This morning Seabury had a good long walk about the block, sprinkling the buildings and offices with holy water and blessing everyone and everything in sight. I woke up at 5:30 in order to get in my exercising (grrrrr) and in order to work out the sermon for the service.
As it turns out, the “fish/snake, egg/scorpion” text finally engendered a notion for a homily (I’ll append it in the “more” section). It went well, and as afternoon arrived I had only a normal backlog of course prep, letters of recommendation, memos, and other appurtenances of academic life.
DRMA: Homecoming King by Guster; ; The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by the Postal Service; Such Great Heights by the Postal Service; We Will Become Silhouettes by the Postal Service.
Anderson Chapel of St. John the Divine, Seabury-Western
Blessing of the Seminary Grounds and Buildings
October 25, 2004
Luke 11:1-13
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Only on a very few occasions have I been tempted to offer my children snakes instead of fish, and then you will have to take my word that they had sore provoked me. But in this morning’s lesson, Jesus actually makes the easy point instead of pressing us on toward a more radical challenge. The urgent question isn’t whether we’ll extend our culinary offerings to include Orange Mamba-lade, but rather: Who among you, when your son styles his hair with Elmer’s Glue, dyes it a color hitherto known only in the feculent depths of the infernal abyss, and comes home from the mosh pit asking to have scorpions for dinner, wouldn’t say, “Sorry kid, but tonight it’s free-range unfertilized eggs”?
The question from this morning’s gospel lesson is easier, inasmuch as Luke and Jesus make it absolutely clear that they want us to know that Heaven will eventually answer our prayers if we nag God persistently enough, that God will not gives us snakes and scorpions when we pray for kipper and eggs. Difficult as it may be for us to await the good things God has promised, we know the right answer to this question.
But we don’t always pray for good things. We labor in vain to build houses that the Lord does not build with us. We make long-range plans, when this very night our soul may be demanded of us. We ask for the scorpions that all the other cool kids are eating, when God longs for nothing other than to nourish us with Omega-3 enriched eggs. Students ask, “Teach us this way”; faculties ask, “Dean us that way”; even our pets don’t reliably cooperate with our plans for their best interests.
Centuries, millennia of patriarchy undergird an assumption that Father Knows Best, that we must always adhere to the dictates handed down from the top of the pyramid of power. Decades, centuries of American rebelliousness and egalitarianism energize a conviction that the people should determine the direction of every important decision. And if we want to serve both God and our neighbors, if we want not to labor in vain but to share in a project so great, so long-range, that we can glimpse its end-point only in a glass darkly, we need to learn that hardest lesson of how to lead and follow wisely, how to rule and submit, how to cooperate with the Spirit in strengthening God’s people, and to cooperate with God’s people in discerning the Spirit.
So the exasperating conclusion to the questions I invoke this morning is that I can’t tell you how to arrive at the right menu for God’s people. Sometimes the church has to subsist on an arachnid diet for a while, and other times that would be a poisonous folly. Without rigid instructions from the hierarchy, without chasing after popular trends, perhaps we can only put our faith in communion: the communion of saints, the Communion of our neighbors, the Communion we have with God. No snakes, no scorpions, but mere bread and wine, and the fragile trust that love will not lead us wrong.
Amen
Posted by AKMA at October 25, 2004 10:47 PM | TrackBack