A Reflection for II Lent All
Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC March 12, 2017 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Jesus
walking on my less dominant side: Abram, Psalmist, Paul, Nicodemus and you.
This
is the second in a five part reflection on Walking With Jesus. Last week we
looked at how the Christ walks with us on our dominant side, our strength, and
helps strengthen us in facing the temptations and trials of our lives. Today I
want to reflect on how Jesus walks with us on our less dominant side. There is
a popular set of theories about brain functioning which divides up the brain
between the left and right hemispheres. In these theories, the left side of the
brain controls the right side of the body and handles the logical, analytical
kind of thinking. If you want to remember a fact – say, the formula for the Pythagorean
Theorem for finding the hypotenuse of a right triangle - that memory would be
pulled from the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere controls the muscles of
the left side of the body and handles the senses of imagination, art, and
music. If, for instance, you wanted to find rhymes for the word “orange”, you
would have to sound it out, play with it, and then from the right hemisphere up
would pop – wait for it – “Aren’t you
glad you waited?” Oh well. Some things aren’t worth waiting for. It would be an
“almost rhyme” for this is not where precision comes from. The inspiration for
poets, musicians, and artists comes from the right brain and their technique
come from the left.
Now
the science for the division of the brain between art and logic is not fully
proven, but it fits my argument for today because I use as an excuse that I
tend to be a right-brain kind of person. My theory is that most of the Psalms,
Prophets, Gospels, and the myths and hero stories of the Bible, which require
imagination, arise from listening to the Divine more from the right brain,
while the Histories, the Epistles and the Law, the regulations, the ones that
follow logical structures, most theologians, and the Creeds spring up from the
left brain. The lessons for today show us people who are struggling to see how
the energy of God can be encountered.
The Psalmist looks at the rocks and
the hills and while he might do the rituals at the Temple, he is filled with
the vision that God is present in all things and times and places, and he sings
his song of love and of a faith that he will never fully understand. The psalm
is a series of cadenced repetition where the Hebrew word “Shomar”, meaning “guard”, is repeated six times in eight verses as
a way of assurance of protecting presence. One of the things I do from time to
time in the Liturgy is to change the salutation at the beginning of the service.
Instead of saying, “The Lord be with you”, as if this was a hope devoutly to be
wished and an honor bestowed on you because you have come to this holy place, I
change it to “The Lord is with you”,
as a way of saying that the creative energy of God is flowing through each of
us, here in this place and wherever we may go. To use Robert Alter’s
translation of the last two verses: “The LORD guards
you from all harm. The LORD guards your life. The LORD
guards your going and your coming, now and forevermore.”
Paul,
in his letter to the Romans, says that his relationship with God is not in the
following of the rules and the laws - that is the path he tried for so many
years - but with his encounter with the Risen Christ Jesus on the road to
Damascus, an encounter which his left brain cannot fully describe. But when the right side of his brain is
opened to the fullness of what cannot be reduced to code or creed, it is then
that he understands that “righteousness” is found by walking with Jesus and
lovingly emptying oneself out for God and neighbor.
In
the Genesis passage, Abram is fine putting up with life in Ur of the Chaldees,
but an encounter with the energy of God explodes his imagination to leave the
security of what he knows to go into the wilderness to do the impossible, to
find the land of promise, not in a geographical piece of ground, but in the act
of walking one step at a time, trusting in a power beyond his senses in order
to be a blessing to others. That is what the life of faith is all about, not in
earning a blessing but by being a blessing to this broken world.
Nicodemus in the Gospel lesson begins his walking
with Jesus, the incarnated energy of God, with confusion for he does not
understand what it means to be born from above, to be born again into a
universe where the safe life of being a teacher is thrown into confusion when
the old answers do not work anymore. John will bring Nicodemus into the
narrative twice more, once when Nicodemus argues for justice for Jesus in the
Sanhedrin, and then again when he and Joseph of Arimathea lovingly take down
Jesus’ body from the cross, caressing the lifeless body and gently wrapping it a
shroud, reverently placing it in the tomb as an act of mercy for the family and
man they loved so much. Nicodemus moves from being a teacher who thinks he
knows everything to being a disciple walking on the path doing justice, loving
mercy, and walking humbly with his God.
Today, dare to go beyond your imagination and dreams
and walk with Jesus.
Jesus Walking On My Less Dominant
Side:
Abram,
Psalmist, Paul, Nicodemus and you.
Degrees
and piles of books surround me;
want
to stay where I am familiar with all
but
my comfort is disturbed by your call
to
walk with you into the unknown free
of
all the things that I know that I know,
to
enter into imagining habitat of dreams
where
the old sign posts are gone it seems
but
placing trust where you lead me to go
will
be the place where I find who I am,
the
blessed image of you as a blessing
to
this broken world’s fear addressing
with
a loving presence, not a program
cobbled
together by many learned others
but
walk simply with sisters and brothers.
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