Wednesday, March 25, 2015

"You have to be Carefully Taught"

A Reflection for the Community Lenten Series
Outer Banks Presbyterian Church
Kill Devil Hills, NC
March 25, 2015
Thomas E. Wilson, Rector, All Saints’ Episcopal Church

Lesson: Mark 11: 1-11
You Have to be Carefully Taught”

I have been ordained for over 30 years, and I have never preached on the lesson I picked for today. It is the lesson we read during the Blessing of the Palms, and then we have a procession, singing “All Glory, Laud, and Honor” and waving Palms as we make our way into the church. We don't preach on Palm Sunday since we read the long Passion narrative  and that takes up so much time.  This lesson tells us about Jesus’ triumphal procession and how everybody seems to love him, and then in the Passion Narrative, everybody turns against him. Did you ever wonder why?

Let’s start off with the preparation for the event - which reminds me of revolutionaries setting up a public incident as a way to stir the people up. Jesus knows where the colt he is to ride is tied up, and he tells his disciples the exact code words to say to those confederates in the plot to set the march in motion. Jesus is proclaimed as the one who brings salvation.  That is what the word Hosannah means - “Bring us help, Bring us salvation”. In an occupied country where the Romans are trying to keep things in order, this could be interpreted as a call to revolution to throw the Romans out. The people line up behind Jesus, wanting an uprising so that they can crush their enemy. In this context it is a call to violence and hate.

Notice that Jesus doesn’t then take the logical step and call for an armed revolution. Instead he “looks around and comes home”. I think the reason that the crowd turns against Jesus later in the week is because he has disappointed them.  They wanted a call to hate their enemies but he spends the next week talking about loving their enemies. We like to hate.  As Rogers and Hammerstein suggested to us in South Pacific, hatred is not an innate part of being human but it happens after we are born:
You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught

anti-Smith reaction in 1928 election
I think of the religious heritage my family passed on to us. When the followers of Jesus became legal and became a protected religion in the Roman Empire, we turned from love as our central value to “being right” and using power to push our positions.  My mother was a Scotch-Irish girl who grew up in an Old Covenanter Presbyterian Church tradition in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where they religiously remembered the Scottish Presbyterian Martyrs who had been sacrificed during what was called “The Killing Time” between 1680 and 1688. They remembered it like it was yesterday, even closer than yesterday, as William Faulkner's line from Requiem for a Nun reminds us: “The Past is never dead; in fact it is not even past.” My mother related how it seemed that every week their Preaching elder, who was from Northern Ireland, would warn them about the Papist threat. She remembered when she was 10 in 1928 and Al Smith, a Roman Catholic, was the Democratic candidate for President against Republican Herbert Hoover. She recalled how hatred and fear would be stoked as Hoover preached, reminding them that the Papacy was the work of the Devil and Catholics would not be part of the elect to enter into God's favor.  “You've got to be carefully taught.”

Scene from Birth of a Nation
My father grew up in North Carolina, and he remembered how he was carefully taught. One of the Wilsons had gone to fight for the glorious Southern Cause  in the “War (pronounced Wahr) Between the States” and was taken prisoner and died in a Union Prisoner of War camp in Elmira, New York. The story was often told that the Wilson family treasure was buried in Goldsboro, but that it was stolen by them Yankees. My father remembered that, when he was a young boy, the movie “Birth of a Nation” played in Asheville, and for weeks after seeing it, he and his friends would ride on their broomstick horses covered with sheets as they reenacted the heritage of the Klan putting down uppity blacks and Yankees - until his father reminded them that the Klan was no friend of Roman Catholics, which he was. In his church he learned that the Protestants were horribly misguided, and regrettably, however nice they seemed, they were an enemy of the true church and would go to Hell, for there is no salvation outside the church.  “You have to be carefully taught.”

You see where this is going? My Yankee Presbyterian mother and my unrepentant Southern Catholic father met at the University of North Carolina and fell in love - for as Jesus taught during the last week of his life on earth, love is the only antidote to hate. It would be nice to say that hatred and fear ended, but we like to hold on to them. When I was a teenager and worked in Summer Stock and Outdoor Drama and became enthralled with being an actor, my father was afraid I would turn into what he called a “Hollywood Queer”, a phrase which he saw as redundant. You have to be carefully taught - he was afraid that sexual orientation is a disease one catches. He was also afraid when I joined a chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) because he remembered the hatred that had been directed toward left-wing types during the McCarthy era.  “You have to be carefully taught.”

 As I grew up as an Episcopalian (after they split the difference), I learned songs that passed on the prejudice of the Protestant Episcopal church.  One of them was “I am an Anglican”, and part of it went:
I am an Anglican,
I am P.E., (Protestant Episcopal)
Not High Church or Low Church,
I am Protestant and Catholic and free.
Not a Presby, or a Lutheran,
Or a Baptist white with foam,
I am an Anglican,
Of course not from Rome
I am an Anglican,
Via media, my home.

“You have to be carefully taught.”

After my father died and I was graduating from Carolina, my mother took us out for a celebratory supper, and when the waiter suggested a French wine, my mother launched into a diatribe against the French under Charles De Gualle as ungrateful to all that America had done for them. “You have to be carefully taught.”

My first job out of college was working as a counselor for the Job Corps program, and I was working in Wilmington when the race riots blew up. Of course they blamed it on “Outside Agitators” because no one would acknowledge the racism that was at the center of our lives. There was a reaction by a White Supremacist group called the “Rights of the White  People”, known as ROWP, which they pronounced “Rope” as a reminder that the old way of hatred at the end of a rope at least kept people in line.  “You have to be carefully taught.”

Years later when I was going to Seminary, I bought a cheap Japanese car, and my mother took one look at it and reminded me that my father had spent World War II as a Marine combat artillery officer in the South Pacific and dismissed my purchase with “Don't you know that those people tried to kill your father?”  “You have to be carefully taught.”

I look at the news in this country and see the bright young fraternity boys who should know better spew their hatred, and we call it “free speech”, even though it is that kind of speech that enslaves us into hatred. I watch as we are polarized with hate and fear mongers are not listening to each other but twisting knives in public discourse and further dividing us. “You have to be carefully taught.”

I look at the news on the International scene and see different sects of the three major monotheistic religions, all founded on love of God and neighbor, slaughter each other in the name of hatred of the “Other”. “You have to be carefully taught.”

One of the reasons I like what we do in this Lenten  Series is that we get all sorts of different views and traditions, and we listen respectfully as we work together to live lives where love is the center and maybe we can work together to teach ourselves. Why do we do it? There is a story told by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, and it goes like this;
One of the Just Men, Father Abraham, came to Sodom, determined to save its inhabitants from sin and punishment. Night and day he walked the streets and markets protesting against greed and theft, falsehood and indifference. In the beginning, people listened and smiled ironically. Then they stopped listening: he no longer even amused them. The killers went on killing, the wise kept silent, as if there were no Just Man in their midst.
 One June a child, moved by compassion for the unfortunate teacher, approached him with these words:
   ‘Poor stranger, you shout, you scream, don’t you see that it is hopeless?’
   ‘Yes, I see,’ answered the Just Man.
   ‘Then why do you go on?’
   ‘I’ll tell you why. In the beginning, I thought I could change (hu)man(s). Today, I know I    cannot. If I still shout today, if I still scream, it is to prevent (hu)man(s) from ultimately changing me.’

I believe that love can be carefully taught.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

We Want To See Jesus


A Reflection for V Lent All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC March 22, 2015 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
We Want to See Jesus
Please sir, we wish to see Jesus”. The Greek-speaking Jews come to Philip who has a Greek name and make this request. The request is passed up to Andrew who speaks Aramaic and makes the request known to Jesus who doesn’t speak Greek. Jesus then remarks that every grain of seed has to die in order for a new life to begin, and he moves from that to his own death.

Is something lost in the translation between the request and the answer? I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t look like Jesus is really responding to the request. It seems that the editor of John’s Gospel just added a random statement from Jesus rather than directly addressing the plea. Yet, sit with the situation for a minute and see if there is a connection.

The Greeks who don’t speak Aramaic want to be able to translate this Jesus experience to their own culture and time. John, who is writing a half century or more after the death of Jesus, is faced with translating the experience of the early disciples to a world that does not know this wandering Jewish preacher from East Nowhere Nazareth. We in 21st century Outer Banks North Carolina need to translate this Jesus experience to our lives right here and now as, like the Greeks, “We wish to see Jesus.”

But where do we see Jesus?

Haden Institute Tile
When Pat and I went through the graduation exercise of the Dream Group Leader Program, besides getting pretty pieces of paper with our names on them, we got tile plaques with a quote from 20th century Swiss psychiatrist and mystic, Carl Jung. Jung had a plaque put up on the doorway of his house and later on his tomb of a Latin quote from Erasmus: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit, which translated is “Summoned or not, God is present.” 
 
One of the things we do in church is to summon God when we say things like “The Lord be with you” or “Come Lord and be our guest” or “Send your Holy Spirit” or, as in the Collect for today, “Almighty God you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners. Grant your people . . . “ But the reality is that God is already here, the Risen Christ is already in the space between us, the Spirit of the Living God is already inside our very breath, the law of God is already written into our heart as the prophet Jeremiah tells us in the Hebrew lesson for today. We just don’t pay attention. We just have a lot of things on our minds. However, like the quote by William J. Toms which you may have have handed to you by your Sunday School teachers as I was, “Be careful how you live your life, you may be the only Bible some people will ever read,” so I tell you, that “You may be the only Jesus that people may come into contact with.”

I do this thing with people who want to get married - I tell them I am not in the business of throwing Holy Water on people in heat. I am asking this couple to help me out because the church gets so busy doing Church Stuff (sometimes I actually do say “Stuff”) that we never get around to showing people what Christ looks like. I am not interested in weddings but I am interested in relationships that demonstrate the Jesus is alive in the space between the two people. I am looking for people who can pour themselves out to one another, to die to their own agendas, to forgive extravagantly, to remember that even when they disagree they still love one another, to demonstrate that their love grows between them and is not to be hoarded as a private treasure but shared with others to make creation a better place, to gracefully care for each other even when the other deserves it the least because love is a gift given not a wage earned. I want them to make a commitment that their love for each other becomes the Holy space between them, and when people look at that Holy Space, they will say, “Oh that is what Jesus looks like!” They may want me to say holy words, but I need them because “I want to see Jesus”.

Summoned or not, Jesus is present wherever two or three are gathered together, even when the name is not spoken. I had a dream this week after a Vestry meeting. In the dream people were gathered around a bowl which held a large blooming flower. I and the others gathered around the flower and we each picked a petal and ate it, but the flower was still full of hundreds and hundreds of petals. As we ate the petals, they turned to bread in our mouths, and we were all aware that we were all connected. I realized that the dream was telling me that the body of Christ had been present all that previous day and during the Vestry meeting. The bright petals became a symbol of the huge, bright, almost golden sliver of the moon in the eastern 5:00 AM sky as I was on my way for my workout and, on the way back at a quarter to seven as the sun was almost on the horizon, the moon had shrunk in size and color to a deep silver. The universe was announcing the love of our creator, pouring out beauty and the Christ through whom all things were made. The dream reminded me that Jesus was there in the people I talked with that day in the middle of all the brokenness. The dream said Jesus was in the middle of the Vestry meeting as we had discussions and listened to each other, remembering that we were not there to push our own agendas but to be the church in miniature seeking the mind of Christ. Jesus was in the way we treated each other with respect and opened us up to see new possibilities. Yes, we talked about things that could be “church stuff” such as Communications, websites, responsible hosting of our guests at Room in the Inn, Sunday school, preschool progress, and organ upgrades, but they all were a part of seeing Jesus. We want to see Jesus.

Part of what we do today at the 10:30 service is to give thanks for the proceeds of the All Saints’ After Dark Program and to provide them to programs in which we see Jesus. We want to see Jesus. In the Room in the Inn, we see Jesus in welcoming as brothers and sisters those who we tend to ignore. We see Jesus in the Community Care Clinic as they work to bring healing to those broken bodies. We see Jesus in the sharing of the loaves and fishes in the Beach Food Pantry to those who are hungry to see grace in this world. We see Jesus in the Food for Thought program as he places a child’s needs in the midst of his disciples and says “whoever receives this child, receives me”. We see Jesus in the Interfaith Community Outreach who are the hands of Jesus to help mend lives of neighbors and strangers. All of these programs pour themselves out, all of them pouring out outward expressions of love, time, attention, and care, giving it away because love is a gift given, not a wage earned. We say thank you to them because we want to see Jesus. Summoned or not Jesus is present.

Please sir, we wish to see Jesus.”

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Snake in My Path



A Reflection for IV Lent                                            All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC  March 15, 2015                                                   Thomas E. Wilson, Rector


Snake in My Path

William Blake's drawing of " Moses Erecting the Brazen Serpent"
Alice Walker, the author of  The Color Purple, said: “I pay attention to my dreams. And I protect my dream space. I find often I can't interpret my dreams alone, so I have certain wonderful helpers I trust with this. The ability to dream was given to humans as a gift.”

The reason I was not with you last Sunday was that Pat and I were graduating from the Dream Group Leader Program and finishing up the classes we were taking. I believe in gathering in groups to be helpers in listening to our dreams and myths.  I had already handed in my paper, An Experiment in Preaching Using Dream Work, my accounting of last year when I spent 23 sermons using the dream work method of looking at the mythic stories of the Hebrew Bible. As you remember, I told you many times that I consider Myths to be public dreams which a community remembers to give a deeper meaning in their community life and understanding, just as I consider dreams to be private myths which give the individual a deeper connection to their spiritual life.   If we were literalists in telling stories from the Bible, our only viewpoint would be that these are historical stories in which things are what they are and have only one meaning -  a stone is a stone and a snake is a snake. However, we are not literalists and if we see this myth/dream as a reflection upon a mystical event, a dream or myth, where each element of the dream/myth has multiple meanings, then each time the story is told another meaning can be seen which may have not yet been seen earlier.  This is what Jesus does when he revisits the public dreams/myths of his people as he does in today’s Gospel lesson. Historians write histories, Prophets and Priests listen to God and revisit the mythic structure.  The question is not “Did this happen?”, but “what does this story mean to you right here and right now?”

Today’s first lesson from the Hebrew Testament of Numbers has mythic properties, letting us know we are not in Kansas anymore, and it comes across as a dream. This public dream that the Hebrew people remembered and passed on to their children was about finding ourselves in a situation where we are in a mess and do not know what we are to do or where to go, and a symbol of that situation in life is the wilderness. There are deaths in this dream and usually deaths in a dream are about changes, the old life is dying so a new life is being healed. When our life is a mess, the first step to for us to change is to admit that WE have a problem and WE have to change; if it is someone else’s problem, they will have to change.  Consider the alcoholic or drug addict - as long as she/he can convince others that they have no problem or that it is someone else’s fault, then they can deny that it is their problem and push it out of consciousness. She/he does not have to change. Also we tend to project the denied parts of ourselves on to others, saying things like, “I don’t have a problem, but Joe over there, he really does have a problem. If he could just control his nagging, I would be all right!” Humans have a hard time making changes, and so we need to admit that our old ways are destructive to us and come to grips with ourselves and the help we will need.  

One of the final lectures in our training last week was on “Snake Dreams”, and we were instructed ahead of time to bring in a snake dream - a dream in which snakes are present. I had not had one, but I took the Hebrew Testament lesson for this Sunday about Moses and the serpents in the Wilderness. The Hebrew people told this myth many times over the years, and Jesus must have been told this story many times for he uses it to explain a deeper meaning in his life and, by extension, in the lives of those who would follow him. Jesus was not interested in founding a new religion, but he seemed to be interested in getting his people back to a deeper meaning in their religious and daily life with God.

The instructor went through the multitude of meanings that the snake symbol has had throughout history, e.g. evil, wisdom, cleverness, new life (with the shedding of skin), danger, hidden, all seeing (the snakes eyes never close), power (a little bit of poison will defeat an enemy much larger than the snake itself), healing, eternity, fertility, guardians of the sacred, the remnants of the umbilical cards which bind us to Mother Earth, and so many others possibilities.   Our instructor asked us to revisit our snake dreams, so I looked at this snake myth and I encountered it again by my making this myth/dream from Numbers my dream. I invite you to make this myth/dream your dream and encounter it as Your Dream sent from God for you to visit for your life here and now. Dreams/myths are God’s way of helping us bring issues to consciousness where we can deal with them. What does your wilderness look like today? What are the things you need to change? Since everything in the dream is part of ourselves, what symbol gives us the most energy?

If I claim this dream as mine, then in my dream I am walking in my life now in a wilderness and I am complaining and murmuring, surrounded by other complainers. We moan and mutter about not getting the things we want and what we get is not enough.

Therefore, in my dream, I mutter about not having enough, not food like they do in the Numbers dream/myth, but money. By canonical decree, I will be made to retire in less than four years, and I am fearfully muttering in my heart that I will not have enough money to live the life of excess I crave. I am muttering that I have made the wrong choices in the past as I was on this journey on this path. If I had worked in a different field, or if I had only taken that other option….  If - If - If. I am dragging my past along in my wilderness, and I want jump into a magical future as a way to avoid dealing with the present.

In my muttering I am aware that I have envy for the things others seem to have. Why are all sorts of blessings seemingly wasted on those people when I am so sure I am more deserving? It is my pride, the mother of all sins, and now it shows up in the violation of the 10th commandment as I am coveting and moving into alienation from them and from God. My feelings of anxiety come to dominate my thoughts and, as I dread the future, I am not able to fully engage the present. As the Buddha advised; “The secret for health for both mind and body is not to mourn the past, worry about the future, anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.” Or, as Jesus prayed- “Today give us the bread we need for this day.”


Since all of the elements of the dream are different parts of me, one of the tasks of dream work is to encounter the elements that have the most energy, which in this case is the snake, and have a conversation with it, asking it to tell me what it is doing in my dream.

This is the conversation I have with the snake in the path.

Tom:        What the heck are you doing in my life?

Snake:        Ssssay sssailor, are you new in town?

Tom:        Don’t get cute with me. (pause) I’m sorry, if every dream is sent by the Divine Dream Maker for health and healing, I need to respect you, you are part of me. But what is behind the way you greeted me?

Snake:        I’m trying to get you out of the thinking part of your brain and into the feeling part - the way you Y chromosome types sometimes are when sex is involved. After all you are sleeping with me. But I want to get intimate and tell you sssome truth that you have a hard time hearing. On one level, when you look at dreams, you get all sorts of analytical in your head and missss the feeling level, missss how it connects to your body, your soul, your whole life. The point of a dream is to change your life, not just to tickle your intellect. Encountering with only your head separates you from God, yourself, and from me.

Tom:        Of course I am separated from you because if you bite me, I will die.

Snake:             Remember that in a dream, to die is to change. Don’t you know you need to die each day to the world in which you live now? You are surrounded by a society of excess and consumption, surrounded on all sides by commercials telling you to buy more and more stuff. You are surrounded by dread-filled commercials which warn you to put your faith in what you own and what you do. You need to die to having a God you hold in your hand or store in your garage as a symbol of worth. You need to be dead to the past so you don’t have to live there anymore. Die to the future so you can live in the uncontaminated present. Look at yourself - you have become like me, slithering around instead of walking upright.
Look at me and claim that part of you so you don’t have to project it on to someone else. For instance, you know how annoyed you are by this one person of whom I don’t really need to remind you?

Tom:        You mean?

Snake:    Exactly that one.

Tom:        Yeah but who can blame me? She is so self-centered.

Snake:    I rest my case. What are you doing now?  You are so self-absorbed that you cannot give thanks for what you have.  You only complain about what you do not have.

Tom:        Like what do I really have that I can be thankful for?

Snake:    You have a home, an income, medical insurance, and a pension, all of them given to you by the church - that same church that you brag you would work for even if they didn’t pay you. Would you? If so, act like it and don’t lie to others, to God and especially to yourself. Claim the coveting and the fear you have and see them as symbols of the greed and fear that destroy people. Like perhaps in the Gospel lesson for today where greed and fear motivated the rulers of this world to crucify Jesus on a cross raised high. Look on that cross and see your own greed, your own fear, and when you are able to claim that you help erect the cross on which you have hung yourself, then you are on the way to wholeness. You can begin to die to the old life and rise to a new life. It is not going to be your own power that does that. Jesus did not use his own power to stop the crucifixion by destroying his enemies or denying it; he entered into it so we might see that the only way to begin a new life is to die to the old one. Join with me, SSSnuggle up with me and letsss make a new life together.


Snake In My Path (Poem)

SSSay SSSSailor, are you new in town?
Perhapsss you are interested in a truth,
you have not been able to really own
or claim for healing to get out of booth
in which you have encasssed for life
away from small ssslitherss of healing
from your dancesss of death now rife
with hazzzzards but now ssso appealing.
Come - sssleep with me and find anew
the truth from which you ssso much hide.
SSSnuggle with me my own little Babu
and for this night, I will be your bride.