God's Word in a Pandemic

God’s Word in a Pandemic

July 12, 2020

Live from Lynn, it’s “Godspell”.

Hello, this is Fr Paul Bresnahan, priest of the Episcopal Church.

Welcome back to “Godspell”: a time to spell it out.

Who is God, and how is God involved in our lives?

“Godspell” is a nice old English word for the Gospel or, what I call, the language of God, the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Silence

Blessed be God; The Most Holy, Undivided and Everlasting Trinity. 

And blessed be God’s Kingdom for ever and ever. Amen

The Collect: 

O God, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Isaiah 55:10-13

10 For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
   and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
   giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,11 so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
   it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
   and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

12 For you shall go out in joy,
   and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
   shall burst into song,
   and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Psalm: Psalm 119:105-112

105 Your word is a lantern to my feet *
       and a light upon my path.106 I have sworn and am determined *
       to keep your righteous judgments.107 I am deeply troubled; *
       preserve my life, O Lord, according to your word.108 Accept, O Lord, the willing tribute of my lips, *
       and teach me your judgments.109 My life is always in my hand, *
       yet I do not forget your law.110 O The wicked have set a trap for me, *
       but I have not strayed from your commandments.111 Your decrees are my inheritance for ever; *
       truly, they are the joy of my heart.112 I have applied my heart to fulfill your statutes *
       for ever and to the end.

Gospel: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

1 That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the lake. 2Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. 3And he told them many things in parables, saying: ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. 5Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. 6But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. 7Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 8Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9Let anyone with ears listen!’

18 ‘Hear then the parable of the sower. 19When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. 20As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; 21yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. 22As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. 23But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.’

“Your word is a lantern to my feet

And a Light unto my path”

These particular words resonate within us like few other words in Scripture do. They take root in us and bear much fruit so much so that we dedicate our lives to the reading, mediating, and sharing of God’s Holy Word in the world. 

Jesus said; “A Sower went out to sow,” There is that part of us that may not understand God’s Word on occasion and Evil snatches us away for a time. There may be something within that gets it at first but the Word may not take root in us at any real depth. Then there are those anxieties within or troubles that draw us away. But eventually the Word of God falls on good ground and it bears good fruit for the rest of our lives and for the lives of those around us. 

The passages of Scripture assigned to be read on this Sunday in the Church Year are of profound consequence to many. The Prophet Isaiah says of God’s Word; “so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose. 

What does God purpose during this pandemic?

We are in a time that will try the human soul. Yesterday, the New York Times carried the heart wrenching story of Doctor Lorna Breen who was head of the emergency department at Columbia Presbyterian in New York City during the worst days of the outbreak. There were shortages of PPE’s and space to put the people who suffered. What she saw there at the height of the epidemic brought her soul to the breaking point. So overwhelmed was the hospital that people were dying in the waiting room unnoticed.

She approached her Bible Study group for prayer and strength in her darkest and most desperate moments because there was nothing more she could do. Like people of faith in every age, Dr. Breen checked in with the Word of God. 

“Your word is a Lantern unto my feet and a light upon my path”.

Dr Breen however was at the end of her inner strength to carry on. Then she came down with the virus and her recovery was far too long for the over achiever she was. When she tried to resume her duties the stress and the strain got worse. She despaired and cried out for help. Colleagues intervened She was admitted to a psychiatric ward. But the stigma attached to anyone who suffered so was especially sharp in the medical community.

Tragically, it was all too much. She cried out; “I’m totally lost.” “I’m just baffled and overwhelmed.” and “It is the hardest time of my life”. On April 26 of this year, she took her life. I know all too well what mental illness can do in moments of despair.

There is much Dr Breen and I share. There was a time in my life when things got out of hand. I was a bit of an over achiever. I ended up in the psych ward at the Cleveland Clinic for 28 days. My psychiatrist told me I was Bi-polar. When you tell me I’m crazy, I can tell you I have the documentation. I have a diagnosis and I have taken my meds ever since. I continue to see a Psychiatrist and a Spiritual Director. 

My recovery took far too long for me and for those God sent me to serve. The stigma of my encounter with mental illness in the church was just as sharp for me as it was for Dr. Breen. I was not welcome back in my position as Rector of that church. I considered leaving the priesthood. Thankfully I was spared suicidal ideation.

During all this time your Word has been a lantern unto my feet and a light upon my path, especially when the darkest night of my soul overshadowed me. There YOU were in YOUR WORD resonating in my soul. “Yea thought I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me.” Mind you, it was a dark time.

We cannot know why Dr. Breen took her own life. She left no note, no letter, no explanation. Things got too far out of hand for her. But I know about how that can happen. When I served in West Virginia there were teens who felt the sting of rejection at home, at church and at school because of their sexual orientation.  They had nowhere to turn for the embrace of love. It was all too much. And I stood at the graveside of more than one. I was among the few who proclaimed that God’s love extends in ever widening circles of inclusion. Mind you, I was taken to task for that too. Sigh..

No matter; “Your word is a lantern to my feet and a Light upon my path.” What does God purpose in this pandemic. Sane leadership for one thing.

What of the mental health of the President of the United States? How can he stand by and ignore a pandemic? How can it be that after all these months he still refuses to mobilize a national emergency strategy to fight the virus? More than 68,000 of us tested positive for COVID-19 on Friday of this week. More doctors, hospitals, the sick, the suffering and the dying face into the bleak reality of the pandemic. 

Why does he not listen to Dr. Fauci? He is one of the few remaining names in this Administration the public trust. It is simple. Wear a mask, practice social distancing and hand hygiene. As early as February and March, he and the World Health Organization began to alert us to the need for universal Testing, Tracing and Isolating. Most of Europe has stumbled its way into flattening out the curve. 

Only grudgingly has he finally worn a mask in public once. He won’s listen to Dr. Fauci. Instead he follows the Roger Stone playbook “admit nothing, deny everything, blame everybody and counter attack.” Does he not see the sickness, suffering and death that has become our national daily experience? Or is this the borderline personality disorder we suspect? Is our President really a narcissist? 

Is Mitt Romney the only Republican with the grit and courage to speak truth to power? Where are the rest? Or are you all so deathly afraid of him? Do you have no backbone? Common decency? Respect for human life? Do you want history to say of you that you chose the madness over your country?

It appears that we have nowhere to turn now but to the Word of God made Flesh and Blood in Jesus. This is precisely what The Gospel of John proclaims; “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.” ~John 1:14       

Jesus; you are the Word of God to Christian folk. You are the love of God made flesh and blood. But that alone does not fix the predicament we’re in. Salvation for us is not become manifest merely in repeating two syllables; “Je-sus.”

It will not be until we recognize that we are now the living presence of Jesus in the world. As Therese of Avila is famous for saying; “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”

We cannot afford 68,000 new cases a day until election day. Dr. Fauci indicated; it won’t be long before that number will climb to 100.000 cases every single day. Our hospitals cannot deal with the numbers we have let alone the numbers coming at us. We cannot allow our loved ones to suffer and die like this without rising up as one. Black lives matter. The lives of our loved ones who suffer matter. The elderly, the poor, the veterans, those in nursing homes, the foolish youth who cram the beaches and the barrooms matter. 

We cannot afford to let this catastrophe continue without holding his feet to the fire. Rise up America. How many more hundreds of thousands must suffer and die before we finally speak up.

Dr. Breen, the Word of God and I are waiting. 

In the Name of God the Most Holy, Undivided, and Everlasting Trinity. Amen.

Prayers for the Church and the World

John, may he Rest in Peace and rise in Glory

Mary from St Mark’s Church in Saint Albans, West Virginia. 

Lord’s Prayer

A Blessing

See that ye be at peace among yourselves, 

and love one another.

Follow the example of the wise and good

and God will comfort you and help you,

both in this world

and in the world which is to come.

May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you,

wherever He may send you.

May He guide you through the wilderness,

protect you through the storm.

May He bring you home rejoicing

at the wonders He has shown you.

May He bring you home rejoicing

once again into our doors.

And may the Blessing of God the Most holy undivided and everlasting Trinity be upon you this day and always. Amen.

God  Bless us everyone!

Thanks for joining with me. See you next week, same time, same station. 

Fr Paul

Creation Stories

The Five Mighty Acts of God

I. The Creation

Folks keep telling me they wish we had a Bible Study, or that they knew more about the Bible, or that they knew more of the Church’s basic teachings. As our Lenten journey begins this year, let’s do exactly that. Come let us learn together. Please turn in the Book of Common Prayer to page 845. There you have before you “The Outline of Faith” or what is also called “The Catechism”. The word Catechism means “teaching”, the words, catechist means “teacher”, catecheumenate means “those who are learning” and catechesis is the process of teaching and learning together. 

As we think about the Biblical narrative, let me suggest that we organize our thoughts around God’s great plan of salvation under five headings. They are easy to remember as; “The Five Mighty Acts of God”. What are they, class?

Act I. Creation

Act II. The Exodus

Act III. Jesus Christ

Act IV. The Church

Act V. The Christian Hope

Our lives, our pilgrimage toward heaven is woven through and through in this ongoing narrative. The Catechism begins with a section on Human Nature. In other words; “Who are we; In the Beginning?”

But first, let me ask you this; How did the Bible come to be? The Bible did not come to us as we now have it, signed sealed and delivered as a fait accompli. What was the process by which the Bible was transmitted and assembled over thousands of years? How did people of faith bring these stories together? Think about it! Where did it all begin?

The truth is that it all began in an oral tradition that endured over hundred’s of years. But even before that, there were the experiences of God. Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Rachael and Leah  and their experiences. Moses and his. Then they told their stories of their experiences of God. The people entrusted the transmission and the preservation of these stories to folks who could read and write; the scribes and the rabbis. These people became the teachers and storytellers of a very special kind. These stories were so precious to the people of God that eventually they were written down. These experiences and the stories they shared became the primary vehicle through which we became The People of God.

Then the stories were woven together by folks who treasured various traditions of understandings. They preserved their traditions and stories in scrolls beginning with the Pentateuch or the Law; the first five books of Moses; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. 

As time went on there was the period of the Judges, the Kings, the Wisdom Literature and the Psalms. They were all were written down by the scribes and eventually there was a whole collection of scrolls carefully preserved for the transmission and the preservation of the stories and traditions of God’s people. This collection of Scrolls began to be called a sacred library. And as you know, the word for library in Greek and Latin is “Biblia” from which we get our modern day word “Bible”, God’s Holy Library. 

Still, few people could read, the scrolls were kept in the synagogues and then the churches. They were heavy and cumbersome and very expensive. Eventually the monks of the church became the publishing society of what historians call “The Dark Ages”. For these monks, especially those in Ireland, they regarded every single word ever written as holy. Thankfully, they preserved the literature of Greeces and Rome and antiquity. As for the Bible they began to assemble these scrolls into books. Their exquisite illuminations, such as the Book of Kells, are a magnificent tribute to western art and spirituality. 

When Christianity arrived in Britain and Ireland between the third and sixth centuries most of the monks and clergy could only carry two books with them; typically John’s Gospel and the Psalms. They were big heavy books. John’s Gospel was regarded then as the most faithful, beautiful,  and exquisite presentation of the person of Jesus Christ. The Psalms of course were carried because they were the Prayer Book of Jesus. After all, as an observant Jew, Jesus would have read the Psalms from beginning to end every month as we still do, those of us who follow the church’s 30 day lectionary for the reading of the Psalms. 

With the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, the Holy Library of Books, became available in a more manageable format as a single book. Literacy spread like wildfire. Everybody wanted a Bible.

But don’t forget how it all began. When you read these sacred pages, they are an invitation for you to remember that God invites you into a living encounter with the Trinity of Persons we see in the Creation itself; God, Jesus and Holy Spirit.

Act I The Creation

There are actually three Creation stories if you include the Prologue to John’s Gospel. Listen to how John’s Gospel begins; 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being…And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

Jesus was there right in the very beginning. According to the Johannine account of the Creation, Jesus is the Word of God!

In Genesis we read two accounts of how things were in the beginning. By the way, the method of storytelling favored by the rabbis was to give two answers for each question asked. This method of teaching was a way of cultivating dialogue and encouraging critical thought so that we might enter into deeper relationship with the living God. Thus when the people gathered by the campfire and the children asked where we all come from, the rabbis would tell more than one story.

For instance, in the first chapter of Genesis, we read;

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good;”

Notice the magnificent Hebrew poetry, and the cadences that speak of God bringing order out of chaos, as if all of time and space came into being out of nothing through the power of God. 

And it was good! 

“Then came the canopy of space, the waters above and below the earth,” This was now the second day and what God did was good.

“Then God gathered the land into one place, there was vegetation and fruit trees and so on and this too was good.”

On and one this creation story goes as you know, and all went well.

“Then on the sixth day, God created humankind in God’s image,

   in the image of God he created them;

   male and female he created them. 

God blessed them. Then, God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.”

There it is; the first creation story. God made everything that is and it was good. It was very good.

As you know, things did not go so well in the second Creation story. 

There is a very different tone in this story. This is not the same kind of Hebrew poetry. In fact if you know your Hebrew you’ll notice right away that this is a whole linguistic style as if written by a different author. Read it for yourself. It begins with the 4th verse in the second chapter of Genesis

Listen to what it says; 

“In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up…then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed.”

You don’t even have to know Hebrew to notice that we’re talking about a different story here. Also this word “Adam” literally means “mud man” because he was made out of the mud that God created from the ground. Then “God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’”

God caused a deep sleep to come upon Adam and created Eve. Soon enough there was the business of the snake, the apple, the disobedience, the shame, the hiding,  the blame and the coverup.

I often think that the nakedness of Adam and Eve is not is not so much about a physical nakedness but a metaphorical one.  It was impossible for either one to accept responsibility for what they had done because of their disobedience. They chose rather to “cover up” their responsibility and accountability. Rather Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the snake. 

What had been that state of satisfaction and goodness in the first creation story now becomes a state of alienation between the man, the woman, the created order, and worst of all God. Then enmity breaks out between the children, Cain murders Abel and the and the social alienation among all humankind enters human history.  God asks this fundamental question “Where is your brother Abel?’ Cain replied, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’” That still statement haunts all of history. 

Notice that there are two narratives for us to consider in our life with God, one in which we walk with God and one another as the redeemed and the forgiven of Christ; and the other in which our alienation takes us far from the goodness of God.

Paul puts it this way in today’s Epistle “As sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, so death spread to all because all have sinned…For if the many died through the one man's trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.”

In the wilderness we are confronted with the reality of sin and evil within ourselves.

In today’s Gospel we read of how Jesus faced down the evil one in the greatest temptations of his life. Of course Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread. God knows he could have. But we do not live by bread alone. Besides, as Jesus told Peter, if you love me you will feed my sheep. All of us will feed the hungry. I’m sure Jesus was tempted to do some kind of fancy trick like jumping off the pinnacle of the Temple to prove once and for all that he is God. But Jesus tells the devil; “Don’t tempt me!” Perhaps the greatest temptation of all would be to take all the nations of the earth, claim their power, and impose Christ’s will on everyone. But that would not change the human heart. God’s power is not found in armies or weaponry. God’s power is shown rather in his dying love through which we are finally reconciled to him and to one another. Finally Jesus dispatches the Evil One; “Get away from me Satan.” 

In the Creation story from John the Word becomes flesh. Then there are the two creation stories from Genesis, one in which we walk with God and one another in peace. The other in which guilt, blame, coverup and rage rules the human heart. Those two story lines continue through scripture was we waver between sin and redemption, self will and obedience, blame and forgiveness. These two story lines weave their way through all of human history.  

Imagine that we gather together this day in the rabbinical tradition to reflect on our Creation. Imagine asking how did things came to be the way they are. I might reply let me tell you two stories of how they were in the beginning. On the one hand all was well between us and God. On the other hand, things went very badly in blame coverup and violence. The question is not how it came to be that way. The question is who we will choose to be today! 

In the Name of God, the Most Holy, Undivided and Everlasting Trinity. Amen.

Fr Paul