S Reflection on St. Francis 2013

A Reflection for the Feast of St. Francis (Transferred) and Blessing of the Animals

All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC

September 29, 2013

Thomas Wilson, Rector

Galatians 6:14-18                                Luke 16:19-31

In the Gospel lesson for today, Jesus has a dream. “Wait”, you say, “It is not a dream.  Jesus is telling a story out of his imagination!” To which I would reply, “Out of the divine imagination - where do you think dreams come from?” Dreams come from where our experience joins messages from the divine imagination in order to give us a different view of the world that they jointly inhabit. The Divine Imagination is one of the places where the God within us unites with the human experience within us. As William Blake, poet, priest and mystic said: “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this universe is but a faint shadow.”

The Divine Imagination gives us this story of the unnamed Rich Man and Lazarus, the beggar. Now right away, the fact that the beggar has a name and the Rich Man has none should be a clue to you that you are invited to insert your name in place of “the Rich Man”. If we look at this story like we look at a dream, then we are invited to see ourselves in both the rich man and Lazarus.  Is this an internal conflict where the spiritual side of ourselves is allowed to starve and die of neglect by the side obsessed with getting things? Or is the dream about the world we live in as we are invited to live into the despair of Lazarus and the shallow self-absorption of our pursuit of riches?

Notice I am not trying to say anything about the “goodness” of each person. Some on the left side of the political divide want to see in Lazarus a symbol of the undeserving poor, the victims of greed in our capitalist system. Some on the right might see the rich man as a nice guy who saw Lazarus as a lazy person who did not deserve his charity. God is not a Democrat or Republican and the point is that they were both loved by God.  But the rich man created the chasm, the big ditch which no one can cross, which is between he and Lazarus in this life and the next. We all dig our chasms, one shovel at a time. We also fill in that chasm one shovel at a time.

The night before I give this sermon I will be doing a Memorial Service on the beach for a homeless woman who I first met during her participation in “Room At The Inn”, when we did a sheltering of the homeless during the winter months. She had many problems, some of her own making. She had a good heart, a fine imagination, a diseased body and a broken mind, but she was loved by God and she loved God. The name she went by was her middle name, Adrianne.  The root of that name means someone who is dark or who comes from the Adriatic Sea area. Her name fit for she knew the dark side of life and she came here because she loved the sea; her moments closest to God were at sunrises and sunsets on the beach. She and I are both broken in our own ways and thereby have a lot in common. During the last days of her life, I was proud of All Saints’ because, in that sheltering program, we helped fill in some the chasm between the rich side of ourselves and the poor side of ourselves.

A colleague of mine in Virginia, John Arms, said that, in addition to Lazarus and the rich man, there was another name in this story. He said he went to visit a parishioner of his in Nelson County, and the parishioner told him the dog in the story had a Biblical name, “Moreover”.  John allowed that he had not come across that name, and the parishioner pulled out the King James Version  of this story and pointed to Luke 16:21 where it reads “and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.”

This was the parishioner’s way of remembering that sometimes our animals have more compassion than humans do. I saw this church’s involvement with programs like “Room At The Inn” as being “Moreover” as we minister to the sores of our lives and our neighbors and fill in the chasms. The name of the beggar, Lazarus, comes from the Hebrew, Eleazar, and since Hebrew did not add verbs to words to determine tense until the Middle Ages, the name could mean past tense, “God had helped”, or future tense “God will help”, or present tense “God is my help”. It is an appropriate name for this beggar who was abandoned by humans and only God could help him.

I imagine that God had kept trying to help the beggar, Lazarus, while he was still alive. The Divine sent prophets to share their dreams and visions about caring for neighbor, but the rich man, you, me or that part of each of us, didn’t pay a bit of attention.. The Divine One sent Moses to begin writing the law about caring for the poor, but the Rich man, you, me, or that part of us, was just too busy. The Divine inspired the hearts of the Middle Eastern people before Moses that they were to give hospitality to the Stranger, as when Abraham entertained strangers and they were angels in disguise, but the rich man, you, me, or that part of us, had different priorities.

You see, there is this thing called greed, and in order for it to survive in our daily lives, we just shut our ears to all the messages that the Divine sends to our hearts. We nourish this illusion that, if we can just get a little more of whatever it is we want, then we can be happy, and the more we have, the happier we will be.  And so it goes, for there is never enough for us if all we see is a universe of scarcity. The more we have, this line of thinking goes, the more of a sense of power we will have. So, this line of thinking goes, we just need to cut back on such frills as compassion, or social cohesion, or just basic humanity, in order to keep more of whatever we want for ourselves.

Mahatma Gandhi had some advice for us - "Let us learn to live simply, so that others may simply live." But the modern day rich man, you, me or that part of us ignores that advice because Gandhi simply is not “one of us”, a Christian. One time Gandhi replied to a missionary attempting to convert him to Christianity saying, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” 

Except, Gandhi was just paraphrasing 19^th Century American former Episcopalian and converted Roman Catholic Saint Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton’s rule: “To live simply so that others can simply live.” Mother Seton had been rich and when her husband died, she was financially destitute. Yet, her spirit was rich and she devoted the rest of her life to helping the poor. 

Today we remember the 13^th century St. Francis of Assisi who had been born rich but left his father’s house destitute in order to give himself, the true self, the only thing worth having and giving, to his neighbor. He told his disciples, "It would be considered a theft on our part if we didn't give to someone in greater need than we are" and "If we can enter the church day and night and implore God to hear our prayers, how careful we should be to hear and grant the petitions of our neighbors in need."  
 Gandhi, Mother Seton, and Francis, all of them caught the same vision of the first century story told by Jesus for today which came from the Divine Imagination.

Today we remember Francis by the blessing of the animals. As we bless these animals, may we be blessed to be like “Moreover” who ministered to the sores of Lazarus, the one whom God helped.  Let us open our ears to the Divine Imagination in our true self and listen to the cries of our neighbor, our fellow creatures of God.

Tomes for October

Parson Tom's Tomes

At the September Vestry Meeting  we started, as we always do, with two items; the first being a time for Prayer/Meditation led by one of the vestry persons, and the second being time for reflection on “How will what we do today affect the poor?”, Some might say that this is what we do before we get down to business, but I would say that these two actions are our business and everything else, the budget, the committee reports and the rest of the agenda flow out of those moments.

The real business of All Saints is listening to God and loving our neighbor; everything else is just taking care of the religious institution of All Saints. During the reflection time some offered how we had touched lives of relative strangers in Dare County who have come into our path as we walked with God's Spirit: Pastoral Care and Memorial Services done for people who were not members of this parish, participating in “Room At The Inn”, “OBX Pridefest”, “Ruthie's Kitchen”, the Food Pantry, Interfaith Community Outreach,  and  the “Food For Thought” program where Dare County school children are able to take some food home for the weekend so they would be ready for school after the break. During the discussion we talked about going outside of Dare County and Jarvisburg Elementary School 12 miles across the bridge from us in Currituck County came up and how many of these children's parents were struggling to make ends meet in these tough economic times. We decided that we would ask the congregation to help get these children ready for school by seeing if we can provide them with school supplies. We asked Steve Blackstock, the principal of the school  (and our Music Director) if he would get a list of supplies that are needed. He told us that they had enough paper, but there are many more other things and he will get a list for us.  (See that list in this month's “Trumpeter”).

During the month of October we do the annual Stewardship Program which will officially Kick Off at the combined service on October 6^th and will wrap it up on as we concentrate on finding how much money we will have for the  running of the religious institution on the Sunday after All Saints Day, our patronal festival. This seems a good time for us to include our outreach as our stewardship as the work of the church as we listen to God's Spirit leading us.

Please join us.

SHALOM

A reflection on debts and debtors

A Reflection for XVIII Pentecost (Proper 20)                       All Saints’, Southern Shores, N.C.

 September 22, 2014                                                                        Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1                    1 Timothy 2:1-7                      Luke 16:1-13

As I was preparing for the Bible Study this week, I was looking at the Gospel lesson and, while I have preached on this lesson at least ten different times over my ordained ministry, I did not notice the word “debtor” before. I guess I was all intent on trying to find out why the Master commended the dishonest servant, and I passed right over the word. As I prayed about it, it seemed as if the scales fell from my eyes and, for a couple of hours, I had a wonderful time thinking I had cracked the code to the meaning of this passage because I finally noticed that word, “Debtor”. 

Let me explain; how many of you for your sins have been to a Presbyterian church? My mother was a Presbyterian and my grandparents took me to their Presbyterian church on their local college campus when my brother and I were palmed off on them for part of the summer so that my parents could regain some sanity. In their version of the Lord’s Prayer, the petition is “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”, while the Episcopalians used “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” I had been told that “sin” meant not necessarily something bad but something that misses the mark and falls short of the target. I just figured that it was a disagreement in translation since to be in debt is also to fall short  I went back to my Greek concordance to back myself up, but that didn’t happen. Because while the words are synonymous, it is Matthew’s Gospel which uses the Greek word for debt and Luke’s Gospel that uses the Greek word for “sin”. 

However, I am not going to let an inconvenient surface fact get in the way of the truth. I want you to know that my Greek professor would disapprove of my playing fast and loose with the words of scripture, and my New Testament Professor is probably rolling over in his grave because the story of the “Dishonest Manager” is in Luke and not in Matthew, and it is not found in any of the other Greek manuscripts.  So I have not a shred of evidence to back me up.  But as Luther says in the 99^th letter to Melanchthon,

"If you are a preacher of Grace, then preach a true, not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. For he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here we have to sin. This life in not the dwelling place of righteousness but, as Peter says, we look for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. . . . Pray boldly-you too are a mighty sinner." (Weimar ed. vol. 2, p. 371; Letters I, "Luther's Works," American Ed., Vol 48. p. 281- 282)

Suppose that I looked at this story not as a recounting of fact, but as if it were a dream.  Come on, admit it.   You knew I was going to bring up dreams again. So for those of you picked five minutes in the “How long into the sermon will it take Tom to mention dreams?” pool, you can wait for a minute to collect your winnings or you could just write down that the names of the people who are in your debt. When we look at a dream, we understand it in symbols and that is the way to understand this story - as a parable, as Jesus’ story told in dream language to the right side of our brain.  

So this is not a story about economics.  In the parable the character of the Master is a stand-in for God, and in the imagination of my prayers, I understood that the word debtor meant sinners. The manager is you and me, we are the stewards of God, and we have all squandered opportunities for God’s Kingdom to come and for God’s will to be done on earth as in heaven. In my imagination I suppose that, in God’s Kingdom, forgiveness is the norm and my job is to forgive. Suppose in the books I keep in my heart I remember every sin that has been done against me, and in that ledger each person’s sin is added to their debt: they owe me!

The image is like the ghost of Jacob Marley in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, who comes to Scrooge bound in chains, chained for all eternity, “clasped about his middle. The chain was long, and wound about him like a tail; it was made, for Scrooge observed it closely, of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel." 

Suppose that every sin that has been done against me is also a sin against God and those offenders are in debt to, and owe, God. Suppose I realize that God is calling for an accounting of my internal books and ledgers, the ones I chain to my heart and memory. Suppose that I do not want to go before God with all that red ink on my soul, so I go to everyone who is in my books and forgive those parts of the sins I am able to forgive at this time, not because I am a good person - I am not - but out of my own self-interest, so I don’t have to go before God with all of my resentments. Suppose that the Master (God) comes to you and me and says, “You were acting shrewdly in your own self-interest just like all those other people who are not members of churches act in their own self-interest. Thank you for doing that for, as my servant John wrote in his Gospel, “the sins that you bind on earth are bound in heaven and the sins that you loose on earth are loosed in heaven.” 

Suppose that when I forgive, it is not just me that forgives but the God within me and you that forgives, and the sinner and I and you share the same sacred ground of our being. Just saying the words is not enough, but I must ask God to cleanse me from my resentment and to change my memory so that, the next time I remember the hurt that was inflicted, the feelings of anger will be replaced by sadness for the pain that I allowed to fester for so long, and I will delight that God gave me the strength to even want to want to forgive.  Suppose that is what we are called to do when we are called by the Master to answer for the ledgers that we have chained on ourselves. Suppose that is another way of looking at this story of cooking the books, burning away all of our burdens in the fire of God’s love.

Suppose instead of holding resentments and holding on to enemies, we pray for them in thanksgiving, as the writer of 1^st Timothy for today urges:  “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.”

That is just supposing of course that Jesus taught us to forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors as the Presbyterians and Matthew say it or sins as Episcopalians and Luke say it. Maybe it is just a dream, but suppose we took it seriously?

A Reflection on connections

A Reflection for XVII Pentecost (Proper 19)                                    All Saints’, Southern Shores, NC September 15, 2013                                                                Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28                1 Timothy 1:12-17                            Luke 15:1-10

Today we continue with Jeremiah’s dreams.  One of the problems with taking a look at prophets is that some interpreters want to see in prophecies predictions for the future.  They expect to see a threat by the Almighty to make a grease spot of the land by the abusive parent in the sky. The Linns’ (Shelia, Matthew and Dennis) book, Good Goats: Healing the Image of God,

addresses the difference between a loving parent and an abusive parent. Sometimes all parents get fed up with their kids and threaten something, like when my father was really ticked off with my brother and I constantly squabbling on the long car ride to the grandparents - “If you guys don’t cut it out, I am going to stop the car and let you walk home.” However, only the abusive parent will do it.   I lost count of the number of times we drove our father to frustration, but he never did stop loving us and drop us off on the highway.

A prophet is a “seer”, one who sees information through visions and dreams about the present reality. The dream comes and, in this case, is a nightmare because the people have been so undermining of the community with the evils of exploitation, unchecked greed, neglect of the poor, corruption of government, and abuse of the land.  They are alienated from neighbor, community, the land, and ultimately from the true self, the image of God who is in the depths of each of our being. There are consequences for this behavior; all behavior has consequences. Newton’s Third Law of Motion tells us, “For every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The problem is that we think that somehow we are not all connected, and we are above nature and people. But as Bob Dylan used to say, “You don’t need to be a weatherman to see which way the wind blows.”

Jeremiah has a dream; it is a nightmare. Disturbing dreams come to shake us up, to have us pay attention and change the way we are living. This is a dream of alienation.  The alienation that we experience but repress, push down into our unconscious is projected onto the screen of our dreams so that we might come face to face with that which we have ignored. Healing comes when we recognize it and make a decision that we don’t want to live this way - lost in a world of alienation.

In the dream, Jeremiah hears the hot wind blow from the desert, laying the land and people low.

Jung had a concept of “synchronicity” which is when two or more events happen at the same time and while they are not caused by one another, they become connected in meaning.  Such as the experience of thinking about someone and then we get a phone call from them. One does not logically cause one another but we give meaning to it, giving them an acausal connection, where the connection is more important than the cause. Jeremiah’s dream from the Divine is pointing out the connections between the actions of the people and the land itself. Now, of course, we can get all defensive and say; “Don’t blame me for the weather. It is just a coincidence.” But from what we are learning about Quantum Physics, acausal connections is one way the universe works. The deeper we go what seems to be coincidental are seen to be incoincidental. The Eastern Religions call it Karma, the “what goes around, comes around” idea or what the Greeks call “fate”. However, we usually are so obsessed with our own entitlement philosophy that we do not perceive the evil that we do. Jung said, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.” Jeremiah, the seer, by sharing his dream, is calling our deeds of thoughtless evil to our consciousness where we can see our actions the way that God sees them. He hears God calling through the dream that we can change this seemingly inevitable outcome, but we are going to have to change the way we act and rediscover our true connections with the land, with neighbor, and with our true selves, the true images of God buried under the inattention of our busy-ness.

I was listening to NPR this last week, and it was suggested that one of the contributing factors to the problems in Syria was the four year drought from 2006 - 2010 which dried up farms and forced 2-3 million people, now homeless, to pour into the cities. While the well-off, living in their own little bubble of privilege, were busily finding ways to profit from the misery, the government’s refusal to aid its citizens helped create the situation where desperate people rose up in revolt. The UN warned about possible unrest from this powder keg in 2009, but the regime acted as if greed is normal, violence appropriate to support their own privilege, and poor people were not their problem. It would be nice to say that we Western Christians respond to such situations out of love, but we are often too busy with our own agendas to pay attention to the world - and at home we act the same way, as if greed is normal, violence appropriate to support our own privilege, and the poor not our problem.

God keeps trying to get us to pay attention to the fact that we are intimately connected to the land, to neighbor, and to the true self that dwells in us, but we alienate ourselves from all of those.  In the Gospel story for today, Jesus looks at the two groups of people who act as if they are not connected with each other. On the one hand are the tax collectors and friends who work for the occupying forces. They had been alienated from their neighbor because they wanted to profit from the situation; but in the process they found that they were profoundly alienated from their true selves. They found that money and power could not feed their souls. Jesus came and, in his imagination from the Divine, he told stories which projected God’s loving persistence on the screen of their consciousness, and they found the strength to change and accept God’s love and hope.

On the other hand, there was a group of Pharisees who were so concerned about being “right” in religion that they were alienated from neighbor who did not measure up to their standards, so that they were also alienated from their true selves, the place where the Spirit of the living God dwells within each of us. The problem with being “right” is that we are so filled with ourselves that God doesn’t stand a chance of being heard.  Jesus, filled with the imagination of the Divine, tells a couple of stories about how the Shepherd goes into the wilderness and the woman goes into the dark spaces to recover that which was lost. The shepherd and woman are archetypes and metaphors for God who comes into the wilderness of our unconscious hidden selves and into the dark corners of our souls to help us find ourselves.

The writer of the 1^st Timothy remembers Paul giving thanks to God for coming into Paul’s dark, alienated soul when he, unconsciously  was the lost sheep, the lost coin, obsessed with being right.  The Lord appeared in a vision, a dream, to project onto the screen of Paul’s consciousness the blindness of Paul’s vision. Paul sings “But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.”

Jeremiah, Paul, the tax collectors and their friends all know what it is like to have God heal the alienation in their hearts and to have the chance to find the true self, the resting place of the divine who lives within and who hallows us, the land, and the sacred space between us and our neighbor - even the neighbor who is our enemy.

Today, I invite you to listen to the dreams of Jeremiah, the imagination of the divine in Jesus’ stories and the song of Paul and ask; “If it were my dream, if it were my story, if it were my song, will I claim it?” I remember a line the Bishop said at my ordination after I replied “I will” to a bunch of promises: “May the Lord who has given you the will to do these things give you the grace and power to perform them.” To which I responded “A-men”, which did not mean “Bed-de-bed-de that’s all folks”, but “I agree”.

 Now my brothers and sisters, I ask you to remember our own Baptismal Covenant,

on page 304 of the Book of Common Prayer:

Celebrant      Do you believe in God the Father?
People          I believe in God, the Father almighty,
                 creator of heaven and earth.

Celebrant      Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God?
People          I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
                    He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit
                        and born of the Virgin Mary.
                    He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
                        was crucified, died, and was buried.
                    He descended to the dead.
                    On the third day he rose again.
                    He ascended into heaven,
                        and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
                    He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

Celebrant     Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit?
People          I believe in the Holy Spirit,
                    the holy catholic Church,
                    the communion of saints,
                    the forgiveness of sins,
                    the resurrection of the body,
                    and the life everlasting.

Celebrant      Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and
                 fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the
                 prayers?
People          I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant      Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever
                 you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
People          I will, with God’s help.

 Celebrant     Will you proclaim by word and example the Good
                 News of God in Christ?
People          I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant      Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving
                 your neighbor as yourself?
People          I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant      Will you strive for justice and peace among all
                 people, and respect the dignity of every human
                 being?
People          I will, with God’s help.

“May the Lord who has given you the will to do these things give you the grace and power to perform them.” To which the people said; …