Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 7, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
A prophet without honor
They shall know that a prophet has been among them.
Listening to Spanish in the morning at the Super 8. Salt and pepper on biscuits and gravy. Coffee. Black and hot and down my throat.
How warm my seat, how hot my temple. Visiting Sunday churches in a lesser-known land, always a visitor – that’s what I want, I guess. No commitments, no expectations. Pip himself wanted less expectations, but Father Dickens wouldn’t stand for it. Someone had to be a hero.
I don’t care who the hero is. We’ll start this morning at Bethel, famous for its music, and then I’ll head for a small Anglican chapel, where most every word will be scripted, and I can follow along, and sing the songs.
Here we are catching fire on a sunny day – God’s presence now in the blue sky, now in the church and then another church, now among the books and latte at Barnes and Noble, and suddenly, in silence.
We’ve been coming here for years, for decades, as long as our son Chris has lived, and he’s 43. And every year I’m always drawn to visit churches. In India those 40 years would have begun with me as student, moving swiftly into years as householder. But now my house is built, our kids are grown, retirement (of sorts) upon us, and so it’s time to explore the woods, be a “forest dweller,” as they say in India, and see what I can find.
See what God shows me – that’s more like it. Just keep your eyes open, David. Listen for the warm. Hold your fingers to the fire until they almost burn. Pastor Steve in Bloomington tells us, “Humans are far too great creatures to be satisfied with anything on earth. Only make friends with Jesus, walk with him, listen, learn. In every moment he gives us life forever.”
Forest dwellers return with heaven in their eyes, to sannyasa, and they move closer to renunciation of personal claims and dependence on God alone. No longer any earthly good? Homeless? This world is not my home. Hungry? Man does not live on bread alone.
Fall asleep awhile, and maybe an angel will bake you bread and put cool water there beside your head. I’m looking at a bowl of oranges and bananas beside me, waiting to be eaten. But if they were not there, would I be satisfied with the angel’s cake, fresh in my mind from that chapter in 1 Kings?
My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness. I am content for the sake of Christ, for when I am weak, then I am strong.
I do believe there are new rules this week about not sleeping outside without a permit. And permits are hard to come by if you have no address, and no money. I could go back to the forest for awhile, I guess, if I can figure out a way to get there.
Before Medicare, the old Indians, at least in Larry McMurtry’s stories, loaded their bedroll on a horse, and set out for the place they had picked when they were young, their particular place to wait and die. They would unroll their blanket, and lie down there.
Then after awhile someone came and found them and buried them, singing the mourning songs over them, weeping for their hero, before they looked around for their own good place to die.
No hurry, just getting ready, be patient with the Rolling Wheel.
As the Lord spoke to me, the spirit entered into me and set me on my feet.
(Ezekiel 2, Psalm 123, 2 Corinthians 12, Luke 4, Mark 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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