[Propertalk] Proper 19 a

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

This is up for editing, but here's a start ....


Bob


THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY           THE THIRTEENTH 
SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST – A
EXODUS 14:19-31					           		            PROPER 19 A
ROMANS 14:1-12					                               11th SEPTEMBER, 2011
MATTHEW 18:21-35					    		               PSALM 114

	A month ago yesterday Jacki Lyden read a short two minute and 
forty-five second essay on NPR’s “Weekend Edition”. She packed into that 
short span of time, with carefully chosen words, a wonderful summary of 
what we do today – the 11th of September – as well as what we do as a 
community of friends of Jesus every time we gather to share Bread and 
Wine and remember Jesus until He comes again.

	Ms. Lyden wrote, “When I was a child in Delafield, Wis., I attended 
Cushing Elementary School. My sisters and I rolled Easter eggs in 
Cushing Park, and I rode horses at the edge of the old Cushing farm. But 
I don't remember ever learning a thing about Lt. Alonzo Cushing, a Union 
officer who was killed at Gettysburg after refusing to retreat in the 
face of Pickett's Charge.

	“I only got acquainted with his story last year, when Cushing was 
awarded the Medal of Honor after being championed for decades by a 
90-year-old widow named Margaret Zerwekh and former Sen. Russ Feingold. 
…

	“Cushing … was just 22 when he died.” 1

	Lyden wondered whether or not the same kind of remembrance will be 
there for the Navy SEALs who died in Afghanistan five weeks ago.  She 
added, “My Cushing Elementary first-grade teacher — and I have no idea 
which political party she belonged to — used to sing us a song about 
veterans, and how each of their uniform buttons are stamped "U.S." — us. 
We are us, those men … (but, she lamented i)t seems that even the fight 
for memory is politicized now, and that no sacrifice for country can be 
viewed as something done for ‘us.’”

	What we do this morning, what people across this nation and beyond, do 
this weekend, is to ensure that the memory of Fire Fighters, Law 
Enforcement Officers, Emergency Medical Technicians and workers and 
bystanders from all vocations in life – what we do this morning is to 
ensure that memory of these people and their actions never fades.

	We do this not to be maudlin, not to pick a scab off an old wound so 
that we can bleed again. We do this because we honour the sacrificial 
life that these people lived. Some may have responded quickly and 
quietly, some may have arrived with the fanfare of sirens that makes us 
uneasy – but ALL responded, in one way or another, and their response 
gives us here not only an opportunity to be grateful for those whose 
lives were taken or changed ten years ago, but also to express our 
gratitude, personally, while we can, to those who, every day, are ready 
to make a sacrifice for US.

	We may not know all their names. They may not know ours. But together 
we form a community from which we may ALL respond to the needs of those 
around us.

	Last Monday, Associated Press carried a story about the discovery of a 
Roman school for gladiators in Austria. I found the article incredibly 
interesting, partly because I’ve been in Roman ruins that have been 
excavated under the city of Vienna. I was able to link the mental 
picture I have of what I saw there with what must be exciting 
archeologists today.

A couple of sentences from that article impressed themselves on my mind. 
The reporter quoted a representative
of the Roemisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, one of the institutes 
involved in finding and evaluating the discovery. “‘A gladiator school 
was a mixture of a barracks and a prison, kind of a high-security 
facility,” (the person said.) ‘The fighters were often convicted 
criminals, prisoners-of-war, and usually slaves.’

	“Still, there were some perks for the men who sweated and bled for what 
they hoped would at least be a few brief moments of glory before their 
demise.”

	“ … a few brief moments of glory before their demise.”

	Hollywood notwithstanding, that’s not why the vast majority engaged in 
the War between the States. Nor was it the motivation behind the 
enrollment of fire-fighters, law enforcement personnel, medical 
technicians who responded ten years ago today – and this is just as true 
of such people today.

Perhaps the second half – the lesser known half – of the 
thirteenth-century prayer attributed to St. Francis of
Assisi says it best. We’ll sing a paraphrase of this after we make our 
Communion in a short while.

“O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.” 2

Scripture has a way of turning us on our heads. Whatever it is that we 
feel that we want or need to do, we’re
asked to measure it against the experience of Moses, and Jesus and Paul, 
among others.

	Where usually we tend to go for self-gratification, using attention 
seeking behavior as if to say that we’re the only one, the only 
congregation, the only city, even the only nation that really matters, 
instead of that we’re told to consider the broader implications of our 
behavior. Whom do we follow? To whom do we listen? Who around us and who 
in the larger community needs our help and how can we be there for them?

	It would have been so easy for the Hebrew pilgrims to have turned their 
back on the signs that God gave them. Those plagues in Egypt – they 
weren’t only for the Egyptians. They were for everyone to note. The 
hurried meal which has become the foundation of Passover – that was for 
everyone who was interested in finding out how compassionate God is. And 
the pillar of cloud, surrounding the Hebrew people as they made their 
way to freedom of expression – that was a sign for everyone to observe 
also – the biggest Cloud App you may ever wish to find.

	It was just like creation all over again. God took the waters and 
exposed dry land so that people could find their way to safety and new 
life. God offered protection to those who sought a new start.

We tend to think of the parting of the sea in Charlton Heston-like terms 
– a strong, tall, muscular individual, with a voice that could travel 
for miles and probably instill fear. But I wonder if that’s what Moses 
was really like. Fortunately, no one had a camera with them that day, so 
we’ll just have to think about it. But I tend to picture Moses as 
someone much more capable of being mistaken for the next person in a 
crowd. He didn’t seek extra attention. He didn’t make a huge fuss. He 
looked at what was happening; he listened to what he heard in his heart, 
and he reached out over what had the potential to destroy a whole nation 
and he provided the means for safety.

I see Moses as making a far more intimate, far more personal gesture, in 
which he caught the eye of each person in the group, and smiled 
encouragingly, and pointed everyone towards safety: just like the Fire 
Fighters, and the EMTs and the Law Enforcement officers who responded to 
radios, and sirens and word of mouth communication.

They too, like Moses, stretched out their hands, placed themselves in 
danger, often without thinking, and did whatever they could to guide, to 
carry and to drag as many people as they could out of the path of the 
terror that was disrupting everything about them.

That’s what service is about. That’s why the word used to describe the 
ministry of responders is “service”. They were there ten years ago today 
to do whatever it took to make sure that a safe way was opened up. And, 
despite the images they have in their minds – images we’ve been seeing 
in all the media this past week – these people of service continue to 
aft on our behalf – to do the most human thing they can possibly do – 
offer their hand for another to take in order to bring to safety, to 
share pain, and calm anxiety, and lessen fear.

Hands are offered all the time in our lives. When we meet someone for 
the first time we usually extend our hand to take that of the other, as 
a sign of peace. When someone is hurting, often we place a hand on the 
shoulder of the other. When someone needs reassurance – as a child going 
to school for the first time last Tuesday – a hand will be offered and 
human contact will give a sign of community, a sign that says that we 
belong together. In holding hands we talk about deep friendship, about 
respect, about love that knows no limit to acceptance, no matter how 
often that person or someone else may have done something – 
intentionally or not – which may have hurt us.

Hands offered and accepted – just as in the ritual of the Peace in which 
we’ll engage in a minute – hands offered and accepted are God’s way of 
working through us to remind us that we’ll be OK, no matter what 
happens.

Hands are what build memories – memories of hope, of trust, of our 
community with God and with one another.
  For me it’s the image of the hand of a safety response service woman 
or man that shows me what we’re all supposed to be about, in God’s Name.

After the destruction in New York, and DC and in Pennsylvania, I heard 
an essay written by Brian Doyle, the editor of “Portland Magazine”, the 
publication of the University of Portland. Here’s what he wrote.

	“A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for 
each other and their hands met and they jumped.

	“Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

	“Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the 
pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

	“The mayor reported the mist.

	“A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher 
that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of 
the ashes.

	“Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were 
people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the 
story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands 
out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street 
looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people ‘leaping as 
they flew out.’ John Carson saw six people fall, ‘falling over 
themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.’ Steve Miller saw people 
jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people 
flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, ‘too many people 
falling.’ Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at 
night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped 
counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and 
he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple 
leaping hand in hand.

	“Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A 
fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

	“But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they 
leaped out the window holding hands.

	“I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families 
of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming 
back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such 
extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple 
ferocious love.

	“Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can 
imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we 
are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me 
believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, 
to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them 
like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some 
unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what 
we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why 
we are here.

	“No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, 
colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of 
hell. Maybe they didn't even reach for each other consciously, maybe it 
was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take 
two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach 
for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly 
into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far 
and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the 
pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the 
air.

	“Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them 
holding hands, and I hold onto that.” 2

	Use YOUR hand to create memories that can never be erased – to bring 
healing, and reconciliation, and peace, and hope, and love. And pray for 
a hand to hold yours for all the troubles and anxieties each of us face.

NOTES:

1 	 “Fallen Soldiers Live In Memories Through The Ages” by Jacki Lyden 
August 13, 2011 Weekend Edition, NPR 
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/13/139589814/fallen-soldiers-live-in-memories-through-the-ages

2	“Unique Roman gladiator ruins unveiled in Austria” By GEORGE JAHN 
Associated Press Monday, September 5, 2011 11:09 AM EDT 
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700176468/Unique-Roman-gladiator-ruins-unveiled-in-Austria.html

3	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_of_Saint_Francis

4	“Leap” By Brian Doyle © 2002 Brian Doyle 
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/questions/leap.html



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