In the beginning

http://youtu.be/dqeqNsfzbNs     is the video of this sermon

A Homily for Trinity Sunday                         All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC June 15, 2014                                                   Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Genesis 1:1-2:4a          Psalm 8      2 Corinthians 13:11-13      Matthew 28:16-20

Last week I mentioned that the stories from the Book of Genesis are best understood as myths. We have this unfortunate habit of thinking that myths are lies, but myths are more than that. Myths are cultural stories - which may or may not be factually correct – that we use to explain our understanding of what might be the deeper truth of the fundamental nature of things.  The themes for these stories come from our connections to the layers of personal and cultural and collective unconscious. As I explained last week, myths are public dreams and dreams are private myths. Each night we dream, and our personal, cultural, and collective unconscious speak to us in symbols in order to help us understand ourselves and our relationship to our true selves, our souls, our God, and the world in which we live.  

In a dream group, we give a title to each dream we share and the title gives us a clue to the theme. The name “Genesis” comes from the Greek translation of the first word of the first book of the Bible. In Hebrew there is the letter “bayit”, which we tend to pronounce as Beth, and when the Hebrews used the letter for a word, it meant “house” – that which contains – or “household” or “Temple” as in Beth-lehem, the “house of bread”. However, when only the letter is written, it is a preposition meaning “in”. The next word in the book of Genesis is “raysheeth” which means first, beginning, most importantly, so therefore, when the word and preposition are combined, the word is “b-raysheeth”, “In the beginning” or “First and foremost” or “Most importantly” God created the heavens and the earth, everything that ever was and will be. 

The myth that follows gives the Hebrew understanding of the nature of all creation. In the other 

cultures around them, like the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the creation myths were tied into a struggling encounter between two or more Gods, like the Canaanite Ba’al, the storm God, struggling with Yam the Sea Goddess, dragon, or the Babylonian Marduk, the hero God, and Tiamat the Sea Dragon, or the God of light and God of Darkness. Out of that battle (or sexual encounter, since both are symbols of struggles), then the earth is formed and life begins as both a resolution of one battle and the first act of the continuing struggle of life. The Hebrew myth aims to explain that most importantly there is only one God, and everything that is our understanding comes from the expression of that one God, whose spirit brooded over the void and whose expression, breath of that brooding spirit, gives life. God is the God of dark and light, of sea and sky, God of both male and female, giving life to everything we know, even to the things we fear, like the sea monsters, which the Psalmist declares that God made for the sport of it.

If you try to make this story literal, you miss the point, so we are urged to see each part of the myth as symbolic pointing to a deeper truth. My way of understanding it is that the myth tells me that science tells us that the Cosmic clock begins when 24 Billion years ago there was an explosion, a burst of being; the burst of energy hurling outwards within the tension of the allurement of gravity drawing it back in. The myth tells us that God spoke the breath of energy that begins this whole process and that every atom of all creation contains the spirit of God. If we look at the Cosmic clock as divided into 12 portions of 1.25 Billion years, galaxies start forming in February, with our Galaxy forming in September, a galaxy so wide that if one traveled at the speed of light  in order to get to the other side, it would take 100,000 years. On October 1^st, the words “Let there be light” reaches here as our sun begins to form. On October 10^th the earth is formed. On October 20^th single cell organisms start to appear, and on December 31^st of the Cosmic clock at 10:54 PM, the mammals of the genus homo and subspecies sapiens or humans with wisdom start to appear. Humans are last to be made in this myth to remind us that God makes us in God’s image; the image is not physical but rather, at the core of our being, the true self which has the three-fold ability to create, to care, and to love as God creates, cares and loves. At December 31^st at 11:59 and 51 seconds the Homo sapiens begin to write down thoughts and record dreams and imagination; five seconds later Jesus comes into the last four seconds of this cosmic clock to point us again to God, to remind us of the Divine Word spoken at the beginning calling us to create, care, and love.

The Genesis myth of creation, that public dream speaking a deeper truth to our true selves is meant to fill us with wonder that this whole creation is filled with God, and our task in these last nine seconds of creation is to pay attention to the whole of creation. We are not to rise above matter but to go deeply into all of the spirit-filled matter. The Spirit is not separate from matter but infuses all of matter. Jerry Wright, a former Presbyterian Minister and current Jungian analyst and one of my instructors for dream encounters (and from whom I have stolen this whole Cosmic Clock analogy) warns us of the attempt to split spirit and matter saying, “When we don’t deal with the things that really matter, it becomes the matter with us.”

First and foremost, “In the beginning”, “Most importantly”, “b-raysheeth”: we are called to live into that wonder of all creation as we listen to that initial creative word resonating with those homo sapiens, humans who, in their wisdom given by God, create, care, and love. Jeff Edwards told us about care which is what stewardship is, the care for all of what we have as a gift from the loving God. We are stewards of the continuing creation which is still evolving. This is also what our Sunday School teachers do with our younger children, as they pass on the stories, dreams, and myths about what it means to be humans in relationship with God - humans with the ability to create, care, and love in the image of God as God creates, cares and loves. It is what we do when the Preacher calls us to pay attention to what is first and foremost. We have to listen. 

Paul in his letter to the Corinthians ends with a call to them and to us to listen and, in listening, create a Shalom peace in our communities. He says:

Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. 

Good bye Mr. van Laer

A Reflection on the Occasion of a Memorial Service for Nick van Laer                 June 9, 2014

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, N.C.                      Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 37-39       Psalm 139:1-11       John 6: 35-40

Nick van Laer                              Nov. 13, 1928 - June 6, 2014

One of the difficulties of being in a church for a period of time is that you start to care about people. When I was a therapist or a counselor, it was easier because I had to keep a professional distance. I would see people in my office after having made an appointment, and it was only for a set period of time and on a particular agenda item. We might set up another visit for another set period of time, then they would leave. After they left, I would write up my notes and reflect on Counter-Transference, which is inappropriate feelings and emotions about the client. If I were to see them on the street at a later time, I would not make the first move because that might betray that I had a professional relationship with them. Outside the office we would never talk about the problem that brought them to see me, and inside the office, if we talked about things outside the problem, then this was seen as resistance to dealing with the problem. I remember once when a young boy client who was coming in to see me talked about pitching at his Little League team's next game, and I impulsively showed up to cheer him on. His pitching that night was horrible because I had stepped outside of my therapeutic role and, by so doing, fulfilled his transference fantasy of my being a replacement for his absent father. His symptoms returned and my Psychiatric Consultant gave me “what for” about my crossing the lines.

In seminary we were told to keep a professional distance with parishioners, lest I be accused of encouraging a clique of personality or other kinds of inappropriate relationships. We were told that a good Priest would be able to leave and people might miss him or her for a little bit, but then they would say, “Well enough of that; who is going to be the replacement?” William Blackstone in his Commentaries on English Law wrote: “He is called parson, persona, because by his person the church, which is an invisible body, is represented; and he is in himself a body corporate, in order to protect and defend the rights of the church (which he personates) by a perpetual succession.”

Nick and Helen were one of the couples in this church who were determined not to treat me as a “personator” of the church. They believed that there was a full person behind the role and, over the years, I ate a lot of his food (and he mine), drank a lot of his liquor (and he mine), swam in his pool to get away from the summer heat, laughed with him at his jokes, talked with him about our shared interest in history, resonated with his gripes, didn't try to bully him away from his doubts, avoided church politics as unproductive, listened as he shared his frustrations and sadnesses, mourned at his losses, and marveled at how much he loved Helen. Nick was not a client; yes, he was a parishioner but, more importantly, he was a friend.

You see, Nick had no truck with roles; he wanted to know what was behind mere personas. What you saw in Nick was what there was; and, God help us, he approached God in the same way. He wasn't all that sure about an afterlife, but he was bound and determined that this life was important. Faith in God was not about “getting into heaven” after he shuffled off this mortal coil, but faith in God meant that God was walking with us each day. For him, when Jesus in today's Gospel lesson said that he was “the bread of life”, Nick interpreted it to mean that the Spirit of Christ was the Spiritual nourishment to make it through each day. Nick liked to share that bread when he would talk with newcomers, and especially when he fed the homeless and helped host them in this church.

Nick knew he was an adopted child of God as Paul urges us to see ourselves in today's lesson from Romans. Nick knew something about adoption. He was adopted by this country when he became a naturalized citizen and was not content to be a mere “summer soldier or sunshine patriot” but served his country with dedication and love. The vanLaer house is a place of adoption of stray cats and racoons, creatures that showed up and found feeding and caring and love, like some Priests I know. Ted Bishop, for instance, stayed in their house when he was interviewing as an interim at St. Andrew’s decades ago, long before All Saints’ was even considered. Nick's sense of duty carried over to his church attendance. He was always loyal to the churches to which they belonged in their travels throughout the world, but I think he saved his passion for All Saints’ when he and a group of parishioners at St. Andrew’s came up north and started to have Episcopal services at Duck Methodist during the summer months. He generously threw his energy, his time, his talents, his treasure into this church. He was one of the people who created a sense of wonder about what we were doing here long before I showed up and how he wanted other people to join him in his love for this place.

One of the things the founders of this church did was to have two long banners proclaiming “Alleluia” in the Easter Season which they hung up behind the Altar Table, and people were invited to write their names on these white banners as an outward and visible sign of their invisible and spiritual New Life in the new church. It was Pentecost yesterday so the red Pentecost season banners were hung as the white banners were taken down, and new people were invited to sign their names. As we were taking them down, we reflected on all the names of people that we saw who were no longer living, and we remembered their names and realized that, while their bodies were not here, their spirits were with us every time we gathered together. They were on the other side of the table as we all had communion together as the Priest would say the lines inviting the congregation to sing the praises of God in the Sanctus, the “Holy, Holy, Holy”, “and now with Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven . . .”

As we were taking down those Alleluia banners, it hit me that Nick indeed was now on the other side of the communion table with a lot of his other friends. Nick has had real problems getting to church for the last several years as his body was letting him down. Yet, while his body was letting him down, that stubborn old Dutchman's heart kept beating so strongly - until finally it stopped and gave him rest. On the anniversary of D-Day, Nick crossed the other channel to land in a deeper and safer harbor to join all the others who have gone before.

Many of you know my addiction to old movies, but high on the list of my favorites is the 1939 version of “Goodbye Mr. Chips” with Robert Donat and Greer Garson. In that movie, there are series of montages as the young boys file by the instructor Mr. Chipping as they check in for the new school semesters over the years. Nick, while his spirit will continue to be an integral part of the fabric of this religious institution, his body will not be here to check the new people and new priests into this fellowship of seekers of a deeper truth and be part of the informal orientation team. Nick has graduated from this school and enrolled in something much higher. Nick was never sure he believed in something further, but we think he was pleasantly surprised as he checked in to a joyous “Hello Nick”, and we on this side say, “We will see you again when our school term ends. Good bye Mr. Van Laer.”

Pentecost 2014

 You Tube video of sermon is:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEBBlFqB5qs


A Reflection for Pentecost                                         All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC June 8, 2014                                                                 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 2:1-21                                         John 20:19-23

Today is the Feast of Pentecost, but before we deal with the Pentecost story, let me remind you of another story - the Tower of Babel story/myth from the Book of Genesis.

I call it a myth because a myth is a story which attempts to explain why things are as they are. Myths show up in in many different cultures in similar ways because most civilizations want to understand the world about them. Each culture gathers together and, in their search for truth, they enter their unconscious connections to a collective unconscious and relate their public dreams in symbolic form which end as stories which may or may not be factually correct but which carry a deeper truth. A way for me to understand the concept of a myth is by defining a myth as a public dream and a dream as a private myth. In the individual experience, the events of a dream may be rather fantastic as our logical mind remembers them, but they are messages from our true Self, our Soul if you will, the place where God's true self connects with us and we are in connection with all of creation which occurs in our unconscious when we are asleep. These dreams may come to drive home a deeper truth about us, about the divine, and about the world we live in.

As you remember in the Tower of Babel myth/story, the people of the earth are all connected to each other, through inheritance from Noah after the flood story and from Adam and Eve as part of the whole creation myth - which may or not be factually correct, but is backed up by the DNA evidence which shows that people all over the world are genetically connected to each other. In the story, the people who are all connected to each other but who are also filled with their own pride and arrogance decide to build a tower on the plain of Shinar to reach to the Heavens to make a NAME for themselves. To make a NAME means to be in charge of their own identity as equals with God. Out of this folly, the tower is scattered and the people are scattered from each other by language as their differences develop and harden into habits of culture and race and color. The myth tells us that we are all related as brothers and sisters, but we act as strangers to each other as, in our arrogance, we view each other as potential enemies. 

The story of the Pentecost experience is a recapitulation of the Tower of Babel story but told in reverse. The disciples are gathered together, men and women, all as an intentional community, not to rise up as a challenge to God but to enter into the NAME of God, to have their identities fashioned by the Spirit of the Living God. They face a challenge and they have some anxiety about having enough strength to meet that challenge. Here in that room the community’s members empty out their fears, arrogances (for indeed, arrogances are only fears in disguise) and differences and rediscover that they are connected at a deeper level to each other and indeed to all the world. The emptying out of themselves that they are the special ones is to leave room in their soul for God's spirit to come into their lives. The Spirit, the wind, the breath of God comes and drives them out into the world, to meet the world on its own terms in order to share the contents of their souls in such a way as to knock down and transcend the barriers of geography, habits of life, language, race, and color. 

Now, we can spend a lot of time arguing how or if this factually happened, or we can accept the Book of Acts as the stories the church tells to explain how the followers of Jesus changed their dependence on the physical presence of Jesus and allowed themselves to be filled with the wind, the breath, the spirit of the Living Christ.  This transformation allowed them to leave their homes and go into all the world in order to share their hearts and souls with previously unmet people who were members of the larger family and only disguised as strangers.

The disciples had a choice - they could be like the people at Babel and try to build themselves up as Towers to take the place of God in their lives, or they could empty themselves out in love in order to bring peace and forgiveness to the broken world.

The stories of the Book of Acts indeed act as our mythic story of how we deal with our faith and especially how we go out into the world from this church. I am especially aware of it as I look out at our group of graduating high school seniors who I first met when they were finishing first grade. They are no longer to be kept safe from the world; it is time for them to face new challenges.  Part of what we will do is to breathe the breath of God on them and send them out to be adults in the world, doing the ministry of sharing the divine spirit within them. This is still their home and they can always return because they are always in our hearts, but we send them out as our ministers.

As they go on to the next phase of their lives, they will meet many different kinds of people, from many different cultures and different belief systems. Their job is not to convert people but to honor them where they are and, at the same time, share with them the truth that is in their own souls. What our graduates will find is that they need to go deeper into their own souls to be able to communicate the mystery that is inside them. This is not a time for glib doctrines or memorized prayers or easy cynicism, but rather, for a hard struggle to find the dreams that are percolating inside their true self, the one they were created to be. God does not speak to their souls in chronic undifferentiated formulas, but each dream the divine dream maker implants is different as each of them is different, and yet each of them and each of us and each of the brothers and sisters we have not yet met are all connected in God’s love.

The lesson from the Gospel of John for today shows us who we are to be. In that Gospel, Jesus came to the people who had let him down and he announced Peace and Forgiveness.  We are Peace-givers and Agents of Forgiveness. Peace is not the cessation of conflict but the bringing of wholeness to broken people. We live in a broken world and we have a love affair with violence, and our job is to heal the brokenhearted, strengthen the weak, stand up for the persecuted, and work for justice. Forgiveness is a gift that we give to those who have disappointed us. I ask the graduates to forgive me as your Priest when I have not been there when you needed me, to forgive us, the church, where and when we have let you down. We ask them to forgive their parents; we try as much as we can, but we wish we were better. We ask that they learn how to forgive themselves as God has already forgiven them and us.  

I ask you as a Parish to keep these students in the Holy Space of your hearts as they do our work of ministry in other places to bring about God’s dream for us.
   

Choice: Talking about or Talking with

A Sermon for Sunday after Ascension All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, N.C June 1, 2014 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 1:6-14 Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11 John 17:1-11

At the Council of Nicea in 325 AD Arius - a bright young priest,  was defending what came to be called a Heresy of  Christ a a kind of 3rd thing- when St. Nicholas - Bishop of Myra (Yes- the prototype for Santa Claus) slapped him. This is a icon of that event

In the 4^th century of the early church, they had this fight between theologians over things like the Gospel lesson for today. There was this bright young priest who notices that Jesus is praying to God. His logic was that if Jesus is praying to God, then he is not God; and since Jesus died, then he is not God; and since he rose from the dead, he is not human. Therefore, the logic went, Jesus is neither human nor God, and he must be a kind of third thing. They had a big fight over that issue and, out of this squabbling, comes the Nicene Creed. The fight continued over the next several centuries as lots of ink and blood was spilled over who was right.

I am just a parish pastor, so I don’t spend too much time arguing theology; I spent a lot of time doing that in seminary and it was fun, but I am too busy talking with God to talk about God. Indeed, I hold with the notion that it is disrespectful to refer to someone in the same room with you as if he or she were not there, so I agree with the old saying that the greatest heresy is to refer to God in the 3^rd person.

For my dream leader training and in preparation for the start of this week’s dream group, I wrote a reflection on a book called Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth by Robert A Johnson, a Jungian Psychotherapist, author, spiritual guide and one of the best writers about dream work. I think in today’s lesson Jesus is having a conversation with his deepest self and doing Inner Work with the heart and mind of God. In fact I think that all prayer, all worthwhile prayer and not just braying out loud at religious gatherings, begins with an encounter and internal dialogue, Inner Work, with the one God, the ground of our being, who is the very fabric of our DNA and our soul.

The way it works is that our imagination and dreams, which come from the unconscious part of us, contain messages from the God who lives in all places and speaks in symbols and metaphors because mere language is so limited. The task is to pay attention because God is speaking all the time and we get so busy with our own agendas that we try to drown out God by our inattention, a sort of “I can’t hear you! Can’t you see I am doing something else?” kind of response.

In the Gospel lesson for today, Jesus is facing, literally, the crossroads in his life as he will have to leave his friends behind who are going to have to go on without him. He calls on the God inside him, that Spirit dwelling as part of his very being, to hallow the space between him and them and be there wherever they will go in their new journeys.

I think about the day I dropped my daughter off at college. I was going to physically leave her at that place three hours away from our home, but she would always be connected to my heart, and I wanted to be closer to her than a phone call so she could know that she was surrounded by my love and the presence of God’s Spirit. The internal dialogue I had with God that day was to allow myself to let her go and to entrust her to the power greater than myself. That internal dialogue has been going on for more than a quarter century and will probably continue long after I die.

In the lesson from Acts for today, Jesus again says farewell to his disciples in the Ascension and they go back to Jerusalem, each of them continuing the Inner Work, the Inner Dialogue with the Spirit of Jesus, the God who dwells within them, and they gather together in a prayer community.

Prayer is the Inner Work before we say the outer words. The prayers that they said together out loud in language were but pale reflections of the prayers they listened to in their hearts. That is what we do on Sundays - we all bring our internal dialogues with us, and there is this spiritual connection in Holy Space if we have done the inner work necessary to prepare for the gathering. Our liturgy, as beautiful and as meaningful as it is, is just too unsubstantial to connect us to our deepest spirit.

The writer of 1^st Peter in the Epistle selection for today, writing probably 80 some years after the Ascension, urges his flock to go deeper into themselves and find the strength that is there in the Inner Dialogue with God’s spirit, the Risen Christ living in them: “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves, keep alert.”

There is an old song that didn’t make it in the Episcopal Hymnal because it is sloppy sentimental, but later on it came into the Hymnal Supplement, Lift Every Voice and Sing. Early in my ministry when I was so worried about being taken seriously, I would cringe at it and make fun of it because I was projecting my inner fear of being a religious fool onto it. But now in the second half of my life, I am beyond embarrassment and, through Inner Work with Dreams, I am trying to claim those personalities and shadows within myself that I had tried so hard to suppress so that my public persona would shine, and now I find myself singing it to myself as I do some of my Inner Work. It an old Baptist hymn written by an Irishman, Joseph Scriven, who left heartbroken from Ireland when his fiancé died the day before the wedding. He settled in Canada as a teacher and fell in love again - and she also died and, at the same time, his mother was ill back in Ireland. He wrote a poem to his mother to follow his example to go into her very self in prayer and meet the God who transcends distance and death. Years later it was made into a Hymn and you may have heard it before:

What a Friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged; take it to the Lord in prayer.
Can we find a friend so faithful who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness; take it to the Lord in prayer.

Are we weak and heavy laden, cumbered with a load of care?
Precious Savior, still our refuge, take it to the Lord in prayer.
Do your friends despise, forsake you? Take it to the Lord in prayer!
In His arms He'll take and shield you; you will find a solace there.

Today I ask you to do your Inner Work and have an encounter with your dreams and imagination for the place where our Risen Lord, the ground of our being, dwells within us. If you feel so inclined, come join us to do dream work, Inner Work, on Thursday evening. It will last six sessions and then in the fall we will start another group for another six to eight sessions. Bring a dream and we will see what God might be saying to us. 

Willie Nelson singing "What a Friend we have in Jesus