Lent 2 B & St David’s Day

March 4, 2012

Genesis 17:1-7,15-16
Psalm 22:22-30

Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38

It’s a comfortable world we live in, with cute little saints traditions. We have friends who paint their doors blue, an old Celtic custom, I guess – “to keep the pixies away,” my friend said. To confuse those dangerous pagan characters from sneaking into your house at night and snatching your children while they are asleep.

At Coleman’s “Irish” pub, the green beer arrived last weekend – the first Sunday in Lent, no less. I thought bishops in predominantly Irish Roman Catholic dioceses had to give special dispensations so the faithful could celebrate St. Patrick’s DAY without breaking their Lenten obligations. Now it’s a month of green beer, like the month of green milk at Byrne Dairy. 

At Coleman’s, and other such places, apparently, it is all cultural trappings, with no allusions to the reasons behind them; they even built the leprechauns their own “wee door” – a sure sign that the death knell to tradition is its appropriation as “cute” by commercial culture.

Thank goodness the Welsh maintain their allegiance to the stark and the serious. St. David himself was the serious leader of a serious monastic community – so serious they drank no beer at all, only water, and ate only bread, with salt and herbs. Work hard, he said to his brothers in the sermon he preached on the Sunday before his death on March 1 in the year 598. “Do the little things that you have seen me do and heard about. I will walk the path that our fathers have trod before us.”

Whether the customs for these saints’ days are silly or serious, however, they all have this in common: they come from a time long before this one, when people looked at the world in ways far different than the way we moderns do. We no longer understand the world as one full of spirits or saints or devils or pixies. Locks are our safety, not prayers. Miracles have scientific explanations, and God is personal, quiet, domesticated. The kinds of questions we ask have predictable answers.

Until they don’t. Until something unpredictable happens to us: we get bad news. Something shocking shakes up our world. Everything we thought we could count on gets overturned. The easy answers we get from the world around us – from the glib and superficial showmen of our commercial culture – offer us no help or guidance that we can use.

Today’s lessons come from the realm of the world-upsetting. Elderly Abraham and Sarah are given the promise of new life with the birth of a son: astounding and impossible. The love and devotion which Peter shows toward Jesus is denounced as Satanic. To follow me, Jesus says, means to renounce your life and take on my death, that your life is worthless unless it is given up for Jesus, for the gospel, for God. Questions are raised by these life-shattering stories that defy predictable answers. God is not so easily defined.

The contemporary Welsh poet, R.S.Thomas, who died a few years ago, was an Anglican priest. He served congregations in small, stone buildings, surrounded by graveyards, within hearing of the surf and the sea. He was a Welsh nationalist, a pacifist and anti-nuclear activist, and he also hated those English vacationers whose second-home developments were ruining the countryside. He was a critic of this modern, commercially-tainted culture. He saw the world, as his fellow-Welshman Archbishop Rowan Williams wrote, “increasingly denuded of recognizable signals of meaning, increasingly dominated by … ‘the machine’ …”, a world whose chatter and clamor effectively blocked the voice of God in our lives. For Thomas, God was known by his absence, elusive and silent:

He is such a fast
God, always before us, and
leaving as we arrive.(1)

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence?  He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body. (2)

R.S. Thomas is our poet for St. David’s Day, channeling an experience of God that cannot be contained by modern conveniences or explanations – an experience of God that stands open to the inexplicable – that shows the cross, which so confounded Peter and the disciples, always with us, before us, above us. The cross, once more, in the poet’s vision, something strange, a harsh instrument of death, no longer the domesticated symbol of the triumphant church, but a symbol of love poured out, love unending, love strange and unknown: blazing, golden, dark and silent, full of unsettling and life-giving grace.

1. Pilgrimages
2. In a Country Church