Proper 5, Year C 6-6-2010
©Holly Lyman Antolini
Lections: 1 Kings 17:8-24; Ps. 146; Galatians 1: 11-24; Luke 7:11-17
Happy are we, O God, who have the God of Jacob for our help, whose hope is in the Lord our God. AMEN.
All four of today’s Scripture readings are about transformation. There’s the widow of Zarephath sharing her last bit of meal and drop of oil with the itinerant foreigner Elijah, yet finding it ever renewed to sustain them through the drought. Then, when all seems lost again as her son – not just the child of her bosom, but also her sole expectation of support and livelihood, as sons were for their widowed mothers in ancient Israel – succumbs to illness, again Elijah is the means of the impossible: the son’s return to health.
There’s Psalm 146, declaring the Lord’s power to transform the social order from top to bottom, caring most intimately for those who seem least protected: the prisoners, the widows, the orphans.
There’s Paul, the good Jew, by his own admission violently persecuting the followers of Christ for what he saw as their violations of the Torah, the Jewish Law. But then he is upended so unexpectedly and completely by the revealing of God’s Son to him that he becomes instead Christianity’s foundational revolutionary, and throws aside the circumcision by which Jews identified themselves as God’s people, in order to welcome Gentiles into the fold.
And finally, there’s Luke’s Jesus, encountering on the outskirts of town another vulnerable widow robbed of her son. He finds his guts churning with compassion and sorrow – that word in Greek, splangchnizomai, to have compassion, means literally, to feel one’s stomach churn. Tears in his own eyes – no, the story doesn’t say that, but if you read between the lines, you know they sprang there! – he tells the mother, “Do not weep.” Then he violates all the Jewish purity codes, touching the bier of the dead man even though that renders him “impure,” and speaking the word that raises him back to life and his mother’s support.
Transformation is not something under our control. We may long for it, wish for it, pray for it. But it comes when God wills, not when we do. Would that I could say to you, God will heal you! God will bring your loved one back to life! But there are many of you in this church this morning who know only too well that it does not always happen, no matter how fervently we call out in prayer.
This week, I myself have lost a dear friend, the proprietor of my favorite coffee house in Rockland Maine, Patrick Reilley, died of an infection related to his long struggle with lymphoma. Patrick is a person who should NOT have died so young. He had come to Rockland at a time when as a city, Rockland was struggling, smelled of fish processing, and was losing its industrial base. He’d opened first his used bookstore and coffee house and then his coffee roasting business – ONLY fair-traded, ONLY shade-grown and bird-friendly! – back in the 80’s. Around these institutions gathered a whole diverse community of Rocklanders, and over the two decades of his presence, the whole city transformed, found its economic feet, became a place people wanted to invest in. Patrick never got much above the public horizon, except briefly as a City Councilor. But he served on boards and commissions, hired and trained young people, including my daughter, gracefully, good-humoredly and cheerfully valued people of all descriptions. Patrick was not a “believer;” he had suffered too much from his Irish-Catholic upbringing, he told me, to take any more chances on “church.” But he was, nevertheless, a humble but consistent agent of transformation. How I wish I could have put my hand on his bier and raised him back to life and work in Rockland!
But even though I cannot bring Patrick back, and God has not vouchsafed to do so for me, I know enough of Patrick to know that within the limits of his too-short life, he exemplified the compassion of God that Elijah, and Paul, and most especially Jesus himself, personified, the compassion that lies at the root of all transformation. And that THAT, that extraordinary power of love that refuses to see the widow and the orphan and the prisoner and the city of Rockland as condemned to misery and pathetic want but rather views all as full of hope and potential and possibility, THAT is the manifestation of God’s will that our readings reveal today.
Take us here at St. James’s. This week is a momentous week here. First, today, in a Gathering following the 10:30 service, your Wardens and Treasurer are presenting to you the reports that informed the Vestry’s decision to launch a Capital Campaign to support our transition to our new premises. To any of you who participated in the last heroic capital campaign that funded the restoration of our bell tower and the installation of our new natural-gas boilers, the thought that we might be ready to launch another such campaign so soon may seem slightly incredible. Yet the energy of HOPE and POTENTIAL and POSSIBILITY we expressed about our redevelopment prospects to our feasibility study interviewers – 51 of us interviewed in all, and actually more than that, since some interviews were with couples – firmly convinced the interviewers, John and Mary Alice Bird, and in turn the Vestry, that we were READY TO INVEST in OUR OWN REDEVELOPMENT, in furnishing the parish house and in digging right in to the work of restoration on our historic Church.
Then, on Monday, Edwin Johnson arrives to begin his first of THREE YEARS of urban residency with us. Yes, that’s THREE YEARS of the Diocese’s gift to us of a FULL-TIME ASSISTANT CLERGY here at St. James’s! Oh, we do incur some expenses for Edwin: his cell phone, his office computer, his continuing education. And next Sunday, when he preaches for the first time here, we will dedicate the “plate” to launch his discretionary fund, so please plan to come and be generous beyond your pledge, because whatever you put into the plate next Sunday will go to support Edwin’s generosity to those in need.
Did you and I PRAY for more clergy here at St. James’s? You BET we did! But did you or I EXPECT more clergy any time soon? NO WAY! After you hear Michael Walters Young lay out the next seven years of anticipated operating budgets for us, as part of his Redevelopment Finance Review Committee’s report after the 10:30 service today, you will know that NONE of us could envision BUDGETING for another clergy person in that time. YET HERE COMES EDWIN, thanks to the generosity of Bishop Tom and his sense of the HOPE and POTENTIAL and POSSIBILITY here at St. James’s! And those of you who met Edwin at the Palm Sunday breakfast and coffee hour have some idea too that his presence with us is a MOST UNUSUAL GIFT! I say no more: just come to church next Sunday and you’ll GROK what I mean!
Then on Tuesday, a bunch of us are grabbing the T and going over to Boston University for the Episcopal City Mission Annual Meeting and Dinner. Remember ECM? ECM is the organization that replenished our jar of meal and jug of oil back in the summer of 2008 so that we could pay for the original feasibility study that launched our redevelopment project. This Tuesday, ECM is honoring one of our nearest and dearest, St. James’s congregation member Anne Shumway, by giving her a Barbara C. Harris Award for Social Justice! And why is that? Because like Patrick in Rockland, Anne Shumway has been consistently and humbly seeing the potential of our most vulnerable here at St. James’s and in the surrounding community for years and years and years. Who KNOWS how many “biers” Anne’s kindly, self-giving hand has rested upon over her years here and long before? And that “churning in the guts” that Jesus felt? That godly compassion? That’s Anne Shumway’s MIDDLE NAME! It’s HIGH TIME her “ministry of transformation” got recognized!
When we step back and view this extraordinary FERMENT of TRANSFORMATION here at St. James’s – and I’ve only given you the week’s HIGHLIGHTS; there’s MUCH MORE GOING ON! – how can we doubt the POWER OF GOD’S COMPASSION? Oh, the fullness of the Kingdom is not here yet. Too many of you mourn deaths you couldn’t prevent. Too many of you struggle with illnesses you can’t pray away. Too many of you continue to be underemployed or misemployed at work that does not satisfy you. The “cap” on the oil well in the Gulf is more like a slight ligature, slowing the flow, than it is a real cap to staunch it. The crisis over Israeli commandos and aid to Gaza in the Middle East is a mess. But here, right here at St. James’s, God’s aid has most manifestly come to us who could not – DID NOT -- expect it! “God has looked favorably upon his people!” say we with the crowd around the widow of Nain.
No. Transformation is not under our control. It is the gift of the all-compassionate God we see in Jesus, his hand on the bier of the widow’s son. But when this gift touches our lives, no matter what we have suffered, our own compassion is kindled. Like Patrick, like Anne, like Jesus, we long to put our hands to the bier of others’ suffering. We long to join in the great mysterious flow of God’s love. Let us, ourselves, claim the HOPE and POTENTIAL and POSSIBILITY God evidently has seen among us, and ADD OUR OWN LITTLE COMPASSION to HUGE COMPASSION OF GOD. It may not be God’s Kingdom yet, but, fueled and encouraged by the PLEDGE OF PROMISE we’ve been given here at St. James’s, we can ACT AS IF IT WERE!
In closing, let us let us pray in the words we sang at Edwin’s ordination yesterday:
Lord, you have come to the lakeshore
seeking neither the wise nor the wealthy,
But only asking for me to follow.
Refrain
Jesus, you have looked into my eyes,
kindly smiling, you’ve called out my name.
On the sand I have abandoned my small boat;
Now with you, I will seek other seas.
You know full well my possessions;
Neither treasure nor weapons for conquest;J
ust these my fishnets, and will for working.
You need my hands, full of caring,
through my labors to give others rest,
and constant love that keeps on loving.
You, who have fished other oceans
ever longed-for by souls who are waiting,
my loving friend, as thus you call me.
Refrain
Jesus, you have looked into my eyes,
kindly smiling, you’ve called out my name.
On the sand I have abandoned my small boat;
Now with you, I will seek other seas.
(Wonder, Love & Praise, #758)
Monday, July 26, 2010 at 11:02AM