A Reflection and Poem for XVII Pentecost C Proper 22 St. Andrew’s Church, Nags Head, N.C.
October 6, 2019 Thomas E Wilson, Supply
Faith As Mustard Seed
I promised you last week that I would spend some time talking about Stewardship, yet all of my reflections and poems have to do with Stewardship. Again, Stewardship is not just about how much money we send to the church but about all of life. Today I want to talk about the Stewardship of grievances. How do we faithfully deal with grievances and hurts?
Last week in the reflection for that Sunday, the Hebrew Testament lesson predicted the fall of Jerusalem and the Hebrew Testament lessons for today from Lamentations and Psalm 137 have to do with the grievances of the people after the fall and destruction of Jerusalem, the Temple and the way of life they knew as they went into the bondage and exile to Babylon.
The song of the 137th Psalm speaks of the bitterness of life by the Waters of Babylon, where they sat down and wept, hanging their harps for singing to God on the branches of the trees. They longed for the day when the Daughters of Babylon would be made to pay and suffer for what had happened to the children of Judah as the Babylonian children would be slaughtered before their mother’s eyes. I left out the 9th verse of the Psalm on the bulletin because the10:30 is a “family service” and I did not think it would be helpful to our smaller children to carry that horrific image with them as they left the church.
The Gospel Lesson from Luke picks up in the 5th verse after the disciples asked if they are to forgive someone who has hurt them seven times a day and seven times asks for forgiveness. The seven times imagery calls forth the idea of completeness but that is held in tension with Proverbs 24:16, “For though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes.” The disciples, in their lives before Jesus, had all been taught that seven is the magic number. You are allowed seven times, and that is it. It was a little like baseball’s three strikes and after that you are out. Jesus just ups the number from seven to forty-nine. When Matthew remembers this story, he remembers Jesus upping it to seventy times seven or 490. The disciples tell Jesus that they are going to have a lot more faith if they are to keep forgiving at that rate, for they already knew some folk they could never forgive once, much less 490 times.
Jesus says that if you have the faith of a mustard seed, the weight of a one, one hundredth of one percent of an ounce, you could do what you think was impossible. He was telling them that with mere human power forgiveness is very difficult but with God’s Spirit. all things are possible.
Let me share some thoughts from Roman Catholic Priest Father Carl J. Arico of Contemplative Outreach Ltd., when he asks us to reflect on Alexander Pope’s aphorism “to err is human to forgive divine.”
When I conduct a workshop
I like to have the participants do a little exercise. I divide them into 4
sections and ask them to repeat after me.
Section one is asked to
say “to err is human’ Section four is asked to say “to forgive is divine”
Then I ask section 2 to say “I don’t know how
to do it” And section 3 says “I don’t want to do it”.
I then say that there is no way of joining the
wisdom of sections 1 and 4 without seriously dealing with section 2 and
definitely with section 3...
There is no leaping from to err is human -
over to forgive is divine.
Let me give you an example from our own bodies. We breathe in and oxygen goes deep into our lungs and through the lungs, in the capillaries and through the entire blood system bringing life and fullness. The blood cleans the body of the garbage of carbon dioxide and then when you exhale the body is freed from that poison. But suppose you only breathe shallowly, so there is not enough oxygen to do the work of cleaning out the poison and the poison stays within you.
The word that the Bible uses for Spirit is, in the Greek “pneuma” or Hebrew “ruach”. These are also the same words, in both of the Biblical languages, used for breath and wind. It is the breath of God that is blown into the lungs of Adam to bring the breath of life; it is the breath of the Risen Lord that brings the Holy Spirit to the disciples in the locked room, it is the wind of the Spirit that blows the apostles out of the Upper Room into the world at Pentecost.
My prayers revolve around prayer during meditation and contemplation; breathing in deeply of God’s graceful spirit flowing through me, renewing my soul and then breathing out cleansing all those anxieties and distractions which gather around like monkeys in a tree, breathing out to set them free. What happens if I decide to hold on to fear? I forget to breathe deeply of God’s peace. Or, if I decide to hold on to a grudge, or long for revenge? Resentments are not so easily chased out of the trees of my mind because I do not want to let them go. I do not want to let them go until the person who I think hurt me, or hurt the people I love, will beg for forgiveness. I console myself by seeing them twist slowly in the wind until they get their comeuppance, which I masquerade with the veneer of justice to cover the desire for revenge I will choose to not breathe deeply of God’s Spirit and all the poison remains in me.
The problem is that when I am in this mindset, I rationalize that forgiveness is dependent, if I think the offender deserved forgiveness when they asked, which I could grant or withhold as I saw fit. But real forgiveness is not for their good but for mine. Every minute of every day the poisons build up, one drop at a time, titrating in a unholy cocktail mixture of resentment rather than hope, bitterness rather than love, separation rather than union, the past instead of the present, withholding rather than giving, being bound rather than free. All this takes a wheelbarrow full of energy to maintain the barriers of my pride instead of the openness of my heart.
Jesus tells us that all it takes is a one one hundredths of one percent of trust that all will be redeemed. Dame Julian of Norwich in the14th Century had a vision:
“And
in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the
palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon
it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it
was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might
last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness.
And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves
it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.
In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”
In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”
If I can look at my enemy and see her or him in that small ball that God made, loves and keeps, then I can send my self-centeredness out to lunch and turn them over to God. If they will hurt someone else, out of love I must work to stop them. If what they are doing is unjust, I must defend the vulnerable person. If they hurt me as an accident, then I need to grow up and acknowledge that accidents happen in this broken world. If they hurt me out of ignorance, I must lovingly teach them. If they hurt me out of the pain in themselves I, out of love for them, try to bring healing to them. If all they did is to hurt my pride, I need to remind myself that I am not the center of the universe, and that the position of savior of the universe has already been taken by someone with a better resume than mine.
Voltaire use to make fun of God by saying; “God forgives; that’s his job.” Yet, through what we see in the experience of Jesus; that does seem close to the truth, as God is faithful to God’s very self. We in the image of God , maybe it is our job to forgive. When he was being nailed to a cross, Jesus cried out, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” When I use my .01 percent of mustard seed of faith to turn an enemy over to God’s love, I live into being a follower of Jesus. As Dame Julian wrote; “The greatest honor we can give Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love.”
So how goes it with you in your stewardship of dealing with the hurts and grievances of the past? It always helps to add a mustard topping to that hot dog.
Faith As Mustard Seed
He pondered; “How big was a mustard seed?
.01 percent of an ounce didn’t seem too much
compared when all the other weights as such,
like a resentment around a remembered deed
done unto him, so many decades of years ago
when another thoughtless child or adult said,
something that he took as a slur when read
in the light of his own self- doubt as a blow.
How much weight did the wanting revenge
pull on soul, refusing to overlook or forgive,
for it’s one more thing his ego won’t outlive,
unless giving Spirit permission to transcend?
“Let it go”, he heard the voice, "to be set free.
Breathe out past, for poisons aren’t for thee.”
Still working on forgiveness- a daily struggle to let the past go.
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