Monday, August 28, 2023
Memorial of Saint Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
O Lord, take delight in us
In God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, grace to you and peace. Sing to the Lord a new song, let us sing for joy.
I sit falling a bit asleep in my living room chair, dreaming of scenes from the beginning of biblical history. For months the lectionary has led me through the story of God and his chosen people – Abraham, Noah, Moses and their descendants. But today the readings move into the letters of Paul to his churches, beginning with the Thessalonians and ending  before Advent with the Romans.
I still want to hear about David and Jonathan, and about Elijah and Elisha, and even the honorable story of Hosea and his dishonorable wife. We’ll be getting doses of the “minor” prophets this year, and the stories of David in 1 and 2 Samuel next year, on nine summer Sundays of Year B.
Not to say I couldn’t hear those tales on my own, and I have begun to, listening to Max McLean read 1 Samuel all week in the shower, where the acoustics are unparalleled. Saul was chosen as king and didn’t stay the course. The Donut Man’s song about David and Goliath fascinates us all, especially Miles and Jasper. But then Saul and his sons were killed, David was made king, and – although I haven’t gotten that far – David chose another man’s wife to be his own.
Over and over the Bible surprises me with graphic depictions of the failures of its heroes, and the greater the hero, the larger the fall. In David’s case, his remorse and repentance matches the severity of his sin. Kind of.  The Lutheran Sunday liturgy I grew up with still today includes “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” Thus our confession copies the song (Psalm 51) of David, written in tears after Nathan called him out upon his seduction of Bathsheba and order for the institutional murder of her husband.
Sometimes a song will suffice, but not always. David’s life mostly fell apart as he grew older, his earlier triumphs left behind, even reversed. “In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David remained in Jerusalem.
I don’t judge David as much as I resemble him. Most of us probably do. When he was young T. S. Eliot wrote about J. Alfred Prufrock, who resembled the aging David, who resembles me:
I grow old, I grow old …
I must wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
Now the volcanic conquests of my youth leave only shape-shifting lava flows dried and black. We must get over the wistful memories of our exploits as young people, our athletic attractiveness both male and female, our ambitious intelligence and entrepreneurial spirit, our indomitable confidence that all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Maturity required this of David, maturity requires it of us. Character, our pastor says, grows out of great suffering. Suffering does not cause character, but it allows it.
When he was older, T.S. Eliot wrote brilliantly about how we circle around and back to the beginning. We do in fact begin in peace and end in peace. All manner of things shall be well. His words ring like a song of acceptance and deep hope in my aging ears.
We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
There’s death, of course, the final resting place. But even before, I breathe deep breaths and feel myself settle into certainty, not about facts or ideas or predictions, but certainty of myself as created, and God as Creator. Nothing I can do will change that.
David knew that certainty as he mourned the loss of his son with Bathsheba, as he grieved the loss of his rebellious son Absalom, as he grew old and cold and needed warm bodies to keep him from freezing. He was “a man after God’s own heart.”
God’s heart calls out to each of us as well. So I breathe deep, settle back in my chair, listen to the wind and fall gently asleep, catching some distant words of the St. Louis poet, describing the contents of “in-between,” what the Japanese call “ma,” the silence between sounds:
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning …
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
 (1 Thessalonians 1, Psalm 149, John 10, Matthew 23)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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