Aren't You Tired of Being Normal?

A Reflection for IV Epiphany 

All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC 

January 29, 2017 

Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Micah 6:1-8 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 Matthew 5:1-12 Psalm 15

Aren’t You Tired of Being Normal?

The question for reflection today is “Aren’t you tired of being normal?” A normal person is one who fits in, who goes along with the norms of the culture. In 1960 there was a play that opened off Broadway called “The Fantasticks”, and it ran for 42 years. For years I had the original cast recording until I just wore out the grooves. It was a product of its time, and one character, the young girl Luisa, sings a song of how she wants “Much More” out of life. She sighs: “Please God don’t let me be normal!” 

 

As you may remember from my class on the Introduction to the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew sees Jesus as the new Moses, the one who leads his people into a new promised land - a land not of geography but of living in the Kingdom of the Heavens here on earth, wherever that might be. Matthew remembers that, like Moses, Jesus as an infant had to face oppression from an evil ruler who, out of his own fear, tried to kill Moses and ended up killing a lot of innocent children. Like Moses, Jesus leads people to a mountain where he will give them a new law to rule their hearts. Moses brings down Ten Words – the Commandments - and then he elaborated on those ten words to his people as a way to live a faithful and happy life. In today’s lesson, Matthew has Jesus sit down on the mountain and speak Ten Sentences - then he elaborates further on them to his people as a way to live a faithful and happy life. We call these ten sentences the Beatitudes, which is Latin for “blessed”, a variation of the first word in each of the blessings.

The word “blessed” tends to have churchy feeling to it - like “Oh poor me; getting God’s reward for all my suffering!” - but it was actually the way the Church translated the Greek word “Makarioi”, which means “happiness”. Happiness is understood not as a result of things going our way, but happiness is a choice that we make - for no person, place, or thing has the power to make me feel anything, much less happy. If you want to live a life of frustration, then try making it your goal to make other people happy. They alone have that power. People become happy when they are able to choose to see the world in a different way. 

 

The Gospel stories use a lot of healing of the blind episodes as a metaphor for people being able to see the world in a different way. Our first lesson is from the Prophet Micah, one who is a “Seer”, a person who sees the world with the eyes of God. In the lesson, Micah sees all the religious activities - people prancing around Temples and passing judgment on other people’s behavior - as ways of attempting the outward and literal fulfilling of the Commandments and their elaborations. Micah sighs, seeing them as missing the point, and he sums up his vision with the words: “God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Matthew remembers Jesus suggesting that all of us need to be “Seers”, people who see that this is not just the Kingdom of the earth in which we live, but we live in a Kingdom of the Heavens right here and right now - if only we will open the eyes of our hearts and see what true happiness looks like.

“Blessed (Happy) are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 

To be poor in spirit means that you need a power greater than yourself to make it through the day. I don’t have to pretend that I am perfect. I don’t have to compare myself with others. I can forgive myself and them, being merciful to them and, in so doing, am changing my past. OK, I screwed up and have been hurt in the past, and I carry some of those scars in my life and body. I will always remember them, but they no longer have the power to give me shame or guilt. I am not a victim and I am no longer a victimizer. I am free from the power of that past, and I can see it for what it was - a journey into love, a recovery from self-centeredness. The power of the past has been broken and changed; the present is free to do justice, love mercy; and walking humbly with my God; and the future is to be able to rest in God’s peace. That is my definition of happiness or blessedness. 

 

Some who continue to see the world as a place where shame keeps us from disrupting “business as usual”, where competition is thought to be the fundamental rule of nature, where the desire to protects one’s own privileges is believed to be foremost, that one’s ego ought to be the center of one’s own universe, that greed is good, that we have no responsibility to do justice, but only to follow the lawful order that benefit us, and that smart people don’t do mercy, might call my definition maladjusted and for losers. However, I find that I am in with good companions in the company of losers like Micah and Jesus.

Almost sixty years ago on April 25, 1957, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave an address in Nashville, Tennessee on “The Church’s Role on Facing the Nation’s Chief Moral Dilemma”, urging us all to become “maladjusted” as the church urges us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. We do not do that by demonizing our opponents but by loving them so that they might see the world in a different way, as a place where the Kingdom of the Heavens reigns and where all of God’s children are connected to each other. 11 years later on April 4, 1968, he was killed because he refused to be well-adjusted as he continued to be citizen of the Kingdom of the Heavens. In 1957 he said:

But the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. The type of love that I stress here is not eros, a sort of esthetic or romantic love; not philios, a sort of reciprocal love between personal friends; but it is agape which is understanding goodwill for all. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of humanity. This is the love that may well be the salvation of our civilization. 

 

My hope for you is that you will be happy to be maladjusted enough to be a citizen of the Kingdom of the Heavens here and now in this nation.

Aren’t You Tired of Being Normal?

Echoing one Fantasticks’ lead’s sighs,

“Please God don’t let me be normal”,

help me be a maladjusted abnormal

standing against as injustice thrives

as power working hand and glove

pushing its own unfair advantages;

let’s not be content with bandages

but work on solutions based in love.

Give me courage not only to mourn

hearts being broken, but strengthen

me; holding to hope as to lengthen

the times of joy soon to be reborn

when we forgive and make a peace

as our unhappy arrogances do cease.

On the First Corinthian Gold Course

On the First Corinthian Golf Course

The Reflection for 22 January, the 3^rd Sunday After Epiphany, will be comments from the Vestry from their Vestry Retreat the day before. The theme of the Vestry Retreat was on how we will work together in the coming year. I had written the outline of a poem as I looked at the lessons for that Sunday and reflecting on the divisions in our nation as we are approaching the Presidential inauguration and congressional hearings for appointments, The Epistle Lesson was from 1^st Corinthians where Paul was lamenting the church in Corinth being divided into three factions on who was right- those who claimed allegiance to Paul, those to Apollos or those to Peter (Cephas). Paul urges them to put all that foolishness aside and focus on following Christ for it is not about who is right. The lessons from Isaiah, the Psalms and Matthew make reference to the people who walk (or sit) in darkness and in my opinion the greatest darkness is when we walk the spiritual path by the light of our own ego. I decided not to make this poem rhyme- that would take the fun out of it.

On the First Corinthian Golf Course

Four Christian Clergy went out to play golf

their names; Roman Catholic is Father Paul,

Father Apollos the Eastern Orthodox Priest,

with Brother Cephas, the Protestant Minister

and Episcopal Rector, the Rev. Mr. Wilson

closing out the Gospel fearsome foursome.

The exercise of Ecumenical duffing was fun.

On the 7^th tee they noted the ambulance sound.

Hearing the sirens they agreed to start to pray

As Rector Wilson reached deep into his golf bag,

Father Paul began prayers with crossing himself,

Archpriest Father Apollos started with his cross.

Brother Cephas incensed, started by stopping them.

“What are you doing with all that superstition?”

The three answered that they were starting prayer.

Cephas says; “Begin with “Father we just want to ask. . ,

as a way of showing humility, begging for free grace.”

“No”, Paul said, “the Cross says I am a true Christian

for God will never consider the prayers of heretics!”

The Orthodox chimed; “But you are crossing wrong,

God will not recognize you as a faithful child.”

The Episcopal Wilson pulled out his Prayer Book,

saying, “Wait until I find the right page for prayer!”

There was a huge sound from the heavens,

Reminding each of them of each of their mother’s

hand slapping her own forehead in frustration.

Then the voice came; “Oy! Vey iz mir! Woman

in that ambulance was the sister of all of you!

Just wait until your older brother gets off work!”

A Pre-Natal Resonating Remembrance Reflection and Poem for January 15, 2017

A Reflection for II Epiphany                                                 All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC January 15, 2017                                                                Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 49:1-7               1 Corinthians 1:1-9                 John 1:29-42               Psalm 40:1-12

A Pre-Natal Resonating Remembrance

In Isaiah’s servant song for today, a prophet of the School of Isaiah sings a song of encouragement to the returning exiles. They are leaving their exile in Babylon, to which they had become accustomed, to return to a home they had never known. He sings that God had not forgotten them while they were strangers in a strange land, but had visions for each of them from before they were born. He sings remembering being named while he was in the womb being formed: “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother's womb he named me.” A couple weeks ago I spoke of how the Hebrew people took “ to name” seriously: for to name someone had the power to know the fullness of the being who was being named. The name was not just descriptive but determinative as the being grew to live into that name. The singer knew he or she began life being loved. The name “Isaiah” has a meaning similar to other names like Joshua, Jesus, Hosea, and  Elisha; all of them are ways of saying in Hebrew “God is salvation”.

I have been blessed in the last year by three of my nieces giving birth to children - River, Marlowe and Liam - and “Old Uncle Tom” gets several pictures of these three children each week as they explore the new world they live in as the parents are surrounding them with their love. All the pictures the parents take help us who are so far away see how they are growing, but also help the children remember as the years go by that they were once the center of love.  These children, like their parents and their Uncle Tom, will grow up loved, but there will be a time when they will say they want to be out of the parents’ tender embrace - and yet often long to return. Novelist John Updike wrote: “Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.”

We all need to remember that we were loved outrageously. What was the earliest thing you can remember in your life about being loved? Tolstoy in his “Reminiscences” wrote that he remembered being an infant all swaddled in a blanket and the look on his parent’s faces as they tried to figure out why he was crying.  

Do any of you remember anything from the womb? I read accounts of people remembering certain events before they were born. I’m not that deep that I can remember pre-natal things in my conscious life, but I do have flashes of images in my dreams coming from the pre-conscious treasury. Every experience we have, and the experiences of all who have come before us, have been kept in some memory in our DNA.

When I was in Grad School at the UNC School of Social Work, I was once given an exercise to use my imagination to explore the birth experience. The school had been heavily influenced by the work of Otto Rank, a colleague of Freud, who differed from him in seeing that therapy needs to be in the here and now of helping people trapped in fearful neurotic repetition of behavior that doesn’t work to unlearn the old patterns so that they might be free to learn and engage the world in a new way. However, we need to understand that the new, which requires a union with an unknown present, might also produce fear. Rank suggested the “Trauma of Birth”, where we had to adapt to a new environment, was the model of growth throughout life - a bouncing back and forth between the fear of separation and the fear of losing oneself in a new union. I remember one of our assignments was to write an account of our birth, and when we looked at it, we could see that our account seemed to fit the way we approached new ideas.

We are called to live productively, constantly creating a new and deeper way of life. This is what is happening to the Baptizer John and his Disciples, in the Gospel lessons. They had come out to the wilderness to get away for the influences of the culture, living on the fringes. However, Jesus enters their lives, and John and some of his disciples see a new reality. John gives the disciples permission to grow and see what is inviting them in the person of Jesus. One of them, Andrew, will go and bring his brother Peter. The story that will happen, as told by the community of the Beloved Disciple, who wrote the Gospel of John, is that they will also bounce back and forth between the fear of separation from Jesus and the fear of union. They fear that they will lose their individual identity or that they will lose their life in following Jesus into death itself.

This is what happens in the church. People come and see something that intrigues them, but in order to join in union with us, and perhaps even in union with God, they have to face the threat of giving up some of their freedom to do whatever they want. Some are reliving the trauma of being dragged to church where they were barely tolerated as children. Some are leery of uniting with a group that will force them to believe things that don’t make a lick of sense or they have a hard time agreeing with. Some of them have suspicions of a religion of peace and love that seems to spend so much time fighting with and condemning others, where the identity of “Christian” can be a warning rather than a welcome. Some are nervous that they will not be up to that dying to self that must precede living to a new life. Some think that love has a finite quantity which there might not be enough to replenish. For some the more they are known means the more they are vulnerable.

This is the day of our Annual Parish Meeting where we will look at the budgets, goals, and plans of the preceding and coming years and elect new lay leaders for the vestry. It is the time, as it always the time each day, to make the commitment to join in union together to live in the here and now, loving our God and our neighbor by our worship of God and service of neighbor. Today, like all days, it is time to leave the past and enter into a new future.

God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference—just for today.

A Pre-Natal Resonating Remembrance

The foot moves as it stretches the wall

causing mother’s stomach to bulge out

upsetting cup, spilling hot drink on bed.

Mother regrets muttering oath as a pout,

vowing never again to repeat that squall

in front of any child later in years ahead.

Child hears the expression of annoying

but senses something else, not an ear

sound but deep resonances of a bloom

between beats of blood coursing here

to all the different parts of the growing

hiding in a comforting crowded womb,

message of not taking to heart projection

of the others' internal struggles on to them,

“This'll happen often in the coming years,

but hold fast time of your own Bethlehem

to balance pain of own Jerusalem rejection

to calm all of the moments of fleeting fears:

you are being loved beyond all measure,

as all will be redeemed as your treasure.”

Unchanined Reflection and Poem for 8 January, 2017

A Reflection for I Epiphany                                       All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC January 8, 2017                                                    Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 42:1-9               Acts 10:34-43             Matthew 3:13-17        Psalm 29

Unchained

Today we begin the season after the Epiphany. During Christmas, we got a lot of stuff, we celebrated about how lucky we are and how blessed we feel - and we are. We have a tendency to think that we deserve all these things for being so good or so loveable or so successful. The lessons today take us in a different direction, from the celebration of ourselves to the emptying out of ourselves. 

In the Hebrew Testament lesson, Isaiah sings the first of what is known as the Servant Songs. We, as Christians, tend to see these songs as precursors to Jesus. I think that Jesus was indeed influenced by these songs, but I think he probably didn’t see them as applying only to him; he saw the Servant as a poetic personification of the entire nation. It was not up to one man but to all the people who are called by God. Jesus did not want to start a new religion but to lead a movement to live in God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven. We would be very comfortable to sit back and admire Jesus for being the Messiah, but Jesus didn’t come to set up a fan club.  He came to call all people to follow him to live a community of righteousness. Isaiah sings the words of God, “I am the LORD and I have called you (plural - the community of exiles returning from Babylon to re-form - begin again - the process of entering God’s Promised Land, a place without geographical boundaries) into righteousness.”

One of the problems that Jesus saw in his community was that the Pharisees made their religion a matter of individual perfection and cleanliness. He saw them as more concerned about how to keep themselves ritually clean. They were so obsessed about eating and doing the “right” things that they missed the point of how to be in a loving relationship with God and neighbor. For Jesus, righteousness means Justice, following God by emptying oneself out for the good of others. 

The New Testament lesson for today from the Book of Acts is the conclusion of Peter’s bout of self-involvement with his own ritual purity. He almost misses an opportunity to reach out to a neighbor, Cornelius, a Roman soldier, the enemy, the same people who killed Peter’s beloved friend, Jesus. The speech you heard and read for today begins “I truly understand that God shows no partiality.” The literal translation is “God accepts no one’s face”. God doesn’t care about race or status or reputation or political persuasion or nationality or religion, but rather about the reality that we are all children of the living God, where righteousness is about the relationship with God and neighbor as all part of one family.

The Bible has made me understand righteousness better, but my real entrée to the concept came from hearing the singing duo of Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield called the “Righteous Brothers”. Medley wrote that they got their name from a group of black Marines attending their show who called out “That was righteous brother!” Righteous did not mean that they hit all the notes right, but that they were doing their “blue-eyed soul” in a way that got so deep into the music and even into the space between the notes that erased the outward boundaries between people and united all of them in an almost spiritual experience. I remember what it feels like to hear the Righteous Brothers sing “Unchained Melody”, a romantic song about longing for someone who feels so far away, during the time when I had outgrown my narrow faith but had not yet grown into trusting something other than myself as the center. Yet it is also a song that touched my soul: “I hunger for your touch, I need your love, God speed your love”.  It becomes almost a prayer to and through God for me, even now and then in those moments when I feel most far away from God’s love, when I feel bedeviled by the sin of it being all about me, as if I not being a good enough person or Priest. When I do not love myself, it is hard to love God or neighbor.

The Gospel story for today from Matthew has Jesus come to the river and empty himself out as a way, he tells John the Baptizer, “to fulfill all righteousness.” To empty one’s self out is the beginning of moving into righteousness - getting rid of the pride, arrogance, shame, self-pity, and resentment that get in the way of the love of God, self, and neighbor. When Jesus empties himself out and buries himself in the water, he meets the God at the center of his soul and rises again out of the tomb of the water to face a new life of love, a life that will immediately be challenged by the demons in the wilderness. Yet that love is nourished by the angels of God who feed his soul.

This week we begin another opportunity to resume as a righteous ministry the caring for our homeless guests here at All Saints. These are people who need food and shelter, but most importantly, they “need your [non exploitive] touch”, they “hunger for your love [and acceptance of them as full human beings]”, “God speed your love.” It is not about doing a right or good deed but about being in a righteous relationship with God, neighbor and self. 

In the next couple of weeks, there will be another opportunity for displays of unbridled narcissism where it will be “all about me” and “what do I get?” and the desire for more partiality. Franciscan Monk Richard Rohr wrote last week:

You have to work to live in love, to develop a generosity of spirit, a readiness to smile, a willingness to serve instead of to take. Each morning you take your inner temperature, observing if your energy is loving and flowing outward or negative and sucking in. . . . Sooner or later, by God’s patience, many of us eventually fall into Love and learn to draw our life from that Infinite Source “which has no end and never fails.” Yes, the nature of Love and the nature of God are the same thing.

God speeds our love by helping us not to condemn those with whom we disagree, but in love, praying for them that they might hunger for God’s touch.  Life following Christ is about creating a community of justice and care for righteous relationships with all by emptying ourselves out as we follow Jesus, entering the Spirit of Christ and worshiping God.

Unchained

Hunched at bar nursing a beer and slights

a friend left town: God wasn’t far behind.

When she will return is not well defined

and Other hasn’t returned calls for nights.

A music box comes alive with some groans

of an aching heart “longing for your touch”.

Perfect pity party music: “can do so much”.

Only on one level does it reach hormones;

a deeper hunger for meaning from Other,

hearing call to belong to something greater,

wider purpose than being one resentful hater

outgrowing tired religion rituals of a mother.

Longing for a “God, speed your touch” rhyme

not as just a hope but as prayer to that Sublime.