Schlemiel, Schlimazel and Mensch.

A Reflection for II Lent                                                         All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C.

March 1, 2015                                                                         Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16      Psalm 22:22-30      Romans 4:13-25          Mark 8:31-38

Schlemiel, Schlimazel and Mensch.

I had some trouble getting into these lessons and after struggling with them, I went to read one of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian Minister who is almost 90 years old, has authored 36 books, and still puts out a weekly blog. After looking at his stuff for this reflection, three Yiddish words came to mind: schlemiel, schlimazel, and mensch.

Our first lesson is about the man we call Abraham, but this lesson calls him Abram. Frederick Buechner, in his book Peculiar Treasures, had this to say about this character: “If a schlemiel is a person who goes through life spilling soup on people and a schlemozzle is the one it keeps getting spilled on, then Abraham was a schlemozzle. It all began when God told him to go to the land of Canaan, where he promised to make him the father of a great nation, and he went.”

It all began in the mythic city of Ur which, depending on your sources, was either in Southern Iraq or Northern Syria, or Armenia, or on the Anatolian Plain in Turkey. In this city lives a man called Abram. Now I want a show of hands of men: “If you are 75 years old, like Abram when he was called, or if you are close to it, or if you can imagine reaching 75, do you think you will jump up and down at the prospect of leaving your house on which the mortgage is paid, leaving your medical plan and savings behind, giving up everything you hold dear, packing up some donkeys and walking hundreds of miles across the desert and wastelands for the thrill of being a father for the first time in your life?”

Now for women, a show of  hands: “If you are 65, ten years younger than your husband (who also may be your half-brother), you have already gone through menopause, and your husband (or half-brother or cousin) says he heard a voice calling him out of the Ether waves to leave the house, do without the paid servants, the friends you made all your life and all the rest, and walk for hundreds of mile across deserts and wastelands so you could be a mother for the first time in your life, would you be happy about doing it?”

I am not a woman, but before Pat and I got married and she was around 50, she did agree to move a whole 50 miles from Roanoke to Lynchburg, but for a few years she kept returning to see her dentist, her doctor, her auto mechanic, her hair dresser, even her dry cleaner. When I suggested that it would be nice if we had a red-headed little boy, she looked at me like I was crazy.

Now Abram starts to wonder about putting up with being a schlemozzle after about ten years of wandering around, getting into a fight with his nephew Lot (in which Lot gets the better land), going through some good years and then bad years of warfare and famine, having his wife confiscated by one of the local rulers of the land in which they were refugees, and then being sent packing when his wife is finally returned to him - and there is still no child is sight.  Finally Sarai, now 75, gets the bright idea of fixing up the old goat Abram, who is now 85, which a buxom Egyptian beauty called Hagar, and she gets pregnant. Well that took care of the child part of the trip, except Hagar gets “uppity” and puts Sarai down. Sarai, in retaliation, gets Abram to kick the Egyptian baggage out into the desert, but she comes back and has the child.

Another 13 years pass and Abraham, now 99, comes home from a journey and says that the voice he has been listening to has told him that all males in his household need to be circumcised, that a child would be born to him and Sarai, and their names would be changed from Abram which means “My Father (my God) is honored” to Abraham which means “Father of Many Nations”, and from Sarai which means “Princess” to Sarah meaning “My Princess”.

Don't you think that someone in these 24 years might have said, “No! God might have a plan but it is not my time table, it is not rational; thank you, NO. It is not feasible and it doesn't make sense. Thank you very much, NO. If it were really God calling us, don't you think that the road would have been a tad easier?  I say NO thank you.” I would not have waited 24 years, I would have started off casting my negative vote at the beginning.

There is a schlemiel in the Gospel story with Peter. Again I go back to Buechner's Peculiar Treasures where he talks about Peter: “The first time Jesus laid eyes on him, he took one good look and said, "So you're Simon, the son of John", and then said that from then on he'd call him Cephas, which is Aramaic for Peter, which is Greek for "rock." A rock isn't the prettiest thing in creation or the fanciest or the smartest, and if it gets rolling in the wrong direction, watch out. . .” Peter lives down to his name and becomes the rock in the Jesus path when he says that Jesus just doesn't get this Messiah business. “After all if you are the Messiah and God is behind you, then everything is supposed to work out for my satisfaction as well as God's.”

In Paul's letter to the Romans, Paul reexamines Abram, and in other places Peter, and moves them from schlimazel and schlemiel to mensch. A mensch is a person of respect and integrity, a person you can count on. We might be tempted to see Abram and Peter as people who kept messing up, and they both do, but when God looks at them, they are seen by God as mensch, people who God holds in respect. God respects us by giving us freedom, over and over again, and is with us as we mess up and never turns the divine back on us.

We started this service with a Penitential order where we acknowledge that we have fallen short of God's dream for us, and still we ask the energy that created us and who gives us energy for another chance. That next chance is given before we ask. It is a gift of Grace which alone has the power to change a schlimazlel and schlemiel to mensch. Grace is another word that I go back to Buechner, but in his book Wishful Thinking:

“Grace is something you can never get but only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.

A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody?

A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you.

There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it.

Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”

Being Waited on by Angels

A Reflection for I Lent                        All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. 

February 22, 2015                               Thomas E. Wilson

Genesis 9:8-17 Psalm 25:1-9 1 Peter 3:18-22 Mark 1:9-15

Being Waited on by Angels in the Wilderness

From Mark’s Gospel lesson for today: “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”

Last week I shared with you that Pat and I studied in Israel years ago; while there, we wanted to have the experience of going out into the Wilderness. We went on a hike and we had a guide, took plenty of water, had been well-fed at breakfast, and had some food packed for lunch. There is now a path, but if you wander off the path, you will get into trouble. In 1969 Bishop Pike decided to go into the Judean wilderness to follow the footsteps of Jesus and was unprepared and perished when he got lost. His body was found at the bottom of a steep canyon into which he had stumbled due to weakness resulting from dehydration.

It is a dangerous place and you do not go into it alone. There were about 20 of us in the class as we hiked across the rocky land, and while we did see a young Bedouin woman herding a small group of goats in the distance, we saw no wild animals. During the time of Jesus, the wilderness was a place from which the wild animals would come to raid the sheep folds and farms on the border. The wild animals were frightening, but when the prophet Isaiah had a vision of the peaceable kingdom, he wrote a song of a time when:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
    the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
    and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
    their young shall lie down together;
    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
 They will not hurt or destroy
    on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea.

I think that Mark is suggesting that Jesus is living into that vision of unity with all of God’s creatures. Mark’s Gospel has an underlying question that it asks its listeners - “Who do you say this is?” The story begins when Jesus comes out of the water at his baptism and God declares to Jesus, “You are my child, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.” Later there are stories of Jesus telling the demon to be quiet when the demon says “I know who you are!” There are the stories of the disciples wondering who this Jesus is. The Pharisees, the Sanhedrin, and Pilate all demand of Jesus his identity. Finally the Centurion at the foot of the cross says at the time of Jesus’ death, “Surely this man was of God.” The Gospel of Mark ends at the empty tomb where the women run away afraid, which raises the question again “Who do you say this Jesus is?”

My thought is that Jesus is how we are united one to another and to the wild beasts and the entire cosmos. If each week we take the body of Christ into ourselves when we eat the bread and wine of the Eucharist and thereby become what we eat, how are we like Jesus? Do we hear God saying to each of us, “You are my child, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.”? God has been saying that same thing to me in so many ways since I was born, but it took me years to hear it. Some, in fact most times, I preach what I need to hear. I just came across a poem in which there are a couple of lines which made me stop dead still and made me wish I had written them. It is by Christian Wiman, he is a poet who edited Poetry Magazine for a decade and then stepped down as he faced what he called "the bright abyss" of a diagnosis of an untreatable and unpredictable cancer which allowed him to  go into the wilderness within and deal with his faith and write about it. He now teaches at Yale Divinity School. This poem is  titled The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians:

“I stand before you in a rage of faith and 
have all good hope that you will all go help.untold souls back into their bodies, ease the annihilating No above which they float,”

( for the entire poem see http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/249782 )

Twenty-one years ago when I walked into the wilderness following the footsteps of Jesus, I thought that the wilderness was “out there somewhere”, but the devastating wilderness is “in here”, in that annihilating No above which my soul floats at times. I long for my soul, the who I am at the core of my being, to be reunited with the “rage of faith” of being loved by God and connected to this man Jesus from 2000 years ago and today, and with all the wild beasts as we are all fed by the angels.

Do we play it safe and never go near the edges of our comfort or do we follow the footsteps of Jesus into unfamiliar territory and maybe then look back, like Robert Frost in the last stanza of his poem the Road Less Taken?

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

---

Reflection for Ash Wednesday

A Reflection for Ash Wednesday                              All Saints Church, Southern Shores, NC February18, 2015                                                  Thomas E Wilson, Rector

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10                                Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

This is Ash Wednesday and the Gospel lesson for Matthew has the warning about making a relationship.  Jesus seems to strike a sad note as he sees religious people make a display of their religiosity as they miss the point and waste their energy. Life is too short to waste on that temptation. T.S. Eliot in his play, Murder in the Cathedral at the end of the 1^st Act has his protagonist, Becket; say after being tempted by four temptations:

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:

Temptation shall not come in this kind again.

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

The question, or the temptation, to ask is how are we planning to keep a holy Lent? We have choices on how to observe Lent. The way I was taught when I was growing up was that Lent was the time to strengthen one’s will power to follow Christ; therefore I should give up something so that I might make a sacrifice - as Jesus fasted for forty days in the wilderness so we were to fast with something like chocolate, or meat. It was a time of separation from a sensual pleasure so that I might prove worthy of God’s love and to prove that I was ready for duty as a Christian soldier in Christ’s army. I grew up during the time of the Cold War in which my area of very conservative Upstate New York saw itself in a spiritual battle for “Christian” values, like Free Market Capitalism, against Godless Communism. It was a time in which there was always an enemy out there somewhere as well as an enemy that was in our soul. Lent was all about making me into a “good American” Christian. It was a path of moral self-improvement. Every day during Lent I longed for chocolate or meat or, later, liquor. I saw Lent as a kill joy time and resented God for putting me through it, figuring God owed me Big Time.

Later on I started to learn another way of building my soul and that was to engage in behavior that would help me to learn how to die to myself by reminding myself what a sinner I was  I would go through a practice of making new resolution for living a better life and humble myself by remembering my sins. It turned into a way of mentally beating me up so that I would have already paid for my sins. It was a path of self-mortification

Later on I learned there was another way of observing Lent and it was a purging of my appetites and life to a simpler lifestyle. I would look at all my luxuries and excesses compared to the poverty of others. I would fast in order to set aside money to feed, clothe and house the less fortunate. The motto was to “live simply so that others may simply live.” It was about the saving of my soul by helping my neighbor. It was a path of societal self-improvement. The problem with that was that I kept looking at others who were not following that path and I became very judgmental. It was not an increase in love but in estrangement.

There was another way of building my soul and this was not to give up something but to take on. This meant that instead of watching movies during Lent I would do more reading of religious materials like the Bible, theologians and mystics. Lent was about me being a more devout Christian.  It was a path of Spiritual self-improvement. 

There is nothing wrong with any of these paths, with the possible exception that it was all about me; I was the center of my Lent.  The lesson for Matthew has the warning about making a relationship with God all about one’s self as if God were a an ATM Machine that dispenses gold stars is you put in the right password.

This weekend, if the roads clear, Pat and I have some friends who are coming for a visit and part of what we will do is clean up the place a bit. The purpose is not to impress them with how good and neat we are but to help them to feel more at home in our home. Feeling at “home” we can relax and catch up on what is going on in our lives and we spent time listening to each other without being distracted by so many things. They have known us for years and have come to accept us as we are, not as we want to be - but as we are. It is called love. I have come to the point of my life where Lent is about cleaning up my spiritual; home so the Divine and I can truly listen to each other and I am not so easily distracted, 

So here are some of our choices for Lent: 

1) Make a sacrifice for discipline, 

2) Become aware of  and repent of sins in life, 

3) Practice simplicity, 

4) Take on a regimen of deeper study,

 5) Slow down and become more aware of the presence of God in the space between yourself and all of God’s creation.

Actually, looking at that list, maybe if we can turn the spotlight off our own wants and desires to look good in our religion, maybe these are the choices we need to do all the time and not just in Lent. Maybe we could use the season of Lent as an excuse to start as a thanksgiving for all we have received.

So what are you doing for Lent?  

Mountain Top Experiences

A Reflection for the Last Sunday after Epiphany                        All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. February 15, 2015                                                                Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

2 Kings 2:1-12    Psalm 50:1-6     2 Corinthians 4:3-6    Mark 9:2-9

Mountain Top Epiphanies

This was the weekend of St. Valentine's Day. I remember 26 years ago, during the Season of Epiphany, I was vacationing in Guatemala on a trip with my mother during the week before Valentine's. I was enjoying being with my mother, but on my solitary walk in the fog one day in the highlands around Lake Atitlan, I reflected that I was really missing this woman I knew back in Virginia. My mother and I had just returned from Atitlan to Antigua, and we went shopping at the Jade Market there. 

Jade Factory in Antigua

They go wild over Valentine's Day in Guatemala, and I thought I should pick up something simple for Pat. She had given me a knock-off Rolex watch some months before which had frightened me at first because I thought it was much too expensive for the relationship at that time. We had not been that serious. I was so relieved when I found out it was a knock-off. But now I was thousands of miles away from her, and I knew I did not want to live without her.  I saw a jade necklace and I debated with myself about buying it, but as I looked at it, I looked deep into the jade and I had an epiphany when I realized that she was more precious than it. I bought it for her as my mother's eyes shot up in astonishment and she started to ask me questions about this woman she had not met.  When I got back, we made an appointment with Pat's priest to start the pre-marital process. It was an epiphany followed by reflection followed by action.

.

This is the last Sunday of Epiphany and the last Sunday before Lent.  Epiphany means a manifestation, a sudden insight and realization, when we look at something that is right before us and then realize its deeper significance and meaning. The season of Epiphany begins with the story of the Magi who see a star and have a revelation that the star means that a new kind of Kingdom is coming, and they follow the star until they come to the place where the child Jesus lies. These were gentiles who knew nothing of the Jewish hope for a Messiah, but on their journey they find the deeper meaning of what they have seen. The Epiphany season ends with the story of the Transfiguration when Jesus is seen by his disciples as they are in the fog on top of a mountain. Suddenly the light of the glory of God shines through Jesus, and when the fog clears, they begin to look for a deeper meaning of the event. They realize that this Jesus is more than just a teacher, but is a human being filled with the creative energy that began the universe. They see a sacred space opening up to the Divine and they want to set up a memorial to this place. However, Jesus tells them that they must go down the mountain and continue the ministry,  except now their ministry carries a deeper dimension.

If you have noticed, every Sunday of the Epiphany season has had a theme of seeing something anew, which raises questions and calls for re-action and action.

Mountaintop experiences always carry a desire to linger in the place of the numinous, but we are to bring the experience of the numinous to daily life. I meet with a group of friends each week, and we have three questions we answer with each other. They are:

a)         What was your moment closest to Christ this week? In essence, that question is designed to share an experience of the numinous, and since I know that I will be asked this question, I try to keep my eyes open all the time.

b)         What did you study this week? This question is designed to get us to use our brains to study and to see a deeper dimension to what we have experienced.

c)                   What has been your action? This question is to keep us from staying on mountaintops and get to the living out of our numinous experience to benefit the world in which we live.

In essence, every week we go through the Epiphany exercise of being open to seeing the glory of God shine through Christ in this world, we try to figure out what that experience means, and then we take it into everyday life. We use our senses to touch, smell, and see the experience of God alive in this world, we use our minds to better understand, and we use our hands to put ourselves into Christ's work in the world.

 Looking toward the gate off Salah Ed-Din into the compound of the Diocese of Jerusalem, St. George's College and the Anglican Cathedral of St George  borrowed from 
  myjourney-algodon.blogspot. 

Twenty one years ago around this time of the year during Lent, Pat and I went to St. George’s College in Jerusalem to study a course called “The Palestine of Jesus.” We read books in preparation for each class, and every night we would have a lecture about what we would experience the next day, with an emphasis on what to look for. We would have the experience the next day and, when we got back to our dormitory, we would share what we had learned and get ready for the next day’s activities.

One day we went to Mount Tabor that tradition suggests was the Mountain of the Transfiguration. The road was crooked, and when we got to the end of it, we had a climb to the top of the mountain, and there, a couple thousand feet down, lay the Valley of Jezreel which opened up to show a major trade route full of history. In my imagination I was able to visualize the story from the Book of Judges in the 11^th century BC with Barak and Deborah looking down on the armies and chariots of Sissera and planning the trap they were going to spring and defeat his army in order to set the people free from domination by the Canaanites. I saw the armies of the Pharaoh Neccho II of Egypt in the 7^th Century BC marching up to challenge the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar for control of the Middle East. Neccho's defeat sealed the fate of Jerusalem which was captured by the Babylonians and taken into exile. I saw the Roman armies of Octavian moving down to destroy Antony and Cleopatra in the 1^st Century BC. I saw Jesus in the 1^st Century AD look down on this valley of violence and show the energy of God's love shining through him. There is a Franciscan Monastery there at the site and Francis tried to hold on to Jesus' message of love and peace. Yet, for the last twenty centuries, the Valley which had been the site of the numinous has seen continuous warfare.  Over the centuries, people have set up up memorials but somehow we have never gotten around to seeing the deeper truth that God's love and peace is meant to be shared with the people down in the valley in everyday life.

Franciscan Monastery on top of Mt. Tabor   photo taken by Shalom Holy  Tours

when the fog come in on Mount Tabor looking over Jezreel Valley - - photo from feuchtblog.net

As we were standing there, the fog came in across the coastal plain off the Mediterranean and we were unable to see the valley or the mountain itself, which forced us to look deeper into ourselves and reflect on what the Transfiguration means. The Mount of the Transfiguration is not just in Israel but in every hill, valley, molehill, and beach all over the world, and it is not just that one time 21 centuries ago when Jesus was transfigured so that we might see the God in him shining through; I think that if we are to follow Jesus, then we are to allow the love and peace of God to shine through us. If we can just slow down in the fog of our lives, we can hear Christ asking us to allow God's love and peace to shine through us, change us and the world, and go down into the valley of everyday life.

Mountain Top Epiphanies

Looking, but not seeing,

yet with new light being

as we now so apprehend

a once overlooked friend.

Discovering on the climb

which is here all the time

bringing us all new lease

of Divine's loving peace.