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.