Soaring With Eagles

 

A Reflection and Poem for 12^th Sunday after Pentecost       Thomas E. Wilson, Guest Celebrant

St Mary's Episcopal Church, Gatesville, NC                         August 27, 2022

Sirach 10:12-18     Psalm 81:1, 10-16       Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16       Luke 14:1, 7-14

Dylan Mack Cloutier; Soaring With Eagles

From the reading from the Book of Sirach or Ecclesiasticus; “The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord;/the heart has withdrawn from its Maker.” The Book was a compilation of sayings and lessons from the compiler's grandfather, a Rabbi in Egypt a couple centuries before the birth of Jesus. It was a popular book among Jews and would have been used freely by Rabbis like Jesus, whose mother, on finding she was pregnant, sang a song, the Magnificat, sprinkled with sayings from this book. Jesus probably was aware of the reading for today and used it as the core of his teaching in the Gospel reading for today. Although popular, it was not considered part of the Jewish Canon of Scripture because there was some question if it was originally written in Greek, not Hebrew. The early Christian church accepted it as inspired but there were quibbles about including it as part of the Canon. The Protestant Reformation scholars dropped it for their Bibles, while the Church of England demoted it a quasi scripture category called the Apocrypha.

From the Gospel lesson for today:

Jesus said also to the one who had invited him, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

The lesson is about how pride, self- love born out of fear, gets in our way in following God. We are so worried about what people think of our image, that it gets in the way of loving either neighbor or God. The Early church considered Pride as the Mother of All Sins, the Chief of the Seven Deadly Sins. It was considered an “Original Sin”, so in the Medieval times, at the time of an infant baptism, the Baptizing Priest would pinch the Baby, so that in the resulting scream the Devil would be expelled to come out and the Blessed Holy Waters would cover the child in the healing holiness. Priests also learned that if you are Baptizing a male baby and you dunk the naked male baby in the containers of warm water, and then take him out, you needed to have the male baby face away from you, or the Altar Guild will be ticked off having to clean the vestments.

One of the high points, every time I come to Gatesville to preside of a banquet of Holy Communion; I am driving through the Great Dismal Swamp and I get a chance to see Bald Eagles, nesting and hunting, living free and wild. When I was a teenager, we were being warned about, what Rachel Carson called, “the silencing of the birds”. She pointed out with the overuse of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT, many bird populations were threatened. Action and prayer for changing the way we lived, was a road to the recovery of several species, like Bald Eagles. Every time I come, my banquet was beginning before I ever got to the town limits as I was blessed by the resurrection of the Bald Eagle Population and the sacrifices made to make it happen,. I was their guest, God's guest and the Eagles' guest.

When I drive through the Great Dismal Swamp, I remember how it had a been a haven for runaway slaves, from 1619, when African slavery was first introduced on English speaking soil, all the way to the end of the Civil War in 1865, 246 years of sanctuary. I am driving through Holy Ground, I am an uninvited guest and I am blessed by those who struggle in hope.

By the time I get here, I realize how blessed I am and you invite me to join you in blessing God. I come to the Great Thanksgiving already thankful. Thank you.

Today, when we do the Baptism of Dylan, we invite him as our guest of honor. He has not done a thing to deserve your love, kindness or blessing. For years; he will not be rich or a member of the Vestry. His pledge will not be great. There will be times when he will not follow the sermon. There will be times when he will not operate on your schedule. Yet, he is a gift from God. Your task is to teach by example of word and deed how to love and care for his and your neighbor, his and your environment, his and your church, and his and your Creating, Redeeming and Sanctifying God.

What better place than this area to teach him. This is a place where people, who came longing for freedom, have centuries of history. This is a place where against long odds, Eagles Soar.

Dylan Mack Cloutier; Soaring With Eagles

Dylan's a child whom I will baptize this Sunday.

Saying all the right words, I'll try to get us out in time,

words he (and we) won't understand by reason or rhyme,

but with hope, his heart begins, to break open that day.

Medieval priests pinched a child to let the devil out,

so newly blessed Holy water would cleanse his soul,

as Godparents made promises as a kind of re-sole,

of their boots on the long march against their doubt.

We hope for him to weep for joy as the eagles (bald),

continue to prosper out of town on the Dismal Swamp,

where once they almost disappeared in a past DDT romp,

but now, by prayer and action, that slaughter had stalled.

Make him open. we pray. to live into a new hope,

that into the still promised land, we'll not just grope.

Divisions

 A Poem and Reflection for 10^th Sunday after Pentecost             August 14, 2022

All Saints Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC                     Thomas E. Wilson, Guest Celebrant

Isaiah 5:1-7 Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18 Hebrews 11:29-12:2 Luke 12:49-56

DIVISIONS

The Gospel Lesson for today from Luke remembers Jesus warning about divisions. Luke will write more about those divisions in his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles; between the disciples on who is the greatest, between Jesus and the Jewish religious establishment, between Jesus and the Roman political establishment, between the Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, between the apostle Paul and the disciples in Jerusalem. Paul and others will write letters about the divisions between Christians in their own churches. History, for the next 20 centuries will tell us about the divisions between theologians over the nature of Jesus, (human, or divine, or a “tertium quid”, “a third thing”). Divisions between Creeds, division between different views of scripture, division between different kinds of worship, East versus West, Latin versus Greek, for or against slavery, different views of “salvation”, different views of end time. You name it; the church has had divisions about it, where we fly the banner of the Prince of Peace and work to destroy those who believe the other side of the division.

In my three quarter of a century of life, I have never known a time without division. Tomorrow, August 15^th, is the 77^th anniversary of the announcement by the Japanese Emperor Hirohito of the acceptance of an unconditional surrender by the Empire of Japan. The victorious forces of the Allied Armies started fighting, having open divisions, between themselves as soon as, and even before, the war was over. Divisions over the future of the countries that had been under the rule of Nazi Germany or the Empire of Japan - the losers of the war, or the Colonial Empires of France and Great Britain - two of the bankrupt victors of the war. Divisions between incompatible social and economic systems, systems of economics and governance.

In 1948, my father, who had been in combat in the wars, got a civilian job in El Salvador in Central America. Soon after we got there, there was a coup d'etat where the leader by a rigged election was overthrown by the army, as one garrison on one side of the capital city shelled another garrison on the other side of the city. My parents, their two sons and their infant daughter, fled to a coffee finca on a mountain overlooking the city to be safe and watched in safety the artillery do its work on each other.

Up until two years ago, we as a nation bragged, that we were not a Banana Republic, which attempted coups instead of peaceful transitions of power. So much for that division!

When we moved back to the United States we found a country divided along political, economic, social and racial divisions. My father was a Roman Catholic and my mother was a Presbyterian and the way they settled those division was to raise the children as Episcopalians. However, one way I learned how to be an Episcopalian by singing a song, “I Am An Anglican” about how important it was that we were divided from other Christians.

By the time I went to college, I was trying out being a radical left wing post Christian. I joined a campus debating society and learned how to sneer effectively and score points for whatever side I was on. It made me feel good to hate. Giving me a sense of purpose to sneer. I was with groups that protested the remnants of Segregation and then against our militarization in Southeast Asia. How good it felt to be right and to hate. After my father died, hate wasn't as much fun and I started to return to a Christian view of the world. In the meantime the Episcopalians were fighting each other over prayers books and schisms.

Even my mother tried out a division. When I bought a Subaru, a Japanese import car, in 1981, my mother, who in World War II had stayed in California, near the Marine Base outside San Diego, each day filled with fear that her husband would be killed by the enemy, while my father was fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific from 1941 to 1945, said to me in alarm, “How could you buy that car? Those people ( the Japanese) tried to kill your father?”

Yes, there are divisions. That is a reality but what are we do do with those divisions if we are asked in the middle of the divisions. David Brooks, in a New York Times editorial of July 21, 2022, wrote;

“Sometimes in life you should stick to your worldview and defend it against criticism. But sometimes the world is genuinely different than it was before. At those moments the crucial skills are the ones nobody teaches you: how to reorganize your mind, how to see with new eyes.”

In reorganizing our mind, we learn how to ask questions of the people on the other side of the division. To go even deeper and listen to their pain and their fears. The question for people of faith is to ask where is God in the middle of all this.

In Lincoln's 2^nd Inaugural Address, in the closing days of the Civil War and the country's division, he showed how to reorganize the country's mind and spirit;

“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

A century and a half later after that address, one of vestiges of “the nation's wounds”, Racial Discrimination was addressed. Last month a great injustice was faced, reviewed and fixed when Buck O'Neil, a Star Player and Manager for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Baseball leagues from 1937 to 1955, was formally admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. For decades he was not admitted because he was black, and the white Major League teams were segregated. He became a scout for the Chicago Cubs in 1955 and in 1962 the Cubs named him the first black coach in the Major Leagues, but even then, he was not allowed to coach during the games, as 3^rd or 1^st base coach. He had been turned down in 2006 for admission to the Hall of Fame, but he said at the time:

“God's been good to me. They didn't think Buck was good enough to be in the Hall of Fame. That's the way they thought about it and that's the way it is, so we're going to live with that. Now, if I'm a Hall of Famer for you, that's all right with me. Just keep loving old Buck. Don't weep for Buck. No, man, be happy, be thankful."

What O'Neil did was to demonstrate what St. Benedict wrote in his rules for the Benedictine Community, whose members were to actively listen to each other, “listen . . . with the ear of the heart” and prayerfully consider what was said and then act in obedience to God. O'Neil listened and heard what was being said behind the words. He understood that the official words covered the bigoted, racist fear of the white baseball establishment. He knew the truth of his own God given, and Buck developed, skill. Instead of bitter weeping and fury; O'Neil chose to put his energy to joyfully help others to break the barriers.

When I do pre-marital counseling, I ask the couple to bring in a fight that they had. They usually proclaim that they never fight. But, by the third session they agree that all this wedding preparation and the moving in together plans may have been the occasion of a hard disagreement. As we go through the “disagreement”, I ask them each to share what they felt about, or thought of, or meant in that comment they gave and when did the groundwork for the fight start before the disagreement ever came to the surface. Usually it has to do with how they treat one another in being “right” and did they listen to what was really said. I keep telling them “Good fighters, who listen and cherish each other, make good lovers. Lousy fighters, who only want to win, make lousy lovers.”

Jesus tells us what we already know, we live in communities of division. That is part of being human. Jesus shows us by his life that we have a choice; we can either create battlefields of burnt ground or we live in community with those with whom we disagree by treating the space between us as Holy Ground where we “listen . . . with the ear of the heart.”

DIVISIONS

(One) I'm much smarter, brighter and cuter than you,

far more deserving of an Almighty's approval,

as you can plainly see if you give a fair perusal,

how my side is really the only one that is true.

(Two) The other side gives, “So's your mama!” retorts,

as a way of presenting a full reasoned argument,

aimed to move into sulking silence punishment,

before moving into dueling chapters and verses.

(One) I heard the sound of hurt in you, can't we stop

for a moment and just listen to spaces shared?

(Two) Please let us see there is a power that cared,
that we'd find a way to have arguments drop.

(Three) Lets agree to stop the Cain and Abel stuff,

and agree love is much more than enough.

Sojurning Servants

 

A Poem and Reflection for IX Sunday After Pentecost      Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Nags Head, NC           August 7, 2022

SOJOURNING SERVANTS

Genesis 15:1-6
Psalm 33:12-22
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

There are two references about the Patriarch Abraham in the lessons for today. First from the Book of Genesis, in the Abraham Mythopoetic saga, where Abram is at the end of his faith and about to call it all off unless he can get an outward and visible sign that he can stop his wandering and find a home. As in most of Mythopoetic sagas, the Hero is flawed; he has tremendous courage but he also approaches the border and enters into the land of being, what polite people call, NDG, short for “No Damn Good”.

The second reference is from that is called the Epistle to the Hebrews, but which is not an epistle and not addressed to the Hebrews, but is well named as a polemic for followers of the Risen Christ to continue to hold onto faith. The writer of this polemic sanitizes the hero Abraham and sees him as a model of unshakeable faith: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Abraham lived with his father Terah their home in Ur of the Chaldees, where Terah worshipped other Gods. Terah is called by God to come to a Promised Land of Canaan. Abram, Terah's grandson Lot, and Sarai, Abram's wife, join Terah as far as Haran, where Terah falters, longing for a home and missing the home he left in Ur of the Chaldees. In his longing Terah dies. Abram, buries his father, and picks up his father's mission. And wanders where there is no Mapquest. He cannot return to Ur, nor even to Haran,' He has no home, has no idea where he is going; but he goes. He has more than a few moments of fear where he is afraid that the God who called his family, may have lied to him and he will never have a home. In this lesson, God appears to him and asks him to look to the stars for reassurance of putting his trust in God. In essence God's message is a little like T. S. Eliot's line from Little Giddings, “For us, there is only the trying, the rest is not our business.”

Abram will be a sojourner, a man without a stable home. He makes it as far as Shechem in Canaan where he sets up some altars to God. But as he starts to settle down, there is a famine in Canaan and Abram packs up his family and goes to Egypt where he lives as a alien. While there, he also enters into NDG territory while out of fear, he will lie and swindle; which gets him into trouble there and has to leave to go back to Canaan, where he continues to dwell in NDG behavior, lies again and then gets involved in a Civil War. He will claim a lot of land but in fact, the only land he will actually own will be the plot of land that he buys to bury his wife, Sarah, when she dies. It would be nice to say he always had faith, but he didn't. As broken as he was, as NDG as he is, he ends his life and finds his home in the heart of God

Where is your home?

I was born and spent two days of my life in the hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, then I lived in homes in Rolla Missouri, then El Salvador, then Pennsylvania, then Ohio, then New York State, then Chapel Hill, then Wrightsville Beach, then Raleigh, then Boone, then Danville, VA, then Sewanee, Tennessee, then Blacksburg, VA, then Lynchburg, VA, then Macon, GA, then Southern Shores, and then Nags Head. I found a home in all of those 16 places, and I left them, and will some day leave Nags Head, because, like Abraham, I am a sojourner, a transient, a sometime, more often than I would like to admit, also dwelling in NDG territory, who is just passing though, whose real home is in the heart of God.

In every one of those 16 homes that I can remember, there was always a place where I felt I could be safe from the outside world. I am an extreme introvert and I need to be alone to center myself. There was always a place, an office, a den, where I thought no one could bother me without my permission. I signed bushels of mortgage agreements and paid lots of property taxes; but I never really owned the houses, they owned me and kept demanding to be taken care of. While English Common law suggests that a person's home is their castle; I was not an absolute King over my palace, as my walls were like sieves, because of my sense of wanting to being indispensable, which was my treasure which fed my ego. As Jesus says in the gospel; “Where your treasure is there will your heart be also.” I found that I could get very good at keeping God out, if I got real busy doing lots of things---and if you want to keep God from interfering in your life; get real busy doing church work.

Nineteen years ago, God's spirit brought Pat and I to the Outer Banks and brought us home to a place I had never been before. One of the things we did when we moved to the Outer Banks was to bless the house turning it over to do God's work of welcome. Jesus addresses this issue of trying to keep God out,in the Gospel lesson for today. Jesus points out that God is the owner the house. Jesus suggests that while we may pay the mortgage, we may have the deeds filed in local courthouses; all the houses, and all owners, and all the guests are invited to be in the heart of God. Again to quote Eliot, “For us, there is only the trying, the rest is not our business.”

SOJOURNING SERVANTS

Lives are full of pillows for heads to rest,

but we keep sojourning from one room,

to another until, when our days consume,

we finally arrive at the goal of our quest.

We tried to find homes of concrete, wood,

glass and wires which we'll claim to own,

with papers to prove, placing our own throne,

in order to rule, hopefully for our own good.

Histories tell us those rulers become slaves,

as their palaces gradually start to own them,

keeping up facades as joy becomes numb,

until those hopes for glory inters in graves.

How about, instead of ruling, we do serving

in the larger mansion, working, conserving?