Surviving the Great Summer Storms of 2012

What a week it has been! Thunderstorms knocked out power for about a half million homes in our area, and the power companies are estimating it will be the end of the week before power is restored to everyone affected.  We lost a lot of beautiful old trees all across the region. The picture above is taken from Dr. Rykman's front yard looking across High Street towards the Sheriff's office and the Court House.  Briarwood is running on generator power, which means that we can have the freezers on, or the water, but not both.  Storms always slow me down a bit, and call me to notice the things around me that really do matter, and now I am pleased to pass them on to you.
1. I was gratified to see how polite and helpful everyone has been here in our town of Lancaster.  Neighbors go out of their way to help each other, and even with all of the traffic signals out, people wait their turns patiently at intersections and in fuel lines at the gas stations.  There have been no reports of looting or angry confrontations anywhere in our county to my knowledge.
2. With all of the electricity going to freezers and the well, we spend our late afternoons and evenings sitting on the back porch in the sultry 90 degree heat reading and laughing with our Dominican and Puerto Rican friends the Macanudos and the Bacardis.  With dogs draped everywhere, and the day fading, the setting lends itself to noticing more of the world around us.  The Monarch butterflies have returned and now flutter with their friends the Sulphers and the Whites around the over-tall clover under the great apple tree.  Hummingbirds zig and zag between feeders.  The crash of a deer down in the woods, or the flash of a chipmunk or squirrel  occasionally stirs the dogs to action, except for faithful old Pat, the white hound, who is just too old and too hot to be bothered by the antics of terriers a quarter or half his age.  Even in the heat of the day, the tree tops sway lazily in the breeze, and the soft enchantment of the wind chimes eases the sticky discomfort.  I daresay such beauty is always around us, and what a shame we miss so much of it because we imagine ourselves to be too important or too busy to take the time...
3. Someone asked me about the inconvenience of running things on generator power.  Upon reflection, I realized that all of the discomforts of the week are luxury compared to service in the Army when we were in the field.  My bed is soft, I don't have to wear those incredibly uncomfortable fatigues and boots all of the time, and my decisions about time and movement are my own.  And...the generators belong to me.  I can re-deploy them at will, and not have to argue with some surly First Lieutenant who is stuck being Battalion Motor Officer and hates his life as well as his job, just to get a light set turned on for half an hour someplace in the forest of Northen Michigan or in the desert of West Texas.  As bad as it might have been, it is still better than Camp Grayling or Fort Bliss.  Everything is after all somewhat relative, and the miseries of what might be make the realities of the present just a bit more bearable.
Those are my reflections on the great storms of 2012 here in Ohio.  May God bless them to your edification and entertainment as he has to my own.

Dealing with Disappointment

Proper 6B, Third Sunday After Pentecost, Second Sunday After Trinity
Preached at St. John’s Lancaster 17 June, 2012

I Samuel 15:34-16:13
Psalm 92
II Corinthians 5:6-17
Mark 4:26-34

Disappointment, and the grief it produces, can be a terrible thing. Samuel was not the only one to experience that reality. Saul had been everything anyone could want in a king, and Samuel had been especially blessed to have had a role in his call and in his training. The young monarch was good looking, strong, well spoken, and brave. And in the end those things made him trust in himself more than he trusted in God. The results were predictable: pride, followed by arrogation of power both spiritually and personally, followed by jealousy, followed by paranoia, followed by violence, followed by rejection from office by God, followed by death. Along the way, Samuel remembered the good days before all of those things started to happen, and he grieved for Saul, and he grieved, and he grieved. Have you been there? Are you there? The loss of a loved one, bad health, or difficult relationships all have the potential to rob us of joy and preoccupy us with grief over our loss and our changed situation.

I believe today’s lessons provide us with some important guidelines for dealing with the kind of grief that consumes us when we experience some great loss, and I hope you will walk through the Bible Propers with me today with an open heart, that we all might begin to receive that healing God wishes for his people.

First- we must all remember that grief is a normal response to loss. Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus. It is also an appropriate response to the immanence of a changing situation, one of those things which will change the way we have lived. Jesus, you remember, sweat great drops of blood as he prayed in the garden on that night before he was crucified. You may remember that Jesus also cried out over the city of Jerusalem, and expressed his grief over the coming destruction of the inhabitants of that city. There is nothing wrong with expressing those dreadful feelings that sometimes assail us all. Certainly we are allowed to address our emotions, and sometimes the intensity of our emotions prevents us from healing in a short period of time. I’m not a psychologist, but in one of the dark periods of my life, one told me that human emotional pain can take up to a couple of years to heal, and sometimes our lives can be dominated by grief and sorrow for weeks or even months before we begin to heal and return to some semblance of balance and joy.
With that said, how do we begin the process of returning to some semblance of normalcy after a great loss in our lives? Samuel got a good start when God reminded him that the new reality was here to stay. Saul was rejected- and that was not going to change. Sometimes I really wish I could talk with my dad again, but he is dead and I will not see him until we rise together to meet Jesus in the air. All of the wishing and crying in the world will not bring him back. I did both of those things for a while, and that was normal and ok, but in due time I had to let him go. It is the way of nature- it is the way of God. Sometimes Mom asks me why he had to die. My answer is simple. He was ninety years old and he had cancer and he died. There are many things in this sinful world that I might like to change, but I am not God. (Some of you are probably thinking that that is a good thing- I agree with you.) Reality is something that we can’t really change, and it behooves us to come to terms with it.
After calling the Prophet to a reality check, God gave him a mission. Samuel had several questions about it. He was afraid, and rightly so, because Saul was still the king and would probably see the mission as an act of treason. And Samuel really didn’t know what he was looking for in this brave new world. But God gave him something to do. There comes a time in our grieving process that we must get up and get active. It is not easy, not for Samuel and not for us. But if we sit and mope we become morbid and the willingness to live goes out of us. In the old days, there were set times for mourning where family members wore black and limited their social contacts. At the end of the period of mourning, they changed their clothes and resumed their customary activities. It was not such a bad custom, because it provided a known framework for re-entering regular human activity after setting aside time for seriously mourning the loss of a loved one. Today, we do not have formal guidelines for when we should be getting back in the saddle after a time of grief, but I am told by my friends who claim to know about such things that by the end of three of four months we should be out and active again, even though we realize that things will not be as they were.

And so lets review:
It is normal to grieve when there is a big change in our lives.
After an appropriate time of grieving, we need to come to terms with the reality that our reality has changed. That takes a bit of time, several weeks at the least.
In order to experience a return to wholeness, we should get busy in some purposeful way after an appropriate time of sorrow. While everything will not be back to business as usual, by month four, we should be beginning to return to some sense of productive purpose in our new reality.

But, grieving and facing reality and being purposely busy are not nearly enough to overcome the hurt that accompanies the significant changes in our lives. You know that and so do I. Our second lesson, the one from Second Corinthians, gives us the real secret to moving on with our new reality. It calls us to a renewed faith that God is in control and that he has a plan for each and every one of us. “We are always confident…for we walk by faith, and not by sight…for the love of Christ urges us on…he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” It is not after all about just bucking up and staying busy. That is a very shallow way to deal with grief. Those things had their place in Samuel’s life, and they have a place in ours, but the reason that methodology worked is because Samuel, like Paul, believed that God holds us all in the palm of his hand. He believed that God “keeps us as the apple of his eye and hides us under the shadow of his wing.” His faith and his experience worked together to convince him that God does love us, and that because of his love we are new creatures. In God’s love, we are able to view life with a sense of forward looking optimism which enables us to keep the events of our lives in perspective. We value the past, and we treasure much about it, but because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, we know that the death and sorrow and hurt of our past is redeemed as is his own death and sorrow and hurt. He bore our sorrows on the cross, and brought to us healing and forgiveness and hope, and therefore we live for him. We no longer see people and events in the same light. We see them in a new and blessed light, because “the old has passed away- everything has become new.”

It sounds good, but on a bad day it still hurts so bad. And that is why Jesus said in today’s Gospel that it only takes a tiny amount of faith to begin to walk into this new creation of God. Even faith as small as a single mustard seed is capable of growing into a much larger and more peace giving faith. Jesus loves you, and he wants you to be healthy and functioning, not bound by never-ending grief or morbid inactivity. He does not demand that you get your house in order to receive his gift. He merely says to believe a little, like the mustard seed. Don’t worry about what you don’t have, rather bring what you do have. You believe that Jesus died for you and was raised from the dead. And so now you can live above that human point of view that perhaps has characterized your life. You can accept his gift of new creation. There will still be days when you remember the past with fondness and some sense of sadness, because your disappointment and loss, like that of Samuel, was great. But by God’s gift and grace, you will find a spiritual peace which will enable you to experience that new creation where purpose, and future focus, and peace are the norm. And as you experience this new creation which comes from believing in Jesus, you will sing with the Psalmist our Psalm appointed for today:

It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praises unto thy Name, O most High:

To show forth thy loving-kindness in the morning, and thy faithfulness every night,

Upon an instrument of ten strings, and upon the psaltery; upon the harp with a solemn sound.

For thou, Lord, hast made me glad through thy work: I will triumph in the works of thy hands.

O Lord, how great are thy works!

Might God do a work in our hearts today that will make each of us abundantly aware that we are a part of his new creation in Jesus Christ. And might each of us heed the practical examples of today’s lessons and respond to his grace
By honestly experiencing our grief
By acknowledging our reality
And by living lives of purposeful activity.

In the Name of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

Peace Amidst the Unexpected

This is not a picture of innocence
Rumbling Thunder, aka "Squirt" as a four year old

There are two rules that country folks take for granted:
1. Good fences make good neighbors.
2. Always close the gate.

As Rebecca and I have developed Briarwood (our home) over the last fifteen or so years, we have tried to be very careful about fencing, but even the best fences cannot do their job if you leave gates open.  Earlier this week, I opened the back gate to the main production plot on the west side of the barn to water the tomatoes, spinach, turnips, potatoes, horseradish, sunflowers, cucumbers, squash, and beans planted there.  From there, I pulled the hose to another location and hooked it into a drip irrigation system and went back to the house. 

When I got home from Columbus later that evening, I noticed that the gate was jammed open against the end of the chicken coop.  I had given her an inch and she had taken a mile.  Squirt had wedged herself between the rail fence and the edge of the barn, managed to make the turn into the production patch in spite of the closeness of the chicken coop to the gate, and proceeded to eat about a third of a row of beans.  She must not have liked them, because then she reversed her location and left without trampling anything else, and when I got home was waiting to come back into the barn for her evening ration of oats and sweet feed. 

When I was a younger man, I probably would have gotten mad, but now I am old, and so I just laughed, replanted the beans, and gave my lovely old pony her grain, along with a bit of a curry.  After all, the mistake was mine.  She was only doing what instinct and curiosity and lack of supervision dictated that she do. 

Very few things in this life are as important as I thought they were when I was younger.  I want to bring a bit of beauty to this place where God has put me.  I want to encourage people to experience the wonders of liberty responsibly and in a manner which is pleasing to God.  I want to live in a way which will encourage my children and grandchildren to want to follow Jesus and get to heaven.  I want to spend every day God gives us with my wife. 

From time to time, other ponies break into the garden of my life and make a bit of a mess of things.  I've found it best just to find the humor in it all, make the necessary corrections that I can control, and move on to do what needs to be done.  It is a formulae for contentment in life.

And next time, I'll remember to close the gate!

Palm Sunday 2012

Our Lord Enters Jerusalem

Our Lord Bears the Cross

 

James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose

Palm Sunday Sermon
Preached at St. John’s Lancaster 1 April 2012
Mark 11:1-11 and Mark 15:1-39

What are we to make of today’s Gospel lessons? The first is so full of hope and anticipation. The King has come into his own! As he rode into Jerusalem in fulfillment of the prophesies, the people ran to acclaim him as King David’s long awaited heir. Surely the Kingdom of God was among men, and it was just a matter of time until “justice rolled down like a mighty river.” But then there is that second reading which recounts the Passion and Death of our Lord. Pain and suffering, alienation and loss, disappointment and fear are everywhere. The contrast is absolute. I for one would rather just talk about Jesus coming into our lives today, but that is not what the Scriptures or our Holy Mother the Church call me to do this day.

A wise man has said that some of the most wonderful things which happen in our lives often occur “in the shadow of a cross.” The architecture of our Church echoes that statement. At the very apex of our beautiful east window, the mythical pelican gives life to her chicks by shedding her own blood willingly. Just below her is the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world- by himself becoming the sacrifice for our sins. On the font where so many of us were baptized is carved the cross and crown, an ever present reminder that only the person who lays down his life will receive it again. Only the one who goes to the cross with Jesus will reign with him in glory. And perhaps most poignant of all is the cruciform nature of the path we walk as we gather at the Lord’s Table to receive the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, as Chesterton says, “to eat the flesh of our God and to drink his blood.” And then we arise and walk again in the way of the cross as we go forth into the world to bear his love to everyone we meet.

The fact is that death and hardship and sin and evil are ever present realities in our world. I may by good fortune, sound investing, and skilled medical practice be able to avoid most of those things for a while, but eventually even the most protected and privileged of us run afoul of the evils of this world. Death comes to one we love at an early age. Divorce strikes in what seems like the most secure and loving relationship. Disease stalks in the food we eat and in the lifestyles we adopt, even when we try to do our best. War claims our sons and daughters in the prime of their lives, and even those who survive are never quite the same.

I would submit to you today that these realities which are all around us are the reason today’s odd combination of Gospel lessons is so very, very important. You see, we are not as those who hope based on what seems right, or on some philosophy we pray might be true. God has come among us and carried the cross. He has laid down his life willingly to demonstrate for us that he has the power to take it up again and claim the crown that is rightfully his. This is not some mere fantasy or novella of a good man’s life. The Bible names the names of eyewitnesses as if to say, “ask them if you don’t believe me.” The New Testament accounts were circulating widely during the lives of so many who were there, and the authors, guided and inspired by the Holy Spirit, invited their hearers and readers to check the facts before they believed. People are pretty much the same in every historical era. Since the fall, our world has been plagued by sin and people have lived with its consequences. We have yearned for the happy times, and for a while, at least occasionally, they come to us. But there is always that shadow of the cross, that harbinger of the place of suffering. When Jesus Christ came among us and took up the cross and died for us, he entered into our world that we might know we are not alone in the midst of our sufferings. When he died for us, he became our great high priest and our sacrifice and our king. And because of what he accomplished in the midst of his suffering, we, like him, will live forever. Through his cross, we shall gain the crown of life which is offered to all who believe in him. Because he embraced the cross, we all might wear the crown.

One of my heroes has long been the gallant Montrose. Condemned by a perjured king to fight a battle that could not be won, he was defeated by his foes and betrayed by his friends. The poet Aytoun, late professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh, translated this good man’s words into verse in “The Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers.”

“There is a chamber far away
Where sleep the good and brave,
But a better place ye have named for me
Than by my father’s grave.
For truth and right, ‘gainst treason’s might,
This hand hath always striven,
And ye raise it up for a witness still
In the eye of earth and heaven.
Then nail my head on yonder tower-
Give every town a limb-
And God who made shall gather them:
I go from you to Him!"


My hero understood the nature of the cross, and the promise and reality of the crown. Jesus made it clear to all who will believe, and that includes you and me. The darkness of pain and tragedy will come to us in this life, but we are not like those who are without hope. For with St. Paul we can say, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.” Pain is a reality in this world, as are death and loss and suffering and injustice. But our God is greater, and as he has come among us to bear the cross, so has he opened the way for us to reign with him in glory. May this be the reality of our lives in this world, and in the next. AMEN.

Rector's Rambling, May 2010- Alfredus Magnus

Rector’s Rambling- May 2010

Those who know me best say that I am rather predictable. Some of them also know that when I truly believe that my world is passing, I reach for a well thumbed copy of G. K. Chesterton’s “Ballad of the White Horse.” The flurry of Easter activities precluded my reading of the news about our denomination, country, and world. But the passing of that great day led me back to the news servers, and I reached again for my well loved copy of the story of King Alfred and my other beloved friends. Mark, the dutiful Roman, has always called me to what I hope to be, but fear I am not. On the eve of the Battle of Ethandune “His speech was a single one,… Dig for me where I die, he said…Bear not my body home, For all the earth is Roman earth, And I shall die in Rome.” Eldred the Saxon has always been my favorite character. In the midst of battle he thought of beautiful things, and of home. “But while he moved like a massacre, He murmured as in sleep, And his words were all of low hedges, And little fields and sheep. Even as he strode like a pestilence, That strides from Rhine to Rome, He thought how tall his beans might be, If ever he went home.” And then there is “Alfred born in Wantage, who (sic) Rules England till the doom.” Of him our Lady had spoken, “But you and all the kind of Christ, Are ignorant and brave, And you have wars you hardly win, And souls you hardly save. I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet, And the sea rises higher.” And yet Alfred did prevail for a time, though his world was changed forever. In his brokenness and humility, he faithfully lifted high the Cross of Christ, knowing full well that every generation of Christians would be called to do the same.
And now is our time, for the vision of Alfred is fulfilled. “I have a vision, and I know, The heathen shall return. They shall not come with warships, They shall not waste with brands, But books be all the eating, And ink be on their hands. Not with the humor of hunters, Or savage skill in war, But ordering all things with dead words, Strings shall they make of beasts and birds, And wheels of wind and star. They shall come mild as monkish clerks, With many a scroll and pen; And backward shall ye turn and gaze, Desiring one of Alfred’s days, when pagans still were men…By this sign you shall know them, The breaking of the sword, And Man no more a free knight, That loves or hates his lord. Yea, this shall be the sign of them, The sign of dying fire; And man made like a half-wit, That knows not of his sire. What though they come with scroll and pen, And grave as a shaven clerk, By this sign you shall know them, That they ruin and make dark. By all men bound to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred; By terror and the cruel tales, Of curse in bone and kin, By weird and weakness winning, Accursed from the beginning, By detail of the sinning, And denial of the sin; By thought a crawling ruin, By life a leaping mire, By a broken heart in the breast of the world, And the end of the world’s desire; By God and man dishonoured, By death and life made vain, Know ye the old barbarian, The barbarian come again- When is great talk of trend and tide, And wisdom and destiny, Hail that undying heathen, That is sadder than the sea. In what wise man shall smite him, Or the Cross stand up again, Or charity or chivalry, My vision saith not; and I see No more; but now ride doubtfully To the battle of the plain.”
And so with Alfredus Magnus, Rex Brittorum, I am called to ride forth this day. How the battle will progress I cannot know, but I know the end. In faithfulness and patience we are called to serve our Lord, and that will be enough. As the good king sang before the Dane, “That though you hunt the Christian man, Like a hare on the hill-side, The hare has still more heart to run, Than you have heart to ride. That though all lances split on you, All swords be heaved in vain, We have more lust again to lose, Than you to win again.” Let us rise above our realities and serve faithfully that greater truth.

To Christ, the True King!

Bill+

Citations are from G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse, SanFrancisco, Ignatius Press, 2001 (A beautiful reprint of the 1928 edition illustrated by Robert Austin)