A Poem and Reflection for III Advent St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Ahoskie, NC
December 11, 2022 Thomas E Wilson, Guest Presider
Isaiah 35:1-10 James 5:7-10 Matthew 11:2-11 Canticle 15 Luke 1:46-55
Joy Arriving By Choosing Intention
Mary sings from the Magnificat,: My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; * for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
Lets take a look at what is happening to her in her life. Mary is a teenage girl and she is pregnant, there is no father in sight. Her parents send her to her cousin's house far away from Nazareth with the pretext that she is being sent there to help out this cousin who is having her first child.
What happens is what used to happen often when I was growing up in upstate New York. In the 10th or 11th grade, a girl, who had started gaining a little bit of weight, would break up with her boyfriend and would take a leave from school to “help” out a relative in another part of the state or nation, and live with that family for the rest of the school year. Good manners required that we take the story at face value. I have a hard time thinking that any of those girls would be singing thanksgiving. For many families, a girl being sent away would be a cause for our parents to give us adolescents a revisit of the “TALK”, about how to be VERY Careful.
Two thousand years earlier, Mary is singing about her joy. Her reputation is shot in that small town. Her parents have sent her away; and yet she is full of joy. Her song is a variation of Psalm 113 and the Song of Hannah in the Book of Samuel, both songs of finding Joy in the midst of difficulty.
Joy is the theme for this 3rd Sunday of Advent. Joy is not happiness, when things are going your way. Happiness is dependent on people, places and things; People - giving approval or distinction, Places - giving a sense of safety and pleasure, Things - to satisfy a need or desire. Joy is independent of people, places and things. Let me share with you a moment when I learned Joy Is independent of Happiness.
A little over 41 years ago, I had been a Social Worker for 13 years. I quit my job after three and a half years as Assistant Professor and Chair of the Social Work Department in a college in Virginia, we had gotten the program accredited and I had struggled with a call to Ordained Ministry. The college was Moderate Baptist in tone and I had taken several courses in theology in my spare time. The Dean of the College and the Chair of the Social Sciences both wanted me to stay and continue while they would arrange for me to adjust my schedule and take courses at the Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest which would be in easy driving distance. Unfortunately the Seminary was having a lot of tension as the Board was trying to move the school into a more fundamentalist camp.The easy path was now unavailable.
So I sold my house, packed up my stuff and my family and I moved to the School of Theology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. After I unloaded the U-Haul, I felt a lot of pain, but being a male I tried to ignore it. Finally it got so bad that I went to the small local Hospital where they told me that I had some Kidney Stones which were too big to pass; I would need to go to a larger Hospital in Nashville, where I would have surgery. This would mean that I would miss the first week of school. I would be behind and I would need to catch up.
The seminary was in a mess anyway since the Dean, Urban T Holmes, one of the finest minds in Theology, had suddenly died a couple weeks before. So here am I in a hospital room with lots of pain pills waiting to go to Nashville. I was not happy. I knew I would be behind my classmates. I had fantasies that I would be the brightest and most prepared theology student. If I had only stayed safe where I had been, was the thought I beat myself up with. Happiness is really just another word for ego gratification.
Into this moment came Retired Bishop Girault Jones, a short little man with a giant faith. He had retired from being a Bishop for 20 years in Louisiana and had moved to Sewanee, building a house which he and his wife called, “Meanwhile”, a comment that it was to be the place for them to be faithful in the time between his retirement and their death. Bishop Jones was asked to fill in as Interim Dean after Terry Holmes death. He was at that time a year older than I am now. He also continued to Volunteer as a Chaplain at the Sewanee Hospital and do a weekly Chapel Services of Communion and deliver the Sacrament to patients. He came in to my room and told me that he would bring me the sacrament, but if the Doctors were working on me, he would stop outside the door and say a little prayer that I would have received the sacrament by “INTENTION” The idea is that the bread and wine were only outward signs, what was important was God's Grace and Love were already being present, pregnant within me, when I opened my heart and had the Intension of being united with the Divine.
The presence of the Divine is in every part of creation. This is the message that Jesus is bringing in the Gospel Message for today; the deeper reality is not measured by looking at the surfaces but looking for the in-breaking of the Kingdom of the Heavens in everyday life, where we are pregnant with God's joyful Spirit.. The poet Mary Oliver, in her poem, Wild Geese, wrote about that awareness of joyfully connecting to everything that has the fingerprints of the creator:
Whoever
you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your
imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
In trying to remember the incident, I really cannot remember if Bishop Jones gave me the Bread and Wine, but it is really not important, for I remember that in the middle of things going wrong, when happiness was a pipe dream, there was a rumbling of a pregnancy of Joy. I knew that God was Intentionally with me “announcing my place in the family of things.” My ego had to be put aside and I needed to be faithful to the Divine presence, of which I was an exceedingly “lowly servant”, that is always here.
Today, may each of you know the Greatness of the Lord, who looks intentionally on you with favor; wherever you are, in whatever circumstance, God's joy is present for you.
Joy Arriving By Choosing Intention
In Hospital huddled and bummed out,
When Interim Dean dropped in to proffer
Communion from Chapel service’s offer,
As gift of Grace even to a partially devout.
If Docs were not working on inpatient me,
It would be a piece of bread, slug of wine,
Outward signs of connection to the Divine,
Allowing me to go beyond present and see,
A deeper reality, beyond happiness, to joy,
If the docs were busy with me; by “Intention”
Would I receive. Grace brooks no prevention,
From inadequacies of Priests or religious toy.
Intended joy set sail in space between this world,
And words, sailing with once tight faith unfurled.
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