Theology For Poeple in a Hurry

A Reflection for the First Sunday of Christmas         All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC December 31, 2017                                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 61:10-62:3        Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7          John 1:1-18

Theology For People In A Hurry.

For my birthday, Pat gave me a book by Neil De Grasse Tyson, Astrophysics For People In A Hurry, which begins, “In the beginning, nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the energy and all the matter of the known universe, was contained in a volume less than one trillionth of the size of the period at the end of this sentence.” 

I looked at that period for a while and could not even imagine what one trillionth would look like. Then I decided that the title of this reflection and poem would be Theology For People In A Hurry. This is the poem that my prayers gave me:

Theology For People In A Hurry.

In the beginning there was loving

searching for a way of expression,

Verb moving makes an impression

on the empty without any shoving.

Implied Promise echoes into Being

in an explosion of energy’s matter

that the empty is filled with scatter,

expressing love into order freeing.

Verb fashioning planets and stars

through the new breathing shared

so honor of all wouldn’t be spared

by intending sacred life to be ours.

Verb reminding “THIS is the pattern

of living. Now is time for your turn.” 

 “In the beginning was the Word”.  So begins the prologue to the Gospel of St. John. Before the beginning there was God, and the Word was the beginning. God gave God’s Word as the beginning of all creation. Then revisiting creation with the person of Jesus as an outward and visible sign of the Word becoming flesh, God shows us what life is like living into WORD. So what is like for us, made in the image of God, to give our Word?

The idea of giving our word is that what we say is not idle chatter, but each syllable is an outward and audible sound of the spiritual nature of our very soul. The Community of the Beloved Disciple reflected on the Jesus experience and they saw this Jesus as the outward expression of the soul/ spirit of God, the Christ. This is the one who walks along the dusty roads. This is the one who breathes life into those who seem to be living dead lives. This is the one who weeps, whose heart is broken time and again, but does not become bitter. This is the one who is betrayed time and time again and yet forgives. This is the one who loves the enemy. This is the one who pours out himself for the help of brothers, sisters, and strangers. The Community said that this is what God is like and therefore this is what life is like and how we live into giving our word, our life.

But it is hard to follow that path and, at times, we are like Jesus in the Gospel accounts when our human natures want to say “enough is enough, I don't want to keep facing the hard facts of living in this broken world”. I say broken because, as in the last two lines of my sonnet, “Verb reminding, THIS is the pattern/ of living. Now is time for your turn.”.  God, Verb, Being's very self tells us how to live, and we fall short as individuals and as societies all over the world. We open our papers or news feeds and read how at times all seems to be falling apart, and yet we speak the WORD of our lives. 

In 1920 William Butler Yeats, reflecting on the First World War, the Irish Rebellion, and the Russian Revolution, wrote in his poem, The Second Coming:

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

Sounds familiar doesn't it? The poem continues, and Yeats leaves it open to see if he has the strength, the faith, to hope for some sort of redemption. Yet he continues to write and in the fourth section of one of his last poems, Under Ben Bulben, he writes urgently:

Poet and sculptor do the work   

Nor let the modish painter shirk   

What his great forefathers did,   

Bring the soul of man to God,   

Make him fill the cradles right.

Measurement began our might:   

When I read that, I realize that all of the words we speak are meant to bring the soul of our fellow humans to God so that we might fill the cradles right of our lives.

In the Liturgical Calendar for the week after Christmas, there are two events set as Holy Days in this week of celebration, the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. December 27^th is the remembrance of the Martyrdom of Stephen, who was stoned because he kept giving the word about Jesus.  This is a reminder of how the world does not like to be reminded of the availability of God's hope because that might get in the way of the agenda of the religious establishments of this world and of how we must continue to give our word of hope. The second remembrance is of the Holy Innocents on December 28, the story of the children slaughtered by King Herod in his fear that the birth of Jesus might get in the way of the agendas of the rulers of this world and that we must continue to give our word of hope.  

As we end this year of 2017 and begin 2018, let us give our WORD again.  In this past month we have had two families have to bury a child, and I wrote a poem reflecting on that:

Weeping With Rachel In Ramah

Scholars tell us there was no historical

          evidence of Bible's Slaughter of Innocents

                   in Bethlehem from Herod's fear,

                             and it was only a myth to have

                             Jesus come across as the new Moses

                    by Matthew's church finding solace

          when their friend died before his mother.

Burying child is obscene, a perversion

          of all we have tried to do as parents

                   when we used to put them to bed

                             kiss them good night, sleep tight.

                             All the worry we did, all the advice

                   all the cheering, the yelling,

          sighing and crying

all the mistakes,

          all the missed opportunities we wasted,

                   all the hugs deferred and missed again,

                             all the secrets shared and kept,

                             all the birthdays still to come,

                   all the joys still to be found,

          all the what-if's crowding in.

We were not able to fully protect them

          from all the threats of inattention,

                   disease, broken hearts and violence.

                             Yet we give thanks for all the love given

                             and received to and from products of love,

                   hope and grace of these precious gifts

          in this, our fleeting gifted universe

where it is no myth to join Rachel weeping in Ramah.

                            

Theology for people in a hurry is that God, the Verb of all, is here wherever we areas we give our word.

Poem: Weeping With Rachel In Ramah

Weeping With Rachel In Ramah

Scholars tell us there was no historical

    evidence of Bible's Slaughter of Innocents

       in Bethlehem from Herod's fear,

        and it was only a myth to have

        Jesus come across as the new Moses

      by Matthew's church finding solace

   when their friend died before his mother.

Burying child is obscene, a perversion

    of all we have tried to do as parents

       when we used to put them to bed

           kiss them good night, sleep tight.

          All the worry we did, all the advice

      all the cheering, the yelling,

    sighing and crying

all the mistakes,

    all the missed opportunities we wasted,

        all the hugs deferred and missed again,

            all the secrets shared and kept,

            all the birthdays still to come,

        all the joys still to be found,

    all the what-if's crowding in.

We were not able to fully protect them

     from all the threats of inattention,

       disease, broken hearts and violence.

           Yet we give thanks for all the love given

            and received to and from products of love,

       hope and grace of these precious gifts

    in this, our fleeting gifted universe

where it is no myth to join Rachel weeping in Ramah.

True Light Betwixt; Christmas Day Reflection and Poem

A Reflection for Christmas Day Service 2017      at      All Saints Church, Southern Shores, NC  “True Light Betwixt”                                      Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

 Isaiah 52:7-10                                                                         Luke 2:1-20

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a man who lived under a dictatorship where law and order were purchased by those who could afford it; the rest had to trust to luck. He was a skilled laborer who had to leave his lodging in the dark and return there after dark to travel three and a half miles each way to a building site for luxury buildings for the dictator, who thought himself a developer for friends and allies of the well-to-do. The man was an economic migrant barely making ends meet, for the man’s family had come from a small town, and there was not enough work there. He moved a four days journey north on foot and lived in another poor, small town where there was not enough work for him to earn a living. One predawn morning he walked that dark trek with a heavy heart, for the young girl he had been fond of in the small town had told him the night before that she was pregnant.  He knew it was not his, but before he had awakened that morning, he had a dream which told him that he should marry this girl and what he should call the baby which would change his life.

Later the rulers of the dictator declared an order, to tax the poor to pay for the rich by having each man go to his home village. The man took his pregnant wife with him on the four to five day journey south. Each night they would have had to camp on that dangerous road, in the vulnerable dark. Finally when they came to his old home town where they hoped to find shelter, there was no room and they found themselves again homeless. They encountered an act of charity which allowed them some temporary shelter, and there in the utter darkness the baby was born. The dictator was a paranoid narcissist, and he wanted to be rid of his enemies, real or imagined, and the man had go with his family further south into a another country, where they spoke a different language and lived as illegal immigrants.

Still later when he got word that the dictator had died, he thought it safe to return to his wife’s home town.  Each day he and his son would walk in the dark to work on the dictator’s son’s government-funded development schemes which the son renamed in order to suck up to the rulers behind his and his father’s dictatorships, for they were ruled by darkness. The mini dictator thought those impressive stone luxury buildings would stand forever, but they would be conquered and scattered over and over again for twenty more centuries.

Does this story sound familiar? It is a story we see played out repeatedly in the history of the world with some variations for local times and places; but the mythic structure remains the same. Myths are not interested in facts; they are interested in telling the truth about human life for there are always lots of Tin Pot dictator wannabes who keep showing up to place their kingdoms under greater darkness. In the story that we are used to hearing at this time of the year, the Dictator’s name was Herod, the development named Sepphoris which Herod wanted to make his capital in the Galilee, his son renamed it Autocratis, the Greek form of the Roman Latin Emperor, and whose ruins are still being uncovered, the man’s name was Joseph, the town the man lodged in was Nazareth, his wife was Mary, his home town was Bethlehem, and the child was Jesus.

This is the story that was passed on by the followers of Jesus to say that, although the world was covered in darkness, there was a light that shined in the middle of the darkness. The followers in the Jesus movement said that they were to follow Jesus and become the light in their generations, reflecting God’s light.

When the church got to be an official religion, it spent a lot of time coming up with the right way to think about Christ and Jesus and less about following Jesus on a daily basis. The Incarnation meant that God is with us in daily life and the church kept pushing the idea that God might reward us with small tastes, and if we are good, we get invited to a banquet after we die.

St. Francis of Assisi tried to return us to following Jesus by emphasizing the Incarnation, the entering of God into everyday life. He said: ‘It is the feast of feasts, on which God, having become a tiny infant, clinging to human breasts.” He set up demonstrations of gathering people at midnight on Christmas Eve in a dark, damp cave along with oxen and donkeys and with the smells inherent in that and proclaiming that God chose this kind of place to be loving and to bring the light which we would take into our hearts and lives each day. This was the beginning of Midnight Masses.

When I was growing up, the church I attended did not have a Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. In that Low Church mindset, such Midnight Masses were considered too papish or High Church. We had a more Protestant service on Christmas Morning. But I would get a ride with friends to do the smells and bells at one of the downtown Episcopal Churches. These services had nothing to do with the heritage of St. Francis; they were usually blowouts of pageantry lifting the congregation up as a preview of the heaven to come.

Since I was a visitor to those churches, I did not understand what was important was, not the ribbons on the packages, but the simple gifts of people celebrating holy ground with each other. Today please be aware that everywhere that love is given, in whatever form, it is always holy.

True Light Betwixt

Going downtown to the Midnight Mass

when I was young was to taste mystery,

silent, alone, as darkness surrounded me,

candles call me to shelter before I pass

away from the church’s warm embrace,

solid high rock walls a fortress promise

against any enemy, “Protection Thomas

from all the demons that do you chase.”

True light huddles betwixt two or more

who offer heaven’s light for each other

walking with newfound sister or brother

on these long walks to that distant shore.

Light is ushered by the midwinter songs

sung in hope for which this world longs.

At The Darkest Moment Comes The Light- Christmas Eve 2017

A Reflection for Christmas Eve Service 2017      at      All Saints Church, Southern Shores, NC 

“At the Darkest Moment Comes the Light”                            Thomas E Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 9:2-7     Titus 2:11-14     Luke 2:1-20

We started off before the service with the church pretty dark, and we gave you candles to be still and be aware of the darkness as you listened to the prelude with the bleak midwinter outside. Then we sang “Silent Night”.  It is Christmas Eve at 8:20 PM Eastern Standard Time here in Southern Shores, and it is 3:20 AM in Bethlehem on Christmas Day. In both places it is dark outside, and we share the darkness. What is it like to walk in darkness?

Almost every morning I awake in darkness and take my dog for a walk before I do my exercise regimen. As we walk out of the house, on many early mornings I can hear the waves on the ocean a half a mile away, and can hear the owls call and the fox cry. There are coyotes, opossums, raccoons, birds, rabbits, deer, stray dogs, feral cats, and human neighbors out there which I have seen in the light but I have not heard them in the dark. One of the advantages of my part of the Outer Banks is that there are no street lights, so I walk by the light of the moon and stars with some ambient light from some of the houses. The heavens are so clear that I am in awe of how the creation was put together. I am also aware of how much I do not see, and there are times when I walk and stare at the stars.  Sometimes I feel that this might not be totally safe and for that reason I carry a flash light. I only use the flash light if I think there might be something out there in the dark, but I prefer that delusion of a sense of being safe and alone with nature. However, on late fall and midwinter nights, nature is not so welcoming in the cold, and so walking alone, I sing the carols of Christmas under my breath to refresh the old story that light is coming into the world.

These are the darkest moments as the nights get longer until the Winter Solstice and then we have a new beginning. Christianity chose this time of the year to remember the birth of Jesus. They were not alone - the Greek God Dionysius, the Persian God Mithra, the Roman Festival of Sol Invictus, the Druid Yule Festival, and others celebrated the change of the light as a chance for looking at a new beginning. Joseph Campbell wrote: “The black moment is the moment that real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”

It is 721 BC and the mighty army of the fearsome Assyrian Empire is surrounding the city of Jerusalem. There is a dark sense of doom which has settled over the inhabitants. The city is full of refugees from the surrounding areas clinging to one last hope of survival. In the middle of this, dwelling in darkness, Isaiah the Prophet looks at a young girl who is pregnant and sees hope. He sees that new life is beginning and sees the hand of God, the hope of God, speaking to him and through him to the people. He cries as a voice of one in the wilderness; “The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light; for unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.”

Hope in the middle of the darkness, a light shining in the darkness. The school of the prophet will remember that idea because soon after, the mighty Assyrian army slinks away back to Nineveh because the King of Jerusalem, Hezekiah, had been emboldened to construct a strategy and had built a tunnel to the springs to provide enough water to withstand a long siege. During that waiting period, the Assyrian army camped outside the walls started to experience plague and many of the army died. In the meantime back in Nineveh, the governing powers started to understand the dangers of a highly centralized empire which meant  the huge costs of constant warfare, an economic system based on greed and plunder of others, and the breeding of an insatiable lust for control. All of these factors come to a head with a series of palace coups and the empire implodes and darkness leaves Jerusalem.

Over the centuries since Isaiah of Jerusalem, the darkness kept coming back and the prophets kept turning the people to hope for a light shining in the darkness. Eight centuries later there are a group of shepherds watching their sheep by night, and they look for a sign of hope in the middle of the darkness. That hope is shown to them, and they go to Bethlehem to see this light coming into the world in the person of Jesus.

As Jesus grows up he realizes that he is that light, and he forms a group of followers who agree to join with him to shine light on the darkness of the lives of the people. Out of this Jesus movement will come the church which calls its members to shine the light of Christ in the darkness of wherever they may be. Since no one kept good records of the birth of Jesus, the church decided to remember the coming of the light on the days following the Winter Solstice when the hours of daylight  start to increase. One of the reasons we gather on Christmas eve is to shine a light to remind ourselves of that central fact of our faith - light in darkness. This is the story that was passed on by the followers of Jesus to say that, although the world was covered in darkness, there was a light that shined in the middle of that darkness. The followers in the Jesus movement said that they were to follow Jesus and become the light in their generations, reflecting God’s light. When the church got to be an official religion, it spent a lot of time coming up with the right way to think about Christ and Jesus and less time thinking about following Jesus on a daily basis. St. Francis of Assisi tried to return us to following Jesus by emphasizing the Incarnation, the entering of God into everyday life. He said: ‘It is the feast of feasts, on which God, having become a tiny infant, clung to human breasts.” He set up demonstrations of gathering people in a dark, damp cave along with oxen and donkeys with the smells inherent in those situations and proclaiming that God chose this kind of place to be loving and to bring the light which we would take into our hearts and lives each day.

The story of Christmas is not told just to point to an event two thousand years ago, but to give us strength to change the events of our lives, to no longer be people of our own agendas, to be the people who promise to hold each other’s hands walking in the cold darkness today, becoming lights for one another. We come not to this place to imagine a far off land but to be outward and visible signs that even though injustice and oppression may seem to be lurking in the dark, the light of Natal Star still shines and a new year begins.

So where is the darkness? You got a couple hours where I can start listing all the places where I have seen darkness? I want to work out all of my frustration with business as usual in this country and the world where people, images of God, are turned into disposable objects of consumption to feed greed and lust for control. Oh, how I long to do that and impress you with the image of my being able to see clearly and get you all upset so you will rise up and, like in the old movie Network, go to the window, or this case out the door, into the darkness and shout out, “I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!”

Let me harangue about the church insurance program that I have to deal with every couple of months because of my age.  They want to treat my claims as a secondary rather than primary policy. Let me start off with my parade of villains who, if there had been a decent God of wrath, should have died a horrific death, instead of my friends whom I loved.

How appropriate that phrase “Mad as Hell” is. In our anger we increase the darkness and create more hells on earth. Yet it is in visiting and acknowledging that darkness honestly that it is also the place where the doors to heaven can be found. So where is your darkness? It is there you will find your greatest light.

“At the Darkest Moment Comes the Light”

I am mad as hell with all the darkness

hanging over news cycles of each day,

I want to point fingers and proudly say

that you ain't seen nothing yet of mess

until I get through being right and true,

spewing my poisonous venom on those

who have earned my wrath; who chose

to cross my path and their days to rue.

Yet I come to hope in a sleeping child

slumbering so peacefully in my soul

who lovingly awakens me to take role

of shepherd kneeling by an infant mild

asking that I might have a hope abound

that I can walk so gently on holy ground.