A Reflection for XVIII Pentecost
(Proper 20) St. George Episcopal Church, Engelhard, NC
September 23, 2018 Thomas E.
Wilson, Supply Celebrant
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!”
“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.
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