A Reflection on "You Shall Be Holy"

I made a video of this on YouTube in case you want to hear it: http://youtu.be/8GpJtv0cGic      "You Shall Be Holy" A Sermon for VII Epiphany                                         All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC  February 23, 2014                                                              Thomas E. Wilson, Rector “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy”

Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18              1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23               Matthew 5:38-48

Anyone remember what this Sunday, the next to the last Sunday of Epiphany, used to be called in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer?  Let me give you a hint - last week was called Septuagesima, which means 70^th day before Easter, and next week used to be called Quinquagesima (50^th).  Go home and look it up.  Every time the word was mentioned in the church I grew up in (heck, I’m not really grown up now…), the Priest would roll his eyes as the immature young boys filled with hormones they did not understand would snicker barely suppressed giggles, and my mother would thump me - and the rest of the mothers would thump their boys - on the back of the head. When we would get home, my mother would sigh deeply and wonder if I would ever learn how to behave in church. My mother died a few years ago, but I think she is still thinking that.

Every year a bunch of people make a New Year’s Resolution to read the Bible all the way through from Genesis to Revelation. And the Hebrew Testament Lesson from the Book of Leviticus is where they really start to bog down. This is one of the most boring books in the Bible, and it is hard slogging for anyone. The problem is that it is a law book, and it is guaranteed to cure any insomnia you might have.

Scholars believe this book was collected in response to the time when the Jewish people were in exile in Babylon, and they were in danger of losing their identity.  As the decades passed in Babylon and as the children were adapting to the local culture, the parents were facing pressure to just go along with living in this strange land, and the grandparents were dying off. The religious center of the community was in danger of falling apart.  The Book collected all the habits of living, rules about health, hygiene, dress, diet, sexual habits, family norms, financial matters, religious observances, and all the minutiae of daily life. The goal was that the exiled community would be different from the larger community in which they lived. The word “different” was important, for “different” was the center of the concept of God. God was the one who was wholly and Holy other. To be Holy was to be different. Chapter 19 from which our lesson for today is taken is called the Holiness Code and underlines that concept by repetition of the phrase “You shall be Holy as the LORD is Holy”.

In these verse the people are reminded not to be greedy; even if the wider cultural norm is to get all you can for yourself the farmers of the exile are reminded to set aside crops for the poor. Even is the rest of the culture plays fast and loose with honesty, honor, compassion and justice the people are reminded that they are different and therefore they to act differently than the rest of the larger community. “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.”

Reading the Book of Leviticus is like spending time with my grandparents and parents who said things like, “I don’t care what the other children do or what their parents allow them to do. You are not them and you need to remember who you are.” That phrase would be honed down to a mantra which would be repeated to me when I would go out:  “Remember who you are.” I passed it on to my daughter, and she would roll her eyes in response because I would say it so often. It became a mantra within my prayers as well for me to remember who I am. It also keeps coming back into my sermons.

In the Gospel lesson, the phrase which ends the pericope is “Therefore you shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Greek work for perfect is “telios” which means finished or complete in and of itself.  My reading is that, as God is complete within God’s self, so are we to be finished, complete within who we were created to be, or as my Grandmother would say, “Remember who you are!”  

There is this concept called synchronicity which is defined as “the simultaneous occurrence of causally unrelated events and the belief that the simultaneity has meaning beyond mere coincidence.” Sometimes we refer to it as “God-incidence”.  It was synchronistic that, at it’s retreat and most recent meeting, the vestry spent hours working on “Remembering who we are.”  This is not nostalgia for the past but a desire to live into who we were created to be. Why did God plant us here?  Who do we belong to? What is our purpose? That so fits in with the Epistle lesson for today from 1st Corinthians:  “So let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future-- all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.” This church’s foundation is Christ Jesus, and we belong to him who belongs to God - that is who we are. “Remember who you are!”  

It was synchronistic also that, during last week’s 9:30 Bible Study where we are studying the Book of Romans, we spent a great deal of time reflecting on the start of the 12^th Chapter where Paul wrote, “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

That was the King James Version and was almost always the central verse of any of the Baccalaureate Commencement sermons that I have given over the years. One of the people in the Bible Study class had The Message by Eugene Peterson where verses 1and 2 are expanded:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

“Remember who you are!” “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.”

 

March Tom's Tomes: Invitation To Dream

Parson Tom’s Tomes

We human beings are sort of like Icebergs with only a tiny part of ourselves on the surface. If we stay on the surface we think it is all there is - but underneath the surface is this entire complex of 90% of ourselves. This is where all the memories of all our individual experiences and the collective experiences of all of created life are kept: in God’s economy, nothing is ever lost. The Divine tells us that before we were born, while we were still in our mother’s womb, God knew us and molds us in Holy Love. God meets us before there is language and before there are rational thoughts. Indeed, as we go deeper in our relationship with God we enter into the irrational parts of religion in the same way we enter and remain in love with other humans because of all the irrational love we have.

I remember in Social Work Grad School in a class of Human Personality and Development we had an assignment to imagine and write about our birth. I couldn’t remember a thing in my conscious mind but in my imagination I wrote an account. When we shared our accounts I was amazed on how different we all were in our imagination and yet, we all were born in pretty much the same fashion, except those who were delivered by Caesarian. The theory was that the memory of that experience was buried in the DNA of our bodies and unconscious and influenced on how we approached new situations. Later on in life I noted that the account I had to write during my Clinical Pastoral Experience in Seminary on how I imagined my death seemed to have a lot of similarities to my imagination of my birth written a decade earlier. Later on as I looked at my dreams in these classes Pat and I are taking about dreams I noticed that some of my dreams seemed to have similar themes. Dreams and Imagination are part of understanding who we are under the surface.

The limits of our rational mind take us only so far in understanding God. The Prophets, Poets, Rabbis, Mystics and Disciples in Holy Scripture and in the history of our faith all connected with the Spirit of God in depths of our being. The Lenten Program for All Saints will have a Soup and Salad to nourish your bodies and an exploration of looking at Dreams to nourish our souls.

A book that is recommended is by John A Sanford, Dreams and Healing: A Succinct and Lively Interpretation of Dreams. This book is 20 years old but it is easily accessible to the lay person. We will take a look at Biblical Dreams, historical dreams and present day dreams as a way that God speaks to us through the third of our lives in which we are asleep. Sanford in an earlier book referred to these nocturnal visits as “God’s Forgotten Language”. We will also take a look at how Freud and Jung helped to open up our awareness of this resource for healing; Freud, without the God hypothesis, and Jung with. However this is not meant to be a therapeutic process but a spiritual rediscovery.

Last month Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers died and his brother Don told the press: "I was listening to one of my favorite songs that Phil wrote and had an extreme emotional moment just before I got the news of his passing, I took that as a special spiritual message from Phil saying goodbye. Our love was and will always be deeper than any earthly differences we might have had."

I remember a song they did: “All I Have To Do Is Dream”,  one verse went: I need you so that I could die/ I love you so and that is why/ Whenever I want you, all I have to do is / Dream, dream, dream, dream, dream

We begin March 13^th. Please join us.

Shalom:

All In All - A reflection for 2-16-2014

A Sermon for VI Epiphany All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC February 16, 2014 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Ecclesiasticus 15:15-20 1 Corinthians 3:1-9 Matthew 5:21-37

“All in All”

The writer of the Book of Ecclesiasticus is the grandson of Jesus ben Sirach, an early 2^nd Century BC Rabbi who lived in Jerusalem. The grandson collected and passed on the poems, maxims, counsels, and prayers of his grandfather. The collection was probably written and published on the commemoration of the Rabbi’s death, and the book was revered by Jews and Christians alike. In today’s passage, he says: “God has placed before you fire and water; stretch out your hand for whichever you chose. Before each person are life and death, and whichever one chooses will be given.”

Do you ever wonder what your relatives will say about you after you’re gone? “S/He seemed like a good person, s/he kept the commandments, avoided breaking the law and never intentionally hurt anyone.” I hear that phrases like that a lot after someone has died. Is the purpose of life to avoid doing bad things and not hurt anyone? Or, is the purpose of life is to fully live and give and receive love? I would like to hear the lines from Hamlet about his father: “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”

“To take someone all in all” - to see in them the good and bad and yet to love them. Does anyone here know the difference between approval and love? We just celebrated Valentine’s Day and, as part of my job in preparing for the sermon (plus, also since I know what is good for me in my marriage) I went to the store to look at Valentine cards, and almost all of them were based on the concept of approval. They gave reasons why the recipient might be loved, listing all the good things about them. As Charlie Brown from Peanuts can tell you, Valentine’s Day is an exercise in building or destroying self-esteem, where people are given the message that they are worthy of receiving love. How do we get idea that love is a commodity to be earned and withheld?

We start off life being loved, but as time goes by, we begin to learn that the continuation of love is based on approval. We are so afraid of losing love that we begin to mold our behavior based on the expectations of the family and community in which we live. We learn manners about eating, about dealing with waste, about touching, about what is expected in production, and in what rules must be followed. There’s nothing wrong with learning all these things. It is part of being civilized. The problem is that we also learn shame. As Mark Twain remarked, “Humans are the only animals that blush - or need to.” So in order to avoid blushing, we learn how to stuff down unacceptable thoughts and feelings before they come to the surface. 

 

In order to hide our connections to the rest of the animal kingdom, we learn how to present a mask to the rest of the world. In ancient Greek Theater, characters wore masks and those masks reflected the character’s persona. A persona is the mask each of us shows on this stage of life. The problem is that our unacceptable thoughts and feelings don’t go away - they are always just under the surface. The stronger the feeling, the deeper we push them, hoping they never come up and blemish our mask. 

Often what we tend to do then is take all of these repressed thoughts and feelings and project them on to another person or scapegoat them by piling all of our repression on them. When we project, we say things like: “Oh I can’t stand that (fill in the blank – white, black, gay, straight, fat, talky, quiet, loud, dirty, depressed, angry, sex-obsessed, self-centered, selfish, etc. etc.) kind of person or when they do that (fill in the blank) kind of person!” Usually projection tells more about the projector than it does about the person on whom the projection is placed. Usually when a country wants to go to war, we tend to project all sorts of things on the potential enemy because it is always easier to kill an object than to kill a person. 

 

In today’s lesson, as we continue the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is talking about how we live fully in this life in the Kingdom of the Heavens, right here and right now. Part of his message is the difference between approval and love. Jesus takes the commandments and pushes them to the pre-conscious level. Fine - you did not murder a person, but did you ever discount a person or call them a “fool”? Did you see or think of another person (or even yourself) as an object to be discarded instead of a beloved fellow image of God to be honored? If the answer is “yes”, then you are guilty of murder. When I was reading this lesson, I thought of all the times I turned people into objects and said “Strike one!” 

Congratulations - you never slept with someone other than your spouse, but did you desire to have another person? Did you see or think of another person as an object to be possessed instead of a beloved fellow image of God to be honored? If the answer is “Yes” then you are guilty of adultery. “Strike two!” Does this mean that if you think it you should do it? No, the Desert Fathers used to tell their novices. “You can't keep the birds from flying over your head but you can keep them from nesting in your beard.”

So the choices that we have seen so far in dealing with unacceptable thoughts and feeling are (a) to repress them and keep them from coming to consciousness, which takes away valuable energy and makes you a stranger to yourself, or (b) project them on to someone else, which takes away valuable energy and time and makes you a stranger to the other person. There is a third option - to claim that repressed part of the one and to withdraw projections from the other. Jesus does this by asking people to go into their hearts and claim their own brokenness. Claim it- own it- take responsibility for it – don’t beat yourself up and set free your energy to accept and give love.

One of the reasons I am looking at dreams is that, when we are asleep, the engines of repression are put to sleep and we are able to go deeper to find the depths where hide our own shadows. As we look at our dreams, we have the opportunity to face our projections. When we look at our dreams in the light of day, then we are able to accept ourselves, the fullness of who we are, instead of the tyranny of the one-dimensional persona. We are indeed deeply flawed, but we are deeply loved in spite of our flaws. When we admit who we are, then and only then, can we really ask help from a power greater than we are. Until we do that, we try to hide and do it all by ourselves, and that takes so much joy out of living. The ministry of Jesus is to show us that nothing ever separates us from the love of God. There is nothing we can do, or say, or think, or feel that cannot be forgiven. God knows exactly who we are and what is inside us and still loves us and calls us to call upon him to grow into the fullness of life with neighbor, self, and God.

The theme of Valentine’s Day is “I love you because you have done these things to earn my love.” The theme of Jesus and his ministry is “God loves you, and now accept that love so you might be free to love others and yourself.” Jesus said that he came to fulfill the commandments, which means that we are not to see the commandments as a list of things we are forbidden to do or a list by which to judge others, but as a guide for searching our souls so that we might present ourselves to be healed by the one who loves us so much. The Psalmist tells us that “We are all fearfully and wonderfully made”, and each of us contains shadows but, at the end of our lives on this earth, may others pray for us “They are God’s children; take them for all in all.”

Light and Salt or Heat and Red Hot peppers.

A Sermon for V Epiphany                                          All Saints Church, Southern Shores, N.C. February 9, 2014                                                 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 58:1-12)            1 Corinthians 2:1-12,              Matthew 5:13-20       Psalm 112:1-9, (10)

I was thinking about the kind of sermons that you have heard me give over the last decade plus and I put them into four categories.

1.      Teaching: These are the sermons where I want to show that I learned something in seminary and/or I am continuing in my education. I have an excitement of what I have learned and I want to pass it on. Sometimes these turn into lectures and it is aimed at rational part of the brain of the listener.

2.      Evangelical: This word needs to be rescued back to its original meaning in the Greek eu= good and angel= message, Good News. These sermon are aimed that part of the listeners’ soul that feels the need for hope and assurance of the presence of God in a world that doesn’t always seem to make sense. This is a “comfort the afflicted” type of sermon.

3.      Prophetic: This is aimed at the part of the work of the church which is “to afflict the comfortable”. You can see this in today’s lesson from Isaiah where he speaks to people he loves and reminds them that they are falling short of who they really are. The theme is being a truth-teller, or the good friend who reminds you that you are better than this.  

4.      Reflective: In these sermons, I try not to just talk to you but to go beyond and share with you how God is speaking to me in my spiritual journey, wondering if you are getting the same message and how if I see it might be helpful for you.

Many times the sermons have multiple layers, but today I'll use the fourth style to share t how the messages for today were hitting me this week.

On Mondays mornings I go to the jail and visit a parishioner. It takes about a half hour to get to Manteo, the county seat and a half hour back. I figure that if we visit as long as an hour I can get back in time to stop at the store and buy something to eat for lunch  during the Monday noon Bible Study where I can start the process of beginning the sermon as we look at the lessons for the coming week. That plan worked for the first couple weeks where I only had to wait for about 10 minutes while a guard went and got my parishioner from the cell and brought him to room that lawyers and detectives use for talking with prisoners. The jail's function is to hold prisoners, and while visitors and family are allowed to visit at strictly designated times, the emphasis is not particularly on rehabilitation. One exception is that 12 step groups are allowed to come in so that some inmates can continue working on sobriety one evening a week. As a favor to the community, they make allowances in allowing pastoral visits from an inmate’s pastor at other than the strict visiting times  and I use that opening. Over the last several weeks the waiting times have gotten progressively longer as they say that they profess their "busy- ness. I use that time to read over the lessons and do some notes. This last week the wait was over an hour. 

As you know, I have a pretty good ego system that thinks I am “important” and as I had seen ther people come and go, I was well into feeling sorry for myself and resentful of the too long wait for a man of MY importance. That resentment devolved into paranoia, and I was on my way to throwing a fit of temper as MY precious time was being stolen from me - ME the center of MY universe. What stopped me were the messages I was getting from reflecting on these passages for today. Isaiah was hearing God asking about the purpose of a fast to humble oneself to help make the world a better place where there will not be the “pointing of fingers and the speaking of evil”. I was ready to point fingers and speak evil of my own importance and I had to remind myself that I was there for my parishioner and not for me. I had to empty my own pride out like Christ emptied himself out to enter into the mind of Christ. 

If I am indeed the light of the world as Matthew remembers Jesus saying in the Gospel lesson, then to whom am I being called to be a light? “Yes”, to my parishioner; but am I also to be a light to the jailers, or do I hide it under the bushel basket of my self-importance? If I am indeed to be the salt, which gives savor to life; was I about to turn into a red hot pepper to burn and punish? I turned to the letter from Paul to the Corinthians and asked the “ . . . Spirit that is from God, so that we (I) may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. (2:12) Can I turn time into a gift from God that I give back to God instead of something stolen from me? Indeed one cannot steal what has already been given away. The Spirit helped me remember a story related by Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart about Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630’s: 

when it was reported to him during an especially long and hard winter that a poor man in his neighborhood was stealing from his woodpile, Winthrop called the man into his presence and told him that because of the severity of the winter and his need, he had permission to supply himself from Winthrop's woodpile for the rest of the cold season.  Thus, he said to his friends, did he effectively cure the man from stealing." 

Jesus talked about fulfilling the law which he meant that it is filled full with God's intent to be the loving way to live together in this, the Kingdom of the Heavens. For Jesus the law was not about punishing but about entering into a “righteous” relationship, not about being good or following rules but about being loving, a reciprocal relationship, with God and neighbor. For Jesus, entering into the Kingdom of the Heavens was not going to a new place of geography after one dies but about entering into a new way of being in the here and now which continues through all eternity.

When I was finally allowed to go back to see my parishioner, I thanked the guards. Without the time to look into the shadow of my soul instead of stuffing it down and ignoring it, I would not have been able to live into the Good News of having “faith ... not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God.” 

My parishioner and I did Bible Study together and this teaching, evangelical, prophetic reflection is the result.


At church this Sunday instead of doing the usual post-communion prayer we will do the prayer in the Book of Common Prayer  for:

For Prisons and Correctional Institutions:

Lord Jesus, for our sake you were condemned as a criminal:
Visit our jails and prisons with your pity and judgment.
Remember all prisoners, and bring the guilty to repentance
and amendment of life according to your will, and give them
hope for their future. When any are held unjustly, bring them
release; forgive us, and teach us to improve our justice.
Remember those who work in these institutions; keep them
humane and compassionate; and save them from becoming
brutal or callous. And since what we do for those in prison,
O Lord, we do for you, constrain us to improve their lot. All
this we ask for your mercy's sake. Amen.