Now and then

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Memorial of Saint Paul Miki and Companions, Martyrs

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Now and then

They went off and preached repentance. The Twelve drove out many demons, and they anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.

But some saw the disciples’ good deeds and miracles and called them dangerous, or evil, or demonic. The filters and screens through which they heard about these things turned them into pollutions, and so they thought to persecute Jesus and his disciples rather than to learn how to submit to God, to the Messiah, to someone other than themselves, to something other than their own ego.

What is wrong with this picture? The good is called bad, and the bad rise up in power, however temporary, to break down what should be built up.

Brothers and sisters:

You have not approached that which could be touched

and a blazing fire and gloomy darkness

and storm and a trumpet blast

and a voice speaking words such that those who heard

begged that no message be further addressed to them.

Indeed, so fearful was the spectacle that Moses said,

“I am terrified and trembling.”

But this is not the end of the world, nor even the end of my own personal moment in time. Movies I’ve watched recently (notably The Wind and the Lion and Night Moves) ring up great, horrifying purchases of violence. Either I push the mute button and leave the room, or I am paralyzed, unable to turn away.

There is more, however. There is always more. Redemption is never not near to hand.

No, you have approached Mount Zion

and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,

and countless angels in festal gathering,

and the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven,

and God the judge of all,

and the spirits of the just made perfect,

and Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant,

and the sprinkled Blood that speaks more eloquently

than that of Abel.

Far more eloquently, the sprinkled blood of Jesus. Abel’s blood drained into the ground, soon forgotten. Jesus’ blood is not forgotten. “This is the blood of my covenant, shed for you. Drink ye all of it.”

Blood brothers and sisters prick their fingers, rub their blood together, and make a promise of eternal oneness. Marriages even more so. And then there is the wonder-filled cult of Christianity, where we drink the blood of our Savior and are made whole. These sharings are acts of family, life lived together as children of the Living God. These gestures hold us, when all around us our world seems to be falling apart.

A friend called out some of her closest folks when they spoke of “saving the earth.” The earth doesn’t need saving, she said. We are instead desperate to save our way of life, but our way of life is in fact in desperate need of change. The earth will be here long after we, or at least our way of life, is gone. The way of all flesh does not threaten the earth itself, does not threaten what God made and sustains.

O God, we ponder your mercy within your temple.

As your name, O God, so also your praise reaches to the ends of the earth.

Of justice your right hand is full.

Not just now has the world seemed to be ending. The catastrophes in the Bible and all up into the present day, our day, remind us of our need for saving. We are not in charge of this, yet we must take responsibility for our futile efforts to make things better on our own. Mr. Yeats, in the early twentieth century put all of this together in his most powerful poem.

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre  

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.  

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out  

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert  

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it  

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.  

The darkness drops again; but now I know  

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This is the way of us, now and then, then and now. Our family of man, made by God but following paths that often take us away from Him, still rests in his arms. Yeats wrote his poem in 1919, and as a correspondent writes, “for one reason or another, every generation has felt the same apocalyptic shudder that Yeats did 100 years ago.” Still …

God is with her castles; renowned is he as a stronghold.

As we had heard, so have we seen in the city of the LORD of hosts,

In the city of our God; God makes it firm forever.

O God, we ponder your mercy.

(Hebrews 12, Psalm 48, Mark 1, Mark 6)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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