A Reflection for XXI
Pentecost St. George's Church, Engelhard, NC
October 14,
2018 Thomas E Wilson, Supply Celebrant
Sunday Night Messages
Over the Crystal Set
When I was in the 4th
grade, my father gave me as one of my Christmas presents, a Crystal
radio set, to put together as a way of hoping the idea of building
something would encourage me to get an interest in making something
out of my life. My father had put one of these sets together when he
was a child and it was part of him opening himself up to science and
technology. He became an engineer and he knew that a science and
technology background would be the coming fields in which to earn a
living. After all, the area in which I then lived in the Southern
Tier of New York had as three of its biggest employers; Link
Aviation, IBM, and Ansco Film and there were always going to be jobs
there. Except, Link Aviation was later sold to Howard Hughes and left
town, most of IBM left town, and Ansco film was sold to Hong Kong. My
father was trying to prepare me for life. While all of these
opportunities were there as the conventional wisdom and the local
Chamber of Commerce kept promising while I was growing up; my father
understood, growing up through the Great Depression and serving as a
Marine Officer in combat in the Pacific in World War II, that an easy
life with easy answers was far from certain. My Father loved me and
wanted me to go beyond my comfort zone and be exposed to a deeper
dimension of life than just existing.
A few months ago when Pat
and I were in Maine, I read a book by theoretical physicist Alan
Lightman, Searching For Stars From an Island in Maine, a
reflection on the human quest for a comfortable certainty in
unchanging rules confronting the modern scientific discoveries which
challenge us to look beyond. My father would have been 100 this year
but he died 52 years ago when I was 19 and I knew he would have loved
that book as a challenge because he had prepared me to look deeper
than the surface reality.
I made the crystal radio
set and at night I would get under the blanket, put an ear plug in
and tune the home made radio to the local stations as a way of
closing my day. The kind of music didn't matter-Pop, Rock, Folk,
Country, Classical, Jazz - which ever station I could pull in best.
Duke Ellington used to say that there were only two kinds of music:
Good and Bad.
However, on Sunday nights
I would pull in the preachers. There were many of them, all talking
about preparing for life; the life in heaven after we are dead. “If
you were to die today, do you know where you are going to spend
eternity; where are you going to spend eternal life?” Eternal Life
was confined to the after death ghetto. Heaven was a reward and Hell;
the way they made Hell sound as a place meant for people who listened
to Godless rock and roll or jazz. The kind of place for people who
had lustful thoughts. The kind of place to have eternal punishment,
day in and day out FOREVER was not a place I wanted to end up. They
were literally trying to scare the Hell out of me. I wondered what
kind of God gets his jollies out of seeing people get tortured in
fire and brimstone. I was told that getting out of Hell was simple
but not easy. I was going to have to go to church more and study the
Bible more and give more to the evangelist de jour as a way of
preparing for life. I was going to have obey the dictates of
religious authorities and not talk back or allow doubt to creep in. I
was told that formula of following the prescribed norms would be
certain to prepare me for Eternal Life away from Hell after I was
dead.
Jesus and the rich man
talked about life and how to prepare for it in today's Gospel lesson.
There are three words for “life” in the Greek of the New
Testament. They are (1) BIOS, out of which we get the science
of Biology - how does the body function. (2) PSYCHE out of
which we get the science of Psychology -how does the mind work, (3)
ZOE out of which we get the science of Zoology - what are the
differences between those things that have life. In this particular
lesson and in much of the New Testament the word ZOE
is used with a modifier AINOION, out of which we get the
word eon for a very long period of time longer than we could imagine
and was a metaphor for God, the Eternal, and the combination usually
used was human life living into the life of the Eternal and is
translated as “eternal life”. What happens over the centuries was
that the metaphor “eternal life” was made literal and was
translated by the Church authorities as the life after death.
When the Bible writers
used the term ZOEN AINOION, “eternal life, they meant a life lived
fully and completely in God's presence. In this particular story
Jesus loved this young man who wanted to live into what he thought
was eternal life. There was something about this young man, because
the Bible does not often have Jesus as “loving” a particular
person, but the writers note that Jesus does love this young man.
Maybe Jesus looked at him and thought , “Wow this is one sharp
person. He has a great reputation. He's followed all the
commandments. He understands the law! He has a great aura of
authority. He is the kind of person who can be a real leader; maybe
better than these twelve guys who hang around me now who keep missing
the point.” Out of his love for this young man Jesus says: “I
really want you to follow me, but I want all of your life, not just
your religion identity and not your stuff. If you really want to go
on this journey - we are going to have to travel light, get used to
losing a lot of stuff, the stuff out of which we used to get our
identity; and you have got a lot of stuff. Since you are going to
lose it anyway; why not give it away.”
In essence I hear Jesus
asking this young man to follow the words of Frances Havergal in the
sequence hymn we sang before and after the Gospel about making a full
commitment. The young man looks at Jesus like he is crazy. The young
man has spent all of his life finding his meaning of life in getting
and managing his stuff, plus he was so proud that he had scrupulously
done all the religion stuff. He was certain about the rules of his
life because his society had created their own Social Institutions to
make sense of their world.
All Societies make
decisions on the shape of Social Institutions, e.g. what is the
nature of a family, what is the nature of an economic system, what it
the nature of how decisions are made for law and governance, what is
the response to the poor, how do we pass on education and culture to
the next generation and finally what is the shape of religion. Emile
Durkheim's definition of Religion as a Social System:"a unified
system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to
say things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which
unite into one single moral community called a church, all those who
adhere to them.”
But living in the presence
of God is not about religion but about an awareness of God in every
moment. Frederick Buechner in his Wishful Thinking tried to
show the difference between Religion and being Religious:
THERE
ARE POETRY BOOKS and poetic books—the first a book with poems in
it, the second a book that may or may not have poems in it, but that
is in some sense a poem itself.
In much the same way
there are religion books and religious books. A religion book is a
book with religion in it in the everyday sense of religious ideas,
symbols, attitudes, and—if it takes the form of fiction—with
characters and settings that have overtly religious associations and
implications. There are good religion books like The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, and there
are miserable ones like most of what is called "Christian"
fiction.
A religious book may not
have any religion as such in it at all, but to read it is in some
measure to experience firsthand what a religion book can only tell
about. A religion book is a canvas. A religious book is a
transparency. With a religious book it is less what we see in it than
what we see through it that matters. John Irving's A Prayer for Owen
Meany would be an example. Huckleberry Finn would be another.
Writers of religious
books tend to achieve most when they are least conscious of doing so.
The attempt to be religious is as doomed as the attempt to be poetic.
Thus in the writing, as in the reading, a religious book is an act of
grace—no less rare, no less precious, no less improbable.
In that same fashion; A
Life With Religion is the placement of God somewhere far off and with
whom you keep an appointment to check in and try to get the Divine on
your side as well as off your back so you can do business as usual.
In this viewpoint, eternal life is a reward for living a moral life,
where we hope that entrance into heaven might be graded on a curve. A
Religious Life is an act of Grace where all of life is seen through
the eyes of an ever present Spirit of love and awe. A Life With
Religion is a habit one forms and can be easy to live with, but a
Religious Life is about living in love and filled with all sorts of
falling short and getting back up again because the love never ends.
I am loved and Love is hard to do but love is the only life worth
living.
Jesus is really not
interested in creating a rival Religion Institution, he is interested
in going deeper where all of our Social Institutions are shaped by an
awareness of God's presence in all that we do. My own belief is that
one of the worst things that happened to the Jesus movement was when
it became a Religion like all the other religions; a way to get God
on our side and off our backs so we can do business as usual. Jesus
was not interested in Religion but in Relationship in this world
where God is in the space between each of us and deep inside us at
all parts of each day. Eternal life meant living into the Eternal
right now and not just after we are dead. I leave it up to God to
deal with what happens after this body cools.
So what must you do to
claim Eternal Life?
Sunday Night Messages
Over the Crystal Set
Hearing the radio
preacher's spittle hit
as he listed all my faults
that last week
with a prescription that
I'd need to seek
about a better moral life
and do my bit.
The verses of “Just As I
Am” are timed
for me to pray for an ill
deserved chance
to re-try to put out the
fire on my pants
as out of the hell's
flames I've climbed.
In that script it was all
about my task,
what I needed to act and
think and say
to keep me whole I'd pray
in right way
doing my leaders will when
they'd ask.
For years it never
occurred I was loved,
just as I am, before I was
by guilt shoved.
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