[Propertalk] 2 lent a rcl

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

Here's what I'm working on for this weekend.

Bob

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY  	         2nd SUNDAY IN LENT
GENESIS 12:1-4a	                          		    	   		   20th MARCH, 
2011
ROMANS 4:1-5, 13017	 
PSALM 121
JOHN 3:1-17

	One of the really interesting books I have is called “What If … ?” 1 
It’s made up of a collection of chapters written by very well respected 
academics and scholars, each of whom has taken a fairly portentous 
moment in history and then speculated on what might have happened if 
events had taken a different turn.

	I find it fascinating. If only Alexander had died at the beginning of 
his military career, as he almost did, before he became called “the 
Great” and the “Hellenic cultural seedbed of the West … had been 
stillborn.” If only Pontius Pilate had listened to his wife. If George 
Washington had decided that crossing the Delaware on Christmas Day was a 
bad idea. Why you and I were born, and why we’re actually in this 
specific room at this exact instant – it’s dependent on SO many factors. 
If only our parents hadn’t gone to the same High School or College, or 
that particular movie, or both liked spaghetti – it’s scary what might 
or might not have happened.

	What if Abraham had put down what our first reading characterised as a 
word from God to a fight with his belligerent neighbours and a second 
helping of head cheese?

	Can you imagine?

	How DID Abraham get the message? Was he on Facebook? Whatever its 
equivalent was four thousand years ago, what if Abraham had thought that 
someone had hacked into his stone tablet, and was trying to get his goat 
– or make off with his goats?  What if someone else had his eye on Sarai 
and was trying to get the two into a fight?

	Our life and our faith have been nourished not only by God speaking to 
humans – including us – but also by how we have heard and responded. If 
I didn’t believe that, despite freewill, God is always in control, and 
always has our best interests at heart, I think I’d go crazy thinking of 
all the ways in which I could have messed up your lives and my own.

	The incredible responsibility and the incredible blessing of our lives 
is that God HAS left it up to us in terms of how we listen, and to what 
and whom we listen, and how we process it.

	“Hey there, sailor; heard God talking to you lately?”

	You may have seen the book with the catchy title “Eats Shoots and 
Leaves”. On the front cover are pictures of two pandas. One is walking 
off to the right with a smoking gun in its hand. The other is at the top 
of a ladder, drawing in a comma after the first word. The subtitle of 
the book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”. There’s a 
version of the book produced for children. This book’s subtitle is “Why 
Commas Really DO Make A Difference” – this time someone is adding a 
comma after the word “Why”.

	Assuming we hear them, words, and how we interpret and use them, CAN 
change our perception, even get us all riled up, so easily – especially 
if the person writing or speaking is careless.

	For instance, the other day on a radio news programme, the reader of 
the story said “A bill working its way through the Oregon House is 
dealing with ‘killing salmon eating sea lions’”.

	O.K., I know my sense of humour CAN be warped at times, but the image 
that leapt into my mind was of a school of salmon attacking a 
defenceless sea lion whose body bore scars from the savagery of vicious 
Coho. It took me a full minute to realise that the reader had neglected 
to inflect the phrase properly, in order to show the hyphen between 
“salmon” and “eating”. It was about whether or not to permit killing sea 
lions which the bill was addressing.

	One final example before this grammatical horse falls down from being 
brutalised. The box of a tube of toothpaste I have at home has printed 
on it fairly explicit directions about the benefits of that particular 
brand, and instructions about its use. I read “Directions Do not swallow 
Adults and Children over three years old.” Apparently it’s open season 
on children under age three!

	All very funny, of course, but grammar, inflection, pronunciation, 
spacing – they have a vital role to play in our daily lives, and if 
we’re not careful, we can make life difficult, not to say dangerous, for 
every one of us!

	Anyone rolling her or his eyes about all this yet? Well, think of the 
first line of the Psalm. “I lift up my eyes; I look to the hills, 
because I know they’re impressive and, barring another earthquake, 
they’ll stand for centuries with very little variance. I look – yet 
still I’m compelled to ask the question, ‘from where is my help to 
come?’”

	Whatever must have been going through Abram’s mind, something touched 
him. He heard. He began to make sense of what he heard. He began to 
think about the implications of what he heard. At some point he must 
have shared the information with Sarai. And they set out. The rest, as 
they say, is history.

	What about us? What have we heard lately?

Let me take that one step back. Do we build time into our lives to allow 
for the possibility that there might actually be something to hear, 
something WORTH hearing?

	No matter what else we may do in Lent, something everyone of us is 
encouraged to do is to take time to think about what’s going on in our 
lives.

	Who are the people whose company and whose opinion we value the most? 
What is it about these people that makes us trust them so much? What 
experiences have we had with them that make us willing not only to take 
seriously what they say, but to seek them out when we need an honest 
evaluation, or dependable comfort?

	I’m appalled, constantly, at the amount of garbage floating out there 
on the radio and TV. Appalled also at what people believe.

	Picture this. You’re at your local grocery check-out of choice and, 
against your better judgement, your eye lights on one of those tabloids. 
What if you saw the headline, “Abram leaving. Wife threatens alienation 
of affection.” You’d
probably treat it with the same amount of credulity as you would the 
headline that blasts, “Obama born in Kenya!”

	The problem with all of this is that we need some sort of a frame of 
reference against which to judge a person’s or a story’s reliability. 
Abram DIDN’T decide in a flash – probably not even in a week. It would 
have taken time – something of which God has plenty. In fact, God gives 
us all the time we want. We make a great deal about what we call Abram’s 
faith. We’re in good company. Paul did too. But we do everyone a 
disservice – including ourselves – if we compartmentalise our “God 
decisions” off from everything else. God calls us to be at one with 
everything, therefore everything should become part of the faith-seeking 
equation.

	If we’re sensitive enough to hear or intuit that God is seeking our 
help, then we must apply all of our abilities to deciphering what’s 
given us. That’s one of the points Jesus made to Nicodemus. “You’re a 
reasonable man,” Jesus said to the Jewish leader, “use your reason to 
figure out what I’m talking about. At least let your reason take you as 
far as you can go. Then God will take you that last step.”

	Jesus wasn’t saying anything that Jewish theologians and philosophers 
hadn’t been debating before. However, He DID put it in ways that may not 
be as highly elaborated as they might have done. He simply asked 
Nicodemus to use his knowledge, his experience and his human 
interactions to help him see what Jesus was doing.

	“Be open to the Spirit,” said Jesus. “God can use anyone and anything 
to get a point across.”

	And Jesus allowed this to marinate Nicodemus’ heart and mind. As long 
as the rabbi was able to come to a decision that would enable him to 
help Joseph of Arimathea put Jesus’ dead body in the tomb after 
crucifixion, Niki could take as long as he wanted. 2

	Just like his ancestor Abram, Niki needed to make a move. So do we. We 
DO have to make a decision, though, and, like the earthquake of ten days 
ago, we can never be sure when the time for making that decision will 
come. THAT’S part of the equation also.

	What if God really wants us to do something here now?

	Back on Ash Wednesday my middle daughter, Kirsten, put a quotation on 
Facebook – it’s part of what Brian Sellers-Petersen wrote in the 
Episcopal Relief and Development booklet for Lent. The quote was, “Ash 
Wednesday is the first day of our Lenten journey, which lasts for forty 
days … before Easter. For me Ash Wednesday is the Holy Day that brings 
the most profound and sometimes contradictory feelings. A reminder of 
death, my mortality and friends and family I no longer see, but who are 
close all the same. A day that points to the Resurrection and promise of 
new life.”

	That, in itself, is interesting enough to think about as we make up our 
minds about what we may have to hear about the journey on which each of 
us is engaged. What one of Kirsten’s friends said in reply stopped me 
cold, though.

	“Wow, that is awesome,” she wrote about the ERD paragraph. Her language 
and thinking are so direct and to the point – and stuck me in my heart 
as I wondered what God’s been saying to me lately – talking about me, 
and you, and anyone and everyone else.

	“Wow that is awesome, I knew about Ash Wednesday and stuff, but that 
really shines a new light on it reading that, I remember growing up and 
going to church and learning about Ash Wednesday and easter, and stuff, 
but I havent been in so long, :(  Its sad, Niki and I started going 
together when we lived in Missouri because I got into reading the Left 
behind series and had him read it as well, but then the church wasn’t 
what we expected it to be, and the people were well mostly rude, and so 
we stopped, and I just haven’t made it back since 

	What if God really wants us to do something, to go someplace, to talk 
to someone? God WILL be with us whatever we do. Still …. Still …. still 
…. It IS scary!

Thank God, humour is one of God’s primary characteristics!! And 
patience!!!

NOTES:

1 	“The CollectedWhat If? Eminent Historians Imagine what might have 
been”  edited by Robert Cowley. G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1999 & 201, ISBN 
0-399-15238-5
 
http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Eminent-Historians-Imagine-Might/dp/0399152385

2	John 19:38-39


Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)
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