The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost- The Rev Melanie Lemburg

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8B

July 27, 2021

        At first glance, our readings for today seem to be strange companions.  “Our reading from the Wisdom of Solomon paints a compelling vision of human life, shaped in the image of the divine at creation, and bound for enduring relationship with [God].”[i]  It talks about how God created all that is generative and none of what is destructive, even death. 

        Our gospel reading shows Jesus, who is on his way to heal Jairus’s daughter and is interrupted by a woman who touches him and finds healing for her disease.  One question that this passage can raise for us is “who-or what-claims our time and attention, and how [do] we determine the worthiness of those people and things.”[ii]

        I’ve been listening to an audiobook titled Sum: forty tales from the afterlives by David Eagleman.  Eagleman is a neuroscientist who I heard interviewed on a podcast last year about his work on the brain, and the interviewer had recommended this book.  It wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I guess I thought the book would be about our brains and the afterlife, but so far, the different “tales” that I have listened to are like fables or parables with many different interpretations and much to ponder.  Last week, as I was walking, I listened to one that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about; so I’m going to read it to you.  (Don’t worry!  It’s really short.)

        It’s titled Circle of Friends.  “When you die, you feel as though there were some subtle change, but everything looks approximately the same.  You get up and brush your teeth.  You kiss your spouse and kids and leave for the office.  There is less traffic than normal.  The rest of your building seems less full, as though it’s a holiday.  But everyone in your office is here, and they greet you kindly.  You feel strangely popular.  Everyone you run into is someone you know.  At some point, it dawns on you that this is the afterlife: the world is only made up of people you’ve met before.

        It’s a small fraction of the world population—about 0.00002 percent—but that seems plenty to you.

        It turns out that only the people you remember are here.  So the woman with whom you shared a glance in the elevator may or may not be included.  Your second-grade teacher is here, with most of the class.  Your parents, your cousins, and your spectrum of friends through the years.  All your old lovers.  Your boss, your grandmothers, and the waitress who served you food each day at lunch.  Those you dated, those you almost dted, those you longed for.  It is a blissful opportunity to spend quality time with your one thousand connections, to renew fading ties, to catch up with those you let slip away.

        It is only after several weeks of this that you begin to feel forlorn. 

        You wonder what’s different as you saunter through the vast quiet parks with a friend or two.  No strangers grace the empty park benches.  No family unknown to you throws breadcrumbs for the ducks and makes you smile because of their laughter.  As you step into the street, you note there are no crowds, no buildings teeming with workers, no distant cities bustling, no hospitals running 24/7 with patients dying and staff rushing, no trains howling into the night with sardined passengers on their way home.  Very few foreigners.

        You begin to consider all the things unfamiliar to you.  You’ve never known, you realize, how to vulcanize rubber to make a tire.  And now those factories stand empty.  You’ve never known how to fashion a silicon chip from beach sand, how to launch rockets out of the atmosphere, how to pit olives or lay railroad tracks.  And now those industries are shut down.

        The missing crowds make you lonely.  You being to complain about all the people you could be meeting.  But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.”[iii]

        Your invitation this week is to reflect on the two following questions.  What are the most generative parts of your life right now?  Who or what claims your time, your attention, and how do you determine who and what is worthy of that? 

---

[i]Ed. Bartlett and Taylor.  Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 3. Homiletical Perspective by Leanne Pearce Reed. Westminster John Knox:  Louisville, 2009, p 171.

[ii] Ibid.  Homiletical Perspective by Beverly Zink-Sawyer p 191.

[iii] Eagelman, David. Sum: forty tales from the afterlives.  Circle of Friends. Pantheon:  New York, 2009,  pp 8-10.