Deuteronomy 11:18-21, 26-28
9th Sunday after Epiphany - Year A
Proper 4 (9) - Year A
Blessings and Curses abound. Our tendency is to focus on one or the other. This is a great theological divide between people—as great a division as the languages at Babel.
Is your initial orientation to life a glass half-full or half-empty and how do you account for the experiences of life that point in the other direction? Between recognizing our proclivities and overcoming our resistance to change lies the experience of Pentecost or any other epiphany.
Habituation is one of the realities we need to take into account as we attempt to stay up-to-date with a next stage of growth in our understanding of ourselves and our experiences. After we walk past the same picture for a week, it becomes a space holder. We know what is generally there but it has lost a connection with our latest experiences and is either misapplied to them or lost track of.
We take our last learning and codify it. Then we tack it up or carry it as a hammer to adjust every new situation to the way we have decided it should be.
To bind a past experience to our life is to blind ourselves to a current choice able to lead us beyond a mere continuation of the past to a jump to a preferred future.
Yes, write down your experiences. Interpret them along the way. But be ready to thank them for bringing you thus far along the way and to bid them as fond a farewell as you have to teddy bears of yore. There is a new choice to be made and a new basis for making that choice.
- - - - - - -
mementos in hand
cry out for eternity
never satisfied
for a moment
choices arriving
set a new moment
yearning
for a chance
cry out for eternity
never satisfied
for a moment
set a new moment
yearning
for a chance
As found in Wrestling Year A: Connecting Sunday Readings with Lived Experience
In my local community we are wrestling with a statue depicting the 10 Commandments, from the movie of the same name, in a public park (dedicated to youth who worked to refute a flood back in the 1960's).
Here is a divide between the two sections of the text. Is the statue to be bound on our public forehead or is it to be lived in everyday lives? The two sides volley many words past one another without touching any helpful interface.
Here we have a sense of the magical nature of words, in and of themselves, that construct our perception of reality (vv. 18-21) and the need to go past them into actual behaviors that make a difference in people's lives (vv. 26-28).
A part of our struggle is with blessings - how long can they remain the same (one generation, two, many)? Is it -- once blessed, always blessed? Is it that blessings need to be renewed to remain blessings? Is it that some blessings need to be discarded in order to be renewed as a blessing? Is it that blessings are always provisional?
Pray, "give us this day our daily blessing." Then, go ahead, choose. Choose your blessing. Follow where it leads. You will be surprised.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2002/june2002.html
Blessings and Curses abound. Our tendency is to focus on one or the other. This is a great theological divide between people, as great as the language issue at Babel.
Are you the glass half-full or half-empty person in your initial orientation and how do you account for the experiences of life that point in the other direction? Between recognizing our proclivities and overcoming our resistance to change lies the experience of Pentecost.
The pericope for today is pretty mechanical. It speaks of building an escape pod that is somehow to be so formative that the blessing/curse genetics of human beings will be reduced to that of only being a blessing for God (not by God).
It is as if God has been talking to “himself” again and plans this re-creation with a big negative (flood) and an expanded positive (expanded food chain to all creatures rather than just plants). I expect we were to learn to acquiese to God because there would always be the threat of a flood (well, a fire next time) hanging over our heads.
This is different than living in a garden protected from the ravages of chaos. How can you expect a future threat, unexperienced, to hold for very long? Here there is concrete evidence of a creator’s curse.
Take a look around at today’s world, church and state. If we are going to assist making the shift to fruitfully live together it might be well for us to move away from generalized fears for the future to demonstrate how the curse to come will grow from our experiences of the past. That is, in both church and state, how do we concretize the presence of facism in order to clarify the closeness of curse? In both church and state, how do we bring a word of blessing that will open our eyes to a rebirth of community (Christian and otherwise).
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/may2005.html
An example of the duplicity available within the blessing and curse model - [For the record my fingers typed "blessing and church" and I had to go back to respell.]
The newsletter of a religious right group within our Annual Conference had on their front page:
"In light of this sermon ["Catholic Spirit" by John Wesley], and our desire for unity within our annual conference, we continue to hope that members of the executive committee for the Kairos CoMotion event hosted at Lake Street UMC in March will accept our invitation for genuine dialogue. Because the cross of Christ (doctrine of atonement) is essential to our identity as United Methodist Christians, we feel it is imperative for us to have honest conversations about salvation and the hope that is within us."
As I read this, the blessing of unity, genuine dialogue, and honest conversation keeps getting trumped by the curse of some preconceived eternal doctrine deemed essential to one's identity.
It feels as if they have claimed the Noah spot and we are relegated to those who are evil continually. Without falling into the trap of participating in a conversation that has no honesty because the conclusion is know by one party, how might we yet be helpfully parabolic by following the Jesus tradition of opening new possibilities for those who might have the ears to hear.
It is difficult to assign even a benign outcome to our experiences of having the certainty of closed heads erase the explorations of open hearts. Right now this matter is in the flood of a no-win situation. Pray for a new start that will lead past where we currently are.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/may2005.html
Blessings and Curses abound. Our tendency is to focus on one or the other. This is as great theological a divide between people as a division of languages at Babel.
Is your initial orientation to life a glass half-full or half-empty and how do you account for the experiences of life that point in the other direction? Between recognizing our proclivities and overcoming our resistance to change lies the experience of Pentecost or any other epiphany.
Habituation is one of the realities we need to take into account as we attempt to stay up-to-date with a next stage of growth in our understanding of ourselves and our experiences. After we walk past the same picture for a week, it becomes a space holder. We know what is generally there but it has lost a connection with our latests experiences and is either misapplied to them or lost track of.
We take our last learning and codify it. Then we tack it up or carry it as a hammer to adjust every new situation to the way we have decided it should be.
To bind a past experience to our life is to blind ourselves to a current choice able to lead us beyond a mere continuation of the past to a jump to a preferred future.
Yes, write down your experiences. Interpret them along the way. But be ready to thank them for bring you thus far along the way and to bid them as fond a farewell as you have teddy bears of yore. There is a new choice to be made and a new basis for making that choice.
- - -
mementos in hand
cry out for eternity
never satisfied
for a moment
choices arriving
set a new moment
yearning
for a chance