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Daniel put together a worship service with prayers well-matched to what we read and who we are, with a prayer from the Y1 readings in Samuel, a prayer for leisure for the retired professor, and an excerpt from Psalms. He concluded with an Epiphany blessing.
For a gathering question, he asked about something we did Friday morning that we don't usually do. (Heavy snowfall began around 6am Friday in Marietta.) We variously flipped off the alarm, slept late, recuperated in bed from a medical procedure, and walked in the snowy tracks of some neighborhood Big Foot whose strides were 20-to-30 inches wider than Scott's.
Yr. D, Living Into the Journey with God, Unit 3 Developing a Sustaining Spirituality: 1st yr: Lanie, Daniel; 2nd yr: Donfred, Joyce, Susan; 3rd yr, Jessica; 4th yr, Scott. Mentor: Scott. Absent: Donfred missed the first 45 minutes.
An overall theme emerged after Jessica expressed outrage over the venality and hypocrisy of leaders in the medieval church. Forget the spiritual excuse for clerical celibacy: it was just a way to keep sons from inheriting church lands. The church monetized sin -- and still does, Jessica said, telling of a Catholic friend who paid to be re-admitted to the church after a divorce. Jessica was appalled by the violence and hatred of so-called Christians slaughtering Muslims during the Crusades.
But Jessica acknowledged that beautiful things were happening in the church within that same time frame, including the glorious expressions of faith and light in Gothic architecture, and the life of her church's name sake, St. Teresa.
So the theme that emerged was something about two tracks, one up, one down: yes, there was ego, self-interest, violence and what Lanie politely called "hanky-panky," but also glorious advances in what our unit is about, "developing a sustaining spirituality."
Daniel allowed David and the apostles grace to grow as they go. "David's misdeeds do not separate him from God's love." Listening to Susan talking about the apostles, he thought, "they may be rag-tag" and dense, but they figure it out as they go along, and grow.
Figuring out as you go along is the theme of this year in EfM!
Joyce was especially taken by the story of Roman soldier Cornelius, and how he and Peter, cultural enemies, were drawn together by God.
Lanie won the prize this week, a $99.99 chili kit delivered to her door. She can invite to dinner her skeptical friend who thinks that Episcopalians sacrifice cats.
Scott, considering how often The Wizard of Oz pops up in our TRs, brought a song from the musical Wicked, the backstory to the movie. In the song "Defying Gravity," Elphaba the green-skinned witch invites her friend Glinda to join her against the fake wizard. Though Glinda respectfully declines to go against the popular ruler, Elphaba "puts herself out there" to oppose the oppression of animals in Oz.
So here's a totally secular song from a secular show that's a huge Broadway hit and even more successful in movie theatres. How does this song in this show "go" with our tradition and our theology?
We quickly focused on Elphaba's sense of purpose that motivated her risk to show leadership (Donfred's term) in opposition to oppression.
We explored some theological categories, seeing the Creation in this musical as a world of consequences, a world where most people prefer to live within existing boundaries, where change has to be, as Daniel said, "incremental." (We thought of reactions to small changes in liturgy. Scott reminded us that MLK faced opposition from Black pastors who thought that change should be "incremental" -- like the Pharisees, they wanted to separate themselves from the oppressive culture of the Romans -- not on option for Jesus, wrote Thurman.)
We felt that judgment is the moment of recognition that you have to step out, put yourself forward, to oppose sin.
Redemption, if it is to come, will be when others follow you. Whether or not they do, you're involved.
Susan related this to William James, "The Will to Believe." Performing the action makes the belief into truth, James said.
Looking for experiences in the "Action" source, we heard from Joyce about leading others around a Post Office truck blocking the right lane; and we heard her story about a shy employee (Joyce) who met her rude boss's abuse with kindness, and won the boss's apology.
We easily connected this to Scripture. We did not think of the most obvious New Testament story about Satan tempting Jesus to defy gravity from the highest point of the temple. But Donfred thought of Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt; we thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., taking a risk to his life every day, confronting injustice while others dithered about "going too far... going too fast." Scott pointed out that Thurman discussed how Jesus did this in his time, as MLK did in our time.
We voiced many insights as we tried to put together a prayer. Joyce was "voluntold" to complete the prayer for us. Here it is:
Dear God our Heavenly Father, You encourage us to go out into the world, to be wary and wise as serpents, and be innocent (harmless) as doves; To love our neighbors as ourselves; and to know that in You we live, and move, and have our being. So, everyday enable us to grow in our trust, help us to become more and more familiar with Your voice because You can only use us to the degree that we trust and to what our faith expects. Grow us Lord; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.
References from Matthew 10:6, Mark 12:30, and Acts 17:28
We do the readings assigned for Week 18. Please do examine the "examen" in the "Response" section on p. 117. Try it at least one evening this week: this is one of the respected practices of our church that helps to "sustain" us in our journeys! Joyce is working on a collect from Wk 17; Daniel will bring us a TR from one of the four source (tradition, action, culture, position). Worship will be provided by Lanie.
