Blending Concepts - Poem by Raymond A. Foss

The name of the sermon
the point of the message
was “Our Highest Ideal”
but it was the underlying subtext
the juxtapose of the capable wife,
the unattainable, artifice, the woman
of wisdom, of work, of myth
and the incapable, improbable, the weak
disciples, matched to each other, compared
in the harsh light of reflection,
with the contrary, the wrong-headed
missing-the-point speech of a President
in the rarified air of the United Nations,
claiming our President was the devil,
how much these stories, these bits of
wisdom literature, blended in his words
made into one whole, on the straw dogs of
overstated ideals, the human inability to
hear a singular improbable message,
a statement of bitter hate, judging the man
not the fruits, the shared curse of humankind
all falling so far short of the penultimate ideal
the vaunted language of Proverbs, the missed
message of Mark, the incendiary hubris of Chavez
each together woven together into a greater whole
of hope really, because it is not the perfection,
but the walk, the road we travel, that makes the difference
in our lives, and the lives of the people we encounter,
the other lives we touch in our wider world
connected as we are in common faults
and humanness, with its noble and ignoble tendencies
sinners all, having the same opportunity for grace

September 24, 2006 15:43
Proverbs 31:10-31; Mark 9:30-37, and the speech by Venezuelan President Cesar Chavez to the UN on 9/20/06, calling US President George Bush the devil.
All covered by the Reverend Peter Hey in his sermon at Wesley United Methodist Church, Concord, NH, 9/24/06.