Psalm 20
Proper 6 (11) - Year B
What is your view of G*D's presence in the midst of difficult times? Easy to discern? Can't tell until you look back at one pair of footprints? A dark night of the soul that doesn't even have any footprints?
Is it your view that the righteous flourish? that the lawless get theirs?
These bedrock understandings of how life moves and has meaning affect our interpretation of our experience. Fortunately our experience can also affect our viewpoint. In the interplay between our various viewpoints and our predominant viewpoint we find ourselves fated from the past and freed for a different future.
An image here is that of a tree that flourishes with fruit. May you continue to see a fruitful future for yourself and for us together. With that vision comes strength for a journey that scatters seeds along the way and prepares for a new creation.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2006/june2006.html
Psalm 20 or Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 or Ezekiel 17:22-24
2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17
Mark 4:26-34
How long will we grieve? Poor Samuel didn't have Elisabeth Kubler-Ross to lead him through any stages. It was get up and get on.
Ezekiel's image doesn't progress through any particular process. There is an intervention, a sprig is planted, a vision established, a journey given to participate in.
For the Psalmist G*D is present before any trouble is on the horizon, during such trouble as arises, and after any trouble has left its mark.
Paul reminds us of the importance of viewpoint. From some vantage points a new creation can be glimpsed that guide our interactions more strongly than the pain of the past.
Seeds have been planted that grow through their usual stages. They can also grow unbidden and unattended to surprise us with a harvest. These seeds do their work through time and beyond time to bring a new perspective from hardened ground. If watered only by tears, yet they flower and fruit.
Where are you in one of your griefs? Ready or not, a sprig has been planted on a dark crag of that mysterious mountain in your life.
- - -
molehills are real
our shape different
because of them
they loom when near
shrink with distance
perspective bound
mother-may-I baby steps
seven-league strides
both bring new views
one for me and one for you
both together
stretching togetherness
recovering from a trip
to grief
and beyond
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html
Presume for the moment that anointing is an equal-opportunity event. All have received an anointing. A gift has been received – to each for the benefit of all.
If a given, how does that change the process of calling upon an anointer? Do we anticipate or presume? Do we owe and incur obligation?
If all are anointed, why do some apply it more easily than others? (while on a Greg Brown kick, here are some more lyrics – and the music enhances them immensely.) For some it leads to charging in where an angel would fear to tread. For some there is a quiet confidence and an ability to stand no matter what the circumstances. For some there is disbelief that they are anointed.
Anointing was and is for every person, regardless of their status, inside or outside a Pentecostal room. When anointed, barriers are removed, we can cross the usual barriers (huge among them is that of language or culture). Stand tall, weapons of war will rust. Cross the barriers, before they are taken down. Doing so will add to the impetus to healthily remove our last barriers – until we clearly see one another as anointed.
This is a remarkably self-fulfilling prophecy. See another as anointed and they will begin to so see themselves. Withhold that vision and we will live up to our worst. Inasmuch as free will abides, these are not cause and effect actions, but deep calling to deep.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html
How wonderful! Everything is going to work out!
A parable will never miss the mark or be misinterpreted.
A G*D/Prophet anointed one will never falter.
A current heart’s-desire will last eternally.
Victory, at any price, is assured.
Each and every utopian dream has trouble distinguishing background and foreground, a part and a whole.
Remember your synecdoche and pay attention to false comparisons.
"The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened in that place at that time among those people. The overarching theory rationalizing the great expense and effort that goes into those little stories is they somehow give us access to the big story, the big picture, what is really going on. . . .
"But synecdoche works only if the part really does stand for the whole. And that is something you often cannot know until long after the moment."
(Bruce Jackson, "Bringing It All Back Home." CounterPunch, Nov. 26, 2003)
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/06/psalm-20.html