WHAT WE REALLY HAVE TO FEAR

In his first inaugural address in the midst of the Depression Franklin Roosevelt asserted that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. That was, in its own way, quite true back then. When we live in fear, we are stymied. We cannot move ahead. Fear of the next bad thing, fear of the unknown begins to control our lives. And when we allow outside forces, fears, to be in charge, it is like living in hell. It is living in hell.

Of course, there have always been fear-mongers over the years, those who would have us believe that we are never safe anywhere, not even in our own homes hiding underneath our own beds. They have their own agendas for propagating fear, always for self-serving motives. They tell us they are concerned for our safety, our well-being, but they are only concerned about themselves and, of course, their power. For if someone can make us live in fear, that person has control over us.

That is certainly true today. Home-delivered pizza sales are up seemingly because people are now afraid to go out to eat even if most of us go out to eat more than we should because we eat too much when we do so. But, then, pizza is not exactly the most nutritious meal even if it is eaten at home. Compounding this fear are years of reading about Columbine, Oklahoma City, Sandy Hook, Orlando – the list goes on.

The truth is, however, that there is only one person we have to fear, really fear. That is the person who looks back at us in the bathroom mirror, the only person who controls our very life. Yes, we can listen to those who want us to be afraid of the dark, of the darkened theaters and dance halls, of the enclosed classrooms and of those who disguise themselves in dark clothing. If we want to give into that fear, they win and we lose.

We are in control of our fears. Yet the real fear that we should have as a Christian is not what others can or might do to us. It is what we can and might do to others, not with guns, not with violence, not in the dark or hiding behind false motives. Rather what we must fear is that we will hurt the ones we love in doing and saying unloving actions and words. That is what we truly have to fear.

Those who have committed and those who commit atrocious crimes against humanity were and are mentally unstable. Our failure as a society is to help such people get help instead of turning our backs on them and turning them out into the streets where their illness only gets worse, their fears only compound and they set off to somehow try to get even for what they perceive as a total lack of love by those who should love them the most. By then it’s too late to redeem their lives.

Is that putting too much blame on each of us individually? Probably. Yet the point is that when we fail to love others with all our heart and mind and strength and will, we only compound the fears of those we hurt. That is what we should fear.

IN DEFENSE OF TRIUMPHALISM -- SORT OF

The concluding verse of Matthew's Gospel commands us to make disciples of all people, baptizing them in the name of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That is the mission of the Church. There is no disagreement about that. There is a disagreement, however, on emphasis. Roy Poindexter, writing many years ago, asked a rather pointed question. To wit:

           

"Why do we always seem to be trying to guide our thinking by the version of the Great Commission in the gospel of Matthew? In the last chapter of John's gospel is another version. There, instead of a priestly pronouncement about authority, recruitment, liturgical procedures, and triune doctrinairism, is a passionate cry that we prove our love for God by feeding his sheep. The former has too often meant conquest and triumphalism. The latter promises to nourish life, and might be better received by a world that feels exploited. Let's try starting with John's version for a change."

           

Well, okay. I remember years ago in seminary, in the 60's, the decade of social upheaval and unrest, when many of my colleagues were leaving seminary to go into social work. One of my professors, aghast and upset at this mass exodus to work in the inner cities, complained in a sermon: "A priest is more than a glorified social worker."

           

Well, okay. But a priest is also much more than the glorified high priest we were all being taught to become. There has to be a balance between triumphalism and service. All triumphalism and no service leaves Jack hungry. All social action and no triumphalism – here in the form or worship and mission – leaves Jack fat.

           

Jack, and you and I, need a little of both. We are nourished and fed through our worship and our mission not so that we can be self-satisfied, but so that we can go out and serve others and help satisfy their needs. We need to be fed in order to feed sheep.

           

It is easy to become triumphalistic, to get fat, to be self-satisfied. The Church of the 50's and 60's was just such a Church. It did not know how to respond to social unrest because it had been caught up in itself. Today, it sometimes seems the opposite: all the church is interested in is in the social arena. There has to be a balance.

           

The balance is struck when we realize that we gather as a community to worship, study, share, be in community so that we can go out to serve. It is not enough, however, to either worship or serve. Those who are served are also missing something: a community to be part of. We often overlook the fact that the many we are called to serve need more than a helping hand. They need and want to be part of a loving community that will nourish and nurture them as the community itself is nourished and nurtured in worship and service.

           

Triumphalism: "authority, recruitment, liturgical procedures, and triune doctrinism" is one side of the coin. The other side is that "we prove our love for God by feeding his sheep," clothing the naked, visiting the sick and lonely, and bringing them into a community. Both are equally important.

GOOD, BETTER, BEST

If the truth were told, we are good people: people in general, not just the people we know or who go to our church. That might be true, probably is true, but that is getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say, at least at the beginning, that people are good.

We are good because God created us and God does not create anything that is of its very essence not good. To be sure, good people do bad things. Good people take the good of creation and do bad with that good. A good person takes a good rock and throws it through a good window. The rock and the window will always remain good; the thrower has become less than good for the moment.

What we are good at, we good people, is in the living out of our faith. Some would call it "the practicing of our faith," probably because we never ever get it truly and totally right. There are always those rock-throwing incidents in the lives of each one of us. That is called sin. We are never totally freed from sin in this life. So we good people who do a good job in living out, in practicing our faith, all know that we can be better.

           

We can always be better no matter how good we are. We can always be better because we all fall short of perfection, of being the best, of never being able to be better because we have reached the summit of being good. That is an unreachable and an unattainable goal even if it is a goal that we each strive after.  Our goal in life as a Christian, or as anything else for that matter, is not to be simply good enough, or better than the next person, but to be the best even as the best will never be perfect.  Whether that "best" is the best we can be or simply the very best is not the point.

           

It is easy, of course, to take another and even take ourselves to task for our failures to be less than the best, for only being good enough or better than most. It is easy for me to stand in the pulpit and point out failures and shortcomings – sin. It is also easy to be satisfied with who we already are. To emphasize one or the other is wrong and will get us nowhere. It certainly won't help us grow into a better person, into a person who strives to be the person God created us to be.

Just who is that person? What does s/he look, think, act like? That’s the question, isn’t it? That is why we need to constantly examine our lives, how we are living out our faith. The point is not to remind us that we are failures. The point and the purpose is to help us understand that practicing our faith involves our whole being and our whole life and that by being attentive to that being and to the various parts of our life, we good people will find ways to become better, better in every way.

           

There is a lot we know about how to practice, live out, our faith. Not to pat ourselves on the back, but we are already doing a good job, if you will. But there is even more that we do not know. There is more that we should know. We know that, do we not? No one can make us learn more or practice harder. What we also know is that good always wants to become better and better is never satisfied with anything less than the best. That is what we strive for each and every day.

SIN IS GOOD, IF…

Martin Luther once opined that if we are going to sin, we might as well sin boldly. After all, a sin is a sin is a sin. Difference in degree makes no difference, as I have maintained for a very long time. For instance, stealing a dime and stealing a million dollars is still stealing. No matter how much we steal, large or small amount, stealing is a sin. So if we are going to sin by stealing, on a theological level, steal big.

On a practical level, I remember an old prof in seminary who said the same thing. He said, if you are going to steal, don’t stop with $10,000. Steal millions because you’ll still get the same jail time. He was wrong, however. A former employee in a parish I served embezzled over a hundred thousand dollars. He got three-to-six years in jail. At the same time a high-ranking sport person had embezzled several million dollars and received a sentence of one year. The parish employee obviously did not steal enough to hire a good lawyer while the other guy did.

There’s a moral there somewhere when it comes to the practical. On the theological level there is one there also. It is good to sin if we know that what we are doing is both deliberate and wrong. We don’t sin by accident. All sin is deliberate. Both gentlemen knew that what they were doing was wrong and that if they were caught, they would have to pay a civil penalty. They were and they did. They had no one else to blame but themselves even if they tried to justify what they did, and they did try.

The reason why Luther and even my seminary prof concluded that a big sin/crime was better than a small one is that we humans tend to not sweat the small stuff. “My sin was not so bad,” we say to ourselves. It could have been worse. Our sins only seem to get our attention when they are whoppers and we can neither deny nor justify what we have done. We have to face up to our sin.

That’s where the rubber hits the road. It seems that it takes something that we can neither avoid nor excuse that finally gets our attention: Luther’s point. Until our sinfulness gets our attention, we keep on keeping on. On the other hand, what if we never really sin boldly, do something that gets us arrested or hurts another so much that the other is scarred for life?

That’s the dilemma we face, isn’t it? Since we are not great sinners, personal sin never gets much of our attention. And because it does not, sinning doesn’t seem to do us much good because we believe our sins haven’t done much bad. We convince ourselves that we are good, and we are, and that we are not perfect, which we are not, and that God understands, which God does.

But none of that is an excuse to not get serious about our deliberate failings and shortcomings, as minor as they maybe. If we do not, they only get worse. 

PRAYER: A CRY FOR HELP

When I was in seminary, our spiritual director used to post signs along the hallway to chapel to remind us of our spiritual “responsibilities” as I would call them. One was “RMCD” as I recall from almost 60 years ago: “Remember to Mark Chart Daily”. He used to pass out slips of papers on which we could write our personal daily and weekly spiritual exercises such as praying for loved ones, making a weekly confession, etc. Then when we accomplished the said deed, we were to mark our chart daily, if necessary.

Another sign simply read “ACTS”. It was his definition of the ingredients of prayer: adoration, contrition, thanksgiving and supplication. Thinking back, I suspect he meant “and in that order”. As I reflect on ACTS all these years later, he was probably correct. When we pray to God, our first words should be of adoration: words of love and worship of God our Creator.

Our next step should be to confess our personal sinfulness, not that we are great sinners but certainly acknowledging we aren’t any great shakes of a saint either. Then, before we get to the Big One, we need to thank God for all many blessing of our lives even as we take so many of them for granted and/or believe that we somehow in some way deserve them.

Then comes the Big One: supplication, which, for many of us, perhaps all of us – saints among us are the exceptions – consumes most of our prayers. We beg God to help us in whatever way we, at that moment in our lives, need help. The list can be long and almost endless. Sometimes there is one issue that seems to be controlling everything else in our lives and we desperately need God’s help to resolve the problem because we certainly can’t all on our own.

Moreover, is there any time in our lives when we don’t seem to need God’s help? That help may not be because of a personal need but because someone we love needs God’s help and we are helpless to do anything about it but to pray for God’s intercession and help; and that is what we do.

When I reflect on my personal prayer life, even in those times when I follow my old spiritual director’s order, I tend to rush through the first three to get to the last one: my cry for help. When I arrive there, I spend an inordinate time explaining to God why I need God’s help in this particular instance. It is as if God has no clue why I am in need of help, no clue whatsoever!

God knows our needs before we ask. We don’t even have to ask. But, then, of course we do. It is our personal way of acknowledging, at least to ourselves, that we are powerless over so many things in our lives and that the only one who can help us through this time is God. ACTS aside, prayer is essentially a cry for God’s help. And so we pray.