[Propertalk] Proper 24 a

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

I don't believe I posted this yet. I'm still working on it, but here's 
my draft which I put together through a week with a seemingly greater 
number of meetings that usual!

Happy celebrating this weekend!

Bob



THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY           THE EIGHTEENTH 
SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST – A
EXODUS 33:12-23		 	           		                       PROPER 24 A
1 THESSALONIANS 1:1-10				                       16th OCTOBER, 2011
MATTHEW 22:15-22					                             PSALM 99

Life’s a journey – we all know that. Every bit of it’s an adventure. So 
no matter how old or how young we are, we should never fail to be 
surprised and, I hope, more often than not, excited and curious about 
what’s next and where we may be taken this morning. T.S. Eliot wrote 
about it in those famous lines in “Little Gidding”, from his “Four 
Quartets”:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
  Will be to arrive where we started
  And know the place for the first time.” 1

This makes me wonder how good my imagination is now, how courageous I 
feel when I wake up in the morning, whether I’m willing to set out 
without much more than a cup of something hot – set out for dear knows 
where.
	
	Only, we DO know where! So that gets me thinking about how I’m 
preparing for feasting with God at that incredibly wonderful table where 
we pray we’ll be with all God’s saints.

I know that my mind is finite and fallible. I know that I have distinct 
preferences – for music, and art, and literature – not to mention people 
– which can limit what I think about and hope to see. I can be stubborn 
occasionally, and I do know that I have blind spots – but I know also 
that my eyes and my heart have been opened throughout my life, often in 
the most surprising ways. Fortunately, God never gives up on me and 
continues to bring delights for me to enjoy, for which I’m truly 
grateful! But I AM still on this journey.

How DO each us of see God, then? I’m sure there are few answers that are 
alike. Perhaps in generalisations  there are similarities, but we’re 
blessed to have minds and emotions of our own, each of which are touched 
by different experiences. What fit Moses’ needs on that day described in 
the first reading may not mean too much for us three thousand years 
later. Yet we ALL want glimpses of God. We’d even settle for ONE. We ALL 
want to see God speaking to our lives, preferably moving through them, 
so that we can be reassured that we’re on the right road in our journey, 
and that we have the right company, and the right ideals in our minds. I 
doubt if any of us don’t care about what’s going on in our lives and 
relationships. It’s just that we have difficulty envisioning how this 
fits in with the way in which we and our friends – and the folk 
described in the Democrat Herald or any other source of local news – 
it’s just that we have difficulty trying to determine what God looks 
like.

So – what about Roman Polanski, Leni Riefenstahl, Carlo Gesualdo, Lars 
von Trier, Judas Iscariot – Judas Iscariot?
	
	What, if anything do these folk have in common? Well, in one way or 
another, all of them have said or done things which horrify. But if you 
were sitting at home and the phone rang, and the voice at the other end 
offered you an invitation to meet one of them; if the voice at the other 
end identified him or herself as one of them, and asked if you’d meet 
with him or her – what would you do?
	
	“IN 1938, a month after the Nazi assault on German Jews known as 
Kristallnacht made headlines across the world, Walt Disney gave Hitler’s 
pet filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, a tour of his studio. He showed her 
some Mickey Mouse sketches, and she offered to show him ‘Olympia,’ her 
cinematic slog through the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He turned her down 
because he was worried it would get out that he was playing host to a 
woman most of Hollywood shunned. In his biography ‘Leni’ Steven Bach 
writes that when she returned to Germany, she praised Disney for 
receiving her, saying, it ‘was gratifying to learn how thoroughly proper 
Americans distance themselves from the smear campaigns of the Jews.’” 2

	All of these people I named were involved, directly or indirectly, in 
activities which society at the time – and since – condemn as 
atrocities.

	But what of their work, apart from their behaviour?  What about life’s 
vocations? Is someone automatically condemned because of one activity, 
or one speech, or even a pattern of behavior? Is there a way to separate 
off one thing from another, or must we forever link the two, and write a 
person off – never attend a certain movie, or read a set of books, or 
listen to particular music? Actually Nazi Germany’s leaders did 
precisely this – they did everything they could to impress on the German 
people that there WAS only one way to think. This is whom you admire; 
this is whom you shun. That group of people are totally beyond 
redemption. And Germans of the 1930s and 40s are not alone.
What about us? How easy is it for me to disassociate myself from what 
others in the group are doing? I go out to a movie, with or without 
friends, and the audience laugh at something I find disturbing or 
degrading. I stand in line at some cash register and I overhear people 
talking for or against something, and I thought the opposite was true, 
and just, and right. What do I do? What if I know the people? What if 
they’re in a group with which I’m affiliated? CAN the mind separate and 
evaluate, taking account of circumstance and company? If everyone, like 
it or not, recognise it or not, is made in God’s image, are we seeing 
God at that moment?

Is there the remotest possibility that, say, in the musical works of 
Carlo Gesualdo, the late sixteenth, early seventeenth century priest, 
and count, and duke, and composer, and virtuoso lutenist AND murderer – 
did you know he killed his wife and her lover, mutilating them in bed 
when he snuck back and caught them together?–  is there the remotest 
possibility that you can learn anything of God from the music he wrote? 
Is it possible to hear in the tortured harmonies of his works the way in 
which his relationship with God can help us deal with our lives today?

Why did God hold back from Moses – no pun intended – and not give a 
face-on view? How much we long for
something plain – maybe even a Walt Disney-ish cartoon in which there’s 
absolutely no ambiguity about who God is, and how God operates and – 
more to the point – how God wants US to operate?

	The chance of us running into Roman Polanski or Lars von Trier is 
really pretty remote – the others, well, they’re dead now so we won’t 
get a chance to see them for a while, I hope!

	But there are others in life whom we find equally disturbing. We don’t 
even need to go up the road to Salem to find people who bother us, with 
whose views and actions we disagree intensely.

	God told Moses that he couldn’t stand the sight of God and live. One of 
the things I assume he meant was that God is SO pure, SO intensely just, 
SO beautiful that not only can we not comprehend what God is like, but 
we may well find our perceptions destroyed by the brightness, the purity 
of what God is. THAT’S why Moses was told he could only see God receding 
into the distance, leaving a trail for him to follow. So perhaps that’s 
what we should be doing as we try to find ways in which to glimpse God 
in our lives and in our neighbourhoods – looking forwards to see who’s 
gone before, and what marks they may have left for us.

	Does this make sense? I’m not saying that Roman Polanski or Lars von 
Trier and the others ARE God – not in the least. But is it possible that 
God may use the film directors to get a point across that may lead us 
through the next difficulty that’s coming our way? Are we SO sure of 
what God’s appearance and modus operandi are like that we can afford to 
rule out someone whose past behavior – maybe even their present behavior 
– makes us want to gag?

	Is it possible, for instance, that we want to disassociate ourselves so 
far from Hitler’s rise to power and his manipulation of the 1936 
Olympics that we prevent ourselves from the possibility of seeing Jesse 
Owens knock Hitler’s philosophy right out of the stadium – without even 
becoming angry and raising a fist?

	There are so many things that can make us afraid in life; there are so 
many people, so many situations that can paralyse us. I can’t deal with 
heights. But with the right person beside me, I can cope. I may not even 
need to see the person, simply to know that the person is right there, 
will reach out a hand to me should I need it – that can be enough.

	Similarly for Moses. Sure, he’d have loved a photo of God to put in his 
wallet, but it was enough to get this back view of God marching ahead, 
blazing a trail for the prophet and those who were with him. And all he 
had to go on was God’s word that it WAS God’s back. After all, Moses had 
never met the Divine – only heard the Voice. So for all Moses knew, it 
was someone God was using, a stand-in, if you like, who was acting for 
God, whether or not the person realised it.

	I guess the trick is to trust. We have Jesus’ promise, “I’ll be with 
you till the ages of ages."

	You’re probably aware of the fact that Vermont’s roads are still so 
messed up that folk are cut off from one another and they’re running out 
of supplies. It’s enough to create panic, especially if people are 
worried about potentially life-threatening medical needs.

	To answer this, to help comfort folk emotionally as well as physically 
and to give them a vision that God hasn’t forgotten them, ”Episcopal 
churches … have resurrected the spirit of the Pony Express to help 
victims of late August’s historic flooding.

	“In the Diocese of Vermont, congregations are relaying peanut butter, 
casseroles, space heaters and cleaning supplies via cars and trucks (…) 
along the state's highways in what has been dubbed the ‘Freeway Relay.’” 
3

	Maybe all that people see are the backs of those cars and vans as they 
turn around at the end of the assigned segment of the trip. Maybe the 
folk at the next stop further up the freeway don’t know what or who 
actually made the casserole, or did something to offer a word of comfort 
and security. Life is funny that way. But sometimes simply getting a 
glimpse of someone’s backside, if I can put it that way, is all that’s 
necessary. After all, it COULD be that if we saw the front, we might be 
too scared, too reluctant to accept the help.

	We may not get what we think we want, but we WILL get what we need – 
even if it appears initially to be questionable. The critic who wrote 
about film directors acting and speaking tastelessly, ended with these 
words. “Judging filmmakers along with their films is a favorite critical 
pastime, and it was fascinating to wade through the confusion of 
responses to Mr. von Trier’s statement, in particular the struggle to 
reconcile a superb work like ‘Melancholia’ with his words. The mistake 
was thinking that the two could be reconciled rather than admitting that 
some contradictions remain insoluble.”

	We do have something to hold on to, then, for whatever we worry about. 
God WILL give us something – something we can see, however faintly; 
something we can hear, however indistinctly; something to set our minds 
thinking and our hearts out-reaching, however surprising the source.

	And maybe that’s where we come back to T.S. Eliot’s lines. We may see 
the same thing, the same people, time after time, but don’t really 
comprehend God in our midst until we’re willing to accept that God CAN 
be seen through anyone, or anything. I pray that God will give us such 
vision.


NOTES:

1 	“Four Quartets” by Thomas Stearns Eliot - 
http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/
	
2	“And Now a Word From the Director” By MANOHLA DARGIS	Published: 
September 21, 2011 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/movies/conflicting-voices-in-lars-von-triers-words-and-works.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28

3	“Vermont churches shuttle supplies to flooding victims via ‘Freeway 
Relay’”  By Sharon Sheridan, October 07, 2011 
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79425_130093_ENG_HTM.htm



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