Notes for the Week Tenth Sunday after Pentecost August 9 2020

Do you remember when it was cold and snowy and we wondered whether we would be snowed out of our Christmas Day service, and we were? That was a couple of years or so ago, and then last year, there really wasn’t much snow, but it was cold enough.  It was Christmas-tide, snow or no snow, and people put up lights and decorations, and businesses painted their windows with snowy winter scenes, reminiscent of what everyone thinks Christmas should be: snow-covered fir trees among the streets and in the woods, and in living rooms, to be festooned with memories and under planted with gifts.

Little did we know what was coming. 

Just weeks later, doors were shut. “Someone’s knockin’ at the door; somebody’s ringin’ the bell…” and that is as far as the lyrics can go for now.  Who is that masked stranger knockin’? Don’t open the door and whatever you do, don’t let it in!

The world still wonders, like an innocent child, if the days of opening doors, and receiving with open arms, will ever be real again.  It wonders why its way of being, its deeply felt longings for welcome expression and recognition of self and other, is being  turned upside down, emptied out of all the way things are expected to be. As if it half expects to wake up from a bad dream, finding all as it was before.

But the painted Christmas scenes, still looking at us in August, force us to stare back at the reality of our once-innocent unknowing of what the future would hold.  The innocent one waiting patiently at the door is small and delicate and in a very different place than it expected the world would allow it to be, and we begin to realize that a  little bit of innocence is alright. Just like a little bit of creation, we too can plant ourselves firmly in a doorway of expectation and hope, as if waiting patiently and innocently for it to open up again to life as we knew it. 

Then was then, and now is now.  Looking back, we were innocent of understanding then what we deem now as a much more innocent time.  We wouldn’t have thought so at Christmas.  Then, we might have looked back fifty years in search of our innocence.  But now, we’re looking back just a few months, and we find there that measure of innocence that existed even in our desire for a more innocent time.  It makes one wonder if, fifty years from now, people will look back on this time and deem it far more innocent than 2070 could ever hope to be again.  I think they will, and so innocence must be here, somewhere.

Perhaps, deep down in each of us, there is an emerging knowledge about our common humanity, no matter who we are or where we are, or how we got here. To know that we are still learning, still discovering, still finding ways to bring loving support amid the chaos, means that we are not yet too jaded to have hope and trust in the way we might yet need to go.  Hope begets renewed dedication and determination to grow, no matter what.  Be it COVID, calamity, chaos and confusion, here there and everywhere, each of us has the capacity and the inward desire to keep calm and carry on, no matter the measure of how good we are at it.  To carry on is to keep moving forward with hope and with courage and with humor and humble grace-filled confidence in our ability to find a small way to light up the world with a simple presence, powerful enough to throw into the mix that will help us all survive. 

Perhaps that’s why God didn’t want Adam and Eve to go near the apples hanging so temptingly from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  To keep our innocence is to allow ourselves to discover life as it is, with all its possibilities for hopefulness and as we find ourselves filled with hope within it. It was Stephen Hawking who coined the phrase, “Where there is life, there is hope.”  St. Paul said, “Not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint…..”

All we grownups think we need to know it all, and indeed, we do need to keep a grasp on what’s happening and the way things are going.  But we guard fiercely against being jaded or grasping at anything that will give us instant answers, right or wrong, helpful or dangerous. Rather, by relying on a little patient innocence, born of hope, faith, love, and a little beauty, might just lead us into whatever bit of new creation God really does want us to find knocking at our door.

We journey together,

Mother Esme+

“He will make your innocence radiate like the dawn,

and the justice of your cause will shine like the noonday sun.  (Psalm 37:6 NLT)