A Reflection for XII Pentecost (Proper 14) All Saints’ Church, Southern
Shores, NC August 7, 2016 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
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 6th 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 9th
Century BC, and Amos and Hosea in the 8th 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 8th
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 22nd 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 14th 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.
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