Thursday, March 27, 2014

Seeing With Different Eyes



A Sermon for IV Lent                                                            All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC March 30, 1014                                                                     Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
1 Samuel 16:1-13              Ephesians 5:8-14              John 9:1-41         Psalm 23 
Seeing With Different Eyes
The lessons for today have as their theme the tension between seeing as God sees versus seeing with human vision alone. We have the story of Samuel, who had guessed wrong about choosing Saul as King of Israel because Samuel had looked only at the outside of Saul and had missed the vision of the troubled man whose insecurity would prove disastrous. In this story, God sends him to Bethlehem to look over the sons of Jesse as suitable successors to Saul. Samuel still wants to look only at outside appearances, but God guides him to look deeper and choose David.  

The Psalmist will later have a song attributed to David, the 23rd Psalm, which reflects a person who is surrounded by his enemies but knows that he sees through God’s eyes what cannot be seen with the eyes of humans - that the Lord is his shepherd and sets a table before him in the presence of his enemies.
This theme of the tension between God’s vision and human blindness will continue through all the Bible. For instance, it is the center of the message of the seers - the people who see - the prophets, such as the prophet Jeremiah who sees with God’s eyes and declares, “Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not.” 

Jesus lives his ministry as one who is a prophet, who sees with God’s vision, but also one who brings God’s vision to life and lives it in everyday life. The Evangelist John recounted the story of Jesus and the man born blind as a motif of the tension between human blindness and divine vision, and his focus is to let each of those of us who follow Jesus to continue to intervene and resolve this tension. The ministry of Jesus brings the man born blind a new vision, but the ones who see with only human eyes continue to live in a deep spiritual blindness. John will call that kind of blindness “sin”. We have a mistaken tendency to be literal and see “sin” as things we do that are bad in and of themselves and “sinners” as bad people. However, the Biblical definition of “sin” is about missing the point of life.  And you and I are sinners when we miss the point. We are, at times, incredibly blind to the reality of God’s presence in the space within and between us, and Lent is the time when we focus on our tendency to rely on human vision alone and thereby enter into the darkness of divine blindness.

The 17th Century Poet John Milton went completely blind when he was in middle age, and he wondered of what further use he was. He had been very successful in Puritan political circles and in writing, but when he went blind, he feared it would end his ability to write. This was long before he was to write his greatest poetry, such as Paradise Lost, and, as part of his prayers, he wrote a sonnet about his discussion with God about the blindness.

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.

The blindness becomes his opportunity to see with God’s vision, and he enters into the ancient myths and sees the dreams of God with his poetry. Four years after his human blindness begins, he is even able to have a second marriage in which he never sees his wife with his human eyes, but he sees her with the divine vision of love. She will die in childbirth, and when she dies, he writes another sonnet as his prayer of dealing with the pain of his loss and with the hope that, in the life to come, he will see her fully as he sees her now in his dreams.
 METHOUGHT I saw my late espoused Saint
   Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
   Whom Joves great Son to her glad Husband gave,
   Rescu'd from death by force though pale and faint.
Mine as whom washt from spot of child-bed taint,
   Purification in the old Law did save,
   And such, as yet once more I trust to have
   Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
   Her face was vail'd, yet to my fancied sight,
   Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
   But O as to embrace me she enclin'd
   I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.

One of the reasons that I have spent so much energy on dreams is because I think that, as we busily go around in this life, we have selective human blindness to our world, our very selves, our neighbors, and our God. In the eight hours when we no longer are using our eyes because they are shut, we are visited with hints of God’s vision in our dreams. Our ego, our human thinking, wants to have nothing to do with these distractions because they get in the way of our struggle to consume more stuff and have more experiences, to live with more but to skate blindly over the surface. Our task is to bring the unconscious to consciousness and to see what God might be showing us so that we might live fully in this life – and so that we might also see the life that is still to come. 

 I know I have hit you with two poems already, but I am going to go for a “three-peat” with another poem about seeing, this one by Mary Oliver, When Death Comes:
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

A Reverence for a Deeper Thirst"



A Sermon for III Lent                                                            All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C.  March 23, 2014                                                    Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Exodus 17:1-7                    Romans 5:1-11                  John 4:5-42                         Psalm 95
 

"A Reverence for a Deeper Thirst"

One of my many pleasures in life is reading a monthly magazine called The Sun which is published in Chapel Hill by Sy Safransky. It says of itself:  “The Sun is an independent, ad-free monthly magazine that for more than thirty years has used words and photographs to invoke the splendor and heartache of being human.“ 

We already have so much clutter in our house, but back issues of this magazine pile up because I don’t want to throw any of them away. In the March 2014 issue is a reprint of a page from a 1928 book by Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Please excuse the lack of inclusive language, but let me read you part of it:

“Creation is here and now. So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note in a symphony thundering through debatable existences of time. Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.”


When I looked at the lessons for today, all I could think of is that these stories are a critique of settling for lives lived without reverence.


In the Gospel Story, the Samaritan woman is just going through the motions of life and all she is thirsty for is water to fill up the water bucket. But she has an encounter with Jesus and that sets her free to seek a different kind of water. It awakens an awareness in the depth of her soul of a different kind of thirst, a living water, where every moment is moistened with the presence of God.  In the letter from Paul to the Romans, Paul is filled with reverence about what God is doing in his life and in the world through Christ. In the Psalm for today, the Psalmist sings of the joy of an enthronement of God as King of all the world. He laments the people of the Exodus lesson for today and urges us to learn from their failure as they ask for just water to drink when there is a deeper thirst that is ignored.

Harden not your hearts,
as your forebears did in the wilderness, *
at Meribah, and on that day at Massah,
when they tempted me.

They put me to the test, *
though they had seen my works. 


What are we really thirsty for? 


When I started to ask myself that question, my mind went in another direction and said to me, “Right now, you are probably asking yourself, what does a parched Christian drink to quench his thirst?” For those of you around in the 1950’s, you may remember a series of ads done by Walt Disney for the soft drink 7-UP – I’m sorry, but this is the way my mind works. Disney was having a cash flow problem and he agreed to do a series of commercials for Ipana Tooth Paste with the character of Bucky Beaver (“Brusha- Brusha- Brusha with the New Ipana”) for the Mickey Mouse Club.  To go along with the Zorro TV series, his 7-UP commercials featured
Theses adds were printed versions on the back pages of Comic Books
Fresh Up Freddie, an energetic animated rooster who dressed in all sorts of costumes and who would  start off by asking  “Right now you are probably asking yourself what does a sandy Beach goer, or dusty Bullfighter, or red hot fighter pilot, or tired fox hunter, or whatever, drink to quench his thirst?” Freddie always thought that a sugary soft drink would do the trick - which is what young kids tend to do. Sometimes we graduate to caffeine drinks, or alcohol drinks, to sooth the thirst and something else. As I grew older, I remember that I needed a couple of diet cokes to get going in the morning and to be up to doing the work that needed to be done. Likewise, I found that I needed a couple stiff drinks after a day at work to finish the chemical search for meaning. The problem is that, while these chemicals can help to divert us from physical thirst, they do nothing to help with the deeper thirst we have. 


The Psalms keep speaking of that deeper thirst: “As the deer longs for the water- brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God./ My Soul is athirst for God, athirst for the living God, when shall I come to appear before the presence of God (43:1-2), and “O God you are my God; eagerly I seek you, my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.”  


Jesus knows something about that kind of thirst for connection with God. That is why he is traveling through Samaria, where the people have no love for Jews, who treat them as second class people. Both the Jews and Samaritans consider themselves to be descendants of Jacob and, as they stand estranged by the well of the common ancestor, Jesus’ thirst for connections with God has brought him to the land of his extended family who see him and his kind as enemies. It is in this place and in this time where he makes himself vulnerable in this hot, dusty, and hostile land and asks for water from the person who has no reason to display kindness toward him. Yet, he empties his pride; he empties himself out and asks for a peace with his enemy. I think he knows that at a deeper level this woman also has a thirst for something deeper than water to drink. He intuits that she has a thirst for the living God they both share. He sees into her soul, her true self, and offers his soul, his true self, for her to share. Maybe at the level of the soul they sing together in silence from the Psalm 123:

 Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us,
    for we have had more than enough of contempt.
 Our soul has had more than its fill
    of the scorn of those who are at
ease,
    of the contempt of the proud.


Jesus on the cross will return to the psalms:  “They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink”. He also cries out his thirst, perhaps for water but I think it is also for the connection to God and for us. I think Jesus says, “I thirst” as an invitation for us to join him in a hunger for righteousness and a thirst for justice as he is a victim of injustice. I think he calls for us to have a thirst for helping strangers as he is a stranger in that land.  I think he invites us to thirst with him for connection with God and neighbor. 
Sister Corita - "I thirst" from Zach Feuer Gallery


What would it be like if we saw in ourselves that woman who is being asked by Jesus to join in the deeper thirst for connection on a deeper level? Suppose we read this Gospel story not as something that happened only once 2000 years ago, but is the archetype, the motif, of all of our encounters with the divine. Suppose every time we decided to pray we would sense the thirst of God to drink deeply of the thoughts of our hearts instead of the jumble of words we offer off the top of our head?


God has an abiding thirst for union with us.  And what is our deepest thirst?

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

April's Tomes on Prayer



Parson Tom’s Tomes                                           Prayers. 
We are centered on prayers There is the Prayer Book where we say the prayers which have a long history in the faith, Prayers that Jesus taught us (The Lord’s Prayer), prayers of St Simeon (Lord let your servant now depart in peace as you have promised)  Prayers of St. John Chrysostom (Almighty God, you have given us grace at this time with one accord), Prayers of St. Francis (Lord make us instruments of your peace), John Henry Newman (O Lord, support us all the day long); prayers written over the centuries and which still strike a chord in our hearts. In recovery groups meeting here they offer a prayer (God grant me the serenity). 

We have prayers on the prayer chain (e.g. Henry’s second cousin Bill is going into surgery and he is worried)  where a group of people agree to pass on prayers in whatever way they think they can be faithful to the request.  We already have a book where people can list their intercessions and thanksgivings which are read during the daily and weekly services. 

R.S. Thomas (29 March 1913 – 25 September 2000) Welsh Poet and Anglican Priest
There is a box in the Narthex where people slip slips of paper with a request for a prayer for my intercession.  The pain in these notes drive me to  just come in to the sanctuary when it is empty and just be still and feel the presence of the Lord in silence,  just listening - to use the phrase by R. S. Thomas, my favorite modern Poet/Priest,  in The Church: “To the air recomposing itself/ For vigil.” And in another poem,” Kneeling”:  “all that close throng of spirits waiting, as I/ . . . The meaning is in the waiting”. It is those I offer up without saying a word out loud but with heart and soul lifted to the Throne of Grace, and as he wrote in Waiting for it, ”Now/in the small hours/ of belief the one eloquence/ to master is that/ of the bowed head, the bent/ knee, waiting, as at the end/ of a hard winter/ for one flower to open/ on the mind’s tree of thorns.” 

Herbert Window in Salisbury Cathedral
I am always drawn back to the 17th century Priest/Poet George Herbert and his poem Prayer:
Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,
         God's breath in man returning to his birth,
         The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
         Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
         The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
         Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
         Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
         Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
         The land of spices; something understood.

Shalom: May your Lent continue to be blessed and your Easter Rising into new life be joyful.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

"Through the unknown, remebered gate"


A Reflection for II Lent                                             All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC 
March 16, 2014                                                       Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
“Through the unknown, remembered gate”
Genesis 12:1-4a                       Romans 4:1-5, 13-17               John 3:1-17                 Psalm 121
Whenever I really need to find the peace of God, I walk down to the beach here at the ends of the earth where there is only the earth on which I stand, the ground of my being, and I look at the vastness of the ocean and the beauty of the sky and I think, “My Lord God made all this.  And what are my problems in comparison to all this? This is the ocean of God in which all life begins and into which all life will flow. I am at the starting and the ending. I am standing at the “unknown remembered gate” and in the “stillness between the two waves of the sea”.”  I find peace in that fleeting moment, and it reminds me of some lines from T.S. Eliot’s Little Giddings, the fourth part of his Poem, Four Quartets.
We shall not cease from exploration
Pat walking on beach after snow
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between the two waves of the sea.

In years gone by, I would go to the mountains in order to be spiritually refreshed, and I would look at the high peaks and get that sense of peace. What grandeur, what wonder! I would quote from the opening line of the King James version of Psalm 121: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” There was no question about it for me - I just stopped at the first line because the mountains gave me all the peace I needed at the time. All I wanted to do was to stay on the surface with a passive God of nature. Mountains are good metaphors for moving into the numinous because, from the beginning of time, most religions have placed their holy sites and altars on top of mountains, or in buildings shaped like mountains, thrusting out of the limits of the earth where it touches the sky. We still have remnants of that pre-Christian archetypal symbol in church spires and steeples.
As I progressed in my spiritual journey, I read past the first line and saw that the Psalmist went beyond the mountain and said that help does not come just from the hills but from the presence of the LORD, the Maker of Heaven and earth.  This Psalm is one of 8 Psalms called “Songs of Ascent” which people were to sing as they went up to the Holy Space.  Central to the idea of pilgrimage is that one has to leave one’s place of residence and journey to find the Holy Space. I have made pilgrimages to High Holy Spaces to see the one God in all sorts of places where all sorts of faithful go - the Muslim Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Eastern Orthodox Monasteries hanging off cliff sides in the Judean Wilderness, Mayan Step Temples in Central America, Pyramids in Egypt, Roman Catholic Chapels in Hill Cities in Italy, different Denominational Mountain Top Chapels in our country. One of these days when I get rich and famous, I am going to go to Ayers Rock in Australia, Mount Fuji in Japan, Denali in Alaska, and the Shwe dagon Pagoda in Yangon in the country formerly known as Burma.

Pilgrimages are intentional, time-limited metaphors of our life-long journey into relationship with God.  We have choices in how we do these enacted metaphors; the most popular idea is to come to these places as a tourist to find out more information or to collect experiences. There is a moment when I love to touch the rocks and connect to centuries of people coming to Holy Spaces and the History books come alive. 

However, this tourist moment fades and is replaced by openness to asking God to change me seeing my life as just collecting experiences and things. In those fleeting moments I know I will go home, but home will be different because I am different. Every trip I take, I come home across the bridge and Pat and I hoot in thanksgiving for ending the journey, but I am different. To revisit Eliot;
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

In the Hebrew Testament lesson for today from Genesis, Abram has a visit from God. I think it is a vision or dream - come on, you knew that a dream would come into this sermon - a dream in which God calls him to enter into such a journey to a place far from home and which will never be a comfortable home for him. Yet, it is the journey of faithfully not knowing that is important, rather than the destination one can claim. He does not know where he is going and yet he goes, one foot in front of another in ignorance and faithfulness. His journey is much like that of the 11th Century Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Anselm, who had an active love of God and was seeking a deeper knowledge of God. He wrote: "Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this, too, I believe, that, unless I first believe, I shall not understand."  So also Abram does not understand and therefore enter into faith, rather he enters into faith in order to eventually stand under but almost never fully understand the “Absolute Paradox” that is God. In this situation one does not do a “leap of faith” but what Kierkegaard calls a “leap to faith”. Abram is on his journey, his pilgrimage, a pilgrimage he will never finish in his lifetime. However, at the end of his journeys, he returns to where he began - in union with the God he can never fully understand. 

The lesson from John’s Gospel about Nicodemus visiting Jesus is also, I think, a dream, for it says that Nicodemus “comes at night to visit Jesus”. In the ten times in my ordained ministry over the last 30 years that I have preached about this story, I was literal and assumed that Nicodemus didn’t go in the daylight because he was afraid of disapproval from his fellow teachers.  But my latest theory is that John collected stories about Jesus as he put together the Gospel, and Nicodemus gave his story about his first call to follow Jesus from a dream he had about beginning a journey to go God knows where.  Nicodemus doesn’t understand anything that is said in the dream. The story is like a conversation in which symbols and puns abound in the dialogue and there is no real coherent give and take, as questions are answered with other questions as people speak past each other.  But Nicodemus makes the leap to faith at the beginning of his pilgrimage to believe in a deeper dimension of life, a pilgrimage that, hopefully, he will never finish in his lifetime, but he will arrive where he began - in union with the God he can never fully understand.

Most of us in this church came here from somewhere else; as we left the places we knew and came to find a deeper dimension of life. It is a journey, and my prayer for us is that we will never end this journey in our lifetimes but keep going deeper until we will arrive where we began - in union with God who we can never fully understand.