This past week has been really terrible in the world.
The United States withdrawal from Afghanistan has been fraught with danger and bombings that killed civilians and soldiers outside the Kabal airport. The COVID Delta variant is spreading like wildfire, especially in Florida and South Georgia. Parents in Florida actually had to bring a lawsuit against the Governor because he has been threatening to withhold education funds from school districts that mandate mask wearing inside public schools. Friday, a judge in Leon County found in favor of the parents because Governor Ron DeSantis does not have the constitutional authority to override the decisions made by local school boards. And the rare, and present, danger of COVID breakthrough infections claimed the life of my friend and longtime civil rights and social justice advocate Agnes Furey. As one might imagine, the shock and pain and hurt of losing a person who lived her life as close to the Gospel as any person I have ever known devastated many in Tallahassee and only further upped the anger and resentment that is boiling over about people who are willing remaining unvaccinated against COVID.
In a climate of anger and division the Sunday lectionary readings gave me something to think about, especially as I looked at the Letter of James laid alongside the Gospel lesson from Mark. The gorgeous love poetry of the Song of Solomon added the perfect balm for the past week.
+++
Texts cited: Song of Solomon 2:8-13; James 1: 17-27; Mark 7:1-8;14-15; 21-23
Prayer: Blessed God who caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant us so to hear them , read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life. Amen. (Collect for Proper 27 aka "The Lee Graham Collect")
There are some weeks when the Sunday lectionary readings are hard
and complicated…like what we’ve been hearing from the Gospel of John all month.
There are sometimes when I know I want to just pull the covers up over my head
and avoid what’s in the readings. And then there are weeks like this one where things
all seem to fit together well…even if the ultimate lesson is one that makes us
pause to take it in and know…” Yeah, we need a refresher course in what it
means to be a Christian.”
I imagine y’all are familiar
with the cartoon Hagar the Horrible, the one with the guy who’s a Viking and
his wife Helga. A friend who serves on the school board in my Florida county
posted a Hagar cartoon.
Hagar has come through the door.
He has arrows sticking out of his helmet and shield. His sword is bent,
and his brow is sweaty and he’s announcing into the room “I’m home from battle!”
In the next frame, Helga steps out of the kitchen. Her face is bruised.
Her nose is bandaged. Her dress is disheveled. There are stars floating around
her head as if she’s taken a few blows to her brain.
She leans on a cane and says, “I’m home from the school board
meeting!”
It’s really come to this now. We live in a world where serving on a
school board…an elected office where you’re charged with making decisions to
aid the learning and protect the students and employees in public schools…makes
you a target for abuse. And all because of a requirement to wear a mask while in school.
I heard on the radio about a woman who is a school board member up in a small county in southern Indiana. She now has a baseball bat by her door underneath the photos of her grandchildren because she’s been threatened by her neighbors.
And while I haven’t visited her town, I am sure there is no lack of
churches…and those who consider themselves regular church attendees…happy to
praise God on Sunday…while beating up a child of God serving on a school board
the other six days of the week.
This is the type of hypocritical behavior that gives Christianity a
bad name.
And this is what our letter from the apostle James…the just leader
of the church in Jerusalem... is talking about with his mirror analogy.
He says that if we hear the right prayers without doing the right
actions in our lives…that’s no better than looking at ourselves in the mirror and
admiring how good our hair looks…and then walking away and forgetting about
that fantastic coiffe we just saw in the mirror.
This is an important tenet in Judaism…one which has been passed
along to us from our Jewish parents…that the prayers we say, the words of
Scripture we hear, the hymns and songs we sing are not just to be mouthed. We are
to sit with them and study them…and take them into our hearts to do the work of
transformation. With that new heart…we are led back out into the world to do
action of our prayers “to show forth God’s praise not only with our lips but in
our lives” (BCP, 101).
This is the same idea that Jesus was driving at in this exchange with
the Pharisees. This is so much more than disciples having grubby hands when
they’re eating. Jesus isn’t dismissing the Pharisees for their commitment to
the ritual of handwashing; he understands the significance of following the
tradition of the elders. What he is saying is that if they’re washing their
hands without feeding the poor, releasing the captives, and taking care of
widows and children then their handwashing isn’t much more than a mechanical
function. There are portions of this passage from Mark Chapter 7 which the
lectionary diviners left out, probably to keep the narrative easier to follow
and not complicated by details relevant to First Century Jewish worship. But
the bottom line is that if the ritual act doesn’t point the person toward doing
the act of caring for all of God’s creation…human, animal and mineral…then it
is an empty gesture and a sign of an empty faith.
The same applies to us. If we come here week after week and say all
the right prayers and do all the right gestures, but then do nothing to make
life better for another person or (worse) actively engage in activities that
hurt someone or something in God’s creation, then it renders our prayers and
praise meaningless. It reminds me of a bumper sticker I once saw: if going to
church makes you a Christian, does going to the garage make you a car?
This is not the same idea as “I have to do good things in order to be on God’s good side.” We don’t earn frequent good person miles with God; God’s grace has already been extended to us. This isn’t about us doing anything for God’s love. This is about us doing acts of kindness because we know deep inside us that God did such acts of kindness and so much more for us already. This is about us letting these prayers and these Scriptures we say and hear shape our outlook and guide our wills.
And what a beautiful starting point for us in this inner work than
our first reading today.
If we look at the reading from the poetry of the Song of Solomon,
we get a glimpse in these five verses of God as the lover, calling and
beckoning to us.
God whispers to us, the beloved, “Arise, my love, my fair one, and
come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.”
Such words, such loving and tender words, spoken to us now in our
world swirling with anger, division, and discontent. Bullies and soul-crushing
reports on the nightly news.
“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”
Come away, my beloved child: I am your God who so loves you. I am
the love that will not give up on you. I am the love that will make it possible
for you to love one another even in the face of rejection.
“Arise, my love, my fair one…and come away”
Now what if we have been hurt by someone? What if we have felt the
sting of betrayal? What if we are carrying around the scars of our life that
make it hard to love? I don’t think there’s a person in the world who hasn’t
known some level of suffering. And those wounds left untended…untouched by God…can
manifest in ways where we hurt others. I’m not talking just about physically
abusive behavior, but even the dismissive ways we speak to one another because
someone dismissed us. Or spread gossip about someone because a part of us is
insecure and wants to feel a level of self-righteousness. This is all part of
the human condition stuff…and is a symptom of the hardening of our hearts
brought about by being in the world.
The challenge for all of us is to remember that all those hurts
inflicted on our souls are not the definition of who we are. They are only part
of us, not all of us. We can turn these hurts to God’s good purposes when we use
them to inform how we deal with each other in that compassionate way…that way where
we understand the other because we have been through the fires of Hell and back,
too.
With prayer, Scripture, and music as the tools that God uses to
reach us in our worship to shape us and prepare us for the week ahead, we can
learn the practice of listening…being slow to anger…and be prepared to exercise
the true religion of caring for those around us.
In the name of God…Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
No comments:
Post a Comment