ISSUES OF FAITH: Finding our way home

THIS COMING SUNDAY is the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany and this particular year Easter coming so early means that Mardi Gras is just around the corner, followed immediately by Lent, starting with Ash Wednesday.

That’s one of our two fast days — Good Friday is the other. Episcopalians know how to “par-tee.”

We know preparing for Lent means eating and drinking a lot before it’s too late! We …

Oh, wait, this year’s different! Hold on, everyone, we have to start again.

This year, we are celebrating “The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple.” And that’s a really important day.

This is the day we remember that Jesus was brought to the temple by his parents for his circumcision as any observant couple would. This act placed him deep in his own tradition as a member of the Jewish community.

Sometimes we Christians forget that Jesus was an observant Jew for most of his life and it’s not till after his Baptism that he started saying difficult things like “Was the Sabbath made for [people] or [people] for the Sabbath?” Or he would eat grains of wheat as a snack when Jews weren’t supposed to work. Or healing people while he was traveling as a preacher and teacher.

Our Jewish siblings are to be cherished as family, and I’m one of those old enough to remember being taught that the Jews, all Jews, needed to be converted to Christianity.

Now we Christians are finally wise enough to remember that the Old Covenant was just first, not obsolete.

No, conversion of the Jews to the New Covenant of Jesus Christ is not necessary for those already covered by the Old. It still does the trick.

In Hey Alma, a feminist Jewish culture site and online community, Emily Burack quoted Alex Zeldin’s (@JewishWonk) tweet, “Seeking to convert Jews *because they are Jews* is not an article of faith. It is bigotry.” He earlier had tweeted “Targeting Jews for conversion is antisemitic[;] hope that clears thing up for anyone who was confused.”

I don’t know any Christians who are interested in converting Jews locally, but I have known many over the years.

These Christians are indeed my siblings, but they are, plain and simple, wrong. It is a matter of a redundancy like being a member of both houses of Congress.

Either one gives you a role in the legislative branch, but both are not necessary; it’s already all taken care of. But for my own spiritual journey, I find the readings from both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures assigned for today in our lectionary important and life giving.

Actually, it would be far more likely for me to ask a rabbi about converting to Judaism than for me to try to convert Jews to Christianity.

One of the Psalms appointed for this coming Sunday is Psalm 84, a text I’ve known literally for decades: “How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of hosts! / My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.”

The author was speaking of the Temple that was in Jerusalem, and the text goes on to add, “Happy are they who dwell in your house! / they will always be praising you.”

That was the text for the first ever art song I chose, on the grounds that I wanted something I could sing in church.

I loved the text, with its old-fashioned English (what I might have then called Old English, but really just an archaic flavor of the Modern English you can see today in the King James Version of the Bible).

It was a magnificent text: “My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord: my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God. / Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God.”

The music itself was, well, very old fashioned, even stuffy. One might even say “sentimental.”

But the text went on to talk of the experience of the Temple: “For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness. / For the Lord God is a sun and shield: the Lord will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly,” and its glorious “They go on from strength to strength.”

Indeed, we believers in God do just that.

That’s exactly the way I feel when I enter the sanctuary of any church I might be visiting in or serving at as deacon.

There’s a quiet wholeness to it. It’s a place that has been sanctified for years by religious ritual and the prayers of the faithful.

I’m sometimes — as are we all — feeling stress or anxiety in these hard times, but for me, entering a church will almost always calm me down and center me.

Sadly this is not true for others, for whom the church has not always been a place of welcome, or even of torment, for being of the wrong race, or class, or sexuality, ability, or gender, a feeling of just not fitting in, of not being welcome.

But for those who don’t fit it, there’s always the promise of Simeon’s song: “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”

Simeon had been waiting for years, even decades, with the promise that he should not die until he saw the Messiah of the Lord.

The minute he laid eyes on Jesus in his parents’ arms, he knew: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed — and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

I’ve always imagined that last bit to be directed to his mother, Mary, who would learn what it was to lose a child before its time, a loss I cannot imagine as someone without children.

I know some of you reading this know and my prayers are with you.

But for many of us Christians, we hold to the promise of what Simeon saw and what the author or authors of the Letter to the Hebrews knew: “Because [Jesus] himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.”

To those who don’t fit in, let me tell you: keep the struggle going as long as you can. If you have to find another path, do so. As someone who has finally found his own way in, I assure you, the wait’s worth it, if it’s possible. And for those who already fit in — help those who seem to having trouble on the journey. Lift them up.

They need you, and you will find you need them.

________

Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. The Rev. Dr. Keith Dorwick is a deacon resident in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia.

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