14th-sun-after-pentecost.md

14th Sun. after Pentecost St. Paul’s, Monroe, NC September 10, 2017

Greetings and introduction

Greetings from my wife and me. Greetings from Rock HIll where we have
lived since 2014, having moved there from Hawai’i where we had lived
for over a dozen years. We are there because WU’s invitation to Mary
Pat to teach in the Math Dept. seemed like a call.

Even before I left Hawai’i I had discussed with my bishop there about
the various opportunities for serving the church from where were about
to move to. Clearly in Rock Hill we are close to NC while still living
in SC and really we are pretty close to a number of Episcopal
dioceses.

When I moved here I called fairly soon and found that it would be 9
months or more before I could meet with the bishop of North Carolina.
I decided to put that off for a while. Of course you then proceeded to
get rid of your bishop by sending him to New York. After meeting with
Bp. Anne, I finally received my license to supply in North Carolina
almost a year ago. As it turns out this is the first time I have been
able to agree to supply in NC.

Hurricanes : we don’t know the time or day

It seems as if we have ended up on the eastern side of Hurricane
Irma’s trajectory. Surely we are going to feel something here. We
experienced remnants of Harvey last weekend when we drove to Ohio to
be at a HS reunion. But the worst is going somewhere else.

But surely we can agree we “dodged a bullet.”

  • It could have been so much worse.
  • I am at least a little ambivalent about the phrase. It could just mean, whew, I’m sure glad (so and so) got hit rather than us. Sort of
    like – “Well, better them than us.”
  • None of us would really take that position if we put it in those terms.
  • I hear something about all of this in the words we hear from St. Paul in today’s reading?

now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone,
the day is near. Romans 13

Seize the Day

I remember looking at the novel by Saul Bellow lying around the house.
I was really intrigued at first reading the book, but I was not quite
sure whether I should be embarrassed or not. It was a grown up book
and I was still pretty young. I knew that as far as my mother was
concerned there was no censorship in our household. If we were
interested in it we were allowed to pursue it. From her perspective,
openness and honesty were especially prized. It was quite a few years later that I really began to recognize what was going on with
the novel and in particular the title.

Seize the day is the translation of the Latin saying Carpe diem. It is one of the oldest philosophical mottos in western history. First
uttered by the Roman poet Horace more than 2,000 years ago, the
actress Judi Dench had carpe diem tattooed on her wrist for her 81st
birthday.

Carpe Diem is an antidote to the reality that we are, as Dead Poets’ Mr Keating (played by Robin Williams) (and by the way also
Shakespeare) put it, “food for worms”.** Life is short and our time is running out.** … Basically its about taking the ones you
love and living every day without ever getting into fights about
stupid shit. We don’t live forever, you gotta make the days you have
with them last. Keep those you love close, and seize the day. Urban
Dictionary

The day is near (at hand): Seize the day for God.
blog

Along with most of my classmates in seminary, many years ago, I did a
summer of CPE at a hospital in Boulder, CO. What happens in CPE is
that 20 hours a week we worked as chaplains in a clinical setting. The
other 20 hours we participated in a seminar in which we read,
discussed, and processed our experiences. It was a time for learning
about practical ministry and about ourselves and how we approached
ministry and how we might change in order to be better ministers of
the gospel. I had a profound learning experience, about ministry
and about myself when I ended up being the chaplain on call in the
emergency room when a young man arrived who had been electrocuted –
by an Xerox machine of all things. The doctors and nurses tried to
revive him but it was in vain. Finally his parents arrived at the
hospital and there I was – a young man about their son’s age trying
to listen carefully to their questions and to reflect back to them
what I thought was appropriate under the circumstances. It was strong
on intellectual concepts. And overly weak in heart-felt empathy.

When they repeated over and over again, “How can this be? How could
God have allowed this to happen?” I responded as honestly and openly
as I knew how at the time. But when we processed this event later with
the group of chaplains and my supervisor – I was convinced – I was
convicted – for having failed to hear those parents in their deepest
agony, in their devastation, asking for some kind of blessing some
kind of proclamation and embodiment of God’s victory over death and
destruction. I missed the moment.

I became convinced that I had failed to seize the day for God and
God’s blessing in that moment.
Almost 20 years later under different circumstances I became further convinced that seizing the day is the responsibility not
just of ordained ministers but was an obligation for all who wish to
wear the name Christian. All of us must seize the day to
proclaim blessings on those nearest to us. Each day, throughout the
day, we all are given the opportunity to respond with a word, a
gesture, a decision, that conveys God’s blessing.

Closing

It has to do with setting priorities. It has to do with knowing
what’s important and what is small stuff. Knowing what needs our
attention now because now is the time.

The things that divide us – and we are faced in this time and in this
country by enormous canyons and walls that divide us – what divides
us is mostly – I’m tempted to say always – small stuff.

What binds us is:

  • We want to know that Jesus is indeed in the midst of us
  • We want to believe and put into action the conviction that our salvation is near at hand
  • For all of us, the night is far gone, the day is near
  • All of us are regularly with 2 or 3 gathered in Christ’s name. Knowing that Christ himself is in our midst, wouldn’t we be deeply
    motivated to extend a word of reconciliation.
  • What binds us together is our common desire to claim God’s blessing – and to claim it now, not tomorrow, or some future time.

Shared from my wife: 4 things you can’t get back:

  1. The stone after it’s thrown
  2. the word after it’s said
  3. The occasion after it’s missed
  4. The time after it’s gone

We do know the urgency about which Ezekiel, Paul, and Jesus tell us in
today’s readings. We all too often pay attention to the lesser things
– that seem so big or tall at the moment. Somewhere, someone, today, at this very moment, is open and hoping for a blessing from you. Give
it to them. For the day is near and our salvation is nearer than when
we became believers.

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