A Reflection on living into the dreams we share with God

A Sermon for XV Pentecost (Proper 17)                    All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC September 1, 2013                                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Jeremiah 2:4-13    Psalm 81:1, 10-16     Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16        Luke 14:1, 7-14

I just got back from the five day Dream Group Leader Training, the first training intensive session that will stretch out over the next two years. The training for Pat and I is being paid for by the money that was set aside for my Sabbatical which I should have taken four years ago. I want you to get your money’s worth, so you know I am going to see a dream in the lessons for today. Surprise, surprise; I find it in the first lesson from today’s lectionary.

Jeremiah had a dream, a vision, where God speaks to him and he shares an overview of that dream. Everything is falling apart for the Southern Kingdom - the rich have corrupted the whole society, justice is a joke, the poor are oppressed, and the country, rotten to the core, is an easy target for an aggressive adversary.  And that adversary appears - the Babylonians. The destruction is in two parts; first is the military victory over the demoralized army (you cannot expect your army to defend you if you exploit most of the soldiers and their families), then the Babylonians set up a puppet government and continue to crush the people. The occupiers have looted the Temple, and when the puppet government tries to revolt, the Babylonians totally destroy the temple and tear down the walls of Jerusalem as they take the people into exile. The people enter into deep darkness and in their well of depression ask, “Where is our God?”

Jeremiah has a dream, a vision, and in the dream he returns to the shared sacred memory of his people, the Exodus experience seven hundred years before. In the Exodus, the Hebrew children went through the wilderness, finding that the Divine was living in their daily lives, so much so that they considered themselves God’s people.  God’s spirit was in every breath they took as they walked in the wilderness toward a promise of being totally united with the Divine. But as they came to the Promised Land, they put the Divine to one side and said that they “could take it from here”. They made God a religion that they could put into use in certain “Holy” times and places, and they got around to doing the business of putting themselves in the center of the universe and the Divine at the periphery. The memory of who they were in relation to God was repressed.  They kept the outward trappings but ignored the heart. As Jeremiah remembers, the people and the leaders all stopped asking, “Where is God?”, because they had made God so small and irrelevant that they no longer really felt God’s presence. Jeremiah hears God say:

But my people have changed their glory for something that does not profit. Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the LORD, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.

Jeremiah’s dream is God asking God’s people to remember who they are - they are people who have a relationship with God that is readily apparent if they would only open their imaginations and hearts.

The darkness of the people of God in Jeremiah’s day is similar to our darkness in our day. We have squandered our relationship with God and relegated the Divine to buildings and schedules. Yet, we can begin to rebuild if we, like Jeremiah, can return to our imaginations, our memories, and our dreams. Since we are already in darkness, the way we find light is to really enter the darkness. There is a poem we looked at during the Dream Leaders Training- I told you I would bring it back up. The poet is David Whyte an English Poet who lives in Washington State.  The poem is called Sweet Darkness and it comes from one of his collections called House of Belonging

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:

the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

When our eyes are tired from busily looking at the world through the narrow center of our personal universe, we need to close them to dream and see vision in order to hear the Ground of our Being. 

One of the exercises presented by one of our instructors, Jerry Wright, a former Baptist Pastor and now a Jungian Analyst, was to imagine the past 14 billion years as a 12 month cycle where each month was 1.25 Billion years. Why 14 Billion?  We think that is when the Big Bang happened, (let’s say in January) that explosion of energy out of which the creation we know began. In that energy explosion, our scripture tells us that God spoke and let creation be in that first hour. Our science tells us that all the atoms in our cellular makeup, in every piece of matter, carry the fingerprint of that expression of power. Our faith tells us that all matter coming from God contains the Spirit of God within it, as we proclaim when we say: “All things come from Thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”  The scientist Carl Sagan echoes “We are made of star stuff.” The Paleontologist/ Priest/Mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."  We, the world, the universe, are spirit-filled. The problem is that we tend to make a distinction between this “real” (in quotes) world and the spiritual world, between soul and body, between heaven and earth, when they are really distinctions without differences.

Using the monthly calendar metaphor, February is when the “allurement” of gravity causes galaxies to form. In the month of September, our Galaxy, the Milky Way, one of a hundred million galaxies, is formed. In the metaphorical month of December, where each day is 40 million years, on December 31st, at 11:53 PM, the beginnings of human reflective consciousness bring us to see ourselves not as controlled by our instincts but as part of something deeper as we have the development of Homo Sapiens (Sapiens meaning wisdom), about 250,000 years ago. 40,000 years ago these homo sapiens in the Ice Age reflect on the nature and meaning of their existence in drawings on the cave walls, not of the food they eat which was reindeer, whose bones are found in the cave, but of realistically painted buffalo and horses which they did not eat but held in some regard outside the daily struggle. At 11:59:53 we have the beginnings of religion with rituals and codified approaches to the numinous. 

At 11:59:55 we have Jeremiah in the 6^th century BCE - in the middle of that time that historian Will Durant called  “The Shower of Stars” and Philosopher Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age” - with Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah in Israel, Heraclites in Ephesus, the Buddha and the Upanishads in India, the Tao in China, Plato and Aristotle in Greece,  when we moved away from local Gods and tribal spirits to universal energies, which we differed in name, but were approached in awe and humility.

Jesus, at 11:59:56 cited in the Gospel lesson for today, reminds of the need for humility when the people at the banquet try to separate themselves based on social rank. This reflects the core of his ministry in which he shows us how to live fully into the material and spiritual at the same time and calls us to live in the Kingdom of the Heavens right here and right now. He invites every one of us to live into the reality of all of us, being fully human and fully spiritual, children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ.  Luke remembers Jesus in his confrontation with the Pharisees “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”

Guttenberg’s Printing Press comes to us at 11:59:59 so all of us could read the scripture for ourselves, and we are reminded how many dreams God uses to speak to us. However, reading takes us to the left side of the brain where our rational mind takes over and, as a result, we got used to preforming the great heresy of seeing God in the third person as he, him, it, as if God was not present but somewhere else to be studied and picked apart rather than the 2^nd person subject of you and thou with whom to form a relationship. With only of a quarter of a second of metaphorical time to go until today, Freud and Jung, a hundred years ago, start studying the unconscious. Jung posited that we are all connected to each other from the beginning of time until today in what he called the “Collective Unconscious.”  He said: “The Collective Unconscious” contains the whole spiritual heritage of (hu)mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual.” We believe that the divine is calling us out of that collective unconscious and speaks to us in symbols and archetypes. As Jung wrote: “In each of us there is another whom we do know (who) speaks to us in dreams, and tells us how differently it sees us from the way we see ourselves.”

Dr. King in his “I have a Dream” speech fifty years ago last week said:

We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.” 

The writer of the Hebrews lesson for today speaks of entertaining angels without knowing it. Angels are messengers from that which we call God, and we think they are “out there” some place, but I would suggest that we entertain angels every day when we change our vision to see ourselves “tied together in the single garment of our destiny” in the sacred space between and in us, and every night when we dream and make a plan to welcome God’s messages from the depths of our Psyche where spirit and matter are one, and to honor and remember our nightly guests. As the Psalmist for today sings: Oh, that my people would listen to me! * that Israel would walk in my ways!

Dream, painting and poem

We were at Kanuga Conference Center for Dream Group Leader Training and started the whole business of learning how to help people invite the dreams to help them hear God speaking to them through the Collective Unconscious. Training is based on using Jungian Depth Psychology and Spiritual exercises to interact with the Right side of the brain where we move out of the rational analysis to more of a encounter with the language of symbol, myth and art. Instead of just writing notes for the Right side of my rational brain- I tried to write a poem and paint a picture. I am not a good poet and I have less talent for drawing but I have to stop the critic and welcome the vision.

The painting is of a section of a dream I had where my father and I were driving at night through the North Carolina Mountains- which we never did together in his life. The road was all torn up and I was driving the way I did when I lived in Boone- too fast as a way to impress the “ flatlanders”.  There was a bright blue barrier and a pale buckskin horse that ran across the road. The horse had a yellow blaze on its flank with what looked like a softened square root sign. My father said he needed to paint that scene- and I took it as since everybody in the dream is me I was being invited to paint. It was so helpful since when I painted it and then asked the painting questions, I found that my unconscious had a whole different reaction than my rational mind. It opened the dream up to whole new insights. 

 

Kanuga Dream 2013

 Also I had some free time and as an introvert needed to get away from all the talking with other people and then went out to canoe on the lake and wrote a poem about it. It goes;

Kanuga Sabbath 2013

Paddler wore a hat to keep

Burn away and doctor happy

J- stroking canoe while sun reflected

Paddle dipping in lake cool water

Lilly blossom bursting on pad

Turtle sliding into deep watery safety

Woken from turtle dreams, that’s if they do,

Off fallen logs sodden in place.

Yet the canoe glides on-

Glides on

Invading the quiet as paddler

Flees the noise to share

Presence with selves in non-language,

Tongues, gills, and bills unknown to

Yet bouncing beyond tympanic membranes

Beneath shared sub-persona sharing.

The paddler retreats to center in greater power

To find true self

September Tomes Perseid Meteor Shower

Parson Tom’s Tomes

In August the Persied Meteor Shower visits the earth and usually hits about the 12^th of the month, which is also the birthday of my wife, Pat. The Meteors are the debris from the Comet, Swift- Tuttle, which last visited in 1992 and will visit again in 2126, as opposed to orbiting Jupiter every 11 years. The debris is hurling through space and is warmed up by our sun which melts the ice and then when it enters the earth atmosphere the small rocks burn up in the atmosphere as they fall in the gravity. For years Pat and I celebrate her birthday by looking for the meteors- on good years 50 to 60 an hour fall. Last year on the Blue Ridge Parkway with the clear darken sky it was perfect. This year Pat, Yoda and I walked down to the Chicahauk crossing on the beach but because of the ambient light from the Hilton Gardens and spotty clouds we saw only about 20 between 3:00 and 4:00 AM. We are in awe that we are hurtling through space on this large piece of frozen rock and fire we call the earth and have a rendezvous each year with other parts of the Galaxy. How we are all connected in the mind of God!

not our picture

Pat wrote a poem this year which I want to share with you.

Waiting for Stars to Fall.

My annual birthday Shower in the sky

Swift-Tuttle of days gone by

Passing through on the way to Infinity

leaving behind lighted trails

Traced in the blue/black sky.

Sitting by the end of the world

on a bench overlooking the sea

Waves crashing mid-ocean

ker--thunking on the beach below

Wind kissing my face

ever so sweet

with ocean mist and spray

Loved ones beside me on either side

                Warm skin – warm fur!

Celebrating 76 years

of life on earth.

Waiting for stars to fall

in the fullness of this night

Time – but a drop in this bucket of

                water and sky and earth and wind-

But blessed by the

spectacle of stars falling.

August 12/13 2013

Shalom

Manteo and Virginia Dare Feast Day Reflection

A Reflection on the Baptism of Virginia Dare and Chief Manteo                All Saints’, Southern Shores August 18, 2013                                                                           Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 60:1-4               Ephesians 2:13-22      John 10:14-16

Icon written for East Carolina Diocese

Today we remember the Baptism of Virginia Dare and the Croatan Native American Chief Manteo in 1587, twenty miles down the road, at the Fort Raleigh Roanoke Island Settlement, what we now call the “Lost Colony”. Dare was the first English Child born in the what was called the “New World”, and Manteo was the first Native American to be baptized as an Anglican Christian. Today many of the churches in the dioceses of East Carolina, North Carolina and Western North Carolina are celebrating this feast day. 

The lessons chosen for this day reflect how all are connected to the one God and to the one Spirit of Christ. Isaiah sings to the exiles, “Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together, they come to you; your sons shall come from far away, and your daughters shall be carried on their nurses’ arms.” John’s Gospel remembers Jesus saying, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” The writer of the Ephesians Epistle continues in that theme and says:

“But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.  For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.  He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace…”  

So today we celebrate the Baptism of two different people into the one body. Virginia Dare was baptized because her parents were part of the Anglican tradition, and it was “normal” for her family to do here in the colony what they would naturally do back in England.  But I wonder what was it like for Chief Manteo to make the decision to be baptized? 

Years ago before I went to Seminary, I was teaching Social Work and Counseling in a small Baptist-affiliated college in Virginia. I enjoyed it and reveled in the role of being the token Episcopalian. I took courses in the Bible and ethics and was impressed with the scholarship of the teachers. My teachers, who in the language of the day were called “moderates”, had been Pastors before they became academics, and they were colleagues and we became friends as I kept growing in faith. I attended the Episcopal Church and worked with the Youth Group, but I felt a call to be an ordained minister. I decided to start the process of Discernment toward the long and expensive proposition of going through Seminary and ordination. Some of my students approached me with the idea of preaching at their Baptist Congregation. In the Baptist tradition, Seminary education is optional, and after one preaches, the deacons get together and discern a “call”.  If they approve, then the congregation votes to approve or disapprove. The Pastor stays until he leaves or until 51% of the congregation votes him out at a meeting.

I was tempted, for it meant that I did not need to disrupt my life of teaching, and it was a heck of a lot cheaper than going to seminary. The college administration, believing in an educated clergy, offered to adjust my schedule so I could take classes at a Baptist Seminary within driving distance. I thought about it and prayed, but I turned my students down because I did not want to change the way I did church. The Episcopal service was comfortable for me, I feared the loss of my freedom of expression without reprisal, and I lacked the courage to enter into the unknown.

Manteo had his first contact with English explorers in 1584 and was taken back to England with another chief named Wanchese.  Manteo was open to the idea of cooperation with the English, while Wanchese was suspicious and saw himself as a prisoner. There was a return visit home in 1585 and then, accompanying the Settlement expedition in 1587, Manteo, under Sir Walter Raleigh’s instruction, was baptized and declared “Lord of Roanoke”.  (Under English law, office holders were required to be baptized and be active communicants, that is, attend communion 4 times a year.) That law was not repealed in England until 1829.

I am not sure how much of a sincere Episcopalian Manteo was, because the Anglican religion was in the process of understanding its sources of knowledge about the divine. The old Roman Catholic teaching had been that the church hierarchy had approved the ideas of dogma and passed them on to the lay people through tradition. The Protestant viewpoint was that Scripture was the only way to understand God. Later on in 1595, a few years after Manteo disappeared from the scene as the Lost Colony went into the mists of time, Richard Hooker formulated the Elizabethan Settlement into The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity when he wrote “What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience are due; the next whereunto, is what any man can necessarily conclude by force of Reason; after this, the voice of the church succeedeth.” Out of this we speak of the three-legged stool of Anglicanism - “Scripture, tradition and reason”.  

All three of these sources are accessed by head knowledge, or the left hemisphere of the brain where we deal with facts, creeds and laws. However, most Native American religions seem to be more comfortable in the right hemisphere of the brain, the place where we deal with the unconscious, dreams, and symbols. One of the books that I am reading for my Dream Group Leader Course is Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams and Reflections, and in one chapter he speaks about his encounter with  a Native American religious leader in the Taos Pueblo in the 1920’s, Ochwiay Biano ( Mountain Lake), who said about whites:

“How cruel the whites are: their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by holes. Their eyes have a staring expression. They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something, they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want, we do not understand them, we think that they are mad.” I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad. “They say they think with their heads,” he replied.
“Why, of course. What do you think with?” I asked him in surprise.
“We think here,” he said, indicating his heart.

The English and Western view of creation was that it is something to be conquered and overcome. The explorers that Manteo met were looking to get rich, and they saw their faith as  support for the view that God was safely ensconced in God’s heaven, and greed was the acceptable response to the world given to them for domination and exploitation. If one killed a deer or found gold, the Englishmen would thank God for the blessing - and would search for more, because more was never enough. Time was something to be grabbed to do busy work, for one could never get enough time to do all that one wanted. Religion was what you believed, and all other beliefs were wrong. Manteo, on the other hand, probably looked at the world as a place of dynamic tension with stories, the spirits of the animals, and nature which came from the living Great Spirit who walked with him and his people in everything they did. When Manteo killed a deer, he would offer a prayer of thanks to the deer which gave its life so that Manteo’s family might eat. If Manteo found gold, he would think it pretty and use it to bring pleasure in art. Manteo would only kill the deer he needed, and the gold he found was enough for there was no sense in trying to get more than one needed. For Manteo time was a gift to be used in connecting with creation and others, and religion was who one was in relationship to the spirit of the universe. Jung once was asked if he believed in God, and he replied, “I do not believe, I know.” Manteo knew God but only as the undefinable mystery which permeated all of life. 

I got a phone call this week from a person who is going through recovery from addiction.  He was raised an Episcopalian - an altar boy and all the rest - until he graduated from high school and went on vacation from the church. He was always fond of the Episcopal Church and identified himself as an Episcopalian even when he was going down the slide as an addict. He now lives in a place where he does not have access to an Episcopal Church and has found a home in a Church of Christ. The Pastor there wants him to be baptized by immersion and become a member. The man wanted to know if it was all right, and he was very worried about it because the Nicene Creed is an important part of the Episcopal service, but the creed is not done in the Church of Christ.  Now, the correct theological and ecclesiastical answer is that one baptism is sufficient, and he should stand up to the Pastor and either he or I tell that fool pastor that he was insulting our denomination by suggesting that our Rite of Baptism was inadequate. That is what the Episcopal Church leaders did when one of the daughters of President Johnson wanted to marry a Roman Catholic boy, and the leaders of the church forced her to get re- baptized. I remember that battle even though I was not attending church at the time, and I sided with the Episcopal leaders and harrumphed along with them.  But as the man and I talked about how much this community meant for him in his continuing recovery, I realized that the service was not about making a stand on holding on to the rules but about becoming a full member of that community and beginning a new start. I blessed him in this new direction of his life and offered to continue to talk with him in his recovery. 

As the Rector of an Episcopal Parish, that answer is wrong and I will deserve whatever the Bishop decides to say to me.  The left side of my brain is not comfortable because I want to be right about my theology.  I wrote a five page paper in response to one question on the General Ordination Exam 29 years ago on the meaning of the Rite of Baptism, and the readers commented on how well thought out it was, and I was proud of my erudition. However, I find the older I get, the less I think with the left side of my brain and the more I think with the right, less with the head and more with the heart. I have learned how to be in awe of that which I cannot define. I am less interested in explanations than in exclamations, more interested in spirit than in law, justice than government and less with being “right” than in being reconciled in Christ. While I believe in the Christian God, the power that permeates my faith comes not from what I espouse at religious meetings but from the dynamic encounter with the mystery for which I can find no words, but which I know and am known through.

When Manteo and Virginia Dare were baptized, the two sheep from different flocks of Christ came together. When they were baptized, the sons and daughters were brought together from far away. When they were baptized, they were brought into one new humanity in place of two. Today, we celebrate our one humanity and welcome all of God’s children to join us there.