A Reflection for XIV Pentecost All Saints’
Church, Southern Shores, NC September 30, 2015 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
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 10th
Century BC. Scholars suggest that they were gathered together and edited from
about five centuries of different poems into one book in the 5th
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.”
.jpg)
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment