John's Divine Humor

A Reflection for V Easter                      All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, N.C.

May 18, 2014                                      Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 7:55-60                        1 Peter 2:2-10                    John 14:1-14

John’s Divine Humor

Some years ago and for several years, this church would have an annual talent show, and a couple of us would do the “Baseball” sketch by Abbott and Costello - you know, the one that has strange names for the players at each position on the team:         

• First Base: Who
• Second Base: What
• Third Base: I Don't Know
• Left field: Why
• Center field: Because
• Pitcher: Tomorrow
• Catcher: Today
• Shortstop: I Don't Care

It is a comedy sketch of misunderstanding as the straight man, Abbott, tries to explain who the players are to Costello. This is part of the middle of it:

Costello: What's the guy's name on first base?

Abbott: No. What is on second.

Costello: I'm not asking you who's on second.

Abbott: Who's on first.

Costello: I don't know.

Abbott: He's on third, we're not talking about him.

Costello: Now how did I get on third base?

Abbott: Why you mentioned his name.

Costello: If I mentioned the third baseman's name, who did I say is playing third?

Abbott: No. Who's playing first.

Costello: What's on first?

Abbott: What's on second.

Costello: I don't know.

Abbott: He's on third.

Costello: There I go, back on third again!

I liken this comedy routine to what I believe is going on in today’s Gospel reading.  It helps to divorce the reading from John from the usual place we hear it read, in funerals as a warning to people that if they don’t get right with Jesus they are not going to get the keys to the penthouse being prepared for them beyond the pearly gates of heaven after Jesus introduces them to the Big Guy on the throne above the sky. What I would ask you to do is to go with me to see it as John’s comedy sketch during Jesus’ farewell, when Jesus tells the disciples things which they want to take literally and thereby miss the point.  

Jesus, in the lesson from John, is saying “Good-bye” to his disciples, and he speaks in metaphors and symbols, as he says he is going to “prepare a place for them”. Thomas, who has this unfortunate habit of being literal, wants to know the “way” to the place. Jesus answers that Jesus is the “Way to the Father”. Philip says “Show us the Father.” Jesus says, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” Let’s look at the four words that are part of the comedy sketch that I envision: “Place”, “Way”, “Father”, and “See”.

·        Place:              We want to make “place” a physical site of geography, but the way I read it, “place” means the spiritual awareness of the dimension of being in the presence of the Holy wherever we are in the this world.

·        Way:                We want to take “way” as being a path to a place, but the way I read it, “way” means the way of living one’s life, ordering one’s emotions, calming one’s mind (as Jesus says at the beginning of the lesson, “Let not your hearts be troubled”), claiming one’s shadows, forgiving one’s enemies, having compassion for the poor and passion for justice, being open to a power greater than ourselves, having a sense of wonder and awe in all creation, living one day at a time, opening one’s soul to the presence of the Risen Lord in the everyday.

·        Father:              We want to place “Father” as the Divine being on a throne above the sky. I see God as the ground of our being, the one in whose image we are made, who has placed the divine Self/ Soul/Spirit within us as our true Self/ Soul/Spirit. God is here every time I breathe. The Holy is here in the space between us. Our bodies are made to wear out and die, but our true self remains connected to everything that ever was and will be.

·        See:                  To see (or to be shown) is not an action of eyes, but a commitment to living into the Divine Vision of what life is all about. Life is not about counting the numbers of days of sheer existence, but about living as if life had a greater purpose than getting as much of whatever you can. I don’t want to confuse you, this is not about earning a bunch of merit badges so that we can earn God’s love in order to “get into heaven” when we die. Heaven is here and now when we die to chasing after things that fade away and “rust and moth consume”, and we are able to “see” the presence of God loving us and our enemies at the same time and with the same intensity, a love so great and so unearned that there is nothing that we can do which can ever keep that love away from us. Death itself is powerless to kill that love.

Jesus is preparing his disciples for his deep love of them, his courage to stand up to hatred, sure of God’s love,  his willingness to find the strengthening presence of God even when everything is going wrong, his forgiveness of his enemies, his accepting of death as not the end but as a gate to a different dimension of love. We see this in the lesson from the Acts of the Apostles for today as Stephen is able to have the vision to “see” God’s presence and to forgive his enemies as they are stoning him, as he lets go of his own fear and places his true self/soul/spirit into the heart of the Divine, the ground of all of our being. For Stephen, Jesus is the Way into his own soul and into the soul of God.

This is the “Place”, wherever and whenever we are, the “Way” is here, the “Father” is here and the “vision to see” is here. Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!     

This is the You Tube version           

 http://youtu.be/qxMHynlPvRM    

Failure as a new start

A Sermon for IV Easter                      All Saints' Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, N.C.

May 11, 2014                                      Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 2:42-47               1 Peter 2:19-25            John 10:1-10               Psalm 23

The Lesson from the Book of Acts of the Apostles for today tells the story of how the early community of followers of the Risen Lord in Jerusalem, listening to the Holy Spirit and deciding to continue the practice started by Jesus and his circle of disciples, entered into a new and intentional social and economic arrangement of selling all their property, placing the proceeds in common, and sharing out of the common pot. It was an experiment in communal living, based on the idea that Jesus was coming back any day and so why plan for the future? Later in the Acts chronicles, it will relate that the community suffered when a regional famine wiped out many of their resources, and the Apostles had to go out to the gentile communities to beg and collect food and money for the Jerusalem community.

Was the move to a communal economy a mistake? With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that decision made it more difficult for the Jerusalem community to adjust; but was it a mistake? Over the years I have heard sermons on this passage as a Biblical Warrant for the advantage of the American Capitalistic system and the failure of the early church to understand the evils of Socialism, with the punchline being an un-Biblical admonition that “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

However, my view is that this story has nothing to do with economics but with the faith of the community to make a decision to risk and try something new. According to the Lords of Finance, they failed in that experiment, but I believe according to our Risen Lord, the real problem would be to play it safe and do nothing. The psychologist B. F. Skinner once said, “A failure is not always a mistake; it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.”

You see, I think that one of the greatest sins in the church and in our lives is our fear of failure where our fear keeps us from risking. We think that if God is with us, then we should not fail, but we see lack of success in the lives of Christians and in the church all the time. God does not guarantee success, only that God will be with us wherever we are, in success or failure. The center of our faith as Christians is not that Jesus went to Jerusalem and converted everyone and died in retirement in his old age surrounded by children and grandchildren, but that his ministry ended with a shameful death on a cross and God was with him through the hell of dying, through the hell of loss of hope, and through the resurrection. Jesus is not a poster boy for American success in life. Jesus is about faith; not that everything is going to turn out perfectly, but that all things will be redeemed.

Today we read the 23^rd Psalm, and it is tempting to see this Psalm as a reassurance that with God as our shepherd, everything is going to be just fine. The line from the King James version, “He (God) restoreth my soul”, is burned in my memory because I have had reason to hope for a restoration of soul after failures. The Hebrew word the King James translators rendered as “Soul” is “nefesh” which means “life-breath”, “life”; the image is of someone who had almost stopped breathing who God revives, brings back to life.

On my way to visit someone this week, I was listening to NPR’s All Things Considered on the radio, and they were interviewing newly retired Yankee baseball relief pitcher, Mariano Rivera who talked about his faith in his biography, Closer. His faith was not that God helped him win games, but that God had given him a gift which he faithfully developed. He said:

It's all about faith — not only in baseball, but just normal life. My faith in the Lord is everything. ... That's why I was able to walk out of circumstances like losing Game 7 of the World Series. I was fine. You know why? Because I gave everything that I had. And if wasn't for me that day, well, it wasn't. But I wasn't going to second-guess my faith or ability.

This church has known a lot of successes in the almost 11 years I have been here and more than a few failures. Each time we asked that God be with us as we tried to follow the will of God for this body of Christ we call All Saints. There were times when I, or we, did not succeed,  and I drew strength from the prayer for Young Persons in the Book of Common Prayer (p.829) in which we ask: “Help them (the young persons) to take failure, not as a measure of their worth, but as a chance for a new start.”

Today, in the wider culture, we remember Mothers and we hold up images of perfect mothers and sentimentalize them. And each year I hear from a couple mothers who feel like hypocrites because they think they have failed as mothers. However, the reality is that those of us who have either had or known mothers understand that they were not perfect. I loved my mother, but she was a real person and knew more than a few failures.  We do not love perfection, we love real people who learn how to find new starts. Today in this church we proclaim that today is always a new start, and the Lord is our Shepherd who restoreth our souls.

  

this is you tube connection to the recorder sermon;      

http://youtu.be/5Y7Y7Mg7v0A

Breaking Bread

A Reflection for III Easter                                         All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, N.C. May 4, 2014                                                               Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 2:14a,36-41                     1 Peter 1:17-23            Luke 24:13-35             Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17

Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus 

One of the problems with being my age is that I remember things that happened long before other people were born, and I will say things like, “Of course you remember Adlai Stevenson’s comment about losing an election?” The usual response is a quizzical look which says, “I don’t know who the heck you are talking about.” So, let me fill you in.  Adlai Stevenson was the Democratic Governor of Illinois from 1949 to 1953, and he ran against Eisenhower for President in 1952 and 1956. My father was a lifelong Southern Democrat, and while he voted the party line, he thought that Stevenson was honest, articulate, bright, witty, and had vision and would have made one of the best Presidents this nation had ever had.  But he lost, lost both times, the second time worse than the first. He did not just lose; he was, as we say in the South, “whooped real bad” or “He was ridden hard and put up wet.”. When asked how he felt, he replied: "Someone asked me...how I felt, and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell - Abraham Lincoln. He said he felt like the little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh."  

 

Anybody in this room ever been disappointed?  Disappointed so bad that it just hurt all over and you felt like crying no matter how old you were and felt as if you would never laugh again. Try as hard as you might, you could not ever understand how it had come to be. That is what is happening with the two men walking away from Jerusalem in the Gospel story from Luke for today. They had invested their heart, time, money, and energy in this man Jesus, and it all ends so badly, so badly that they leave town in order to get away from the place of defeat and humiliation. Yet as they walk, these two ex-disciples, now without someone to follow, keep going over every detail of the failure. Unable to leave the past behind, they carry every aspect of it with them, having what some would call a “monkey mind”, feeling like a tree full of monkeys - in this case, angry monkeys – are all chattering away inside their skulls and in the space between them about their own and others’ failures. 

I suggest that this is beyond sadness over the loss of a friend and starts to enter the realm of depression as we notice the use of sarcasm and projection. The sarcasm appears in the form of the comment, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what happened?” The projection occurs when they accuse Jesus of not being able to see, when they are the ones who cannot see Jesus in front of them.  I know from firsthand experience the difference in being with someone who is sad versus someone who is clinically depressed. If I am with someone who is sad, I can, by an act of empathetic imagination, feel their pain.  It stays their pain but I can honor it and help them go through it. However, with clinical depression, I start to get infected by that person’s anger and it threatens to become my anger.  Then I am of no help to them but, instead, become one more angry monkey. These men on the road are under the mistaken impression that, if they can work this out in their mind, then they can come to peace with it. They are so absorbed with their loss and placing blame that they don’t even notice that it is Jesus who is walking with them. 

He enters into the discussion with them and they do some Bible Study, but the problem is that they are so far up in their heads that they still don’t notice that the Risen Lord, the one who the women were saying they saw and interacted with, is walking with them. They have so much energy in their pain that, before they know it, they arrive at their destination. It is in that place that they stop and breathe. They sit down in silence and Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them. Then their eyes see for the first time the truth that had eluded them - that the Risen Christ is their guest. It is only when they stopped their minds long enough to give thanks for what they had instead of focusing in on what they had lost were they able to see the presence of the Holy all around them.

I remember the death of my brother. I didn’t think my mind would ever shut down - the monkeys of blame just kept holding court in my brain. I kept as busy as I could in the vain hope that I could figure it all out, that there would be a good reason for all of this. I, like the men on the road to Emmaus, lost a lot of time not noticing what was going on around me. I got busier as the monkeys - and I - got angrier. I went to my yearly pre-Lenten Confession, one more thing to do, and my confessor surprised me. She told me that she would make my absolution conditional on my doing two things: the first, going to a psychiatrist, because by that time it had moved into a clinical depression. 

The second thing she told me to do was to go on a silent retreat at a nearby monastery and to be still, give thanks for what I had, and open my eyes to see the world as having a center other than my anger. The psychiatrist could help heal the mind but the stillness and giving thanks would help cure my soul. 

The church is not in the therapy business, but it is in the business of healing souls. I think the church saw in the experience of the travelers to Emmaus an enacted metaphor for dealing with “The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune …The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to”. 

          

The world is a place where there are many disappointments and things do not always make sense, and because of that, we get out and go to a place called “church”, an English word derived from the Greek word  for Lord, “kyrie”.  The Lord is the host of this house, this church, and in the Lord’s house, we can be still and listen to the silence of God and, in giving thanks, have “our hearts burn within us”  and our eyes opened to see the world in a different light. Losses do not disappear but they get placed into different hands. We, like the travelers on the Emmaus road, listen to scripture and enter into a dialogue with it as we deal with that reality. Then we re-member – bring to life again - the actions of our Lord who takes, blesses, breaks, and gives.  He does this with himself as he takes his life dedicated to God, allows it to be broken, blesses it with forgiveness of those who have failed him, and gives peace and strength to all who partake of him. We take that peace and strength to re-mind – bring to mind again-  that we are the bread that is also taken, blessed, broken, and given for the sake of the world. 

Today my prayer for us is that our Risen Lord will be known to us in the breaking of the bread.

Bettly Clissold Dayenu

A Homily in Celebration of the Life and Death of Bettye Clissold 

April 26, 2014                            All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC  

Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 61:1-3 Psalm 121, 2 Corinthians 4:16--5:9 John 14:1-6

These are the hard days. We are over our initial relief at the end of her suffering, and we now move into the full awareness of her loss. We think that Bettye should not have died since there were plenty of other things she needed to do. She wanted to make sure that John was alright. She wanted to make sure that her sons were happy. She wanted to see her grandchildren grow up into full adults. She wanted to sink her roots deeper into her new space on the Outer Banks. She wanted the time to see her old church in South Carolina healed. She was an amazing woman and she could have made more of a difference if only she had not gotten sick. 

 

It is a habit of mine to get ticked off with God when things do not go the way I like them. I fuss and moan and I tell the Divine off and start to feel put upon because of my loss, because I think the world should cater to me. The problem is that it is not all about me. In this case, it is about Bettye and her Lord. If I live my life as if it all about me, then the world can be an empty place. Yet, when we live a life where it is about the connections, the space between us and each other and our God, then the world is so full. Bettye would say her life is not about her; rather it is about the short time she had when she could be about connecting to others, neighbors, family, friends, strangers, and to the Divine Other to whom she was devoutly connected in love. 

 

Bettye picked the music and lessons for today as a way for her to share her faith. The 121^st Psalm, which is 8 verses long, gets it strength from a one Hebrew word repeated six times in the psalm - “shomer”, meaning “guard”. There are two additional instances which show a guarding action - “the sun by day and the moon by night”. When I was in Israel in the Judean wilderness, these verses came alive to me for we had to watch out for sunstroke and dehydration in the merciless sun, that masculine symbol of both destructive and creative energy. The ancients believed that the moon, that feminine symbol of the unconscious, could cause one to be “moonstruck” which they thought was a form of mental illness. The Psalm reminds us that the world is a dangerous place which does not revolve around us, but we get through it when our guard is walking with us, one step at a time, to keep us from stumbling. 

 

The Psalmist believed that God was present in the everyday moment. Our modern life, however, separates us from connections. We live in heated and air conditioned houses, and we drive in our heated and air conditioned cars to go buy things from strangers in heated and air conditioned stores, and we worship God in heated and air conditioned buildings, along with people who mostly are strangers to us. We are dis-connected from nature, neighbor, and God, so we have this tendency to think that God is far away, up above the sky, and judges us from afar. But God is here and now, within our true selves, and guiding to join us with the fullness of the divine vision of connectedness with all of creation. The passage from 2^nd Corinthians, which she chose, echoes that reminder, that in our journey through this life, we walk by faith, God’s sight, the divine vision, not our own limited sight. 

 

Bettye also chose the Isaiah passage where the prophet sings that, in the middle of everything going wrong, the Divine is in the midst of us and throwing a feast for us and many people don’t even see it. There is a line from the play and movie Auntie Mame in which Mame exclaims, “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!” Bettye could see the banquet, and she gave thanks for it every day. She would come to church with her grandchildren and beam in their presence and found the experience of connecting with others exciting. I saw her in the hospital and at home and, even when she was in the midst of dying, she was reveling in the joy of being with her husband, her children, and grandchildren. It fit so well with the song she chose: “He walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own.”

One of the things we do in the Episcopal Church is to offer Holy Communion at the time of celebrations of life and death. Jesus participated in the Passover Celebration, that celebration of connectedness with what it meant to be a Jew, connected to God and our forebears, and celebrated the journey through the waters of the Red Sea and the Wilderness, and the presence of God in the gathered community. In Passover, a song is sung of how God is with us wherever we are, and a refrain of thanksgiving is sung – Dayenu, which means “even that would be enough”. Jesus added another dimension by saying that, even in the days to come when he could not celebrate Passover with his followers, he would still be present with them, he was still connected with them. We have this idea that whoever we love, though we are separated by distance or time or space, is alive on the other side of the same table, feasting with God in that other dimension. 

 

I invite you all to come forward - all may, some should, none must - and see Bettye connecting with all creation, nature and divine. This is not about creeds or theology but about the ultimate reality that we are all connected - which Bettye understood.

If Bettye had only been born and never been loved by her parents - Dayenu

If Bettye had only been loved and had never loved - Dayenu

If Bettye had only loved and never made a full commitment to love – Dayenu

If Bettye had only made a full commitment to love and had no children – Dayenu

If Bettye only had children and never taught them to love – Dayenu

If Bettye had only taught her sons to love but had not taught them to be responsible and faithful citizens – Dayenu

If Bettye had only raised responsible citizens and had never forgiven their failings –Dayenu

If Bettye had only forgiven their failings and not filled them with unconditional love – Dayenu

If Bettye had only given unconditional love for her family but not poured out that love to the new generations – Dayenu

If Bettye had only given love to her family and not shared the same with her community and us, her friends and neighbors – Dayenu

For all that we have received from Bettye and for her continual and new life with God - Dayenu.