Coming Home
I read the daily office readings with Rachel and Brendan over breakfast
most mornings. (I think it’s more important, or at least as important,
as the eggs and biscuits). For the past two weeks, we’ve been reading
the incredible story of Joseph, envied and hated by his brothers, sold
into slavery in Egypt, trial after trial, and yet, he continually finds
himself growing in faith through these sufferings with God’s help.
On Tuesday, we got to the part where Joseph’s brothers, you remember,
the ones who sold him into slavery and told their father he’d been
eaten by a wild beast, well, these same brothers come down to Egypt to
get food. You remember there is a famine in all the land of Egypt, and
even in all the lands around Egypt, but Egypt has grain because Joseph,
with God’s help, interpreted Pharoah’s dream predicting the famine and
devised a wise program of stewardship to store up food to feed the
people during the lean years. So Joseph’s brothers in Canaan are now
hungry, and they come to Egypt to ask for grain, and who do they have
to ask but Joseph himself. But they don’t recognize him – how could
they? In their wildest dreams they’d never imagine the chancellor of
Egypt to be the same brother they hated and sold into slavery and felt
relieved to be rid of. So there they are, asking Joseph for grain to
feed themselves and their families. He plays a trick on them. He makes
one of them go back to Canaan to get the youngest brother Benjamin and
meanwhile he holds the other brothers in prison. The passage ends with
the words, “so he put his brothers in prison for 3 days.”
"Three days!" said Brendan. Wait a minute. That is strange. It only
took them 3 days to go from Egypt to Canaan and back. And Rachel spoke
up, It took them 40 years with Moses. They must have had a really bad
map. Next day, we
continued with the next chapter and realized they were 3 days in prison, not on
the road. But the journey did seem still to be a matter of days, so the insight
stayed and played on my mind.
Just days journey before slavery but 40 years afterwards. Do you
suppose there is some deeper insight here? I thought of this quote from
Francis de Sales: “our sins often come on horseback and by express, but
they depart quite slowly and on foot.” Hunger leads us quickly into the
land of Egypt, but once we are enslaved and used to it, leaving the
slavery of sin and seeking the freedom of grace can take an awfully
long time, with lots of false starts, doubling back, wandering
aimlessly and lost.
Then again, there is something else that took 3 days – the crucifixion
and resurrection, remember, “on the third day, he rose from the dead.”
Three days. Could it be that Christ has come to assist us, to bring us
back to our true home, to restore us to the state we once enjoyed but
did not appreciate, the state of communion with God? Three days it took
Christ to take on the sin of the world and defeat death. Forty years it
took for the children of Israel to long enough for their true home that
they stopped wanting to return to Egypt, and at last could enter the
promised land.
It’s about faith, isn’t it? When our longing for the true home – the
kingdom of God within – grows stronger than our desire to get whatever
it is that we think we must have to be happy today, then maybe we are
ready to enter the promised land, to stand on the threshold of another
way of being, a way that is beyond all of our silly desires and endless
chatter, a way of deep stillness, surrender and wonder.
So what does this have to do with Lent, and with the Samaritan woman?
I think of how we began Lent, with Ash Wednesday, and with the
wonderful reading about giving our alms in secret. What are our alms?
Are these not the sacrifices we make in secret, the sacrifices of old
desires, the sacrifices of wanting to prove ourselves, or get praise,
or get satisfaction, or whatever. We give these alms in secret, quietly
recognizing that such things keep us enslaved in the world of Egypt, a
false world. Such enslavement has estranged us from our true home.
Secretly and in silence, we recognize that it is our own fault, we stop
endlessly blaming circumstances and people and we let these things go,
with no fanfare, no dramatic tales of our own suffering, no repetitive
lists of who and how they done us wrong, those poor misguided people.
No, we recognize, secretly and in silence, that all of our negativity
is our own. It is nobody’s fault. It is our cross. Secretly and in
silence, drop the resentments, the blaming, the lists of other people’s
faults, the criticisms, the judgments, the constant noise of it all.
Secretly and in silence, we let it go, painful piece by painful piece.
And God who sees in secret, God whose ways are hidden from the world of
ego, rewards us in the secret place in the heart where no pride can
enter. What is the reward? Faith in God grows as the false and foolish
pride we took in our own imagined greatness diminishes and dies. The
reward is faith, but it can only grow in true soil. The soil of
pretending to be better than we are cannot sustain the seeds of faith.
They will not grow where the soil is shallow.
You get good soil by working over the waste. Composting it. Lent is the
season, the season of recognizing our sinful states and seeking to
change our ways of thinking. Lent is the season for composting the
soil. It grows rich with honest awareness of our sinful states. It is
worked over by repentance, the changing of our minds. Isn’t it an
amazing experience when your mind changes? When you see through a silly
belief you held onto for decades, and you let truth in? Isn’t it
amazing to surrender to Truth and stop seeking to prove oneself
“right”?
So here we are, with Jesus and a Samaritan woman at the well in the
bright light of midday. In that light, Jesus tells her of her own
wayward life, and he catches her in a lie, a pretending to be better
than she is, a sin of omission. And she rejoices! The soul does
rejoice! The ego kicks and screams when we begin to recognize sin of
our own doing – the ego likes only to recognize other people’s sins,
make no mistake about that! So learning to distinguish between the
soul’s truth and the ego’s truth is a tough lesson, but one well worth
learning for ourselves. It can begin to lead us in a true direction.
Humility comes with the insight into our enslavement to the ego’s
imaginations. Humility brings the chance for the soul to grow while the
ego diminishes. Humility is the proper stance for anyone before God. It
is God who can help us, for we cannot help ourselves in this. We are
too much astray, too much under the spell of our own enchantment, too
much believing our fantasies are real. We can’t help ourselves out of
this enslavement. But in three days, Christ brought freedom, Christ
brought us back to our true home. And the rest is just the time it
takes us to recognize the truth of it, and let that truth change our
minds. It may take us lifetimes, or one lifetime, or we may have the
insight of faith in an instant, and spend the rest of our lives trying
to make amends so we can live faithfully.
But we do know that whether we wander 40 years or get back home in 3
days, we have the same home, a true home, and nothing else matters.
Nothing can separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus, not envy
or hatred, persecutions, famines, slander, not all the spiritual forces
of wickedness, as much damage as they can do in the world, none of
these things has any power to enter the true home, the kingdom of God.
Thank God we have such a home as that. A pure land, all the muck and
mud of the world cannot touch it - a deep and true state of such
astounding grace and love.
Amen.
The Rev. Edie Bird
The 3rd Sunday of Lent, 2008
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