A Reflection for IV Epiphany All Saints Episcopal,
Southern Shores, NC February 1, 2015 Thomas
E Wilson, Rector
The
Prophet Blake
In the Hebrew Testament lesson for today from
Deuteronomy, Moses is telling his people that in the years to come God will
call forth prophets who will speak to the people about what they see that God
is calling them to say. Prophets were “Seers” who see what God is saying. They
will arise over the centuries and speak with the authority of God to rulers,
religious establishments and all people. A prophet is not someone who tells the
future but someone who says that he is seeing the world through the eyes of
God, and those eyes can see and share what will comfort the afflicted and
afflict the comfortable. They are always a bit on the outside.
Prophets are not secretaries who just take down
dictation from the Almighty but those who enter into a deeper level of
awareness and see past language into images and symbols. Since I am so
interested in dreams I tend to see prophets as people who have dreams and
visions in which God speaks to their unconscious bypassing the intellect and
ego. Prophets pay attention and then try to faithfully translate the images and
symbols into the spoken language of their hearers what they have seen in their
vision. Since the words of our language is so limited, the hearers are then
invited to see the Divine vision through the eyes of God themselves for
prophecies are meant to be internalized and used for change to a deeper life in
connection with the divine energy. St Francis used to say; “Preach the Gospel,
the Good News, and if necessary use words.
Jesus is a prophet in a long line of prophets and in
today’s Gospel lesson from Mark Jesus comes to the synagogue and afflicts the
comfortable teaches with an authority that is at odds with the powers that be,
and in that tension Jesus casts out a demon. In the 21st Century we
have a different world view that finds talk of “unclean spirits” quaint and
unsophisticated. However, we must move beyond the narrow constraints of
language and we move from seeing the Gospel of Mark as a newspaper factual
account and dare to see it as a Gospel that uses images to tell the deeper
story of how Jesus enters houses of religion and houses of our souls where we
try to domesticate God’s awe. Jesus urges people to join in casting out images
of the condemning and fear provoking God and restoring a God of love. Each of
us has evil within us which we do not want to face, but what Jesus does in the
synagogue is move this one man closer to the mark by exposing the spirit which
holds him captive. This man’s unclean spirit alienates him and people around him from God’s love and
Jesus brings him back by setting him free from the domination of that spirit.
Jesus is a prophet who comes to free us from the traps which bind us.
One of my favorite prophets was Romantic Poet
William Blake in 18th century England. He considered himself a
prophet and, like Jesus, found himself at odds with the established religious
institutions. In his poem, “The Everlasting Gospel, Blake re-imagines
Jesus who would be offended by the religious institutions of Blake’s time. This
is almost a paraphrase of the Gospel story we heard this morning. Listen to
these lines from only a small part of his poem where he is talking about Jesus:
If He had been Antichrist,
Creeping Jesus,
He’d have done anything to please us;
Gone sneaking into synagogues,
And not us’d the Elders and Priests like dogs;
But humble as a lamb or ass
Obey’d Himself to Caiaphas.
God wants not man to humble himself:
That is the trick of the Ancient Elf.
This is the race that Jesus ran:
Humble to God, haughty to man,
Cursing the Rulers before the people
Even to the Temple’s highest steeple,
He’d have done anything to please us;
Gone sneaking into synagogues,
And not us’d the Elders and Priests like dogs;
But humble as a lamb or ass
Obey’d Himself to Caiaphas.
God wants not man to humble himself:
That is the trick of the Ancient Elf.
This is the race that Jesus ran:
Humble to God, haughty to man,
Cursing the Rulers before the people
Even to the Temple’s highest steeple,
In his preface to the long Poem Milton, Blake did a poem, “And
did those feet in ancient time” which was later set to music as Jerusalem, which one of our parishioners
gave me a direction to be done at her funeral. You may have heard that song
sung as the theme for the opening pageant of the Summer Olympics in 2012 in
England. One of the lines in the poem was, “Chariots of Fire” as an image of
divine energy. and was the theme of a movie about another Olympics. Blake in
the original manuscript hand wrote a verse from the book Numbers "Would to
God that all the Lord's people were Prophets.”
For Blake the divine energy would be needed to undo, what he called in
the same poem, the “dark satanic mills”. People who want to ignore Blake’s
spirituality would suggest that Blake was referring to the Industrial
Revolution, which as in all good poetry, dreams and visions means more than a
simple literal level. Besides the mills of the Industrial Revolution spewing
smoke and sulfur in the formerly green countryside, it also may have been referring
to the great churches that were factories to mass produce people who were
alienated from the God of compassion, from the fullness of the God of nature
and buried in creeds, rules and rites and thereby went along with the status
quo leaving the demons of the economic, social and political systems
unaddressed and unchallenged.
Listen to
these lines where Blake attempts to translate the vision from images touched by
words. Listen to the prophet Blake see the world through God’s eyes and urge us
to join in a change of the world empowered by God’s divine energy;
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
\
Now listen to his poem “Garden of Love” where he
re-imagines what it is like when Jesus walked into the synagogue as it were in
the 19th Century into a church more obsessed with rules and laws
than love. Hear again the words of the Prophet Blake:
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not. writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
When Jesus sets that man in the synagogue free from
the unclean spirit he unbinds the briars from our deepest joy and desires. May
we see God setting us free!
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