Thursday, January 3, 2019

Paying Attention (Reflection and Poem for Epiphany Sunday)


A Reflection for Epiphany Sunday                       St. George's Episcopal Church, Engelhard, NC January 6, 2019                                                     Thomas E Wilson, Preacher
Paying Attention
In the Church Calendar this is the Feast of the Epiphany and the 12th Day of Christmas. In the Secular Calendar this is the first Sunday of the New Year and the 6th day after New Year's Resolutions. So, what was your resolution? One of mine was to pay attention. I decided I needed to do more often as I was looking over the lessons for today. Looking at the first two Chapters of the Gospel of Matthew; there are four stories about paying attention.

The first story when Joseph was asleep and he has a dream to which he pays attention. I believe that dreams are a way that God usesbto speak to us. Pat and I have studied dreams for a number of years. I do not take dreams literally but I do think they are messages from my personal unconscious which goes back to when before I was born, and the collective unconscious which stretches back to the beginning of the universe, given in symbolic form. We take the dreams and look at the symbols and then prayerfully consider them and what they might mean in my life and how God might be using them. God is constantly speaking to us; the trouble is that when we are awake, we are overwhelmed by the noise of the ego of our conscious mind about our own agendas. We are so focused about our own desires, we cannot see the bigger picture. In dreams however, our own egos are asleep and we are open to hear what God is speaking As Frederick Buechner writes: “I choose to believe that (God) speaks nonetheless, and the reason that (God's) words are impossible to capture in human language is of course that they are ultimately always incarnate words. They are words fleshed out in the everydayness no less than in the crises of our own experience.” In this first story Joseph's ego had made a decision to end the engagement with Mary because he was afraid of looking foolish in the eyes of his neighbors. However, the dream with images and symbols told him that the deeper meaning of his own life had more in common with God's love than his own pride.

To pay attention we have to go beyond the limits of our mind and enter into the mystery of awe; awe that there are so many things that are beyond our puny understanding. Richard Rohr in his meditation for last Wednesday wrote:
Jesus clearly believed in change. In fact, the first public word out of his mouth was later translated into the Greek imperative verb metanoeite, which literally means “change your mind” or “go beyond your mind” (see Matthew 4:17 and Mark 1:15). Unfortunately, in the fourth century, St. Jerome translated the word into Latin as paenitentia (“repent” or “do penance”), initiating a host of moralistic connotations that have colored Christians’ understanding of the Gospels ever since. The word metanoeite referred to a primal change of mind, worldview, or way of processing and perceiving—and only by corollary about a specific change in behavior. This common misunderstanding puts the cart before the horse; we think we can change a few externals while our underlying worldview often remains narcissistic and self-referential.
This misunderstanding contributed to a puritanical, externalized, and largely static notion of the Christian message that has followed us to this day. Faith became about external requirements that could be enforced, punished, and rewarded, much more than an actual change of heart and mind, which Jesus described as something that largely happens “in secret, where your Father who sees in secret can reward you” (Matthew 6:4, 6, 18).

The second paying of attention is when the Magi see a star. The Magi were Zoroastrian priests from the Parthian Empire, modern day Iran and much of the Middle East. They studied dreams, astronomy and natural phenomena which they understood was the way their God, Ahura Mazda, was speaking to them. Then they prayerfully considered what they had seen or imagined and interpreted them for possible options for action. They believed that all of the universe is connected and all events had meaning for our lives. When they saw the star, they decided that this heavenly event had earthy significance. They decided after study and prayer to take a journey west to Judea. In August, 2017 Pat and I went down to South Carolina to see the total Solar Eclipse, it was also a pilgrimage to cause us to take less seriously what our life might look like after I retired the next year, a changing the way we were used to seeing the universe. We were standing in a field, looking up into the sky and all we could do was to laugh in wonder. Now of course we understood the scientific explanations for an eclipse but since we believe that all things in God's universe are connected we chose to also see the spiritual dimension of us stopping to pay attention. It did not tell us of what we should invest in the Stock Market but our prayers of thanksgiving got deeper. In case you are interested, there will be a lunar eclipse, a Blood Moon, on the night of the 20th and morning of the 21st of this month from about 10:30 PM to 2:30 AM. The next time you can see a Blood Moon will be on July 27th but you will have to go the Indian Ocean to see it.

The Magi went to the Jerusalem Priests and asked if they might be of help. The Priests studied and looked in their books and passed on the information. However, since the Temple Crowd were in the pay of King Herod, they thought it best not to explore its meaning further. Herod was not overjoyed about a Son of David being born as a rival to Herod. Herod was an Idumean, a descendent of Esau not Issac; and although he was raised as a Jew, he was seen as an outsider and was only in power by the support of Rome. Herod tried to curry favor with the Jews by massive building projects like the Temple Complex but those around him did not fully trust him, after all he executed one of his wives, her mother and brother, and three of his sons out of his fear of losing control. Herod paid attention because he saw plots against him wherever he looked. In the Magi's Zoroastrian Religion Ahura Mazda, the Creator God, had an adversary, Angra Mainyu, the destructive spirit of Evil, which 1st Century BC Judaism and 1st Century AD Christianity would borrow as Satan, and the Magi would have thought that Herod was under the rule of that demon. Herod sent the Magi on their way as part of a plan to kill this possible rival to his throne.

The Magi paid attention and went to Bethlehem as a part of their pilgrimage to find a deeper spiritual meaning in their lives. They took the natural event of a birth of a child and in it they saw the deeper miracle of life. Matthew writes that “they were overwhelmed with joy.” Joy is usually the response when we stop to pay attention to what God is doing..

While they were there they paid attention to a dream about avoiding Herod. When they left, Joseph had another dream telling him of danger from Herod and to go to Egypt for safety. Joseph paid attention and stayed there as a refugee. After a few years Joseph had been paying attention to the news from Jerusalem, when he heard that Herod was dead, he thought that he was safe in going back home, But he had another dream which warned him to avoid Bethlehem and go to East nowhere Nazareth to stay off the radar. He paid attention and the Gospel continues

Matthew begins his Gospel be telling us that we need to pay attention because something is happening because everything is connected. Later on, he remembers Jesus warning that there will be wars and rumors of wars but they would need to pay attention to a deeper truth that the Risen Christ will be with is us even to the end of the ages.

Again to quote from Frederick Buechner:
If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”


Paying Attention
Long journey from Christmas to Epiphany
took twelve days for some Zoroastrian priests
bringing precious presents out of the easts,
of the frankincense, myrrh and gold brilliantly.
Getting to the house, they dropped the gifts,
got down on their knees, the formulas saying,
spent some more time to their God praying,
and left giving Herod's report short shrifts.
Basically, that is what we are called to do;
dropping our treasures and our conclusions,
remaining open to see desires as illusions,
defining reality as if we didn't have a clue.
This is a wondrous universe made for awe
where the holiest prayer is a joyous guffaw.



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