LIFE

I wish I could take credit for the following, but I cannot. It came over the Internet and I cannot give credit where credit is due. But I think the message is one we all need to hear as we begin a new year.

           

"Life isn't about keeping score. It’s not about how many friends you have. It's not about if you have plans for the weekend or if you're alone. It isn't about who you're dating, who you used to date, how many people you've dated, or if you haven't been with anyone at all. It isn't about who you have kissed; it's not about sex. It isn't about who your family is or how much money they have, or what kind of car you drive, or where you went to school. It's not about how beautiful or ugly you are, or what clothes you wear, what shoes you have on, or what kind of music you enjoy. It's not about if your hair is blond, red, black, or brown; or if your skin is too light or too dark.

           

"It has nothing to do with what grades you get, how smart you are, how smart everybody else thinks you are, or how smart standardized tests say you are. It's not about what clubs you're in or how good you are in sports. It's not about representing your whole being on a piece of paper and seeing who will accept your application.

           

"But life is about who you love and who you hurt. It's about who you make happy or unhappy purposefully. It's about keeping or betraying trust. It's about friendship used as a sanctity or a weapon. It's about what you say and mean, maybe hurtful, maybe heartening; about starting rumors and contributing to petty gossip. It's about what judgments you pass and why. It's about who you've ignored with full control and intention. It's about jealousy, fear, ignorance and revenge. It's about carrying inner hate and love, letting either grow to fruition. But most of all it is about using your life to touch or poison other people's hearts in such a way that could never have occurred alone. Only you choose the way those hearts are affected; and those choices are what life is all about."

           

We will make thousands of choices this year, each of them deliberate. Each choice we make has a consequence, an outcome, a result that affects not just ourself but everyone around us – everyone else. Those consequences are permanent. They never go away.

           

Father Theodore Hesburgh, the former President of Notre Dame University, said this: "My basic principle is that you don't make decisions because they are easy; you don't make them because they are cheap; you don't make them because they're popular. You make them because they're right."

           

Making the right decision, the right choice takes time and effort; it takes prayer and thought; it takes the grace of God and the willingness to be informed and led by that grace. It is often difficult. Yet no matter how difficult, we will never regret making the right choice.

May 2014 be a year of life filled with right choices for each one of us, a year of grace and love.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC

Everyone, I think, loves to sing. It is part of who we are as human beings, as children of God, really. There is always a song in our heart that is waiting to be sung. That fact that some of us can't sing all that well or at all is beside the point. It simply may be God's way of keeping us humble. We all have felt the power of a song sung so well whose words meant so much at a certain moment in time.

I have always dreamed of being able to stand in front of a congregation and sing, maybe even sing a song during a sermon to help convey the message. But if I could, and I know me, my head would swell to unbearable proportions and I would be impossible to live with. So I sing in the car to the radio, when alone. And when I must sing, like in church, I don't belt it out lest I get belted in return.

           

There are those who don't like to sing but I don’t know anyone who actually represses the song that is in his or her heart.  I suspect that part of the reason many people like the early Service is that there is no music. It's not that they don't like to sing. It is that they don't like to sing at 8:00 in the morning. Okay, I'll buy that – reluctantly.

           

Part of the joy for me of the Advent-Christmas Season is being able to sing the songs of the season. Now I know that some object that we should not sing Christmas songs until Christmas, like we shouldn't sing "Happy Birthday" to a person unless it is that person's birthday. Maybe so, but Christmas is not the birthday celebration of Ordinary Joe either. And so our celebration of Christmas should not be limited to just one day. And so we sing the songs of Christmas as a way of preparing our hearts and minds and souls for the celebration of Christmas.

           

And we sing when the Spirit – and it is the Spirit – moves us. We sing to celebrate life, to celebrate love, to celebrate. We sing to bring life out of death or life to death. We sing. And when we sing, our song becomes infectious. It gets under our skin and into our pores, into our very being. And it infects others and affects them as well. Music is what brings a community closer together, more than dinners or bazaars or anything else. It’s the power of music.

           

Why? Because it is in our song, in our music, that we are of one voice, of one accord, of one mind. Nothing else is on our mind or in our hearts except to make music. We can truly get lost in song. We should sing together more often. We may not be making good music when we do because we are not all good singers, but what we will be doing is making good community

           

As the hymn says, God is glorified in our music – most of the time. No, all the time, if it is truly music. Even my children and grandchildren who listen to it would be hard pressed to say that some of the stuff that passes for music these days is a glorification of God. But that's another issue. When our music is a glorification of God, when we are singing, we are often the most alive and the most at one. And when we don't feel like singing? That's when we need to most.

PRESENTS AND PRESENCE

The Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a rather harsh winter for much of the nation. Visions of shoveling snow, worries about getting stuck in a ditch I have slid into because of that snow, power outages, and so forth all come to mind. All of this reminds me of something Robert Farrar Capon once said. He was reflecting upon how we assume that God will always get us out of the messes we get into, whether those of our own making or not, if we only have enough faith. But God never promised to get us out of the ditch we slid into. God did not promise to miraculously restore our electricity.

Rather, what Capon said God said is that God would be with us in our car in the snow bank, in our home in the dark, while we waited for help to come. God never promised to be the Big Helper in the Sky. He promised to be the Great Handholder here with us. God’s ministry was and is a ministry of presence: being with us through thick and thin, through ill and well, through it all. To me that is very comforting even though it will not take away the discomfort of the cold and/or the dark, will not get me out of the ditch, will not repair my electric line.

And there is no “if we only have enough faith” about it. Yes, we need to believe that God will be, is present with us wherever we are. We need to reach out to that Presence. But the Presence is unconditional. It matters not whether the mess we are in is of our own making or not. God is present to be with us through it.

           

This is the time of year when we feel the compulsion to give material presents to those we love. Sometimes we even give presents at Christmas simply because we want to, out of love, and for no other reason. That, of course, is the reason for the greatest Christmas Present of all. On Christmas we celebrate the fact that God gave us the great present of his Son’s presence among us. God gave us the Present for no other reason that God loves us. No greater gift could God give than that Gift. Yes, theologians tell us, even scripture tells us, that God’s greatest gift was his Son’s death on the cross and resurrection to new life. For because of that Greatest-of-All Gifts, we are all given the eventual gift of eternal life when we die.

Yet the fact still remains, the here-and-now is a little more important than the hereafter, here and now, stuck in a ditch, house without power, spouse deathly ill in the hospital. The present of the promise to be in God’s presence eternally is wonderful and gratefully accepted. But when we are in the ditch in the snow, lonely and cold, what we need most of all while waiting for someone to come along and lend a hand is the comforting presence of God.

           

And God is there. In the stillness of the cold, in the darkness of the night, God is there. Sometimes I think that the reason why God chose to have His Son to be born in a barn where no one else was, in a tiny town no one really knew or cared about, with no one around except those whom society considered to be nobodies, was to remind us that most of the time for most of us it is in the quiet and the lonely and in the nowhere moments that we find the ability to find the presence of God.

ADVENT WEEPING

The Preacher is sitting on the river bank with a young friend. He says to the young man, "Remember, Son: 'I complained because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet!'" "Heavy!" concludes the boy, who thinks for a moment and says, "Y'know, Preacher, I complained because I had no call waiting, until I met a man who had no cellular phone." The Preacher was speechless and could only think to himself, "I weep for the next generation." (Doug Marlette, Kudzu)

Those of us of the Preacher's generation, who have children and grandchildren of the cellular-phone generation, relate well to Marlette's cartoon commentary. Well, I do, anyway. And I especially do during this time of year when Christmas shopping is foremost on the minds of many, even my own mind. What do you get for children and grandchildren who really have everything they need – need, not want?

Like the Preacher, I not only often shake my head in wonderment and bewilderment for my children's, and especially for my grandchildren’s generations, I also weep for them. In more ways than I would like, the pre-Christmas season – which we call Advent – has become more a time for weeping than keeping.

Trying to keep a good Advent, trying to use the time to adequately prepare for the celebration of Christmas, often conflicts with the secular demands of pleasing loved ones with presents. The weeping is caused because you somehow suspect that what may please you will not please them. And it is not a selfish, poor-me weeping. I think it is a genuine concern for the next generation.

Perhaps it is also weeping caused by a genuine concern for my own generation. And while I lament and weep over what I perceive to be the selfishness of my children and their peers, I also must admit that my peers do not seem to possess ulterior motives of good.

My generation wanted to save the world. As I look around, as I observe the budget debates in Congress, what I see is the same self-serving actions I find in my children’s and grandchildren’s generation, I find in myself. "What's in it for me?" we all seem to be asking. And then I reflect on the Nativity Scene and wonder what would have happened had Jesus asked that same question. And I am thankful he did not.

No one of us is immune to looking out for Number One. It goes with the territory of being human. But when we never seem to get passed Number One, when Number Two is always a distant second thought, then there is truly reason to weep – and to be afraid. Revolutions have always begun and will always occur when the Number Twos get tired of playing second fiddle and being sacrificed for the benefit of the Number Ones.

Advent reminds us that Jesus came among us and sacrificed his life as an example of how we should live our lives – in loving service to others. My suspicion is that Jesus weeps for all of us, not just the next generation. Advent is a time to reflect on how each one of us might change that weeping to rejoicing.