Lives of Integrity

A Reflection for XVIII Pentecost (Proper 20)      St. George Episcopal Church, Engelhard, NC

September 23, 2018                                               Thomas E. Wilson, Supply Celebrant

Wisdom of Solomon 1:16-2:1, 12-22   Psalm 1  James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a   Mark 9:30-37

Lives of Integrity

There is a prayer with which we start off the service and it is called a Collect; so called because it is a collection of thoughts that reflect a time of year or the lessons for this Sunday. The Collect is in your bulletin: “Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

The lessons for today have to do with how does a person live a life of integrity. Yes, we are in this world but we are also connected to God, we are the images of God living with fellow images of God. When we look at the world in this way, we realize that we are not the center of our own universes; that position is already filled. The Psalm speaks of the differences between living a life that has God as the center and those who don't. The Wisdom of Solomon passage talks about Righteous living. Righteous does mean being perfect but being in a right relationship. Some of you can remember a singing group in the 60's and 70's called the Righteous Brothers. Righteous did not mean they were especially good people but the fact that they were connected to the soul of the music they were singing. In the Epistle of James in today's lectionary, he uses the term “Wisdom from above” to mean the same thing.

Two Sundays ago, the last time I was with, you and a lot of things have happened since then, I told you I would be leaving the next day to fly to in Colorado and visit my daughter who was in hospital there. I had planned to stay a week, but after the plane left the ground the warnings about the upcoming storm got more and more ominous. I found my daughter getting better in the rehabilitation unit in the hospital and I was glad to be there. But around 2:00 on Wednesday morning I started to reassess my priorities. It was nice to be with my daughter and be helpful for her and her family but I was anxious about Pat in what looked like the path of the storm. By 5:00 I had arranged all the parts of the trip and started back and landed before the airport closed. By that time the storm moved more to the south and we, on the Outer Banks, just got a much milder storm that was expected and you in Engelhard got much more flooding that we did.

Did I make the right choice? Since the storm did not do much damage, I wasn't all that helpful to Pat. Right or wrong, I made the choice I could live with; a choice with integrity. Reassessing priorities to live with integrity is something we have to do all the time because the world never stands still. Reassessing priorities is what Jesus is having his disciples do in the Gospel lesson from Mark for today. They, of course, do not want to go through the trouble to live with integrity; they only have energy for their own ego agendas of who is going to be the greatest. We may not be like Mohammed Ali who used to proclaim; “I am the greatest!” But like the disciples, we tend to be trapped in ego agendas of determining our worth. We want to judge our worth by what we have built up of our accomplishments, or our possessions, or the approval of others. Jesus is trying to teach his disciples that the rest of the world sees success in the matter of how much stuff we have accumulated, how many battles won or how many accolades collected. He says that the point of life is not what you get but what you give in moving closer to God..

The disciples are trying to avoid the integrity of following Jesus into a deeper way of living by entering into a fantasy that they will soon be known as tremendous healers with great powers and approval. They will be the ones known for fixing broken people, places and things. They don't want to hear Jesus talk about the fact that being a prophet is one who the world does not want to hear.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a three part essay for Esquire Magazine in 1936 called The Crack Up about his inability to fix things. In part two he writes:

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary daytime advice for everyone. But at three o'clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn't work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream—but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world.

Then to underline that point Jesus takes a young child. Now here I want you to enter into imagination with me. What does the child look like? For years when I saw the Greek word “paidion” which is translated as “a young child”, in my imagination I saw Jesus pick up a small baby. Now, I am a sucker for babies and I used to have this thing I would do when mother and baby showed up for the service and the mother looked nervous about the baby making too much noise. When parents get worried about their kids' behavior they get tense: the tenser the parent the greater the anxiety of the child. When the parent and child would come up for communion; I would steal the child out of the parent's arms and hold him or her and give out Communion with the infant in my arms. Usually as I was calm the baby would be calm and every other person who came up for communion would smile or touch the feet of the baby as part of their communion. The message sent and received was that this child was, for that moment, part of the communion with God and neighbor. I wanted to the child to know their earliest memory of church was being loved. The ushers knew what was going to happen and often they would warn parents; “Now he may grab your baby.”

But as I reflected on this lesson from Mark, I started to see “paidion” in a different way. Jesus lived in a third world country and I started to remember young children in third world countries we had visited. Many families are desperately poor and they would send their children out on to the streets to beg. Anytime a visitor, who was not part of a group with guides running interference, went to the souk, the marketplace, usually a rabbits' warren of sheds, stalls and alleyways full of merchants selling their wares; there would be children begging making lots of noise I was told not to make eye contact, to pretend they don't exist, otherwise they will get in your way and mess up your day, your agenda, your bankroll and they won't go away; because they know they have a “live one”.

This week, in my imagination, I saw Jesus pick up a filthy, noisy begging child; the kind of person I had been warned to ignore. But, Jesus does not see an annoyance but sees a fellow image of God of whom he is called to a servant. For Jesus being an image of God means being a servant to God's creation and people. Now the caveat exists that we are not called to be all day suckers. Many times throwing money to a beggar is a way of trying to get rid of them. There may be other ways to treat a fellow image of God and there are times when a “No” is appropriate or there be other ways to help. In my imagination I understood that to live with integrity means I and the other beggar are both being lifted up in Jesus arms.

In The Didache, Greek word meaning “Teaching” an early Christian document written about 80- 90 AD, not incorporated into the New Testament, and rediscovered in 1873, there is a warning to “let the money sweat in your hand” as you are asked to treat the other person with respect and not just to treat them as an object of pity. Pity is a looking down on someone, compassion on the other hand is a joining of souls at the three o'clock because it always is three o'clock in the morning, day after day. It is the time for living with integrity. 

Living With Integrity

Can't remember if it is old Foghorn

Leghorn or W.C. Fields who snarls
“Go away kid, you bother me!”

I think I thought that God was

saying it first when I wouldn't

stop asking answerless questions.

But God was the one laughing

at all those attempts at certainty

I heard, later religiously taught,

and not quite inwardly digested.

Calling evolved as me, picked up

and placed as the begging child

in the middle of all the good folk

as part of my ministry to bother.

Being a Balm in Gilead

A Reflection for XVI Pentecost             St. Gorge's Church, Engelhard, NC

September 9, 2018                                Thomas E Wilson, Visiting Supply

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23  Psalm 125  James 2:1-10, 14-17  Mark 7:24-37

Being a Balm in Gilead

There are many ways to approach Bible stories and it is best to look at the stories from several different ways because a good story is like a diamond, which when we turn it we see other dimensions; every time you really look at it, there is more there. The story does not change but I have and the world has and I cannot just pull the old view out of mothballs, but I am compelled to encounter it again.

The Lectionary, the schedule of the lessons for each Sunday, is based on a three year cycle. I went to seminary in the fall of 1981 so I am beginning my 37^th year of studying the lessons for each week and this would be my 14^th time I have looked at this Gospel lesson from Mark as a lesson for this Sunday of the year. Over the years, I have translated it, I have borrowed insights from others who for over 2000 years tried to come to grips with it. I have interpreted it from a theological, sociological, historical, literary, spiritual and philosophical; you name it I did it. But today I approach this story about a parent coming to Jesus and begging for healing for a daughter as a parent.

St. Ignatius Loyola suggested in his Spiritual Exercises that we can by an act of imagination enter into the person of a character in the story and feel what it is like to be in that story from the Inside Out rather than from the Outside In, so that it becomes an experience of our intuition rather than from our intellect, from our body instead of our brain, having the word become flesh in our lives.

Seventeen days ago Shanon, my 48 year old daughter, who lives in Colorado, was sitting in the living room rocking chair, on a normal day after her husband had taken their 13 year old son to school and then gone to work, Shanon 's heart stopped and she became unconscious. Later, we do not know how long, Luke, their 16 year old son found her unresponsive and called 911 and under their direction performed CPR on her until the medics arrived and took her to the hospital eight blocks away. I flew out to Colorado the next day joining her mother, her husband, her two sons with multitude of their friends in flooding the ICU unit with concerns, thoughts, love and presence, besieging whatever Gods and powers we believed in with prayers to find a way of healing.

As she was in her coma and when we were alone I would talk with her. I made a joke that as a preacher I was used to talking with people who did not seem to be paying attention. I prayed, I recited Psalms, I sang songs, one of them was an African American spiritual, “There is a Balm in Gilead” which I asked Clare, your organist, to play as your sequence hymn for today. it comes from a verse in Jeremiah where, in his frustration for his country that has just lost its way, the prophet cries out “Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?

The song holds on to the faith that there is indeed that balm in the person of Jesus.

There is a balm in Gilead,

To make the wounded whole;

There is a balm in Gilead,

To heal the sin-sick soul.

Some times I feel discouraged,

And think my work’s in vain,

But then the Holy Spirit

Revives my hope again.

(Chorus)

If you can’t preach like Peter,

If you can’t pray like Paul,

Just tell the love of Jesus,

And say He died for all.

(Chorus)

In my imagination I understood from the Inside Out the frantic quality of the mother in this story and the fact that she would not give up until there would be a healing as long as there was a chance. There is a Prayer that guides my life, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” This woman, and I, would not accept until we had tried every opportunity.

She comes to Jesus and she has a three strikes against her. One; this is a foreign country and it was a violation of ritual purity that a Rabbi, as Jesus was, contaminate himself with consorting with a Gentile in a foreign land. Two, this woman was a gentile not a Jew., and the proper procedure would be that a Jewish acquaintance of a Gentile would come and ask respectfully for intercession. Three, the woman was a woman and prayers asked for a woman could only be asked through the oldest male relative of the woman. Four: The woman was uppity. This woman said: “I don't care about the ways things are usually done; the health of my daughter is more important that any social or religious doctrine; compassion trumps dogma, love trumps institutional self interest!”

Jesus starts to say something that can be translated as: “We don't do things like this back home. You are forgetting yourself. Pull yourself together. It just ain't done.”

This now becomes a real moment of a continuing shift in Jesus' understanding of his mission and life. Before encountering this woman, he saw his reason for being as a Prophet calling his people of the Jewish sect to a deeper awareness of their faith. By his words and deeds he calls people to repent and to be made whole. It is his job description. But the woman's response shakes him as he comes to realize that he is not called to make not a vocational decision but to enter into an ontological insight; it is not what he does that is important but about who he is. He is the image of God and when he encounters people, he doesn't don't just stop and say, “My job is to be a special revered Holy Man, who if you are nice and I aprove of you, can do good things for you!”

What is happening the woman is looking through him and sees God's very self. In a way it is like the story of thre Transfiguration where the disciples can see Jesus transfigured into the glory of God. And at the same time Jesus looks at, and through the woman and no longer sees someone who is a foreigner but someone who is also the image of God's very self. It is her love for her daughter that is the image of God dwelling in the space between. Jesus is not just a Holy Messenger who is telling them that the Kingdom of the Heavens is coming and we need to get ready for it. Jesus is saying that God is not far off somewhere above the clouds acting like a judge but is living right here and now in, between and through our lives here on earth; wherever love is – God's very self is there. The faith that makes the woman whole is not an intellectual assent to doctrine but her love that lives the reality of God's love.

When my daughter was in ICU, after the fear and shock wore off, I was able to look at the Doctors, Nurses,Technicians and visitors in a whole different way. I was able to look through them and see Images of God doing acts of love and healing. I suspected that more than a few of them did not attend church regularly or hold on to the Filoque Clause of the Nicaean Creed or even subscribe to Christian doctrine but they knew how to love this stranger far from home and his daughter.

We come to church not to get our ticket to heaven's reservations confirmed but to be reminded that we are images of God made to love and when we come to receive the bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ, it is to remind us that we have become what we eat. We are outward and visible signs of God's presence in this world to our brothers and sister images. Like Jesus we are learning that wherever we live or journey, whatever is our race or creed or the language we speak; we are images of God made to love and be loved, together to be the Balm of Gilead to make the wounded whole.

My daughter, Shanon, is in the process of recovering and I will be going back tomorrow to be with her and her family and friends when she gets out of the rehabilitation unit to be part of the Balm of Gilead that makes the wounded whole. Today in Hyde County may you realize that you are part of the Balm of Gilead making this wounded world whole.

Waiting For the Balm of Gilead

The machines lights kept blinking

giving information to those understanding

the beeps, announcing to those outstanding

professionals around her now thinking

of translating to us, Outer Circle of family

and friends without training and degrees,

if we'd be sheltered from ill wind, lees

of fortune or we'd be buffeted by calamity.

“Today”, they conclude, “will be more hope

to make it through tomorrow and next day.”

“But more things need to be done”, they say

leaving us with a few more crumbs to grope.

They left and we told to each other stories

to be shared when the tide turns to glories.