Proper 27b -- Palm Harbor FL
Sermon: Proper 27B
St. Alfred's Episcopal church
Nov. 9-10, 2024
After 42 years of ministry, this past Sunday's was among the most challenging sermons I ever had to prepare and deliver. It can be viewed at https://boxcast.tv/highlights/st-alfreds-episcopal-church-sunday-holy-eucharist-rite-2-syur7m0hxikht6lj1phm/pggokxirk3vhysidsow7/sp7txlsd8q19tvifjuyv.
Opening
We had an election this past week. You may have noticed. Wednesday brought a lot of intense emotions across our country – but, of course, the emotions varied a lot because it was win/lose situation. I felt it. But I did anticipate it. I have been thinking about this sermon for weeks now. I thought about previous occasions when I was called upon to preach after the nation had experienced something intense. I thought about the charge I accepted on the occasion of my ordination, that I preach the Gospel to all people, regardless of any distinction other than that they were children of God. The bishop's words to me were, in part ...
Vow to Bishop at my ordination 1
As a priest, it will be your task to proclaim by word and deed the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to fashion your life in accordance with its precepts. You are to love and serve the people among whom you work, caring alike for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor. You are to preach, to declare God's forgiveness to penitent sinners, to pronounce God's blessing, to share in the administration of Holy Baptism and in the celebration of the mysteries of Christ's Body and Blood, and to perform the other ministrations entrusted to you.
In all that you do, you are to nourish Christ's people from the riches of his grace, and strengthen them to glorify God in this life and in the life to come. ...
I have had no trouble accepting that charge and vow. But I have often thought, "How do I do that when my audience is made up of children and retirees, people living in mansions and people living on the streets (out front of my church building), … ?" That is to say, ALL people.
The challenge
One of the preachers here at St. Alfred's recently, when I told him that his sermon had been outstanding, he said in response that he was preaching to himself in the first place. Today, in part, I am preaching to myself. What I have to say speaks to me of the Good News of God. It may not to you, but I am genuinely trying not to exclude anyone from the basic message that God is in charge.
I begin with trying to keep a right perspective on things. In days gone by I might have called it "looking at things from God's perspective" – or "in the light of eternity," – or "Imagining God's perspective."
Big Enough God?
Getting a picture of eternity is, of course, quite impossible. But I was introduced many years ago to a representation of time leading up to eternity. It involves a spool of string. Actually 2 spools.
Expand our perspective
The first step is to imagine that this length of twine represents time since the beginning. God gets in the picture. At various places along the timeline I have placed various events, proportionate to the approximate date.
New Cosmic scale
| New scale | Years ago | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| Big bang | 13.8 bill | 100 ft |
| Stars & New chemicals | 13.6 bill | 98 |
| Earth & solar system | 4.5 bill | 33 |
| Life | 3.8 bill | 28 |
| Hominids | 2.8 mill | 1/4 in |
New Human scale 2
| New scale | Years ago | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| Hominids | 2.8 mill | 100 ft |
| Homo sapiens, tools, hunting | 315 k | 11.3 ft |
| Fire, living in caves | 200 k | 7.1 ft |
| Neanderthal disappear | 40 k | 1.4 ft |
| Villages, agriculture, complex society | 8 k | 3.4 in |
| History begins | 6 k | 2.6 in |
| Jesus | 2 k | .9 in |
Grace is found in the most unlikely places
So in the light of eternity what seems important to us is a very very tiny piece of God's perspective. But today's texts from Scripture points to another aspect of my search to broaden our perspective. First, there's Ruth in the first reading.
Women in today's reading
This reading is included in our cycle of readings because of its ending. The short, sort of charming, story about Ruth ends with a kind of footnote. It points out that Ruth was an ancestor of David. That makes her an ancestor of Jesus -- according to the geneaology in Matthew's gospel. In that lengthy list describing the lineage of Jesus, we read lots of men -- and 5 women. 3
- Tamar
- Rahab
- Ruth
- Bathsheba
- Mary
Each of these women were socially and sexually compromised in the lives they lived. But God saw fit to use them to his larger purposes. They were forebears of the whole ball of wax (the Kerygma, the "Gospel") -- the Good News of God.
Ruth shows us that God works in unlikely places and in unlikely persons. When it comes to God, our expectations are often mistaken.
And isn't that what we hear in the gospel! The widow's mite is as valuable as all the treasures contributed by the wealthy. God works in unlikely places through unlikely people. Including you and me.
Wonder in unlikely places
Let us seek to see things with God's eyes. God's handiwork is often not obvious to us -- maybe usually not obvious. But when we see it, an appropriate response is awe and wonder. Consider this reflection from A Big-Enough God by Sara Maitland.
… we might respond to, react to, the Big-Enough God in her particular revelation through creation.
An immediate and necessary response is a humbled and shaken ejaculation of 'Oh wow. The same sort of "wow' that I suggested would be a poet's response to the creation narrative. This wowed posture, it seems to me, is what is meant by that odd word joy. For people who have difficulty in assuming this posture I can recommend the exercise of drawing up a list of things for which it would be insane to give thanks, but which are obviously extraordinary. I will give you three [one] of my favourites to start you off:
- Once upon a time someone invented mayonnaise. It may not have struck you what an extraordinary thing this is, but think about it. While you do, be sure to bear in mind that in rural societies every egg is precious, and every drop of olive oil has been pressed out by the feet of children who doubtless complained ceaselessly as they stamped.
Nonetheless, and for no apparent reason, it occurred to someone in Mahon on Minorca, without an electric blender, that if you wasted a great number of egg yolks by pouring olive oil on to them very slowly while half breaking your wrist with a whisk, the resulting mixture, far from being yellowish and perfectly revolting, would be white and fluffy and taste delicious with cold meat, hard-boiled eggs and particularly cold poached salmon. Legend tells that mayonnaise was first made for a passing king, but this seems to me improbable. It is most unusual for any cook to start messing about with unlikely experiments when a king is waiting for his dinner; and your rivals -jealous that you got the job - are more than half hoping your souffle will flop, and a small but perfectly formed slug will sneak into the salad and lurk under a rose-cut radish.
But then what circumstances are probable? Mayonnaise is not something you could discover through neglect, like Stilton cheese; nor through poverty, like bacon; nor through impatience, like new potatoes. Nor is it something that anyone can possibly have imagined first and then pursued determinedly through experiment. It is the unlikely consequence of careful persistence in an apparently pointless exercise. It is the joyful result of a creative application of hope, faith and love.
If I get to heaven I shall seek out this passionate soul, searching among the angels for one whose wings have that particular soft and lustrous sheen, and thank her. For it gives me some vague notion of how God must have made the world - smashing whole galaxies, more precious than eggs; slowly pouring in the dust of trampled stars and patiently stirring the primaeval goo - simply for delight and to see how it turned out.
(2) There are 9 planets and 47 moons in our solar system. (Actually there are more: the Voyager spacecraft photographed several extra moons around Saturn, but their orbits are not known and they are not named yet.) They all spin in the same direction except one: Triton, Neptune's giant moon, orbits its planet in reverse; which means that it is rotating the other way from Neptune itself. All that distance away, across cold space and out into the dark where the sun's light is as frail as moonshine, Triton – wrapped in crimson oceans of liquid nitrogen, down which sail majestic great blue-white icebergs of frozen methane – spins alone in a different direction.
"(3) God so loved the world that the Word (which was in the beginning and was with God and was God) became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, and we beheld that glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father."
City of God
For me, today, the challenge to seeing God's Good News staying focused on God's perspective, I would like to add a particularly Christian way of seeing that.4
St. Augustine wrote an extended piece at a time when the foundations of his world had fallen to pieces. The city of Rome was sacked by invaders. The reflection he wrote was titled City of God. He contrasted 2 cities, sort of obviously labeled "City of Humans" and "City of God". Much has been written about his work through the centuries, but it all boils down to Augustine's theology of love.
It all comes down to Love of self vs. Love of others – including love of God.
The City of God is not some place or time in the hereafter. It exists alongside the City of Humans. Wherever the primary activity is Love of self -- there you have the city of human beings. Wherever there is love of others -- there you have the City of God.
The true home for the children of God is in the City of God.5
Burn (Annie Dillard)
Annie Dillard gives a particularly vivid image of what that looks like in a little essay she wrote 20 years ago or so.
One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second
Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth's wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax— a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle's round pool.
And then this moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning.
The wax rose in the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.
She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning – only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.
Annie Dillard was able to see into the heart of things and in the most ordinary of things to recognize the awesome presence of God. Good news.
My effort today has been to try to put the present into a proper perspective, God's perspective, and to let the Good News of God soak in.
That light giving moth is easily given a Christian twist.I can hear that image of fire as Good News in a story from the ancient Desert Fathers. 6
A story from the desert fathers: Abba Lot came to Abba Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and, according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not become fire?:
Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity, we shall harness for God energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world we will have discovered fire.
If I can sometimes and in some places be a light to illumine the Good News of God – it will have been enough.
Keep Burning.
From the Examination↩
The oldest known remains of Homo sapiens—a collection of skull fragments, a complete jawbone, and stone tools—date to about 315,000 years ago. "History" means recorded history which requires the development of written language which began ca. 6,000 years ago.↩
Unlikely Heroes The Women of Matthew 1 - Wycliffe Bible Translators USA Homepage↩
Reading Augustine's City of God Understanding the Two Cities Discourses on Minerva↩
Teilhard de Chardin↩
Comments
Post a Comment