The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, August 1, 2010
Hosea 11:1-11
Psalm 107:1-9, 43
Colossians 3: 1-11
Luke 12: 13-21
This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
This parable is referred to sometimes as the parable of the Rich Fool. While there is nothing wrong or unspiritual with collecting material goods and enjoying them, then as now, "You can't take it with you." He might well have wanted the bumper sticker that says "He who dies with the most things, wins." It's witty, unless one's life account is to be required this very day. Maybe there would be time to scrub off the bumper sticker, but not enough to repent or quickly reorder a life, or be forgiven. Jesus is illustrating the foolishness of that life's focus, not condemning the person. The scolding ends the story, but it doesn't seem to me that that's the way Jesus wants God to be understood or loved. Jesus wants the focus for people to be "rich toward God."
Jesus wants people to join with the psalmist to "give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, and his mercy endures for ever, delivering the people from distress, putting their feet on a straight path to a city where they might dwell. For he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things."
Jesus knew the risk of the "eat, drink and be merry" philosophy, familiar from Epicurus, a 4th century B C Greek. The Romans understood many beliefs, but had not found Epicurean ones consistent with Roman virtue. Whether a direct reference to that philosophy, or simply to a life led that way, not intentionally "rich to God," Jesus wanted people to devote themselves to helping bring about the reign of God. This Gospel is not focused on condemnation, but rather is a dramatic way to show what to do, by dramatizing what not to do. Being "rich to God," being a Good Samaritan, praying for daily bread, forgiveness, and reaching out toward God's realm was the point of Jesus' hyperbolic comment to this rich hoarding person, the rich fool.
How, then, can we add to our store of supplies "rich to God?" Last week, the topic was the Lord's Prayer, but the point was about praying shaping believing, rather than the reverse. We call it the Lord's Prayer, but I only spoke of praying. Prayer and praying are not the same. While the action, the work of, the life-shaping activity, the verb is praying, but prayer is both a product of that verb, and a tool of the person praying, so I'll say more on prayer.
I read an account in a daily eee Jewish "10 Minutes of Torah." The person wrote of looking forward to the final comment of part of the weekly service, beginning "Let the time not be distant..." He knew, as a boy, that what would follow for him would be a delightful, sweet bubbly fruit punch. That sentence was for him a promise of something enjoyable. He learned that the rabbis had added that concluding phrase-here I quote-so that "the end of the worship service was to end on a hopeful note. The One who had created all would one day be the One to whom all would turn. No matter what our daily lives are like now, our best days still lie ahead, in a world, according to our forebears...would become one in spirit, one in friendship, forever united in Your service." The boy grew to understand that the devout and complex prayer that began "Let the time not be distant." went on to articulate for his community what a perfect world would look like, and understood that what and how he said that prayer would make a difference. The delight of reciting a traditional formal prayer being like an old-fashioned ginger ale and sherbet fruit punch has stayed with me as an image of a kind of prayer.
We each have favorite "set" prayers that encapsulate for each of us an idea, something hoped for or sought, that we know by heart, in heart, and beyond mind. The two parts of the compline prayer: " Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch or weep this night," and "Tend the sick, Lord Christ, give rest to the weary, bless the dying, sooth the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous;" and all for your love's sake" encompass a hugeness of praying and an elegance of language. When such a prayer is grafted into our ears, psyches, longings, casual attendance, and eyes it serves many functions. Sometimes I hear one of the phrases as a particular reference to someone about whom I'm thinking. Other times I hear only the sound, the rhythm, the magnitude of a kind of universal encompassing hopefulness. Sometimes I am conscious only of linking with generations and communities of people, who have and are saying this prayer, so I'm more part of a past and present group of people attending to the needs of many of the world's peoples. It's a prayer that sends me in many directions; shaping my praying, and forming what I can and do believe.
Another of my own well used prayers is the one I say at the end of the service, "Lord Jesus Christ, you have left us a wonderful memorial of your cross and passion. Grant that we may so venerate these sacred mysteries, that we may evermore perceive within ourselves the fruit of your redemption," and so on." What I hear in that is the "see within ourselves the fruit of our redemption," my redemption. It's a prayer where we are to value ourselves, our this-moment, actual selves as part of the long-ago deed of the cross. It puts me into the visual field of the Saviour, and also him into my self, my being, my work, my thinking, my footsteps and handwork, and self regard. It affirms that prayer isn't just to make us each into humble pie and sinners. If each of us is worthy of the sacrifice of Christ, we're worth it; we're no worm. On a bad day, this prayer bucks me up, while on a good day, I remember to join a group of adoring people praying. It's not about my particular actions, but rather as the group implied whenever I say this.
There are some other kinds of prayer for me. (I think we all, all Christians, maybe all people whatever they believe, in whom they believe, want to pray better. Even when we don't know what prayer is, or to whom we pray, there are circumstances when we wish we could express a kind of rhetorical largeness to respond to a situation, a person, an idea.) There are some kinds of music that become such prayers, that help link the person praying to the Other, or the One, to whom prayed, like Yoyo Ma's playing of the first Bach unaccompanied cello suite. For many the perfection of King's College Cambridge provides that aural ikon. For many of us, it's our own playlist of music that transports us to "wonder, love, and praise." Often it's the words of hymns, but the tune is key as well. The Navy Hymn's prayer "for those in peril on the sea" is one of these. For many of us such hymns are more useful than prayer book prayers, because the tune makes us able o learn them by heart and to remember them.
One friend used to tell the story of one of her Sunday School students. She had made the class learn some of the canticles and collects. He was rushed to the Emergency Room after a bad skiing accident with a compound leg fracture. When she arrived to the ER, he was tapping his hand rhythmically saying, "Surely, it is God who saves me. I will trust and not be afraid. Surely, it is God who saves me. I will trust and not be afraid. Surely..." She knew she'd been right to encourage memorization. I remember visiting and elderly, dying hospitalized woman. She asked me to start a few of "the old prayers" for her. The stress of her situation had knocked the beginnings out of her head, and she couldn't say them. I started a few, and left her repeating and repeating her comforting words. She, and the boy, weren't so much praying the prayers as tapping them into their beings, not thinking or even feeling them, but wrapping them securely around. Having several of these available is essential, so some memorization is worthwhile.
For me, those prayers, remembered in music and by heart I'm pretty sure I count as prayer. For many of us when we long to pray better we don't count much of what we do as prayer, as really being prayer. I was telling a friend that for me familiar scenes of novels often were at the core of my believing, vocation, and praying. (For her ethereal plainsong was more central, I think.) She looked a little quizzical about what I meant. Think of the end of The Secret Garden. When the garden blooms, Mary walks, and they sing the Doxology-that scene- is firmly fixed in my prayerbank. "God is surely there." As our hymn this morning says, "Where true love is, God is there," Ubi caritas, ibi Deus est.," so much more elegant in Latin, with the where and there, even closer in ubi and ibi, and the single verb used twice in the sentence. And the matching 5 syllables- so I always hear, "Whe-ere true love is, God is surely there," because it scans correctly.
Other fiction scenes and moments exactly present themselves as prayers and snatches of poems, like Pattiann Rogers', "I have a need to adore." If we take as truth that God can only speak to us in language we, ourselves, speak, then we each have a highly individual iBank of quotations, songs, formal prayers, images, pictures, photographs, scenes from fiction, non-fiction, and memory, through which God reaches us. We go back to these touchstones over and over, like tuning into WEEI sometimes even in winter, hoping to find our Sox on.
The concept of Orthodox ikons was not that they were holy pictures, but rather that they were doors, through which to travel toward the Holy One. Our doors may be covered with vines, and as obscured as the one into the Secret Garden, but with pruning and care, they get easier to find. It's a reason so many of us read mysteries, because, classically, good must not only triumph over evil, but also, there must be a satisfactory resolution. I want Richard Hannay to find the 39 Steps; I want him to figure out the clues in The Three Hostages; I want Sandy to emerge triumphant at the end of Greenmantle, so I read these favorites over and over, just to be sure. They put me in touch with an orderly world. Someone's occasional comment, "But haven't you already read that" is as absurd to me as "Haven't you already said that prayer?" Well, yes, and I'll say it again, until I am able to "hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" whatever God is saying to me. The initiative is God's, and I envision God poking at me through whatever it is. It might be a perfect peach or it might be "The spacious firmament on high" that conveys the wonder of creation. Creation is equally wondrous whether I notice or not, but God sends out a stream of ways for me to get it and respond. That's the role of prayer: to shuttle God's presence and commentary into my, into our, conscious and unconscious being. "God is surely there." Good News.
© Katharine C. Black 1 August 2010
