Parson Tom's Tomes September 2016

Parson Tom’s Tomes September 2016

Pat’s birthday is on August 12, the same day as the Perseid Meteor Showers each year and each year on that night we go to a dark place to watch the light show in the sky.as the meteors radiate out of  the space between Cassiopeia and Perseus. We have watched them together, weather permitting, for 27 years now from different places; from the North Carolina Blue Ridge Parkway to the Outer Banks, Maine, Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia and this year was the most spectacular. Pat suggests that we saw 100 meteors in the hour we were at Chicahauk Beach. The trick is to be still and focus, opening ourselves up to God’s marvels. I wrote a poem about it thinking of the story from Luke when Jesus gives instructions to wait for the host of the wedding Banquet to invite us to come higher to a place of honor. That invitation is offered each new day to each of us by God as our welcoming host in this life banquet.

Shalom

Tom+.

The Host said: “Friend Come Higher” (poem)

Is is third hour: waxing Gibbons' shadow

has left the building. We're racing down

for yearly stardust asperges appointment

to the beach to have those ocean breezes

be the divine wind clearing out our lungs

from this years toxic gases emitting from

mongering candidates pandering rants.

We're on a planet spinning again into one

of the many places Creator/ Maid sweeps

the stardust off her crafted chandeliers

which we, in our limits, call Perseus

after that slayer of dreadful monsters.

Speeding recklessly at a rate of 100

ooohs and aaaahs per hour we leave all

that oh so important trivial tripe behind.

Hear her say, “Friend come higher, so

that that you be anointed to remember

that you, and neighbor and your enemy 

as well, are my beloved stardust and to

stardust shall you all each day return.”

The Host Says "Friend Come Higher"

A Poem for Sunday 28, August 2016  based on reflection on the Gospel lesson for that day of Jesus at a banquet and an experience of getting up early with Pat and watching the Perseid meteor showers on August 12, 2016



The Host said: “Friend Come Higher” (poem)
Is is third hour: waxing Gibbons' shadow
has left the building. We're racing down
for yearly stardust asperges appointment
to the beach to have those ocean breezes
be the divine wind clearing out our lungs
from this years toxic gases emitting from
mongering candidates pandering rants.
We're on a planet spinning again into one
of the many places Creator/ Maid sweeps
the stardust off her crafted chandeliers
which we, in our limits, call Perseus
after that slayer of dreadful monsters.
Speeding recklessly at a rate of 100
ooohs and aaaahs per hour we leave all
that oh so important trivial tripe behind.
Hear her say, “Friend come higher, so
that that you be anointed to remember
that you, and neighbor and your enemy
as well, are my beloved stardust and to
stardust shall you all each day return.”

Unbending - Walking Upright

A Reflection and Poem for XIV Pentecost                All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC 

 August 21, 2016                                                  Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Jeremiah 1:4-10           Psalm 71:1-6       Hebrews 12:18-29        Luke 13:10-17

Unbending Walking Upright

This Sunday and for the next 10 weeks we have as our Hebrew Testament lesson selections from the book of the prophet Jeremiah.  Depending on how you read the three verses before this lesson for today, Jeremiah is either born or begins his ministry in 627 BC in the southern kingdom of Judah. He is born in a priestly city a couple miles north of Jerusalem. Priestly cities were places set aside for Levites where the lands were used to support and house families of Cohens, the Hebrew word for Priests. Priests were not called; they were born into the job. They were raised to be attendants at the Altars in Jerusalem, to be moral guides for the people, to accept sacrifices and interpret the entrails of the sacrificed animals for portents from God. Most of the time, Prophets and Priests would be on opposite sides as the prophets acted as critics of the priestly clique who tended to be supporters of, and apologists for, the status quo. Jeremiah, the son of a Priest, receives a call from God to be a Prophet, so he was not all that popular with his Cohen cousins. It would be like the butchers son’s one day declaring that he was now going to be a vegan. In this lesson, Jeremiah says that he was given the call before he was born, so he could have been a guy who just did not fit in from before Day One. His mother probably cried a lot and his father probably was frustrated with him. When Jesus says Prophets are honored everywhere except in their hometown, their family and household, he was speaking from his own experience and from centuries of historical witness.

When Jeremiah is born, or receives his call, in 627 BC, the Northern Kingdom had been wiped out and carried into exile by the Assyrian Empire about a hundred years before. In 626, the Assyrian Empire, whose capital was Nineveh, the ruins of which are across the Tigris River in the modern Northern Iraqi city of Mosul, had reached the point of decline from their own mismanagement and civil strife that it was ripped apart by rival claimants for regional power. The greatest threat to Judah is now Babylon on the Euphrates River about 300 miles south of Nineveh, about 50 miles south of modern day Bagdad. Jerimiah becomes extremely unpopular when he suggests that the Babylonians may be the instruments of divine justice to punish Jerusalem for its rampant corruption and its exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. The Babylonians will conquer Judah in 597 BC and destroy Jerusalem in 587 BC. Because Jeremiah has been a critic, he is kidnapped before the fall and taken into Egypt where he disappears from history.

Being a prophet is not a job that Jeremiah wants, but with great sorrow he remains faithful to the call he was given to “pluck up and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” He knows the truth that one cannot plant without plucking up and pulling down, one cannot build without destroying and overthrowing the old order. What keeps him going is a sense of hope of how all things will be redeemed in God’s time. It is the vision of God’s love building the new that gives him energy each new day. Jeremiah knows that love in his life and has known it from before he was born. It is when you know that you are loved that you are able to find the strength to speak the truth to power, putting up with the negative opinions from others and finding hope for the future.

When I was in high school English, our teacher, assistant football coach, and Drama Club advisor, Mr. Miller, made us memorize Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 about finding hope:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee—and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

   For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings

   That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

That kind of loving hope in the midst of turmoil is what the Book of Hebrews is suggesting when the writer says that “ indeed our God is a consuming fire”, a fire that burns with love and hope.. 

In the Gospel lesson, Jesus sees a woman all bent over; she has spent her entire life in this posture and the healing comes when she is straightened.  The old way of being in the world is changed, and healing comes as the old posture is destroyed. The religious folk are upset because Jesus is a threat to business as usual where law breeds shame, but Jesus responds that there is a new way of looking at the world, that God is tearing apart the old shackles of law and shame for a different way of walking in the world.

Most of us don’t like to change; we would prefer that other people change. We see this in families and communities all the time. Yes, they know that the way they do things is broken, but they want someone else to do the changing - somebody else’s ox to be gored, somebody else to make the sacrifice, someone else to pay the bill for healing. However, the old saying is true: “No change equals no change.” Change is possible when someone speaks loving, hopeful truth to power, and supportive, loving, hopeful truth to those who feel that they have no power. 

Unbending Walking Upright (poem)

I hate the way things are; is lousy

but I’m used to it, part of my life.

What’d it be like without a knife

twisting shame walking drowsy

all bent over seeing only ground

not daring to look into other eyes

afraid they'll see beyond my guise

and make some sort of pity sound?

However notion to me remembers

that there was once a womb voice

declaiming love could be a choice

as that consuming fire fans embers

   to walk upright and truth speaking

   and of no other's approval seeking.

How Do We Know the Other?

A Reflection for the Feast of Mary the Virgin           All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC August 14, 2016                                                   Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 61:10-11           Galatians 4:4-7             Luke 1:46-55               Psalm 34

How do we really know the Other?

Last week I spoke of the commemoration of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6^th a day late on August 7^th. Today I am reflecting on the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin a day early on August 14^th instead of August 15^th, the day of the Feast. It all averages out!

How do we get to know Mary, the mother of Jesus?

There is a wonderful movie from 1947 called A Double Life staring Ronald Coleman, the man said to have had a velvet pillow voice. In the movie Coleman plays an actor, Tony John, who gets so into his characters that the characters take over his life. While playing Othello, his imagination takes over and he enters into Othello’s murderously jealous soul and strangles his oh-so-cheap girlfriend played by Shelley Winters, and later, trying to replicate the action in the play where Othello strangles Desdemona, he attempts to kill the actress in that role, Tony John’s ex-wife.

The movie is enjoyable melodrama, but it contains a kernel of cautious truth for to really know another person is to step away from the rational, to be willing to no longer rely on the masks we wear of being a “good” person and to admit the deeper hunger to know another from the inside out. Sometimes shame gets in the way of our dropping the mask, but when we know that we are forgiven for being the limited people we are, we are free to admit our shortcomings and failures. It is the movement away from being “in love” with an outside façade to being loving with each other.

There is a poem, if there are any heavens, by e.e. cummings about the holiness of that kind of love:

            if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have

one.            It will not be a pansy heaven nor

a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but

it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be(deep like a rose

tall like a rose)

standing near my

swaying over her

(silent)

with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which

is a flower and not a face with

hands

which whisper

This is my beloved my

                                  (suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

&the whole garden will bow)

How do we know another? Too often we try to get inside their heads as we try to figure out the other, but we only get to the outer shell, the persona, the construction of the ego of another. I can get all the facts and figures about another, I can describe how they physically appear or the actions that they take or the words they say, but each person is a mystery and the only way to encounter a mystery is to get inside of it by an act of intuitive imagination, a union of souls each giving graceful allowance to be known while maintaining respect for the other. Each must be willing to let go of all the “head” kind of knowledge and see the true self buried underneath all the layers of ego. This is how soul friendships begin and, it is also the beginning of worship.

How do we get to know Mary, the mother of Jesus? If we use our rational mind, then we accept the explanation of church theologians:

(a)    Mary is a substitutionary “Mother Goddess” figure the church used to help pagans wean away from the many Goddess cults in the ancient world. Or/and

(b)   Mary is a model of how women are supposed to bend to the will of predominantly male figures in her life. Or/and

(c)    Mary is the officially authorized motherly bosom in whom we can go for comfort. Or

(d)   She is a peasant woman who lived two millennia ago who claimes she had a mystical union with God and a child was born which she named Jesus.

Out of that rational thought, the Roman Catholic theologians made the first three views into dogma - Pope Pius IX in 1854 proclaiming the Infallible Dogma of Immaculate Conception which said the Mary was conceived without recourse to sex and therefore was sin free, pure enough to have a mystical union with God, and Pius XII in 1950 proclaiming the Infallible Dogma that Mary was assumed into Heaven in bodily form and therefore her body did not see corruption.

Jung responded to the 1950 action suggesting that the Trinity had become a Quaternity by writing in his Answer to Job:

One could have known for a long time that there was a deep longing in the masses for an intercessor and mediatrix who would at last take her place alongside the Holy Trinity and be received as the ‘Queen of heaven and Bride at the heavenly court.’ For more than a thousand years it has been taken for granted that the Mother of God dwelt there.  I consider it to be the most important religious event since the Reformation.

I tend to be moved by the fourth option of the simple peasant woman who dared to have union with God. The Virgin Mary stories give Mary as the model for union as she says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”  How do we have union with God? We do as Mary does - open ourselves and allow God’s love to flow over, in, under and through, knowing that there is respect and love for another. See how the other lessons for today reflect that same theme of union. Isaiah sings of how the Divine wraps us up in wedding garments as God’s chosen one for a wedding festival. We are used to hearing of the Bride of Christ.  How about being the “groom of Christ”? How does that make you feel? We are so used to viewing “Union” as reflecting a sense of domination, but how about a joining of two lovers? The people chosen as bride and groom are not especially pure; they are simple people risking irrational connections with God. The Psalm uses the startling imagery of using the bodily sense of tasting God and finding God good as God found each step of creation good. How can we taste God? In his letter to the Galatians, Paul uses the imagery of us being the children of God. All of these are irrational, but we accept them as true.

As a result of her union with God, in today’s lesson Mary sings a song of defiance of the establishment. Mary is not meek and mild; she is a tough broad standing up to a male-dominated culture and saying that she and the God in whom she has union have a plan to take down the thrones of the mighty and to scatter the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. I would suggest that the union is so strong that that she goes beyond gender. Every time the word Greek word “hautou” is translated by most official translators it is he, him, and his, but the word can also be translated as she, her, and hers. She and God enter into one. She does not relate what exactly happens in the union for it is beyond creeds and dogma of the rational mind.

Evelyn Underhill in her study of Mysticism calls that union “that perfect unity of consciousness, that utter concentration on an experience of love, which excludes all conceptual and analytic acts.” She quotes St. John of the Cross about what happens after the moment of union with the divine:

“All things I then forgot,
My cheek on Him Who for my coming came,

All ceased, and I was not,
Leaving my cares and shame
Among the lilies, and forgetting them.”

The mystics, male and female alike, speak of the deeper hunger for union with God and they call it ecstasy, which many assume has sexual overtones. That longing for union is the erotic element of love as C.S. Lewis says that love which is eros is a gift that is given not a thing that one gets. Its danger for being sidetracked is when one is influenced by the “Natchez Syndrome”,  from the line by Ogden Nash; “When ah itches; ah scratches!”

 John Donne wrote a poem called The Ecstasy which starts off with two lovers in each other’s arms, but they realize there is something else is going on;

When love with one another so

         Interinanimates two souls,

That abler soul, which thence doth flow,

         Defects of loneliness controls.

We then, who are this new soul, know

         Of what we are compos'd and made,

This union stuff is inviting and dangerous and yet life giving. Mary leads the way and invites us to follow, allowing ourselves to be loved and ravished by the Divine as we really are so that we might be outward and visible deliverers of the love of God to this broken world.

How Do We Really Know the Other?

On the Eve of Mary Day 2016 (poem)

Begging bow to me not comfortable plea

letting my love entwine you in soul deep

as morning dew within my pores to seep

letting me be one with you, you with me

grow with and within me new each day

each thought leaping over synaptic cleft

that you surround me both right and left

as you form me anew to make body pray

no longer bound to know a casual muse

each song note I’ll shimmer in response

in Your heart flow my blood to ensconce

so please never leave or seek to recuse 

letting it be to me as Mary that your will

dwells within us as a blessing to distill.

Remember Being Bored in a Religious Service

A Reflection for XII Pentecost (Proper 14)                   All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC August 7, 2016                                                         Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20                Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24         Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16    Luke 12:32-40

Remember Being Bored in a Religious Service?

Today is August 7, 2016 and, earlier this year, President Obama went to Hiroshima and gave an address to commemorate the 71 years since the dropping of an atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. Whenever I would start to do my condemnation diatribe of that attack, my mother would tearfully remind me that my father would have been in the first wave of Marines which expected very heavy casualties in the invasion of Japan that the bomb made superfluous. At the time of the bomb drop at Hiroshima, my mother was five months pregnant with my older brother, loving my father with a passionate intensity, and terrified of losing her husband and being a young widow raising a young child alone. She and I were in these discussions after my father had died when I was in college, when indeed her earlier fear of being a widow raising children alone had come to pass. Every August 6^th I am reminded of the sobering thought that I owe my very life to an act of horror; every breath I take is because of innocent men, women and children destroyed. It is important that my life, and all of our lives, have meaning to work for something greater than ourselves. I was moved and helped by our President’s speech as he said:

The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.

In the Hebrew Testament lesson for today, we are invited to listen to the words of the servants called prophets, who served someone greater than themselves. This summer we have looked at the prophets working in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, Elijah and Elisha working in the 9^th Century BC, and Amos and Hosea in the 8^th Century BC. All of these prophets have railed about the fact that, while the ruling elites had elaborate religious rituals, wondrous buildings, and busy Priests working overtime to handle all the sacrifices and tame Temple prophets giving the finest sounding prayers and blessings that money can buy, there is a hollowness about it that suggests that God has left town. The more you pay, the better praise you get as you exploit the poor and vulnerable, and the more vocal the prayers become for your success in getting richer. 

Today we begin to hear another 8^th Century Prophet, Isaiah, but he is in Jerusalem in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and in today’s lesson, he projects onto God his own frustration. He suggests that because of the hollowness, God is bored out of God’s skull with all those empty rituals, altar prancing, religious posturing, and sucking up to the powerful and influential. Isaiah was bored with people giving things in hope of a reward but never giving themselves.

Anyone ever get bored with church and religious stuff? I get restless and want to change things around to shake people up, like changing the way the church chairs and altar are placed for different seasons or using a different liturgy, or bringing in a different preacher. 

From 1978 to 2008 there was a religious satire magazine called The Wittenberg Door which I enjoyed and which poked fun at all us religious stuffed shirts.  There was one article called “Things to do when you are bored in church.” One suggestion was to hand out Bingo Cards with sayings that the Preacher seems to use often in his sermon, like “sinner”, “grace”, “salvation”, “hellfire”,  “Whore of Babylon”, “Godless Communist”, “homosexual agenda”, “War on Christmas”, “me”  and the like, and whenever one gets five in a row, the winner stands up and yells, “Alleluia; the Rapture is coming!”  Another suggestion was to reflect on the phrase “All the hairs of you head are numbered”, and during the long sermon, bow your head, place your hand as if meditatively listening, count the hairs one by one, and after the service, compare your scores. 

When I was younger and a lay person, in my judgmental condemnations, I kept leaving church out of frustration and boredom. I always wanted to be right, and nobody ever measured up to what I wanted to get from a church. My worth was determined by my need to prove that my life on earth would be meaningful, and I would go to church two or three times and leave in a high dudgeon, upset about what the preacher had said or done or not said or done. But like most people who pick serial arguments, what gradually comes to the surface was that the problem was not them but me. I was going to church to see what I could get out of the experience. I considered myself the smartest person in the room. I was a consumer looking for a bargain, and all I could find was what I considered bargain basement merchandise of thought. There were plenty of things to do, but for none for which I wanted to be a servant. My problem was that I wanted to get, but I did not want to give myself unless I could get my wants met first. I did not want to be a servant. To use lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Lost Archangel proclaims on being expelled from Heaven:

                 Farewel happy Fields

Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell

Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings

A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.

The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

What matter where, if I be still the same,

And what I should be, all but less then he

Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least

We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:

Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce

To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

Jesus refers to that temptation of pride in today’s Gospel lesson, which has a parallel in the 22^nd Chapter of Luke, when he says: “Who would you rather be: the one who eats the dinner or the one who serves the dinner? You’d rather eat and be served, right? But I’ve taken my place among you as the one who serves.” 

My conversion to the Jesus movement as opposed to being a prideful religious shopper was not an intellectual assent to theological propositions, but what the last verse of the Psalm for today calls “walking in God’s way”, being comfortable with being a servant. I remember in the late spring of 2003 when I was here for some interviews and walked into this church sanctuary for the first time, I noticed the towel on the cross as a reminder that we were all servants.  I was thrilled for I realized I had come home to a place I had never been, to join a group of servants. 

The writer of Hebrews in today’s New Testament Epistle lesson says that even the giants of faith “All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.”

Today is the first Sunday of August 2016.  Since I started to work here, this is the 14^th time I will have preached twice on the first Sunday of August in this church. On that first Sunday, 2003, I said, “Yes, we will change for we are not called to stagnation. Yet there will be things we will not change. We have a threefold mission in the church: (1) Outreach - to serve others, (2) Inreach - to create a community of love and justice,  (3) Spiritual - to enter into God’s life-giving spirit.”

I finished my inaugural sermon (I called them “sermons” then and not “reflections”) saying;

The task of the church is to not settle for the surface but to go deeper to the spiritual heart where we meet Jesus again for the first and continual time.  Church is where we point to Jesus. As a priest I do not make anything holy, only God can make things holy. When I stand up here I do not change the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood, God does that. I point to what God is doing and say, “Jesus is here in the bread and wine. Jesus is here in the space between us when we exchange the peace. Jesus is here when we baptize. Jesus is here whenever we reach out as a community in love to our neighbors. Jesus is here in the moments of our prayers in the service for the sick, the friendless and needy. Jesus is here in the visits to the homes, hospitals, shelters and prisons.” What we do as a church is to point to Jesus and in so doing participate in eternal life. Eternal life begins not after we are dead but right here and now.  When I visited with you I saw the outward and visible signs of the presence of Christ. This will not change. I promise that I will join with you in the ministry of proclaiming by word and deed the presence of Christ.

Baptisms, Weddings, Funerals (Hatching, Matching, and Dispatching), Sunday and Midweek services, for maybe over 1500 times yammering in front of you, not always inspiring or helpful, but since that day, I have tried to stick to the point that we are a community of faithful action servants in the presence of God as we gather together, for as Jesus says; “Whenever two or three are gathered together in my name Christ will be in the midst of them.” If we are bored during a religious service, then we need to remember that we are called to a meaningful life of service with Christ.

Remember Being Bored in a Religious Service?(Poem)

Oh not that insipid hymn again

that I have to bluff singing

their way and not mine, why

do I have to join in one voice?

Please not that cliché thudding

against my tired brain, I just

wanna be at peace maybe to

inspect the inside of eyeballs

but a child in the back keeps

rolling metal truck on floor,

and next pew person smells.

What am I going to buy for lunch?

Is the coffee hour any good today?

Have I been robbed of today’s hour?

I could have killed it differently with

            a few more chocolate donuts

            which I deserve for all I do

            in taking care of my things.

That sun may not last long enough

            for me to get a summer tan

because need to look healthy

making those others jealous

before this vacation ends and

I getting back to daily grind.

I really don’t want to hear of a search

            for meaning; breathing’s enough.

How much longer until it all will end

            for I deserve better than this,

better to rule instead of serve.