[Propertalk] 4 Lent b rcl

[Robert P Morrison]

The editor has nudged out the writer and should be taking over on this shortly!

I wish you well for your interchange with Jesus, whatever time zone you're in!

Bob

THE EPISCOPAL PARISH OF ST. JAMES, LINCOLN CITY                         4 LENT B RCL
NUMBERS 21:4-9	                       	                            22nd MARCH, 2009       
EPHESIANS 2:1-10                        			      PSALM  107:1-3, 17-22
JOHN 3:14-21

	“We praise you, O Christ, for entering into the life of the world;
	May we also be signs of your presence as we follow in your ways.” 1
	Thirty or more years ago I got a letter from a friend who’d been my room-mate in Seminary for two years. He must have been about thirty then. He told me he’d been diagnosed with cancer; that he’d had surgery; and that he was then travelling a hundred miles plus each way on narrow Scottish roads, I think it was at least once a week, first for radiation and then chemotherapy treatments. This went on for months.
	His comment was one very common to others in similar circumstances. He said the treatment was awful. He said he felt better with the cancer, and often thought about stopping the treatment. He didn’t, and now all that time later, he’s still alive - very healthy, enjoying life in Aberdeen in Scotland, and a proud grandfather. He may even be a great-grandfather, I haven’t heard. He stared directly at the face of the violent pain, the nausea, the terrible travelling - and the uncertainty that any of that would produce any sort of a positive outcome whatsoever - he stared directly at it, and he kept going. He looked at the bronze snake; he faced Jesus’ cross; and he simply kept going, no matter how weak he became, how tired he became, how un-human he felt. Somehow, he was able to sense that he was not going through this alone, but that in the battle going on in his body, and, to some extent in his mind, he had God’s company.
	That’s REALLY important for me to know. There are so many times when I, and you, and countless others, feel isolated by and from society. There are times when even our best friends, the people on whom we may feel we can depend no matter what, even our best friends sometimes can’t quite bring themselves to journey with us. For one reason or another they drop by the wayside. They can’t take on one more thing that adds stress. They don’t want to deal with a situation that hits too close to home.
	Not to be too judgemental - sometimes it’s not a matter that these people WON’T be there; it’s that they CAN’T be there. Possibly that person or group is recovering from some similar wound. Maybe the fear is that the same danger may well fall on them next. We all know about this. A family member or a best friend dies, or becomes seriously ill, or is, somehow, separated off from us so we can’t have as close a relationship as we’d like. One of our neighbours or, worse yet, a co-worker, is laid off because of the economic downturn - and we wonder if we’ll be next. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons why we and others may not feel able to travel along the same road as someone else, no matter how close they may be to us.
	Whenever happens - a sense of aloneness, of not belonging, of not being appreciated and valued, of not being loved - sometimes a sense of what sociologists call “anomie” settles in over us because while people may be all around us, no one seems to be there for us in our time of need. Our whole lives seem disrupted and we don’t know where to turn. We’re out in a desert, far from home; the surroundings are completely uncomfortable; what we believed to be our basic needs aren’t being met. I’m sure we’ve all been in that desert at one time or another in our lives. There are many, right here in this community, who feel as if the economy has dumped them in such a desert just now.
	Then, just when we thought that we could experience nothing worse, out of nowhere, comes a den of snakes, biting us, chasing us, threatening us. And when we become recentred with God, what does God say? - “Look at the snake.”
	God, in the midst of everything that can trouble us, in the midst of those times when we actually wish to banish God from our lives because we’re so frustrated and fearful, and, literally, don’t know where to turn; right at the heart of the danger, and fear, and abandonment, God says, “Look at the snake” - whatever it is.
God knows exactly what we need, and what disturbs us to much whenever we’re ill, or threatened, or whenever the most important person or relationship is jeopardized. God gives to us what we seek above all - a sense of belonging. God gives us company.
Think back to those times when you were really sick as a child, or your own child was so sick. Remember what it was like to feel so helpless, so de-energised, so frustrated? Then remember what it was like to have a parent sit at your side - or to be the parent. Maybe it wasn’t so much what the parent or you DID. It could be that part of the frustration was in not knowing what to do. But the simple act of sitting there, of laying a damp cloth on a forehead, of holding a hand - all of these convey a sense of relationship, of belonging, that is priceless. They are as much a part of the healing and renewal process as any surgery, or medication. In fact, they make the pain, the inconvenience, the “lost-ness” tolerable. Both the one who is receiving the comfort and the one who is giving it interact in such a way that they share in the act of staring at the serpent that disrupts and divides. Together, they stare “Death and Life in the face”. That’s a phrase from the writing of Rabbis Phyllis Berman and Arthur Waskow which was posted on an internet discussion group this past week. 2
	What Berman and Waskow point out, in talking about the section from the Book of Numbers from which the first reading is drawn, is that, “The Torah-portion (called) Hukkat (Num. 19 through 21) calls our attention to what looks at first like paradox.
	“Literally ‘looks,’ for the paradoxes appear before the eyes.”
	Dealing with the same sort of issue as that of life-threatening snakes, in a passage slightly earlier than today’s verses, Berman and Waskow describe how the people are told to stare at “a red heifer (which is to be) slaughtered and burned in red fire with red wood and red dye in a great cloud of red smoke for / before the eyes of the priest (Num. 19: 5).”
	The people have become enveloped by ‘tumah’. “What is ‘tumah?’ Not impurity, as it is usually translated, but a spiritual state of laser-beam inward focus,” wrote the rabbis, “(quite different from experiencing holiness in community). ... For people so touched to move back into community, they had to go through one or another ritual. For death-contact, the red cow was the relevant ritual. 
	“The burning cow becomes a spectacle, literally, of redness for the priest to stare at hard. Look hard at all this red, then quickly shut your eyes: You will see a flash of green, a field of green. Green grass, green growth, green Tree of Life, green Garden.
	“If you look intently upon the color of death - and then, but not till then, you release yourself from that gaze by blinking - you will live.”
	What a marvelous image! I wonder how often you’ve done this - either as some sort of a game or in earnest. I can think of specific places and times when I have. In the Abbey Church at Mt. Angel, for one, where the area behind the altar is bathed in a warm pink, which sets off the large cross hanging over the altar. Stare at it long enough, then look at a plain white wall, and the reverse colour of the spectrum registers on the brain. The cross appears where it doesn’t hang. It seems if I look long and intently enough at the cross - or the pink wall - or whatever it is - a reverse image become available for my meditation, and even for the healing and transformation of my life. I find that I can turn from my inwardness, from my self-focus and absorption, my lone-ness, to discover God as my companion in the desert-like or life-less moment.
	“But,” say Rabbis Weskow and Berman, almost in sorrow, “the priest who kills the heifer and the one who burns her body and even the one who gathers up her ashes are all (drawn into the midst of this feeling of anomie) by the process. They (too) must be ritually released from their narrow focus. 
	“Gazing on death opens up the spirit from its laser-beam focus on death, but the process of this opening itself narrows the focus of the practitioner. Is this a paradox? Only if we are puzzled by the flow of life/death/ life. Today many physicians and psychotherapists who heal the wounded may themselves take on the woundedness;”
	The rabbis muse, “would that we shaped a ritual to heal these healers!”
	There’s nothing easy about this - neither about how to face daily the serpents around us nor in helping others to face their serpents and demons. But this is where the Gospel of Christ dovetails into this so neatly, no matter how terrifyingly. As we stare at the cross, as we take the cross into the heart of our minds and souls, and as we take there the image of Jesus ON the cross, we find there that God in Jesus is offering EVERYone not just a ritual, but a concrete symbol that God-with-us draws us closer and closer to all the things we fear so that we may be completely released from them.
	The great success of Twelve Step Programmes is that they’re built around a sense of community in which everyone takes seriously what’s happening in the life of the others. They’re there for one another, no matter where, no matter when, no matter what. Plus the fact that they hold fast to the belief in one whom they call “The Higher Power”, whom many mane “God”.
	We all search to belong - to families, to congregations, to organisations, to any body which will be able to - what do we say? - any body which will “lift us above ourselves”. As deadly as it was, as unspeakably dehumanising as it was, the Cross of Jesus can do just that. Jesus’ journey on earth is over. Now He walks with us as we make our own pilgrimages to our own Jerusalems.
	Jesus knows that on the way, we’ll encounter harsh criticism; we’ll face incredible sadness; we may experience great pain within our own bodies and souls. Jesus is aware of all that can dispirit us, so He stands there still. On the one hand He’s above all that - He reaches out His hand to draw us to Him, through the cross. On the other hand He’s NOT above it all - He’s right there at the point where our problems are affecting us. He didn’t look away from His cross. Nor does He look away from ours.
	The Rabbis asked, “what do you do with these super-serpents (that threaten to paralyse or snuff out our hope, our very lives? Look hard into their faces. Stare hard at death, the face of fear, and you will be freed to life. 
	“Stare hard at death -- and blink. Shut your eyes tight. Stare, and stop staring. Once you have seen clearly, open your eyes anew by first closing them for just an instant. - Open them! - to a different possibility. Then the colors of life will appear.”
	THAT’S the Good News of which Jesus talks too. The different possibility of which Jesus talks is that the Cross is NOT the end. THAT’S why we thank God, using such words as the short prayer from the Stations of the Cross with which I began this sermon. And THAT’S what we may sign to others on their journey, whatever their hardships.
	You belong. I belong. Everyone belongs. And not a snake, not even a cross cannot be faced down. THAT’S how much God loves the world!
 	“We praise you, O Christ, for entering into the life of the world;
	May we also be signs of your presence as we follow in your ways.”
NOTES:
1	“The Way of the Cross: using Inclusive language Texts”. Various sources including A Prayer Book for New Zealand, Book of Occasional Service (Church Hymnal Publishing); Ann K. Fontaine & Thomas K. Lewis, The Book of Common Prayer.   
2	Red Cow, Red Blood, Red Dye: Staring Death & Life in the Face 39. HUKKAT. Red Cow, Red Blood, Red Dye:Staring Death & Life in the Face By Rabbi Arthur Waskow and Rabbi Phyllis Berman http://www.shalomctr.org/node/275

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

541-994-2426 (Church)