NO WARNINGS

Whenever we’re on the interstate and driving from one state to another, as we enter the next state, we are greeted by a sign that says “Welcome to wild, wonderful West Virginia” or Pennsylvania welcomes you”. The next sign says “Speed limit 65mph, radar enforced”. The last sign, if there is one, says “No warnings”. The state welcomes us and then immediately warns us that it won’t tolerate speeding. Thus, if we are caught speeding, we have no excuses. We have been warned!

Warnings are part and parcel of life. We warn our children that if they don’t behave, they will be punished; if they don’t study, they will fail. Employers warn their employees that if they do not do their job, they will soon not have one. There are warning on food products and, in fact, on almost everything we purchase. Most of these, I suspect, are placed on the labels at the behest of the corporate legal staff to save the company legal problems in case some foolish consumer uses the product incorrectly.

The sad part in all of this is that we should not need to be warned in the first place. Why do we need to be warned that speeding kills; that smoking causes cancer; that no one ever wins a war; that if we don’t study, we will fail; that if we don’t do our job, someone else will take our place? Why do we need to be warned to not do what we know we should not do and, conversely, to do what we know we should do?

Human nature? Yes, if we deem we humans to be selfish, sinful and stupid, which is probably the case, is it not? We are indeed selfish, as everything we think, do and say starts with the self. It is when we fulfill our own desires to the detriment of others that we get into trouble as we hurt them. We know better but often we do not do better, do the better thing.

We are also sinful in that there are times when we deliberately hurt others, even the ones we love the most. We drudge up some reason that allows us to hurt, whether that reason is pay back for a hurt the other caused or whether that reason is that what we are doing is what we want to do no matter whom it hurts. Again, we know better, but we do what we know is sinful anyway.

Then, of course, we simply do something stupid. We drive too fast, eat or drink too much, take chances that we know are foolish, needlessly place ourselves in a dangerous situation: the list is long. We have been warned and, as always, we know better; but no one stops us and we do not stop ourselves, much to a later chagrin and pain and hurt. And then we wonder how we could have been so stupid.

Why do we ignore the warnings? It’s not that we don’t believe them because we do. It’s not that we feel we will never get caught because we know we eventually will. It’s not that we believe we are immune to pain and hurt because we know we are not. So why?

BARBARA SCHLACHTER

My wife and I just returned from a Celebration of the Life and Ministry of The Rev. Barbara Jeanne Hartley Schlachter. It was a wonderful and moving and oh-so-fitting service to honor Barbara. She and I served together at Christ Episcopal Church in Cedar Rapids. I hope our mutual ministry was fruitful to the people we served. But for me, personally, in a word – or five – Barbara pushed my comfort level.

I was not alone. I think all her life Barbara pushed peopled into their uncomfortable zones, places in their minds and hearts that, at that moment in their lives, they would rather not be because it meant that they would have to deal with truths they would rather ignore and for which they found excuses and then, heaven forbid, change.

Barbara, of course, on so many issues, was ahead of her time which is the reason why she made so many uncomfortable. We liked the way things were; and if pushed, especially we in the Church, could find some theological reason why we believed what we believed. For what we did not see or refused to see was that those issues were power issues that were masquerading as theological issues. That’s the way it has always been, hasn’t it? What Barbara did was force us to take off the mask and see what we did not want to see and face the truth, uncomfortable as it was to do. That was her way all the way through her life. She refused to allow us to hide behind the mask that was hiding the truth.

And she did not care whom she offended. The truth is the truth after all. When the Church tried to bar her and her female colleagues from ordination as priests because the Church could – and did, she stood tall until the church, ruled by males who liked it that way, could no longer try to use false theology to hide behind their mask of power. She pushed the Church’s comfort level when it needed to be pushed.

When she and Mel became a clergy couple, no one knew what to do with them. “We’ve never done it that way before,” they said. “How are we going to work this out?” they asked. “Figure it out,” Barbara and Mel said, “because we’re here to stay.” And the Church did, much to the Church’s benefit, I might add, even though it took pushing the comfort level of so many, especially the bishops who did not have a clue what to do.

At Christ Church Barbara started a women’s group she called “Women of Excellence.” The name drove me up the wall. It pushed my comfort level. Don’t ask me why. It just did. But it made my chauvinism face the truth that women by nature are excellent and I had better get comfortable with it. (I have, my excellent wife making certain of that!)

The Church and the world are a better because of Barbara’s life and never-ending ministry. She pushed the comfort levels of so many of us when we did not know they needed to be pushed and forced us to come out from behind a mask that tried to justify our beliefs and actions and made us change. Thank you, Barbara. Rest in peace.

IF GIVEN A SECOND CHANCE

There’s not a one of us who would not like to have a do-over, who would like to have had countless do-overs in our lives. Sometimes that wish comes immediately after we have messed up something. Sometimes that wish comes only after much reflection, even after years of reflection. We look back at what we have done and know that we could have done better, and that, given a second chance, we would have done better.

The unfortunate reality is that we usually don’t get those second chances. Yes, the team lucks out when the fourth-down pass is incomplete but the defense commits and penalty and the team gets a second chance. Sometimes that second-chance brings success and sometimes it is still another failure. Second chances, do-overs, are never any guarantee that the next time around will be better.

What we must do, of course, is do the best we can in the moment. If we fail, we fail; but we have given it our best shot. That is all we can ask of ourselves and ask of anyone else. Yes, others may have been able to do what we failed to do, but others were not asked to do it. We were and we did our best. And if we were given a second chance, we would fail again because the first time around we gave it all we had, our best.

The truth, of course, is that we don’t always give whatever we are doing our best effort. Them when we reflect back on the truth of that, we can only rue our failure because we cannot go back, undo time, and start over. What was done was done. We move on and hopefully move on realizing why we failed and what we must do the next time around to insure we do not fail again.

Yet, the same is true in living out our daily lives. So often we simply go through the day doing what we normally do, doing the best we can but being rather oblivious about just exactly what we are doing and, really, how important what we are doing is even as it seems so mundane. We do our job, whatever that job is, as best we can, but give little thought to the truth about how important that job is not only to us but to those with whom we work or who reap the benefits of what we do.

No one of us and nothing we do or who we are is unimportant even if we are retired and feel that we have nothing to give to anyone. We always have something to give even if that is simply praying for others. We miss so much of life because we so often do not stop to reflect on just how important what we are doing is, just how important we are, because we are important. We have a calling, a vocation, from God.

All God asks of us is, first, to do the best we can so that there will never be a need for a do- over, a second chance. And second, God asks of us, and we should ask of ourselves, to be present in the moment, to be aware of how important we are to others and how important what we do is to them and to ourselves and to our God.

DOING WHAT COMES UNNATURALLY

An item from my email bag. "If you can start the day without caffeine or pep pills; if you can be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains; if you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles; if you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it; if you can understand when loved ones are too busy to give you time; if you can overlook when people take things out on you when, through no fault of yours, something goes wrong; if you can take criticism and blame without resentment; if you can face the world without lies and deceit; if you can conquer tension without medical help; if you can relax without liquor; if you can sleep without the aid of drugs, THEN YOU ARE PROBABLY THE FAMILY DOG.

           

Isn't that the truth! Would that we all be more like the family dog. If we were or could be, then life as we know it would be so much easier for us and everyone else for that matter.  

Another truth is that as much as we may want to be like animals, or at least have the disposition of animals (especially dogs!), we all probably have a long way to go. For whatever reason it is, we are often disposed to be indisposed, especially to those who are always whining or complaining or who bore us almost to death. We find ways to avoid those who don't have time for us or who blame us for their problems. The list is endless of those people we naturally want to avoid. 

           

It is also natural to avoid pain and suffering, to run away from it as fast as we can, especially the suffering of others. It is even more natural to avoid any action that will cause us personal pain and suffering. It is not natural to turn the other cheek, to walk that extra mile, to love the person who is deliberately hurting us. It sometimes takes every fiber of our being to do any one of these actions that seem so foolish. But as Christians we are called to do what comes unnaturally.

           

That is not easy nor is it meant to be easy. Sometimes it takes great will power to do what we know in faith we must do. It is an effort of the will because often our heart is simply not in it. But it is more that than. It takes more than that, as we have all discovered whenever we have made that effort to will ourselves to go that extra mile, to do what we really did not want to do.

First of all it takes self-discipline which demands training which is what Lent is all about. Lent is about training ourselves to willingly walk where we would rather not go but where our faith demands we go, to do that which we would rather not do but which our faith demands that we do. Because doing such does not come naturally, we have to learn how to do it. Lent is the time to practice the self-discipline needed to do so.

But no matter how self-disciplined we are, no matter how much we are willing to walk that extra mile or turn that cheek, sometimes it was only in and through the grace of God and only the grace of God that we can take and make those steps. Our natural instinct, again, is to turn and run away. But we must not.  Thus, looking on from the outside, when someone does what comes unnaturally, we can probably assume that that person is probably a Christian.

MORE SAID THAN DONE

It’s been said so often that we often overlook its truth. That truth is that after all is said and done, there’s a lot more said than done. In almost any endeavor more gets said about the process and during the process than gets done. We all talk a good fight, as it were; but when it comes to actually putting our words, even strong words, into action, we tend to fall back a little if not a lot.

This is true in all walks of life, in all parts of life. All of us are good, sometimes very good, at talking about something, about what should be done, about how it should be done, about who should do it, how quickly it needs to be done. Yet all too often not much seems to get done except a lot of talking. The church is certainly not immune to this fact of life.

I suspect that vestry meetings and congregational meetings and planning meetings are classic examples of a lot more getting said than what actually is accomplished from all that talk. If we expended only half the energy and half the effort we use in talking about a project as in doing it, we would grow by leaps and bounds.

Perhaps all this is another way of saying that talk is cheap, because talk certainly doesn’t cost us anything. But it is not as simple as that. Before we do anything, especially anything of importance, we certainly should talk about it. We should get opinions pro and con and in-between. We should talk and think and plan. And then, depending on the importance of what has to be done, think and talk and plan even more.

In the end, however, we should do something that reflects the length of time used in discussing the project. Of course, often it does. If we spend very little time thinking and talking about something that needs to be done, the result can be slipshod or worse. If we spend the correct amount of time, the result can be exactly what we hoped for. The fact that we often do not do what we’ve talked about or that the end result falls far short of our hopes and expectations is why it is so true that after all is said and done there’s a lot more said than done.

The whole of the scripture is a good example. A whole lot is said in the bible about what we should do as believers, as Christians, as professed followers of Jesus. But after reading it all, after reflecting on what Jesus said and did and about what we should do to live out our faith in him, we tend to come up short.

In the end and throughout it all, what is really important and what scripture is saying to each one of us is very simple. We have heard the word. We know what it says. We know what is expected of us. We need to quit talking about what we should do. We need to quit making excuses why we cannot do or have not done what we should and just do it, live as we know we should. Given human nature that is not easy to do.