Friday, June 5, 2015

Being One's Own Authority



A Reflection for Pentecost 2B, Proper 5       All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, N.C.     June 7, 2015                                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
1 Samuel 8:4-20          Psalm 138                    2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1                        Mark 3:20-35
                                                            Being One’s Own Authority
In this season after Pentecost, the Revised Common Lectionary, which outlines the lessons that are to be read for each week’s service, directs us to stories in the Hebrew Testament lessons from the time of the rise and fall of the Kingdoms in Israel. The theme of these accounts is that if we try to put the ultimate authority for our lives in our leaders and their institutions, they will eventually let us down.  My understanding is that each of us has to find our own way through the tension between the tyranny of slavishly following our leaders and the anarchy of individual caprice. It is a delicate tension for, on one hand, our leaders tend to be ego-driven and their egos and agendas can lead us into dependence on them to do our own critical thinking. On the other hand, “just doing it cause it feels good” does not a community make.  A Community is not where everybody agrees but, rather, it can be defined as an entity in which every person is the ultimate authority for themselves and shares responsibility for the care of others and joins with others to determine the mind and direction of that community. 

Last year in the Hebrew Testament Lessons for the season after Pentecost, we went through the mythic cycle of stories from the Creation to the Flood, to the Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses and Joshua sagas. The theme was the journey to follow God and, if you remember, I used these myths and dreams as a way of listening to God on the journey and applying them to how we are on our individual spiritual journeys. In this year’s selection of mythic stories of people building and, alas, destroying community, my hope is to look at how we might be building or hindering our community at All Saints’.

Today is also a special day as we are honoring our high school graduates as they continue in the task of creating the community in which they will continue to grow. Some of them will leave town and begin a community somewhere else; my hope is that we will have taught them something about the necessity of community. 

Our first lesson for today is from the last of the Judges, Samuel. These books of Samuel are compilations of different oral stories and sagas from the time of 11th Century BC, which were gathered together by different editors over the centuries until it reached written form in the 2nd or 1st Century BC. Each editor has a different point of view, so it is more of a kaleidoscope than straight narrative. If you expect consistency on the literal level, you will awfully frustrated.

The story today has Samuel faced with a demand by the people - they want him to anoint a King so they can be just like all the other people in this neighborhood of the Middle East. They are afraid of the neighbors they have and want a leader who is going to bigger, meaner, and stronger than the neighbors’ leaders. Samuel, whose Hebrew name literally means “In God’s name”, tries to tell them that having a King like all the other Kings is really not a good idea. However, as the graduates can tell us, that oft-repeated line from our parents “Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean you have to” just doesn’t get much traction. Finally, Samuel in his vision or dream hears God saying, “Let them do it for that is the only way they are going to learn.”  The people then spend the next 500 years learning this lesson, over and over and over again. Even then, they don’t pay attention, for as long as they have a King, then they don’t need to take responsibility for their own authority. 
You would have thought that the Christians would have learned a lesson, but when they got to be legal, they sucked up to the Emperor and the Kings that followed in the wreckage of the Empire. Louis XIV of France was asked about how he was helped to rule the state, and the “Sun King”, as his sycophants called him, replied out of his arrogance, “L’etat, c’est moi!”, which according to the Wilson translation means, “The state? Don’t make me laugh. I am the state”.  You see, the problem is that if you give authority over your life to a person or institution, that institution or person has their own agenda and you will get lost in the process. 

I wish I could say that only Kings are arrogant as leaders, but arrogance is no stranger to other institutions. Pat Wilson can tell you of meeting a new Priest straight out of seminary in June of 1984 who, she told her friends, was the most arrogant person she had ever met. That priest was arrogant because he was unsure what he was doing.  He had not yet made the transition from showing he knew everything in seminary to being able to work with others to create community. Pat’s view of the arrogant priest she held for a number of years, until she married him, but she still has occasion to revisit that opinion. 

Even in democracies, authority can be subverted by arrogance. I remember a governing board I attended once where the chair had an item in the agenda labeled “remarks”, and he came down from the dais and started off by saying, “I am coming down here to be on your level so that I am not going to talk AT you but WITH you.” He then proceeded to talk AT us for 20 minutes as he strutted around making excuses, laying blame on others, and pursuing his own agenda. It was a campaign speech and he had more than three years before he would run again, but he had never made the transition from selling himself arrogantly as THE authority during his successful campaign to being a person who wanted to work with others to help govern a community. 

That transition from authority to work with others to lead a community is a transition I am still learning. You may notice that I have changed the bulletin notation from “Sermon” to “Reflection”. I am not standing up here lecturing the right way to see something in the way I used to lecture students when I was a college professor, but I am here to share with you my experience. This came about because I keep realizing that there is a whole bunch I do not know about God. I am not the AUTHORITY on God – I wish I was, but I am not; all I can do is share what I see that God seems to be doing in our life together. I can share my journey with God, but that is not a chronic undifferentiated path for all of you. The Divine energy behind, in, and through all creation approaches us as a lover approaches a beloved - it is different for every person.  They can be alike but, as each of us is different, so also the God dwelling in us is meant for each of us and we share that vision in community.

I think it was my dream work that pushed me over the edge. When I was a therapist, I “knew” what each symbol meant in a client’s dream, but in reality, it was only my projection on that symbol. But I am not a therapist.  I am a fellow journeyer on the road, and only you are your own authority.
Another experience that helped was having my daughter grow up, graduate, get married, and have children of their own. I am no longer her authority and have not been for years. She gives me the respect to listen but she is her own authority. She may make what I think are wrong decisions, but she knows I respect her choices and I will be with her whatever she chooses.

Samuel hears God say the same thing for the people of Israel in the Hebrew lesson for today. Samuel hears Samuel’s God’s thought and yet allows them to make their own decisions, and even so, promises to be with them for all time. God continues to love because as far as I know, and has been known, love never ends.

Today as we honor the graduates, let us remember that we are all in the process of graduating. We ask them - and you and me - to become our own authority as we grow into a deeper relationship with the energy that is the divine community of the creator of all things, with the one who shows us how to be fully human, and with the one who gives us the energy to love, persevere, forgive, and to see with the divine vision.


Being One’s Own Authority (Poem)

I once knew it all, or
at least I thought so; for
it was easier to be the authority
on all invisible things. Yet,
my knowledge base shriveled
as wisdom grew as a gift from
the Divine Sophia, she of the dancing
laugh, who saw me strutting and
posturing and then wrapping me in
her arms whispered “You are only
 the authority of this ever so,
so fleeting moment with me.
Come lay you wearisome ego and
agendas on my breast, filling your
soul with passing understanding peace
            entering into eternal community and love”.

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