Ten-Finger Exercises

Preaching on Saturday?

I left a little early from a PEO Christmas party luncheon, to get to a funeral I was presiding at in time to get a parking place nearby. The weather was freezing rain, and yet the place was packed, the funeral home I mean.

For those of you who've never heard of PEO, it's a sorority dedicated to education for women. I thought my sorority days were over in college where I was an Alpha Gamma Delta. I can't say it was ever as meaningful to me as it probably should have. I'm not much of a joiner. I was in Rainbow Girls for all of one meeting. They showed us the carpenter's apron that is a sacred symbol for Masons, and told us to revere it but didn't tell us why. That was enough for me thanks. I didn't go back. And I've never tried to hook up with an alumni group of AGD, although there may have been one somewhere I've lived.

So why, at this ripe old age, did I decide to join a sorority of women who are mostly 10-20 years older than I am (in this particular chapter anyway.) I wanted some connections with women who weren't from the church, although many of them are. Maybe I wanted to be connected to them too, in a different way than being a clergy person. I'm learning to admire these women who grew up in a different culture, the second world war.

Anyway, I had to leave early to get to this funeral. I don't preside at funerals very often, and am always a little unsure of whether they went well. This was no exception. The widower is part of a prestigious university faculty, and his wife was young, in her fifties. They had both "grown up" in church and had not wanted any more of it as adults. That's a common attitude. It's as if they think they learned the basics and, having been "forced" to go to church as children, they don't want any more of it. So when I was preaching, I was hoping that it would interest this man , to show him there is more he might learn and enjoy learning.

He had scripture picked out for me from the King James translation, and so I used the Rite I Burial Office which matches the style of language. "The Lord be with thee. And with thy spirit." I'm sure it sounded formal and outdated to people who go to church regularly, but it was the sound he wanted to hear. I've mentioned before in this blog that the eye is fascinated by new things, but the ear is drawn to what is familiar.

Although the immediate family were no longer church-goers, their adult children probably had not gone to church at all. The siblings of the woman who died were of two very different bents. One appeared to be militantly anti-church, the other had an evangelical ministry to prisoners. And they were easily offended and had been so at their mother's funeral when the pastor said she'd "worked in the field like a man." Duh. But why get offended? Gender issues trigger lots of stuff in some families.

Here's the text of the homily I preached, without the personal information I began and ended it with.

The story of the Good Samaritan is the gospel lesson Mr Blanc chose because it makes him think of Jennifer, who would go out of her way at any and all times to help someone. (The gospel lesson was Luke: 10:25-to the end of the story.)

Let me set the story, from the book of Luke, in context.

A lawyer had posed a question to Jesus to test him. The question was, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus turned the tables on him and asked him what he thought the answer was. The lawyer responded with what is sometimes referred to as the two great commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus said he was correct: “Do this and ye shall live.” The lawyer persisted, asking another question, to vindicate himself. “And who is my neighbor?” he asked.

There was a far-reaching difference of opinion between the rabbis’ interpretation of that summation of the Law and Jesus’s. The rabbis understood loving God to mean being obedient to all 613 commandments that made up the Law. Jesus was convinced that showing love to God meant devotion to God’s purpose of grace and redemption.

The rabbis considered “neighbor” to be limited to a certain group of people, and they debated endlessly over who should and should not be included. Gentiles certainly would not be included, nor Samaritans. So to ask, “Who is my neighbor?” was another test question.

Jesus responded to that question with the story of the Good Samaritan: there was a man who was going from Jerusalem to Jericho, and on his way fell in with robbers and was stripped and beaten until he was almost dead. A priest and a Levite each saw the man and passed him on the opposite side of the road. They didn’t even want to get near him to see if he might be alive and in need of help. They did not want to risk being defiled by a dead person. Then came the Samaritan who found him, and bound up his wounds and carried him to an inn and saw that he was taken care of.

Jesus challenged the lawyer to consider that a semi-pagan foreigner might actually know and do a better job of loving God than did the educated and devout Jew who was so blinded by all the rules.

What Jesus did, essentially, was to say that the lawyer was asking the wrong question. The proper question is, “To whom can I be a neighbor?” and the answer is, “anyone whose need constitutes a claim on my love.”

By all accounts of anyone I’ve met who knew Jennifer, this is what she did best. And then I went on to connect it up.

Heard a big WOOHOO from the office, and watched with Bill as the space shuttle launched. His son John was standing on the beach in Daytona watching too and talking on the phone to Bill. "Holy cow!" is what he said over and over. "It's lighting up the whole sky!"