Teaching Our Children

An Introduction to a Celebration of Christian Education Teachers and Students.   Trinity Sunday   May 31, 2015                                All Saints’ Church                                   Thomas E. Wilson Rector

During the service in place of the Psalm today, we sang or said Canticle 13, the Song of the Three Young Men or Benedictus es, Domine. When I was growing up in the Episcopal Church, while we would have communion every Sunday at the 8:00 service, the 10:00 service had communion only on the 1^st Sunday and the other Sundays were Morning Prayer. During Morning Prayer, we sang two Canticles every week the Venite (Come let us sing to the Lord) and the Benedictus es, Domine. (Blessed art thou O Lord God of our Fathers,* Praised and exalted above all for ever).

We don’t sing it that often because we don’t do Morning Prayer that often anymore, but that refrain was imprinted in my brain, and I find some times when I am walking on the beach I will sing that refrain as a praise to God when I see how wonderful the world is and I am so thankful for it. It is easy to praise God when everything is going my way. Yet this song was composed for a different purpose. It composed to accompany the story of three young Jewish men whose Hebrew names were Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, but they maybe more familiar to you by their Babylonian names, Shadrach, Meshack and Abednego. The Book of Daniel tells of the Jewish people who were in exile in Babylon in the 6^th Century BC after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC. One story from that Book is about these three young men who refused to bow down to a massive gold-plated pagan image. For their refusal they are threatened with being thrown into a fiery furnace. The three young men continue to refuse and say to King Nebuchadnezzar:

“Your threat means nothing to us. If you throw us in the fire, the God we serve can rescue us from your roaring furnace and anything else you might cook up, O king. But even if he doesn’t, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference, O king. We still wouldn’t serve your gods or worship the gold statue you set up.” (The Message translation)

So the King had them thrown them into the fiery furnace which was so hot  - how hot was it? – it was so hot that it burned up the guards who had thrown them into the furnace and the closest spectators as well. The King looks into the furnace and he sees four figures walking around and they are singing this song. The fourth figure is an angel who walks with them and gives them strength. He calls for them to come out and he tells his people not to abuse the Jewish people any longer.

The song that we sang comes from the 2^nd Century BC- four hundred years after when these stories were supposed to take place. The song and story were taught by the Jewish teachers and Rabbis so that the children of the people in Israel would know that God was with them even as they were being oppressed by a Greek tyrant named Antiochus Epiphanies IV who wanted them to follow the Greek Gods and culture. Three centuries in the 1^st Century AD  when the Romans were oppressing the Christians, their teachers taught the adults and children these songs and stories so that the Christian children would know that there was a power greater than themselves to help them resist the pressure of the Roman pagan culture.

The song we sang today, “I Bind Unto Myself Today”, is a metrical late 19^th Century version of an 8^th Century Irish song attributed to 5^th Century St. Patrick’s adaptation of an earlier Celtic prayer, and it was taught by the monks, teachers, and priests to the Irish children and their parents to find strength especially during the murderous raids by the Vikings. If children were kidnapped by the Vikings, those who knew this sung prayer could keep reminding themselves each day of their faith while they were held prisoner or as a slave in a pagan land.  We tell the stories and sing the songs passed down to us so that we will be able to tell our own stories and sing our own songs of faith as we grow deeper in our spiritual journey.

Today we celebrate our children and the teachers who teach the Christian story and songs to them so that they hold on to the Christian faith of their parents and so that all will be reminded how important it is to know that God walks with us through all the fiery furnaces of this world, and that when things are not going well, we can still give thanks for all things.

Sing Boldly

A Reflection on the Occasion

of a Memorial Service for

Jeannette Gilberta Dalgliesh

May 16, 2015

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC

Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

SING BOLDLY

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Monk, Teacher, and Mystic puts out a daily reflection, and last week he was talking about the Desert Fathers (Abbas) and Mothers (Ammas) who in the 4^th Century moved out from the cities seeking a simpler life in the desert where they thought they might be closer to God. They found that the simpler life was not about being in the geography of a desert but about being able to focus without distraction on what we are doing in everyday life. Rohr relates:

An old abba was asked what was necessary to do to be saved. He was sitting making rope. Without glancing up, he said, "You're looking at it." Just as so many of the mystics have taught us, doing what you're doing with care, presence, and intention is prayer, the very way to transformation and wholeness.  As other master teachers have taught in many forms, "When we walk, we walk; when we chop wood, we chop wood; when we sleep, we sleep." As you know, this is much harder than it first seems.

Gilberta had learned music as a way of life from her father, an organist – a true musician whom she adored, for he believed the words of St. Augustine, “To sing is to pray twice.” She did not live in the desert, but she prayed when she sang. When she sang, she sang as a form of prayer, to be connected to God. She sang not just hymns, but all songs had an element of praise of God and she sang with her whole being into the song. I talked to a long time acquaintance who was with her in doing Bell Ringing at St. Andrew’s years ago, and she remembered that same sort of dedication of self in preparation and execution. Sacred music was so important to her because of the early and constant exposure she got from her father. I once told her that new church organists are not graduating all that often now days. She cringed at that remark, wondering if All Saints’ would go down the road with second class music, and she reminded me of how much she had been comforted by Steve Blackstock, our organist and choirmaster’s dedication to fine music.

Her focus could at times be disconcerting for choir directors. Instead of obediently following orders, she would make suggestions on how something might be sung better. Choir rehearsal always took longer because she took it more seriously. She did not do things to get through with them; she did them by entering into them fully. Committee meetings would last a bit longer. If I was still a therapist, I might suspect more than a touch of O.C.D. (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder); but there is a reason I am no longer a therapist - because I found that people need to be encountered not diagnosed. We all must live fully - even into all the brokenness in which we find ourselves. I was influenced by Martin Luther when he wrote to his disciple Philip Melanchthon:

If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world.

When I talked with Gilberta’s daughters about what we wanted the service to look like, they told me that the theme needed to be “Peace, Love and Forgiveness”. Gilberta sang boldly and, as Luther said, we, each of us, are both saints and sinners at the same time. Yes, Gilberta was a sinner and her major sin was being judgmental. Sins are not bad things that we do, but virtues done without love. Love covers all sins, and she was able to come to grips with when she allowed her perfectionism to tromp on people; she was quick to repent. She was sinned against, but she trusted that God’s graceful forgiveness was able to overcome all of our transgressions.

I appreciated Gilberta even at the times when I would sing the service music and her eyes would roll, as she knew I was just getting through the task instead of singing it according to the music. She would come up to me the next week, when she was able to couch her criticism with love, and tell me that I needed to practice more before I did it the next time, but I never seemed to find the time. For her my sin in singing was not being fully present to the music. For Gilberta, making priorities meant time was what you filled, not what you found.

One of the frustrations that Gilberta had in her final illnesses was that she did not have the energy to fill her time. She said that she had lived a full life and did not regret dying; for her, a life that was not to be full with her vital presence and attention was not worth living. She enjoyed life and she did not willingly give it up even when, thirteen years ago, the doctors at Johns Hopkins told her she had cancer, the kind of cancer that is usually fatal. She agreed to some trials and she fought through some very unpleasant stuff - she fought because life on her terms was worth living. She wanted more time to love and to do what she loved.

She sang fully. She could be a pain, but when she sang, she sang boldly. When she loved, she loved boldly. Her kids can tell you everything she had done wrong, but she knew how to love. She lived boldly –so boldly that her doctor from Johns Hopkins had to keep in touch to get hope to do what he was called to do which was to treat people who have the odds stacked against them.

At the center of this woman was her faith and she trusted Christ boldly. If you want to remember Gilberta do four things: (1) Trust Christ boldly, (2) Live boldly, (3) Love boldly, and, especially (4) Sing boldly.

Spring Living Water

A Reflection for the Sunday after Ascension          

 All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C.    

May 17, 2015                                                    Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 1:1-11         Psalm 47    Ephesians 1:15-23       John 17:6-19

Spring Living Water

Every week I meet with a group of up to six men who gather together and ask each other three questions: 1) What in the past week has been your moment closest to Christ? 2) What have you studied this week? And 3) What was your action plan in the past week to make the Gospel message alive in the community and how did you do with it?

This last week, as we went around the room, I was struck by the fact that the answers given to the first question were memories of a time when each man was connected in relationship with another person. We found that our study had led us to action as we understood that God was not a noun to contemplate but a verb in which we join. In the Gospel lesson for today Jesus prays that the disciples will be one as he and the Father are one. My study for that morning we met was from Richard Rohr’s writing about the Trinity in which he said:

The Mystery of God as Trinity invites us into full participation with God, a flow, a relationship, a waterwheel of always outpouring love. Trinity basically says that God is a verb much more than a noun. Some Christian mystics taught that all of creation is being taken back into this flow of eternal life, almost as if we are a "Fourth Person" of the Eternal Flow of God or, as Jesus put it, "so that where I am you also may be".

This Sunday is the day we celebrate the Feast of the Ascension, when we say that Christ ascended into Heaven. The story from the Acts of the Apostles tries to put into written form a spiritual experience that is beyond the power of words to describe. Let me give you an example of the moment I was closest to Christ this last week. I was meeting with baby Elizabeth Grace and her mother to prepare for the baby’s baptism. She woke up and started to fuss, so Stephanie got out a bottle and started to feed her and write down something at the same time. I took Elizabeth in my arms and started to feed her the bottle. Elizabeth and my daughter Shanon were both born at the same time of year thirty-five years apart, but in that moment, it was as if I had stepped into a time machine, and so filled with love that across time and space I was able to be with both Elizabeth and Shanon at the same moment. I could feel it in my arm, the same arm with which I held my daughter so many years ago, as the muscles which held the memory of that love were coming to life again, not just with Elizabeth’s weight but with the combined weight of holding both of them at the same time - for love, like God, is a verb not a noun. As I was trying to explain this experience, I got a letter which quoted an insight about the mystic love connection between God and humans by the 9^th century Islamic Sufi Mystic Mansur al-Hallaj;

I am the ONE whom I love,

And the ONE whom I love is I.

Two breaths and spirits sharing one body.

If you see me, you see the ONE

And if you see the ONE, you see me.

Again, if we take the Ascension story literally we get into trouble if we think heaven is a place up there somewhere. Heaven is the full presence of the Divine flow of energy, and the story of the Ascension was an attempt to say that as the Divine came down to human life in the form of Jesus, so also are we humans taken into the full dynamic presence of the divine. The wall between the sacred and secular, the temporal and the eternal, is broken down. The story from the Acts of the Apostles for today sets up the thread that winds through the rest of the book - that God’s energy is able to flow through us in this world, to receive what the writer of the Letter to the Ephesians, Paul’s disciple, says “the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

To be invited into full participation in the dynamic relationship, which we, for lack of a better name, call “God”, is an act of adoption by God, so that we are brothers and sisters of the human expression of God who we call Jesus. God’s adoption is what we celebrate when we do a baptism. My own theology is that I do not make a sacrament, but I only point to what God has already done. For instance, when I do a Eucharist, I don’t do a magic trick and change the bread to the body of Christ  or to change wine into Christ’s blood.  All I do is point to the bread (or “wafer”, because as my Liturgics Professor in Seminary used to say as he encouraged us to get our parish to make bread for the services, “It takes more imagination to believe a wafer is really “bread” than to believe it is the “body of Christ”) – I point to the bread and wine and say “The Risen Christ is right here and now;  take God into yourself and realize you are part of the divine.” So when I do a baptism, I am not “saving” this child, but I point to the water and the child and say, “This child coming out of the water of re-birth has already been born into God’s family. We just got around to holding a party for the adoption papers.”

When I was growing up, I had friends who had been adopted. Part of my work experience when I worked in Child Welfare was to supervise Social Workers who did adoptions. I had friends who adopted children. I never saw the children as second-class members of the family, but they were part of the dynamic energy of the relationship of the family; they belonged to the family, were fully loved, and were expected to grow into the relationship on a daily basis. The children’s identity was being formed by the love that was being given to them. Love is the only way we are ever able to really know another person, and it is in being loved that we get to know ourselves.

This child who we baptize today, Elizabeth Grace Gillaspie Harris, I knew before she was born as I saw the love between her parents who conceived her. I did not know what she was going to look like, I did not know what her tests scores were going to be or how she was going to do in school, but I knew she was loved. At the end of our lives, we will not long be remembered for how we looked or how many things we accomplished or accumulated, but more so for how we entered into the dynamic energy field of love by loving and allowing ourselves to be loved, fully living into “the fullness of him who fills all in all.” 

Here is how I want you to help Elizabeth Grace and her family grow into the family relationship of God and this church. I want you to practice each week asking yourself three questions: 1) What in the past week has been your moment closest to Christ? 2) What have you studied this week? And 3) What was your action plan in the past week to make the Gospel message alive in the community and how did you do with it?

Spring Living Water (poem)

The spring light pours into the

sanctuary, that holy space now

finding me standing by baptismal font

cradling this new baby in my arms

with my hand pillowing her head.

The living water bubbles as reaching

Into the water for sacred actions

of blessing, claiming and anointing

has to wait for the now waking baby

to be fed. Her mother hands me the

prepared bottle and the baby, to be

christened Elizabeth Grace, suctions

liquid daily bread to quench the fear

of being forgotten by busy adults.

Yet other living waters of memory

flood into the muscles of my arms

remembering decades ago on yet

another spring morning when before

I passed as sacred, living only as secular,

I held my baby making promises of hope.

Now my arm holds not one but two

as past  and present flowing  together

into the sacred reservoir of forgiveness.

The walls are washed away which divide

past from present, sacred from secular

and reward from gift. My prayer turns to

petition that when looking around the font

into eyes of those who promise to help her,

she remembers and see the divine in them

as sacred time and space is wherever she walks.

Joining in Singing the Music of the Spheres

A Reflection for VI Easter       All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. 

May 10, 2015                           Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 10:44-48 Psalm 98 1 John 5:1-6 John 15:9-17

Joining in Singing the Music of the Spheres

The lesson from the Book of Acts for today is the ending of an episode in the life of the early church in which the people realized that God was not calling them not to be a tightly-knit group of believers who agreed on everything. Rather, they were to go outside their comfort area and encounter people who were different from them and discover that the same Holy Spirit binds them to these strangers. They were not to sing the same old songs but to learn to sing God’s new song.

“Sing to the Lord a New Song” is the opening line of Psalm 98. I just had a hard time getting past that line. The Psalm is a celebration of how the musicians and nature are all singing the same song, as the horn, lyre, lute, and voices join the hills and rivers in this New Song as old as creation. It was one of the reasons Steve and I chose the opening hymn, “Earth and All Stars”, which has the refrain “He (the LORD) has done marvelous things and I too will praise him (The Lord) with a new song.” The hymn was written by Herbert Brokering and the music composed by David Johnson. Brokering was a Lutheran pastor and poet who wrote more than a hundred hymns. He wrote this one in 1964 for the 90^th Anniversary of St. Olaf College where Johnson was the head of the Music department. Brokering viewed each part of the multifaceted university as a distinct entity able to praise God by its work. The Psalm celebrates the sharing of the same song by the musicians and nature, and Brokering expands on all things in nature as part of God’s music, from snowstorms in the winter, flowers and trees in the spring and summer, and rustling dry leaves in the fall. He hears the musical instruments blending with loud boiling test tubes and athletes and hammers and lectures and the prayers as all part of the great symphony of creation. 

 

The Hymn was included in the 1982 Hymnal, and it was the first time that hymn was exposed to Episcopalians who hate new things and who “loved” the old 1940 Hymnal. One of my Professors at Seminary was the head of the committee who put together the Hymnal, and this piece resonated with me because it reminded me of how a university is supposed to work - working together as we respect the building of a common good, a community of learning. By definition a college is a gathering together of colleagues to teach a discipline, and a university is a gathering of a number of colleges to create a whole, a universe of learning. I felt that I had been part of a community of learning when I taught at a college before I went to seminary where the relatively small Psychology, Sociology, and Social Work Departments would work together to create options to expand learning opportunities for our students rather than building our own reputations. 

 

My first posting after ordination was as a chaplain at a University, and it was a disappointment to me to see how the individual departments were so obsessed with going deeper in their separate areas and forgetting the nature of a university. The church I was working with had a bunch of academic types, but they were so busy getting research grants to keep their programs together and publishing paper after paper - many times variations of the same theme - in order to get tenure. It was part of my job to minister to the graduate students, junior faculty, and research fellows and their families being ground up in the maul of the “publish or perish” machine that regimented the undergraduates who took lots of classes but never got to the education of the whole person. The University was trying to move from being a very good regional university to being a top-tier University with a national reputation for tough, top-notch scholarship. People working so hard, so busy at being busy, so intent on competing with each other to climb the greasy pole of academe, they could not hear the music of the spheres. Milton wrote:

Aristotle ... imputed this symphony of the heavens ... this music of the spheres to Pythagorus. ... But Pythagoras alone of mortals is said to have heard this harmony ... If our hearts were as pure, as chaste, as snowy as Pythagoras' was, our ears would resound and be filled with that supremely lovely music of the wheeling stars. Then indeed all things would seem to return to the age of gold. Then we should be immune to pain, and we should enjoy the blessing of a peace that the gods themselves might envy.

Being out of sync with the fact that we are called to sing God’s creation song is not difficult in such an environment. However, this noise is not confined to institutions of higher learning but is symptomatic of the larger society. In an interview a few months ago, Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann opined

We in the United States live in a deathly social context that’s marked by consumerism and militarism and the loss of the common good. That ideological system causes us to be very afraid, to regard other people as competitors, or as threats, or as rivals. It causes us to think of the world in very frightened and privatistic forms. The gospel (however) very much wants us to think in terms of a neighborhood, in terms of being in solidarity with other people, in sharing our resources, and of living out beyond ourselves. The gospel contradicts the dominant values of our system, which encourages self-protection and self-sufficiency at the loss of the common good. The church is in some ways a reflection of those dominant values.

One of the things I like about our choir is that Steve Blackstock keeps working with the members of the choir about how they are to sing together; yes they have different parts, but the parts are not independent, competing sections but complementary constituents of a whole. They are not here to perform and have us “ooh and aah” at how good they are, but to lead us by showing how we can come together to sing the music of the cosmos of God. The choir does its work when it shares a “common good” of praise.

We are here as a church not to compete against the Methodists or Baptists or Roman Catholics or Presbyterians or Lutherans but to join them in one song to create a common good – to join with them in singing with the Lord the music of the spheres.