That Which We Have Heard & Known

Occasional thoughts of an Anglican Episcopal priest

Category: Deuteronomy (Page 3 of 6)

Dog Crap, the Temple, and Love – From the Daily Office Lectionary

October 23, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Dog Crap, the Temple, and Love

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Friday in the week of Proper 24, Year 1 (Pentecost 21, 2015)

Ezra 3:10 ~ When the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, the priests in their vestments were stationed to praise the Lord with trumpets, and the Levites, the sons of Asaph, with cymbals, according to the directions of King David of Israel . . . .

So I haven’t written one of these random meditations for a week . . . and instead of starting this one early in the morning as I usually do (so that they are sort of sleep befuddled first impressions of the Daily Office lessons more than anything else), I went out to do yard work.

I was reminded of another verse of scripture: “You shall have a designated area outside the camp to which you shall go. With your utensils you shall have a trowel; when you relieve yourself outside, you shall dig a hole with it and then cover up your excrement.” (Dt 23:12-13) We have a “dog yard” on the west side of our house; it is our “designated area outside the camp” and it is my privilege to clean it up every Friday on my day off. After doing that, I mow the lawn.

The yard clean up is the foundation, if you will, of my day off. After that is accomplished, I can relax and enjoy the day; I can rejoice and praise the Lord. Foundations, it seems to me, are like that. The work of digging footings, laying foundation stones (or blocks of concrete, or pumping in concrete), making sure the work is level, providing for proper drainage, and so forth, is all very hard work. And then it gets covered up and no one ever sees or thinks about it again, unless something goes wrong. Picking up dog crap is like that. It’s gross and unpleasant work, and no one ever thinks about it . . . unless it doesn’t get done and the stuff piles up. Getting that unpleasant but necessary work done, the work that makes everything else possible, the very important and absolutely necessary work that no one notices when all is well, that is good reason to praise the Lord.

This was not, of course, my initial thought reading the lessons this morning; this only came to me after the dog yard was cleaned and the lawn was mowed. My initial thought was a question: Did St. Paul have this scene in mind when he wrote to the Corinthians, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal”? (1 Cor 13:1) Was he thinking of noisy temple rituals when he wrote of actions lacking the foundation of love?

For love is the true foundation of all good. On its website, a Canadian food ministry in which the Anglican Church of Canada is a part includes a prayer beginning with these words: “Creator God, we know that love is the foundation of creation and all life, your love and ours. We know that all things are possible with love – that the least becomes the most important, the last becomes the first.” Done with love even the grossest and most unpleasant of jobs, even most hidden and little recognized work, becomes the most important. Picking up dog shit, cleaning up the latrine, digging ditches, laying stones . . . done with love they are the foundation of the temple and worthy of praise and celebration.

General Convention and Common Sense – From the Daily Office Lectionary

June 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the OT lesson for Tuesday in the week of Proper 5 (Pentecost 2, 2015)
Deuteronomy 30
11 Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away.
12 It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?”
13 Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?”
14 No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.

Every time I read this paragraph from Deuteronomy I think, “He’s saying God’s law is just common sense.” And then I recall college philosophy courses in which I learned that “common sense” isn’t common, at all, and that exactly what common sense is is a matter of some debate and has been since way, way back. From Aristotle’s koine aisthesis through Cicero’s sensus communis to Descartes’ bon sens and even Thomas Paine’s political twist in the pamphlet Common Sense that played such an important role in this country’s founding, there is very little agreement on what “common sense” actually is. Which should come as no surprise; going back almost to the day Moses received the law on Sinai there’s been disagreement as to what God’s law is and what it means. ~ In two weeks, I’ll be with a thousand or so of my closest friends at the 78th General Convention of the Episcopal Church and, at some point during the legislative hearings and floor debates about marriage equality or church structure or budget or whatever, I know I will hear someone say, “It’s just common sense” and some people will nod in agreement and others will shake their heads in negative wonderment, because for Episcopalians there just isn’t any such thing as a common “common sense”! There’s only common prayer.

“By the Grace of God” – Blasphemy! (Sermon for Pentecost 2, 7 June 2015)

June 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

====================

A sermon offered on the Second Sunday after Pentecost, June 7, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are 1 Samuel 8:4-20;11:14-15; Psalm 138; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; and Mark 3:20-35. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

====================

CrownAs I read the lessons for today, I had one of those weird little flashes of memory when some small bit of trivial knowledge you had forgotten you knew floats to the surface . . . . In this case it was something from my 9th Grade American History class. My American History teacher loved to fill us up with the minutiae of our country’s past and the one that came to mind is the debate over what to call the President of the United States: the Founders had to determine how the president was to be introduced. There were, apparently, some who favored “His Democratic Majesty, by the Grace of God, President of the United States.” Other senators recommended “His Elective Majesty” and John Adams recommended the title: “His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties.” All of this embarrassed George Washington who would have none of it; he wanted simply to be called “the President of the United States” and to be addressed as “Mr. President.” And thus it has been since then. The American president doesn’t even get “Your Excellency” as the presidents of other nations do.

The reason this came to mind, I think, is the story of the election or selection of Saul as first king of the Israelites, the first part of which we heard today from the First Book of Samuel. Let’s set the scene . . . .

This is the end of the period of the judges, which is a really poor translation of the Hebrew word shofet which describes what were essentially warlords. After the Hebrews had finished their trek across the desert of Egypt, after the first generation (whom God had forbidden to enter the Promised Land) had died, they settled the land which came to be called Israel and they become known as Israelites. But they were not a united nation in the sense we think of today. At best, they were a loose confederation of tribes with no sort of central administration. Whenever they were threatened from the outside, the leader of one tribe would be commissioned and anointed to lead their assembled troops. You know the names of some of these people: Gideon, Deborah (yes, there were female judges), Samson. They would lead the amassed warriors until the end of whatever crisis and then return to their life as a tribal leader.

Eventually, however, the people decided that this wasn’t a workable arrangement. So they come to the most recent of the judges, who was also a prophet, Samuel, and say to him (as we heard in the lesson), “Anoint us a king so that we can be like other nations.” Specifically, in our reading today, they say they want a king to “govern us and go out before us and fight our battles;” in other words, they want someone to go to war for them.

Samuel is very upset by this; he considers this to be an affront not only to himself but to God! So he prays to God and asks what to do. God reassures him, “They aren’t rejecting you; they are rejecting me, which they have done many times in the past.” And God tells him to give them what they want, but tells Samuel to warn them of what will happen, what it means to have a king who goes to war. He does so. He tells them, “Look – a king will turn you into slaves. He will take your sons and turn them into soldiers; he will make your daughters [I love this]; he will take your horses and your flocks and the produce of your fields. You will not like it, but when you call out to God, God will not answer you.” I think that last warning may be a statement that whomever they choose (and they end up choosing Saul) will not be king “by the Grace of God.” This is fine with the people: “We want a king,” they say.

So off they all go to Gilgal and, although we aren’t given the details in today’s lesson, they choose Saul to be king . . . and we know how that works out – Saul is a terrible king and has to be replaced. Eventually God would send Samuel to anoint David and David would then be succeeded by Solomon and, after Solomon, the kingdom would split and both Israel in the north and Judah in the south would suffer a series of pretty bad monarchs. But even David and Solomon, back to whose rule the people of God have looked for millennia as a sort of “golden age,” were not that great: David was guilty of essentially murdering a soldier, Uriah, and committing adultery with his wife, Bathsheba; Solomon had hundreds of wives and amassed great wealth at the expense of his people. None of them lived up to the ideal of kingship which God had pronounced through Moses at the very beginning of the Hebrews’ occupation of the Promised Land.

Interestingly, our Daily Office Lectionary this past week included (on Wednesday) that very description of kingship in a reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. As I was pondering today’s reading, I wondered if Samuel, or perhaps even God, had forgotten these words spoken to the Hebrews by Moses on the border of Canaan which he (as part of that disobedient original generation) was forbidden to enter. In his farewell discourse, speaking on God’s behalf, Moses had said:

When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,” you may indeed set over you a king whom the Lord your God will choose. One of your own community you may set as king over you; you are not permitted to put a foreigner over you, who is not of your own community. Even so, he must not acquire many horses for himself, or return the people to Egypt in order to acquire more horses, since the Lord has said to you, “You must never return that way again.” And he must not acquire many wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away; also silver and gold he must not acquire in great quantity for himself. When he has taken the throne of his kingdom, he shall have a copy of this law written for him in the presence of the levitical priests. It shall remain with him and he shall read in it all the days of his life, so that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, diligently observing all the words of this law and these statutes, neither exalting himself above other members of the community nor turning aside from the commandment, either to the right or to the left, so that he and his descendants may reign long over his kingdom in Israel. (Dt 17:14-20)

When I researched this apparent lapse in divine memory, I found one commentator who explained that the difference between what Moses says and what the Israelites did in demanding a king is the difference between peace and war. Moses’ ideal king was to be appointed when the land was “settled,” when the people were at peace; the ideal king was to look after the welfare of the people, not amassing wealth nor preparing for war. In the First Book of Samuel, the people demand a king to “govern us and go out before us and fight our battles;” they want a king to go to war. This is a far cry from the ideal approved by God through Moses.

Let that sit for a moment and let’s turn to the Gospel lesson taken from the third chapter of Mark. We are early in Jesus’ career, but a lot has already happened. He has been baptized and spent forty days in the desert discerning his mission. He has called the Twelve who are his inner circle and, together with them, he has walked through the countryside visiting villages, preaching his good news, healing the sick, and casting out demons. His reputation has grown and now he has come to his home town. The crowds are huge and they press in so tightly that he and his friends can’t even eat.

The situation is made more chaotic when Jesus’ family, Mary and his brothers James and Joses and Jude and Simon and Jesus’ sisters (whose names we are never told), show up to “restrain” him because they’ve decided his nuts! They’ve heard what he’s up to and they think he’s gone crazy. And not only are they there, some of the religious authorities from Jerusalem have come and they are saying that Jesus is evil! He’s in league with Beelzebul, either because he’s been possessed or, worse, because he’s intentionally working for the Devil.

Here is Jesus doing good works, healing people, feeding people, casting out demons, modeling a new kind of kingship, and his family says he’s a lunatic and the scribes say he’s Satan. He declares both assertions to be blasphemy, but he says that these blasphemies can be forgiven, there is only one unforgiveable sin: “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.”

Now what is blasphemy? If I were to ask, you’d probably say something like “cursing God” or “speaking ill of God,” and in one sense you would be correct. Muslims might say that drawing a cartoon of Mohammed is a blasphemy and many believe that putting a crucifix in a container of urine, as artist Andres Serrano did several years ago, is a blasphemy. But none of those answers is technically, theologically correct. Blasphemy, as theologian Craig Uffman has written in a paper prepared for the up-coming General Convention, “is claiming God’s union with us in our doing that which is false, such as murdering, stealing, or any of the other ways we choose the opposite of the good.”

Blasphemy is when we claim that in what we are doing, in whatever incomplete, incorrect, sinful, false, inadequate thing we are doing, God is cooperating, that our will is God’s will. The most egregious contemporary example I can think of is the Nazi regime in World War II Germany, which claimed that in their oppression and annihilation of the Jews “Gott mit uns” (“God is with us”). Wehrmacht soldiers wore this slogan on their belt buckles. But God was not with them; God is not in, with, or supportive of any corrupt, false, oppressive, violent, or degrading act of sinful human beings. To claim otherwise is blasphemy, blasphemy against the Spirit of God, the unforgiveable sin.

Now, let’s go back to the Israelites demanding a king . . . I believe that this is why their experiment with kingship worked out so badly, worked out exactly as God warned them through Samuel, again and again as they anointed kings not as administrators of peace (according to the ideal set forth in Deuteronomy) but as warlords to “govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.” Those kings might have claimed, as European monarchs later would claim, that they served at the election of and “by the Grace of God.” God’s ideal, however, was very different.

I think that’s why that little tidbit of American history came to mind as I considered this lesson. I believe our Founding Fathers, particularly George Washington, were very wise in eschewing titles of nobility for anyone, but especially such titles and forms of address for our president. We certainly pray that God’s grace will sustain and guide our national leaders, but our leaders serve by the election and selection of the people; they cannot claim to serve “by the Grace of God” and if they do so, they blaspheme! I think that in every election in which I have voted (and I have voted in every election since becoming eligible to do so) there has been at least one candidate who has hinted (and some have said outright) that “God told me to run.” That makes me very uncomfortable because that is the very core of the sin of blasphemy, claiming God’s union with us in what we do, claiming that our will is God’s will. I think that in the acceptance speech of every politician who has successfully run for office during my adulthood there has been some sort of claim (hinted at if not stated outright) that God was responsible for their victory. That makes me very uncomfortable because that is the very core of the sin of blasphemy, claiming God’s union with us in what we do, claiming that our will is God’s will. We’ve had at least one president who claimed that God told him to take our country into war! That makes me very uncomfortable because that is the very core of the sin of blasphemy, claiming God’s union with us in what we do, claiming that our will is God’s will.

Look again at our opening collect this week, the prayer that began our worship today:

O God, from whom all good proceeds: Grant that by your inspiration we may think those things that are right, and by your merciful guiding may do them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

We can certainly seek God’s inspiration and strive to follow God’s merciful guidance. In doing so, we are brothers and sisters of Jesus who said in today’s Gospel lesson, “Who ever does the will of God is my mother and my brother.” But we have to admit that, like the ancient kings of Israel, we are always going to fall short of the ideal! We strive to do God’s will, but because we are human there will be in everything we do that small bit of sinfulness, that portion of self-serving falsehood. By what we do and by what we leave undone, we will constantly err and stray from God’s ways like lost sheep, we will follow too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, and we will we offend against God’s holy laws. None of us can ever claim that our will is God’s will; none of us can ever claim that God is in union with us in what we do, because what we do is, at least partially, always corrupt, false, and incomplete. Beware of anyone, especially any leader, especially any politician, who claims otherwise.

The best we can do is the best we can do, always knowing that it will fall short of God’s ideal. Thus, we can never claim that our will and our falsehood is God’s. To do that is unforgiveable blasphemy. All that we can do is acknowledge our shortcomings, constantly seek God’s inspiration, and strive to follow God’s guidance. Then, by the Grace of God, we will be not kings ourselves, but brothers and sisters of the King. Amen.

====================

A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

====================

Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Priest as Pal – From the Daily Office Lectionary

June 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the OT lesson for Friday in the week of Trinity Sunday
Deuteronomy 26
1 When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it,
2 you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name.
3 You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, “Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.”

Moses today gives us a different metaphor or two for the priesthood. He begins with the picture of priest-as-produce-manager, the receiver of baskets of fruits, grains, and vegetables which are to be placed before the altar of the Lord. Today’s pericope then ends with the priest-as-party-planner: “Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate….” (v 11) ~ I must say that these are more inviting roles than those that American Christianity has assigned the clergy: priest as principal prayer, priest as preacher, priest as pastor, priest as purveyor of religious solemnity. I get so dreadfully bored with all the seriousness put on the modern priesthood. ~ I visited a lady in the hospital this week. I was with her for about 45 minutes. She’s not a parishioner; she lives in another town and goes to another church and has another pastor. Thank God! She’s just an old friend and we spent most of our time laughing. She didn’t expect me to pray with her; she didn’t ask for an anointing; she didn’t share her diagnosis, prognosis, fears, or hopes; she just shared her friendship! It was a refreshing experience: priest as pal. It would be so nice if that happened more often.

Campaign Contributions Not Bribes – From the Daily Office Lectionary

June 4, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the OT lesson for Wednesday in the week after Trinity Sunday
Deuteronomy 16
19 You must not distort justice; you must not show partiality; and you must not accept bribes, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.

“You must not accept bribes….” but, apparently in the eyes of the Religious Right, huge unreported corporate campaign contributions to unaccountable political action committees are perfectly acceptable.

Blessed Silliness – From the Daily Office Lectionary

June 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the OT lesson for Monday in the week of Trinity Sunday
Deuteronomy 11
18 You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead.
19 Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.

To be honest, I’ve always believed the practice of orthodox Jewish men using phylactories as part of their prayer discipline to be a bit silly. But, to be even more honest, a lot of other religious practices including many of my own are also a bit silly. ~ When I did a little research into the meaning of silly, I found there is good reason for this. In its earliest origins the English word silly – which has come to mean foolish or stupid or feeble-minded – meant happy, fortuitous, or prosperous. Its closest contemporary cognate in another language is the German word selig, which carries the sense of blessedness, holy blissfulness, and happiness. Etymologists can trace the development of meaning attached to silly from “happy” to “blessed” to “pious” to “innocent” to “harmless” to “pitiable and weak” to “feeble-mind and foolish” over the course of less than 600 years of English linguistic history. ~ So, yes, using phylactories is silly; genuflecting, making the sign of the cross, wearing funny clothes (“vestments”), holding hands while praying over a Mexican dinner in a local restaurant . . . these, too, are silly. They are symbolic actions reminding us of the blessedness and holiness of life. We need more such reminders, many more. Which is why we need to remember them, to teach them to our children, and to talk about (and do) them at home and away, at night and in the morning.

Chicanes – From the Daily Office Lectionary

May 30, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the OT lesson for Saturday in the week after Pentecost
Deuteronomy 5
32 You must therefore be careful to do as the Lord your God has commanded you; you shall not turn to the right or to the left.
33 You must follow exactly the path that the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live, and that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land that you are to possess.

A day or two ago a friend and colleague in ministry posted a Facebook comment about the word “chicane” which was new to her. Her husband, an intelligent and well-read individual, had used it and explained it properly, and she was singing his praises. I’d not seen the word for many years, not in fact since I stopped driving small go-cart racers in high school. A chicane is an S-curve added to a roadway to require drivers to slow down; they are used in racing circuits to test the drivers’ skill and to prevent them from attaining speeds unsafe for the raceway, and they are sometimes used in residential areas to calm or slow down traffic. Because of that Facebook mention, I thought of chicanes when I read this passage. Moses is speaking to the Hebrews crossing the desert, relaying God’s commands to them. They are to follow a straight path turning neither right nor left. I’ve never walked through the deserts of Egypt or Sinai, but I have hiked the deserts of the southwestern United States and, within the past year, a small part of the desert of Palestine. One would think a desert would be a place where you could walk a straight path; it is not. One is constantly turning right or left and changing one’s course in response to changes in terrain, to obstacles, and to dangers. What does God mean by ordering the Hebrews to take a straight path to “the land that [they] are to possess,” to turn neither right nor left in a place where turning one way and the other is an inevitability, where one cannot follow “the straight and narrow”? The commandment is clearly a moral metaphor, but it seems to me it is an impossible one. Life is more like a hike through the desert, with unexpected turnings and directional variety, than it is a walk across a level pavement. Life is full of chicanes, turnings left then right then left again, that test our abilities, try our patience, and slow us down.

Loss of Sabbath – From the Daily Office Lectionary

May 29, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the OT lesson for Friday in the week after Pentecost
Deuteronomy 5
12 Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you.
13 For six days you shall labor and do all your work.
14 But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work – you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you.

I usually take Friday as my day away from the office, my “day of rest.” However, this week I “stayed home” yesterday and later in the day posted this summary of the day to my Facebook page: “This has been a productive, if somewhat expensive, alternative day off. I took today rather than tomorrow because [a] I have a wedding rehearsal tomorrow and [b] I was able to schedule some much needed auto maintenance today. Auto maintenance was the first accomplishment – new right front lower ball joint ($600, also the expensive part of the day). Mowed the lawn, whole thing, and cut two huge low-hanging branches off the thorny-something-or-other in the back garden that have made mowing a pain (in reality – the thing has 1-1/2″ long needle sharp spines!) Did three loads of laundry (one a big load of black shirts so I have uniforms for rehearsal, wedding, and Sunday). Made a big batch of ‘copper penny salad’ for church choir end-of-program-year picnic this evening. Hard boiled a dozen eggs and put them to pickle in a mixed brine saved from three sources: Lebanese pickled turnips, Palestinian pickled baby eggplants, and home pickled ramps and garlic. In a week or two I will be able to report on the success of said pickling of eggs. – It was also a day of memories of our pilgrimage to the Holy Land, set off by a lunch of pickled turnips, pickled eggplants, and toasted pita (spread with labneh and sprinkled with za’atar). – And I realized while driving home from the auto shop that it’s been ages since I wrote any poetry and also realized that it’s been about the same period of time that I stopped carrying an actual paper notebook to record random thoughts. My ‘mobile device’ just doesn’t function in the same way for that purpose…. loss of paper = loss of poetry. Going back to paper.”

Not only have I lost my poetry, I seem to have lost sabbath. I think the two are related.

Decluttering Idols – From the Daily Office Lectionary

May 26, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the OT lesson for Tuesday in the week following Pentecost
Deuteronomy 4
15 Since you saw no form when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire, take care and watch yourselves closely,
16 so that you do not act corruptly by making an idol for yourselves, in the form of any figure—the likeness of male or female,
17 the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air,
18 the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth.

Today is “trash day” (or “garbage day” or “put the bins/bags/cans/boxes at the curb day”) in our neighborhood. I have lugged 12 large black pastic bags of refuse to the curb. Eight of them are from gardening – we pulled weeds and trimmed hedges as part of our Memorial Day observance. Two of them are household refuse. One, the heaviest, is a week’s worth of cat box siftings. The last is filled with idols.

My spouse and I are trying to declutter our lives – to keep what is meaningful and might have value for our children and (so far only one) grandchild, but to dispose of that which is merely of interest to us and needn’t be carried over by future generations. Making that distinction is difficult. The worship booklets prepared for my ordinations 25 and 24 years ago; the newsclipping about my wife’s joining her insurance agency; a prayer from a greeting card my mother kept at her bedside for many years…. Keep them? Toss them? Cherish the memories but let them go? Some hard-and-fast rules for disposing of idols would be very handy, but few of our memories are in the likenesses of winged flying things or fishy swimming things or scaley creeping things. That’s why only one bag in eight (and that the smallest of the bags) holds the discarded idols of decluttering, and it has taken three weeks to get that far. At this rate, we will never get to the Jordan much less cross it.

There Will Come a Time – From the Daily Office Lectionary

May 25, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the OT lesson for Monday in the week following Pentecost
Deuteronomy 4
9 But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children – . . . .

It is simply the fortuitous convergence of calendars that presents us with this reminder about memory and generational transmission on the day our secular society sets aside as “Memorial Day” for remembrance of fallen warriors. But, nonetheless, here it is – Memorial Day and a reminder to remember and pass on. – I was thinking, a few days ago, about the loss of family memorabilia. My friends talk of old photographs, diaries, news clippings, favorite recordings, memory books, pieces of handmade lace, and so forth that they have inherited from past generations: through a series of unpleasant family events that material is all but gone from both sides of my family. Until I came into my late-middle age (and, now, early dotage) the loss of these things mattered very little, but now I see their value and feel their loss. If you and your family still retain such family memorabilia, do not let them slip away. Your children and your children’s children may not care about them now, but there will come a time . . . oh, yes, there will come a time.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 That Which We Have Heard & Known

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑