Endue with the spirit of wisdom
After church yesterday a couple of questions came my way. One was a bit of gentle flak for not having prayers for the nation, our country that we find at such a horrendous crossroad. Flak, yes, deserved, justified, as the day's officiant I should have done that, the Episcopal Church has formal prayers for such, or I could have written prayer, or prayed extemporaneously, couldn't I. So, why didn't I?
Well, for things left undone that we ought to have done, there are always Reasons, if seldom Excuses - - although forgiveness is generally gracious, absolution. In this case, my Reason was that, having considered it, I did not, Because. Not "just because", but for two considered and deliberate reasons.
My chief Reason was Because I wanted the Epiphany gospel of Jesus' baptism, and our observing it with the liturgy for Holy Baptism, and "Engelberg" the baptism hymn, and renewing our baptismal covenant, and realizing something about the kingdom of the Father, to be the singular sense of Sunday worship for Epiphany 1B; and I was not willing, and decided not, to dilute that with anything else whatsoever.
My other Reason was because of political tension. If one is as aware of it as I have become, as sensitive to it as I am finding myself - - one hesitates to stir that tension with a word or a stick or, God help me, even a prayer. And I demurred.
Why? Because: I am eighty-five years old, an age at which I have lived through much that no one else around me has suffered and holds inside. Yes, there's the joke, which I always enjoy and appreciate, that if you want to know any of the Early Church Fathers, ask Old Father Tom, because they were his personal friends. But I grew up through the world's most horrendous Time of human evil and human cruelty, recorded not just in words as we have from the tyrannies of ancient history, but recorded in photograph and film, black & white and horrible Technicolor, when human indecency was the core of governments. I'm witness to the Third Reich, and the Japanese Empire. To the South I grew up in, unconscious that what I knew as right was so wrong. To racism, antisemitism, hatred, meanness, merciless cruelty to other human beings.
I watched, have watched, it's burned in my memory, and I watch again so as never to forget or forgive, newsreels, documentaries of Germans, from whence came my own people, in brown uniform, marching, parading in the streets of cities and towns, roughing up, bullying people whom they hated, dragging people out of stores and homes, beating up Jews, smashing shop windows, burning books and buildings. Government officers with pistol in hand firing into just executed innocents, the body jerking in final spasm. I remember, and anyone can still view online, boxcars being crammed with unsuspecting humans on their way to concentration camps, the boxcar doors rolled shut, slammed and chain locked. Stories, the writings of Eli Wiesel and others who were there, of the horrors. Videos in Spring 1945 of German concentration camps, wretched skin-and-bone survivors, oven doors standing open showing charred human bones, skulls, inside. On the grounds, mounds of naked bodies of murdered and unburied humans. Boxcars crammed with hideous corpses, twisted, eyes rolled back, mouths open. The stories from Americans who survived the Bataan Death March. Newsreels of lynched black men in the America of my birth and growing up. Memories of water fountains signed "White Only" and of being required by law to sit in the front of the bus on public transportation. Jonathan Myrick Daniels. Emmett Till, 14 years old. No black humans tolerated on the Gulf beach here. Again, seared in memory, marching uniformed thugs in brown with armbands, carrying their flag, brutalizing people.
We always knew "It Can't Happen Here", though it actually was happening here for our early centuries and, like antisemitism redivivus across Europe, I've been watching it develop anew in America. The hatred, the reviling, the evil. White Supremacist parades with the flag of the Third Reich and the Confederate battle flag. Web sites online preaching violence, spewing hatred and unspeakable evil. Last week I watched them gather in assembly with the White House in the background, American flags fluttering, the crowd waiting.
Waiting, then stirred into a frenzy of determined hatred and, on command, charging to the National Capitol bent on the violence they committed as I watched Fox News live. I saw a policeman standing helplessly by as rioters viciously smashed glass and broke through doors. I watched a terrified Capitol police officer running up inside stairs, chased by a rioter with his mob behind him. Television later reported that the mob dragged a police officer down steps; that another officer was caught crushed and screaming in a doorway. A police officer was murdered, reportedly smashed in the head with a fire extinguisher. I saw hatred. Violence. I watched as a Confederate battle flag, which I grew up revering but have come to despise as a new symbol of flaunted evil, was arrogantly carried into the national Capitol. I was horrified, appalled, scared, yes goddammit, scared. But not surprised. Not surprised: I've been watching it develop for years, even, horrifyingly, egged on by Executive authority, the hatred encouraged officially in recent years of national nightmare. A personality cult developing, cultivated and refined.
After last week's riot was quelled and relative calm restored, I read that government executives watching on television had lamented that most of those involved, their supporters, were such low class people. Worse, worst, read with stunned incredulity that a large percentage of Americans are in full sympathy with the rioters.
So yesterday I decided not to stir it. But +Time is my personal blog, and I'll stir it this morning:
Almighty God, who hast given us this good land for our heritage: We humbly beseech thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of thy favor and glad to do thy will. BLESS our land with honorable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. SAVE us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. DEFEND our liberties, and FASHION into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues. ENDUE with the spirit of wisdom those to whom in thy Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that, through obedience to thy law, we may show forth thy praise among the nations of the earth. In the time of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in thee to fail; all which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Bear in mind, that a prayer, this prayer, any prayer, is only as efficacious as those who pray it cause it to be. Let us not be damn fools: God is not our agent, we are God's agents, He has no hands but our hands. Hearing our prayer, God will not Bless, God will not Save, God will not Defend, God will not Fashion, God will not Endue, God will not bring it about; but, God may, as we pray, inspire us to make it so.
The other question that came to me after church yesterday had to do with my homiletic endeavor and with our Sunday School class perusal of Sayings Gospel Thomas, a couple of logia in particular:
(3) Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom of the Father is within you and it is outside you.
(113) His disciples said to him: On what day will the kingdom come? <Jesus said:> It will not come while people watch for it; they will not say: Look, here it is, or: Look, there it is; but the kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and people do not see it.
The point raised was that if the kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth as Thomas wrote Jesus saying and as I preached, might not Hell also be spread upon the earth, and might not we in fact be there now with what is happening, what is being done, to our nation and in our world. To respond, I could not possibly agree more. Where I live now, my life as I daily experience it and with whom, is as close to heaven as I ever need or want to be, this is the kingdom of the Father. But as an American living through recent years and into the present, I'm in Hell, the only thing wanting being the smell of brimstone. But yes, hell here, now is as real as heaven here, now; both physical and state of mind. This is it, and we are there.
BLM&PTL
T+