The Empress and the Sinner

My wife told me a story once about the funeral of a great Empress. A grand procession accompanied her remains to the cathedral and when they arrived at the doors, a voice from within asked, “Who seeks entry?” And a herald pounded on the great doors and proclaimed, “Open! For the Great Empress, Protector of the Faith, etc., etc., etc.” - and the doors remained closed. “I do not know her.” Again. The doors stayed shut. Then finally the herald humbly asked, “Please open the doors for Catherine, a sinner, a child of your own redeeming.” The doors opened wide. And the welcome was glorious.

This story comes to mind this week for a couple of reasons. Two festivals are coming up in the Church calendar, one right after the other: All Saints and All Souls. On November 1st while we are recovering from a candy binge we remember the Saints of the Church recognized in our calendar. On the following day we remember All Faithful Departed,  All Souls, that is, a commemoration of every one, known and unknown, who has gone before us into glory.

And the other reason is that the story of the empress resonates with a parable of Jesus… which I will tell here with the labels removed from the characters. 

“Two people went up to the temple to pray. One …stood and prayed about himself with these words, ‘God, I thank you that I’m not like everyone else—crooks, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this person here. I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of everything I receive.’ But the other stood at a distance. He wouldn’t even lift his eyes to look toward heaven. Rather, he struck his chest and said, ‘God, show mercy to me, a sinner.’ I tell you, this person went down to his home justified rather than the other. All who lift themselves up will be brought low, and those who make themselves low will be lifted up.” (Luke 18:10-14, Common English Bible, paraphrased)

“God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” is the prayer at the heart of this gospel story. In fact, in folk tradition, this prayer becomes ‘the Jesus prayer’ - the prayer one may recite repeatedly until it sinks into one’s heart. It can become a reflex, a prayer as close as breath, one that accompanies every step.

Of course in Boy Scouts the closest to a prayer that accompanied every step was, “A hundred bottles of beer on the wall.” Not so eternally sustaining. 

Many people have versions of the Jesus Prayer, simpler or more elaborate than the prayer of the man in the Temple, building on it or stripping it down to a simple “Je-sus” inhale/exhale, or adding words, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

And of course there is a long tradition of other repeated recited prayers. 

This one can be ours, as people of faith. Or as sinners. To be more accurate. And to be a bit humble about it. Nobody really owns this prayer; but one may own up to it.

The great empress, when all her finery had been folded and put away, was still a soul in search of God. Of mercy. 

And the Psalms remind us that, 

Our sins are stronger than we are, but you will blot them out.

and that we are welcome, not because of our own merit or position or greatness in the world, or conversely our practiced pieties, but because God is great and God is gracious. 

In other religious traditions we come across a saying that could be taken from the Psalms, “Let these words be written above my throne: ‘My mercy always prevails over my wrath.’” 

In other words, however tremblingly terrifyingly true it might be that God’s holiness and majesty, and our faltering failings, may be in chasmic distance from each other, God will come to us, as Jesus came, to bridge that gap between unutterable majesty and ineffable holiness, and our own - rightly acknowledged - humble condition.

The good news is that God does not leave us in despair, or the loneliness of sin, but comes to us, and brings us home.

Happy are they whom you choose and draw to your courts to dwell there! they will be satisfied by the beauty of your house, by the holiness of your temple. Awesome things will you show us in your righteousness, O God of our salvation, O Hope of all the ends of the earth and of the seas that are far away. (Psalm 65:3,4-6)

Father John Leech is a priest associate of the Episcopal Church of Saint Matthew in Tucson.

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http://edgeofenclosure.org/proper25c.html

Two unusual sources of inspiration from Prof. Laura Hollengreen's University Humanities Seminar on World War One and the Avant-Garde:

Jay Winter, “Homecomings:  The Return of the Dead,” in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press,1995), 15-28.

Allyson Booth, “Corpselessness” in Postcards from the Trenches:  Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War (New York and Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1996) 21-49. 

The Arizona Daily Star published a version of this essay under the title “Humble yourself to be lifted up” in its Keeping the Faith feature, Home + Life section, Sunday November 6th 2022, E3. https://arizonadailystar-az.newsmemory.com/?selDate=20221106&goTo=E03&artid=4

waiting for rain

Ted Ramirez from Tubac has a song about the time of year just past - about waiting for rain. It is a cheerful song, sung in June, waiting for the monsoon. The rains will come - haven’t they always? And all this dry ground will moisten. Rivers will run, green will show among the brown. Mosquitoes will hover; termites take wing. The birds are happy. And there is the smell of creosote after the rain. Hope.

Hope. Scattered seeds. Scientifically and practically, as Joann Lee from San Francisco observes, we place our seeds cautiously in the garden, in neat rows, tilled carefully. Soil prepared, supplements added, nurture required.

It seems almost farcical to suggest a sower throwing arms wide, seed scattering here and there… indiscriminately? We don’t do it it this way -- usually.

Though as we speak a counter-example sits on my mantelpiece: mesquite pods of a rare variety. I’ve been encouraged by the giver to toss them into a wash just as the monsoon starts… And here where some oaks used to grow, cattle have unconsciously spread mesquite pods of a common variety wherever they sense moisture and shade enough to pause in…

Some gardener, huh? Rocks, weeds, thorns - and good soil.

Wherever that might be. Cracks in the pavement. There are towns where I lived once, San Francisco for example, where there seemed to be no green thing for miles, except in parks - just concrete. Before the urban tree movement. And Brooklyn -- you wouldn’t know it, looking at brownstone buildings lined up in closed ranks, but behind and between the stone facades are gardens, green things, and occasionally now a community garden in a vacant lot.

But that is not enough, not what it’s all about. Sure, there are farms, big and small, organic gardeners and agrichemical giants.

The seed that grows between, behind, among, and inside the buildings -- the Word of God -- falls more indiscriminately, apparently. A seed lies dormant in a human soul for years and miles. One day something brings it moisture and nurture, and it grows. May be concerns, bitterness, indifference can stop the process - or can it?

Is grace inexorable? Does it miss us sometimes?

This story seems not to be about gardening. It’s a simpler, stranger story, a challenge to be worked out. Parable itself seems to mean, literally, to throw alongside, to scatter about. Jesus the punster. And sower - for he himself throws out to us this story.

To scatter, broadcast: that’s what we do. For all our niche marketing and careful planning, it’s the seeds of hope that we drop unconsciously or unconcernedly, without an agenda, that may lodge, grow, and lead to fruitful life.

There is a story about an old Scottish minister looking back at the end of his life, over the course of his career, and a question came. Did you ever convert anybody? Did you ever bring the gospel into anyone’s heart? No, I don’t think so -- unless it was that little Davey Livingstone…

David Livingstone, who went on to a life of missionary service in Africa.

Now such things are less fashionable. But the people -- the descendants of the people who heard the Word from such as David Livingstone -- are grateful.

For the missions, indiscriminate as they may have been, left behind some seeds to grow.

Material benefits -- clean water, epidemic diseases eradicated, healthier food, educated children -- but notably all this came from a greater good, that ordered them and made sense of them all: to reconcile our souls to God in Christ.

This is still the mission of Christian service, underlying all our efforts and activities, and to be reaffirmed … as it was this last week by my wife’s relief and development organization, refocusing their efforts in light of the greater mission, for all is done in the name of Christ.

And so those seemingly random efforts have behind them a hope and a promise, that under God’s grace and with his assurance, his word will not return to him empty.

And the rains will come and water the earth.

May it be with us as you have purposed. Amen.

Isaiah 55:10-13

Psalm 65: 9-14
Romans 8:1-11

Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

The Book of Common Prayer. New York: Oxford. 231.

Joann H. Lee, “Living the Word”, The Christian Century, June 21, 2017, 19.

Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, Nourishing News, July 2017.