A perfect day in the great Northwest, sunshine but not too hot. We get up early in order to attend a 9:00 AM worship service. My wife looks lovely, dressed to celebrate the Eucharist for the 7th Sunday in ordinary time. Traffic is light, but already while we're coasting toward a red light, a big SUV behind us is pushing. In the rear-view mirror, I can see a woman driver barely visible over the steering wheel of the tank she's driving. She's wearing a big straw hat. Where is she going in such a rush at 8:30 AM?
The light changes and she's pushing again. I turn left, but apparently not fast enough. The next light is also red, but she's right on my tail. After another stop, there are two lanes in the street, so she can pass, accelerating like this is a race, but after she gains a quarter mile on me, she gets stuck at the next light behind a guy in a pick-up. He must have been looking at his phone. Now we're on the freeway entrance, a quarter-mile uphill ramp. I'm in the slow lane, but I have clear road ahead of me and can get away from this nuisance.
Well, yes, but she must have been pushing the guy in the pick-up too, because now he's aggressively speeding behind me toward the lane-merger on the freeway ramp. The arrow on the pavement indicates that he should merge from his line to mine, but he's going seventy miles per hour and trying to pass. My wife yells. I'm just irritable enough now to step on the gas instead of letting another rude driver push me around.
I won. He relented. We avoided what could have been a collision at seventy miles per hour.
The freeway is wide open at this time of day, so both the SUV and the pick-up go flying past. I have time to reflect on the stupidity of this all-too-common scenario. It's not the first time I've been unable to control my reaction on the same freeway entrance. There are two lanes plus an express lane on WA-520 from Redmond to Bellevue and Seattle. Jockeying for position can be aggressive and dangerous. We're on our way to church, for God's sake! Why can't I be a Christian about it?
This seems to be precisely the kind of encounter Jesus was talking about when he said, "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also". I don't think this is a mandate for pacifism. If someone attacks me, I'll fight. But, in Jesus's time, a slap in the face by a Roman soldier might have been little more than an insult. In an occupied country, a man would be better off taking the insult than resisting in a fight he couldn't win. On the freeway at seventy miles per hour, taking the insult of one pointlessly aggressive driver or another is surely better than risking several people's lives. So, I had another sin to confess if we made it to church. The open freeway is an opportunity for people with more horsepower in their engines than common sense in their heads about the risks they're taking to get ahead of a few other drivers. Police budgets have been cut. With fewer cops on the road, things have gotten worse.
If we had not made it to church, I wouldn't be telling this story. The greetings were pleasant. We had several nice conversations in the narthex. In a discussion with a woman on the vestry, we heard about the “It’s All About Love, churchwide festival of worship, learning, community, and action for the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement", in Baltimore. The Presiding Bishop, of course, likes to hold forth about love, even to an extent that embarrassed the British aristocracy at a royal wedding. It doesn't restrain his ridicule of conservatives. It didn't restrain the Episcopal hierarchy while they were spending thirty million dollars suing churches that couldn't in good conscience obey their dictates. Oh, well...
The musical procession was small but dignified. The Episcopal Church has generally maintained traditional liturgy and music against the pop culture trends in many denominations. We have a music director who makes singing in worship a joyful experience. The hymns and liturgical responses have not yet been neutered to appease elite gender ideology. Things were going along splendidly until the sermonic interpretation of the Parable of the Sower.
Our priest had just returned from the love-fest in Balitmore, so I suppose it was too much for her to imagine that the metaphor explicitly requires fertile soil for the word of God to take root and grow. Some plants, she opined, find thorny ground quite hospitable. No type of soil is absolutely good or bad. Lichens and moss grow on rocks. It's about diversity, of course. I could agree that we don't want to think in dichotomies. There are different expressions of flourishing. I guess seeds getting trampled by a culture that appears to despise Christianity can survive. The Episcopal hierarchy is very tolerant. They can't find anything in the Bible that criticizes anyone. Well, maybe white males... The Anglican Bishop of York recently declared that the Lord's Prayer is "problematic" for its patriarchal connotations. At times this tolerance seems more the nihilism of Pontius Pilate--What is truth?--than the perspective of Jesus--Strait is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it.
After the parable on its head, getting back on the freeway was a bit of a relief.
Now another Sunday has passed, and we have to thank the Episcopal hierarchy for correcting Jesus on the Parable of the Wheat and Tares. The Lectionary keeps raising ideas uncongenial to the perspectives of the “It’s All About Love, churchwide festival of worship, learning, community, and action for the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement".
"Another parable Jesus put forth to them, saying: 'The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat. ... Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them but gather the wheat into my barn.'" Per this week's sermon: we don't want to reduce this to binary thinking! Sheep and goats! That would be retrograde. Yes, reverend bishops, but it does appear that there are some useless weeds and poisonous herbs growing in our garden.
On this one, I suppose, I can try to extend a comment by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago:
"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties--but through every human heart--and through all human hearts. This line shifts, oscillates through the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And in the best of all hearts, there remains...a not uprooted small corner of evil."
However, binary options are required for any kind of logical thinking. Don't try to write a computer program without binary logic.
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