5th Sunday after Pentecost, Church of St. John the Evangelist
The Mestiza-Latina, Indigenous poet Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes: “One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.”
Pinkola Estes is a psychotherapist who has worked with victims of extreme trauma with the tortured and the war-wounded. She has been witness to many storms in this vocation of hers in which she has chosen to accompany and to be truly present with people during the stormy days of their deep woundedness and pain, and through the storms of fear and anxiety and despair.
It is a big thing to sit through these storms and not to be carried up in their winds oneself. “I have felt despair many times in my life, she writes, “but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.” I suspect she would say the same about fear and anxiety.
So, here we are on a boat, with capable, experienced fishers on an inland lake susceptible to windstorms and they are actively freaking out whilst our good Lord is taking a much deserved and needed nap.
The Gospel of Mark doesn’t exactly put the disciples up on pedestals as role models for us. These folks repeatedly don’t fully get what Jesus is on about. They squabble, they get competitive with each other, and at times they just seem rather weak-souled and dim. No, the point of the disciples in Mark’s gospel seems to be about them being just like us, models of the many sorts of imperfections and temptations and insecurities that we know in ourselves. Each of these stories about what’s going on with the disciples is in fact an opportunity for us to explore our own fragilities a bit, to be helped to name our own sin and to understand better its roots in those fragilities.
We have a tendency to forget the presence of God that is right now right here in this and every other moment of our days and nights. We have a tendency to forget that grace, God’s presence, is in this moment, always offering us peace and a fresh start. And we have a tendency to give in to fear.
That’s quite a normal human thing, it seems, and has even taken over the church at times. Paul’s own big heart just broke when he watched the divisions take root in Corinth. The community had become distracted into leadership squabbles that took up all the space and had drained their capacity to trust the Gospel of God’s peace-giving presence. It’s like they set a dinner table to gather the community but they couldn’t resist bringing fear to the table. It may have begun as the presence of realism in their conversations. Look at the facts: Christians are being persecuted in some places. It then might grow to risk assessment, and look hypothetically something like: gosh, some of these things we’re doing, like taking care of orphans rather than selling them into slavery, might annoy the powers that be. It then projects into the concerns of what might happen to the people in our community if the powers that be scrutinize more of our behaviours. Before we know it anxiety and fear have fanned latent embers and toxic smoke is released into the dining room. We can neither breathe properly nor see properly, we know we’re perishing, and all we want is to be saved. Or is that all we want? Don’t we also want to be confirmed in our fears? Don’t we want to be told that our terror is legitimate, that we are right to be afraid about a future we can’t control or predict, that it makes sense to compromise the gospel in order to protect ourselves? Can you see how fear can sneak in as a respectful dinner guest and end up wrecking the whole house? Fear multiplies, and then divides communities.
As Paul’s heart is breaking over Corinth, it pours out a loving medicine in the form of a call: be present right here right now to what God is doing in this time. Not in the past shaped with nostalgia or shame, not in the future shaped by fear or despair, but now, says God, is the acceptable time. Always Now. Since Jesus has come, and remains present in creation, that is Every Now. This now this morning.
All that Paul has endured in suffering, trials, isolation and betrayal is past: wounds he still carries, to be sure, but he has not allowed bitterness or hatred to simmer into the sort of fear and anxiety that insists on entertaining itself at our dinner tables the cost of our souls. Paul is doing a lot more than counselling mindfulness here. He’s on about overturning the powers and principalities that destroy life. The call to the Corinthians to pay attention to what is now is a call to pay attention to what God is doing now.
Press pause and ask, from all that we know about God and of the good news that does justice and healing and reconciles people with God and with each other, what might we possibly suppose God thinks of us right now as we can’t stand each other, and actually fight with each other just because we go to different churches on Sunday and listen to different preachers? – which was essentially what was going on in Corinth. What God is doing now might just be weeping for us, and in that sorrow is rebuke and the grace of the possibility of healing, if we wake up and get on with what God is about.
Our fears and anxieties can become so powerful that they do appear almost like demons outside of ourselves. But that power is false. Even our fears and anxieties are loved into calm by the presence of God, and can be redeemed and healed so that their destructive powers no longer have a place in our souls. As Jesus, using the power of God’s sovereignty over all of creation, to the wind storm, so too God rebukes the destructive powers of fear in us. God does this with the gentle authority of Jesus over the waves, by God’s simple, calming breathing presence with us.
Even though there are real and fearsome things in life, they do not need to paralyse us; they do not need to have dominion over us. They do not need to take a place at our table then turn the tables and buy and own our souls. Why? Because we are not alone. What Paul endured without becoming hateful and bitter he did because he was not alone, and he knew it and he knew his life depended upon God. Paul names the hurts that must have caused deep wounds; in naming them he confronts them with the healing power of hope; even just confronted, it seems, they shrink from having the sort of power over him that would have made him surely bitter and twisted. Instead, we have a mini resurrection story of Paul’s continuing love for the Christians at Corinth.
Our Church has been learning these lessons within my own lifetime. This time exactly next year our General Synod, the national governance body, will be meeting in our diocese. The last time General Synod came to our diocese in 2001 there was quite a bit of division in the church. At its heart was, concern, in a context of insecurity which became full blown fear over what would be the consequences of the lawsuits over residential schools, specifically the Mohawk Institute in our diocese. Legal counsel argued that the consequences of making a formal apology would lead to the church being named legally and therefore financially responsible and it would bankrupt us. Meanwhile, other parts of the church had issues formal apologies beginning with the Primate’s Apology in 2001. And at that General Synod our church witnessed as it never had before the presence of Indigenous leaders, many of whom had been well through their own healing processes. They told to a divided and fearful church their stories of suffering and of their faith in the God whom they witnessed was their hope and their light and their only source of love when otherwise they were isolated and abused in the residential schools. And their story telling helped along its way our fragile church in our own healing journey, a healing from the insecurities and fears that turned into the very racism that did all that damage in Indigenous peoples’ lives in the first place, beginning generations ago. In powerful witness to God’s healing power, Bishop Gordon Beardy, an Oji-Cree man and survivor of residential school, made public acceptance of the Primate’s Apology and declared “my people have become your people; and your people have become my people.” Looking back, it’s strange to remember the ways in which fear and hope, anxiety and faith did battle at that time. At next year’s General Synod we will witness publicly again how healing continues; we will be reminded again of our needs to confront the fears that lead to racism; and we will celebrate with gratitude and honour the many Indigenous Anglicans in this land.
Another quotation, this time to end. This is from Yann Martel, who speaks of fear as life’s only true opponent. It is, he writes in Life of Pi, “a clever, treacherous adversary… it goes for your weakest spot, which it will find with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always… so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it.” This is true, it seems not just psychologically and philosophically but theologically as well. Shine the light of the Word of God, the Christ, on our fear, and we might find ourselves able to see better what fears in ourselves are real and which are projected; and we might also find ourselves more aware of the real presence of God with us as we go through things that are legitimately fearsome, like illness and grief.
Eileen Scully
22 June, 2024
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.
As our parish musician, he provides both support and leadership so that a variety of parish programs can find musical expression and attract participation. When our handbell choir is in season, he is one of our ringers. At parish dinners, he provides popular piano music for the guests to dine by. For both worship services and concerts, he will rehearse and accompany vocal and instrumental soloists from our congregation on piano, organ, or even accordion.
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.