Of Perseverance and Pearls

The I Ching, the Book of Changes, is an ancient book of Chinese wisdom dating back to the time of Confucius. One tosses coins or yarrow stalks, and depending how they fall you create a hexagram: a stack of six solid or broken lines that correspond to a similar picture in the book. You then consult that hexagram that has a name like Fire on the Mountain for advice. Often the advice includes the words, “Perseverance Furthers.”

That is certainly the story of Jacob in his quest for a wife. He has stolen his older brother Esau’s birthright by tricking his father, Isaac. Jacob’s mother suggests he run away to lay low with a kinsman, Uncle Laban, and while there find himself a wife. Jacob falls in love with Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel. He offers to work for Laban for seven years so he can marry her. Laban agrees, Jacob works for seven years, which the narrative tells us, “they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.”

He goes to claim his wife. Laban makes all the wedding arrangements, when lo and behold the Trickster Jacob is tricked! Laban gives away his firstborn daughter Leah, she of the lovely eyes to Jacob, which Jacob does not discover until the next morning. After confronting Laban, he is told that since he has already consummated the marriage, and besides local custom does not allow giving away the younger daughter before the firstborn. Complete this week of wedding celebrations, however, and work another seven years for me, then you may marry Rachel as well! Jacob agrees, and seven years later, marries Rachel whom he loves. Perseverance furthers!    

And that’s not all! Over time he also marries Leah’s servant Zipah, and Rachel’s servant Hilpah, and as we all know among these four wives he fathers twelve sons who become the heads of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, Jacob’s new name given to him by a stranger with whom he wrestles all night long beside the river Jabbok. Israel means ‘he who wrestles with God.’ Despite what this foundational story might tell us about the Biblical view of marriage, one can easily say that Jacob, son of Isaac, grandson of father Abraham, persevered in his quest for the woman he loved, persevered in wrestling with God, and as such became the father of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Jacob persevered for The Pearl of Great Value Jesus talks about in Matthew chapter 13!

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.” Years ago, long before Tom Shaw SSJE, became the Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, he gave a meditation to the clergy of the Diocese of Connecticut during a Quiet Day in Holy Week. He spoke about this parable of The Pearl of Great Value. He began by saying that our God is a very frugal God and does not waste one iota of our life experience. Each moment we live and breathe on this earth, God values and savors who we are and what we are doing.

One of the hidden truths of the kingdom, and this parable among these several that speak of hiddenness, is that we, each of us, and all of us together as God’s people, are the pearl of great value. That is how much our God loves each and every one of us! So much so that God would send His only son to walk among us as one of us to show us the way of the Lord. So much so that he did not let us get away with killing his only son, but returned him to us, so that wherever two or three are gathered in his name, Jesus himself is in the midst of us, calling us to return to the God from whence we come. We come from love. We return to love. And love is all around. God is love, and loves us even more than the merchant who gave everything for the Pearl of Great Value.

This is all meant to be an example of God’s Perseverance to love us. Even God’s wrath is an extension of God’s love for us. As Maggie Ross writes in her book The Fire of Your Life, “The wrath of God is his relentless compassion, pursuing us even when we are at our worst.”

Recognizing that we are precious in the eyes of our God, said Bishop Shaw, we need to take time each day in our prayers to be silent and allow God to thank us for what we have done for God today. Every day we are to leave some silence in our prayers and to allow ourselves to feel God thanking us for all that we do for God in this His world. It sounds so easy. But are we really capable of believing and knowing that God loves us that much? Do we feel like pearls of great value? Bishop Shaw assured us that we can. And more importantly, that we must. It is central to the life of faith to accept and receive God’s love. To know how much our God values us and everything that we do.

This is why all these kingdom parables are so very important to understand. They each point to the hiddenness of God’s reign, God’s Kingdom, in our midst. They each suggest that the life of faith begins with something as small as a little bit of yeast or a single grain of mustard seed. We do not need to do big and heroic things. Though in truth, as God’s own pearls of great value, every little thing we do for others brings a smile to the face of God. 

And the more we let God thank us for what we can do for God, the more confident and empowered we become as God’s own people. And soon the people around us and the people we meet begin to feel like pearls of great value as well. All we really need is faith as small as a mustard seed to make the whole creation new! To give new life to our own tired bodies. To put a smile on the face of a stranger. To plant seeds of God’s love throughout the neighborhood which God has called us to make our home.

Take time today, to be silent and to let God thank you for what you have done for God today. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Just feel God’s thanks and love for today. Imagine God washing your feet at the end of a long day. Imagine God offering you a piece of his bread and a sip of his wine. Imagine God making you an integral part of His body, that sacred mystery the Church. Beginning today make time every day for God to thank for what you are doing for God. Persevere in accepting that you are God’s Pearl of Great Value.

As we luxuriate in God’s thanks, mercy, compassion and love, we will become a new people. We will come to accept that we are God’s pearls of great value. As that new understanding takes root and grows within us, others will come and make their home among us, take rest among our branches, and discover their value as God’s own pearls as well. Such a life of love and thanksgiving is all ours. If only we will have faith as small as a mustard seed. Amen

The Mustard Seed Song

https://youtu.be/i_kqy2Zc4fw

Let There Be Music!

Let There Be Music

This Sunday we pray: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask.

I don’t know about anybody else, as the Time of Coronavirus wears on, I’m feeling not so much ‘weakness’ as a sense of weariness – weary of all the measures we take day in and day out to be safe wherever we are; weary of witnessing those who refuse to take a simple measure like wearing a mask; weary of treating a Public Health Crisis, a worldwide Pandemic, as some sort of political football; weary that there just may be no football, baseball or basketball at all despite heroic and not so heroic efforts to resume play, “Safely,” whatever that may look like. And of course, I am aware that those who are on the frontline fighting the Coronavirus, and those in “essential jobs,” are infinitely wearier than I will ever be, or most of us will ever be.

That’s why I am feeling the compassion and mercy in our wisdom literature for today, because Jacob (Genesis 28:10-19a), the Poet of the Psalms(139), and Jesus in Matthew (Matthew 13:24-30,36-43) are all offering us words of hope delivered in the midst of weariness!

Jacob is weary – and running for his life. Having stolen is older brother Esau’s birthright, his mother, Rebecca has urged him to run away and hide, for Esau the hunter is after him. He is alone, isolated, and weary, trickster though he is. With nothing but a stone for a pillow, he lies down to sleep his weariness off. Suddenly he sees a ladder reaching up to heaven with angels ascending and descending. And then! The Lord God standing beside him to announce that all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well: he shall inherit the land upon which he sleeps as promised to his grandfather Abraham and his father Isaac; his offspring will be like the dust of the earth stretching out to the north, the south, the east and the west; you and your offspring shall be a blessing to all the peoples of the Earth; “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.” Jacob awakes, weary no more, and exclaims, “How awesome is this place!” He takes his stone pillow and erects it as a pillar, anoints it with oil and proclaims the names the place Bethel – Beth-El, the House of God, the House of Elohim!

Psalm 139, a song, a poem, may as well been written by Jacob as it proclaims that there is nowhere we can go or hide that God is not with us! Whether we climb Jacob’s ladder up to heaven, lie in our grave, dive into the depths of the sea, “your hand will lead me, your right hand hold me fast. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will cover me, and the light around me turn to night, darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day; darkness and light to you are both alike.’” The light shines in the darkness, the light shines on our weariness, the light surrounds us in our weakness and holds us fast, and leads us always closer to the light, sings the Psalmist!

After yet another enigmatic agricultural metaphor and parable that acknowledges that there is evil planted amidst the good, do not worry! After the harvest, the Lord will bundle up the evil and burn it. It will be taken care of. Meanwhile, says Jesus, “The righteous will shine like the Sun! The one who has ears should hear!”

At the words, “shine like the sun,” I recall sitting in an empty theatre somewhere near Pughkeepsie, NY, listening to John Hall and Orleans rehearsing, “When the world was in trouble/And it looked like there was hell to pay/ Fire, Fire everywhere!/And the news got worse each day/Well, people really wondered/Just how long they could hold out/God looked down from heaven above/And He began to shout: Let there be music! Let is shine like the Sun! Let there be music! Everybody’s got to have some fun!” A lyric that surely has resonance in our time of weariness: weariness with a pandemic, weariness with racial and economic injustice, weariness with uncertainty about what to do next, all kinds of weariness.

Our texts invite us to remember. Remember: Singing is what has sustained God’s people for millennia! Telling odd stories has sustained God’s people for millennia! Visions of ladders and angels and the Lord God standing right by our side has sustained God’s people for millennia! Day or night, in heaven, in the depths of the sea, or on terra firma, there is no escaping: God is with us: Emmanuel. Evil will pass, righteousness shall shine like the Sun. Let there be music! Let it shine like the Son! We have ears! Do we hear? The Lord God stands beside us in the present weariness, and with mercy and compassion invites us to sing and to shine like the Sun! And urges us to remember that all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well! Everybody’s got to have some fun!

Let there be music by Orleans

The Poet and the Storyteller

Both Isaiah chapter 55 and Jesus in Matthew 13 invite listeners to…well, listen! To listen carefully; to incline our ears to the Word of God. Let anyone with ears, listen! The invitation is to ‘anyone.’ But they both know not everyone will listen. Really listen. Both are addressing people who are in some form of Exile: 700 years before Jesus, all of Jerusalem was carted off to Babylon where they lived in Exile for several generations; while Jesus and all of Israel is in Exile at home under the oppressive regime of the Caesar’s Roman Empire. Isaiah writes a poetic vision of hope, while Jesus tells a story with a surprising ending.

Both are addressing people who feel no longer at home. For those in Babylon they were literally not at home, which they understood as punishment for idolatry and not listening to the Word of God. Especially traumatic was being separated from the Temple, the center of cultic religious life. Jesus and his contemporaries were under a repressive military occupation. Rome is squeezing every ounce of produce, livestock, oil, wines and fish out of the land along with a system of tolls and taxes on the fabled Roman roadways. And for those who did not cooperate, the Casesars, Herods and Pilates promised only violence and certain death – spiritual death as well as literal death. Both Isaiah and Jesus address people who feel as if they have returned to the days of slavery in Egypt with no way out.

Think for a moment where in this world or even in this country there may be people in similar circumstances struggling to get free from systems of domination that appear to be holding them back or down. Or, ponder how we sometimes let ourselves become assimilated, tenured or even enslaved to spiritual, political, economic, religious or others kinds of idolatry, or slavery to systems of external or internal or emotional domination from which there feels as if there is no escape. There are any number of ways to find ourselves in similar circumstances to those who have been carried off to Babylon, or those held hostage in Israel. So, let us incline our ears to what the poet and the storyteller have to offer.

Isaiah 55 begins like this:

Ho, everyone who thirsts,

    come to the waters;

and you that have no money,

    come, buy and eat!

Come, buy wine and milk

    without money and without price.

2 Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,

    and your labor for that which does not satisfy?

Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,

    and delight yourselves in rich food.

3 Incline your ear, and come to me;

    listen, so that you may live.

If you are thirsty for justice and righteousness, or if you are just plain hungry and thirsty, guess what? There is an alternative food supply to that which is monopolized by the Empire! Why spend your time and your money, why do you labor, for that which does not and will never satisfy you? This is the question for us all. The solution is to listen to the word of God. Incline our ears so that we may live, because staying on the Babylonian treadmill is the way of death – death of the spirit, death of the community, and just plain death from living on the junk food of the Empire. Staying in the Empire of the Caesars, Herods and Pilates is also an endless nightmare of violence and death.

Then there is Jesus who paints a picture of a sower who goes out to sow seed, and sows. That is, this is someone who knows what she is doing. It is a skill and a ritual to sow seed. You scatter it far and wide and evenly so as to cover all the ground possible with an economy of seed. Inevitably, some falls in places that are not productive, but the seeds that land on good soil, watch out! Let anyone with ears, listen! Sowing: anyone who has followed Jesus this far will know is code for the work of God – to care for one another, especially widows, orphans and resident aliens, ie those without resources! And seed is the Word of the gospel, the Good News, the Kingdom of God. There is, once again, an alternative to the kingdom of the Empire that only exists to suck you dry.

Then Jesus teases with them. For those who hear the Word of the New Kingdom and do the work of God as laid out in our covenant with God so many generations ago, the yield is one hundred-fold! The farmers are laughing themselves silly! They know that is just impossible. So, Jesus says, alright, how about sixty-fold! Now everyone is laughing cause anyone in the region knows seven to ten-fold is about average. But Jesus has their attention now, so all right, thirty-fold! Now people are thinking, this is possible, but we’re no long talking about wheat are we?

They are hearing echoes of Isaiah:

 As the rain and the snow come down from heaven,

and do not return there until they have watered the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,

giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

For you shall go out in joy,

and be led back in peace;

the mountains and the hills before you

shall burst into song,

and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;

instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;

and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial,

for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

Isaiah and Jesus are both sowers who go out to sow the Word of God that “shall not return to me empty,” saith the Lord. “For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace.” Rogers and Hammerstein are right after all, “The hills are alive with the sound of music!” The music of escape and return, the music of love, the music of Miriam and the women getting their tambourines and singing their way out of Egypt, out of slavery out of Exile, out of being held hostage in your own land! There will be new growth, a new bread supply, and a new people for those who have ears and listen. For those who sustain hope in the wilderness, joyfulness in days of deep sadness, and for those who refuse to be tenured to systems of oppression that will always fail to satisfy, there is an alternative. Some seven hundred years apart, Isaiah and Jesus still offer words that will sustain us, and if we listen, if we really incline our ears toward their visions, we will find our way out of our many idolatries, our many exiles, and return us to the Household of God’s Eternal Love. Amen.

The Fourth of July 2020

On this Fourth of July we pray: “Grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace.” Because on July 4, 1776, the thirteen “United States” unanimously declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Among the earliest colonists, men like John Cotton and John Winthrop, more than 100 years before Thomas Jefferson penned this Declaration, provided a vision before even reaching these shores this the New World would also be “the New Israel.” It is only natural, then, that we revisit some of the underlying constitution of what it means to be like the people who became Israel in the Wilderness Sojourn in our reading from Deuteronomy.

At the heart of this understanding Moses, speaking on behalf of the God of the Exodus and Passover, says we must remember who we are and whose we are: we were sojourners, strangers, aliens, in the land of Egypt as slaves 24/7; deprived of Life, Liberty and Happiness. Therefore, we are always to “love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” – and as well we should, like God, execute justice for the widow and the orphan. [Deuteronomy 10:17-21] Widows, orphans and resident aliens, strangers, are to be a protected class in Israel – and therefore ought to receive the same kind of love and care in our “New Israel.”

In 1982, as I entered my final year at The General Theological Seminary in New York City, we were engaged in a racial audit – an examination of what kinds of institutional racism and bias might exist systemically in the life of the seminary community. Needless to say, people were on edge during this process. In the midst of this, I had to deliver my Senior Sermon in our weekly Community Eucharist in the Seminary Chapel. I was nervous. The seating was what we all choir seating – pews facing each other across the center aisle – we could all see one another. We came from all kinds of backgrounds – Anglo-Catholic, Low Church Protestant, Evangelical, Historic Black Churches, Egyptian Churches, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches, and the Congregational Church as I had. You would notice that people on the other side would cross themselves at different points in the liturgy, bow their heads, and all sorts of manual acts as they are called. People on both sides would begin to mimic those on the other side – a sort of ongoing metaphor for the kinds of assimilation that goes on in our united melting pot made up of all kinds of different people similar to the crowd who left Egypt that fateful day in Exodus.

As I got going in my sermon, having been told to calm my nerves I should imagine everyone sitting there in their underwear (which frankly was even more unnerving!) – I suggested we all  take a look across the aisle. We are all strangers here. We all come from different churches, different dioceses and even different countries – just like the 650,000 who left Pharaoh’s Empire of Oppression. “Remember, you were strangers in the Land of Egypt,” I said. “Let’s sit here quietly, looking across the aisle at one another and ponder this as we try to reconcile our racial biases. We are all strangers in this new world of seminary.” I will never forget the power of that silence as we remembered who we were and whose we were – all of us believed we had received a call from the Almighty God of the Passover and Exodus to be in the seminary.

Winthrop, Cotton, Jefferson and all the others also believed they were sent by God, and penned the unforgettable words, “all men are created equal…endowed with certain unalienable rights.” And then proceeded to define Africans as only 3/5ths of a person in the Constitution. And as I write these words Friday evening, the Lakota First Nation People are attempting to protect their Sacred Land, their Holy Ground, from being used as a political stage for the resident aliens who had long ago agreed by treaty that this was Sacred Native land. We still forget who we are and whose we are. We are the new strangers in an Old World that had sustained significant civilizations for thousands of years before we arrived. It’s no wonder that we need to ponder the words of Moses and God in Deuteronomy this July 4^th more than ever: “we are always to love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land” once upon a time.

Then there is the business about loving our enemies and being perfect as “your heavenly Father is perfect.” Jesus in Matthew always has a way with words, but this tops it all. We may as well admit right now that we have utterly failed in these two categories of Christian virtues: we find it difficult to love our neighbors let alone our enemies; as to being perfect like God, well no analysis needed here. This, of course, comes from what we lovingly call The Sermon on the Mount, a sort of Christian Magna Carta or Constitution. We recall, surely, that prior to all this talk about loving enemies and being perfect in chapter 5, our Lord utters words about the need for us to be reconciled “with those who have something against us” before ever thinking to come before the altar of the Lord – before even stepping into church. [Mt 5:21-24] We might do well silently to ponder these words of Jesus before going back to see how we might take Thomas Jefferson and the representatives of thirteen colonies seriously and finally accept that all men are created equal; that race is a biological fiction; that science, of all things, has confirmed we are all one – all notions of so-called “race” we just made up to divide and demean one another.

My friend and mentor, the Reverend Bob Bonner, used to tell the story about his son Bruce who grew up in Texas and loved to play football. In high school the football players were required to be on the track team in the spring to stay in shape. After all the events had been handed out to the football team, there was one event left: the High Jump. Bruce was rather short and stout, but he volunteered to High Jump. Even after practice at school, Bruce would set up a broom stick across two standards in the backyard and jump and jump until dinner time. He worked really hard at it. Bob would say, “How high can you jump?” And Bruce would point to just above his waist with a big smile and say, “Up to here!” When he came home from the first track meet, Bob asked Bruce how it had gone. “Well, I told you I could jump up to here,” he said pointing to just above his waist. “The problem is they started with the bar up to here,” as he pointed to his upper chest. Bob would say, “That’s OK, son. You tried your best. God will forgive you the rest.”

Bob would tell us that’s what Jesus is talking about when he urges us to be perfect as God is perfect. Give it your best, and God will forgive the rest. I guess what I am thinking is that the Fourth of July is a time to ask ourselves, “Have we really tried our best? Have we really found ways to show that we believe all men, women and children are created equal? Have we really treated strangers, all strangers, with love and respect and dignity? Have we tried to reconcile our differences before coming before the altar of the Lord week after week after week?”

One day I was about to leave my office when the phone rang. It was Bob Bonner who was dying of a brain tumor. He said on good days when he could talk, he called his friends and did I want to know the rest of the story of Bruce? Of course, I did. Bruce had learning disabilities and was a five-year student at high school. Every day he practiced with the football team even though he was ineligible to play in games. Bob asked him why he did that. “Well,” said Bruce, “I do it for myself because I know I would get in trouble if I didn’t have something to do after school. And now that I’m bigger and stronger, I do it for the team so they get to practice harder and play better.” I do it for myself, and for the team. This July Fourth seems like as good a time as ever in my lifetime to see how we might practice harder at being perfect as God is perfect: welcoming strangers in the land, loving our neighbors and enemies, and reconcile things with those who have something against us. We know the ‘team’ needs us to do this, and it will be better for each of us at the end of the day as well. Grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace. It’ worth trying harder at this, and if we do, perhaps God will forgive the difference. Amen.