Guest post! This is the closing homily from this year's Province V young adult retreat, for which I had the privilege of serving on the design team with an incredible group of folks. One of those folks, the Rev. Beth Scriven, preached this beautiful word at our closing Eucharist.
Spiritual ninjas.
We haven’t talked a lot about that overarching theme this weekend, but it’s been present on my mind. Early in the planning process I remember Jonathan saying something about how if you’re a ninja, you have to have more than one move, right? And that’s sort of what the life of faith calls for, and even the idea of fierce conversations - every conversation can’t be identical. You need different moves for different situations.
So as we’ve gone through this weekend, there have been a number of moments when those different ninja moves have come up for me, from Courtney’s “hiding from feedback” move to the variety of kinds of fierce conversations that Jesus has in the different scriptures we’ve read, to one of my favorite memories from when my nephew W was really little.
When he was about 18 months old, we put on some music we could sort of ignore while he played and we did the adult thing of sort of half-talking to each other and half-playing with him. Until we tried to figure out why he was suddenly turning himself in circles, around and around, and realized it was the song from the musical Cotton Patch Gospel where Jesus is teaching things like “if someone asks you for your shirt, give him your coat as well” - and the chorus playing was “Turn it around, turn it around. Surprise ‘em a little, start shifting the ground. To get right side up, turn upside down. Now is the time to turn it around.” We weren’t listening, but he was. Turn it around. Turn it around.
Yesterday in our discussion of prayer as a fierce conversation with God and last night during our wrap up session, I heard people name the ways that fierce conversations and our practicing for them felt like confession, like repentance, like turning around and, by the grace of forgiveness, starting anew. And it reminded me of little W, turning around and around - and of the God of humankind’s early years, turning around and around as well.
“Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth… I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth… When I see the bow in the clouds, I will remember the covenant I have made with all flesh on earth.”
We are so accustomed to the rainbow as a sign of God’s promise that it is easy to forget that it is so named because it is God’s bow, and the purpose of a bow is to be a weapon. But God has turned that bow away from the earth. If it were to fire now the arrow would simply fly up into the heavens. The bow set in the clouds, turned away from the earth, reminds God - reminds God! - that while a fresh start can help, God has promised not to start fresh in quite that way again.
So God finds new ways to pursue justice and mercy, righteousness and peace, new ways to start fresh without destroying all flesh. Every time God sees that the wickedness of humankind is great, and is grieved in the Divine Heart, as I have to believe God must be fairly often, God sees also the the bow has been set in the clouds. The bow has been turned around.
And from this point on, God turns largely to conversations. Through patriarchs and matriarchs, God continues to make and keep the covenant of love and relationship. Through judges and prophets, God continues to renew the covenant. Through the very Word of God becoming flesh and living and conversing among us, God renews the covenant of love.
Again and again, the bow is turned around. Again and again, we are invited, we are urged, we are tempted - just as Jesus was - to become chained to the way the world is. The world requires that you feed yourself, protect yourself, secure your own position, because you cannot help the world if you don’t play by the world’s rules.
And again and again and yet again, Jesus turns that reality around. Yes, nourishment is important, but I will find it from God. Yes, I am God’s Son, but I don’t have to prove it on your terms just because you asked for it. Yes, I love these peoples of this world God has made and loves, but real love is of God and casts out fear. Their redemption is in God and not in the power of this world.
Again and again and again, the world forges weapons and chains and terror; but again and again and again, even in the midst of God’s grief, the bow is turned away from the earth, the swords are beaten into ploughshares, the chains are broken, and justice and peace are brought together by this love so fierce and unyielding that it can afford to find and meet us where we are (and if you have not yet spent time with this window here entitled “Our Human Struggle” I encourage you not to miss this incredible visual summary of the gospel of love).
Again and again, we are changed by the conversation. Gradually, then suddenly, we are shaped by justice, by love, by compassion. We are converted, as we will hear at the Eucharist, from the patterns of this passing world, and freed to become part of how God now loves and liberates our struggling, painful world.
As that perfect love casts out our fear, we are freed to have the real conversation - one ninja move at a time. As loving conversation changes our hearts, we are brought back home to rest in love.
Again, and again, and again, God is faithful.
Again, and again, and again, we are changed.
And this is the sign of the covenant between God and all flesh: a bow that has been turned around, a broken light that has been made beautiful in its brokenness.
My prayer for each one of us as we go out from here is that we might see and remember that we too have been made beautiful in our brokenness and equipped to renew and pursue loving relationships, one fierce conversation at a time.
The Rev. Beth Scriven is in her third year at Rockwell House Episcopal Campus Ministry, a ministry of the Diocese of Missouri serving the campuses of Washington University and St. Louis University.
No comments:
Post a Comment