has the young naked women in one shot and the older naked women in another and the realization is that we are all part of the same condition as the younger women look in fear and the older women in envy and loss and yet all of that outer stuff fades. It is only inside of ourselves that we meet what truly matters and all the characters are running from that as fast as they can with the use of desire, substances, sarcasms, activity, work- you name it we use it!

The problem with this movie is that it requires viewers to enter in their own voids and maybe that is why it is out in rentals so soon instead of movie theaters. It is too intimate for a crowd- a small group would be better and having prayers before and after honest discussions.

Good clip of Cohen connecting his song to Garcia Lorca

Reflection on life and death of Peter MacFarlane

 

A Reflection on the Life and Death of Peter MacFarlane

August 25, 1920 – November 15, 2012

All Saints Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC

Thomas E Wilson, Rector

23rd Psalm John 14:1-6

I was thinking about Pete this week and I was remembering a song that a bunch of us sung back in the 60’s written by Andy Stewart set to an old bagpiper song “Green Hills of Tyrol”. It concerns a Scottish Soldier far from home

There was a soldier, a Scottish soldier
Who wandered far away and soldiered far away
There was none bolder, with good broad shoulders,
He fought in many a fray and fought and won
He's seen the glory, he's told the story
Of battles glorious and deeds victorious

who

Sees leaves are falling, and death is calling
And he will fade away, on that dark land
He called his piper, his trusty piper
And bade him sound away, a pibroch sad to play
Upon a hillside but Scottish hillside

Not on these green hills of Tyrol

(Chorus)

Because these green hills are not Highland hills
Or the island hills there not my lands hills
And as fair as these foreign hills may be
They are not the hills of home.

We are born in the image of God, born from the heart of God, and in our lives we wander far away and yet God is with us. Death is the time when we finally go home and rest in the heart of God, from where we began the earthly pilgrimage, with those we love. Heaven is not a place far away where we go after we die but a circumlocution we use to describe the presence of God wherever we are. The Lord’s Prayer reminds us that we ask for God’s Kingdom on earth as well as in heaven. When Jesus says in John’s lesson for today that he is going to prepare a place for us; he is not talking just about after we kick off but he is talking also about his crucifixion and death so that we will know that there is no God-forsaken place; for God is in all places even when it doesn’t feel like it. From the 23^rd Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

Celtic Spirituality, of which the Scots are part, believed in what they called “thin places” where the curtain between this world and the next could be especially thin and when our eyes were opened we could see how interactive they were. Thin places can be geographic; it is one of the reasons that I live on the Outer Banks; whenever I feel like I am obsessed with my own agenda, I go down to the beach and walk so that I am able to see how out of touch I am with the things that are really important. 

 

But, thin places are also non-geographic where we allow our eyes to see God in the space between us. Jesus reminded us; “Whenever two or three are gathered together in my name I will be in the midst of them.” The thin space is there when there is love; like between Pete and Betty. The thin space is there when we act with honor, like Pete did. The thin space is there when we live in integrity like Pete did. The thin space is there when we realize that the world does not revolve around us for we are called to care for our neighbor, like Pete did in his armed service to his adopted country and in founding the Volunteer Fires Department in this community of Southern Shores. The thin space is there when we see people who decide not to practice dying in retirement but to live each day to the fullest as Pete did, as his neighbors watched this 92 year old man climb up tall ladders because he need to fix something in his yard because he saw the world as something for which he continued to be responsible. The thin space is there as we mourn for him and realize that as the piper plays his soldier home, part of Pete’s spirit lives within those of us who were honored to share parts of his life. Jesus said: “In my father’s house there are many mansions” and as we gathered together in thanksgiving for Pete’s life we are in one of those mansions.

We give thanks today for Pete’s life and to see him come all the way home.

This is a version that Stewart sang and we had a bagpiper play the Green Hills of Tyrol

sermon for Nov. 18, 2012 CHANGE?!

 A Sermon for  XXV Pentecost (proper 28)               All Saints Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC November 18, 2012                                                            Thomas E Wilson, Rector

1 Samuel 2:1-10                  Hebrews 10:11-25              Mark 13:1-8

Sandy Briggman in her Servant Ministry Moment talked about how she is called to volunteer with the Guardian ad Litem program and be there for children whose face a unknown future. Everything the children have ever known is being changed, many of the structures they had come to trust are in rubble. So now, what do you do?  You search for a new future without trusting in the past. We did not plan the lessons for today to correspond to her talk but God has this way of showing up despite our plans for the lessons have as one theme the breaking from the trust in the past in order to be set free to envision a new future. There is an old joke about the Episcopal Church: “How many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb?”  There are two equally true answers (1) Four- one to mix the drinks and do it and three to talk about how good the old one was.” And (2) “Change? My grandmother gave that bulb!” 

In the lesson from 1^st Samuel, Hannah is breaking from the tyranny of the past and the present. She was the childless second wife, the trophy wife, of Elkanah. In Israel at that time, if you were a second wife and had no children you were to be pitied. The community assumed that you had displeased God and it was thought that God had closed up your womb as a punishment. Without children, which were their Social Security, if you grew older there would be no one to look after you, and as a woman in that culture, she would not be able to inherit anything from her husband. The first wife despised the second wife because she was a rival for her husband’s attention; and in the story that leads up to Hannah’s song, the first wife never misses an opportunity to show her contempt. Her husband gives Hannah extra rations as a way to placate Hannah’s hurt feelings; but as my wife tells me, husbands usually just sort of miss the point about what is important for a woman. Hannah has no future and she goes into the Shrine to pray and place her trust, not in her husband but in the strength of God, the one greater than herself and her husband. The reading is the song she sings in thanksgiving for her prayer; strikingly similar to a song that the young girl Mary sings a thousand years later as she faces an unknown future. 

Mark in his Gospel remembers Jesus warning his disciples not to put their trust in buildings, institutions and other things built by humans; the future may be uncertain but it is open. In the Hebrews passage the writer speaks of the whole sacrificial system of the Temple which has been destroyed as the Temple was turned into rubble in 70 AD; they are free from the past and able to enter into a new relationship with God through Christ.  

Keeping things the way they are is a comforting illusion. Living things never remain the same; life is about change. What are the things in the past that you trusted? I remember growing up in Upstate New York and we knew that we could always count on the local businesses to provide employment. Look at the companies—there was Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company- everybody is going to need shoes right? Except they make them somewhere else now. There was Link Aviation which made Trainers for aircraft- everybody is going to need flight simulators? Except they went through 5 different buy outs and take overs and are now in England. There was General Aniline & Film (GAF) which made dyes and chemicals, View Masters, Ansco film and cameras and everybody would always need film right? There was IBM and there was a whole new market for room size computing machines and they said they would never leave their beloved home in Upstate for we were a friendly place for business; until they sold off those divisions. Everything was going fine until I started to finish college and looked for work and saw that in the years I was at school we started to enter the Rust Belt as the manufacturers closed down.

Each morning we would also say the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag and we trusted our government to be supporters of freedom and democracy as opposed to those Godless communists. Until that day when we looked at all the corrupt dictatorships that we supported in their abuse of their people because at least these crooks were our crooks and they hated communism. Until that day when we saw the face of Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and saw naked Demagoguery. 

We trusted the government, who we thought would never lie to us; until that day when President Eisenhower stood up and told the world that the U-2 plane was not on a spy mission but on a routine weather information gathering flight when it was shot down while off course over Russia and then had to admit he lied. Until that day when President Kennedy lied, until that day when President Johnson lied, until that day when President Nixon lied and so on.

We trusted our government who told us when a nuclear attack came all we had to do was get under our desks and cover our heads and then go home, take a shower and live under ground for a couple weeks. Until we saw films of Hiroshima which suggested that no desks were big enough to get under for safety and our military considered mega million deaths acceptable.

When I was growing up every morning at school we said the Lord’s Prayer. Jewish kids were allowed to keep silent during the prayers but it had to be a “respectful” silence, the Roman Catholics had to do the “respectful” silence during the Protestant ending but that was what it meant when you knew that the WASPs (White Ango-Saxon Protestants) ruled and they would always have a majority. On top of the Wasp hierarchy was the Episcopal Church which we knew was on its way to being the unofficial National Church. There was a National Cathedral being built to be a place where the nation worshipped. We knew that Episcopal men had the key leadership positions in business and government, good Episcopal women could stay at home and do most of the church work while the Rector took the credit, and live off the generosity of their successful Episcopal men. All we boys had to do is memorize a bunch of stuff, avoid the big sins, and don’t rock the boat and we would ascend to our places of privilege and the church would continue to grow because the masses would be attracted to liturgy done well; until that day when the church started to get totally irrelevant. We knew there would always be mothers at home and at church meetings, until that day when they had to go to work in order to keep food on the table and they discovered they were full human beings.

We knew that there would always be newspapers to give us the unbiased news, until that day they started dying. We learned that only faithless bad girls got pregnant before marriage and only sick deviants became homosexuals; until that day when we saw good girls get pregnant and healthy people come out of the closet. So many things we thought we knew but they are in the past and it needs to die so that we can move on.

William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun wrote of his troubled characters trapped in subjective time: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."  

The Good News is that things change and the past can die and set us free to place our trust into the one greater than ourselves. The Bad News is that we have to let it die in order to be born again into the new future. The Bad News is that we have to be ready to change where God leads us. The Good News is that we can be ready to change where God leads us.