A Reflection and Poem for 3rd Sunday of Lent St Andrew's By The Sea Church, Nags Head, NC
March 12, 2023 Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant
Clinging To The Rock
I want to warn you that I will sing parts of a hymn that sprung up in my heart when I was reading these lessons for today in preparing to preach . I will not lead you in singing it, since I was the only member of a play's large cast of an Outdoor Drama in Florida, asked not to sing since, according to the Music Director, I was drowning some of the best voices on the East Coast. He suggested that I was being paid for my acting ability and not as a singer. I so enjoy singing that I never quite get around to listening.
Later I was a lay reader and chalice bearer in a church before I went to seminary and the Priest would keep asking me not to stand between him and the organist. I have had a raft of organists in six different states where I have celebrated, roll their eyes, asking the God of Music for patience and deliverance. One of them is your present organist, who jumped at the chance to come here, in part I suspect, to get away from me.
This malady I suffer from is actually a disease. Left untreated, it is a terminal disease. It's technical name is “selfishness”. I am so self absorbed that I don't really care about other people. In the play, in those scenes, or during those parts of of a service, my task was to help other people to sing as part of a community of voices singing a song. However, in my selfishness, I usually just belt it out.
The Hymn that came to me is not in the Episcopal Hymnal. It was written in the 19th Century by a Baptist Preacher, Robert Lowry. It was later adapted by Quaker and Shaker communities and I heard it first sung by Pete Seeger in a further adapted version, after that summer when I was 19 years old, 57 years ago, during a concert centered on peace. My girl friend-at-the-time had to drive us to Durham to the Duke Campus to hear him. since the Speaker Ban Law forbade people like Seeger to step foot to speak on the Campus at Chapel Hill. The trip was like a pilgrimage to drink deeply from a well of peace. This is the first verse and refrain:
My
life flows on in endless song,
above earth's lamentation.
I
hear the clear, though faroff hymn
that hails a new creation.
Refrain:
No storm can shake my inmost calm
while to that
Rock I'm clinging.
Since love is Lord of heaven and earth,
how
can I keep from singing?
Seeger's adaption is seen in the much more political last verse:
When tyrants tremble, sick with fear
And hear their death-knell ringing
When friends rejoice both far and near
How can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging
When friends by shame are undefiled
How can I keep from singing?
There is no archeological evidence for the Exodus, but the Hebrew Testament Lesson for today is the Mythic story from Exodus, Moses at Rephidim has to deal with his people's attack of nostalgia of a paradise that never was in back in slavery of Egypt, where they remember that they always had Nile water to drink. But the water from the Nile came at the price of chains in slavery. They are afraid of this new freedom in the wilderness with its cost of creating a new community of self discipline to work together for a common good. They grumbled and Moses struck the rock bringing forth water. Moses called the place “Meribah”, the place of grumbling.
There is another mythic story in the Book of Numbers where Moses is at Kadesh, where he strikes the rock in response to the grumbling and calls the place “Meribah”. The Rabbis tried to come to grips with these two stories in two different places and they came up with the idea that the well of the Rock had followed the Hebrew people. Paul will allude to that when in his letter to the Corinthians, he speaks of the Christ, the well of the Rock on which Paul's faith is founded, as following him wherever he may go. The community “hear the clear, though faroff hymn/ that hails a new creation.”
In the Psalm for today, the community centuries later, dealing with holding on the hope in the mythic stories, sing about “that Rock” to which they are clinging, from whence the water flows and it goes with them in everyday life.
Paul writes about that in the Epistle to the Church in Rome about being called to the discipline of freedom, leaving the past and shame behind, to work together to build a new community. He believes that the Christ is with him wherever his journey will take him. In essence he asks the Romans to “hear the clear, though faroff hymn/ that hails a new creation.”
That is one of the themes in the Gospel Lesson from John. The Samaritan woman goes out in the noonday sun to get her water from the well. Noel Coward had a song, “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.” The woman goes out alone because she has been shunned by the community and this is the only time of the day when she knows that she can be alone from the allusions to her shameful past where she had been giving her body so many times. Jesus accepts the past as past and invites her to live into a new hope filled life to “hear the clear, though faroff hymn/ that hails a new creation.”
As part of my Sabbatical study in Palestine back in 1994, Pat and I went to that well on the outskirts of Nablus on the West Bank. We came not as tourists but as persons longing to drink deeply of our faith to “hear the clear, though faroff hymn/ that hails a new creation.”
It is in that encounter that the Samaritan woman learns what love really is and she believes the refrain that has yet to be written centuries later. She falls in love with Jesus, giving not her body but her precious soul. “Since love is Lord of heaven and earth,/ how can I keep from singing?”
Mary Oliver had a poem about that kind of love:
Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable —
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love.
We are in the middle of Lenten season here at St. Andrew's By the Sea on the Outer Banks. We live in a world where ancient myth becomes living metaphor and in that we affirm the Well of the Rock follows us here. Our community is called to come to grips with our pasts, leaving them behind in order to create a new future to “hear the clear, though faroff hymn/ that hails a new creation.”
Clinging To The Rock
In these Outer Banks, salt and sand clinging
to us, till we have to brush or wash it off,
as when we heard that new song far-off,
coming to this new place to join in singing.
Cars, trucks and memories brought the past's
stuff of our lives to this rockless place,
where we sink down to find the grace
to leave much behind, clinging to what lasts.
The well of the Rock follows to this place,
to bath and wash us, refreshing us each day,
so that our lights can shine beyond the bay,
and into the thirsty hearts of those we face.
Singing, not always on key, but with love
overflowing, ascending to meet that Dove.
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