To thine ownself be true + Lent 1C + 2.17.13
M. Campbell-Langdell
All Santos, Oxnard
All Santos, Oxnard
17 February 2013
Lent 1C (Deut. 26:1–11; Ps. 91:1–2,
9–16; Rom. 10:8b–13; Luke 4:1–13)
“And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act. 60
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, 70
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
(Hamlet, Act I, Scene II)
You may recall these words of wisdom from William
Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the words
that Polonius shares with his son Laertes who is about to go off on his
own—words of fatherly blessing that remind Laertes who he is and what his
principles should be. Words to write
upon one’s heart.
As a teenager, I had a special association with these
words. You see, my Cross Country team
would do a short run once in a while around Pasadena called the Buster’s loop,
called such because it would go right past a favorite coffee shop haunt called
Buster’s. While to my dismay we never
seemed to stop there during the run, I would go on occasion with friends after
school. They had the most amazing
Cappuccino Floats and the barista working there would scoop the ice cream. And I remember he had the most interesting
tattoo around his wrist. In very
stylized lettering, so that it seemed to take a couple of furtive glances
before sorting out the message, it said “To thine own self be true” in a sort
of cuff around his wrist. Now, as a
teenager, I had just read Hamlet and
was enthralled by Shakespeare. I even
practiced thinking in verse. And I
thought, wow. If I were to have a
tattoo, that would be a contender. Words
to live by. Words to write on one’s
wrist. Or one’s heart, if you will.
Joan Chittester, in her book The Monastery of Heart, states that you need to read scripture
daily, absorb it almost under your skin: “As monastics of the heart we must
read the scriptures day in and day out, till they ring in our ears, and fill
our hearts, and become the very breath we breathe.”[1] Chittester
re-interprets the monastic life here as not just being something open to
professed religious but also to all Christians wishing to deepen their
relationships with God. And to do so,
she says, you need to live and breathe scripture.
Now, if you study today’s passages you will see that with the
exception of the Psalm, which is itself quoted later on, all of them are shot
through with allusions to Biblical history and the epistle and gospel in
particular cite numerous scriptural texts throughout. And it is clear, reading the passage from
Luke today, that Jesus, swept into the desert and into his time of temptation
by the Spirit, that Jesus has the word of God tattooed on his heart. He is true to himself in a very clear way in
this passage. The devil tempts—first
with bread when Jesus, even our own human/divine Jesus gets hungry, famished,
and if you have ever been really hungry, you know that you get to a point where
you don’t care, you just need the food.
Bread, sustenance is all that matters, and Jesus says, no.
No, the Word of God is my bread. Earthly bread is needed but that is
secondary. I will stay true. True to myself, true to God.
And then comes earthly power—all the nations must have seemed
an enticing lure, but Jesus stays true, citing scripture again—any earthly
power, which is its own form of worship, is to fall on its knees to the Living
God. I don’t need that, says Jesus, I
already have it within me.
And then, Jerusalem, foreshadowing the ultimate temptation –
the pinnacle of the temple—this would surely show them once and for all who
Jesus was—who needs a whole ministry of service and healing others, when you
can just hurl yourself down and let the angels catch you up, just like the
Psalm? (Aha! Here, the devil shows he knows the scriptures
too, but his twisting heart has gnarled the meaning.) And Jesus says, no, no… I will not test God,
or better said, I will not let you, devil, Tempter, test God. Because testing God by trying to forfeit our
lives rather than listen to what God would have us do is selfish, and perverse.
Jesus clung fast to the scripture that was true, and in so
doing he stayed true. True in the forty
days or “fullness of time” in the desert, true when our wandering ancestors
could not stay true, wandering in the desert in the Sinai for forty years.
Jesus took the fullness of time and fulfilled it, showing us
errant humans how to stay true. So, you
and I, we too have the word near us. For
us, too, the word is on our lips and in our hearts. We, too, know that our spiritual ancestors
were wandering Arameans and that this means that we should never assume our
place or power, never take it for granted, but keep humble to God and in
community by sharing what we have.[2] We have truths tattooed on our hearts. What truth is tattooed on yours? Perhaps some scripture word is on your heart,
or bound around your wrist, today.
Perhaps it is something that has edified you; that has given you
strength and been your refuge when the winds of life seem to beat you down. Perhaps it has been your lodestone in the
desert days of your life. Or perhaps
there is a word that has lodged itself in a way that is harmful. Can you take that word and turn it around,
hear what a loving God would have to say about it? Remember that even the devil can twist
scripture to try to bring death. But if
we hold it, even when uncomprehending, in the knowledge of a loving,
life-giving God, and we let the Spirit do her work in us, we will find
life. We will find truth.
There might even be a passage that just speaks truth better
to us now, even if other pieces of the word still seem broken.
Take whatever message speaks to you today, and cradle it
close, tattoo it on your heart. And we
will, feeling the scripture close to us, on our lips and in our hearts; we will
know that we are true. That we are true
to God. That we are true to ourselves in
the deepest heart of our being. And what
could we want more than that?
.jpg)
Comments
Post a Comment