Mary Magdalene
A beautiful woman named Honey
Told jokes with a countenance sunny.
The punch lines were bold,
and the jokes were well told,
but since not about sex were not funny.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 15, 2013
NOTE: Views from the Edge added Mary Magdalene to the post.
This sermon was preached at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska May 12, 2013 following a trip to Cambria, CA that began with Kay breaking her ankle on the way down the stairs as we were leaving for the airport. The rest is story of William Randolph Hearst desire for a bungalow that ended up as a castle, and an encounter with Mr. Excellent. The fawn story never made it into the sermon because of a forgetful preacher.
The story of the fawn is this. The morning Kay and I were preparing to leave Cambria for the trip home, I noticed a deer in the backyard pacing. There was a fawn lying on the lawn. Examining the fawn, it appeared to be alive, but was not moving, injured perhaps. The next time I looked, its eyes were closed. After examining it, I called the owner of the home we had rented to suggest that she call animal rescue. I thought there was a dead fawn in her back yard.
When we arrived home in Minnesota there was a voicemail that Animal Rescue had come and taken away the fawn only to realize that it was very much alive. It had just been born that morning. Point of the story for a Mother’s Day sermon: God is like that mother, staying nearby waiting for her newborn baby to get up.
A sermon three years after Deep Water Horizon on love, freedom, and caring for each other, the oysters and the crabs in the Gulf of Mexico.
My younger son is gay. For 12 years he’s been in a committed relationship in New York.
His response to the news that Minnesota will now become a marriage equality state was:
“Great. One more state in which I get to choose not to get married!”
He doesn’t want to get married. He just wants for anyone who chooses the covenant of marriage to have that choice. He just wants to live his life.
In 1978 students at The College of Wooster began “coming out” to me in the safe space of my office at The Church House”, the campus ministry center that housed the offices of the College Church, Westminster Presbyterian Church. I served the dual role of Pastor of the church and Pastor to the College of Wooster.
Dr. Violet Startzman, the physician at the College’s Health Center, came home with the results of a three-year study on homosexuality commissioned by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Westminster sponsored public forums, adult studies, and less formal conversations about the core finding of the study: same-gender orientation is not a choice; it’s part of the natural spectrum of human sexual attraction and love.
It was in that context that previously fearful or confused students shared in the privacy of the pastor’s office and found affirmation. They were active in the college church. They were ordained (student) elders on the church board.
My story since then is complicated, more so than I would like it to have been, in retrospect. Pastors are teachers and educators as well as advocates. Those of us who seek to minister to a congregation wear the mantle of conflicting responsibilities of conscience, patience, unity, and advocacy. We are first and foremost rabbis (teachers). Teaching is different from preaching, although the good preacher is also a teacher. And teachers begin by respecting their students, no matter what their views are on a given subject. Each of us perceives the world through eyes that see what experience has taught us to see.
When my son came out to us, we were grateful. Grateful for his self-knowledge. Grateful for his trust. Grateful that a (not-so-secret) secret was no longer a secret. So very grateful and proud of who he was as a young man and all that he had done and stood for.
Now, today, I am in Minnesota. He is in New York. I, like him, am grateful that there is one more state in which he can choose whether or not to be married.
A sense of humor is a basic requirement for getting older.
How dim is my (our) mind in my house?
2 x 70 = less mind than the average 10 year old…
11:00 pm
She: What’s that noise?
He: What?
She: Put in your ears.
He: What did you say?
She: I heard something outside.
He: I’ll go look–let me find my glasses…
She: They’re on your table by your teeth.
He: I know I ‘m able to find them by myself!
She: I think it’s a burglar!
He: …a bugler?
She: Never-mind, I’ll go myself. Where did I leave my slippers?
You call 1-9-1…
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 11, 2013
“If you believe in GOD’s powers and you ask for help and he doesn’t help you right away, it means he believes in you!
It only takes 20 seconds of insane courage to do the impossible.”
– Ruth J., 9 yrs. old.
After worship at Shepherd of the Hill in Chaska, Ruth and Lily hand me their reflections on the sermon – either in words or in drawings and symbols printed on the backs of yellow visitor/prayer request cards. Their insights blow me away. I look at their cards and ask myself, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Ruth is a young Paul Tillich:
“Faith is the courage to be. Courage can show us what being is, and being can show us what courage is.” – Terry Lectures delivered at Yale University, The Courage To Be, Yale University Press, 1952.
Missing Something
Stone cold bronze age
Man sits stone cold still
In clothes no ape would wear
Living inside his business suit
Even when alone.
His faceless head retains
the slivered brain of stone-cold
Men who wage the wars
And capitalize on capital
And Capitols.
There is no logic, no capacity
For reason or self-assessment,
Where air blows through the
Empty space a left brain
Might fill.
What’s left is all right and
would still feel and leap
For joy or bow with sadness
Had it not been turned to
Bronze or gold.
His fingers touch left to
Right and right to left
In prayerful hope for the
Missing mind and face, and
Heart of flesh.
– Gordon C. Stewart, May 10, 2013, Chaska, MN
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” – The promise for the bones in the Valley of the Bones (Ezekiel 36:26).
Steve’s prairie haven – home of the Urbana “Morning Chorus”
Springtime is the loudest.
Breeding has begun.
The travelers have returned:
finches, swallows, robins,
hummers, whippoorwills.
Our dead end rural road
has little traffic even later
in the day–none at 5 am in May.
No sound but bird song:
Coos, chirps, whistles,
call and response.
The choir has no conductor
that we see.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 9, 2013
Katie and Kay (Mom) at Katie’s graduation.
For Christ to have gone before us,
To have kept us from ultimate sadness,
To be our brother, our advocate,
The One who ushers in the Kingdom,
Here
And the One to come,
Does not keep us from our digging today.
We still gather here and throw the dirt on our sacred dust,
We take the shovel like all those gone before us
And surrender to the Unknowable—
The place where
Love and Beauty and Kindness grow wild.
Where sorrow has no needs,
Where there is all beginning and
Nothing ends.
I know this Love of hers lives on. I feel it.
I watch it in many streams of synchronicity,
Where my heart leaps from memory’s knowing,
Where I share a breath from her beyond.
And then I cry in secret,
Begging that she return
On my terms.
But if my begging is selfish,
The answer to it is not.
If I but knew the splendor of that Place where Love lives,
I would marvel in her good fortune
And ponder her grace inside a timeless waiting for us,
A begging for our good fortune
To come on her terms.
We live our lives in time.
She lives all time as Splendor.
We are bound between this stalemate
And the mystery that is our promise.
Until then we have no other luxury than
To shout her precious memories to the sky
In loud thanksgiving that Love herself lived with us awhile.
Then, because we live with fuller hearts
From knowing more than before our loss,
We turn our shovels over
As those with little other choice for now.
For now we dig.
And shed our tears
With greater Trust.
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is
In heaven.
– Kay Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 9, 2013,
the third anniversary of loss and fuller hearts.
Katie and Maggie sharing a moment of sadness. Maggie knew!
“IT’S RAINING, IT’S POURING” was written the day we learned that Katie’s incurable Leiomyosarcoma had taken a turn for the worse. In memory of Katherine (“Katie”) Elizabeth Slaikeu Nolan.
It’s raining, it’s pouring
The old man is snoring
He went to bed and he bumped his head
And couldn’t get up in the morning
It’s a day like that. I bumped my head on the illness of a 33 year-old loved one. It’s raining sadness. I’m having trouble getting out of bed in the morning.
Terminal illness has a way of doing that unless you believe in miracles of divine intervention or you have extraordinary powers of denial.
My spirituality has become increasingly like that of Rebbe Barukh of Medzobaz, an old Hasidic master in Elie Wiesel’s tale of Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggle Against Melancholy. When he prayed the customary Jewish prayer, “Thank you, Master of the Universe, for your generous gifts – those we have received and those we are yet to receive” – he would startle others with his weeping. ‘Why are you weeping?” one of them asked. “I weep,” he said, “in thanksgiving for the gifts already received, and I weep now for the gifts I have yet to receive in case I should not be able to give thanks for them when they come.”
For my family at this critical time, the real miracle has already occurred – the shared gift of love – and it will come again in ways I cannot now anticipate when the last page of the final chapter of our loved one’s life is over.
The miracles are more natural, nearer to hand. Although I don’t believe in selective divine intervention, I am on occasion a sucker for denial – except on days like this when it’s raining and gray and I’ve bumped my head on the hard fact that cancer is ransacking my loved one’s body. A certain amount of denial, too, is a blessing in disguise, one of God’s generous gifts to keep us sane when the rain pours down and clouds are dark.
Faith comes hard sometimes. In college mine was challenged and refined by Ernest Becker‘s insistence that the denial of death lies at the root of so many of our problems. My faith has been refined along the way by the courage of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre to face the meaninglessness of the plague, the faith and courage of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich who stuck their fingers in the gears of Nazism, and the humble witness of Mother Teresa working in the slums of Calcutta with more questions than answers and some anger at God.
The job of faith, as I see it, is to live as free as possible from illusion with a trust in the final goodness of Reality itself, despite all appearances to the contrary. Faith is the courage and trust to look nothingness in the eye without blinking or breaking our belief in the goodness of mortal life.
When I look into my loved one’s eyes I see that courageous kind of faith that defies the cancer to define her, and a resilient spirit that makes me weep tears of joy over the gifts we’ve already received and the ones we have yet to come.
It’s still raining and it’s still pouring, but I refuse to snore my way through this. I’ve bumped my head on the news of a loved one’s terminal illness, but I’m getting up in the morning.
POSTSCRIPT March 21, 2012
Conversation yesterday about “The List” posted on Bluebird Boulevard:
Karen:
My mother died of cancer eight years ago. Her loss is still visceral. She is in every bird I see.
Me:
The morning of Katherine’s memorial service Kay, Katherine’s mother, was standing by the large picture window gazing out at the pond in our back yard. Out of nowhere, it seemed, two Great Blue Herons flew directly toward the window and swooped upward just before they got to the house. “She’s here. That’s Katie,” said Kay without a second’s hesitation. On her last day of hospice care, Kay and I each remarked that her face looked like a baby bird. I’m a skeptic about such things. I’ve always been, and always will be, a doubting Thomas. My assumptions and conclusions come the hard way. But on the day the herons flew directly at Kay from across the pond, I saw it with my own eyes…and HAD to wonder.
Within a minute a third Great Blue Heron perched on the log by the edge of the pond and stood alone for a LONG time. It reminded me of a gathering on the steps of the State Capitol in Saint Paul following the tragic deaths of school children at Red Lake, MN. The crowd stopped listening to the speaker. They were looking up. “What’s going on?” I asked Richard, the Red Lake American Indian advocate and my co-worker at the Legal Rights Center.org. “Eagles,” he said. “Where?” “WAY up. They’re circling.”
I learned later that the eagles were also circling at that same moment over the grieving families gathered at Red Lake. I asked American Indian colleague what he took it to mean. “We don’t ask. That’s the white man’s question,” he said. “We just accept it. We live in the mystery.”
Views from the Edge 