[Propertalk] 2 Lent b RCL

[Robert P Morrison]

Here's a first draft of what will now be re-read and thought over for tomorrow.

Best wishes,

Bob

THE EPISCOPAL PARISH OF ST. JAMES, LINCOLN CITY   	2 LENT B RCL
GENESIS 17:1-7, 15-16		8th MARCH, 2009 
ROMANS 4:13-25		PSALM  22:22-30
MARK 8:31-38

	“All shall be well … and all shall be well … and all manner of thing shall be well” 1
	I wonder what sort of a person Julian of Norwich was. She’s known only through her writings, some of which are an account of mystical visions she had while she hovered between earthly life and death. We don’t know how tall she was, what her colouring was, whether she had a light soprano or a deep alto voice. More to the point, we don’t really know that much about how people reacted to her. She WAS revered. People sought her out just to listen to her. But what was she like at Vestry meetings? What was she like when the harvest failed, and when the local market went through desperate times? If someone wandered down Wall Street; if someone visited GM’s, or Ford’s, or Chrysler’s boardroom last week; pick a spot, any spot, any time - if someone stood there and said, with or without a smile, “All shall be well … and all shall be well … and all manner of thing shall be well.” Well, I think we might be inclined to turn away in scorn. Even someone not known for being overly sophisticated could be pardoned for thinking such a person a bit unbalanced and out of touch. 
	But that’s how faith can be described - the act of accepting and making for us something our experience says is out of touch with reality. And, insisted Paul the apostle, it’s faith that not only secures our future. Faith secures our present also. Faith frees us up to act according to how one believes one is being led by God, no matter what our next-door neighbour, never mind the rest of the world, thinks. Assuming, that is, that faith is placed in something reliable.
	But then, how do we determine that?
	According to “The Oregonian” of last Wednesday “An old con wears a new disguise. Tough times make scams easier to pull on vulnerable Oregonians.” 2 Do you trust a newspaper reporter? Or a TV news figure? Or a radio announcer? Or someone who calls on the phone?
	What about the voice of God?
	At least Abram and Sarai didn’t have to deal with newspapers and other mass media. Neither did the first century Jews or the Romans. Still, hearing God? Especially hearing God talk about having hope when things look so dark and uncertain, even dangerous - THAT’S asking a lot. Yet that’s what the Church, the Body of Christ in and for the world, has to offer.
	Abraham and Sarah, newly named, set out on the second phase of their life when most people were looking forward to a few years of retirement. When things were supposed to be winding down - no matter how disappointing, how terribly lonely it must have felt to have been childless - when bones may have been aching and muscles unresponsive, Sarah and Abraham were told to have hope that they’d be beginning a family soon.
	Or the disciples, Peter especially, flushed from their inspiration that Jesus was God’s Anointed, only to hear what that really meant! Hope must have been tremendously difficult for them.
	The word from God however, has always been such that there’s always been an offer of encouragement - not removal of the difficulty; not immediate pleasure or satisfaction from something accomplished - but encouragement that the task WILL be accomplished, that there WILL be a sense of fulfillment. And it’s this which is the seed of hope which lies within us, dormant or otherwise, no matter what’s going on around us, or, indeed, anywhere within us. It’s this hope, this knowledge that there’s nothing which will be able to overcome the fulfillment of God’s love and God’s reign, which can enable us to continue even in the midst of clouds swirling with leaden greyness and winds howling with demonic intensity.
 	There are times when I seem to wonder where I thought I might be going - in the writing of a sermon; the visiting of someone who’s asked for my company; the travelling to a certain place for a specific reason; and so on. If that sort of feeling of uncertainty comes to me, then usually I start to look for some sort of a sign that I AM, in fact, doing what I’m supposed to be doing. Sometimes the sign comes in an e-mail; sometimes a word that pops out of whatever I’m reading; sometimes a note or a phrase of music that may have been in the background. One way or another, there ARE those God-given moments of encouragement and assurance that things WILL work out, no matter how difficult the journey may be.
	These are the sorts of things we ALL need. The main point, as Ann Fontaine suggested this week, is that we discover that often what gets in the way of our thinking, or our dreaming, or our acting is we ourselves. “How often,” Ann asked, “do I limit myself by thinking I have blocks that cannot be overcome?” I’m sure that many of the things that bother me have been allowed to grow simply because I don’t recognize both the desire and ability of God to help me to get around or through these crises.
	In his mesmeric poem “If”, Rudyard Kipling talked about the ways in which we CAN overcome obstacles.
	He began,
		“If you can keep your head when all about you
		Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
		If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
		But make allowance for their doubting too;”
	To Sarah and Abraham and through them, God is saying that nothing is really so hopeless or so threatening that they and we should ever give up believing we can follow our vocation.
	To Jesus, as much as to Peter and that bunch of dubitators, God is saying that the road blocks may seem incredibly high, and the effort required to surmount them immense. But God’s word to them and to us, through these two accounts, and innumerable other moments, is that THAT may be exactly the way we have to take in order to bring others with us.
	It may seem a bit of an imposition, having God say, “Do this. It’s tough; it’s unthinkable; it’ll make you squirm.” I DO wonder, sometimes, about why God might allow certain things to happen. But then I think of the outcome of these two stories, for instance. Yes, Sarah and Abraham must have had a great kick out of having a son so late in their lives. No doubt their neighbours thought they were nuts. And Jesus - we all know what His friends thought about Him going to Jerusalem right at the time when there would be the greatest resistance to His Presence and His speech. For the sake of everyone who came after them, however, as much as for the integrity of their own person and character, they went on. They showed how God DOES support, how God is present in pain.
	So, if we can keep our heads; if we can wait; if we can dream; if we can bear to hear the truth - these are the opening words of each verse of Kipling’s poem - if we can face risk, and disaster, and what others may think is  tremendous unpredictability - then not only do we win the prize of reaching our full humanity, but we also offer support to those who’re less able to endure buffeting and overcome doubting, those who are trying to reach fulfillment as well.
 	Our Interim Assisting Bishop, Sandy Hampton, wrote a little note to the Diocese this week, referring to the challenge facing Jesus and the disciples, and hinting about how we might respond. He talked about the absurdity of having to face execution if one is described as giving God immense pleasure - as we all do, from time to time. Sandy Hampton referred to “Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard (who) dealt with this troubling notion (of absurdity) when he wrote that ‘Christianity has taken a giant stride into the absurd. Remove from Christianity its ability to shock and it is altogether destroyed. It then becomes a tiny superficial thing, capable neither of inflicting deep wounds nor of healing them. It's when the absurd starts to sound reasonable that we should begin to worry.’ Kierkegaard then names some of Christianity's unreasonable assertions: ‘blessed are the meek; thou shalt not kill; love your enemies; go, sell all you have and give to the poor.’” 3
	We should actually EXPECT to have to deal with the difficult, the dangerous, the absurd, then. Which is good news - both for us who consider ourselves within the Church, and also for those who sometimes think of themselves as outside the Church - especially in the current economic and social climate when so many people are filled with questions that have led them to doubt their abilities, and have led to an atmosphere of depression.
	Maybe this is as good a place as any to mention that as interesting as Kipling’s poem is, it seems to suggest that all that’s necessary to survive hardship and so on is a stout constitution and good perseverance. Our experience, however, suggests that even that cannot always save us. We need constantly to look beyond ourselves, as Sarah, Abraham and Jesus did. In a sense THIS is absurd, but it worked for them - and most of us have found it speaking to us too. 
	This doesn’t mean that we won’t have questions or won’t have fears. A writer in the magazine “Christianity Today” reminded readers this week that “The church is God’s hospital. It has always been full of people on the mend. Jesus himself made a point of inviting the lame, the blind, and the possessed to be healed and to accompany him in his ministry, an invitation often spurned by those who thought they were fine as is. We should not be surprised, then, that the depressed populate not only secular hospitals and clinics, but our churches as well.” 4
	Dan Blazer listed some of the emotions people are feeling right now in the world - probably both in and out of congregations. He mentioned several serious difficulties with which people are dealing, then described them as an “Opportunity for the church”. He wrote that “Christians are called to weep with those who weep, and should welcome emotional pain that results from empathy and draws us alongside the afflicted. If we have grown numb to the pain and suffering around us,” he suggested, “we have lost our humanity.”
	What we’re invited to do is to accept this for ourselves, therefore. Then we are to empathise and support others, to help them find their place in God’s realm. But if we don’t or can’t accept the possibility that God can give us fruitful hope, despite our years and physical condition; if we don’t or can’t accept that pain and even death CAN and WILL be overcome, as the disciples had trouble doing, then it makes our faith journey that much longer. Mind you, we can take hope from the fact that even Peter found that the penny dropped eventually.
	“And thanks be to God, who raised the One who entered fully into our condition, breaking the power of sin, death, and hell, that we not only can name wrecked reality, but also lean into it on the promise that Christ is making all things new.
	Blaze concluded, “Those who bear the marks of despair on their bodies need a community that bears the world’s only sure hope in its body. They need communities that rehearse this hope again and again and delight in their shared foretaste of God's promised world to come. They need to see that this great promise, secured by Christ's resurrection, compels us to work amidst the wreckage in hope. In so doing, the church provides her depressed members with a plausible hope and a tangible reminder of the message they most need to hear: This sin-riddled reality does not have the last word. Christ as embodied in his church is the last word.”
	Julian of Norwich, God’s eternal optimist, wrote, “At the same time that I saw the sight of our good Lord’s head, bleeding, I received a spiritual vision and a new understanding of God’s familiar love for us. I saw God as every good thing to us. Whatever comforts us is our Lord.
	“The Lord is our clothing, who wraps and covers us for love. The Lord embraces and shelters us. The Lord surrounds us with His love. The Lord never leaves us. God is every good thing.” 4
	THIS is the Good News for us this morning. And THIS is the news we have to offer all whose lives are being turned upside down, whose hopes may be hanging by the slenderest of threads.

	
NOTES:
 	Julian of Norwich: 14th Century Mystic 
2	Catherine Trevison “An old con wears a new disguise”.“The Oregonian. Wednesday March 4th 2009. Page 1 http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/03/old_con_with_a_new_face_nearly.html
3	Bishop Sanford Hampton to the Diocese of Oregon 4th March, 2009 
4	Dan G. Blazer: The Depression Epidemic Why we're more down than ever—and the crucial role churches play in healing.  Christianity Today 3/06/2009 10:23AM http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/march/15.22.html
5	Julian of Norwich: “Revelations”

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Robert P. Morrison
The Episcopal Parish of St James,
PO Box 789
Lincoln City, Oregon, 97367

541-994-2426 (Church)