[Propertalk] 5 Lent b RCL

[Robert P Morrison]

Here's an offering for tomorrow. It needs to be talken to the editor, but this is that from which I'm starting8 - )

Bob


THE EPISCOPAL PARISH OF ST. JAMES, LINCOLN CITY             5 LENT B RCL
JEREMIAH 31:31-34	                                                          29th MARCH, 2009
HEBREWS 5:5-10   			                PSALM 51:1-13
JOHN 12:20-33

	Do things ever change? The writer of Ecclesiastes, in that famous passage, says there’s nothing new under the sun, and gets quite defensive about it. Ads on TV, the radio and in print media, however, try to say the opposite - this is NOT your parents’ …. Fill in the blank here …. implying that things have changed irreversibly.
	Well, they’re right! Both the pessimistic writer and the ad writers. There are things which DO change, which MUST change; there are things which OUGHT to change; there are things which it would be helpful if they DID change. And then, thank God, there are those things which do NOT change.
	And I see a link between the two. The first group can happen because of the second. Change can happen precisely because of certainty. So if you want the short form of the sermon this morning, so you can turn on your i-pods, or take out the Sunday paper, or plan the week’s table menu, then here it is.
	God has promised undying, irrepressible love and support and asks for our support, our trust, our co-operation. But God asks for more. God asks for change. Not just the standard, theological “about turn”, although that may well be part of it. God asks us to sweep the hard drives of our emotions and our rationality, so that we can discover how to live a life of continual updating and renewal to meet the needs of ever-larger collective memories, AND of ever-increasing social needs. But because Jesus has run the programme before - run all of them - and can provide endless tech support, we’ve all been freed to discover how the riches and intricacies of these programmes can and must be personalised to meet the needs of the people who live next door as well as those around the world, with whom we can communicate at the touch of a keyboard. 
	If that computerese is “too much”, then it should be expressed more simply shortly! But first the base on which everything rests, the certainty.
	The Hebrew people are to be understood as representing all of creation, and God’s desire to draw everyone into a loving and nourishing embrace. And this is to be accomplished through example and through story-telling. God asks the Hebrew people to live a life of assurance, especially in the midst of uncertainty, assurance that God will be with them no matter what happens around them. 
	The covenant God gave as the people began their journey from one Egypt to Canaan is based around what we now know as the Ten Commandments. Of course, laws make sense. They protect the entire community; applied equally, as they’re intended, they ensure that society can flourish, especially when people feel under stress. But laws CAN, sometimes, seem so impersonal. As clear as they may be crafted, there may be an absence of that note which really resonates, which grabs someone’s attention and invites them to become a part of the relationship among those who’re partners in law.
	I’m not making excuses for the early Hebrews - nor for ourselves. We’re intelligent beings, most of the time, anyway! If keeping the law, if behaving according to a set of principles, however noble, is entirely a matter for the head, then we can be disengaged. Try as hard as we may, we may find ourselves drifting away from God and one another.
	What happens if we engage more that the head gear, then? What happens if our hearts, our emotions are drawn into the picture also?
	God’s actually pretty smart, when you think about it. God recognized the danger of speaking only to the head. So when people reached a stage of being able to think with their hearts then God presented the same deal, this time making sure that the people understood that this was to involve the ENTIRE human Being. This is where the good news starts to become apparent. God wants all of creation to know that we’re called to love, to respect, to encourage one another right to the core of our being. There’s nothing that God wants to leave to chance. God established the covenant with humanity, longing to draw us all closer so that we can actually FEEL what it means to live without fear. God spoke to the ancient Hebrews first, and then to us, telling us that we have been made holy by the way that the law has been engraved on our hearts. God spoke at creation and has spoken down through time, reminding us of the way in which we’re protected by the sort of love that only a mother having giving birth knows.
	God calls to us this morning to acknowledge not merely that the law is written in our hearts. God calls us to discover that this love is an absolute. So we’re drawn to respond by giving ourselves freely to God and to all of God’s creation.
	One way this might look came to me through a passage I read in a book about the first of three daughters of a Jewish Talmudic scholar in Medieval France. The oldest girl seemed unusually sensitive to the way in which God was calling her into relationship, so she watched and worked with her father, observing the daily regimen of prayer, study and work very carefully. In preparation for High Holy Days, she woke up early one day to offer the special prayers for forgiveness. Passing her parents bedroom, she noticed that her father hadn’t put away his tefillin, the special leather straps and boxes containing scripture passages, boxes which the law commanded to be strapped to a man’s wrist and forehead during morning prayers.
	The girl, Joheved, didn’t want the precious symbols of love and dignity to be damaged, so she went into the room to put them away.
	“Joheved had almost finished folding up the straps when a shocking thought struck her. She accepted the commandments. Why shouldn’t she pray with the tefillin? Nobody would see her if she closed the door. She’d just try it once, to see what it was like.
	“Shaking with fear and excitement, she rolled up the sleeves of her chemise, unwrapped the tefillin’s arm, straps, and started putting them on. When she finished winding them around her hand, a sense of holiness enveloped her that obliterated any sense of wrongdoing. The sacred leather, pressing tightly against her skin, gave her a constant awareness of the Holy One’s presence. Before, it had been hard to shut out the world and concentrate on her prayers. Wearing tefillin, she had no difficulty devoting herself to her selichot (her prayers for forgiveness). …..
	“The next day …. She kept thinking how the tight tefillin straps made her feel as if the Holy One was holding her arm Himself.” 1
	The rest of the chapter describes Joheved’s interaction with her father, who was won over by her argument for wearing tefillin to the extent that he got her her own. What adds to the compulsion and the experience is that the particular tefillin her father wore had been her grandfather’s.
I was struck by the way Maggie Anton, the book’s author, described the spiritual experience of putting on the tefillin. Joheved, a real character, discovered how she was drawn into a powerful experience of God’s love and forgiveness, as well as God’s support and encouragement, by binding those scripture passages to herself. THAT’S precisely how we’re asked to feel because of the way that God’s words have been engraved on our hearts. THAT’S what we’ll be asked to consider when we renew our baptismal promises in two week’s time. God has imaged us in such a way that we have, within us, that very Presence which reminds us that we’re holy, we’re loved, we’re protected.
Now this DOESN’T mean that nothing can ever go wrong for us. I DO know some people who’ve been told by their congregations that if only they prayed harder their problems would disappear. That’s incredibly cruel, as well as wrong, theology. Bad things, horrendous things, depressing things will continue to happen to us. We may even be guilty of committing some of them, God forgive us! But somewhere in the act of drawing closer to God, searching for signs of God’s constancy in our lives, can give us the ability to overcome fear, if not the actual infliction of pain. Knowing that God is with us, we can face anyone and anything. Maggie Anton wrote, in a comment about the book, that people were talking about the way that “the discussion of tefillin (has become) a recurring motif for women pushing the boundaries of their religion” 2
This discovery of how to push boundaries, of how to deal with new things, of how to experience growth, how to live with tension - this discovery in itself is one of the marks of change to which I referred at the beginning. Because we’re given an unshakeable faith by God; because God has called us to live in an intensely personal and intimate way with the laws of creation and those which transcend even creation; because we’re grounded in the love which brought everything into being in the first place, we can take pleasure in discovering the sort of change to which Jesus invites us. Jesus actually seeks a transformation in us that may seem like death, but in reality it may simply be change - a radical transformation of our priorities and principles.
So what might this look like? The change may be an end to fear of the unknown; and end to arid ways of looking at ourselves and the world; and end to the insistence that everything should be done MY way, or (let me say this a little softly) The Episcopal Church’s way, or the U.S. way; all so that something more wonderful may be allowed to grow in its place.
When those outsiders came asking to see Jesus, they may not have been expecting such a welcome, but Jesus included them in the comment about how self-absorption leads to a non-productive life. Self-offering, on the other hand; losing one’s self in wonder at the Presence of God; losing one’s self in the wonder of offering one’s self completely to God; losing one’s self in offering one’s self completely to the needs of God’s world; such an offering - a tangible offering as well as a spiritual one - may not only be a life-enhancing change for ourselves, it may bring incredible life-enhancement for others whom we may never meet or know.
A mailing I received this week from “Women for Women International” talks about how microcredit loans - small amounts of money given out to those whom most financial institutions won’t recognize - can turn around individuals, families, villages and whole countrysides. With a few dollars, one woman, Milka in Sarajevo, began growing raspberries on her farm to supplement her income from other sources. It wasn’t long before growing raspberries became the family’s major source of income.
	Noorzia in Kabul has been able to open a restaurant. “I am the new definition of a businesswoman” say Women for Women International ads. 3
Change in the way we think about money - you’ve heard it a million times, probably - that what you spend on a cup of coffee in one week can make the difference between life and death; change in the way we think about relating to those in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or North Korea - just to pick the more dramatic spots; change in the way we treat one another in Lincoln City, for heaven’s sake! Change can revitalise not only the world, but also our individual spiritual relationships, primarily because the certainty we rediscover in the faith that God loves and protects us can drive away fear and give us hope instead. All of life can take on a whole new perspective once we acknowledge the lengths, and depths, and height of God’s love for us. Because of that, for instance, as a bioethicist commented this week on NPR, the recession is no reason to stop giving to and for others. In fact, Peter Singer said, it’s unethical NOT to give in recession. Now THERE’S a change of an idea! 4
We DON’T need we look any further than inside ourselves. Change doesn’t begin out there somewhere. Change - what some would consider one of the foci of Lent - change HAS to begin within. Naturally it’s more fun if we can change our spouse, or our children, or our neighbour with that barking dog or annoying habit. However, as much as these may be helpful, the examination and turn-around for which Jesus looks in us is that of the individual, one at a time.
Of course, we don’t NEED to change. We may think we’re happy with how we are, and who we are, and the way we relate - badly or well - with other people and with God. However, if we claim to be alive, we HAVE to change. As a good friend, a medical scientist, wrote this week, “Life respires, reproduces, requires nourishment, grows, and by definition CHANGES. That is exactly how I know that I am alive and how I know that God is alive. The constant is life, the evidence is breath (the grain blowing to the ground and ruah, wind, Spirit), reproduction (the grain of wheat is no loner alone), but is fed by the soil and will feed, and is changed....what is not dead, is alive. Without change we have no evidence of life.” 5
I pray that we may rediscover the meaning of life, that we may find what Joheved found, that wherever we experience the word of God engraved in our lives, we may feel as if the Holy One was holding our arms Himself.
So live without fear: your Creator HAS made you holy, has always protected you, and loves you as a mother. Go in peace to follow the good road and may God’s blessing be with you always. (St. Clare - EoW)


NOTES:
 	“Rashi’s Daughters: Book 1: Joheved” by Maggie Anton. Plume Books (Penguin Group) London 2007. Page 133. See www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Ancient_and_Medieval_History  also www.rashisdaughters.com/blog - the entry for March 20, 2009.
2	www.rashisdaughters.com/blog - the entry for March 20, 2009.  
3	www.womenforwomen.org  
4	Peter Singer “IT’S UNETHICAL NOT TO GIVE IN RECESSION” Monday, March 23, 2009
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/03/23/pm_ethics_of_giving 
5	Barbara Allison-Bryan, Virginia  ballisonbryan at gmail.com   

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

541-994-2426 (Church)