Thursday, May 14, 2015

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 9th 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.

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