A Reflection of All Saints

A Reflection for the Sunday after All Saints 

All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC 

November 3, 2013 

Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18 Ephesians 1:11-23 Luke 6:20-31

Today we remember the Saints in this, the church of All Saints. So what is a saint?

I asked several people to tell me what the word “saint” means to them. One person said that her mother was a saint because she was the best person that she had ever known; she stands out from the rest of the people she has met in her lifetime. Her mother was different and that is the core of the meaning of the word saint. It comes from the Hebrew word for a person, place, or thing that has been set aside to be different - to be different as God is different - to belong to the Lord, to be holy. For instance, in the creation story, one day of seven was set aside to be different, to belong to the Lord, to be a Holy Day. In the same way, when Jacob has a dream, he wakes up and sets up a remembrance on the holy ground. When Moses approaches the burning bush, he has to take off his shoes for he is on “holy ground.” When the people set up an altar and a temple, that altar, the temple, the furnishings, the people, and the priests are set apart to be different because they belong to God. 

 

Later in the Hebrew Testament book of Leviticus, there is a section known as the Holiness Code which has a refrain, “You shall be Holy (different) as the Lord God is Holy (different)”. The Holiness Codes were assembled when the people of Israel were in exile in Babylon, and they were in danger of losing their identity in that strange land. They were told that they were not to fit in but, instead, stand out as different because they had a relationship with God. We see this in the Hebrew Testament lesson from Daniel for today as he has a dream which was interpreted to mean that those who stayed in relationship with the God that was different, the God of Israel, and were loyal to this God, would inherit the Kingdom of the Most High. 

 

Daniel is in exile, and the God of Israel seems so far away since the outward trappings of “Holiness”, like the Temple and its services, were so far away. But Daniel calls on the people to continue to be Holy, different in their lives, as God is Holy. Saints live lives that are different because they “believe” that God is working in this life, but it is “belief” in the old version of that word. We tend to think that “belief” means an intellectual assent to a proposition; however, intellectual assent is not what belief really means. The word belief developed from the old English word “beloef” which meant to hold something dear.

As we began our worship today using the Service of the Word, listening to scripture and preaching, we sang the “Shema”, the ancient Hebrew song of loyalty: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the LORD is one.” It continues “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength”. We listen because it is the first step in living into loyalty to our God and responding to the love which has been given to us by loving our neighbor and ourselves.

In the New Testament the Greek word for the one who is set apart is Hagios, and Paul, in the letter to the Ephesians, refers not to especially good people but to people who live their lives differently from the rest of the world; they live their lives in the light of the resurrection of the Risen Lord Christ. They live their lives as if the spirit of the Risen Lord is right there in the midst of them. Jesus tells us in the Beatitudes from Luke for today that there is a different concept of happiness for those who live lives in the different reality of the Kingdom of God in this world.

In the Roman Catholic tradition, a capital “S” Saint is one of exceptional piety and purity through whose auspices and intercession exceptional miracles are performed. But we in the Episcopal tradition tend to see that saints are regular people, people who are working - some days with more success than others - but working nonetheless on having a different way of living in the world, a world in which there are everyday miracles happening all the time. These dog- faced people see the miracles that others dismiss as interesting events.

Saints are those who know that God accepts them where they are but are actively working, with God’s help, to move themselves deeper into the journey with God. Like any relationship, it either grows when we work at it or it decays when it is ignored.

Last week was the 40^th anniversary of Pablo Casals’s death, the pre-eminent cellist of 20^th Century. He was 96 when he died, and he practiced every day of his life from childhood, when his father made him a cello with a squash gourd as a sound box. He did a concert in the Kennedy While House in 1961 when he was in his 80’s. When Casals (then age 93) was asked why he continued to practice the cello three hours a day, he replied, “I’m beginning to notice some improvement.” 

 

A Saint is one who does not pretend to be perfect but can face her/his own defects. As Thomas Merton wrote in No Man is an Island:

But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God.

A Saint is one who works each day on improving relationships with God, self, and neighbor. Therefore, a Saint is one who works on listening deeper to God by continuing to study scripture. We believe that Scripture cannot just be read on the surface but must be approached through prayer and daily study. 

 

A Saint is one who goes deeper into her/himself and, because there is a natural human tendency to self-deception and blindness, is open and honest with fellow saints on the shared journey. Saints are never loners; they might be hermits, as Thomas Merton was, but they are always connected to others. Merton, a Trappist Monk, in his Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander, wrote about a time in 1958 when he left the hermitage and went into town to the corner of 4^th and Walnut in the business district of Louisville, where he had an epiphany:

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is in fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in the other cares, the other illusions, and all the automatisms of a tightly collective existence. My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not “they” but my own self. There are no strangers!

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift.

A Saint is one who each day asks for help from a power greater than him/herself. A Saint lives in the spiritual reality where prayer is as necessary as breath, and indeed it is God’s breath flowing in and out of us. A Saint takes prayer seriously. When I thought about the saints in my life, I immediately remembered Bill Wienhauer, who died six years ago, who was my Bishop before and during the time I went to seminary. One day in Seminary, I decided I wanted to suck up to him since he would be the final voice of my ordination, so I faked sincerity and asked him to pray for a particular issue. He agreed but he said that he would not be able to add me to his list until next week on Thursday. His prayer list was full but he had an opening then. He explained about how he saw intercessory prayer as a participation in a three-way dialogue with God. I came to realize that, when he prayed for me, he entered into my heart, my soul, and my brokenness and took them on himself, carrying the shared burden to God’s Holy, Healing Spirit. To pray for others is not to add a name to a list, but an act of creative imagination on a spiritual plane. 

 

A Saint is one who commits time, energy, soul, spirit, treasure, and life to the relationship with God and God’s world and God’s people.

Saints are all over the place, and I can still see them even when they have crossed the bar. I look over at the choir and, in my mind, I still see Lillian Oswald and she sings to me about the value of the choir, not in its performance but as it leads worship. I still see Jack Mann who, in this life, kept showing us how to care for the poor and who in the next life is still urging us to care for those outside ourselves. 

 

One of the things we do on All Saints Day is to thank God for all the Saints in our lives and to give thanks for the saints who have gone before, who are now doing intercessory prayers for us, but on another shore, in another plane of existence in God’s loving universe of being. To use 19^th century British novelist George Eliot’s phrase, they are part of the “Choir Invisible”, those she remembers who have shaped her life but are now dead, but to whom she is still connected and who are still shaping her life. The first stanza of her poem goes:

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
Of miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men’s minds
To vaster issues. 

 

Today we remember the Choir Invisible and Visible, the choir of all Saints both living and dead who sing the same song to lead us in our worship of God. In this church, the choir is the whole congregation who choose to sing, not just with their voices, but with their hearts and lives in order to live different lives and to participate in a different and Blessed reality.

Reformation Sunday Reflection

Reformation Sunday for All Saints’ Episcopal and Emmanuel Lutheran, Southern Shores, NC October 27, 2013 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector Jeremiah 31:31-34 Psalm 46 Romans 3:19-28 John 8:31-36

Today we are having a “Lutherpalian” Service. “Lutherpalian” is a neologism, a made-up word, where we squeeze Lutheran and Episcopalian together, and Keith, the Lutheran Pastor, and I, the Episcopal Priest, and our congregations join together for worship. We are using the lessons from the Lutheran Lectionary for Reformation Sunday, which is the last Sunday in October before All Saints Day, November 1^st. In the Episcopal Church and in Lutheran Churches that do not observe Reformation Sunday but observe Reformation Day as October 31^st, the lessons for today would include the Gospel parable from Luke in which the Pharisee and the Tax Collector both show up at the Temple to pray – more about that lesson later.

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther, an Augustinian Monk and Professor at Wittenberg University, wrote a letter to the regional Archbishop protesting the sale of indulgences. With the letter he included a paper that he had written on the subject, which was later called the 95 Theses. Luther’s followers remember the story that Luther, apparently following local custom for making announcements, nailed the 95 Theses onto the door of All Saints Church. I asked Keith not to nail the 95 Theses to the glass doors of this All Saints’ Church, so we taped them to the doors instead. They are in Latin and if your Latin is rusty, there are a few copies in English for you in the narthex. 

Within weeks Luther’s protest was translated and, thanks to the recent invention of the printing press, was distributed all across Europe. His protest was the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation. King Henry VIII, the head of the Church in England out of which the Episcopal Church was born, wanting to suck up to the Pope, wrote a book in opposition to Protestants, including Luther. The Pope rewarded him with the title “Defender of the Faith”, which he later revoked but the King kept.

However, the Reformation had its roots long before Luther came to the scene, for it was an era of anxiety when all the world seemed to be falling apart, and basic questions came to the fore, as they always do in times of uncertainty. 

The world had changed in so many ways. Politically the balance of power was unraveling. The Eastern Roman Empire collapsed with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, and Europe was open to invasion from the East which was to extend as far as the Siege of Vienna in 1529. The fall of Constantinople was the end of the Middle Ages way of warfare with the extensive use of gunpowder and cannons. New ways of warfare meant the unraveling of the feudal system and changing alliances of power. The end of feudalism gave hope that one could change one’s lot in life and cities grew, but moving from feudalism to trade changed the economic situation, leading to massive inequalities of wealth and an abundance of resentment. The fall of Constantinople led to the mass migration of Greeks to the west, bringing with them their art, ideas, and culture which flowered into the Renaissance. The Fall of Constantinople cut off trade routes to the Orient, causing European powers to start exploring new routes to riches through the Atlantic and expanding the view of the known world. Science was changing. Ideas that the Earth was not the center of the solar system led to expanded thoughts about the universe. Technology was changing with the invention of the printing press and the realization that ideas could be published outside the control of the church and state. The press made it easier for people to discuss ideas in their native languages instead of just Latin. The church in Rome seemed corrupt and far away from people’s lives, and they resented the church for wanting people to just “pray and pay” and keep their opinions to themselves. The indulgences were a way to raise money for the building of St. Peter’s church in Rome and to buy a sinner’s way out of purgatory, or as the sale pitch went, "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs."

During Stewardship season, I know a winner of a campaign slogan when I hear one, but if I used that one, I would probably get in trouble with the Lutherans.

Like Luther, we live in a world of change where technology, warfare, political landscape, economic forces, social cohesion, the search for alternate paths, and mistrust of institutions all are, to use the words of Yeats in the first half of his poem The Second Coming:

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

When everything is changing, we face the world the Psalmist for today faced when she sang: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. /Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; / though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.” Yet when we live in a world of change, we ask basic questions, and Luther was interested in one of the most basic questions - “What is the relationship we have with God?” 

 

Luther studied to become a lawyer, in deference to his father’s wishes and tuition payments, but he hated law school. On July 2, 1505 Luther was riding on horseback in a thunderstorm, and a lightning bolt struck near him. In fear for his life, he called for heavenly help - “Help, St. Anna! I will become a monk!” The vow was his bargain, and he joined the Augustinian Order where he tried to be the best monk ever. He fasted, he did good works, he prayed, he beat up his body, he confessed, all to extremes. His confessor told him to lighten up, but he continued in his zeal and later said, "I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailer and hangman of my poor soul." He was living through a purgatory of his own making, trying to earn God’s grace. His confessor, Johann von Staupitz kept calling Martin back to the love of God and grace. Luther would say of him, “"If it had not been for Dr. Staupitz, I should have sunk in hell."

Luther came to understand that indeed he was a sinner, not because he was a bad man but because he was trying to earn a love that had already been given. The answer to the question “What is our relationship with God?” is based on acceptance of God's gift of love. It is the faith of Christ, the faith that God gives to us when the Divine brings us into Godself. Yes, we are sinners, people who louse up, but Luther called it "Simul justus et peccator", which translated means that we are both Saints - connected to God - and sinners at the same time. Which brings us back to the story of the Pharisee and Tax Collector. The Pharisee, who in his arrogance and his refusal to look into his own soul, presumes union with God because of his good deeds, unlike that Tax Collector sinner who is able to face his brokenness but asks for God’s mercy. Or as Paul says in the passage for today from his letter to the Romans

But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 

 

Reformation is about being totally honest about ourselves, claiming our brokenness, and being totally open to being united with God on God’s terms of freely given love, instead of lingering in the slavery of the blindness of our own arrogance. Here at All Saints’ there is a Thursday night class about living a life of serenity – letting go and letting God, of breaking free from the bonds of our slavery to people, places, and things which can only come when we accept our shadows and free ourselves from our self-deceptions. A life of serenity comes only with the help of the power greater than ourselves, giving us the strength to make it through each day. 

 

Reformation did not begin and end with Luther 500 hundred years ago. The problem was that it spread far and wide but not deep. The reformation got diverted into creeds, rituals, and lines of authority instead of doing the work of real reforming. Even Luther got side-tracked and instead of following where Christ would lead, the path toward reforming the fullness of our being and learning to love our enemy, Luther stopped focusing on God’s love as the worth of a person and projected his own shadow on others. He made the enemies the sinners who must be destroyed, be they fellow Protestants, or Peasants in the Peasants Revolt, or Jews in their unconversion, or Muslims on the borders, or the Religious Institution in Rome. One of the problems of being free is that, unless we honestly and rigorously live into being free, we substitute another kind of slavery in its place. Luther used the legal skills he was honing in his study of the law as well as his cleverness to win his political, national, and institutional cases for Northern European hegemony against Rome, but he neglected to win his case for God’s love by his mercy. As in all fights, we can be right but miss the point of righteousness. Being right is about winning points; being righteous is about a relationship in which we accept God’s unmerited love and give it unmerited to our neighbor and give mercy unmerited to our enemy.

As I went to sleep a couple nights ago, I was surprised to see a bunch of monsters smiling at me as they walked across the proscenium, welcoming me into my dream. I realized that they were symbols of my shadows of being right and forgetting about the righteousness of relationship. I needed to claim them as part of my brokenness instead of projecting them on to other people. Like Luther and, I suggest, you, I have a lot of work to do in my reformation. 

 

The past is not yet past. It is now the time for reformation. To paraphrase Yeats’ phrase from the end of the second stanza of Second Coming, a “slouching towards Jerusalem to be reborn”, it is time to be reformed - a reformation of our religious, economic, technological, scientific, and political institutions, and a reformation of how we treat one another in our personal lives, all undergirded by a reformation of our relationship with God. Reformation begins today.

Stolen from Buechner on Dreams

Parson Tom’s Tomes for November

The Rev. Hilary West who is now down in Mexico sent me this quote from Frederick Buechner’s 1988 book , Whistling in the Dark, An ABC Theologized, and I thought I would pass it on to you. My copy of the book left me years ago when I loaned it out in an inquirers class. This is a definition of Dream which I had read it years ago but it didn’t make sense then. Now that I am really interested in dreams it does. 

 

"No matter how prosaic, practical, and ploddingly unimaginative we may be, we have dreams like everybody else. All of us do. In them even the most down-to-earth and pedestrian of us leave earth behind and go flying, not walking, through the air like pelicans. Even the most respectable go strolling along crowded pavements naked as truth. Even the confirmed disbelievers in an afterlife hold converse with the dead just as the most dyed-in-the-wool debunkers of the supernatural have adventures to make Madame Blavatsky's hair stand on end.

The tears of dreams can be real enough to wet the pillow and the passions of them fierce enough to make the flesh burn. There are times we dream our way to a truth or an insight so overwhelming that it startles us awake and haunts us for years to come. As easily as from room to room, we move from things that happened so long ago we had forgotten them to things lying ahead that may be waiting to happen or trying to happen still. On our way we are as likely to meet old friends as perfect strangers. Sometimes, inexplicably, we meet casual acquaintances who for decades haven't so much as once crossed our minds.

Freudians and Jungians, prophets and poets, philosophers, fortunetellers, and phonies all have their own claims about what dreams mean. Others claim they don't mean a thing. But there are at least two things they mean that seem incontrovertible. One of them is that we are in constant touch with a world that is as real to us while we are in it, and has as much to do with who we are, and whose ultimate origin and destiny are as unknown and fascinating, as the world of waking reality. The other one is that our lives are a great deal richer, deeper, more intricately interrelated, more mysterious, and less limited by time and space than we commonly suppose.

People who tend to write off the validity of the religious experience in general and the experience of God in particular on the grounds that in the Real World they can find no evidence for such things should take note. Maybe the Real World is not the only reality, and even if it should turn out to be, maybe they are not really looking at it realistically."

SHALOM

A Reflection on the Celebration of lifefor Marie Nesbit

A Reflection on the Celebration of Life for Marie Motz Nesbit

Gallop Funeral Home, Nags Head, N.C.

October 20, 2013

Thomas E Wilson

Revelation 21

King James Version (KJV)
1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.
4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.
6 And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely

Today we gather together to give thanks for the life of Marie Motz Nesbit. When I talked with the family about her the first thing they told me was that “she went her own way”. The more we talked the more that phrase “went her own way” seemed to mean three different things; the first was that she was very particular about the way things should be done like in setting a table or in cleaning a house or how people acted or in how a woman should go outside with full makeup and dressed well. The second was she especially had difficulty putting up with churches and businesses and sometimes family members with two notable exceptions her mother and her grandson, Michael Lee. She was a tough woman to fully know and she kept a lot of things deep inside her. She loved God but she was at time deeply ticked off with the God who would not answer the prayers she offered up in the way she wanted them answered. The third was that in her way there needed to be light, more light, more light shining off bright things as a way of keeping the darkness of mundane everyday life from gaining sway. In her way there needed to be movement, more movement like dancing to keep the grinding of the world at bay. In her way the most important was that there needed to be more compassion to keep to keep the selfishness of the world away.

Compassion, for in going her own way there was a deep longing longing for connection and in making the world a better place. Frederick Buechner, in his Wishful Thinking wrote “The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." She was that way when she took care of her mother for she knew her mother’s deep hunger for connection and worth as her mother got older. She was that way when she would suddenly show up with an unannounced and unplaned for guest, a stranger guest for thanksgiving, a guest who needed to be connected. She was that way when she would work at Hotline. She knew that the deeper hunger the people at Hotline needed was not for clothes but a feeling that someone really cared about them as a full human being. If Marie had been in charge everything would have been given away. This is how she showed compassion by giving away, giving away time, giving away things, giving away love. At the end of life your life will not be measured by what you have but by what you have given away.

She gave away love and God gave away God's love to her. There are times when we want to ask God why God did not make it easier for Marie but God does not promise to be a good luck charm to keep bad things from happening to us. God only promises to give us strength to walk through the valley of the shadows and to anoint us as God sets a place for us at God's table in the presence of our enemies. God loved her and she loved God.

When the family was talking with me about Marie and they were talking of light and shadows and her deep faith and a vision of being reunited with family, I was reminded by a poem by Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and died in 1973. It is a sonnet about love.

Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Today we remember Marie who while she did not care much for flowers had the light of many hidden flowers in her life and has fallen asleep so close to God that her hand on her chest was God's hand, so close that when her eyes closed she was in God's dream and there she stays forever along with all that have ever loved and been loved. If you want to remember her show compassion, don't judge their worth except by God's love for them and every time you show compassion Marie lives in you and you in her.

A reflection on being marvelous made

Reflection on the Occasion of the Baptism of Joshua Emanuel Erazo 
October 20, 2013 
Pentecost XXII (Proper 24) 
All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC 

Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Jeremiah 31:27-34 Psalm 119:97-104 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 Luke 18:1-8

Let me warn you ahead of time that I was hoping that Nancy Rementer would be preaching at both services, so I used the time which I usually spend in preparation reading some more stuff from Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian minister and author. It started off when Hilary West in Mexico sent me a long quote from Buechner about dreams, an area which we have talked about over the phone. I used the long quote for my Tomes for next month’s Trumpeter, and it inspired me to look at some of his books that I have and underline quotes from him on the net. So fair warning. There are three quotes from Buechner coming up - one in the beginning, one in the middle, one in the end. This is the first one, and it is from in one of his autobiographical works, The Sacred Journey: "All theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography."

It is hard to be an unjust judge, it takes a lot of energy to go against who you are, but I don’t think the story that Jesus is telling in the Gospel is about judicial ethics; rather it is about ontological resonance- being who you are. Notice that there is no name for the judge and so we are invited to try the character of the judge on for size. Jesus is telling this story as he is on his way to Jerusalem where he is meeting his destiny, becoming who he is and his purpose in life. In looking at dreams we make assumptions that all the people of the dream are all parts of the one person of the dreamer. I think this story is Jesus’ internal struggle of living into himself as well as the personal and corporate struggles of those who follow Jesus, the struggle of incorporation of the whole person, being true to oneself instead of just being on the surface of ego expediency. 

Paul at age 3, sister Anne at 7 months and me at age 2  down in Salvador- he is further back from camera so he just seems smaller. Paul is wearing a straw hat like our gardener Amadeo

I had a brother Paul who was a year older than me, and I was in awe of him and I thought I could never catch up to him and be as big or strong or bright or popular or cool or good looking as he was. He was built differently than I was with dark black hair, ruggedly handsome, having a darker skin shade that never got sunburned like I did, and he moved with such grace that he was voted the “Handsomest Boy in the Senior Class” in our High School. When we were children in El Salvador and the maid took us for walks, the women would rub my copper red hair for luck and say, “Ay que Lindo!” because I was different and cute. But they would look at Paul and, not touching him, would say with an intake of interested breath and a whole different tone of voice, “Ay, que macho!” People always said he was “God’s gift to women.” I envied him because I thought he was indeed God’s gift.

For years I wanted to be more like Paul, but I was not created to be a Paul doppelganger. I was created to be who I am and that is different - not better, not worse, but different. Like the unjust judge I was not called to be an un-Tom Tom. Just like you are not to be an “un-Judy Judy” or an “Un-Steve Steve”, God wrote down God’s divine dream for each of us in the core of each of our beings. Jeremiah, in today’s Hebrew Testament lesson, says that God “writes God’s law on our hearts.” The law is not a series of statutes and ordinances, but a deep relationship with the divine and our true selves. We violate this law when we forget the relationship, when we forget the presence of God, when we forget who we are. It took me years to find out that I was also a gift from God and to find the joy of my heart when I am whom God dreamed me to be.

Today we will baptize Joshua Emanuel Erazo, and we will say that he is God’s gift to us. All I know about Joshua so far is that he is loved, he likes to snuggle, he has dark black hair, ruggedly handsome and won’t get too much sunburn. I know from his genetic makeup he will be strong, and he will inherit the inner strength of his parents, Jesus and Maricela. And we are here to make promises that we will help him and his parents and his sister, Diana, grow in their faith. “Growing in faith” means living fully into who you were created to be when God dreamed of each of us, being a contributing citizen of this world , a creature of flesh and mind, and a living home of the spirit of God. Buechner, again from The Sacred Journey , wrote "You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own."

Becoming fully human means to grow into the image of God in which we were created. The old phrase, “We are only human” is wrong - it should be that “We are marvelously human, fearfully and wonderfully made.” In the Gospel story from Luke for today, the unjust judge is out of balance with who he was created to be. In response to the presence of the Holy within his very being, symbolized by the widow’s constant badgering, he says, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming."

I think the point of the story is that, without coming to an awareness of the full person each of us is - the physical, the relational, the spiritual, an interaction of common purpose in the trinity of our being - we will have no peace. The judge has no peace when he denies his central identity of being fully and compassionately human. Jesus is telling the story from the core of his imagination about the struggle to find peace with his central identity. There is an old phrase about what happens when we forget the indwelling of the Holy within ourselves. It goes “No God = No Peace, Know God= Know Peace”.

Look at Joshua Emanuel’s name, and we are given a reminder of what we are about. The name Joshua comes from the Hebrew of “Yeshua”- or “Yahweh is our salvation, our deliverance” which is translated to the Greek as Jesus in the New Testament. Emanuel comes from the Hebrew “El = God and Emanuel = God is with us”. Our promises that we make in our Baptismal Covenant are to help Joshua, and each other, know God through us so that we might know Peace within and between us. We do this as much for ourselves as we do it for Joshua. Again to quote Frederick Buechner, this time from his Wishful Thinking: “The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

A Reflection on the Life of Marjorie Sayre Wallwork

A Reflection on the Life and Death of Marjorie Sayre Wallwork

October 14, 2013

All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC

Readings:     1 Corinthians 15:51-58                          John 6:37-40

I have been doing a lot of thinking about beginnings and endings this last week; in fact, I did a sermon about that idea in the Sunday services yesterday. Maybe I should have saved it for today because this service is about beginnings and endings. On one hand, we gather together to say that Marge's life on earth has ended. However, as we gather around the table later in the service, we will declare that Marge is still with us on the other side of the table, as she has begun the next stage of her life by walking through the gate of death.

If we only lived in the physical world, we would always be in beginnings and endings, for every day is a beginning of the future and every day is an end of the past. Yet life is never that easy for those of us who have also lived in love. My mother died a few years ago and it was a strange feeling, living into being an orphan in my sixties. I am all grown up and while it is right and natural that the next generation should die before the younger, I was unprepared for the hole that was left in my life. I still think of things I want to share with her, and I realize that I will not hear her voice. It is only in my memory and imagination that I can hear her laughter about what I wanted to tell her. She went through that after my father's death decades before. She would tell me that she would see something and she would turn to share it and say “Bill”, before she realized that she, on this earth, was beyond hearing him except in her hopes, memories, and imagination. Yet they are both alive, part of my DNA in how I think, how I evaluate, how I enjoy, how I laugh, how I cry. The relationship with them made me who I am. When they died, there was an ending and a whole series of beginnings. As Paul reminds us in the first lesson from 1^st Corinthians, “Behold I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep but we shall be changed.”

Marge understood that all of life was, at its core, a mystery, all will be changed. Marge would talk about how much she missed her husband and how when she died she would be reunited with him. The end is not the end; the gate is open to a new beginning.

I think the world in this life is divided into two groups, the first who say, “It all begins with me” and the other who say that “It all ends with me.” When I first met Marge a little over 10 years ago, I was impressed by how gracious she was. I had then had a couple decades of history dealing with Altar Guilds and getting fish eyes from them as they looked askance at some of my ideas, as they thought with longing about the last good rector - who was always the one three before me, the present incumbent – and how dear Saintly Father Whosits would not have approved. As I talked with her about the Altar Guild, I noticed the steely center of her will as she suggested how things should be. I knew that things she did for the guild would be done right and I need not worry about it.  But at the same time I remember thinking to myself, “I better not mess with her about a bunch of changes I have in mind; she is tough.” I made the mistake of thinking that she was an “It all ends with me” kind of person, the kind who wants everybody else to change and for her to be in control. While I was never wrong about the strength I glimpsed, I was so wrong in other ways - for the more I saw her over the years, I saw her as an “It all begins with me” kind of person. She was open to changing things in her life while the core of her heart never changed. Marge saw everything through the eyes of thanksgiving and mercy.

Part of being a Pastor is visiting people and listening to their complaints. I remember priming the pump and asking her about how difficult it must have been to leave her friends and independent living in New Jersey, having her children living far away, moving in with Betsy and Chris. She looked at me as if I did not have a brain in my head. She was not to spend time feeling sad about the past.  She had decided to look at the present, look at each new day as something for which to give thanks. She would tell me how wonderful Chris and Betsy were to her, how grateful she was to her caregiver Maggie, how good it was to see her daughters and grandchildren and how she was so glad to see her friends here.  Try as I might to open the door to complaints, it was one door she was not going to enter.

I would ask her “How are you doing today?”, knowing she was in pain, and she would say, “Oh I am fine.”  She was not lying; oh, she was hurting - but why should she complain when there was so much for which to give thanks. She saw, in the middle of all the losses, the blessings of all the graces that surrounded her. She was too busy giving thanks and had no time to complain.  When someone would bring up boorish behavior on someone else's part, she would reflexively find some excuse – “Maybe he was feeling bad, maybe she had a stomach ache.” Life, she thought, was too short to carry around resentments and memories of people not being at their best.

Every day Marge would read her meditations, and she put herself in a right relationship with God and neighbor. If you are an “It all ends with me” kind of person, you carry around a list of people with whom you want to get even, for you live in a universe of scarcity because you are the center of your life. If you are an “It all begins with me” kind of person, you forgive people before they ask, for God's love shines through you as you see joy in a universe of abundance.

Today we give thanks for Marjorie Sayre Wallwork’s life. We give thanks for her witness of living faithfully into the Great Commandment of loving God and neighbor. We give thanks for the resurrection in which she is raised up and reunited with all that she has ever loved, and in which we will be reunited with her.

Today we bless the Christ candle that is given in Marge's memory to honor her. The Christ candle is lit at baptisms, funerals, in every service during the Easter Season, and on special occasions to show the presence of Christ, the light of Christ shining in the midst of the gathered community. The last one bought by the church was about fourteen years ago when the church was built. I am so cheap that, for over ten years, I kept telling the Altar Guild not to buy a new Christ candle because we could always make do.  I guess when I came here over 10 years ago, it was about five feet tall, and this year it had burned down to a foot and a half  long.  This month the Altar Guild finally put its collective foot down and said we need to get a new one. At that time, Marge's family asked if they could give something in her memory. I thought of Marge and thought that the new candle made sense, for she was a light to us on how to live a life of thanksgiving and forgiveness, a light on how not to live in the shadows but in the light of love, a light to shine into the unknown futures, a light to remember the endings and celebrate the beginnings.

If you want to remember Marge, be a light in your world to show a better way to live. Let your light so shine on your beginnings and endings that people may see your good works and glorify your father who is in heaven.

Reflection on Beginnings and Endings

A Reflection on XXI Pentecost (Proper 23)                  All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC 

October 13, 2013                                                        Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7        2 Timothy 2:8-15          Luke 17:11-19

I had a dream last Saturday night/Sunday morning about beginnings and endings, and I have seen that dream acted out in waking life this week. Come on – don’t roll your eyes like that – you know dreams are important to me for I am persuaded that dreams are ways that God prepares us for events that are happening in our lives.

The dream was that Pat and I are traveling and check into a motel. A motel is a symbol of a temporary place to stay, so this dream in about transitions in my life. I am walking outside in the parking lot- another transition place - and am taken prisoner at gunpoint and told I would be held for ransom. The leader of the group looked like a young Peter Finch, the actor who was most famous for his role as the aging news anchorman in the movie Network,

who, under stress because of dropping ratings, goes crazy and after a night of imbibing a lot of Spirits, goes on the news program and urges people to go to the window and shout “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

But in my dream he was young, and he reminded me of when he played the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham in Walt Disney’s 1952 movie Robin Hood.

So; ratings have to do with money and the evil Sheriff extorted tax money form the poor Saxons to pay for the rich Norman Bishops. In both movies the Finch character dies.

What was happening in my non-dreaming life at the time were three things: (1) on Saturday morning we met with and arranged for further meetings with a dream counselor for Pat and I as part of our dream studies to help each of us look at our dreams while being open to the Spirit. And (2) the Federal Government is waiting to find out if they have enough money to operate and there are comments that the government is being “held hostage”, and (3) is the approach of Sunday morning’s Stewardship breakfast, the kick-off of the fall stewardship drive, which raises an irrational preconscious anxiety level in me in that, when I lead the request for money which has an underlying element of being a referendum on my Priesthood, it’s sort of like being held as a hostage pending the ransom payment. 

In the dream I asked Finch if I could go back in to say goodbye to Pat. He agrees and we start moving the mattresses they had piled up for the expected fire fight. The symbol of moving mattresses is the dream’s way of telling me we were about to get to the point and I would “wake up” having no more need of the mattresses. I am aware in the dream that it is 4:00 AM, that darkness before the dawn, and 4 is a symbol of completeness- like the four directions of a compass, so it is telling me that  it is coming to an end. In the dream the Finch character tells me I have three choices: (a) I could run away, and in that case he would shoot me and I would die. (b) I could tell Pat and the church not to pay the ransom, in which case I would die. (c) I could go with the kidnapper in which case I would die because I could identify him.  It was a real “Morton’s Fork”, a between Scylla and Charybdis dilemma which, no matter what choice I made, it would end the same way.  I am in a situation I cannot control; so what does life look like in that situation? Is there a fourth option?

It was then I woke up and when I wrote the dream down, I wondered why I felt so calm about dying. Then I remembered that usually the metaphor of death in a dream is not about physical death but about the entrance into a new beginning. Maybe the fourth option was to see the dying as a new beginning.

All dreams have many levels, and as I looked at the dream, on one level I heard God telling me that the dream was about looking for new beginnings even in places where I had limited control. However the unknown future turns out, it is a beginning of something new; the end is only a prelude to a new beginning.

Four hours after that dream I faced the morning without anxiety and enjoyed the wonderful Stewardship Kick-off, where the theme was “Examine your blessings and celebrate with Thanksgiving”.  Both Karen Arbaugh and Jeff Edwards seemed to express the viewpoint that blessings seem to come, even though at first look they may not be seen as blessings but, upon reflection, they offer a gate to a new way of living. I did not tell them what to say but their minds were responding to the same energy waves as my dream. This is called synchronicity, when an apparently meaningless coincidence in time of two or more similar or identical events is causally unrelated but there is a meaning given to what could be dismissed as mere coincidence. 

The next day after that, I was called by the emergency room at the hospital and so I cancelled Monday’s Bible study where we were to look at these lessons for today. A man had died and his wife asked for last rites from a Greek Orthodox or Episcopal Priest.

The man was dead and I could not fix that, but as I prayed for him and anointed him with oil and commended him to God’s gracious care, giving thanks for his life and ability to love, I was reaffirming my dream -that the end was also the gate to a new beginning. God’s dream gave me the direction of how I was to non-anxiously look at his death and, by extension, my own death. The learning, which I need to keep hearing, is when I am in a situation I cannot control; I must not be consumed with anxiety and trust that there will be a blessing of redemption.

After I lived into the lessons of my dream, I looked more deeply into the lessons for today and saw the same themes. Jeremiah is writing to the people going off to exile. They are in a situation they cannot control; their life is ending in Jerusalem and, instead of blaming them for this event or spending more time in lamenting as he had done, he urges them to use this ending as a new beginning and “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Jeremiah examines the blessings and celebrates with thanksgiving.

The writer of the letter to 2^nd Timothy remembers a 1^st century Christian Baptismal hymn, which recounts that when a Christian went into the waters of Baptism, they got a new name and went through the waters of new birth.  Her/his whole life changed into an ending, and a new life was beginning.  “If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he will also deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful--for he cannot deny himself.” I love that song because it says even if from time to time we deny God, God’s love overcomes, denies the denial, for God cannot deny God’s very self’s prime directive of love. The writer of 2^nd Timothy remembers Paul in prison, in a situation he cannot control, examining his blessings and celebrates with thanksgiving.

In the Gospel lesson, Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem where he knows that his life will end. On the way he meets ten lepers whose whole lives are centered on their disease and they have no lives other than to be outsiders. Jesus heals them and sends them to the priests so that might enter into new life. The Samaritan comes back after he has examined his blessing of beginning a new life and falls at Jesus feet and, in the Greek, he uses the same word that we use for the Eucharist, the Great Thanksgiving, he celebrates with thanksgiving.

We are in a universe of blessings as things end, and in the endings there are new beginnings, and all ends and all beginnings contain blessings. So I invite you to dream about your beginnings and endings in your life and examine your blessings and celebrate with thanksgiving.