Fill an egg to help send St. Margaret’s “Chicks” to camp!  Starting this Sunday and continuing through Easter there will be empty Easter eggs in the Parish Hall that can be filled with donations for Bishopswood camperships.  We have 10 children from St. Margaret’s that we are working hard to send to camp and your donation, no matter the amount, will be a great help.  Please find an empty egg, fill it with your donation, and move to the Easter basket.  On Easter Sunday the basket will be presented at the offering for a blessing.  If you have any questions, please contact Erin Ireland at geireland@myfairpoint.net or 548-2145.  Thank you!

Recipes for Irish corn bread, oatcakes and soda bread, Colcannon,  Parsnip and Apple Soup, Boxty ( potato pancake), Coddle (a bacon, potato and onion dish), Beef in Guinness, Steak and Kidney Pie and Ham Steaks with Whiskey Sauce are on the Time and Talent Table in the Parish Hall.

There are also dessert recipes. Among them: Irish Chocolate Cake (probably “Irish” because ingredients include mashed potatoes) and Country Rhubarb Cake. Help yourself to any of the recipes or add one of your own for others to try.

We encourage you to bring a few friends with you to dinner, especially those who like to cook. Remember to bring your own beverages. Come a bit early if your dish needs to be reheated or assembled. And, as always, non-cooks are welcome to help us clean up.

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St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church
Creation Series 6, and Transfiguration Sunday
February 19, 2012
2 Kings 2:1-12; Eccl. 8:1-13; 2 Cor. 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9

Ecclesiastes and the Gift of Simplicity

If you’ve been following our exploration into creation stories, you’ve seen that the Bible has many things to say about creation, that no one story tells it all. Nothing points out the dramatic differences more than today’s reading from Ecclesiastes. We have talked about the blessedness and goodness of creation in Genesis 1; the joy of Woman Wisdom and the Cosmic Dance in Proverbs; Second Isaiah and the God who is making all things new; and God’s delight in the wildness of earth’s creatures in the Book of Job. Today we look at Ecclesiastes, for whom “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Ecclesiastes has been called “the most unconventional perspective on creation in the Bible.” (i) It contains the teachings of one identified by the unique Hebrew name of Kohelet, which means something like “one who gathers an assembly” (ii) (The New Revised Standard Version uses “teacher,” but it’s an imperfect translation). When we read someone’s writing, it is always helpful to know who they understood their audience to be, and it is likely that Kohelet was addressing himself as a teacher to young, educated men with “good prospects,” the next generation of movers and shakers. And shake them up he does.

We read the most familiar of passages from Ecclesiastes, in fact one of the most familiar passages in the Bible. But let me give you another example of what our Teacher Kohelet has to say, from Chapter 1 –

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity …
All things are wearisome –
One cannot express it.
The eye is unsatisfied with seeing,
And the ear does not get filled from listening.
What has been, that is what will be;
And what has been done, that is what will be done.
There is nothing at all new under the sun.
There is a phenomenon of which someone says,
“See this, it’s new!”
It has already been for ages,
Those that were before us.

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…” I kind of like William Brown’s take “vapor of vapors, all is flatulence.” (iii) (!) It amounts to the same thing, something that is insubstantial, even noxious.

Is this just a viewpoint of one very depressed, world-weary and cynical person, or is there some wisdom here? What’s it doing in our canon?

Speaking to his group of young men, students, the teacher seems to want to blast away any pretensions they might have to their own uniqueness, their expectations of lasting achievement. He reminds them they are but dust. Like the Book of Job, humility is the basis of his teaching. He asks “what is enduring?” Wisdom is better than folly, yet the wise and the fools face the same fate in death. Possessions we can’t take with us. We can pass on our goods, our achievements, but those who come after us may not deserve them and may squander them. So don’t aim for immortality. Don’t start posing for the statue you hope they’ll erect to you in the town square. The Teacher points out the cycles of nature, and of life: you’re born, you live, you’ll die. It’s not about sin, this all didn’t come about because of “The Fall” or any other human failing. It’s just inevitable. We are just a part of the web of life. One of my favorite rock groups could be quoting this teacher: “sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.” That’s our Kohelet.

But there is more here. Thankfully, the teacher doesn’t drop us down a well of bleak nothingness and leave us there. Ecclesiastes 8:15 says “So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun.” The Teacher says this repeatedly. Pleasure seeking and living for the moment! Well, not quite. The teacher would be better understood as urging us to “receive the gifts of God” (iv) that are evident all around us. This is essential gratitude to God who is the author and source of every good gift. “We practice the core religious virtue of humility by noting with pleasure, day by day, the gifts that come to us from God. And the truth is, most of those are given so regularly that we never even pause to recognize them for the gifts they are.” (v)

Many of us experience the wisdom of this. I’ve heard many times, when someone is asked how they are coping with a deep loss or tragedy, “I’ve learned to take pleasure in the small things in life.” When I’ve been forced to give up things, things I can no longer do, I find I can be happy with less. The first half of life is often about accumulating – degrees, financial security, furniture, reputation and a place in society. That’s important, even necessary. In the second half of life, spiritual growth happens in part by the process of letting things go, and discovering – to your surprise – that you no longer need them, or at least not the way you might have thought you did. You don’t need them to define who you are. And the teacher in Ecclesiastes reminds us to strive to live simply. This simplifying we now know is an ecological necessity. When did we become a nation of storage facilities? When did the malls become our houses of worship? What deep hunger is trying to be filled with more stuff? That question is the beginning of a deepening of faith.

So we have these two notions: the teacher’s insistence on enjoyment, and the pronouncement that runs throughout the whole book, “vanity of vanities.” “Vanity” might be better understood as “absurdity” – the appalling disparity, the gaping chasm between what should be and what is. The Teacher expresses the reality that if we make the purpose of our lives our own achievement, our own immortality, our own gain, we have, in the end, nothing.

And this brings us to the Gospel, the transfiguration. Because, what the Teacher of Ecclesiastes has to teach us is important, but it is not sufficient. Kohelet falls short of a gospel faith. One might see Ecclesiastes as preparing the way for Christ, that it leads us to the door but doesn’t go through it. Learning, day-by-day, to live life as a pure gift, we gradually prepare ourselves to receive the gift of Godself, given to us in Christ. Because God gives us gifts not so that we simply keep them and take satisfaction from them, but that we see through the gifts to Godself, and that we may receive the gift of God’s very self.

Looking at the Gospel, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes may give us a new perspective on the Transfiguration. Like Peter, we too might be tempted to be dazzled by the ethereal vision of Jesus in white, Elijah and Moses at his side. We too, might want to stay in the rarified oxygen of the spiritual, and not have to get earthly, get real, and see things as they are. But the text reminds us that after their vision on the top of the mountain, Jesus comes back down again. Down to the nitty-gritty. Down into religious and political quarrels, which are never, it seems, far from us. Down into poverty and pain, polluted rivers and an unstable climate. Down to species extinction and high asthma rates. Down to problems in Europe and Syria. Down to the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons. Down to the unemployed and underemployed, down to mortgage foreclosures and financial struggles. Down and down, and into it all, Jesus comes.

This gets at the heart of the gospel, Mark’s and, truth be told, that of the whole New Testament. As Paul sings in Philippians, “though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Phil. 2:6-7). Jesus’ downward movement from his rightful place in glory to embrace all of creation out of love is, in a very real sense, the essence the gospel. (vi)

This is not to dwell in the dark places of our lives, but to assure and remind ourselves that Jesus is already there. In the face of everything, even while he knocks the stuffing out of self-importance, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes reminds us that God is in all things. Our Gospel faith reminds us that Christ is present in, and redeems all things. In Jesus, God interacts with creation in “a most intimate, intense, and bodily way.” (vii) Christ saves us not by removing us from this earth, but, coming down the mountain, he enables us to find the ways to live harmoniously with all life, to be attentive to daily living, to respect all life, and to live in gratitude.

God came to us in and through the Incarnate Son precisely to be with us and for us through thick and thin and through life and death — indeed, God came in Jesus to be with us through death into new life. We are called to participate in and enjoy God’s life as it is intended for all creation. May it be so. Amen.

i  William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation, (Oxford; NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), 177.
ii  Ellen Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 2001): 104.
iii  Brown, 181.
iv  Davis, 107.
v  Davis, 108.
vi  David Lose, Commentary on Mark 9:2-9, accessed on line at www.workingpreacher.org.
vii  Norman Wirzba, Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight (Grand Rapids, MI: BrazosPress, 2006), 45.

Next month’s supper, Saturday, March 10, will focus on Irish foods. Faye Ward and Elaine Bielenberg are in charge and they’ve located recipes for both traditional and modern dishes. Dinner is at 6. Recipes are on the Time and Talent Table. Help yourselves.

The Irish are well known for their love of the potato but the coming of the potato in the 16^th Century turned out to be a mixed blessing despite the nourishment it brought. Until that time, the poor survived on milk, butter, cheese and offal, supplemented with oats and barley. They occasionally made blood sausage. The landed classes ate beef, mutton and pork.

The adoption of the potato as the core of Irish cuisine should not be seen as a voluntary choice.  According to Wikipedia, the Penal Laws in Ireland resulted in the large Irish Catholic majority being denied the right to buy land or pass it on to their descendants. Thus many farms were less than a quarter of an acre yet had to provide food for extended families. “The only way to avoid starvation,” reports Wikipedia, “was to intensively cultivate a single crop, the potato.” That reliance meant terrible famines when the crop failed as it did several times before The Great Famine of 1845-1849, when approximately 1 million people died and another million emigrated.

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St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church
Creation Series 5
February 12, 2012
Job 38:1-17; Ps. 30; 1 Cor. 9:24-27; Mark 1:40-45

It’s a strange story, this Job and his laments, there isn’t another book in the Bible quite like it. Like the book of Proverbs we talked about a couple of weeks ago, it belongs in the category of Wisdom literature, but it is still unique. The authorship is unknown, the date and place of origin is a matter of debate. It has a primordial, mythical quality to it. Job himself, who may have existed or maybe not, is a type of folk legend, a non-Israelite from the land of Uz, about as mythical a place as Eden. Our Job is the picture of a good, blameless and upright man who gets flattened by a slew of bad things he doesn’t deserve. William Brown describes the book as a kind of “thought experiment” that tests and challenges the conventional wisdom of the day.(i) That conventional wisdom is that good things happen to good people and bad people get their just desserts. So if something bad happens to you, surely you deserved it. The book of Job repudiates this idea, but it is far more than a simple treatise on the reality of undeserved human suffering. It asks the question that is put by Satan to God in the first chapter: will humans be righteous and faithful apart from rewards and punishment?

The basic story is laid out in the first couple of chapters. This Job is a prosperous, happy, family man, one who feared God and turned away from evil. Then suddenly he loses everything: his children die, his fortune disappears, and he winds up on a garbage dump at the edge of town with oozing sores and crawling flesh, awash in his own misery, as anyone would be. It is all horribly, cruelly unfair.

Job has three friends who visit him to offer consolation. In the beginning they keep silence for seven days and nights, but finally they begin to talk. They talk, and talk, and talk, for 29 chapters in a cycle of 27 speeches, going around in endless circles, rehashing old ground. If you bother to read these arguments you’ll see they don’t develop, they simply repeat themselves over and over again, though with a bit more literary flair. The gist of the argument is that, since God is just, Job’s suffering must be due to some guilt on his part; he must have committed some sin. If not Job, then perhaps it was his kids who had messed up, and Job is paying the price. They are defending their worldview, with all absolute certainty.

But when we get to chapter 38, these friends disappear, and the remainder of the book is between Job and God, beginning with the words from God “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare it to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”

From there God takes Job on a whirlwind tour of the universe. It is the most extensive catalogue of earth elements and sea and sky and all manner of plants and animals to be found anywhere in scripture. It’s tame. It’s wild. It’s orderly and chaotic. It’s beautiful and savage. And God delights in every inch of it.

The first piece of wisdom that Job seems in need of learning, and which is imparted to him by way of this whirlwind tour, is humility. Humanity’s place in the universe presented by the Book of Job is in stark contrast to Plato’s hierarchy of being, or arguably in Genesis 1 or Psalm 8, with humans just a bit below God and over the rest of profane creation. (Actually it usually went God-man-woman-beast). Over and over again, Job is reminded that he had nothing to do with creating the world, and that he is a creature among many. The Lord cares for a vast world beyond human knowing, and does not necessarily exercise control over it for the immediate benefit of human beings.(ii) God reminds Job that God brings the rains to a land where no person lives. In fact, in God’s two speeches to Job, God describes a universe almost without people.

So we might ask ourselves whether this might be the wisdom we are called to claim, and the repenting – which as you remember we have defined as “moving into the larger mind” – that we need to own. Today I am joining with faith leaders around the world for a national “preach-in” on global warming. How we see ourselves in the world is key to our attending to this, what I believe is the most urgent and pressing issue of our time. And, as people of faith, we need to attend to the reality that our changing climate will affect the poorest of the poor first. This makes climate change a front-and-center faith concern. Yes, we need earth stewardship. We have a special responsibility to care for the earth, given our singular capacity to destroy it. And at the same time, we need to hold a second idea in tension with this: that we are creatures, servants of creation, intimately and radically interconnected to all life, and subject to creation’s laws. Stewards and servants. This reminder that we do not stand above or apart from the earth, but are in fact radically interconnected with all of life, is a truth our ancestors grasped but which we seemed to have forgotten, as we commodify the blessings of the natural world, and think of the earth as scenery, rather than as our essential habitat. How might we live, if we understand that the world is of value in the sight of God all by itself, whether it serves us or not?

We know we can live in ways that rejoice in and respect the natural world. We know the adjustments that we can make to our daily lives that can make a huge difference to the planet. We can eat lower on the food chain – that is not difficult to do here in Belfast, and we support local farmers at the same time. We can buy less stuff. Use renewable energy. Advocate for policies that reduce our footprint and are grounded in the knowledge that God desires that all humans and all creation thrive.

Just when we might be tempted to be awed by our own particular brilliance, something comes along to humble us, if we allow ourselves to listen to what the earth has to tell us. When the tsunami hit Indonesia a few years ago, there was talk afterwards about how we needed new technology to give us a better early tsunami warning system. But do you remember that the Island tribal peoples and the animals sensed that the tsunami was coming, and headed for higher ground, removing themselves from danger? Knowing this, we might open ourselves to the possibility that survival — our salvation — lies not in our technological know-how, or better machines, but in the acquiring of some humility, reconnecting ourselves to the pulse, the hum, and the wisdom of the universe that is right there in front of us, if we can relearn to hear it.

It may be a helpful “thought experiment” us to reflect on how we see ourselves in creation. Do we feel as though we have pride of place, and the rest of the world is here for our benefit? Is this a scary thought, that humans don’t perhaps occupy some special place but are there with all creation? Or might it be a profound relief? Might this be exactly one of the central ways in which we experience grace? Because, if you believe that humans have a special, higher place in the hierarchy that reaches to heaven, then it would follow that within humanity there is a further hierarchy of being. Which means that someone is below you and someone is above you. I wonder how many of us carry the burden of this sense that we have to continually prove ourselves to God, that the next guy is surely more deserving, more holy, more worthy than we are. Or, “I’m no great shakes, but at least I’m better than that guy!” How exhausting! How profoundly lonely. Can we take in that if God loves every inch of every thing that crawls on the ground, God loves every one of us too, not just when we behave well, but for the very is-ness of us? Just because we are?

Because if there is the second big lesson in Job, it is God’s profound joy, God’s exuberant delight in creation.

“Do you hunt game for the lioness
And feed her ravenous cubs,
When they crouch in their den, impatient,
Or lie in ambush in the thicket?
Who finds her prey at nightfall
When her cubs are aching with hunger?”

“Do you teach the vulture to soar
And build his nest in the clouds?
He makes his home on the mountaintop,
On the unapproachable crag.
He sits and scans for prey;
From far off his eyes can spot it;
His little ones drink its blood.
Where the unburied are, he is.

This is not Walt Disney; there is nothing sentimental about this vision of the world. It is rich, tough, grisly, wild, untamed glory. This is a God who is passionately in love with the world. This is a world that is blessed. Every inch of it. That includes the vulture, the behemoth, and Job. And you. And me.

Let’s say one more thing about the Book of Job. The first 29 chapters, the ones where Job and his friends are arguing, are framed in answers of absolute certainty, and under the illusion that the world was ordered by rewards for the righteous and punishment for the wicked. This is a persistent religious understanding too. But the passages that contain the wisdom of this Book, narrated in the voice of God, are almost entirely framed, not in answers, but questions! The voice of God challenges Job’s thinking with question after question after question. It reminds us of the power of the question, the question that opens us up, calls us to resist easy answers, and breaks through our established thinking. It reminds us of the need to be able to rest in ambiguity and mystery. We don’t – and never will – have all the answers. In the words of Evelyn Underhill, “if God were small enough to be understood, [God] would not be big enough to be worshiped.”

The book of Job invites us to ponder – what if God loves questions more than answers? Perhaps it is in our questions that is the beginning of humility, and the beginning of wisdom. It’s the question of the scientist, and the question of the person of faith. Who are we? What is our place in creation? And how does God want us to live, on this glorious, heartbreakingly beautiful Earth?
Amen.

(i) William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science and the Ecology of Wonder (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 115.
(ii) Bill McKibben, The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994).