Proper 20, 17 Pentecost
19 Sep 2021
This weekend I attended my 50 +1 high school reunion. The 50th was cancelled last year due to Covid. Even this year’s was on the chopping block for a while. Now I have attended reunions in the past, but never helped produce one.
One of the things we did was to have a memorial for our deceased classmates, of which there turned out to be far too many; I am sure there are others but many classmates have gone AWOL over the years. With a class size of 354 it would be easy to lose oneself.
It got me thinking: why do we have reunions and why was it important to honor those who have died?
And what does any of this have to do with Mark’s Gospel?
I began to think about why I had attended reunions in the past. I have a few close friends from high school, some of those friendships extended to grade school. It was fun to see those people I liked. But there was something, or rather is something, that emerged as I pondered more deeply. There were people at the reunion that I did not like in high school and they did not like me; or at the very least we traveled in very different social circles. It no longer matters; it did not really matter then. (When I was a child I thought like a child.) What seemed to matter most now is that we have a shared story; a shared experience with one another. This is truth. We shared the Viet Nam war and the draft; we shared the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. We shared Jimi Hendrix and so many other music makers. . We had Woodstock. We had great teacher and mediocre ones. All of us learned the being on the football team or in the band didn’t make you more or less important. The best lesson I have learned from reunions is that they are like Eucharist: we come to the table as equals, as a community, and we know we have a role to play in the world beyond. I came to thank people and was surprised, or maybe not, that they felt the same way.
One of our classmates, a start athlete in school, stood up and started singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, originally written by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the musical Carousel and sung by the heroine after her husband has completed suicide. My classmate was recalling a low period in his life and telling how he was lifted up by remembering his classmates.
Stories are what life is all about; not riches nor fame, but the stories of our lives and how we share them with one another and lift each other up . And that is how I feel about my classmates now. The debutants and the jocks lifted me up over my life in ways I could not have imagined.
And so it was when I read the information we found on those who had died. I saw in each one a story, an existence that was important to family and friends. The deaths spanned the decades from our sophomore year to a month before the reunion.
I thought Mary Oliver captured it best, as she often does, with a poem.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
So I come around to what Jesus and James have to say. Jesus has taken his close disciples and tried to hide from the crowds so he could teach them. What does he say? The Son of Man will be betrayed and die. But they don’t get it; they were like myself in high school. My priorities were geared towards success and how it is measured (good education, good job, good health, good friends, and a good spouse). My equivalent of arguing about who is the greatest. I didn’t get it; I can only hope I have gotten it now.
I have learned and my classmates have learned these lessons well. One who could not be there even wrote that he thought he was more or less a jerk in high school and that he and learned how to be a more kind and caring person. The first must be last; we must receive and take care of the least of these.
We have learned what James is teaching: the wisdom that comes from above. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. [1]
When he says draw near to God, he speaks of the way we live. In Jesus’ time children had little value in society; it was a society built on honor and shame and one where loyalty to a patron was how one “got ahead.” But Jesus says be a servant and receive those who have no value just as you would receive a patron, for God does not look at the world as we do.
James says we covet what we should not and obtain it by quarrels and dissension. First, figure out what really matters: to be a servant and receive everyone and to set your sites not on earthly, or petty, things, but on this above and second, to be a servant and receive everyone.
So I honored those of my classmates who had died, as did everyone who was present, and we honored one another; something we could not have done those many years ago. Life is a journey which I embrace; it is a journey we are all meant to take together. James, I believe, says that wisdom is a way of life and not a way of thinking. I want to follow that way.
[1]The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. (1989). (Jas 3:17). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
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