Let the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts
Be acceptable in thy sight
O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.
The phone rang.
“Turn on the television!”
“What channel?”
“Any channel!”
Twenty years ago something happened that everybody noticed.
Events today still reverberate with what happened that morning.
Two thousand years ago something happened that almost nobody noticed. At first.
Just another Roman execution. Best to just get on with business as usual.
Around Jesus as he was led to the cross through the marketplace streets of Jerusalem, business continued as usual.
But then something else happened. Quietly. And really, almost nobody noticed. At first.
Women went to the tomb of the dead body of their savior and he was not there.
Quietly the word spread.
Shock and sorrow gave way to rage and fear twenty years ago. Retaliation was sought. A blind giant struck out in all directions, setting on his known enemies.
Shock and sorrow two thousand years ago were superseded by hope and a cautious joy. Life did not get easier for the disciples: it got harder. For he had warned them, to Peter’s dismay. Yes, I am the Messiah, but keep it quiet -- and listen: the Son of Man must suffer and be rejected and be killed and after three days rise again.
This is not what we signed up for, Jesus. Is this not the day you will restore the kingdom of Israel? Are we to give up hope? We cannot look for another: you hold the way of life.
You must go with me, on the way, not around the passion, but through it, and through the way of the Cross peace will come to all people. This is the way of joy, of life, of love.
Many times in our world we would like to respond like John Wayne: if the other guy throws the first punch, you can go to town on him. Or on anybody who looks like him.
All too quickly we insert ourselves in conflicts between brothers, taking sides where no side can be helpful. Intervention in faraway places out of altruism or greed, seemingly to make the world safe for business and democracy, often leads to harm, or disaster.
How frustrating it is that twenty years of endless war has militarized a generation and left the extremists in charge in one place and chaos in another. We cannot impose democracy by force, top down. We should know that by now.
Futility, nobility, sacrifice: the story of twenty years. Look at the monster Rome made of itself endless seeking security, pushing its boundaries ever outward, for one less enemy, one less threat.
That endless search for security through force eventually imploded.
In the end it was the way of grace that prevailed. That small and scared band of followers at the foot of the cross - or in hiding - became many and brave. Fearless witnesses to love, willing after all to pick up their crosses and follow.
Security, identity, compassion, community: found not in force or violent responses to violence, the sense of belonging not of soldiers but of witnesses. It is in that giving up that they found themselves, in that loss that they gained, in that service, freedom.
A Franciscan put it this way in a familiar prayer: Let me be an instrument of peace.
This is not the easy way. It is not safe, not as the world knows safe. It is the way of the cross, through death to life.
What does it profit to gain the world but to lose one’s life? One’s soul? Follow the one who lived with integrity, who through the giving of his life gave new life to all.
A teacher of mine, Paul Lee from Santa Cruz, said that he’s been thinking about the idea that bad mouthing is negative prayer.
Today drawing on the letter of James, it would be so easy to talk about parish gossip or demagoguery or whispering campaigns or gratuitous backstabbing or all the other ways in which the tongue is a nasty weapon, the abuse that people vent on each other even in their own homes...
There are those negative things all right, but we can grasp the positive ways in which speech can be a builder-up of life as it is meant to be, indeed we know from Philippians that: “Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”
Every tongue confess: so ultimately our speech should coincide with the speech of God, that is the word of God, that is Jesus Christ himself: in fact our speech should be immersed in Christ as we dwell in Christ.
The 19th Psalm ends “and let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you oh Lord my rock and my redeemer” - my rock, my strength, my fortress, my stronghold. From that strong safe place in the cleft of the rock that is God‘s heart, we can speak the truth in love.
The letter of James talks about the tongue as a small member that boasts of great exploits, of the tongue being like small flame that starts a great fire, and James acknowledges that everyone makes mistakes in speaking and we all need humility and repentance and the chance to realize how what we say can build up community, society, even the kingdom of God
Twenty years ago something happened that everybody noticed. We are still today reacting to what happened that morning.
Because this is the nearest Sunday to the 20th anniversary of the Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States in New York and Washington DC and the ensuing wars against Afghanistan and then Iraq are much on our minds today, and as Kabul has been retaken and therefore Afghanistan has been re-taken by the Islamist revolutionaries who had harbored the ones who plotted and planned and executed the terrorist attacks of 20 years ago.
What has been gained and what has been lost? After 20 years of blood toil tears and sweat, of death and destruction, of hopes raised and lowered, of a generation of young women at last having a chance to be educated, to breathe more freely, who now face an uncertain future in the land of their birth, the whole generation that’s grown up after the American intervention in their countries…
What will happen to those women, those girls, their brothers? What will happen to them now that Afghanistan is ruled again by an extremist ideology? and what will it mean for the countries around them? What does it mean for those countries as they become more surrounded by extreme ideologies? What will it mean for those who are minorities: Christian, Zoroastrian, Baha’i, Hindu, Jain, animist, followers of other religions or none? What will it mean for them, for their safety, for their ability to worship or not worship?
In America we have four freedoms which will be familiar to anyone who sings the song of Zachariah, of freedom to worship without fear: the four freedoms that were articulated by a president back in the 1930s capture something very American: freedom of speech, freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of worship.
Four freedoms that should be true for everyone. Will it be true for the people of the Middle East and south Asia, of Afghanistan and Iraq?
True security, trust and freedom from fear, comes from following the way of wisdom which is the way of life with God: the way that Jesus calls us to follow.
True security, trust and freedom from fear, are so often offered by those who do not truly have them to offer: demagogues, authoritarians, simple cookbook wisdom alternatives (“... do these 10 things and you’ll be free…”) yet the way of wisdom is the way to freedom from fear.
This seems especially relevant today as we look at so many around us and wonder why they are the way they are, why we are we the way we are, when our politics or personal contact or relationships with others, our attitudes towards strangers we see casually and judge mentally, seem to be based on a desire for a release from the fear and a release of the anger that that fear instills in us; we seek so often for comfort and security and identity in some false gods and false path when we could be following the way of Christ.
***
Twenty years ago, first thing in the morning my uncle called and said to turn on the television. I asked what channel and he said any channel, so I did, and I saw something unbelievable, unreal: airplanes flying into the side of the building.
When I went out to get the paper, it was already on the stoop: my neighbor had brought it and put a note under the rubber band: “turn on your television” and there it was again and again and again: repeats of what happened that morning in New York City.
And then later my brother called from the Washington area, as we had set up a family disaster system: if you were on the East Coast and you were under threat you called somebody on the West Coast, if you were on the West Coast you could call and say I’m all right, I’m all right, I’ve survived the earthquake or the wildfire or the flood or whatever it was. In this case the airplane had flown into the Pentagon, two airplanes had flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and one airplane had been brought down in a field in Pennsylvania that was intended perhaps for the Capitol building in Washington DC - it was unbelievable, unforgettable, it changed our world.
At first other nations poured out their sympathy. Said the president of France, “We are all Americans now,” and suddenly we felt close to people in Tel Aviv or other places who had had terrorist attacks as they sat at sidewalk cafés or walked down the street or rode a bus: this was much larger in terms of damage and fatalities but it was of a kind and we were all of a kind: human kind.
Yet before you knew it the United States had attacked Afghanistan and then Iraq, so like other world spanning powers before us we became involved in conflicts on the far side of the world.
So how do we now as we speak of these events on a Sunday, when the epistle focuses on the word of God and of speaking rightly in his praise and rightly in terms of a positive and loving attitude? How do we speak about or think about the terrible events of 20 years ago in their long lasting event effects?
Well for one thing I think we can choose to be among those who speak positively of what can be spoken of positively, we speak hopefully of what can be spoken of with hope; and we proclaim God‘s kingdom, God‘s goodness, his ultimate triumph over evil, the triumph of good through the Cross.
That’s why we try to curb our own tongues as we speak to others, even in the simplest ways: in the checkout line at the grocery store or speaking about people we do not like or do not know or those close to us. How do we speak positively, how do we find not in this tragedy a good thing but in this kingdom of God a good thing?
What could we do differently, what should we do, what should we have done: all those questions are part of the heartbreak but the question to ask is where we move from disillusionment and disgust, a feeling of betrayal or loss or grief or anger or fear or nothing? How will we move from there to a place not of despair but of hope?
Hope is the last thing you would expect Jesus followers to have as they watched him expire on a Cross suspended above the heads of the few who watched.
Hope was far from anyone’s mind you would think and yet on the morning of the third day it came in an astonishing way, beyond hope to something like love and joy, and somehow that became the response of these bereft, grieving, lost people.
A peacemaking specialist told me the other day that when people had sat behind tables with name tags and microphones and spoke to each other formally they didn’t make a lot of progress until they got away from the table and their name tags and began to relate to each other on a human, even spiritual, level, as they broke bread together.
Which is after all what we’re about isn’t it? We here do not separate people into camps and choose one side: what we do here is all come to the common table in the name of Christ, to the glory of God, and ask for the prince of peace to reign in our hearts and in this world as he does in heaven.
Among the many songs Linda Ronstadt performed and recorded was one by Bob Marley entitled “By the rivers of Babylon” which draws on verses from two Psalms that you may hear this fall in many churches: the last verse of Psalm 19, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord my strength and my redeemer,” and the beginning of Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon…” which is a sad and angry lament about being in exile.
Invocation is often the use of that first phrase: a preacher will say it before he begins to preach. But we rarely hear the second because of the anger and even rage that psalm expresses as the words go on from the beginning of the experience of exile.
Yet many of us do feel in exile or as a stranger in a strange land from time to time even in a familiar place or somewhere far away from home.
After the initial expression of loss, sorrow, and grief from psalm 19 the reggae song takes an interesting turn: moving to the hopeful and prayerful expressions of psalm 19, “Let the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart be acceptable in thy sight.”
In these times it is especially welcome to have those last words of Psalm 19 so that we don’t immure ourselves in lasting despair or dwell in gratuitous negativity as we discuss these events.
So let the words we speak, and the meditations at the deepest root of our being, be thoughts of praise and words of hope.
The Lessons Appointed for Use on the Sunday closest to September 14
Proper 19 Year B RCL Track 2
Isaiah 50:4-9a. Psalm 116:1-8. James 3:1-12. Mark 8:27-38.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mto7cdYDrxI
The Episcopal Church of Saint Matthew, Tucson.
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