A Relection on Time Informed by the Grand Hotel, Richard Matheson and the Lessons for June 30, 2013

A Reflection for VI Pentecost (Proper 8)                   All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, N.C. June 30, 2013                                                             Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14         Galatians 5:1, 13-25       Luke 9:51-62

     The movie, a soapy “Romantic Science Fiction” piece with beautiful costumes, sets, and score, was about a man who wants to go back in time in order to have a love affair with an actress who died in the previous century but who has a man in her dreams. There is this line that the Jane Seymour character gives which is a three hanky soliloquy:I was reading the paper last Sunday and there was an article about the Grand Hotel at Mackinac Island, Michigan. Pat and I went to the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan years ago and visited the island. When I saw the Hotel, I realized where I had seen it before; it was the

place where part of the movie, Somewhere in Time, a 1980 film starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, was shot. The movie was taken from a novel written by Richard Matheson, who died this last week, which had the scene set at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. 

The man of my dreams is almost faded now. The one I have created in my mind. The sort of man each woman dreams of in her most secret and deepest part of her heart. I could almost see him now before me. What would I say to him if he were really here? Forgive me, I've never known this feeling. I've lived without it all my life. Is it any wonder that I fail to recognize it? You brought it to me for the first time. Is there any way I can tell you how my life has changed? Anyway at all, to let you know what sweetness you have given me? There's so much to say-- and I can't find the words-- except for these... I love you. That is what I would say to him if he were really here.

The concept was based on the idea that many different dimensions of time are running at the same time, and you can jump from one time sequence into another. I liked the idea and can even find some talk about it from the Quantum physicists who theorize about space-time loops and warps. The movie didn’t do too well, but sales of the VHS tapes of it went through the roof and it got good ratings when it was shown on television as a chick flick weeper. However, there was enough interest in backward time travel to sustain a series on the tube in the early 90’s called “Quantum Leap”, where the Scott Bakula character, “Sam Beckett”, goes back and fixes the past.

I liked that series because there are things I wish I could do to fix the past. Wouldn’t that be neat? This time I would study as an undergraduate instead of waiting until grad school. This time I would pay attention to people, places, and things. This time I would not waste time. This time there would be no regrets. Maybe I am the only person in this room who has had moments where immediately after you say something, you realize that it was exactly the wrong thing to say, and you desperately look for the rewind button so that you can live the moment all over again and this time do it right. The problem with that kind of thinking is that I start to be haunted by the past of “what ifs” instead of living in the present of “what is”.

The lessons for today are about living in the “what is”. In the Hebrew Testament Lesson for today, Elijah and Elisha both know that they will be separated. They had been together since Elijah had come back from his encounter with the Sheer Silence of God, and he sees Elisha plowing and throws his mantle over his shoulders. Elisha had a moment of hesitation and wanted to go back and kiss his parents goodbye. But he leaves his past behind and slaughters the oxen he had been using for plowing, as a sacrifice, so he would not be tempted to go back into the past. His past is as dead as the oxen and the past, like the oxen, is offered up to God. He walks with Elijah into the present and, while being warned of the future, he stays in the present with Elijah until Elijah is carried off by the chariots of fire. He mourns and then he goes on, on the path that he was taking, so that he might continue the work in the present. He lives life not in the past or future but solidly in the present - and God is here, in the present, redeeming each moment as we live it in love.

In the Gospel lesson Jesus has that same determination to stay in the present as his face is set toward Jerusalem. He knows where he is going and will not allow himself silly thoughts about revenge on the Samaritan towns which did not receive him. The disciples want to waste time on revenge for the past slight, but Jesus is too busy in the present to hang on to the past. Some prospective disciples want to hold on to the past, and Jesus echoes the earlier admonition from Elijah that, if you are on a journey, you don’t need to waste time looking back.

Paul in the Epistle lesson warns about going back into the slavery of the past instead of living fully in the present life of the spirit in Christ. I wish he had not used the words “flesh” and Spirit” as dualities. What happens is that moralists have used that duality as a separation between being human and being sacraments of God. I think that Paul was saying the incarnation is about joining the divine and the human, and we are called to live into being fully human and being fully aware of the Risen Christ living within us. 

I do not see human flesh as bad or a burden; life is a blessing and meant to be good. I wish that Paul had used a word like “ego-centric” instead of “flesh”. I think Paul means “flesh” to mean something like the standard way we set up our social systems, the use and consumption of people, life, time and the world for our own agendas, and not about mere human failings. Look at his examples of what he calls “flesh” and what I would call ego-centric; “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.” 

The moralists want to equate “fornication” with the sexual expression of love, but it is a little like saying that playing “Chopsticks” is like playing Chopin’s Moonlight Sonata. Yes, both use the piano but there is a real difference in the playing; “Chopsticks” is a way of killing time whereas the Moonlight Sonata is a way of filling the time with something wonderfully special that has meaning outside of itself. Moralists would equate “drunkenness” with “drinking”; yes, both use alcohol, but drunkenness is about obliterating the present whereas having a drink with dinner or with a friend tastes the present.  The same would be said about the difference between gluttony and tasting good food. All of the examples Paul gives are wastes of time.  Why waste your time with “idolatry and sorcery”, which are wish-fulfillment fantasies, in attempt to get something to change the present so that the world is re-shaped to please your own ego. Down the list, “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy” - why waste your energy carrying the heavy load of “trying to be right”, as if being right in the past matters in a life where our faces are meant to be set on living a life of love in the present? 

There is an old Zen Buddhist saying: “Before enlightenment - chop wood, carry water.  After enlightenment - chop wood, carry water.”  The difference we have is that everyday life is lived fully in the spirit.  Or as C.S Lewis said in the Screwtape Letters, “For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”  Today is the only day we have, and eternity is here touching each moment and each moment is to be lived fully rather than consumed heedlessly.

 

July Tomes

Parson Tom’s Tomes

The deadline for the Trumpeter, the church’s monthly newsletter, is the 20^th and forces me to step into the future about what the next month will hold. As I write this edition of my Tomes for the month of July, I am planning to go down to Oregon Inlet to the retirement ceremony for Commander John Peter Rascoe III from the Coast Guard Reserves.

Oregon Inlet South Nags Head, NC

 Peter attends our church and is Town Manager of our town of Southern Shores. I knew him first when he would visit here taking vacation from his job as a County Manager of a neighboring county. He was facing some tough obstacles which he handled with integrity, strength and grace. I was pleased when he came here for I am proud that he chose to come here to work and set an example of what it means to be a Public Servant and a citizen-soldier. He spent some time being called to active duty three years ago to help out when the BP Oil Spill hit the Gulf. It was the last of four call ups to active duty since 9-11.

 

While I abhor war and the use of violence, my father and my older brother both served honorably when their country called and I respect those who serve our country. One Christmas season night in 1964, over the dinner table when my brother, home from the Marine boot camp, and I, home from being a Peacenik student, were arguing about the Vietnam War; my brother announced something like , “You follow orders and kill the enemy of your country!” to which I responded like, “It is wrong to kill!” My father, a Marine Corps Major during WWII, looked at me and said: “Then shoot high; you owe your country your life” and then turning to my brother he said, “But not your mind.” That settled that argument!

This country owes a great deal to its military personnel and there are times when the nation rises to the occasion to honor them. However, the honor, as the saying goes, “is more honored in its breach rather than its observance.” The paper this week told the story of the backlog of Veteran claims due to the underfunding of the Veterans programs. I find it hard it difficult to reconcile the statements of some of our political leaders and bloviators who wrap themselves in the American flag, urging us to go to war for the glory of our honor and then refuse to fund the results of their xenophobia. 

The paper also told the record of the High Command in dealing, or not dealing, with the endemic sexual harassment and abuse going on in the ranks, with the mindless excuse that changing the apparently permissive status-quo of “boys will be boys” will hurt morale and effectiveness. Military personnel need to be treated with respect as, and expectation of, men and women of honor not boys  in exploitative fraternities.

The Book of Common Prayer has this prayer for Heroic Service:

O Judge of the nations, we remember before you with grateful
hearts the men and women of our country who in the day of
decision ventured much for the liberties we now enjoy. Grant
that we may not rest until all the people of this land share the
benefits of true freedom and gladly accept its disciplines. This
we ask in the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This 4^th of July let us honor our service personnel but let us resolve that it will not stop on that day.

Shalom

A Reflection on the Feast of St. Peter and Paul

Feast of St. Peter and Paul (Transferred), a Reflection All Saints’, Southern Shores, NC June 23, 2013 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Ezekiel 34:11-16 2 Timothy 4:1-8 John 21:15-19

This coming Saturday is the Feast of two followers of the living Christ, Saints Peter and Paul, who emptied themselves out so that we might know the Christ within us. They experienced the Risen Christ in different ways, but they listened to each other in love. Don’t tell the Bishop, but I changed the lessons of that date to this date in order to remind us to live into our name of “All Saints.”

“Do you love me?” is the question that the Risen Lord asks Simon Peter. “You know I do” is the response.

How do we know that someone loves us? For that matter, how do we know when we are in love? When I was younger I fell in love a lot. I figured that love meant that I looked at someone who I thought was “cool”. The definition of “cool” meant something that I thought was missing in my life and that I wanted to incorporate into my life - a little like the statement “I love that car” meaning “I want that car.” The identification of “cool” status was accompanied by an overwhelming rush of emotion. If she responded to the overture, maybe she could rub off some of that “cool” status on me. However, I had to project the image that I was perfect all by myself, and therefore “cool”, but willing to grant her access to me. But wait a minute; I had more than a little nagging feeling that I was not perfect. No problem, I thought. I’ll just fake it by doing all the sorts of things that will make her love me, and she will be so grateful that she will think I am perfect. I would really know that she loves me when she also has that same rush of emotion, and it will cause us to want to merge into an amorphous ego mass, feeling the same things, saying the same things, liking the same things, spending all our time with one another, and swapping saliva a lot. That would mean that we love one another.

So what happens when we discover that we don’t like the same things? Let’s say in music I like (a) opera and (b) the Rolling Stones and (c) Jazz, which she considers (a) as pretentious and boring, (b)as crude and (c) as pointless because you can’t dance to it. If we believe love means you never disagree, who has to change?

Suppose the merge of ego is not seamless? Suppose she or I desire to grow, deepen, have our own agenda, or have a depth of complexity within ourselves? Does that mean we are too different and, therefore, must end the whole thing?

I had a love affair with Jesus at several times in my life. I thought he was “cool” and was everything I needed in my life. He could control himself. He could heal people who were not whole. He was admired and I tried to be like him. I put Jesus on a pedestal, singing songs about him in Sunday school, having a picture of him on the desk on which I did my homework, and I even had a plastic glow in the dark statue of him that I earned in Vacation Bible School at the Presbyterian Church in the 2^nd grade. I took his body into mine when I was allowed to take communion. I joined my mind to his, memorizing the things that he said and trying to do the things he did. I asked WWJD, “What Would Jesus Do?” every day. The problem? I realized that I could only love him from afar since we were so different. I kept on not being perfect, even when I tried real hard, even when I promised I would be better. I was judgmental of others who said they loved Jesus but I saw no Jesus in them. I worshipped Jesus, even though Jesus had told us not to but to see through him to connect to the one who loves us and in whom we have our being. There have been several times when I dismissed Jesus as this plaster figure created by my own desires. I sang “Jesus loves me” but I knew it was a lie since I knew that I fell so short of the goal, but I kept faking it, hoping I would win his approval.

“Feed my sheep”, “Tend my lambs”, Jesus said to Peter, for these were not deeds to be done to earn love but outward and visible signs of living in the Kingdom of heaven where love is the norm. It took me years to figure out that love is not something that is given to me, or you, as a reward for being “cool” but as a life that is given freely. Love is not the closing of a hand on a possession but the opening of will. A joining of bodies and an agreement of minds can be mistaken as love, but without first the joining of spirit, those things are only charades. Love is not what you get but what you give. It is counter to all that we learn about life in our culture where we amass and count ourselves rich, but the richness of living comes from the giving. Jesus, in order to show what is the nature of God, empties himself out for others, or as Victor Hugo in Les Miserables echoed Paul in I Corinthians, “Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.”

Love is what we who are fools and God do. The task that we do in the church is to move from a love affair with Jesus as the perfect human to taking and joining the Spirit of the Living Christ to our own spirit and will. There will be times when we will disagree - that happens. There will be times when what we do will fall short - that happens. But those times never reduce the love. One of the ways we can see the love of the Christ within us in action is between two people in a committed life-long relationship, where the space between the two people is Holy Space as their spirits are joined together. 

As Rumi, the 13^th Century Persian poet and mystic, said in the poem Spring Giddiness,

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about
language, ideas, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

I do a lot of weddings, and sometimes they are celebrations of parading what someone is to get - “look at that groom; look at that bride” - or just expensive pageants of the transfer of property from father to husband, or the throwing of holy water on “coming of age”, where there is more than enough competing or dueling cleavage by bride, mother, and bridesmaids. The weddings I like are where we focus on the marriage rather than the wedding, and it is a matter of the joining of spirits by the emptying out of themselves to one another in the name of God. They become the ministers of the sacrament of the presence of God, and I try to get the couple to hand out the bread and wine as if to say, “Take in our love for each other and see Christ coming into your life.”, or to go back to Hugo, “The reduction of the universe to only one being, the dilatation of only one being unto god, this is love.” In the musical, that line is changed to “To love another person is to see the face of God.”

Any chance I get I want to underscore that possibility, and so I bug people to redo their vows on their anniversaries. I especially need it since I helped to destroy my first marriage by focusing on the “What is in it for me?” question instead of the “How can I share my spirit, so that the world is changed?” question. Today Bill and Sylvia Wadsworth agreed to ask our blessing at the 8:30 service. They know something about disagreeing, about facing rough times, about messing up, about falling short, but they sure know how to love, and that is all that matters. Listen to Rumi again;

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about
language, ideas, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

A Reflection on projection

A Reflection for IV Pentecost (Proper 6)                   All Saints Church, Southern Shores, N.C. June 16, 2013                                                                  Thomas E Wilson, Rector

1 Kings 21:1-10, 15-21a        Psalm 5:1-8         Galatians 2:15-21              Luke 7:36-8:3

We have two stories before us one of an evil man and the other of a good man who both miss the point of life. The evil man is Ahab in the story from the Hebrew Testament lesson for today. He was part of the House of Omri line of Kings of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Omri had over thrown and murdered the King who reigned for seven days after he had murdered the precious King. Fear is passed on through the generations and Ahab, the son of Omri, did not murder his father so he succeeded to the throne lawfully but he did not trust the law and was ruled by fear and his wife Jezebel. Ahab and Jezebel believed that the only way to conquer fear was to make other people fear them. I don’t think he was born evil but he became so.

Part of my belief system is I think we are all born out of the ground of our being in the image of God with the intension of living fully into that image of playful creative imagination, loving deeply and working joyfully; which is my definition of living into the divine Trinity; Creator, lover and worker. In our growing up our egos work hard to create a life of stability and we tend to start to ignore and repress parts of us that don’t seem to fit in as we try to succeed in the world’s definition of life. 

There is an apocryphal story that I like about a very young child whose mother overhears whispering to the new baby sibling, “Baby, tell me what God feels like, I am starting to forget.” As we grow up we tend to become strangers to our true self, deep inside us, as we try to go along with getting along in this world. But the true self, which Jung at one point identified as the “Christ within us”, does not give up and keeps sending messages from our unconscious and the collective unconscious to our outer self so that we might grow and be healed into wholeness. The messages are usually in symbols which are projected so that it can bypass the usual Ego defenses. Part of the dream conference which Pat and I attended operated under that assumption that dreams can be a way that God speaks to us to move into wholeness as the symbols are projected onto the screen of our dreams.

I think what happened to Ahab in the story for today was that he saw Naboth in his vineyard and saw a projection of the kind of life that he unconsciously longed for to create something to pass onto the world, to love and work in peace. He saw it and was moved and wanted to partake of it.  If he had taken that message into his own consciousness, he might have been moved into healing. But when he was refused, his threatened ego drove him into depression and he was so enmeshed with Jezebel so that they were an undifferentiated ego mass, that she arranged for the murder of Naboth. God sends a message to Ahab through his alter ego, the prophet Elijah, to repent. Ahab recognizes the threat to his own ego and calls him “enemy”, but Ahab repents. But the repentance is short lived and new opportunities are pushed back into the unconscious.

In the second story from the book of Luke, Simon the Pharisee, a good man invites Jesus to dinner. Pharisees are good people, the best people to have as leaders of a religious community. Simon was born good but the deeper Self, the Christ within, became a stranger to him as he replaced that image of playful creative imagination, loving deeply and working joyfully with a fear of doing the right thing which is covered over with an image of smugness being right about things and judgmental about people which he projected to the world. Simon invites Jesus as the beginning of a movement to claim his deeper Self. However, Simon’s Ego, which is fearful that things might change is threatened and starts to work by suggesting that Simon doesn’t need to get too close and welcome as one would welcome someone who could change his life, and somehow Simon just doesn’t get around to really welcoming Jesus.  

 At the dinner party Simon sees a woman who has a shady past but who knows how to love and she loves Jesus by anointing his feet with ointment and washing them with her tears. Simon’s true self shows him this symbol of love and if he had been able to integrate it into his conscious he might have been able to have compassion and move into healing. But his ego sees all of its work of being right threatened and goes to work and projects onto Jesus his own shadow of being a person who does not know what is going on.  Jung said: “The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”  It is always the way that the things that most tick us are the shadow we refuse to acknowledge; but as Jung advised us “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”  Jesus who does know exactly what is going on calls Simon to become like this woman who finds release from the being a stranger to the Christ living within her.

We do not know what happens to Simon the Pharisee but the woman was made whole. Later on in the Bible we have the letters of a Pharisee named Saul who was a stranger to himself and unable to live into the image of playful creative imagination, loving deeply and working joyfully and projected all his fear on the followers of Jesus, until he met the Risen Christ and rediscovered the Christ within him and became Paul. In today’s passage from his letter to the Galatians he underscores that understanding; “For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Each of us has been born in the image of God, the ground of our being, to playfully create, love deeply and work joyfully. The Christ within us is always speaking to us to bring us into wholeness of the consciousness of the presence of God. When something stirs in what we see like Ahab who sees Naboth in his vineyard, or Simon sees in Jesus and in the woman, or as Paul on the road to Damascus, or in a dream- don’t reject it, don’t let your ego which tries to keep everything from changing be fearful. Ask what is God saying to you and be open. Echo what the Psalmist sang for today: “In the morning, LORD, you hear my voice; *early in the morning I make my appeal and watch for you.”

a reflection on Julie Hamilton

A Reflection on the Occasion of a Memorial Service for

Juliette Watson Fowler “Julie” Hamilton

June 16, 2013

All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores                              Thomas E. Wilson Rector

Revelation 21:2-7     Psalm 23      John 6:37-40

Every time I went to Julie’s house, I violated the 10^th Commandment about coveting. Julie had this room off of the living room where she had an endless pool. It is a small pool where the swimmer swims against a generated current of water- always going upstream - getting exercise and getting stronger. One of my regrets is that I never tried out that pool because I did covet it so, but I had to remind myself, as I always do, be it an endless pool, or sports car, or any number of electronic devices, when I violate that commandment, (but to be fair, I only violate that commandment on days ending in the letter “y”), it – in this case, the pool- does not belong to me. It is something that gave Julie joy for, when she swam in that pool, she entered a different physical and spiritual dimension of presence. She talked about how she loved those moments of quiet exercise, and how she was able to swim through her frustrations without leaving home. I saw that she found peace there, and I thought if I used that pool I would be trespassing on her space – plus, on the less noble side - I was afraid she would show me up because she was in good physical condition.

She was tough! What she did over the years was push herself, constantly push herself, and when it came time for her body to shut down in order to die, her body kicked into overdrive and kept her alive long past anyone’s expectations. Every time I would ask how she was doing or how she was feeling she would respond that she was “fine”! She had to be tough for she had a lot of things to overcome, and she did. I think of that pool and how swimming against the current, never feeling sorry for herself and yet keep on going was a good metaphor for her life and how she faced some of the issues in her life. 

She was faithful in that swim against the current; faithful to her family, her profession, her friends and in her church. In a time when church attendance is down nationwide, she continued to come and give her treasure and her time. When I came to the church 10 years ago, I brought with me 19 years of being a faithful worker in religious institutions, and I had developed a hermeneutic – which is a fancy theological word meaning how I look at things - of distrust about institutions and was tired of keeping institutions afloat just for the sake of keeping them afloat. I talked about how the paradigm of the church was shifting, how I wanted the church to be less hierarchical and experience a more organic growth with parishioners going into themselves, discovering their greatest joy, and through that, discovering the spiritual gifts the Holy Spirit gives them, for God is not glorified by resentful, burned-out people. The hope is that the people would offer their gifts and the church would no longer say to newcomers “Here are the tasks that need to be done, do we have volunteers?” Rather we would need to find a way to use those gifts that they were called to give to live into a deeper spiritual reality

Julie, very nicely, thought I was out of my mind and maybe a closet anarcho-syndicalist. In her life, in her work, and in her churches, she had seen plenty of schemes come and go and she would play along, but she thought life was what you did, your job was one way what did to make the world a better place. Friendship was defined by what you did together rather than physical proximity for she was a friend she didn’t just collect them. Her church was the people with whom she worshiped God within the context of a community of the faithful.  And anything she could do to help it survive, grow, and pass on to future generations was what she would do. None of this contemplating on your own navel stuff for her; give her the job and she would do it. No moaning or complaining, and if it meant swimming against the current, so be it.

My favorite metaphor for God is the flowing energy of life that we are able to see in all of creation and my metaphor for life is contained in the Revelation passage for today, “the spring of the water of life.” We all begin in the energy of God, in the water of God’s love and placed in the water of the womb. We swim and grow there, and then one day we have to adjust to a whole new, unimagined by us in the womb, different dimension of God’s creation but in the same energy and stream of life, for when that water breaks in our birth, we follow the stream to join in the conscious world with others. We learn how to read the currents, when to swim against it and when to allow the river to take us into still waters, where we join with others. We have interludes with people and take streams when then we get separated again until we are all finally swept by the currents into a new unimagined different dimension of life, the sea of love which is God, and where we first began. T. S Elliot reminds us in his poem Little Giddings from Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. “

I know that some of you are getting tired of me repeating myself. One of the problems of a Priest who has served a church for a number of years is that parishioners know what he/she is going to say before s/he says it. Another problem is the fact that it is harder to keep a professional distance and say, “This is just a job.” Julie and I have been metaphorically swimming in the same waters for 10 years and it is strange not to have her here and continue to count on her. There has been a hole since she has been sick, and we will have to go around the hole because, God knows, she left a big one in the life of the church and in our hearts. The hole is not fatal but we will need to honor the scar. In the last month I have done five memorial services or burials, and I have quoted from Little Giddings each time. I used the metaphor of the river of life as well as that quote four times in the last two weeks. In the service a month ago I did not use the river metaphor, but instead, another quote from Little Giddings:

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

From the defeat of Julie’s body, we have taken our inheritance of toughness and our consolation in the thanksgiving for her peace. She has left us a symbol, a symbol perfected in death of the tough woman who takes on tough tasks because she believes, with God swimming beside her and using all her will and strength, all will be well. She is with our Lord now, and “All shall be will and/ All manner of thing shall be well.” Today we come beseeching God in thanksgiving for her life and rest at the last. There is a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer on page 833 which was cribbed from a sermon by John Henry Newman, Sermon XX in Sermons on the Subject of the Day, and it is a prayer I say often at night before I go to bed and also when I place bodies and ashes into the ground:

O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows
lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is
hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done.
Then in thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest,
and peace at the last. Amen.

 

A reflection on image of God

A Sermon for III Pentecost All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC June 9, 2013 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

1 Kings 17:8-24) Psalm 146 Galatians 1:11-24 Luke 7:11-17

Today’s worship service is different than you are used to. I wanted to share with you the worship service that we used during the dream retreat Pat and I were on two weeks ago. It is an adaptation from the Iona Abbey Worship Book. The Iona Abbey Community, centered on the island of Iona off the coast of the Scottish Hebrides, is an ecumenical Christian group heavily influenced by Celtic Christianity. Much of our Western Christianity is focused in the separation of the world from Heaven, on hierarchy of power with authority being bestowed from above, clergy being rulers (that is what the title “Rector” means) over the lay people, strict order, distrust of women, and a focus on creedal statements, sin, and punishment.

Celtic Christianity was in Britain brought by traders from the east who came for the tin mines used in the making of bronze, before the Roman Church in the form of Augustine arrived there centuries later and is focused on the belief that God is ever present, that heaven and the world are separated only by a thin porous veil called “thin places”, that authority comes from one’s own interior journey and relationship with God, on the honoring of the feminine, on all people being equal before God, and on the emphasis of wider belief parameters, freer and more interior worship, Grace, nature and blessings.

I want you to notice

(1) that the Affirmation of Faith is not a creedal statement of belief in theological forums but about living a life of relationship with the divine.

(2)The confession and absolution is reciprocal not just from the hierarchy.

(3) I want you to notice also the blessing. It is not the blessing that I give to you but the blessings we give each other as we point to all the blessing which surround us.

The lectionary stories in our worship service today have to do with an exposure to a different view of God. Today we have different stories: one about a widow of Zarephath and her son who is brought back to life by the prophet Elijah, the second about the raising of the widow of Na’in’s son by Jesus. These two stories dovetail with Paul’s introduction of himself in the Letter to the Galatians about how his faith had been given new life. First of all, you need to understand about the ancient culture and its view of widows, women, and sons. A woman was property which belonged to the oldest male relative, her father or her husband, and in the absence of either father or husband, she belonged to her son. The widows who are not named - the writers want to tell you something with that omission - have no real identity of their own because their sons, their hope and their comfort in old age, have died. In that ancient society’s view, widows were fair game to be used by predators.

Elijah, the prophet we met in last week’s Hebrew Testament lesson, was in the competition with the Priests of Ba’al. Let’s fill you in on Ba’al, the deity of the people of Sidon, who was brought in to Israel when Ahab married Jezebel from Sidon. Ba’al means Lord or Master, and he was so called because he was considered the Patron of the city, the God of war and thunder. Ancients tended to use archetypal metaphors for the most dangerous predators in their lives to give image to the idea of the numinous. Think of the metaphors used: the Lion and the Crocodile in Africa, the Thunderbolt maker Zeus in Greek mythology, the Elephant in Asia, the Killer Whale of the Pacific Northwest indigenous tribes, the serpent in Mesoamerica, the shark in Polynesia, even the Eagle in the United States. These metaphors for understanding the nature of the relationship with God are meant to demonstrate that we are to live in fear of our Gods, our predators, and we must placate the Gods or disaster will come to the people. The metaphors used tell us more about the people than they do about the deity in whose image they are made.

The problem with religion is that we spend a lot of time and spill a lot of blood trying to nail down definitions of that which cannot be defined, as Voltaire wrote in his notebooks, “If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.” We tend to become what we adore. A God in the form of a wrathful Judge tends to create wrathful judges. A God of war tends to resonate with followers who worship violence. Male Gods tend to give the message that the male is the only acceptable icon of God.

Elijah and Jesus present a new metaphor for the relationship between humans and the God that lives within him and in the widows and sons. Elijah and Jesus point not to a vindictive God who rains famine and misfortune on those with whom he is displeased but to a divine energy of healing and wholeness freely given. Paul in the Galatians passage says that the God he worshiped was one of regimentation and order, but he was introduced to the God of freedom and love by Jesus.

You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors. But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentile

Today we are thanking the teachers of our children not for the dogma that they taught but for the love they made manifest in their lives of the children. We give thanks for our graduates who we send off to college, and we ask them to proclaim God by being open to the Holy Spirit and by showing love and grace. Anselm in the 11^th century said: “God is greater than that which can be imagined and if we can define it: that which we define is not God.” Having that insight, we might want to take a moment to ask “What images do we use for God?” Jesus never took on the title of God and he always asked people to look through him to see the God of love, the ground of his and their and our being.

What images are you using for God? Whose image are you in?