Confessions Of A Retired Expert

A Reflection for Proper 24, Year B                St. Luke's and St Anne's Roper, and Grace Plymouth, NC

October 20, 2024                                          Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant

    Job 38:1-7, 34-41        Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b          Hebrews 5:1-10           Mark 10:35-45

Confessions Of A Retired Expert

The Bible begins with the story of Adam and Eve, whom the story goes, are asked to care for the world in which they live. It is God's creation, not theirs. They are not owners, but tenants on the land that belongs to God. They are the servants of God. That story goes that they did not want to be servants, they wanted to replace God with their own desires to be like God. Therefore, the story goes. since God became aware of the sin, God punished them by driving them out of Eden. The moral is given that if you do not obey God; God will make your life a living hell or save up until you are dead and then give you the real thing of hell. This is based on the concept that God gifts good things to good people and bad things to bad people.

However, in today's lessons this theme is challenged when God mutters: "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” This passage of Job is from the end of the Book and is God's response to Job, Job's counselors, others and us, when we react to the concept that God is our servant, and all who demand that God be held accountable as an inadequate servant, when bad things happen to good people. He is saying that in this world, Bad things happen, but God is here with us in the middle of all the bad things.

The Passage from Hebrews underscores this message with the idea that Priests are not the ones who control God, but they are servants of God's creation. They do not command or control God; they listen. They are servants of God's healing in this world. “able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward.” The writer of Hebrews knew fully that Jesus never went to seminary, he was not part of the Priestly caste, but he did the important stuff like “deal(ing) with the ignorant and wayward.” like each one of us is called to do.

One of the things I do is to say to people “Let me pray for you!” It is not because my words are magic. It is not because I have a special relationship to God that make my prayers more efficacious in persuading the Big Boy upstairs, but because it is a way we people have of letting each of us know we are not alone in facing what we are going through. We are joined; heart to heart.

The Gospel passage has Jesus underscore that he, the son of God, is not the ruler but the servant of God and God's creation. This is who we are to be: servants of Go and God's creation:

“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

Every life we have on this earth is not to be seen as just that life as living only for itself, but as a way we are able to see ourselves, and each other, as gifts from God - to see God's living creation for whom we are to care for.

This year I am 77 years old: in 2 months I will be 78, and 60 years ago I was an expert. I knew everything I needed to know. It was the 2^nd month of my being a Freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that is about the time the first tests are given in the first classes at college. That is when I found out there was a whole lot of stuff I did not know. I found out that I needed to pay attention. Around the same time, my girlfriend I left behind in my home town, hundred of miles away from the college I was attending, was letting me know that she had her own life to lead, because I was not to paying enough attention to her.

It would be nice to say that I learned my lesson and I no longer encountered stuff I did not know if I just paid attention. The lessons today are about reaching the limits of what we can really know. And, even if we knew everything, we must come to grips with the understanding that we are not in control of the universe. We have to come to understand that no one divinity had died and left the position open so we could be God. We are called to follow, not replace, God and minister to all of God's children.

I work as a Priest in churches part of my life; but I am meant to live in sacramental relationship with all my neighbors, my friends, my enemies and my God in all of my life. I take my cue from Frederick Buechner who wrote:

A SACRAMENT IS WHEN something holy happens. It is transparent time, time you can see through to something deep inside time.

… Needless to say, church isn't the only place where the holy happens. Sacramental moments can occur at any moment, at any place, and to anybody. Watching something get born. Making love. A walk on the beach. Somebody coming to see you when you're sick. A meal with people you love. Looking into a stranger's eyes and finding out they are not a stranger's. 

If we weren't blind as bats, we might see that life itself is sacramental.

Confessions Of A Retired Expert

It's sacramental when we recite the Psalter,

but when we leave behind the church labors

and then approach any of our neighbors,

it is only then ,we approach the true Altar;

The place where God fills all the spaces

'tween us: holiness's away from church.

It's there, we really don't need to search,

Our world is filled with sacred Places!

Where our eyes have only to wish to see,

That the Peace of God is being shared

With anyone who'd just stop and cared,

Filling the chasm between me and thee.

Don't need be experts in understanding,

Faith's growing when love's expanding.

job of Job

22^nd Sunday after Pentecost: a Reflection                   St. Luke's and St Luke's Roper, Grace Plymouth

October 6, 2024                                                         Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant

Job 1:1; 2:1-10              Psalm 26    Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12                    Mark 10:2-16

“The Job Of Job”

From the Book of Job in today's Hebrew Testament lesson: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”

One of these days when I get rich and famous being a Priest, I am going to really retire and I am going to put on and act in a play called J.B.by Archibald MacLeish. Usually I write a poem first to try to make sense of the lessons for that Sunday, but if you have a world class poet like MacLeish, lets use him. The play is in verse and begins:

“If God is God He is not good,

If God is good He is not God;

Take the even, take the odd,

I would not sleep here if I could.

Except for the little green leaves in the wood.

And the wind on the water."

Louis Kronenberger wrote a summary of the play:

J.B. was Archibald MacLeish's re-enactment, in a contemporary setting, of the Book of Job. It was also,  in a double sense, a theatre piece: the action took place inside a night-lit circus tent where a sideshow Job had been performing. Two out-of-work actors, Zuss and Nickels, toying with the Biblical masks of God and Satan they find lying around, are suddenly aware of a Voice from outside them and are caught up in a story near at hand. In the story, J.B. is a rich, admired American industrialist with a devoted wife and five children. Then disaster looms and mounts: his children are senselessly killed or brutally murdered; his possessions are lost, his house is destroyed, his wife goes away, his body festers. All this happens against a crossfire, Biblical and profane, between Zuss and Nickels; then J.B. wrestles with his soul, with his comforters, with his God, till at the end his health is restored and his wife returns

How does God allow evil to happen? Most people think that any first class God worth its salt could be counted on to fix things, like our mistakes or hurricanes, before they happen. Even if the power of hurricanes are increased by our disregard of global warming and our refusal to change the way we pollute; we want God to be like a genie in the bottle and fix things.

The ancient Greeks used to do plays, called Comedies, because they end up well, which would be finished with a “Deus ex Machina”, a God in a Machine, where an actor dressed up as a God would be lowered in a basket from a high pillar, hanging over the scene like a God in the palace of the Gods, and explain how the problem is being fixed by heavenly power. Except if God is not fiction, we need to come to grips with a God that does come down in a machine to fix things. The crowds at the feet of the cross taunted Jesus that if his God loved him, that God could fix things to turn it into a comedy.

The play was MacLeish's attempt to come to find meaning in the events of his life living through (1) his serving in France in World War 1, (2) going through the post war economic depressions and hatreds, (3) the slaughter of World War 2, and (4) the insanity of Cold War. Poetry Foundation wrote of the poetry:

Like Job, J.B. is not answered, yet his love for Sarah affirms, in the playwrights phrase, “the worth of life in spite of life.” That worth is found in a love that paradoxically answers nothing but “becomes the ultimate human answer to the ultimate human question.”

In the Gospel lesson for today There are two different strands of the teachings of Jesus. On the one hand, he is asked about divorce and he answers that divorce is a sin. Every three years I have to hear that; it is not what I want to hear. The day after I graduated for college, I was anxious about living an adult life, so I married my girl friend who was a divorced woman. Jesus is reported to say that was adultery. We lived together for 19 years until our daughter went off to college; then we got divorced. Count 2 for my adultery. Later, I married another woman who was divorced. In baseball that is strike 3. Pat and I were wonderfully blessed and married for 36 years until she died 15 months ago. We learned how to love and forgive each other, every day of that marriage. Instead of being satisfied with a legal agreement, instead of moaning about the past, in spite of being failures in marriage; we learned how to give blessings to each other. We shared what MacLeish called the “worth of life in spite of life”.

In the play and in the Book Job has "comforters" come to him, but they want to get God off the hook and want Job to admit that God must be punishing Job for a sin he must have committed. But Job was blameless. - the word “comfort” does not mean providing soft things but it comes from two Latin words “com”- which means “with”, and “fort” which means “strength”. When my wife died, I had comforters that were true to the meaning of the term; I was the recipient of lots of moments when I was prayed for, hugged, fed, helped by the sitting with, in loving silence by, friends, family, neighbors and former parishioners. It was the worth of life in spite of life. They did the job of Job.

In the second part of the Gospel passage for today, Jesus, in the viewpoint of his disciples, is interpreting the serious work of Jesus' teachings. The disciples are centered on getting the important tasks done, but some pesky children are in the way. But Jesus rebukes his disciples saying:”Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” The author continues “And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.” He loves them and he is teaching his disciples and us that love is a gift; it is never earned or to be earned – only given freely. It was the worth of life in spite of life. It is a job of Job.

In this country we have an economic system that says you get what you earn. Except I do not work for a living; I am retired and I get pensions for (1) the work I did as a priest, and (2) the work I did as an Assistant Professor in a college in which I taught before I went to seminary and (3) social security for all the jobs before then since I was 16, 61 years ago. One of the things I do two to three times a month is to get in my car and drive here, charging you with my mileage and doing holy work around an altar and make with a message, for which I pay taxes. You are paying me to to keep my mind and soul alive. So I thank you for helping me, your neighbor, The job of Job is to give thanks to God for whatever you have received, both good and bad. It was the worth of life in spite of life.

I am especially proud of these two congregations. When the storms hit Western North Carolina, a couple of hundred miles away, not your next door neighbors, you dug down deeply into your hearts and pocketbooks to comfort and renew, You received the bad news of what was happening to your neighbors far away, and you heard in your hearts God's good news about being comforters, “strength givers”, to those neighbors. You opened your mind to pray for all those facing difficult days ahead. It was the worth of life in spite of life. You were living into the job of Job.

As I was writing this reflection I got word that another hurricane called “Kirk” was east of Bermuda and was expected to keep heading toward Ireland. The weather warning says: “Impacts with the highest likelihood are an increased Rip Current Threat and rough surf. Ocean-side coastal flooding impacts are also possible with the increased wave action bringing potential for ocean overwash and beach erosion, greatest chance for eastward facing coastal areas.”

Life happens and this hurricane will probably only cause me minor inconvenience, but I need to pay attention to my neighbors. I live on the Outer Banks, facing east and like you, “live in the worth of life in spite of life” and am “living into the job of Job”.