Proper 25B
24 Oct 2021
Winter is coming!! I could feel the chill this week and thought that perhaps I should start looking for my winter hat and gloves. It turns out they were still in the same bin with my summer hats and gardening gloves piled on top. I tried to remember if I had washed up all the winter gear last spring; I had not. I guess I was so thankful to be done with winter I just cast it aside. But it is coming back; it always does.
It has been easy these past few weeks to become absorbed in preparing for winter’s vile aspects and being caught up in politics and everything in the world that is NOT going in what I would consider a good way. We are told as Christians we are in but not of this world; I fear I feel the sting of being a human living on a chaotic planet far more world than I would like.
I find plenty in scripture to justify my thoughts and feelings, but I realized this past week I needed to put the brakes on and look in a different direction. And not just a different direction, but through a different lens and to a different world. Right now I need to look through the lens of hope.
I have been out just riding around with Nan; no destination in mind but only looking for the great display that God lays out in the fall for us who live in temperate zones. I have walked the property and see the world turning yellow and orange; the soothing green of summer is giving way to the flamboyant colors of fall, as if the world is headed out in a blaze of glory. I have found more puffball mushrooms this year than I have ever seen, along with a crazy array of fungi unlike any I have ever seen before. I have been eyeing the walnuts but so far have resisted the temptation to harvest and husk them because I know they will probably sit for the rest of the winter and then the squirrels will get them next spring when I throw them out, uncracked. And this week we accepted a foster dog and her week-old puppies. If you follow me on Facebook, you will see my page full of all too cute pictures of pups in the miracle of their sheer dogness. And I have been cooking more; trying some Indian cuisine and finding the spice blends unworldly good.
Life is good and it is meant to be lived. Taste and see the goodness of God.
Job had been through hell, literally. All his assumptions about God were put to the test and found lacking. But nevertheless he persisted. He could have cursed God, given up on God, confessed that he had committed some unknown sin, but he did not. And what did he say? “And now my eye sees you.” Job has gone from hearing about and reading about God to encountering God. The encounter was fearsome, but Job now has a new and greater understanding of God. As Bishop Scarfe said yesterday, Job (who had never sinned) repented. The NRSV does not do a good job of capturing what has happened. Change repent in dust and ashes to repent of dust and ashes. Get off your pity pot!! It is a whole different way to understand the reading.
Perhaps The Message captures it best:
“I’m convinced: You can do anything and everything. Nothing and no one can upset your plans. You asked, ‘Who is this muddying the water, ignorantly confusing the issue, second-guessing my purposes?’ I admit it. I was the one. I babbled on about things far beyond me, made small talk about wonders way over my head. You told me, ‘Listen, and let me do the talking. Let me ask the questions. You give the answers.’ I admit I once lived by rumors of you; now I have it all firsthand—from my own eyes and ears! I’m sorry—forgive me. I’ll never do that again, I promise! I’ll never again live on crusts of hearsay, crumbs of rumor.
OK, God, you do not give any of us a neat and tidy way to look at suffering, or much of anything in the world. But Job has learned that you need to know God first hand.
So has Bartimaeus. What did he want? Jesus is in Jericho, the place where the walls fell not by the sword but by trumpets and marching! He is on his way to Jerusalem to a certain death. Yet he responds to the plea of Bartimaeus. The blind man who already knew Jesus was the Son of David, the messiah. Whoa!! In reality, he may have already had more insight the nature and purpose of Jesus than any of the disciples. Let me see!! Oh sure, another Jesus miracle. That may have worked for the early followers of the Way but passing this off as Jesus is bigger than life will not work for me; too many years have passed. I need something different from this story.
Taste and see!! Bartimaeus sensed he was missing something, not merely the physical ability to see!! He literally threw off his cloak, possibly his only worldly possession and his only protection from the elements, because he sensed so much in what Jesus offered.
Taste and see! Experience God in Eucharist. Experience God in all the sensual pleasures that this earth has to offer us. Experience God not with your mind, but with those visceral feelings that we all have. God is to be found in the mess of earth and clay, food and wine, friends and family. It is not about an intellectual assent to God accompanied by an overbearing assurance that you are now better than someone else, destined for heaven when others are headed the other way when they die. It is about right now.
Taste and see. The goodness of the Lord. As the hymn then says: glorify the Lord, worship the Lord, bless the Lord.
I sometimes think we should hold our entire service around a dinner table, with a feast of all kinds and sorts of foods, except perhaps liver and onions. Our faith should lead us at all times and in all places to worship the Lord and live our faith. God is with us, Immanuel. Job learned it, the psalmist knew it, and Bartimaeus sensed it. No one was looking for a pie in the sky; all were looking at the here and now, this very earth we call our home.
Live lives that are worthy of the creator who made you; worship the Lord in holiness and in joy.
In the 1950’s, poet Denise Levertov, living at the time in NYC, railed against the distancing of humans from the world around them that was so prevalent in the religion of her era. Instead she felt that you are in the world and of the world and should embrace God in the wonderfulness that is the world!
The world is not with us enough O taste and see the subway Bible poster said, meaning The Lord, meaning if anything all that lives to the imagination’s tongue, grief, mercy, language, tangerine, weather, to breathe them, bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh our deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince, living in the orchard and being hungry, and plucking the fruit.
Denise Levertov
I dare you to go, pluck the fruit and eat it; taste and see.
Amen
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