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Living In The Margins | Luke 10.25-37 | Pentecost 6 |
When he had gone three blocks, he saw an old woman sitting in the park, staring at the pigeons. He sat down next to her to drink a root beer when he noticed that the old lady looked hungry. So he offered her a Twinkie. She gratefully accepted and smiled at him. Her smile was so pretty that the boy wanted to see it again, so he offered her a root beer. She smiled that beautiful, radiant smile at him again. The boy was delighted. They sat there all afternoon eating and smiling, though they never said a word.
As it grew dark, the boy realized how tired he was and he got up to leave. He gave the woman a hug and she returned the gesture with her biggest smile ever.
When the boy arrived back home, his mother was surprised by the look of joy on his face. “What did you do today that made you so happy?” she asked. He replied: “I had lunch with God.” But before his mother could respond, he added: “You know what? She’s got the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen!”
Meanwhile, the old woman returned home. Her son was stunned by the look of peace on her face and asked what she had done to make her so happy. She replied, “I ate Twinkies in the park with God.” And before her son could respond, she added, “You know, he’s much younger than I expected.”
When you go to bed at night, do you ask yourself the question: what did I really see today? How many times did we see people and dismiss them because our mind was on something else? How many times in any day do we miss seeing God because our eyes are merely operating in reflex mode without any real mindfulness? Each missed person is a missed opportunity to know God in a new way.
Jesus made this point when he told the story of the robbed man. Several walked on by without stopping to see if the man needed help. They were concentrating on their schedules, one was talking on his cell phone and didn’t even notice the man. One woman was afraid she would catch a disease if she got close to him. But the Samaritan was walking on the shoulder, not on the main pathway, when he stumbled onto the bruised and bloodied body that had been pushed to the side so as not to block traffic. Both had been relegated by society as outcasts. They were the only two people to met God on the road that day, and they met each other in the gutter.
A significant part of Irish history is found in the monks who were cloistered away in colonies of small beehive-shaped huts in remote parts of the island where the harsh climate is very unforgiving. Here they communed with God and nature along the edge of the island, copying manuscripts of scripture, illuminating the texts with very elaborate Celtic symbols and drawings. Eager to ply their trade, they voraciously copied hundreds of books from Europe’s mainland that had been brought to them from the travelers. As it turns out, much of what they copied would have been otherwise lost, for when Rome fell, the marauders pillaged and burned the libraries and public buildings. Much of the literature we cherish today exists because dedicated monks did little but copy manuscripts day in and day out.
As serious as these documents were, the cunning monks were not above having some fun in their toil. When they found the main text boring, the monks would write poems of their own composition in the margins of the manuscripts. These reveal an earthy lot of monks who were not afraid to reveal their humanity and often revealed a very observant eye that saw God in everything around them.
One of the more lusty of these margined poems is about the promiscuous Aiden. One monk writes: I do not know with whom fair Aiden will sleep, but I do know that fair Aiden will not sleep alone. It was not a moral judgment as much as a sly wink, for the ancient Celts celebrated the sensuous. It was part of the circle of life.
The Celtic mind was cyclical in thought and delighted in paradox. Good and bad, playfulness and seriousness, fun and work, morning and night, life and death were all part of a holy circle that was woven in and out of the tapestry of each moment of life. Writing in the margins was a way of being playful and poignant, and a chance to balance the tediousness of the main text.
As part of the sermon, Ina will sing for you three of the poems that have survived, set to music by Samuel Barber. Here we see the great celebration of life in all its facets. The first expresses a desire to share a great lake of beer with the people of heaven, especially with Jesus. Since Jesus was at times accused of having one too many, so the monk is in good company. The second sees something very holy in a pet cat whose mission in life is equal in importance to that of the monk. The third poignantly captures the pilgrimage from birth to death, the delight of seclusion, and the communion of bread and water that sustains. The texts are printed for you.
In the margins, these monks talked about life. To live in the margins is to live in paradox. In our pain is our strength. In our failure is our success. In losing ourselves by caring for others we find ourselves. Living in the margins means walking in places where we will encounter those who have been marginalized by society: people living with AIDS or cancer, those with no medical insurance who live in fear of even a treatable illness they can’t afford to treat, those in prison, or those with no place to live.
Jesus lived in the margins with those robbed of life and taught us to do so as well. He gathered up the folks who were cast aside by society and told them God’s kingdom was made up of the likes of them. It was politically incorrect and he paid for it with his life. In this story Jesus told, the Samaritan and the robbed man were both outcasts. They recognized each other by their common pain. And now he calls us to live in the margins where pain and loss will be our strength and where eyes mindful of God in the form of an old woman or a young boy eating twinkies together or a cat will be quick to recognize the holy.
It is in the margins where we live in playfulness as well. It is here that we will find God, away from the tiresome clangor of ladder climbing and religious dogma. Live a little, Jesus said. We are called to live in the margins of playfulness, with keen eyes for God in cats and robbed men, called to be part of the circle of life where death is a new adventure in the realm of all things holy. When Jesus was accused of enjoying a glass of wine and being a party lover, he did not deny the charges. And as Luke says in this story, go and do thou likewise.
–Gary L. McCann
PASTORAL PRAYER
Force that through the stem drives the flower, drive that beauty through us that we may blossom with the glory of life. As we gather to worship the God of the Ages, be to us a holy presence that we may be nurtured by your spirit as we sing and pray, as we speak and listen.
This is a day you have made; let us revere and enjoy it. May we put aside our worries and our petty concerns to enter fully into the day. May we cast off the weights of jealousy and pride that so easily tempt us down the wrong pathway so that we may frolic in the Light. May we drink deeply of the richness of the moment and taste the sumptuous flavors to be found in people, pets, poems, and pilgrimage.
What we seek for ourselves we seek a hundred fold for those who have brushed shoulders with tragedy this week. Those whose family members are missing, those who have been caught in escalating wars around the globe, those so in despair they have sought solace in addictive behaviors, those whose trust has been betrayed by a friend, farmers anxious about the lack of rain and those recovering from too much rain. Conspire with their spirits to rise above all that would destroy their faith and be to them the eternal force that through the stem of their countenance a flower of hope and joy will blossom.
Even as we pray for these things we realize the responsibility we have to stop beside the road to help those robbed of life. Give us courage to be prayer in the flesh to care for the afflicted, the dying, those whom society has relegated to the sidelines, those who are stretched between heaven and hell, and those who by nature of their birth, their race, their lifestyle or their creed have been beaten up and cast aside. Empower us to change systems that betray the abundant life God intends for everyone.
In our time together in this room, visit us with all that we need to do all that you ask us to do. May our worship be worthy of all that is holy. In the name of the Christ, Amen.
NOTES ON ‘HERMIT SONGS’
Samuel Barber
The G. Schirmir score of Hermit Songs (1954) is preceded by this note:
The Hermit Songs are settings of anonymous Irish texts of the eighth to thirteenth centuries written by monks and scholars, often on the margins of manuscripts they were copying or illuminating–perhaps not always meant to be seen by their Father Superiors. They are small poems, thoughts or observations, some very short, and speak in straightforward, droll, and often surprisingly modern terms of the simple life these men led, close to nature, to animals and to God. Some are literal translations and others, where existing translations seemed inadequate, were especially made by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Robin Flower in The Irish Tradition has written as follows: “It was not only that these scribes and anchorites lived by the destiny of their dedication in an environment of wood and sea; it was because they brought into that environment an eye washed miraculously clear by a continual spiritual exercise that they, first in Europe, had that strange vision of natural things in an almost unnatural purity.”
IV The Heavenly Banquet
Attributed to St. Brigid, 10th century
Translated by Sean O’Faolain
I would like to have the men of Heaven in my own house;
with vats of good cheer laid out for them.
I would like to have the three Marys, their fame is so great.
I would like people from every corner of Heaven.
I would like them to be cheerful in their drinking.
I would like to have Jesus sitting here among them.
I would like a great lake of beer for the King of Kings.
I would like to be watching Heaven’s family
Drinking it through all eternity.
VIII The Monk and His Cat
8th or 9th century
Translated by W. H. Auden
Pangur, white Pangur,
How happy we are
Alone together,
Scholar and cat.
Each has his own work to do daily;
For you it is hunting, for me study.
Your shining eye watches the wall;
my feeble eye is fixed on a book.
You rejoice when your claws
Entrap a mouse;
I rejoice when my mind
Fathoms a problem.
Pleased with his own art,
Neither hinders the other;
Thus we live ever
Without tedium and envy.
Pangur, white Pangur,
How happy we are
Alone together,
Scholar and cat.
X The Desire for Hermitage
8th-9th century
Based on a translation by Sean O’Faolain
Ah! To be all alone in a little cell with nobody near me;
beloved that pilgrimage before the last pilgrimage to Death.
Singing the passing hours to cloudy Heaven;
feeding upon dry bread and water from the cold spring.
That will be an end to evil when I am alone
in a lovely little corner among tombs
far from the houses of the great.
Ah! To be all alone in a little cell,
to be alone, all alone:
Alone I came into the world,
alone I shall go from it.
| Copyright © 2001 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved. |