The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8B

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8B July 27, 2021 At first glance, our readings for today seem to be strange companions. “Our reading from the Wisdom of Solomon paints a compelling vision of human life, shaped in the image of the divine at creation, and bound for enduring relationship with [God].” It talks about how God created all that is generative and none of what is destructive, even death.i Our gospel reading shows Jesus, who is on his way to heal Jairus’s daughter and is interrupted by a woman who touches him and finds healing for her disease. One question that this passage can raise for us is “who-or what-claims our time and attention, and how [do] we determine the worthiness of those people and things.” ii I’ve been listening to an audiobook titled Sum: forty tales from the afterlives by David Eagleman. Eagleman is a neuroscientist who I heard interviewed on a podcast last year about his work on the brain, and the interviewer had recommended this book. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I guess I thought the book would be about our brains and the afterlife, but so far, the different “tales” that I have listened to are like fables or parables with many different interpretations and much to ponder. Last week, as I was walking, I listened to one that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about; so I’m going to read it to you. (Don’t worry! It’s really short.) It’s titled Circle of Friends. “When you die, you feel as though there were some subtle change, but everything looks approximately the same. You get up and brush your teeth. You kiss your spouse and kids and leave for the office. There is less traffic than normal. The rest of your building seems less full, as though it’s a holiday. But everyone in your office is here, and they greet you kindly. You feel strangely popular. Everyone you run into is someone you know. At some point, it dawns on you that this is the afterlife: the world is only made up of people you’ve met before. It’s a small fraction of the world population—about 0.00002 percent—but that seems plenty to you. It turns out that only the people you remember are here. So the woman with whom you shared a glance in the elevator may or may not be included. Your second-grade teacher is here, with most of the class. Your parents, your cousins, and your spectrum of friends through the years. All your old lovers. Your boss, your grandmothers, and the waitress who served you food each day at lunch. Those you dated, those you almost dted, those you longed for. It is a blissful opportunity to spend quality time with your one thousand connections, to renew fading ties, to catch up with those you let slip away. It is only after several weeks of this that you begin to feel forlorn. You wonder what’s different as you saunter through the vast quiet parks with a friend or two. No strangers grace the empty park benches. No family unknown to you throws breadcrumbs for the ducks and makes you smile because of their laughter. As you step into the street, you note there are no crowds, no buildings teeming with workers, no distant cities bustling, no hospitals running 24/7 with patients dying and staff rushing, no trains howling into the night with sardined passengers on their way home. Very few foreigners. You begin to consider all the things unfamiliar to you. You’ve never known, you realize, how to vulcanize rubber to make a tire. And now those factories stand empty. You’ve never known how to fashion a silicon chip from beach sand, how to launch rockets out of the atmosphere, how to pit olives or lay railroad tracks. And now those industries are shut down. The missing crowds make you lonely. You being to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.”iii Your invitation this week is to reflect on the two following questions. What are the most generative parts of your life right now? Who or what claims your time, your attention, and how do you determine who and what is worthy of that? i. Ed. Bartlett and Taylor. Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 3. Homiletical Perspective by Leanne Pearce Reed. Westminster John Knox: Louisville, 2009, p 171. ii. Ibid. Homiletical Perspective by Beverly Zink-Sawyer p 191. iii. Eagelman, David. Sum: forty tales from the afterlives. Circle of Friends. Pantheon: New York, 2009, pp 8-10.

The Third Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 6B

3rd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 6B June 13, 2021 We spent this past week at our family farm in Northeast Mississippi with my parents, brother and sister-in-law, and their two daughters. The four adults have joined together over these last few years to make their living by growing organic vegetables which they eat and sell through subscriptions to their CSAs or Community Supported Agriculture. In years past, when we have visited in the summer, we have helped with special projects that needed more hands, but this past week, it rained almost the whole time we were there, so no big projects were planned. During the few times I was able to get out and help, I spent the time cleaning out the old plants from the raised beds and the fields to make room for the new plants and seeds that they will plant in the coming weeks. At some point, I remarked to my sister-in-law that Jesus clearly didn’t know what he was talking about when he used these farm related parables that are our gospel reading for this Sunday. The sort of farming Jesus talks about makes it seem effortless. The farmer plants and then goes to sleep, and he wakes up just in time for the harvest. There’s no mention of all that can go wrong with farming—the 14 inches of rain that can fall in two days’ time; the bugs that eat the crops; the year that the watermelons just would not grow. Even though the ground was wet, the plants I was pulling up were deeply rooted and did not want to come out of the ground. I found my hands inexplicably sore the next couple of days and realized it was from all the grasping and pulling. And don’t even get me started on the ants. As I remarked on Jesus’s naivete to my sister-in-law, she began to tell me about her favorite new plant on the farm this year. It is elderflower bushes. The elderflowers are small, white, and delicate; they will eventually give way to elderberries, but she told me the elderflowers have all sorts of properties on their own. Elderflowers have been used in treating cold and flu symptoms along with sinus problems and swelling. The elderflower has a delicate, sweet fragrance that has been distilled for perfumes, and my sister-in-law used it to make a delicately sweet simple syrup which we used to make cocktails. She had spent significant time researching elderflowers and learning how to use it and what to do with it. And here’s the really cool thing about the elderflowers. They just showed up one day on the farm. Probably a bird was responsible for transplanting the berries from somewhere else but they just started growing all on their own. And she was curious enough to learn what they are and what to do with them. The kingdom of God is like an elderflower plant. You don’t know where it comes from; it just shows up one day and there is no work that you have to do to grow it or cultivate it. It offers bountiful gifts to you-first flowers and then berries- but it is up to you to notice it, to see it, to name it, to delight in it, and to figure out what uses you can make of it, how it can enrich your life and the world around you. This week, may you look for the Kingdom of God that is already within and all around you, through no work of your own. May you find ways to delight in it that it may be the free gift of God’s love and presence in your life.

The Second Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 5B

2nd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 5B June 6, 2021 As a spin-off of my work on family systems theory for my continuing education this year, I’ve been reading the book Friedman’s Fables by Edwin Friedman. Friedman was a Jewish rabbi, who used the psychological system of Bowen Family Systems theory (developed by Murray Bowen) and expanded it to think about how organizations, groups, churches, react in the similar predictable patterns through which families interact. In Friedman’s Fables, Friedman draws upon his knowledge of family systems theory and Jewish midrash (the process of taking a story from scripture and embellishing it or expanding upon it through imaginative interpretation), and he has written a series of stories to help the reader more playfully engage some of the principals that lead to deeper personal development through self-differentiation. This week, as I was reading, I came upon the story that is titled Raising Cain: A Case History of the First Family. It is, fortuitously enough for this preacher, Friedman’s form of midrash on our Old Testament reading for today. The basis of the story is that an angelic messenger has written a psychological case study of the first family—Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel. The case study says that they family came in for counseling because “the sons have been quarrelling a good deal, and both mother and father appear quite helpless to do anything about it. Most of the focus is on the older brother, who broods a lot, is extremely sullen, and is very jealous of his far more successful younger brother.” The story continues by looking at the parents (Adam and Eve) and their relationship: “At the beginning of their marriage, both husband and wife seemed to have lived in a very blissful state, naïve, it appears, about what was happening all around them. Something, we’re not sure what, changed that, and things have never been the same since. The husband growls continuously about his lot and why life has to be so difficult, whereas the wife never fails to remind him of how much pain she went through to bear him sons. But it is more than their discontent that seems to be seeping down, particularly to their elder son. More pernicious still may be their attitude toward their discontent. Neither husband or wife seems capable of accepting responsibility for their own destiny. Both are always claiming that their lives would be far different were it not for how the other behaved. The man tends to blame his wife, and the wife tend to blame the environment….Neither seems capable of taking responsibility for personal desires, loves, or hates. Each sees the other as causing his or her own pain. Ironically, they thus each give their partner great power to guilt the other.”i After focusing on the parents, the case study moves on to look at the children-Cain and Abel. The narrator reports: “There seems to be no strength in the family at all, by which I mean the capacity of some member to say, I am me, this is where I stand. I end here and you begin there, etc. It may be this constant expectation that the other should be his keeper that prevents each from taking responsibility for himself. And as long as this attitude persists in the parents, we can hardly expect the boys to act more pleasantly toward each another, still less at times to be watchful over the other. This situation will certainly leave a ‘mark’ on one of them.” He concludes, “In a family like this, with no one able to tolerate his own solitariness, or, for that matter, anyone else’s, I fear the weakness in the children will never be corrected. Actually, my fantasies are worse. For, if the current inability each parent manifests to deal with his or her own pain continues, I fear that Cain’s view of life will never truly focus on himself and, perceiving the source of all his problems in his brother, he may one day up and kill him.”ii In his commentary on this fable, Friedman cuts straight to the heart of it by inviting the reader to “suppose the human family’s original sin is blaming others,” and then asks, “How can the members of any generation modify that transmitted attitude?”iii “Suppose the human family’s original sin is blaming others.” It’s certainly in evidence in the Genesis reading. It starts with a simple question from God to Adam and Eve: “where are you?” and then devolves into Adam blaming Eve and Eve blaming the snake. We see rampant blame at work in the gospel reading for today. It starts with Jesus’s family’s anxiety about what he is up to and their attempts to restrain him because they believe he has gone crazy and then escalates into a full on blame-game name calling by the Scribes who accuse Jesus of being possessed by Beelzebub. All of these groups are reacting to change which naturally brings anxiety, but as opposed to dwelling with their own discomfort, they are quick to try to pass that discomfort on to others by blaming. “Suppose the human family’s original sin is blaming others.” Does that give us more of an explanation of the state of the world, the state of our country, or the problems that we see in our families, in our churches? How does Jesus offer the antidote to blame in his person, in his teachings? What role does blame play in your life on a regular basis? Who do you find your blame directed most frequently toward? Your invitation this week is this. To pay attention to the very first taste of blame that you feel on the tip of your tongue or in your heart, and to draw back from it. Before speaking or acting, be curious about what pain your blame is springing from, pay attention to where you end and the other begins, and then speak or act out of that space. i. Edwin Friedman, Friedman’s Fables (New York: Guilford Press, 1990), 47-48. ii. Ibid. 49. iii. Edwin Friedman, Friedman’s Fables: Discussion Questions (New York: Guilford Press, 1990), 9.