Mice, Fish, Cities and Silence
Below is the text from a sermon preached by me (Evan Clendenin) at St. Benedict’s Episcopal Church, Lacey WA, on January 24, 2021, the 3rd Sunday in Epiphany.
Here is a link to the scripture lessons.
Working along on the boat frames and patterns. A slow process, but suddenly, these boats are just going to fit together and be ready to paddle. Trying to proceed with chisel, plane, and square in much needed silence, stillness and listening.
Hope you can join in building one someday.
“For God alone my soul in silence waits.” Psalm 62
In this present moment, when the form of this world is passing away, in the present moment when a time to repent is upon us, in the present moment as we conclude a week of prayer for Christian unity, one of several institutons born of early 20th century dreams of forging peace, for God alone my soul in silence waits.
This present moment. When we might experience anxiety, boredom, emptiness, and many, too many, overwhelming demands. When we feel grief and the loss of many people, and many things, Have you named your losses? Maybe too many times? Or maybe not yet.
For God alone my soul in silence waits.
When you feel stress, and strain, urgenct impulses to act, to strike, to cut, to bite, or tweet, ‘be still and know that I am God.’ At least for one good breath, in and out.
We gather today in part to remember, hear and say the psalmist’s words, poetic words, divine words that stop us, speak something unknown and vital into us, and turn us around. Speaking of which, tomorrow, January 25 is a very, very minor secular holiday of sorts, the birthday of the scottish poet Robert Burns. If you watched the presidential inauguration ceremonies this week, then you have a lively sense from Ms. Gorman’s poem of how wonderful and potent poetry can be. And so you see why people, mostly not scottish people, gather around the world to remember a poet. You may have learned this poem in school.
Wee sleekit, cowrin, timorous beastie/O what a panic is in tha breastie/Tha need na start awa sae hasty/With bickerin brattle/I would be laith to rin, and chase thee/With murderin’ paddle!
Burns, a tenant farmer, had turned up a mouse nest from the soil as he plowed a field. He did so at a tense, anxious moment in his life, when his family was about to lose their home, become homeless. Where would they go when they got turned out of their nest? Burns sees this little mouse, and offer consoling words, creature to creature-don’t be afraid, don’t run away in anxiety and fright, I mean you no harm. Words that this man himself needed to hear.
And that brings me to Jonah, and God’s way of teaching this prophet how to trust, even as the vision of God’s peace, justice and love exceed and reform Jonah’s own vision of justice. You may recall that Jonah had been called by God to proclaim a call of repentance to Nineveh, that big city, that capitol of a nation that had oppressed his own. Jonah wanted nothing to do what that, so he left town, hopped on a boat in Joppa, hit some bad weather, volunteered to be tossed overboard, and found himself in the belly of a big fish. No joking, the scripture finds Jonah in the belly of a big fish, a dag gadol in hebrew. And today, he repents, after being vomited out on the beach, he repents, and heads to the center of Nineveh, a big city, an ir gdolah. It works in english and hebrew-big fish big city. And, fearful mouse, fearful man.
God starts with smaller things to show Jonah his own recalcitrance and resentment rooted in fear of this larger world. Look at all the ways he could work really hard, seem very busy, even quite just, and never actually stop, look and listen to the one who was calling to him, and the way in which he was sending him. Jonah, and we too, need those lessons and places, often many times through our lives, that will give us no choice but to be still and know the presence, the voice, the love of God. What that love, which exceeds our own imaginations of love, asks of us in prayer and deed. For Jonah, he had to sleep on a boat in a storm, come to a place of quiet in that dream-like big fish, before he could calmly walk into that big city the size of a walk, a walk of three days. three days. He walked one day in, and he proclaimed the judgement of God designed to enact mercy, forgiveness, an invitation into resurrection life for those people people Jonah thought of as wholly and irredeemably in the wrong. And to do so without any excess outbursts, quips or vitriol, the proclamation and nothing more. It is commonly interpreted as Jonah being half-hearted. Maybe so. But maybe it is Jonah actually beginning to feel what trust in something larger than himself feels like, that he is not as righteous and effective as he thought, that he is simply the bearer of the message, and all he has to do is speak it truthfull and faithfully with his sobered mind and burned-out body, part way on that three-day walk.
For God alone my soul in silence waits.
Jonah’s challenge in also our challenge. To be still. To listen. To learn new trust in the work that is larger than ourselves, and the vision of God which is truer, more humble yet greater than our imaginations are ready for. As we wait on God alone, to let this unknown silence speak words into our whole being, which we can carry as we walk, as we speak in the places we will go, and are right now.
Deer Mouse, Peromyscus maniculatus, Seney Natural History Association, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons