Passion of the Heart Reflection and Poem for 30 August 2015

A Reflection for XIV Pentecost                                 All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC September 30, 2015                                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Song of Solomon 2:8-13         Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10      James 1:17-27      Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Passion of the Heart

Each week we put a meditation question in the bulletin to invite you to spend some moments being still and reflecting before we begin the worship service. Last week the question was “In whom or what do you put your trust?” This week after I had prayed and looked over the lessons, I discovered the question I needed to ask myself as I began to write the reflection: “To whom or what do I direct my passion?” 

The dictionary defines Passion as a strong and at times overwhelming feeling of love and strong desire to be united with that object of desire. I would go further and say that Passion is not just a feeling but a series of continuous, determined actions for being fully united. There is an old saying that there is no book of the Feelings of the Apostles, but there is one of the Acts of the Apostles. As Richard Rohr reminds us “We don't think ourselves into a new way of living; we live ourselves into a new way of thinking.”  One of the themes that I see in all of the lessons for today is active passion, and so the question I ask each of you is “To whom or what do you direct your passion?” Thomas Merton said, "People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall."

Let’s start with the Psalm for today. In the Bible there are instructions to many of the songs that tell the choir and the instrumentalists the tune, the occasion, or the emphasis on how the psalm was to be sung. Apparently today’s song was written by one of the court poets for the occasion of one of the Kings of Israel being married to a foreign princess. Court poets tend to get their money from flattering the King, so this new Princess from Lebanon is being told that she is a lucky girl and she needs to turn all of her allegiance, attention, and passion to this catch of a man.  The song apparently was very popular and people sang with joy. My theory is that after the Temple had been destroyed and the King’s palace reduced to rubble by the Babylonians and the people taken into exile, the exiles still sang this song but changed the phrase “Your throne of God”, meaning that the King owed his throne to God’s favor, to “Your throne, O God”, and thereby changed the focus of their passion from the Kings who had let them down to God who was always with them. I think that when the exiles sang the song as part of their worship and in an act of imagination, they saw themselves as the brides coming forth into the presence of God and made commitments to love, honor and cherish.

The same thing happens with the Song of Solomon from which the first lesson is taken. It is a collection of erotic poems of love between two people who long to be united. These poems were very earthy and popular and were used at celebrations of weddings, and tradition labeled these songs as coming from or dedicated to King Solomon in the 10^th Century BC. Scholars suggest that they were gathered together and edited from about five centuries of different poems into one book in the 5^th Century BC. There was some real debate by the Rabbis about including this book into the Bible in the first Century AD when the Rabbis gathered to counter the Christian practice of using all sorts of readings in the synagogue services. The majority of the Rabbis chose to use it as an allegory of God’s love with humanity, but it was close because some Rabbis thought that, with its frankness of human sexual desire, it just was not appropriate for public worship. However, the majority view was carried by Rabbi Akiba in around 90 AD who said, “For all the world is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the writings are Holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”

For those of you who have seen the 1993 movie “Sister Act” with Whoopi Goldberg, you may remember that the nuns in that story try to build up passion for their failing ministry and take the 1964 pop song “My Guy” and turn it into “My God”, a hymn about Jesus, and the 1963 pop song “I Will Follow Him” became a hymn about Pope John Paul II. In some of our services here, especially the Feast of All Saints and some funerals, we throw in “When the Saints Go Marching In”, which started off as a Gospel song and then became a New Orleans jazz standard. We use it for worship as a way of channeling the passion for our church or for the person being remembered in the Memorial Service and turn it into a passion for life in Christ in this world and the next.

Even today many people don’t approve of that co-mingling of the secular world with the profane, and they start to harrumph that the religious experience needs to be seen as a separate and wholly different one from everyday life. When we read this lesson in Bible Study this week, one of the participants asked with alarm, “What is this doing in the Bible?”  

For those of you who have attended weddings that I have done, you may remember that I say something like “sometimes the church gets so busy doing Church stuff that we forget what God looks like”. What I have learned about God does not come from books but by being in active loving relationships. The reason I do weddings is not to throw holy water on a couple in heat, but to bless them in their passion to be united in love as entry into the ministry of showing God’s love in how they treat each other.  Their love is a sacrament. The sacrament is not the ring, not the license, not the gown, not the wedding service, not the reception, not the wedding presents, but it is the active, shared love that is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. My understanding is that couples act by uniting together in a lifelong, committed, monogamous, non-exploitive relationship and, in the same way, the story of faith is about how God and humans act on their passions to be united one to another. God is the one longing for a passionate embrace with us, and we have only to actively and gracefully accept it.

We see this understanding of passion for unity with God and persons as a way of understanding the next two lessons. In the Epistle of James the writer wants to do away with all the nitpicking about who is right in their interpretation and to replace this smugness with a passion for helping the poor and vulnerable. Religion is not about who is right but about how we live out God’s love for us as we are united to God. When Micah calls on us to “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God”, he is asking us to stop being passionate about our agendas and to enter into passionate love with God. Passionate union with God needs equally passionate union with neighbor. 

In the Gospel lesson the Pharisees who have a passion for the law start to point out the faults in how the disciples are observing the laws of cleanliness. Jesus points out that this passion for the law is not a passion for unity with God, but a stopping short of union with the God of love and an excuse to attack other people based on one’s own pride in how he or she has obeyed the law. In essence, he seems to be saying that these nitpickers do not want to be united with God but rather prefer to replace the living God with a rule book. Life is not about being safe following the rules. Julian of Norwich suggested that it is sometimes in our brokenness that we unite with God:  “If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

Relationships can be rocky, and it is not always that we live happily ever after. Union with God does make us vulnerable to the brokenness of the world. Teresa of Avila wrote in her autobiography about a moment she experienced when she was far into her inner journey. Bellini captured that moment in his baroque work of marble The Ecstasy of St. Teresa in Rome’s Santa Maria della Vittoria. She wrote, “The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God.”

Today we have the baptism of James Witter to be brought to go again, and yet for the first time, through the breaking water of new birth. We will pray for the Spirit to give him and us passion to embrace the love of Christ and the brokenness of his beloved world so that he will no longer be content with anything but God.

David Brooks in his new book Path to Character has a quote from someone who corresponded with him:

The Heart cannot be taught in a classroom intellectually to students mechanically taking notes. . . . Good wise hearts are obtained through lifetimes of diligent effort to dig deeply within and heal lifetimes of scars. . . . You can’t teach it, e-mail it or tweet it. It has to be discovered within the depths of one’s own heart when a person is finally ready to go looking for it, and not before. 

To whom or what do you direct your passion?”

Passion of the Heart (poem)

Calls come to dip in shallow pools

bubbling in the back of churches

yet still the brooding spirit lurches

empowering us as heaven’s fools.

My passion tired of lonely seething

longs for one to hold and know thus

the divine is in the space between us

as in shared encountered breathing.

I come as penitent for the embracing

touch of the world’s untidy persona

to my soul’s widening gaping lacuna

of responsibility; now mine for facing.

Give desiring for me with you uniting

finding peace passing understanding

within your arms as our feet landing

into Holy Space never again slighting.

Placing Trust Reflection and Poem for August 23, 2015

A Reflection for XIII Pentecost (Proper 16)              All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC  August 23, 2015                                                  Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

1 Kings 8: 22-30, 41-43               Psalm 84                Ephesians 6:10-20          John 6:56-69

Placing Trust

The question in your bulletin for meditation before and after the service is “In whom or what do you place your trust?” In the lessons for today we have four teachers who spend energy trying to teach people about the reality they see and in which we all live. In this fourth week of the Gospel story from John, the author continues Jesus’ explanation of what he was doing when he fed the multitudes in the wilderness. When he fed the 5000, the people saw a miracle worker who could help them get what they need to get their “needs” met. Their question was, “I liked the food, but what else is in it for me?”

In most of the 6^th chapter, Jesus focuses on his point that the food was not to meet the “need” of a hungry stomach, but to give a taste of what life would be like if we could change the way we look at the world and ourselves. If we exist only for what we consume, then life has no meaning other than feeding the furnace of desire. Jesus is teaching them, and us, that the meaning of life is in being connected to the power greater than ourselves, which we, for convenience, call “God” and Jesus called “Father”.  This “being connected” is what the translators call belief. The word in Greek that John remembers is “pisteuo” which can mean belief, but it goes further beyond intellectual assent. It means emptying oneself out so that others may be fed through you. One does not “have” a belief but one lives into that belief by walking with God in a life of integrity, compassion, justice, and mercy, as the Prophet Micah says, “What does the Lord require of you to do but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.”  

“Belief”, in Jesus’ definition, is not a passive thought but an action of entering into abundant life where one is totally trusting in God. Many of the people in the throng leave because it is hard to trust God - trusting does not answer the question of ‘What is in it for me? How do I benefit if I give myself away to God?” The disciples come up to Jesus and tell him that he has a marketing problem that frightens people away. Jesus gives the disciples the opportunity to leave, but they have come this far trusting that God has been walking with them.  But they are still shaky.

There is an old story that I heard a preacher tell years ago, and I have heard different variations since then.  I usually tell stories that have to do with my own experience and stay away from stories about people who I do not know, but here it is anyway.

There was a tightrope walker who did incredible aerial feats. All over Paris, he would do tightrope acts at tremendously scary heights. Then he had succeeding acts - he would do it blindfolded, then he would go across the tightrope, blindfolded, pushing a wheelbarrow. An American promoter read about this in the papers and wrote a letter to the tightrope walker, saying, "Tightrope, I don't believe you can do it, but I'm willing to make you an offer. For a very substantial sum of money, besides all your transportation fees, I would like to challenge you to do your act over Niagara Falls." Now, Tightrope wrote back, "Sir, although I've never been to America and seen the Falls, I'd love to come." Well, after a lot of promotion and setting the whole thing up, many people came to see the event. Tightrope was to start on the Canadian side and come to the American side. Drums roll, and he comes across the rope which is suspended over the treacherous part of the falls -- blindfolded!! And he makes it across easily.  He then makes the return trip blindfolded and pushing a wheelbarrow! The crowds go wild, and he comes to the promoter and says, "Well, Mr. Promoter, now do you believe I can do it?" "Well of course I do. I mean, I just saw you do it." "No," said Tightrope, "do you really believe I can do it?" "Well of course I do, you just did it." "No, no, no," said Tightrope, "do you believe I can do it?" "Yes," said Mr. Promoter, "I believe you can do it." "Good," said Tightrope, "then you get in the wheel barrow." 

Which brings us back to the question, “In whom or what do you place your trust?”

The Psalmist for today tells of how the sparrow finds her home in the Temple of the Lord and the swallow builds a nest next to the altars where she may lay her young.  The birds of the air understand that the core of their being is bound up in being present with God without pretense or prevarication. Therefore, in the same way, the Psalmist ends the Psalm with the promise to those who walk with integrity, “Happy are they who put their trust in the Lord.”

In the first lesson for today, Solomon, in his prayer of dedication of the Temple as the National Shrine of the Religion of the Kingdom, suggests that going to the Temple is not a replacement for walking with integrity with God. He teaches his people that God is found, even by foreigners, if they put their trust in God, and they can find Peace. 

“In whom or what do you place your trust?”                        

 Up until about 5 months ago, Pat had a thirteen year old car.  She loved it, but she could no longer to put her trust in it, so we bought her a new car and she trusts it - so far. Janis Joplin  used to sing a song she wrote with Michael McClure and Bob Neuwirth - “O Lord Won’t You Buy Me  a Mercedes Benz”.  If you watch car commercials, you know that they appeal to us as symbols of freedom and justification which is how the author Flannery O’Connor uses cars in her stories. In her novel Wise Blood, the hero Hazel Motes, who, having bad experiences in the war is fed up with God, begins to set himself up as a prophet against God, saying “I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.”  He gets himself a beat-up car as a mobile pulpit and proclaims, “A man with a good car doesn’t need salvation!” Of course you know Hazel and his car will soon be parted three-quarters of the way through the book. 

“In whom or what do you place your trust?”            

 I have a credit card which I pay off every month so I won’t have to pay any interest and which I use to earn mileage points to be able to fly out to see my daughter. I trust my economic system. However, last month on vacation as I was driving across Canada, I got a text message on my phone from my credit card company. They wanted to talk to me about six charges of all the same amount to a series of places in Italy. Apparently someone had been able to hijack my information and was making charges. It would be nice if nothing bad ever happened to us, but that is not the world we live in. The writer of the Letter to the Ephesians passage for today teaches the readers that trust in the Lord is a daily exercise and uses those wonderful images of putting on the full armor of God for the protection of our soul. The armor is not used for aggression but a daily stewardship of the relationship of trust in God to withstand what Hamlet will later cite:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th' oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,

“In whom or what do you place your trust?”

Placing Trust (Poem)

The Lottery would be nice to win

but not the Measly Million flaunt

but higher than the Donald when

saying whatever I choose to want

so never having to worry again.

A Mercedes could be comfortable

always trusting German engineering

to always be real sure I am in control

for all roads I ride on be domineering

never having to worry about my soul.

As I clutch and squeeze out of that fear

of watery trust slipping through fingers.

Imaging old me, on empty heath like Lear,

railing that more is never enough lingers

as I wonder who or what do I hold dear?

Partners in Prayer

A Reflection on the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary 

All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC 

August 16, 2015 

 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14 Ephesians 5:15-20 Luke 1:46-55

Partners in Prayer

Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin 1605

Yesterday, August 15^th, in the Episcopal Church Calendar was the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin, and I moved the celebration to today. Thirteen Augusts ago, on August 1, 2003, I came here as your new Rector, and on the third Sunday of that August, I had also wanted to transfer this feast, but the General Convention had just affirmed the election of the first openly gay Bishop in the Episcopal Church and had caused so much controversy that I decided I needed to face that issue instead of dealing with Mary. It took me three years to make the switch, but I need to honor Mary in my own life and in the life of the church as the embodiment of what it means to be a Christian - one who remains open to God’s hopes and dreams. The Gospel story for today reflects Mary’s prayer/song of thanksgiving called the Magnificat. That prayer/song predates Mary by a thousand years with the singing of that Song by Hannah, the mother of Samuel, related in the First Book of Samuel. 

 

Hannah was an old woman who for years had longed for a child, and when finally God had granted her wish, she sang this song in which she, like all parents expecting a child, dreams of their child making the world a better place. Hannah lives in a time when the leaders of the nations and tribes arrogantly exploited the poor and pander to the whims of the rich. Hannah prays/sings that God will give her child the strength to face these obstacles and bring in a time of justice and mercy. The prayer/song is not about what she will get out of this but that she is open to what God can do. She comes with utter openness to be used to bring in God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Her son, Samuel, will work to help his nation and he will work to try to influence both King Saul and David to remember that every life is lived in the expectation of being a vessel for God’s loving-kindness.

A hundred years later when David dies, his son Solomon begins his reign as King, and after he finishes dealing with the palace intrigue, he realizes that his Kingdom is not his to own but is part of his stewardship from God to bring about justice and mercy in daily life. His prayer related in the first lesson for today reflects the radical openness to let God use him to bring about God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Nine hundred years later there was a young girl Mary. The title “Virgin” was not a per se acclamation of purity but is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word “Almah”, which meant young girl, into the Greek word “Parthenos” which had the more technical definition of virgin. To be fair, there was an expectation in the Palestinian Jewish community that young girls would be watched over in order to insure virginity at marriage. When Isaiah wrote his prophecy about a “virgin bringing forth a child”, he was speaking about God extraordinarily working with ordinary humans and not about the purity of the particular person. The title meant her utter humanity rather than a pure demi-goddess. It was in the centuries later that the church fixated on sexual purity and on the implication that God used Mary because she was pure. The implication therefore meant that God will only use extraordinarily perfect people. It is my understanding that God uses all kinds of folk to be vessels of God’s loving-kindness. One of the reasons I do a confession of sin almost every week is because I know what I have done or left undone, by action or inaction, and loused up in thought, word and/or deed, and I have the more than sneaking suspicion that I am not the only one in this room that needs to confess. As Mark Twain said that humans are the only mammals that blush, or need to.

One of my favorite paintings is Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, housed in the Louvre in Paris. This painting was rejected by the church as unfit because Mary had dirty feet and her stomach is bloated, but I love it because this is a flesh and blood woman not a bloodless plaster saint. The suggestion that the model may have been Caravaggio’s mistress or a prostitute probably did not help.

Mary sings this Song as her prayer of praise that God has chosen her, not because she deserved to be chosen, but because God, in an act of Grace, uses her to be a vessel of God’s loving-kindness to the world. Her son becomes an outward and visible sign of God’s care for all people. This song of commitment is in the same tone as the promises we make when we do baptisms. Today at the 10:30 service we will baptize Oliver Carl Elliott Payne into his ministry of being a vessel of God’s loving-kindness to all the world. We will ask the Holy Spirit to move within him and ask his sponsors and this community to help him live into his calling.

In the broader church in the world there are many who pray using the Rosary as a way of uniting with Mary in her prayer to God, and it is a commitment that we who say the prayer will be like Mary in opening ourselves up to be vessels of God’s Grace, not because we are pure but because we need God’s Holy Spirit to work within us. My Roman Catholic grandmother taught me this way of prayer when I was a child, but it took me getting much older before I started to use it even sporadically.

Let me talk you through what this looks like. The first thing we do is to make the sign of the cross. When I was baptized, the Priest made the sign of the cross on my forehead as a sign that my life was no longer my own but I was claimed as Christ’s own forever. When I make the sign of the cross, it is a reminder that I am part of something much larger than myself, and I claim the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as a shorthand version of trying to describe what I can never fully understand. I am entering into a mystery of faith.

The Sign of the Cross: In the name of the Father of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen  The next thing I do is to recite the Apostle’s Creed which was part of the baptismal service when I was baptized and which we will call the Baptismal Covenant.

The Apostles' Creed: I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into hell. On the third day He arose again; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen The nest step of the Rosary is to say the Lord’s Prayer which is the one that we say Jesus taught us to pray. When we say this prayer, we do not say it alone, we are aware that we are tied into centuries of believers who do this in so many languages. When I was in Jerusalem years ago, I visited the Church of the Pater Nostrum, an unfinished Roman Catholic church, and in its cloister is a series of more than a hundred plaques each showing the Lord’s Prayer in a different language. I love it when I do services with people who say the Prayer in their language while I am saying it in mine, or even in contemporary version, because it is not the words that are important but the spirit which fills the space between, under, over, and through the words that makes a difference between a ritual and an act of faith.

The Our Father: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name: Thy kingdom come: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread: and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation: but deliver us from evil. Amen. The next step is the Hail Mary which came into devotional use in the 11th or 12th century and became widespread in the 16th. It begins with the words of the Angel who announces to Mary that she will be a vessel of God’s Grace to this broken world. When I say this, I am re-living into that moment of Grace where God’s messengers come and remind me that God does just hang out in heaven someplace above the sky but each moment fills each and every molecule of space in creation and my everyday life. I join with Mary’s Spirit because I believe that life when we die does not end, it only changes. I am not just with Mary, but I am with all the folk who have ever been. Last week I did a prayer for someone who was facing addiction, and I knew that Jack Mann and Jim McDonald, two men who I admired and who have died, were with me in that prayer. I take the name of this church seriously, All Saints, and I know even if I am the only living presence in this building, all of God’s Saints are present. When I am using the rosary as a way of meditation, I will say the Hail Mary slowly ten times to slow my mind down so that I will be reminded that I am not alone.

The Hail Mary: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen  I end the ten Hail Mary’s, the decade of prayer, with a reminder that I pray not for what I want but for how I might be used by God in this world to the praise of God.

Glory Be to the Father: Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. This prayer is not magic but it can be helpful for some people to go deeper. I invite you to say it slowly with me if you wish - All may, some should, none must.

Partners in Prayer

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee:

blessed art thou among women, and

blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners,

now and at the hour of our death. Amen

Hail Jack, full of grace, the Lord is with thee;

blessed art thou among men and

blessed is the fruit of your outreach, Christ

dwelling in the space between us and the poor

Hail Jim, full of grace, the Lord is with thee:

blessed art thou among men and

blessed is the fruit of your care, the Holy Spirit

strengthening the recovery of addicts.

Hail Lillian, full of grace, the Lord is with thee;

blessed art thou among women of song and

blessed is the fruit of your love of music

singing “plummet sounding heav'n and earth”.

Caravaggio had it right with the Virgin’s death

she of dirty feet and passionate intensity

showing the fullness of God in the ordinary

incarnating love given gracefully.

Holy Jack, Jim, Lillian and all my soul friends, and

all who have lived as brothers and sisters of Jesus

pray with this sinner now and in the hour of my death