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Ordinary 17A
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Commentaries and Lectionary Reflections (RC)(2020)
Layers of Wisdom
A terribly decrepit old man is sitting on the front porch when a very beautiful woman walks by on the sidewalk. His mouth is hanging open. Of course there was an old flea-bitten dog at the man’s feet, since George Booth was the cartoonist. His equally haggard wife is at the door with the screen pushed open just far enough to take in the scene. “Well whistle, you damn fool!” she says...
Commentaries and Lectionary Reflections (RCL)(2020)
Walking with the Wind
I’ve been moved this week with the reporting about longtime civil rights leader US Representative John Lewis. His 1998 memoir is titled Walking with the Wind. In the introduction, explaining his choice of titles, Lewis tells the story from his childhood of a summer day that had become stormy, the sky darkening, the wind picking up, lightening flashing in the distance: "About fifteen of us children were outside my aunt Seneva’s house, playing in her dirt yard,” he wrote. Aunt Seneva gathered them inside the little house. Their laughter and play had given way to quiet terror. The wind howled, the rains pounded, and the house began to shake, then to sway, and the wooden floor boards upon which they stood began to bend. “And then,” he wrote, “a corner of the room started lifting up…This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky” with Aunt Seneva and the 15 children inside. Aunt Seneva instructed the kids line up and hold hands and to walk together toward the corner of the room that was rising. Back and forth they went from the kitchen to the front, “walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of [their] small bodies.” Lewis reflects, “More than half a century has passed since that day, and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart.” He continues, “It seemed that way in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams—so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed, they came together and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest.” And then another corner would lift, and we would go there.” He continues, “And eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle, and the house would still stand. But we knew another storm would come, and we would have to do it all over again. And we did. And we still do, all of us. You and I. Children holding hands, walking with the wind..."
Commentaries and Lectionary Reflections (RCL)(2017 to 2019)
Asking for Anything
In his little book Chapters on Prayer (#31 and 32), Evagrios the Solitary (345–399) thus advised, "Pray not to this end, that your own desires be fulfilled. You can be sure they do not fully accord with the will of God." Drawing upon his own experiences, Evagrios admitted that "often when I have prayed I have asked for what I thought was good, and persisted in my petition, stupidly importuning the will of God… But when I have obtained what I asked for, I have been very sorry because the thing turned out not to be as I had thought."Proper 12A
We tend to encrust biblical insights with extraneous questions and issues, (perhaps as an avoidance of their “simplicity and familiarity”). The actual barrier, however, is not understanding, but the compulsive priorities of our deeply complicated human nature. But as both readings and psaltery responses from the Hebrew scriptures for today vividly illustrate, God’s ways can prosper despite and even through human frailty.