Going Down a Hard Road -- Reflection for September 27, 2015

A Reflection for XVIII Pentecost                              All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC September 27, 2015                                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22            Psalm 19:7-14                    James 5:13-20                    Mark 9:38-50

Going Down A Hard Road

From wallpaperstock.net

Today is the only time in the three year cycle of the readings that any portion of the Book of Esther is used in the Revised Common Eucharistic Lectionary. The Hebrew Bible is divided into three parts - the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. The Law (Torah), the first five books of the Bible, were brought together around the 5^th Century BC as the Hebrew people wanted to remember what it meant to be a Jew when they were in danger of losing their identity. The Books of the Prophets were gathered together in about the 2^nd Century AD as the people needed to remember the warnings about the rich and powerful abusing the poor and subverting justice, as well as the admonitions to trust only God to get through the tough times. The Writings, which contained songs, Psalms, Proverbs, poetic books, historical novels and other books, were gathered together in the 2^nd Century in the Christian era in response to the Jewish Christian groups attending synagogues and wanting to add all sorts of writings about Jesus to the readings. 

The Book of Esther was one of those historical novels included in the Writings, and its scroll was usually read during the Feast of Purim celebrated on the 14^th Day of the Jewish Month of Adar, which next year is on March 27-28. One of the real drawbacks of the Outer Banks is that there is not a synagogue or organized Jewish community to host a “Purim Festival Blowout”, a festival during which a spiel (or play) has fun with the Esther story. In other places I have lived, there have always been temples and synagogues around – I remember one which did the spiel in Star Wars theme, with Haman looking like Darth Vader and Esther with a Princess Leah hairdo. In the spiel, every time Haman shows up or his name is mentioned, the people drown out his name with boo’s, catcalls, and noise makers, and huge applause and cheers break out when he is taken out to be hanged.

It is fun-filled story-telling, but the story needs to be told to understand how the Jews look at the world and God. Think of the three major festivals celebrated every year. There is Passover, when the Jews remember the exodus in the 12^th Century BC, the time when they were exploited as slaves and the Egyptians wanted to kill them.  The Hebrew people survived and they held the feast to celebrate. Then there is the feast of Purim, the festival held to celebrate the survival of the Jews following the attempts by the Persians in the 4^th century BC to kill them. Then there is Chanukah, when the Jews remember the time of the Maccabean struggle against the Seleucid Empire in the 2^nd Century BC when the Seleucids wanted to kill them. But again the Jews survived, and now Jewish people hold a feast to celebrate. Do you notice a theme? There is a life that is full of troubles, and yet, we give thanks to God for giving us the strength to make it through. 

How easy it is to hate the Jews. Remember the old line from William Norman Ewer, a British journalist, who wrote: “How odd of God to choose the Jews”, to which Ogden Nash, an American poet, replied, “It wasn't odd; the Jews chose God.” Over and over again, the Romans tried to kill the Jews at the destruction of the Temple in 69 AD, Masada at 73 AD, and in 135 AD, they destroyed Jerusalem and the names of Judea and Jerusalem were wiped from the map for centuries. During the Crusades, the Christians gathered together to march to the Holy Land and, on the way, they would slaughter Jews as belated revenge for Jesus’s death. Jews were expelled from England in 1290 AD, France in 1395, Austria in 1421, Spain in 1492, and persecuted under the Inquisition throughout Spain and Italy. They suffered under series of Pogroms in Tsarist Russia and Poland in the 19^th Century AD. In the 20^th Century they were persecuted under Stalinist Russia during the purges, and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Ukraine, Norway, Albania, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, France, and Italy all willingly joined in Nazi Germany’s attempt to exterminate the Jews. Even today in the 21^st Century it goes on, and yet, each year the Jewish people gather together and celebrate these three events which represent all the centuries of persecution, and they celebrate and give thanks to God for giving them the strength to survive by giving a toast to life, “L’Chaim!” 

At its deeper core, the Esther story is about a young woman needing to make a decision about whether to risk being involved. In this story, when the King chooses her to be his wife, Mordechai tells his orphaned cousin Esther not to tell the King that she is Jewish because of the widespread antisemitism. However, months later on when that simmering hatred is being formed and shaped into concrete plans orchestrated by the King’s Grand Vizier, Haman, Mordechai goes to Esther to intercede with the King. She pleads that she has so much to lose; after all, the King had gotten rid of his previous wife because she had displeased him. She has gotten used to having all the stuff that comes with being a queen. She comes to realize she has a choice either to cower alone in comfortable, fearful safety or to claim that God is with her as she stands with the God who can give her strength to claim her connection with the outsiders and endure the danger as she faces the evil.

It is that being aware of how we are counting on God’s strength to make it through that we see in the other lessons for today. The last verse of Psalm 19 is the formal coda to the Psalm which was later adopted as the conclusion to the silent prayer said three times daily in Jewish worship, and I prefer Robert Alter’s translation “Let my mouth’s utterances be pleasing, and my heart’s stirring before You, LORD, my rock and redeemer.”  

James in the Epistle lesson for today reminds us that we need to be aware of being in the presence of God in all circumstances of our lives as we give thanks to God for living fully into the good times and making it through the tough times. Jesus in the Gospel points out to the jealous disciples who see someone else casting out demons in Jesus name that the presence of God is not a rare possession given to the fortunate, favored few to hoard, but a free gift given to all sorts and conditions of people to have the strength to make it through the day if we can only stop business as usual and make it a priority.

I remember a simple thing that happened almost 37 years ago, long before I went to seminary, and when I was full of the stupid bravado of a 30 + year old male who believes that nothing bad could ever happen to him. I got hired to teach in a college beginning in the winter semester three hours away from home. I rented an apartment there for the school week and would drive home for the weekend on Friday afternoon after my last class and appointments. It was 155 miles from door to door, and I had a car that was on its last legs. One weekend, halfway into the trip, past the interstate portion and now into the two lane road going up into the mountains, it started snowing. The car was making all sorts of death rattles, it was getting dark, the heater was not working, and I kept using my credit card to scrape the icy frost off the inside of the windshield and side window. Each mile I was anxious about making it home, along with the anxious fear of a father and husband worried about what might happen to his family without him. If I could make it, my three hour trip would now take over four. I made a decision that I could not know if I would make it or not, but I would give thanks for each mile I was closer to home. So, as the odometer changed each mile, I would say something like “Thank you Lord.” Something in me changed as I did that; I don’t think the car got any better or the weather improved, but I changed. I had driven that road before many times, but all had changed. As Heraclites noted, we cannot step into the same stream twice.  I slowed down my breathing and fear left me as I placed my family into the hands of a loving God, and I gave thanks for every moment that was given to me in the life I had left.  God had been present with me long before I left the college, but it took a situation over with I had no control to let me see that God had always been with me - but I just didn’t get around to noticing. 

Going Down A Hard Road (poem)

Click; the odometer changes to a new mile,

car creeping down the snowy asphalt aisle.

Almost there; but filled with fearing lonely.

forty, thirty, twenty or more to go but only

if a road’s distance now might be plundered,

one at a time, of five thousand, two hundred,

eighty feet: forty inches of old tire’s new turn

inching homeward bound as wheels do churn

as driver murmurs more dew-frosted prayers 

of thanks given when a sacred presence shares

strength to make it through all. “Don’t be afraid”

spirits before Her womb or out His tomb prayed,

for Divine messages have come in many disguises,

when control is lost; angels bring in new horizons.

Finding the Perfect Spouse

A Reflection for XVII Pentecost (Proper 20)                     All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC September 20, 2014                                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Proverbs 31:10-31            Psalm 1                                James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a                       Mark 9:30-37

“Finding the Perfect Spouse”

Catalog cover of Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci 

I started off this week being straightened out by Judy Mumma, the office administrator here in the church. I asked her if she had read the first lesson as she made copies for the Bible Study, the one that begins with the question of what are the criteria of a capable spouse. I suggested that I thought it was patronizing and doesn’t it give an impossible list to live up to - as it was a list made up by a mother-in-law for the kind of wife her boy needed around the palace. After all, how many women in our congregations take raw flax and turn it into linen? She fixed on me a look that would have frozen mercury, and while she admitted that linen manufacture was not one of top ten marketable skills on the Outer Banks, she opined that it was very good to see that women were respected and noticed for all they do, working in the workplace and taking care of the house and children while the man just sits around and puts his feet up. Not all that brightly, I pulled up a line from the old Enjoli shampoo commercial, a bastardization of the old Peggy Lee song, “I Am a Woman” - the line that that was sung by a sultry, skinny blonde “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan. and never let you forget you’re a man.” Luckily, a parishioner came in at that time and pointed out that this was not a fight I had any chance of waging, much less winning.

This chapter of the Book of Proverbs begins with an acknowledgement that this was a collection of advice given to a King, of whom we know nothing, by his mother who had named him “Lemuel” meaning “belonging to God”. In the first nine verses of the chapter, she begins, as mothers tend to do in speaking to a son who is missing the point:

“No, my son!

No, son of my womb!

No, son of my vows!”  

These are the three short declarative sentences which come out of relationship of love from the creative force that brought forth the life of one who thinks he is in charge. This is a metaphor of God speaking to God’s children who think they are in charge of all creation. 

She launches into warning him about loose women who will trap him and admonishes him to avoid getting drunk for he will forget to protect the afflicted. Save the booze for the people who need to forget, she urges. Never forget, she says, to stand up to defend the rights of the poor and needy. She then moves on to the idea of a perfect spouse, creating an acrostic poem in which the first letter of each line is another letter of the Hebrew alphabet. I don’t think it is about the perfect spouse because remember, the Book of Proverbs begins with the search for Wisdom – the  feminine attribute of God, the compassion of God - and portrayed as a woman crying out at the City Gates, the place where the legal business of the community takes place. Now this 31^st chapter is the other bookend which ends the Book of Proverbs with the search for Wisdom in human form, an icon of compassion who is praised in the city gates demonstrated by a woman.

When they do the work of justice, there is a tension within the Hebrew community between the following of the law which is about the knowledge of ruling, behavior, power, and order on one hand, and the place of mercy and compassion on the other. This tension is played out throughout the Hebrew and Christian scripture and indeed in the scriptures of all religions. Look at the opening line from the lesson for today from the Epistle of James: “Who is wise and understanding among you?  Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.”

Yet, hold that tension, for the Psalm for today is Psalm One. I remember the first time I used that Psalm pastorally. It was in the summer of 1982, and I was doing my Chaplaincy Training at the University Hospital.  After working all day on Friday ministering to my floors, I began a weekend shift on duty as the sole Chaplain in the building. The weekend would end on Monday morning when I would go back to work in my wards. There was a room to catch cat naps if I was lucky, but never trust in luck. The idea was this macho reasoning that we needed to think and minister even when we were tired, off balance, and alone. A young man was brought into the Emergency Room with a gunshot wound, the first of many that weekend – how much of a love affair we have with guns! This had been a family fight as he and his stepfather were both armed. The stepfather, who had been defending the family, was now being held by the police and the young man was brain dead. Past any more medical help, he was put into a room to die. I talked with the young man’s family and they spoke about how much of a burden his violence had been to the family. Nobody wanted to stay with him and so they went home. 

Being my first night working alone, I decided that no one, no matter how bad, should die alone. So, in between calls, I sat by his bed through the night. At one point I decided to pull out the trusty Prayer Book and read the Psalms to him as comfort from the God that forgives all sins. I started with Psalm One and realized that there was no comfort in the last line - “So the way of the wicked is doomed.” Psalm Two’s warning was less helpful: “Lest the Lord be angry and you perish for God’s wrath is swiftly kindled”. And so it went: Psalms of Damnation for the wicked and Psalms of Hope for the righteous but not for the sinner. It was at the 22^nd Psalm that I came to the Psalm our Lord sang on the cross when He was dying and realized that Jesus knew what it was like to die forsaken - and yet God redeems even the cross. The 23^rd acknowledged that we were both in the valley of the shadow of death and needed help, but it was finally at the 38^th when the Psalmist acknowledged that he was indeed a sinner and still trusted in God for salvation. God does not desert even sinners who call to Her. Hours later, long after the dawn, the family came back, and we prayed together for compassion for all members of this broken family. He breathed his last late that morning with a few members of his family around him. Such as it is that all ministry, all faith, all of life, is in that creative tension between order and mercy.

The Gospel story for today from Mark continues that theme of how compassion and order live in creative tension. Jesus tells his disciples that his ministry is to enter fully into the brokenness of the world. The disciples cannot understand that because they believe something like “If you are good, then God is good to you and nothing bad ever happens to you, but if you are bad, then you deserve bad things happening to you.” To undercut that tension, the disciples want a return to some order and they argue about who is greater. To answer them, Jesus picks up a beggar child - in third world countries there are always children begging on the streets - and he takes this filthy beggar and lifts the child in his arms and tells them “when we welcome (and for the word “welcome”, Mark uses the Greek work “DECKOMAI” which can mean more than a “Howdy do” but can mean love, honor, respect even cherish) “when we welcome such as this child, we welcome, love, honor, respect and cherish Jesus.

“To love, honor and cherish” is what we promise in our Wedding service because it is a sacrament in which the couple act out, in their lives, the Holy Space where two or more are gathered together in Christ’s name. It is not about finding a perfect spouse, with a checklist of attributes passed down from your parents. Marriage is a creative tension between keeping the vows we make - order – and learning how to show mercy to each other when we, as we all will, fall short of all the expectations.

Finding the Perfect Spouse (Poem)

For her new Southern Catholic in-laws, my Yankee,

Protestant mother tried cooking up fried chicken.

They politely ate with utensils, but bird was cranky.

Mom invites using fingers, caused faces be stricken.

Near tears, failing with arts of manners and cuisine

but love came to the scene as greasy fingered father

looked at her as if she was his long sought for queen

which he would no, never, trade for all or any other.

There would be many other times when she, or he

would fail, falling far short of perfection absolute,

or worse find stuff over which they did not agree

as air grew frosty enough to comfort a malamute.

Yet as long as he lived, and beyond, love bloomed,

ordered by forgiveness in each new day groomed

YODA's Poem-- Reflection and Poem for September 13, 2015

A Reflection for XVI Pentecost (Proper 19)                         All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC  September 13, 2015                                                                                       Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Proverbs 1:20-33              James 3:1-12                      Mark 8:27-38 

YODA’S POEM

 

In the month since we have set up The All Saints School (TASS), there has been a change in the noise level around my office. My office looks out on the playground, and I used to look out the window and see some stray deer or people walking their dogs.  Now with the area fenced in and the children going out to play, I hear lots of other things, and I watch how the children interact with each other. I had forgotten what it is like to have a bunch of two and three year olds playing and how in touch with each other they are.  In the first couple of weeks when the children were new to the school,  there were moments of anxiety, and some of the children were away from their parents for the first time and they cried. When a 2 or 3 year old starts to cry, it is not unusual for another child to join in on the lament, and soon there are five children crying together.

I remember when my daughter was a baby, and if I came home after a stressful day and fed her a bottle, she could feel my stress as I held her in my arms. Later as she grew, I marveled how much she was in touch with the world around her and the feelings of others. I think there is something that is inborn in us that responds to the tears, stress, laughter, or joy of another human being and to the joy and wonder of the world.  However, something happens to us and we start to focus all our energy on how we can meet our own particular agendas, and we begin to lose touch with others and the world. We fill ourselves up with skills and we no longer pay attention to the wisdom with which we were born.

In the first lesson from Proverbs, Wisdom, a Hebrew feminine personification of God -  and, please know that they were not seeing Wisdom as a separate God but as a part of the God that is both masculine and feminine - speaks and calls for people to pay attention to all she has to say. The author doesn’t just say she speaks, but that she “cries” out. She cries because she is in touch with all the brokenness of the world. The writer of the introduction of Proverbs does not see God as sequestered on a High Holy throne, but as dwelling in the middle of our lives, crying out to us and with us, crying out so that we might listen and pay attention. I was talking to a mother this week and she remembered how her mother used to sadly sigh at how her children were not following her loving direction, “I’m trying as best as I can.”

In the Gospel lesson, Jesus tells the disciples that he must enter into the suffering of the world. Peter tries to straighten Jesus out, but Jesus tells Peter he is focused in on human things and not the divine. He then tells the disciples that living into the fullness of life means to step away from their own agendas of control. He tells them: “For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life.” I think when he is saying “forfeit of life” he is meaning that they, we, are missing the point of life.

I was mulling over these lessons when I was walking my dog in the predawn hours before I do my morning workout. I am telling my dog that we need to go out and he needs to do his business “because I have an agenda and a limited amount of time to  walk you, respond to my email, do my prayers because I’ve got a boatload of names, do my work out because I need to work off that too-big lunch from yesterday, shower because I need to not offend, read the paper because I need to catch up, have breakfast so that I don’t wolf down a big lunch today in a hurry without even tasting it, and then get to work because I am behind in the things I need to do because the music we picked to duplicate in the bulletin for the services is not covered under our copyright agreements, and – and – and -; So- let’s get with it!”

We walk out and there is just a sliver of the waning moon, and the night is clear so the stars are shining so brightly. My dog, Yoda, one ear up and one ear down, stops and sniffs the air to catch the scent of the animals in the woods. He cocks his head to listen to the crickets and the katydids. For one second I am lost in awe of the vastness of the space, but I remember my agenda and remind myself I have a long way to go.  We walk a little bit more and he wants to sniff the ground, over and over again. I’m telling him that “we are out here for a reason- so get with it!” He looks back at me and his eyes in the flashlight seem to say in a non-rhyming, non-metered poem:

YODA’s Poem

 “You are the one missing the point.

        We are here to listen to the deeper wisdom.    

              God is here in the space between us, in the echoes of the crickets,

                   in the cry of the fox,      

                       in the ocean breeze cleaning the air which we foul with our fossil fuels,

in the sleep of our neighbors refreshing their bodies and souls as Wisdom is whispering to them in their dreams            

because they, and you, didn’t pay much attention during the previous day, and

            in the rental homes full of visitors trying so hard to get their money’s worth and desperately have a week to remember in pictures.

Listen to your mother God who is trying as best as She can with you.

The Apostle James is right in warning you the danger of setting yourself in being a teacher when you still have so much to learn.

Listen to the cry of Wisdom.”

What Is Your Good Name?

A Reflection for XV Pentecost (proper 18)               All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC September 6, 2015                                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23          James 2:1-10 -17               Mark 7:24-37

What is Your Good Name?

From the first lesson for today from the Book of Proverbs: “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold.” Years ago at a clergy conference, we had a seminary professor lead us through parts of the book of Proverbs. She warned us not to tell our parishioners to read the book of Proverbs straight through because they wouldn’t get anything out of it. She suggested that the best way to read the book is one Proverb at a time, one day or even one week at a time. Read one proverb right after you wake up and try to memorize that one verse. Say the proverb again at breakfast - reflect on it - what does it mean for you?  At your coffee break, say the proverb aloud to yourself. Repeat and reflect at lunch, at midafternoon break, at dinner, and before going to bed.  Try to live into the proverb so that you have brought it into your life. Some of the proverbs will be a waste of your time, but others contain wisdom passed on through centuries. Knowledge comes from outside oneself, but Wisdom comes from the heart of the true self within oneself.

In the Gospel story from Mark for today, Jesus tries to get away from people, but his good name precedes him, the name made not of letters and words but of love. We remember Jesus not for his miracles but for the fact that he was the embodiment of the compassion of God, and we take his good name as strength and a model. 

Last month I finished a book by David Brooks called The Path to Character in which he posits that there is a difference between a resume and a eulogy. A resume is a document that represents to people who do not know you what skills and talents that you possess for a position that you are interested in filling.  The resume says that this is what you can do. A resume after you die is called an obituary and it tells the things that you have done. 

I remember about 20 years ago when my mother called me and shared that she was distressed to read in the Carolina Alumni Association bulletin the notice of my death.  It made no mention of my marriage, my child, my going to seminary or my ordination - it only listed my degrees from Carolina, social work experience, and the college in which I had taught. I too was saddened to have had only a partial resume and not to have merited a eulogy. I wrote the Alumni Association suggested that, while the time of my death seemed to correspond to the time when Pat and I were in Egypt and visited the “City of the Dead”, a collection of mortuary Temples and Tombs on the West Bank of the Nile from Luxor, and while I had enjoyed visiting the Tombs, I decided not to remain there full time. 

Apparently there was another Carolina graduate with a similar name - Tommy Wilson, instead of Thomas E. Wilson - who was also teaching there at the college in another department, and he had died. When the Alumni Association wrote to me suggesting that I needed to give money, the letter was noted by a secretary who had been hired after I left to go to seminary ten years before and she returned the letter, writing on the outside that Tommy Wilson had died. The Association called and checked and the receptionist confirmed the bad news, so the newsletter went out to let my classmates know not to expect me at the reunion.  

Unlike a resume, a eulogy is an exercise undertaken by someone after you die which attempts to  share that part of your character that remains living in the community after your death. The word eulogy comes from the Greek of “eu” meaning good and “logos” meaning words, or good words about how God was made real in this person’s life. In his book, Brooks looks at the lives of people to share the character traits we need to have a society worth saving. All of the people chosen were complex people and had lapses and failures in their lives, but they also had character traits that live after them. In essence the book is an extended metaphor on the first of the Proverbs in today’s first lesson. “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold.”

In Othello, Shakespeare has Iago, pretending to be afraid of being accused of slander, mouth these lines:

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.

In the bulletin for today, the meditation question is “What is your good name?” Too often we wait until we are near death before we take the time to think about what our good name is. Pat and I went out to lunch this week and I asked her to tell me her character traits, and she got all sorts of humble because she had always been taught to not sound like she was boasting. I reminded her that we had read Richard Rohr’s reflection for that day over breakfast where he said:

We all need such inner experience instead of simple outer belief systems. You need inner experience whereby you can know things to be true for yourself instead of believing them because other people say they are true. This is second-hand religion or hearsay religion which is unfortunately the most common variety. 

Finally after much prodding, she allowed that she only hoped that people would say that she was a “Wise Woman”.  By this she meant that she goes deep into herself to touch the wisdom that comes from being in touch with the collective unconscious - for wisdom comes from within, and she picked good people as models, and she learned from her mistakes. Confucius said: “By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”

I tried to prime the pump, and she accepted that she is a faithful friend, an extravagant lover of God and neighbor, an appreciator of the beauty she experiences through eye and ear, a fearsome foe to the mean-spirited, fearless in her loyalty to victims of injustice, and a seeker of peace. That I see is part of her good name that she lives into.

We are at the point of our life where we are going to have to down-size. The house that we love, the art collection we have, the money we have in the bank, the clothes which stuff our closets – none of these will outlast us. What will survive is our true self, our soul, which will return to the One in whom we had our beginning and on this plane of existence, we leave our good name.

What is your good name?

What is My Good Name? (poem)

When I asked why he did call me “Thomas”,

father joked it is a guy in a bar on that night

I was born. A girl friend said “Less a promise

made and more a Michael would been right.”

Good names are not made of molded syllables

of written characters, but a sum total character

of the who, which outlives concluding syllabus

for the deeds or goods of a once one-time rector.

Titles held, deeds done, hours given, words said,

written, or recited; all will in memory fade away.

Will compassion last longer than my hair once red,

even with greater spirit than that good gin Bombay?

When the rain of hundreds of storms turn buried ashes

into richer earth, I hope my spirit will speak in silence

of the graves to the lives my soul did touch in flashes

of the passion given me, and from birth, I had reliance.

Iago’s pretend fear of slander is not my today’s threat.

Good name is not a what, a hole to fill; but the whole

of being, that each day I am tempted to pawn in debt

for clutter of that God gifted center of this eternal soul.