All Are Created Equal (Part two and three)

All Are Created Equal

For the You Tube Video of this  go to:
http://youtu.be/PvSWfd74ymg

A Reflection for III Pentecost (Proper 8)       All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC    June 29, 2014                                                    Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Genesis 22:1-14                      Psalm 13         Romans 6:12-23          Matthew 10:40-42
           
All Are Created Equal (part two)

Today we continue the reflection from last week looking at the myths in the Genesis stories. A reminder that a myth is not a lie, but a story which may or may not be factually correct and which people tell in order to understand the way things are. Myths are usually about speaking a deeper truth about relationships between God and humans, humans with other humans, and humans with their own true self. They are like dreams in that they are more meant to shed light and understanding than they are to pass on facts. Dreams and myths give meaning not about surface events in the dream/myth but about the symbolic interaction within the dream.

John Trumbull's painting 40 years after the event

Let me give you an example about myths using the commemoration of the 4^th of July coming up next week. These are the facts:  representatives from the colonies met and, on the 2^nd of July, they came up with a Declaration of Independence from England. The myths that came forth out of that meeting have been told many different ways, including elements about John Hancock’s signature, the mass signing on the fourth, the cracked Liberty Bell, and other details which are based on the belief systems of the people looking back at the event over the passage of time. Since it has been only 238 years since that day in 1776, the myth has not yet fully developed or reached its final form. This American myth is told, retold, and re-interpreted based on the needs of the later generations to remember who we really are. 

Here are the facts of the Abraham story of the binding of Isaac: in ancient times, there were many deities that required parental sacrifice of a child in order to thank those gods as a quid pro quo for good things happening or to influence the deity to a future course of action.  That is all we know, and scripture has stories of Israelite rulers and warriors sacrificing their children and prophets denouncing the practice, as well as many stories of the slaughter of innocent women and children to their God. I think this is a myth about who God is and who we are in relation with God and others by writers at least a thousand years after the Abraham/Isaac stories were first told. There is a remnant of sacrifice in the offering at the Temple as a payment for the acknowledgement of blood being shed during the birth of a child, which could be a left-over from the earlier sacrificial practice.  Jesus’ parents went of Jerusalem to pay a sacrifice of thanksgiving for his birth.

The Rabbis in the Talmud used to embroider this myth with some extra dialogue.  For instance, in one variation, God asks for a volunteer angel to go down to Abraham to tell him to kill Isaac. All the angels refuse and tell God that if God wants to have this horrible deed done, God alone is going to have to do it. Apparently the Rabbis wanted to pass on the myth with another dimension - that even angels don’t use the “I was only following orders” excuse, and we are all responsible for our actions.

While both the Bible and the Muslim Quran agree that the sacrifice was to be done on Mount Moriah, which they also agree is the present site of the Temple Mount and Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Quran tells this myth with Ishmael taking the place of Isaac.

However, I don’t think the myth is about child sacrifice once upon a time. Rather, I think that the public dream that is the myth goes deeper, speaking to our conscious and unconscious tendencies to treat people as objects for our own agendas. What does the myth tell us?

 Two things: (1) God is the giver, not the taker and 

                   (2) we are to treat God’s gifts as subjects of awe, not as objects of malice. 

In this myth God indeed is the giver of all things, even the child Isaac. While Isaac is a gift, he is still created equal with Abraham, and God loves and cares for them both equally. God still owns the gift, but we are asked to be stewards of that gift. The responsibility of Stewardship means any gift is given by God and is to be honored for the betterment of the community of faith. Our children do not belong to us to do what we want to meet our needs; they are to be loved for who they are and helped to grow into who they were created to be. Our spouse is not an object to be used for our needs but to be loved and helped to grow into who s/he was created to be and for the mutual creation by the couple of an icon of forgiveness, respect, honor and self-giving care. Our neighbors are gifts from God and are not to be manipulated or exploited for our profit, but we are to work together to create a community of grace. As the Gospel lesson for today reminds us, we are to be welcoming of all gifts from God.  Even our enemies are gifts from God in order to grow in that love which overcomes all differences, creating a commonwealth of peace and justice - “thy will be done on earth as in heaven.”

I think that the myth tells us that the God who continues creating the universe, who continues to walk beside us and live within us, this God sees no real purpose in answering petitions for taking sides about national boundaries or in religious squabbles or in party affiliations or in financial schemes or in generational power struggles whose main purpose is to take advantage of another person. This God laments the divisions we tend to engender between the gifts God has given us. We were not created to consume people, places, and things for our own selfish gains. We are the equal gifts of God given to the world. When we live into that truth, we are able to love the giver of the gifts, we are able to love ourselves as precious gifts from the divine, and we are able to be in awe and wonder over all the other gifts given to us in this world that are placed in our collective stewardship.

Part three is in the Tomes in the July Trumpeter.

Which I am including now : Parson Tom’s Tomes

“All People Are Created Equal” (Part 3)

This continues the reflections in the sermons for June 22 and 29. It starts with a dream. When God created the entire universe, God gave a dream to all of creation which became part of our collective unconscious as human being. The dream said that we, all the atoms of creations, are all connected to each other and all persons are created equal.

From the beginning of written though all peoples have written this dream for their communities. From Ancient China Confucius said; “"Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.".
In India, the Hindu centered their moral laws on Dharma; “One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self. This, in brief, is the rule of dharma. Other behavior is due to selfish desires.”  

In Ancient Egypt the Goddess Maat weighted the souls of the dead so they might enter the afterlife and at the center of the Code of Maat was “"Now this is the command: Do to the doer to cause that he do thus to you.”  

The Hebrew people enshrined in their law about the treatment of strangers: “But treat them just as you treat your own citizens. Love foreigners as you love yourselves, because you were foreigners one time in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” 
 
The Buddha spoke against violence of any kind: “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.”

Jesus took the whole of the law and summarized it in his encounter with a lawyer: “And one day an authority on the law stood up to put Jesus to the test. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to receive eternal life? ‘What is written in the Law?” Jesus replied. “How do you understand it?” He answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Love him with all your strength and with all your mind.’ And, ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.’ “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do that, and you will live.”

And so it goes, as people in every land have encountered the dream and either followed it or shaped it to their culture, or ignored it.

Lincoln 80 + years after the event

On July we remember the events in Philadelphia 1776 when it was written in the Declaration of Independence:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness “  Again they encountered the dream and shaped it to their culture because their interpretation meant men and not women, they meant adults not children, they meant allies not enemies, they meant men with property and not men without property, they meant white men and not black nor native American, they meant English speaking who were already there  and not Hispanic, nor Eastern and  Southern European, nor Asiatic who would come “yearning to be free”, they  meant straight men and not gay men.

Our History show that  in the 238 years since that  day in Philadelphia  we continue to encounter the dream anew in every generation and re-interpret it as “All People are Created Equal” This month let us dream the dream again.

Shalom

All Are Created Equal (Part 1)

A Reflection for 2^nd Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7)         All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores 

June 22, 2014                                                                           Thomas Wilson, Rector

Genesis 21:8-21          Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17              Romans 6:1b-11          Matthew 10:24-39

“All People are Created Equal” (part one)

A Video of this sermon is found on You Tube : http://youtu.be/j4mPER86J44

This is the first of three reflections which will be spread out over the next Sunday and the Parson Tom’s Tomes for July. The plan is that they will be shorter than my usual sermons or homilies because I believe that a preacher should stop talking before the people begin to wish s/he would.

It starts with a dream.  When God created the entire universe, God gave a dream to all of creation, which became part of our collective unconscious. Over centuries the dream kept coming to people all over the world. The message of the dream from the Divine Dream-maker was "All people are created equal." The problem is that, when we wake up from that dream, we forget it.   We look around and see all the inequality. We see the rich getting richer, we see the powerful consolidating their own power, we see lines drawn more brazenly between race, color, language, gender, sexual orientation; you name it, and we devise a reason why some people are less equal than others. Our rational minds look at the evidence of what passes for normal and say, "I guess that is the way it is supposed to be." Our egos, which have the function of interpreting how to get along best in the world, take the message from the rational mind’s evaluation of reality and say, “Let’s find ways to use it for our advantage. After all, if equality is only a dream, therefore it is not really real, and we need to live in the real world.” We accept the inequality but the dream keeps coming back over the eons because, in God’s reality - and God is the ultimate reality - dreams are incredibly real, and our perceptions are only self-serving opinions.

Dreams are how God speaks to our personal, cultural, and collective unconscious free from the tyranny of the rational mind. Individuals gather together and share their dreams within the context of their culture and, out of those cultural dreams, we create stories, sort of like jazz riffs, off the themes of the dreams. What we notice is that myths from one culture seem to have similar themes with myths from other cultures, and we think that all of these different myths have their beginnings in the dreams that God planted in the collective unconscious of all humans.

In today’s lesson from the Genesis collection of stories is the mythic story of the struggle between Hagar and Sarah, who both have sons from the Patriarch Abraham. Hagar’s son is named Ishmael and Sarah’s son is named Isaac. Since this is a myth, the names provide some commentary about the outline of the story. The name “Sarah” means something like “Princess”. Hagar means something like “Stranger”. Ishmael means something like “God has listened”. Isaac means something like “the one who laughs”. So what do the names tell us? Sarah, the princess, the one who feels as if she is entitled, is in opposition to the Stranger, Hagar, who was from Egypt and was originally the slave of Sarah. Both the Princess and the Stranger want a son. The Stranger has the first born son and names the child as “God has listened”. God has been faithful to the Stranger and that irritates the Princess. However, the Princess has a son much later and that son is called “the one who laughs”.   I tend think of that in the context of Proverb 1:26, “I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when panic strikes you,” a variation of the more familiar proverb of “the one who laughs last, laughs best”, and all I can think of is that he probably had a nick name like “Na -Nya-Na- Nya –Nya”.

There is an earlier chapter in this myth when Sarah, who had agreed to this option of Abraham fathering a child through Hagar, got really resentful as Hagar sashayed around showing off her pregnancy. Sarah turns brutal and Hagar tries to run away, but an angel convinces her to return. If any one of us has been in a blended family – heck, even a family where everybody has the same parents - we can imagine the infighting that usually goes on for dominance. The Gospel also has Jesus remind the disciples that families can be snake pits as competing claims for dominance are played out. He tells the disciples that even a sparrow which is sold two for a penny is precious in the sight of God. 

There is also another clue in the Hebrew word that this chapter uses when Sarah sees Ishmael “playing” with Isaac. This word can be, and has been, translated several different ways. The word can mean playing with, or laughing (with or at), or mocking, or even fondling. Each choice of translation puts all sorts of different interpretations for Sarah’s reactions. I can imagine that Ishmael, who is 14 years older that Isaac, probably bullied the little pest during this great feast to celebrate the weaning of Isaac.

So the fight is set up over who has the most equal part of Abraham’s love and promise, of which son was the more equal. Sarah pushed the weak Abraham to acknowledge what she interpreted as the truth. Ishmael, the son of the slave Hagar, has to go; he had to die so that Sarah's son Isaac could have the bigger portion of the blessing. Now if this were an historical account, then there would be historians and theologians arguing over who was more equal than the other, who was the victor. This is what we see in the fight between Muslims and Jews, and by extension, Christians. The Jews see themselves as descendants of Isaac, while the Muslims see themselves as descendants from Ishmael. But this is not a history, it is a myth, and so listen to what God does in this story. God will bless both of them. God is with Hagar as she is afraid she and her son will die, and God is with her enemy Sarah and her son Isaac. The myth tells us that God’s dream is that both Ishmael and Isaac are equal in the eyes of the Divine Dream-Maker. In this myth no-one is cast out of the presence of God.

The Psalmist for today underlines that message when the Psalmist sings “For you God are good and forgiving, and great is your love to all who call upon you.” I look at this message and I think if the dream is “All are created equal”, then what does God think of my enemy? If God is the definer of all things, then how do I define my enemy? Do I believe that All Persons are created Equal?”

In the beginning

http://youtu.be/dqeqNsfzbNs     is the video of this sermon

A Homily for Trinity Sunday                         All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC June 15, 2014                                                   Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Genesis 1:1-2:4a          Psalm 8      2 Corinthians 13:11-13      Matthew 28:16-20

Last week I mentioned that the stories from the Book of Genesis are best understood as myths. We have this unfortunate habit of thinking that myths are lies, but myths are more than that. Myths are cultural stories - which may or may not be factually correct – that we use to explain our understanding of what might be the deeper truth of the fundamental nature of things.  The themes for these stories come from our connections to the layers of personal and cultural and collective unconscious. As I explained last week, myths are public dreams and dreams are private myths. Each night we dream, and our personal, cultural, and collective unconscious speak to us in symbols in order to help us understand ourselves and our relationship to our true selves, our souls, our God, and the world in which we live.  

In a dream group, we give a title to each dream we share and the title gives us a clue to the theme. The name “Genesis” comes from the Greek translation of the first word of the first book of the Bible. In Hebrew there is the letter “bayit”, which we tend to pronounce as Beth, and when the Hebrews used the letter for a word, it meant “house” – that which contains – or “household” or “Temple” as in Beth-lehem, the “house of bread”. However, when only the letter is written, it is a preposition meaning “in”. The next word in the book of Genesis is “raysheeth” which means first, beginning, most importantly, so therefore, when the word and preposition are combined, the word is “b-raysheeth”, “In the beginning” or “First and foremost” or “Most importantly” God created the heavens and the earth, everything that ever was and will be. 

The myth that follows gives the Hebrew understanding of the nature of all creation. In the other 

cultures around them, like the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the creation myths were tied into a struggling encounter between two or more Gods, like the Canaanite Ba’al, the storm God, struggling with Yam the Sea Goddess, dragon, or the Babylonian Marduk, the hero God, and Tiamat the Sea Dragon, or the God of light and God of Darkness. Out of that battle (or sexual encounter, since both are symbols of struggles), then the earth is formed and life begins as both a resolution of one battle and the first act of the continuing struggle of life. The Hebrew myth aims to explain that most importantly there is only one God, and everything that is our understanding comes from the expression of that one God, whose spirit brooded over the void and whose expression, breath of that brooding spirit, gives life. God is the God of dark and light, of sea and sky, God of both male and female, giving life to everything we know, even to the things we fear, like the sea monsters, which the Psalmist declares that God made for the sport of it.

If you try to make this story literal, you miss the point, so we are urged to see each part of the myth as symbolic pointing to a deeper truth. My way of understanding it is that the myth tells me that science tells us that the Cosmic clock begins when 24 Billion years ago there was an explosion, a burst of being; the burst of energy hurling outwards within the tension of the allurement of gravity drawing it back in. The myth tells us that God spoke the breath of energy that begins this whole process and that every atom of all creation contains the spirit of God. If we look at the Cosmic clock as divided into 12 portions of 1.25 Billion years, galaxies start forming in February, with our Galaxy forming in September, a galaxy so wide that if one traveled at the speed of light  in order to get to the other side, it would take 100,000 years. On October 1^st, the words “Let there be light” reaches here as our sun begins to form. On October 10^th the earth is formed. On October 20^th single cell organisms start to appear, and on December 31^st of the Cosmic clock at 10:54 PM, the mammals of the genus homo and subspecies sapiens or humans with wisdom start to appear. Humans are last to be made in this myth to remind us that God makes us in God’s image; the image is not physical but rather, at the core of our being, the true self which has the three-fold ability to create, to care, and to love as God creates, cares and loves. At December 31^st at 11:59 and 51 seconds the Homo sapiens begin to write down thoughts and record dreams and imagination; five seconds later Jesus comes into the last four seconds of this cosmic clock to point us again to God, to remind us of the Divine Word spoken at the beginning calling us to create, care, and love.

The Genesis myth of creation, that public dream speaking a deeper truth to our true selves is meant to fill us with wonder that this whole creation is filled with God, and our task in these last nine seconds of creation is to pay attention to the whole of creation. We are not to rise above matter but to go deeply into all of the spirit-filled matter. The Spirit is not separate from matter but infuses all of matter. Jerry Wright, a former Presbyterian Minister and current Jungian analyst and one of my instructors for dream encounters (and from whom I have stolen this whole Cosmic Clock analogy) warns us of the attempt to split spirit and matter saying, “When we don’t deal with the things that really matter, it becomes the matter with us.”

First and foremost, “In the beginning”, “Most importantly”, “b-raysheeth”: we are called to live into that wonder of all creation as we listen to that initial creative word resonating with those homo sapiens, humans who, in their wisdom given by God, create, care, and love. Jeff Edwards told us about care which is what stewardship is, the care for all of what we have as a gift from the loving God. We are stewards of the continuing creation which is still evolving. This is also what our Sunday School teachers do with our younger children, as they pass on the stories, dreams, and myths about what it means to be humans in relationship with God - humans with the ability to create, care, and love in the image of God as God creates, cares and loves. It is what we do when the Preacher calls us to pay attention to what is first and foremost. We have to listen. 

Paul in his letter to the Corinthians ends with a call to them and to us to listen and, in listening, create a Shalom peace in our communities. He says:

Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.