A Poem/Reflection for II Lent St.
Andrew's Episcopal, Nags Head, N.C. March 8, 2020 Thomas E.
Wilson, Supply Clergy
Leaving
As I reflected on the lessons for
today, I was struck on how often an image came forward when a person,
Abraham, the Psalmist, Paul, or Nicodemus, stands at a door, physical
or metaphorical, in the process of making a decision to leave for an
uncertain future that seems to be calling, or to stay where the
present is predictable and safe.
There is Abram, in the Hebrew Testament
lesson, who has a life where he takes his sheep out to pastures near
Ur of the Chaldees where he and his family had pastured over the
generations. Except now he, in his spiritual imagination, hears and
feels a calling to go – where? God knows where, but Abram doesn't.
Ur of the Chaldees had been a womb for Abram and it was time for him
to be born into a new life as Abraham.
There is the Psalmist who sings about
lifting up his or her eyes to the hills where he knows and being told
that he needs to look further and deeper, to look into the soul of
the maker of Heaven and Earth. The early settlers of the Promised
land went to high hills to set up their idols to worship their Gods by
being closer to the sky, the dwelling place of the Gods. The Psalmist
looks at the hills and finds that she or he needs to leave the old
comfortable and domesticated Gods and enter into a new relationship
with the power above, behind, in, over and through all creation.
Before seminary, I lived in the
mountains of western North Carolina where each day I had a chance,
using the King James Version, to repeat to myself, “I lift up mine
eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my salvation!” Most of the
time I ended the verse with an exclamation point rather than a
question mark, leading on to the second verse. The psalm really ends
with the decision to not place my trust in geography, but in the one
who is with me in “my going out and coming in” of my journey. The
Mountains of Western North Carolina had been a cocoon for me and it
was time for me to leave it.
Paul, in the lesson from Romans for
today, uses the image of Abraham to parallel his own journey from
being a Pharisee whose lived his life sure in the rightness of
following the law scrupulously to being tossed off his his high horse
of pride and having to depend on God's Grace. The comfort of the easy
answers of the religious law had been a tomb for Saul and it was time
for him to be resurrected as Paul.
In John's Gospel lesson for today,
Jesus is meeting with Nicodemus, who wants to hold on to the
certainty of the life he had chosen. This is a comedy routine with a
pun, that the Johannine community of the Beloved Disciple used to
laugh as much as I used to laugh at the old Abbot and Costello
routine “Who is on First?” The pun is in the Greek word “anothen”
can mean again, or from the
beginning, or from above. Jesus is telling him that he needs to leave
behind the old dead stuff he is practicing, die to it and then be be
born, live, into a new life based on God's grace not the traditions
of religion. Nicodemus misses the point and gets all literal; being
literal is one of the classic defenses against the spiritual.
Nicodemus asks how can he climb back into his mother's womb and be
born “deutero”, a second time. Nicodemus lives in a womb, tomb,
and cocoon of arrogant religious tradition and as John's Gospel
relates, it was time for him to leave so that he might be born again
in his faith by walking humbly with his God, doing justice in arguing
in the Sanhedrin against the condemnation of Jesus and loving mercy
by helping to bury his friend.
Leaving the past behind is something that happens all through scripture. The Hebrew children had to leave Egypt to go through the wilderness following Moses in order to leave behind injustice and enter into a Promised Land. Centuries later the Jews in exile needed to leave Babylon to come back to reclaim their heritage.
In all of these
cases leaving is not the same as fleeing or escaping. Escaping and
fleeing are based on fear whereas leaving is based on trusting in
something greater than oneself. It is an answer to call to move away
from the safety of the wombs, tombs and cocoons of the past into a
new future that is open, not closed.
Heraclites advised
us that we cannot enter the same stream twice for the person has
changed and the stream has changed. A rich Life is filled with
moments when we leave in order to grow. Many of the people on these
Outer Banks left somewhere to come here. What was it like to begin
again? Did we come here and try to replicate the past or did we
decide that a new life means a new life not a retread of the past
wombs, tombs, and cocoons?
Jesus in Matthew's
Sermon on the Mount advises, “Sufficient to the day is the evil
thereof”. My take is that he means that each night we leave the
past behind us, consigning the day to our dreams to find out what we
have learned. Then in the morning's dawn greet the new day that the
Lord has made, free from the assorted wombs, tombs and cocoons to
which we once clung to, and live into a resurrected life where we can
do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.
We are a
resurrection people, Jesus was not raised from the dead in order to
do the same old, same old but to enter a new dimension of life. We
are the children of the resurrection and the most important part of
the church service is not the sermon, not the lessons, not the
prayers, not the sacraments but the dismissal to leave the church and
share blessings in this world because you know that you have been
already blessed.
As you in this
church are in the search for a new Rector, let us remember that the
search is not a nostalgic exercise of recapturing the comfortable
past but a movement into an unknown future in which God watches over
our coming ins and going outs. Pray for the clergy who are in a place
where they are listening if it is a time to leave, rather than flee,
into a new place. Pray that they and you will have the discernment to
know the difference.
Walking out of that house for the last time
of living in that once home, he knows change
will take him down roads, different, strange,
unknown, but not alone. It’ll be a hard climb
for making sense of an open history, of his life,
yet unwritten, with pages full of quiet moments
of experience; wandering while being homeless,
vulnerable to betrayal, assured of so much strife.
One foot in front of another, he begins that walk
to promised destiny that he’ll change the world.
Unsure he understands; doubts, thoughts whirl
holding on to faith as hours run out of his clock.
Maybe it isn’t as essential that final destination
be known, as journeys become a life’s vocation.
No comments:
Post a Comment