George Emblom is working on a tune for this hymn.
A HYMN FOR THE FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING
SONNETS ON CREATION, 7: And God rested. . . .
SHOWING OFF THE BAY AREA
Those of us who live in one of the world’s tourism areas commonly observe that we don’t visit the local attractions because, after all, they’re always there and we can do it some other day. Out-of-town visitors provide the principal impetus for us to break out of our rut and see more of where we live. A visit from brother Dan and his wife Ginger gave us just that opportunity this past week and provided us with the excuse for a vacation at home.
It’s not easy to narrow down the attractions of the Bay Area to six days, particularly if you don’t want to exhaust a group of people who are all over 60. So we got a list from them of their desiderata and put in a few of our own. Things started off on a Saturday afternoon with a car tour of Oakland, where we live, including Lake Merritt, of course, and one of our own favorites, Middle Harbor Park. This is a shoreline park with a great view of San Francisco wedged into the Port of Oakland. The port itself, with its huge cranes for handling container ships (said to be the inspiration for the giant walkers in Star Wars) looms at either end; but the park stretches far enough along the shore to have its own sense of open air and holiday within sight of the working world.
Jon treated our guests to a Sunday morning car tour of San Francisco, including a drive down the twisty part of Lombard Street. They also visited Bernard Maybeck’s great Palace of Fine Arts, Alamo Square with its “painted lady” Victorian houses, and the Presidio with its view of the Golden Gate. The afternoon we devoted to a walking tour of our neighborhood, which has several excellent restaurants and interesting shops.
On Monday, we braved the (welcome) showers to visit the two big San Francisco cathedrals that form such a contrast to each other. Both are impressive, but Grace is Episcopal and Gothic while St. Mary’s is Roman Catholic and ‘sixties modern. The architectural contrast is about more than simply design. The Gothic style is interested in detail and diversity, in out-of-the way nooks and crannies, in things that cannot quite be seen but only glimpsed and half-imagined. The modern style of the sixties is much more unitary. There is relatively little of individual interest, but rather a single centralized space dominated by its concrete canopy. Both style make an impression. My own taste votes for the quirkiness of the Gothic, at least for a sacred building. A late lunch at the Cliff House rounded out the morning. The sun had come out. There were a few surfers down below on Ocean Beach. And the food was good—in fact, a great deal better than one has any right to expect at such a spectacular location.
Tuesday was focused on Muir Woods, a place almost as impossible to describe as it is to photograph. There is hardly any way to convey the height of the ancient trees in a forest of coast redwoods. The place is damp and cool and relatively quiet, even with so many visitors. And there is no place else on earth quite like these forests, though the karri trees of Western Australia have a majesty that comes close.
Wednesday was Alcatraz day. The trip there requires advance planning, since tickets sell out quickly. A ferry takes you to the island, where you can then wander pretty much at will till the last ferry leaves for San Francisco in the late afternoon. The walk uphill to the penitentiary proper is good exercise. On the way, you pass the ruins of earlier incarnations of the place, beginning with its role as fortress defending the Golden Gate in the 1850s and prison for Confederate sympathizers in the 1860s.
Neither Jon nor I had been to Alcatraz before. I had read about the rehabilitation of the gardens, and they were indeed rewarding. Even in the quiet garden time of November, they were still interesting and attractive with their variety of succulents. And the views from the island are incomparable. Even the prison itself proved more interesting than we expected, given that neither of us is an aficionado of “true crime.”
Thursday, we all went to Napa, where my sister Wanda has a small vineyard called “Miller’s Pond” in the Coombsville AVA. The day included a drive to St. Helena and lunch at the wonderful Farmstead restaurant, where much of the food is grown onsite. We tasted wine at one winery on the way back from lunch while Dan, who prefers beer, waited patiently until that particular bit of the trip was done with. Then a visit to Whole Foods for the ingredients of a light supper at Wanda’s farm.
At that point Ginger announced that she had been able to check off everything on the list of what she had most wanted to see, which gave us Friday as a day devoted mostliy to rest and recovery—with lunch at Zachary’s Pizza, a Rockridge mainstay.
It was a vacation for us, I think, as much as for Dan and Ginger. It’s even taken us a couple of days to “re-enter” our routines, much as if we had been somewhere far away for that time.
SONNETS ON CREATION, 6: Let us make man in our image. . . .
SONNETS ON CREATION, 5: . . . bring forth abundantly
SONNETS ON CREATION, 4: And God made the great lights. . . .
SONNETS ON CREATION, 3: Let the earth bring forth grass. . .
ENCOUNTERING GOD
A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA
22nd Sunday After Pentecost, October 25, 2015
Proper 25B: Job 42:1-6, 10-17; Psalm 34:1-8 (19-22); Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52
We’ve heard two strange and difficult stories in our readings this morning, both centering around an encounter with the power of God. It’s a good thing we have stories like this because there’s really no other good way of talking about our encounters with God. As soon as the great mystics start trying to find other language, they start sounding, well, mystical and, for most of us, confusing.
These two stories are very different in some ways—and very much alike in others. And they both deserve closer examination.
The first, from the Book of Job, is really just the tail end of a very long story. Some of you will have heard Bill Trego say more about it last Sunday. In very brief summary, Job is God’s devoted friend. But Satan, the celestial Attorney General, challenges Job’s sincerity and God allows Satan to inflict terrible suffering on him to test him. Job’s old friends gather around. They intend to comfort him, but they wind up in a theological argument about what he must have done to deserve such suffering. They want him to ‘fess up. He insists that he’s done nothing wrong. But he has no explanation for what has happened to him. The one thing he keeps insisting on is that he wants to meet the God who used to be his friend and now seems to be acting like an enemy.
At the end of the book, Job finally gets the meeting he asked for. God unveils for him something of God’s inexhaustible creative power and says, in effect, “Do you really want to go head to head with me?” Then, in today’s reading, we heard Job’s response:
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;
therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.
This overwhelming encounter with God leaves no room for questions and theological arguments. Job understands who he’s up against and gives in. And yet . . . and yet, he still dares to speak: to address God, the God whom he has known both as friend and, so it seemed, enemy. His words are filled with awe. But they have the ring of authentic faith. God and Job are divided by absolute difference—the distance between the One who is all-powerful and the mortal two-legged creature that is humanity. And still, they speak here to one another; they commune with one another. The Job who can say, in effect, “I see now that I am, by comparison, nothing,” still knows that he has been given the privilege of speaking with God as friend, face to face.
Our other story comes from the Gospel of Mark, at the time when Jesus is on his way up to Jerusalem. Jericho was the last city on the pilgrim road that led there, the last real chance to turn back and avoid the authorities in Jerusalem. There is a sense of gathering danger even in the opening words of the story: “As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho. . .” Aah! that large crowd that will play such a big part in the events to come, sometimes cheering him on, sometimes calling for his death. Events are taking on a momentum of their own. Room for maneuver is shrinking.
And then Jesus hears a lone voice calling for him—as persistent and obnoxious as the voice of Job demanding an interview with God. Many other voices, like the voices of Job’s comforters, “sternly ordered [the man] to be quiet, but he cried out” ever more loudly. And Jesus halts the whole unwieldy parade to respond: “What do you want me to do for you?” “Rabboni, let me see again.” “Go, your faith has made you well.” This brief conversation with the blind man seems almost incidental. But it was, for the blind beggar, just as unpredictable, just as improbable, just as overwhelming as God’s much longer conversation with Job.
There’s something odd in the way Mark tells the story—a signal to us to pay attention. We learn the blind beggar’s name: Bartimaeus. (Mark seldom gives a name to any of the people who have brief interactions with Jesus in his Gospel.) And then Mark explains the name for us: Bartimaeus means “Son of Timaeus.” Well that doesn’t help much, does it? Let’s put it all into into English: “Son of Worthyman.” (For that is what timaeus means in Greek.) This man didn’t deserve to be blind any more than Job deserved his sufferings. Like Job, he is suffering without cause. Like Job, he utters an insistent demand for God’s attention. And like Job, he gets it.
It seems we have two figures here who are both worthy people, whose sufferings in this world are undeserved. And both of them have a strong enough hope in God that they will go on calling out for some meeting, some understanding, some conversation. The people around them tell them they’ve been cast off, but that doesn’t stop them.
This is, I think, a widespread human experience. Maybe we don’t consider ourselves worthy, much less sinless. But what human being has deserved every last misfortune and difficulty that befalls us? Perhaps we have to be pushed pretty hard before we call God to account. But here, in these stories, are two figures who did that and who are held up to us as models. They are models of real, honest prayer: direct, straightforward, insistent.
And in both these cases, the people who called on God received good things. Bartimaeus received his sight. Job got his wealth back and received a new family in place of the old. Is that the point? Just pray the right way and God will take care of everything? No. There are too many examples to the contrary in scripture to think that it’s that simple. God does work miracles in our world—things that cause us to marvel and fill us with hope and new life. But God is not under contract. Miracles are not something guaranteed to follow on the correct execution of the right sort of prayer.
The real point of these stories comes in what follows—not in the miracles of healing and restoration, but in the change that comes over these human interlocutors with God. Bartimaeus, at Jesus’ word, “immediately regained his sight,” Mark tells us, “and followed him on the way.” He joined the disciples and the crowd going up to Jerusalem. If we had asked him before what he would do if he should regain his sight, he would probably have said, “I’ll go home and get back to work at my business—and maybe read a book.” Instead, he launched himself into a dangerous adventure—a new, bigger, more challenging kind of life than he had ever imagined. That can happen to us when we face up to God. He could tell that danger might lie ahead. He went anyway.
The change may be a little harder to see in Job because Job’s world was so different from ours. But you may have noticed how oddly the story ended. God restores Job to wealth and family. And then we’re told that Job does something new and different with what has been given to him:
He also had seven sons and three daughters. He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers.
Seven sons and three daughters—the same kind of family as before. But two things have changed. First, we’re told the names of Job’s daughters—something that rarely happens in the Scriptures of Israel. It implies that Job’s perspective has changed. Before the disaster, he valued his sons. Now, it is his children he values. The daughters are specifically noted, even though the sons are never named.
And, a further step, Job makes his daughters heirs alongside their brothers. This goes far beyond the norm of familial justice assumed in the rest of the Old Testament. Sons inherit; daughters get married off. But Job, after his encounter with God, is actually building a new kind of world. Having seen the splendor of God face to face and confronted his own human weakness and mortality, he responds with a kind of humanity and generosity he never conceived before.
Job saw and conversed with God and then gave up trying to figure things out. Instead of explanations, he chose a new life of generosity. Bartimaeus received his sight from Jesus. Instead of going back to his old life, he embarked on a new life of uncertainty and daring, following the one who had communicated God’s power in healing him. There is the heart of both stories. To encounter God won’t give us any explanations, won’t settle any questions, won’t solve all our future problems. But it will give us a new and bigger life—one that we probably could not have imagined without it.
We could put it all in more theoretical terms. But the stories say it better. Meeting God makes the world new. And sooner or later, it will be given to those who seek it.
AUTUMN GARDENING
Under the influence of San Francisco Bay, the Oakland autumn plays itself out in a way that will seem very strange to people in most other parts of the US. September is apt to be sunny and warm (even hot); it is more like summer than our actual summer months, which are kept cool by influences from the ocean. October is also warm; but with the gradually shortening days and lengthening nights, one begins to feel that autumn is indeed in progress. Leaf drop begins in earnest, hastened this year by our prolonged drought. The month is summer and autumn rolled into one. Only in November (El Niño consenting) can we expect the rainy season to set in. Even then, there will probably be no weather cold enough to leave a trace of morning frost until late December.
Still, with plants from so many parts of the world growing here, the garden looks like autumn. Tuberous begonias have dropped their flowers and are beginning to drain the energy from their foliage. The leaves of the apricot tree are turning the same red-tinged gold that one hopes to see again in next year’s fruit. Everything is slowing down. A few pots of chrysanthemums add color here and there. A couple of Sedum sieboldii have put on their dusty pink flowers, a perfect compliment to their grey green leaves.
There is harvest, too. The year gave us a bountiful crop of quinces: some turned into membrillo (my first try at it), some into a tasty stew with lamb, some into pie, some frozen for future needs. The fig tree, gift long ago from Father Tom Schultz, OHS, has at last settled in enough to give us a bounty of figs, including enough for the squirrels as well. (Good thing, since they get their share first, of course.) The’ve made for thiis autumn’s particular treat—splitting them and grilling them briefly over charcoal to go with whatever else was cooking there.
Still, autumn brings plenty of garden work. The Oscularia have expanded exuberantly and need cropping back before they completely overrun the path. (In the late spring, they will put on a show much like the Sedum sieboldiii, but with more intensely pink flowers.) Lavenders need pruning. The quince and apricot and fig will need it, too; but that will wait till they’ve dropped their leaves.
There will be bulbs to plant soon as well—and always the challenge of finding the right places: where they can be enjoyed from the windows while the spring is still cold, but where they’ll be out of the way of other projects. The thing about bulbs is that I always forget where I’ve planted them, making them a great surprise when they come up. My reward at the moment: a small clump of autumn crocuses (Crocus sativa, the kind from which Spanish saffron is made) in full bloom. Their comrades have all either perished or refuse to do anything more than send up leaves in the spring. For some reason, this clump alone has found the spot it likes.
It’s a pleasure to be in the garden on a cool October afternoon. Part of it is the relief from too much sun and heat, which wilt this septuagenarian pretty quickly. But the other part is simply the comfortable sense of being in the year’s late afternoon, a time of putting things away, settling toward dinner, evening, bedtime.
Sonnets on Creation, 2—Let there be a firmament
