Turning The Other Cheek

A Poem and Reflection for the Sunday after All Saints         St. Andrew’s, Nags Head, N.C.

November 3, 2019                                                                  Thomas E. Wilson, Supply Clergy

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18      Psalm 149       Ephesians 1:11-23      Luke 6:20-31

Turning The Other Cheek

Today is the Sunday after All Saints Day and one of the things we will do today is to re-affirm our Baptismal Covenant. It is when we remember who we are, Christians living the dream of Jesus. It is the Day we remember those people in our lives who made a difference in this life with us but are now on the “Other Shore”, away from our sight but never away from our love. This is a day when we remember that we are Saints.


Fellow Saints . . . Now I can see that some of you are looking at me as if I was laboring under the misapprehension that I or you are perfect beings. No, I know that you and I are far from perfect in our actions, thoughts and desires. I am aware that all of us have violated at least 6 of the 10 Commandments in the last week by thought, word or deed. I know you want to rationalize that you at least did not kill someone, but remember the phrase “by thought, word, or deed”. Yet you are a Saint. Wilson’s definition of a Saint comes not from a behavioral viewpoint, what you do, but from an ontological viewpoint, what is your state of being, who you are, like it or not.


Who are you? We like to use terms that limit us like sex, race, gender, age, family, political affiliation, nationality, mental health status, economic class or system preference. Yet none of those tell us the core of our being. The Biblical view of Saint is any dog-faced person who has an awareness that they are creatures of something greater than themselves. When Paul in the New Testament writes to the “Saints” living in Ephesus, Corinth, Rome or wherever, he is writing to each member of that Christian Community in that area, good or bad. 


We have a choice on how closely we pay attention to that awareness, but in each of us, the images of God, there is the implanted seed of the holy; of that no one has a choice. Each of us, good behaving or bad as all get out, is loved by the Holy. Holy Love has nothing to do with approval of behavior. God is bigger than any creed or doctrine.


During the time Jesus is living, the Roman Occupying forces make it difficult to love them. The soldiers will march wherever they like. If a Roman Soldier commands a Jew to pick up the Roman Soldiers’ pack, under the law the Jew must carry the pack for a set distance. If a Roman soldier slaps you on the face to get you out of the way and you stand up to him and slap him back, then you would be killed for striking against the majesty of Rome. If a Roman Soldier demands your coat it will become the soldier’s property, or you will be arrested and thrown in jail. This is what it is like to live in an occupied territory by a hated enemy. This is the reality of everyday life for the followers of Jesus in 1^st century AD Judea. How can you love someone who is your enemy? How can you love someone who doesn’t even to seem aware of the fact that he or she has the seed of the holy about them?


Jesus suggests that there is a way if we can change our way of thinking. If we think that everything seems to belong to us for our own happiness and to build up our prideful egos; then we are missing the point about being a saint and steward who lives by a belief that all life is a gift and the response is meant to be: “All things come from Thee, O Lord and of thine own do we give back to you.”


If you see your enemy as a beloved of God who has just forgotten who she or he is, then the response to an enemy is to lovingly call him or her back to a proper relationship with themselves, with neighbor, and with God. So how do we respond to the soldier who strikes us on the cheek? Since the way we usually strike someone on the cheek if we have contempt for them as less than a real human being, an object not a subject, is to use the back of our hand as a slap. If you are not thinking like the Saint you are, there seems to be two choices, 1) fight back and lose bigtime, or 2) hate yourself for your own weakness and carry bitterness in your heart. Jesus suggests that Saints have a 3^rd choice; that you take this attempt at humiliation as an opportunity to give a new perspective on reality. He suggests that we stand up and say something. “Excuse me my brother, out of your arrogance, you have dismissed me as a human being, an object not a subject, I want you to treat me as an equal and slug me with your fist. You do not take anything from me, but I give you my other cheek. It is my gift out of love.” It might not help you, but if enough people do it the soldier might be tempted to be less full of arrogance down the line. 


How about the coat demanded by the soldier? Take the power of arrogance away from him and strip down to your skivvies or less and give them away to him. It will be his shame and not yours, your love not his hate, your blessing not his curse that will be remembered.


How about the pack for the certain distance, say a mile? You will say, “That was the requirement of the law but out of love, I will carry it a second mile.” No one can deprive you of what you have already decided to give away for God’s Kingdom.


For those of us who lived through the 1960’s we saw this in action during the Civil Rights struggles. Instead of one White bigot who slaps a Black person off the sidewalk because the Black person did not follow an unjust law and the Black person carried the shame. But now, the protesters say; “The law which you live by is contemptuous toward me and my family. Instead of my chocking it down in shame, I will proudly sit down before you and you will have to arrest me to call this injustice, to your attention. There will not be enough room in the jails, enough time in the courts, enough stomach in the people who pay you to put up with this shining a spotlight on the hate you live by. I will pray for you as I give myself, as a steward of my own body, into your care out of love for you.”


The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a vision of non-violent confrontation and he expressed and lived the dream. Daniel in the Hebrew Testament lesson for today turned to dreams to live into the hope of the future today. Jesus taught a dream of love by Saints so that Society can be changed wherever and whenever we find ourselves. 


Fellow Saints, how can we respond in love to be in solidarity against the arrogance of our society we live with now and which we support by our silence? Tell, and live, the truth about a reality where everyone of God’s creatures has the seed of the Holy within them. Think about turning the other cheek as a matter of stewardship; being an example of how to live without arrogance. Hold on to the dreams and visions to give us examples from the past, strength for the present and hope for the future. Saints are the ones who wake up to remember and hold on to their dreams. As the song goes: “(F)or the saints of God are just folk like me and I mean to be one too.”

Turning the Other Cheek

He asks me to be steward of my enemies?

My enemies can take care of themselves,

I don’t want to do all things Jesus compels,

like turning the other cheek as my penalties

for following, knowing I’ll get other slugged.

He wants me to be as vulnerable as he was,

to give love a chance to change the old laws

of eye for eye to be abandoned, shrugged.

I’m to let the enemy know all of me fully,

seeing me not as an object, but a subject

proclaiming all be treated with respect

even if they seem to act to me as a bully.

We need freedom from old ways of thinking

to grow in peace with arms and lives linking.

Looking At My Brother During Prayer

A Poem/Reflection for XX Pentecost Proper 25C                 St. Andrew’s, Nags Head, N.C.
 October 27, 2019                                                                      Thomas E. Wilson, Supply

Joel 2:23-32                  Psalm 65          2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18                          Luke 18:9-14

 Looking At My Brother During Prayers

Jesus is telling another story, this time about two men going to pray at the Temple. The Jerusalem Temple was considered an exceptionally Holy Space where one was closer to God. My theology says that it doesn’t matter where I am, God is as close as my breath. However, a quarter of a century ago, when Pat and I were studying at St. George’s College in Jerusalem during my Sabbatical, I got a sense of the Holy Space unexpectantly.  The only part of the old Temple left accessible is the Western, or sometimes called the “Wailing”, Wall at the foot of the Temple Mount. 

Jerusalem was originally a Jebusite City until it was conquered by David in the 11^th Century BC. The early Canaanites used to set up Holy Shrines on the top of hills to worship their Gods like Baal and Ashtoreth. When David conquered the city, he brought in a portable shrine as a place of worship and left the Canaanite Shrines in place. His son Solomon built a bigger and more impressive place of worship, a Temple, next to, and overshadowing the hilltop shrines to the Canaanite Gods.  Later, under Josiah, there was a period of reform where those hilltop Canaanite shrines were removed. However, the Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC but rebuilt after the exile. It was not as grand as the old Temple, but it was adequate. When the Romans wanted to help the reign of their puppet, Herod the Great, they underwrote much of the cost of refurbishing the Temple with a massive Public Works Campaign. The Temple Religious authorities, the Pharisees and the Sadducees all liked the new Temple because it was a great complex because it fed their ego needs of “importance” and provided a good income stream. 


Jesus had reservations about it because it did not help people get closer to God only closer to a religious ritual which had little to do with real life. One of the reasons that the religious authorities and the Romans wanted to crucify Jesus was that he did not appreciate the big, beautiful Temple sitting on the top of the Temple Mount and he disrupted the services. Jesus was only one of many of the troublemaker’s who spoke and demonstrated against the corrupt system. Thirty plus years later there was a revolt against the Roman Occupiers and in 70 AD the Roman Legions under Titus destroyed the Temple as many people remembered Jesus’ words about the Temple being destroyed. If you go to Rome you can see the Arch of Titus showing the looting of the Temple and the bringing of the Menorah back to Rome for the Triumph. 


In 135 AD after another unsuccessful Jewish revolt, the Roman Emperor Hadrian expelled all Jews from Jerusalem and built a Temple to the Roman God Jupiter over the spot where the Jewish Temple had once been.  In the 4^th Century, after the Roman Emperor Constantine became a Christian, he tore down the Temple of Jupiter and built an octagonal shaped Christian church and shrine on that spot.  In the 7^th Century the Muslims conquered Jerusalem and tore down the Octagonal church and erected an octagonal shrine, the Dome of the Rock, and followed that with building the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which became the 3^rd most Holy Muslim site. This last week a riot of a couple thousand Jewish settlers raided the Mosque to show their faith on a Jewish Holiday. Obviously, over the centuries people of many religions carried the conviction that one place is more Holy than another place.   


On one of  my Sabbaticals, I went to the Temple Mount and stood in line to go the wall to offer my prayers. There were pieces of paper you could write your concerns and then walk up to the wall and place the paper between the rocks. Access to the wall was divided with a small section off to the side where women could approach and pray. On the male section, I noticed that the devout Jewish men were weaving and bobbing in their prayers probably the remnants of ancient forgotten dance, all liturgy begins as a dance, but still alive in the preconscious of deep prayer. I found myself moving in my prayer.   I slipped my prayers into the wall for some of my parishioners back in Virginia, separated from me by time zones, seas, oceans and thousands of miles away but as close as a breath of a prayer.


All meaningful prayer is meant to draw us closer to what we imagine is God and our neighbor. There is a scene in Hamlet when Hamlet’s Uncle/Stepfather is kneeling to pray. Hamlet thinks Claudius is in a state of Grace praying, so he plans his revenge for later. However, after Hamlet leaves, Claudius gets up and confesses: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts cannot to heaven go.” The inner conversation he was having was not with God but with himself.


 The story that Jesus is telling is about two men who are in the Holy Place and both look like they are praying. The Pharisee is not in conversation with God but stays in his own ego as he sneers to himself about the deficiencies of the sinner. He does the outward form of the prayer, but his thoughts remain below. The other man, the sinner, is in a conversation with God and listening to hear the love of God come through, even though he is a sinner. He is part of a Holy Dialogue.

A couple weeks ago I looked in the closet of the Rector’s office and I found a bunch of pictures in frames. Since I knew that some candidates might be coming to look over the place, I decided to bring them out and put them on the wall to give an impression of an inviting space instead of an empty room. One of the pictures was a copy of the Icon, The Hospitality of Abraham, by Russian Orthodox Painter, and Saint, Andrei Rublev which he did in 1411. On the surface it depicts the three strangers whom Abraham invited to dinner. However, as the story goes on in Genesis, the three men are a depiction of God bringing the good news of the child to be born for Abraham. The Christian understanding of the Three Visitors is the Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Spirit sitting at the table in dialogue with each other. Henri Nouwen wrote about this Icon:

The more we look at this holy image with the eyes of faith, the more we come to realize that it is painted not as a lovely decoration for a convent church, nor as a helpful explanation of a difficult doctrine, but as a holy place to enter and stay within.

As we place ourselves in front of the icon in prayer, we come to experience a gentle invitation to participate in the intimate conversation that is taking place among the three divine angels and to join them around the table.  The movement from the Father toward the Son and the movement of both Son and Spirit toward the Father become a movement in which the one who prays is lifted up and held secure…

We come to see with our inner eyes that all engagements in this world can bear fruit only when they take place within this divine circle… the house of perfect love (Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons, p. 20-22).

As I started preparing for this reflection and Poem I tried to remember when I was first made aware during the time when I was supposed to be Praying when in the presence of someone else. A memory came to me of when I was about 8 years old. My older (by one year and four days) brother and I were sharing a bedroom and were kneeling at the side of our beds. My Father was there putting us to bed after singing a couple songs which we loved. One was often the “Wreck of Old 97”, which for some strange reason we loved even though one of the verses ended, “He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle, scalded to death by the steam.” But as Paul was praying before it was my turn; I was aware of how jealous I was of my big brother. I wanted to stop and point out to my father all of Paul’s faults so my Father would take my side. I was desperately thinking like the Pharisee in this story that Jesus tells: “I am better than that one over there!” Somehow, I think it was the grace of God, I kept on script and did my “lay me down to sleep” without giving my fragile ego a chance to feel better at someone else’s expense.


This was not the last time I would have this opportunity. I am almost 73 years old now and this happened when I was 8; so, it has been about an average of 80 times a year for the last 65 years- you do the math – I’ve got my shoes on. 


Over the years I have had to learn a new way of dealing when an uninvited person comes into my prayer and meditation time. Before I pass judgment, I have learned to ask this uninvited person inside my imagination, “Why are you here?” Sometimes the person who comes in is my projection of all the things I have in my shadow that I don’t want to admit but have dumped on to this poor soul. Like I was doing with Paul. I have come to realize that often it is God’s part of the conversation to invite me to not go back to empty ritual where “my words fly up but my thoughts remain below” ritual; but God is placing this person there  for me to pray for, forgive or care for a fellow child of God, my brother or sister, born from another DNA with whom I need to get into a Holy Conversation at this Holy Place.


How goes it with your prayers? As Stewards of your conversations with God your Father, Christ your brother and the Holy Spirit holding you together, how are you dealing with the uninvited guests in your prayers?



Looking At My Brother During Prayers

I wanted to tell my father about my brother

of all the shortcomings Paul had within him,

how Dad should look at him with eyes grim,

and he’d look at me, bragging to my mother.

Didn’t want to tell him I wanted to be like Paul,

his being handsome with that ease and charm,

which I so envied but could only do as smarm,

then a retreat that was less a walk than a crawl.

Years later, Paul and Dad are dead, but not gone,

for their love for me was not based on approval

of which one of us God considered more useful

based on the hard lines my jealousy had drawn.

My father saw us both as his sons, beloved both

because each of us were cut out of the same cloth.

An Impatient Lover

A Poem/ Reflection for XIX Pentecost, Proper 24 C                         St. Andrew's, Nags Head, N.C.

October 20, 2019                                                                                Thomas E. Wilson, Supply

Jeremiah 31:27-34      Psalm 119:97-104         2 Timothy 3:14-4:5        Luke 18:1-8

An Impatient Lover

Today the Gospel lesson from Luke is a story that Jesus is telling which is usually called something like “The Unjust Judge” or “The Importune Widow”. A lot depends on who we think is the main character of the story. When Jesus tells a Parable, the point of the story is to tell us about God, God is the reason for the story. For instance, there is another story that Luke has Jesus tell which we like to call “The Prodigal Son”, but the point of the story is not about the son but the Father who loves his child so much that he is constantly watching for his son's return to welcome him back home. Where are we in the story; where is God in the story? Often it depends on where we are in life.


Let’s step back for a minute and see how the editor of Luke made decisions on how to put these stories together. Since I have been here as your supply clergy the Gospel reading are set in the journey of Jesus after he set his mind to go to Jerusalem, beginning in the 14^th Chapter. even when he knows what will likely happen to him there. He knows there will probably be an unjust Judge waiting for him. He knows he will be asking for Justice and he will probably not get it unless the Judge is persuaded by people pleading for justice on his behalf. You all know what will happen as the crowd turns on Jesus and asks that he be crucified, wanting law rather than justice. 


Last week we talked about the story of Jesus and the 10 Lepers, which is in the 17^th Chapter. The beginning of the 18^th chapter is a discussion with the Pharisees who are asking him clever questions like “Well since you say the Kingdom of God is coming and you are so smart; give us the time and date when it will show up?” Jesus answers that the “Kingdom of God is among you, right here and right now!” Jesus then turns to his disciples and warns them that things will change quickly, so be prepared. They ask him “Where?” He finishes his warning with a disquieting phrase; “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” Jesus knows what is coming.


The editor of Luke probably said to himself, “This story of the Unjust Judge fits right here after the warning of the corpse.” What is the editor trying to tell us? Is the story of Jesus complaining to the Judge, God, to grant him justice and save him from being an early corpse? And the answer could be to continue praying, for God, the judge, might still interfere. In which case we in St. Andrew’s in the beginning of our Stewardship Campaign would be to say that our stewardship is to pray unceasingly, and; oh by the way, the church needs time, talent and treasure to keep the place open for you to pray. 


Well the church DOES need the time, talent and treasure, so that could be a place to stop. My usual spiel is to say that God or the church does not push equal gifts, but equal sacrifice, not an average pledge but a loving commitment. 


Except, I want to go in a different direction. It is almost too easy to see God as the Judge. Remember that Jesus does the unexpected. I was thinking that God is not the Judge but the Widow, crying out for justice. What happened to the widow may have been legal, but it was not just. There can be a real difference between law and justice. Laws are made and enforced to bring order out of chaos for the benefit of some and the detriment of others, because we, who are comfortable hold on to the illusion that we live in a divinely ordained competitive system between winners and losers, saints and sinners. Joseph Fletcher proposed that “Justice is love distributed”, from the winners to the losers to bring about equality and equity. Reinhold Niebuhr said: “Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not ... Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” 


Popular culture tends to like the image of the Male God as the final High Judge who will weigh the balance between the breaking and keeping of the Divine Laws. But in this story Jesus suggests that God is in the image of the woman, who pleads for justice to be done. Who are we in the story? There are times when I am the one who says, “I just don't want to be bothered with this idea of justice. I worked hard for where I have gotten. Leave me alone!” Yet God, she is a real nag, keeps showing me where injustice is being done and I am a beneficiary of that injustice. Back to Niebuhr who looked at the human family and said:

Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can only be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice. Justice requires that we carefully weigh rights and privileges and assure that each member of a community receives his due share. Love does not weigh rights and privileges too carefully because it prompts each to bear the burden of the other . . .Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.

In Jesus' story there is a woman who is the image of God, who loves and is a lover calling for Justice from outside of our windows through which we want to separate ourselves from our neighbor. She does not call for generosity out of the goodness of our hearts or out of pity but out of loving Justice. The message of God remains the same from the importune widow to the prophet Micah, eight centuries before Jesus' vision, who asks, “What does the LORD require of you, but to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.”


God, she, keeps crying out to us and we keep silent in word and deed. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King wrote in his Letter From the Birmingham Jail to White Christians: “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”


God, she keeps crying out to us and sometimes we are moved to say, “I can keep silent in word or deed no longer.” When I reflected on the lesson, I realized that the woman was not crying out to an uncaring God but God, she was speaking to the uncaring side of me declaring her love. She is asking me to look at the plight of the victims of war in Syria and work for justice. To speak out more to my representatives in Congress about the treatment of people asking for sanctuary from violence and poverty. 


Closer to home; how can we respond in a loving way to the victims of the hurricane, Dorian, on Hatteras Island and Ocracoke? How can we respond to neighbors who are in trouble? This week I was encouraged as the members of the St. Andrew’s Brotherhood at their Tuesday breakfast talked about the projects that they were doing to give their strength and sweat to help a family; it had nothing to do with the law but it had everything to do with justice as love distributed. 


How will you answer the Stewardship request of time, talent and treasure, from St. Andrew’s church? These are some of the choices:

(1)  Ignore it, since the church did not do what you wanted on something or another over the last year. You are under no legal obligation to support the ministry of the church if it swerves from your wishes.

(2) Do a cost benefit analysis of the going market rate for the services you received. So many dollars for the sermons that you found helpful, visits that were healing, hymns that ministered to you, etc. You are under no legal obligation to pay more that the going rate for religious merchandise.

(3)  Figure out your fair share and divide the budget by the number of parishioners to get the amount of your bill. You are under no legal obligation to pay more than your “fair” share.

(4) Decide you are going to be a Patron and give an amount that would fit your status in the community to support an institution of which you approve. It may be a way to get a legal tax deduction.

(5) Go to the Books of the Law in the Old Testament and read the legal requirement to give 10% off the top, talking with your accountant to find out if that means gross or net of time, talent and treasure and then talk about charity in addition to that.

(6) Do standard fund raising; figuring out how much money needs to be raised to meet the budget. Then appoint a group of people to go through the roster of membership and friends of the church and do a sales campaign on them on a level of giving what you think they need to give. Divide up the givers into categories like angel, archangels, seraphs, cherubim, etc, and post the names on the church wall. The focus will be on the survival of the religious institution. Don’t waste time with prayer and reaching out to do justice by keeping it business like.

(7) Go beyond the legal and calculating into the loving and just. Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God by praying and listening to our impatient lover. Then give what you can in time, talent and treasure based on your prayers as a gift of loving justice, not a tax on faith.

In my meditation, and in my prayer as I began the poem. I thought that God was just not the Importune Widow calling but the Impatient Lover calling me to love. In my meditation there were three people: (1) the Impatient lover as God, she, calling to me to love and do justice in return, (2) the Priest, the religious conservative in me, is having difficulty hearing that kind of prayer from God, and (3) Me, trying to figure out which voice to follow.  As I share the poem with you, now there are (4) you! What voice do you hear?

An Impatient Lover

Turning up to air she said “Tell me,

share what’s in your heart, my love.

To my hand you are like a glove

covering my very soul with thee.”

The Priest harrumphed, “Tis not

seemly that you’d speak out thus

in prayer as if you were giving a buss

on divine lips. Not respect as we’re taught.”

She replied, “I’ll have no need for shame,

for my whole being longs to be known,

as child, maiden, lover and old crone,

entwined by love beyond any name.

Out of impatient love I’ll dare to yell,

harridan like, till your distance I’d quell.”

Living With the Eyes of the 10th Leper.

A Reflection for XVIII Pentecost                                          St. Andrew’s, Nags Head 

October 13, 2019                                                                   Thomas E Wilson, Supply 

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7                         Psalm 66:1-11            2 Timothy 2:8-15              Luke 17:11-19        Living With the Eyes of the 10th Leper 

I try to begin each day the same way. Before my feet touch the floor, I try to give thanks. I walk out into the predawn morning when the world is also just awakening and sounds of the changing of the guard whisper in the maritime forest where I live. The foxes, opossums, coyotes, feral cats and racoons are returning to their lairs and owls to their nests as the deer and morning birds are beginning to stir. It is the time before many people awaken, so the lights in their houses are few. We don’t have streetlights in my neighborhood so the only light we have are the stars, moon and flashlights to light our paths.  

Often I will walk on to the Beach, drawn by the pull of any body of water, be it lake, pond, river, ocean. Water is an ancient archetypal symbol of the unconscious; a place where you are invited to stop and meditate to go deeper, under the surface, and listen to what the numinous spirit might be trying to say to us when we are too busy to listen to God. In that silence, words, images and symbols come to the fore and take me to paths that bypass my ego.  

On that dark shore I will face due east to where the rising sun has yet to suggest Homer’s “rosy fingered dawn”.  But as I look east I also realize that it is a real long “wade in the water children” until the next landing which might be Casablanca in African Morocco. Last week I sang to myself the old African American Spiritual, Wade In The Water- “Children. God’s a gonna trouble the water.” Often I will be in awe and in speaking to God, I return to the sacred script and repeat the last line from the movie Casablanca, where Bogart turns to Claude Raines and says, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” 

I am a movie freak and much of my theology is influenced by films. The story of Casablanca follows what Joseph Campbell in his book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, calls a “monomyth”, the archetype of classic mythic hero saga story line of finding oneself. In these stories, “the cave you fear to enter is where you will find your treasure.” Rick, the Café owner has been broken from his past and is isolated even from himself. His recovery begins when he must enter the troubled waters to reintegrate the past into his present, having gratitude for the past, able let the past go and move on into a new present with hope for the future. 

I think one of the themes of the lessons for this Sunday is part of that classic mythic hero saga archetype which is our faith. Jeremiah in the Hebrew Testament lesson for today writes to the people in captive exile in Babylon, cut off from their past. He urges them to learn from the lessons of the past, claim it and then let it go to embrace a new present with hope for the future where they are now living. God has troubled the waters for them so they can wade in. Instead of living in the dead past they are urged to seek to work for the welfare of the community where they can live being stewards of a new present there with a hope for God’s future. The Babylonian Captivity is the cave they fear to enter, and it is where they find their treasure. It is in Babylon where they find what it means to be faithful God’s people in a strange land. In faith they can say, “I think this is the beginning of a new beautiful friendship with God.” 

The Psalmist for today sings of the past the captive people in Babylon have gone through and how they went through water and fire and then came out of the troubled waters into a new present of which they are stewards. Their response to all the caves they feared to enter is to encounter the treasure of the mission to sing “Praise the LORD all ye lands.” In faith they can say, “I think this is the beginning of a new beautiful friendship with God.” 

In the 2nd letter to Timothy, the Pauline writer tells of Paul’s hardship as he waded in the waters of following the Risen Christ. Paul integrated the difficult past with gratitude for all the hardships he has gone through so that he might be a joyful steward of the present with hope for the future. The cave he feared of following the Risen Lord, is where he found the treasure of life lived fully in thanksgiving. In faith the writer can say, “I think this is the beginning of a new beautiful friendship with God for you Timothy.” 

In the Gospel lesson from Luke, the editor of Luke has Jesus walking to Jerusalem through the border lands of Samaria and Galilee. Two things about border lands: 1) it is where you give up the past and prepare to enter an unfamiliar future, and 2) border lands are where people who do not really fit in are pushed into. The people in Galilee did not like, or trust, the people of Samaria and vice versa. This is the kind of place that Lepers from both sides of the border would be shuffled into. This is where Jesus must go through Samaria in order to get to Jerusalem. Galilee is his home base and he must leave his past, enter the area of Samaria where he is seen as an outsider, wading in the water of people wanting to stay in their old past. Jesus tries to bring a new present into the lives of people he meets, and he moves to an unknown and uncertain, future in Jerusalem. Jesus is entering the outskirts of the cave any sane person would fear to enter, but it will be where he finds his greatest treasure, his reason for ministry. 

Jesus sees himself as a steward of God gifts to help people into a new present. The mixed bag of ten Galilean and Samaritan Lepers approach him as he is entering the village. I envision them running out of their hovels in the gullies away from the village and since they, in their disease, will not be allowed to enter the village, they call out to him. Pleading for mercy before he goes away into the village where there is not mercy available. 

Jesus doesn’t do any religious mumbo-jumbo, but he looks upon the Lepers with his mercy and in his vision, he sees that they are healed. Jesus’ vision changes their reality and they only need a Priest’s certification in order to get back into their lives they had before the disease struck them. They rush off, eager to embrace the past. Except, one leper, a Samaritan, seeing that he is already being healed stops in order to give thanks. That is what stewardship is –stopping and giving thanks for all that we received and saying in essence “I think this is the beginning of a deeper beautiful friendship with you Jesus.” 

The other nine lepers are just eager to go back to the past as if nothing had ever happened to them. They do not want to wade in the water of a new life. They saw the Jesus experience as like a public utility where you turn on a switch without thinking enough to enter a relationship with it in real life. Jesus suggests that while all ten lepers were relieved of their disease, it is only the 10th leper’s faith had been made whole. Not only is his skin healed from leprosy, but his eyes have been made whole seeing the new reality of God’s presence in this world. The Samaritan Leper who feared entering the cave of meeting Jesus, finds his treasure of being whole. He has been able to integrate the past, embrace the present and have hope for the future. Being a Steward is living with the eyes of the 10th Leper. 

The theme of the lessons is also the theme of this time in St. Andrew’s Church. The past is gone, and we are grateful for what we have been able to integrate it, as it is the time to wade deeper into the water of the present with hope for the future. I know you did not want to enter the cave of a search, but my prayer is that process will bring you the treasure of a deeper faith and vision for this church. Your new Rector, it is hoped, will not promise a return to the past but ask you to integrate it into the new future together. It will take people with a vision. We need to pray for the vestry and the search committee and the congregation who all need to have the vision to claim the past, wade with courage into the present and hope, and work, and give, in faith for the future of God’s vision for the future. 

Our prayer is there will soon be a day when you are able to say to her or him; “Louise (or Louis) (or whomever), I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” 

Living With The Eyes of the 10th Leper 

Climbing out of bed, looking as she slept, 

realizing that there was nothing he'd done 

that could have earned him this prize won, 

yet she was, in his life, as a treasured gift. 

Walking predawn, dark beach lit by stars, 

looking due east toward rising sun way, 

imagining the tide washing issues away, 

so he could place thanks, healing by God's 

hands, emptying out love beyond measure 

so that each day was filled with gratitude,  

where life wasn't empty, but newly viewed, 

FULL of abundant time, talent and treasure. 

Heaven was not reserved for life afterwards 

but a full life now, lived as Christ's stewards.