September 2, 2012, 14th Sunday after Pentecost

September 4, 2012 All Sermons

September 2, 2012, The 14^th Sunday after Pentecost

Year B, Proper

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

“Arise my love, my fair one, and come away;

for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth;

the time of singing has come,

and the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land.

The fig tree puts forth it figs, and the vines are in blossom;

they give forth fragrance.

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

Solomon offers this poem as a way to understand the true nature of things. Solomon experienced a world of abundance. Of plenty and joy. Of light and life. A beautiful vision, no?

In the Gospel, we find Jesus offering a withering riposte to the Pharisees who again were nit-picking at the conduct of the disciples.

“There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart that evil intentions come…” and then he goes to offer twelve categories of human evil, from fornication to folly, avarice to wickedness.

It is fabulous to put these two texts together, a passage from the Song of Solomon and a fragment of our Savior’s words as related by St. Mark. Solomon was a great King; son of the great King David. He lived in still legendary opulence and unbridled worldly power. And there is Jesus, Son of Man, raised by a humble tradesman, poor, mendicant, wandering the world as prophet with the attendant pariah status assigned to all true prophets of Living Gods. These words were recorded centuries apart, in contexts as different as could be imagined, and yet, from these very different perspectives and in very different ways, these two teachings on the true nature of things are saying exactly the same thing.

“The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes…and says to me: ‘Arise my love, my fair one, and come away…Flowers appear on earth…the turtledove is heard…the fig tree puts forth its figs… Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.’”

Beautiful, isn’t it? Ecstatic. You can feel the joy de vive, the immersion in the straight up fabulousness of being alive, and even better than being alive, being in love. “…he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle… Look, there he stands… gazing in…” You might know that feeling. The reckless abandon of love and joy and beauty. That feeling you get looking out on a cold, rainy morning while you are as warm and cozy as can be. The longing of missing someone and knowing you will see them again soon. Sharing the thrill of a beautiful cloud passing by or moonlight sparkling on a river with a child. Life is beautiful. In all its forms life is abundant and radiant and pulsating. God is good, very good, all the time.

Jesus knew this. He knew that life was abundant. He knew that the joy of God could be tasted in the sugars concentrating in the figs as they ripen. He saw God’s face in the vines as they blossomed as He did in the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. He knew how precious life is, how directly a gift of God is our breath in and out of our bodies. And He, more than most, knew how fleeting the gift and joy of life is. He knew more than most about the tenacity of life andits fragility. He lived fully and bravely in the knowledge of where it would lead Him, and live he did, brilliantly.

That would be wonderful if that were the end of the story. It would be wonderful if all of our beloveds were frolicking along the hillsides, that everyone one had figs a’plenty to eat, and babbling brooks of clean, sweet water to drink. It would be wonderful if all of us were quick to listen, slow to anger, if we were all doers and not just hearers of the Word. What a world it would be if we could all see the face of God in that blossoming vine or that lily let alone in the face of another person. But most of us are not like that. Some of us are alone, or worse, are lonely. Some our brothers and sisters do not have enough food or water. Some of us are bitter, angry, and righteously so in the face of violence and oppression. There is more to the story than life is beautiful.

What Jesus teaches us, echoing the words of Solomon, is that the world, the Creation and the creatures who inhabit it are fabulous, very much because it and all of us are of God. We are of God, immediately, directly. What Jesus is teaching is that all of these problems, from loneliness to hunger, anger to alienation these are ourdoing, not aspects of God’s creation, they do ot arise in the world in and of themselves. “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile…” Now of course all hunger is not directly human caused, though it is harder and harder to tell which floods, droughts and famines are caused or worsened by human activity and those which are pure happenstance, but in any case, hunger and filthy water, like oppression and violence exists because we, humans, allow it to continue. We have the means to feed the world and to make it safe (or at least safer) if we had the will. But apparently we don’t. So it is on us, we are culpable for that suffering. The world doesn’t defile, but by our sins of commission and omission as individuals and as a species, we do defile.

All of this “defilement” talk, “impurity” talk is tricky business because words like this, religion based on or perverted by these concepts have been responsible for a great deal of evil in the world. Only a generation ago the Mormon Church’s official teaching was that people of color were so unclean as to be sub-human. Many groups of less exotic Christians exclude along gender lines because of the assumed impurity of women. Our own Episcopal church still isn’t clear that gay folks (another “impure” class) can wear the purple shirt of Bishop without controversy. So it’s tricky, but at the same time it is true. The world is not “evil.” The cholera bacterium isn’t evil, it just is. Swarms of locust don’t have a moral will which tends towards good or ill, they; like us have a will to live. Concentrations of locust become a plague only when they pass into human consciousness. Cholera becomes an epidemic only when it crosses our path.

Bits of the world become sullied, becomes impure, sin-laden in our hearts not because the world is evil, not because we are bad or evil, but because our whole frame of reference is so totally off. It is not about us. Absolutely, truly, really, really, really the world does not revolve around us, humans. The world does not seek ITS place in relation to us, to humanity. It is we who seek meaning, who seek to locate ourselves in relation to everything else. Case in point: many of us even address the greatest force of all, God, as “Father,” a decidedly human concept and that is just the beginning of our anthropomorphizing, our humanization our domestication of God.

Jesus warns us, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” We are far too entrenched in a human-centric version and vision of the world. To most of us, everything somehow relates to us, and not in some philosophical observer effect kind of way, but really, most of us assume without it even occurring to us that that everything in creation is somehow ours by right to relate to, to make meaning from, to use as we see fit. And this manifests in all sorts of terrible ways. From major political parties embracing gas/oil/coal-only energy policies to introducing virulent genetically modified canola here in our beloved Willamette Valley, to me driving a truck to church that gets like 10 miles/gallon… when it is all about us, when goodness and utility are only considered in relation to our own interests, when it is me, me, me or even we, we, we, it is not going to work out. Well, the funny thing is that it is not going to work out most poignantly for us and our kind.

The remedy? Hold the world, but don’t hold on. Be a gentle companion to the creation. Take it all in, don’t just consume. Don’t let yourself be defined as “consumer” or “resident” but be a participant and a citizen. As you walk in the world, take only memories, leave only footprints (if that). Most of all, follow the directions of Solomon: