IT COMES WITH THE TERRITORY

Responsibility comes with the territory. That is the message throughout Scripture. It was the constant message of the Old Testament prophets. Jeremiah, for instance, reminded the leaders of Israel that God had selected them and put them into their positions of leadership, and God expected them to fulfill those positions to the very best of their abilities. They owed it to the people. They owed it to God and they truly, and perhaps most importantly, owed it to themselves to lead the people as they should be led, as they knew it was their responsibility to do so.

Those chosen as leaders – shepherds, Jeremiah called them – did have a choice. They did not have to accept the position. If they did not want that burden laid on their shoulders, they could hand on the torch to someone else, someone who was ready and willing to lead. God never forces anyone to assume leadership responsibilities. But once accepted, God expects only the very best.

What we all sometimes fail to realize, however, is that as a believer, as a Christian, the responsibilities of leadership come with the calling – and the acceptance of that calling – to follow Jesus. All members of the Christian community, you and I, are called to lead others to Jesus by the way we live our lives: it is leading by example. The responsibility comes through our baptism. It is to "proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ," as the Baptismal Covenant asserts.

We do not do this alone, of course. We do it "with God’s help" and with the help and support of the Christian community. When we forget that, or when we reject that help, that is when we get into trouble. When we think we have to lead alone or when we refuse the help of others and decide to go it alone, disaster awaits. We will fail. That is a given. The shepherds of Israel whom Jeremiah took to task failed because they refused God’s help and took leadership responsibilities into their own hands. That was selfish, foolish and, in the end, disastrous.

There will be times this day, for example, perhaps many times, when each of us will be called upon to teach those we encounter, often by happenstance, what it means to be a Christian and we will do so simply by the way we are living out our life at that very moment. They will not know that that is what we are doing and we will no doubt be totally unaware that that is what we are, in fact, doing. We teach by our very lives, for good or for ill, aware or unaware.

Leading by word and example, no matter who we are and no matter what our position in the Christian community, is a responsibility that comes with the territory. It is a burden at times, of course. Sometimes it is a very difficult burden, to be sure. Fulfilling the responsibility that God imposed on the prophets to remind the leaders of their responsibility was never a piece of cake. Nor is it at times for us. But it is a burden that is made lighter the more we allow God and the rest of the community to help and support us in our life of faith, just as we are there to help and support them in fulfilling their leadership responsibilities as Christians.

SLOW ON THE UPTAKE

To be honest, sometimes it takes me quite a while to get the message or get the point. After twelve years in seminary and fifty years as a priest, it somehow, and finally, dawned on me that the primary, and often only audience for Jesus during his public ministry was twelve people: the Apostles. Yes, he preached and healed and even took to task the leaders of the people whenever necessary. But he was almost totally focused on those twelve men.

Why? Because he had to convince them that his message on how to live in this world, how to make this world what God created it to be, was the one and only way to bring it about. You see, from time immemorial we have believed that in order to survive in this world, the way to succeed, was to have power over another or others. The Apostles followed Jesus because they believed he was the Messiah who would raise up a mighty military force to overthrow the Romans and make Israel what Rome was. And when that happened, they would be his right hand men and with that would come power and prestige and wealth.

Jesus had to disabuse them of that idea. No, he said, power only comes not through military might but from the might of love. Nothing else works. There is no other way to change the world or to live in this world. Like me, they, too, were slow on the uptake. They really didn’t get the message until Pentecost. Then they went out to try to get Jesus’ message across to the rest of the world. They did their best, but it seemed to be a fleeting message at best and a seemingly a false and unbelievable message at worst.

The world is still slow on the uptake. We still seem to believe that military power and prowess is the way to go. Might makes right or at least insures that the mightier we are militarily, the better off we will be. Taint necessarily so. In fact, it isn’t. Military might does not improve the lives of every citizen. In fact, it often makes it worse. Want to know how to provide health care for all? Cut military spending in half. If there is a next war, it will be over in a short time and no one will need health care. We’ll all be dead in short order from all the bombs.

But I digress, sort of. The point is still valid, I think, and I believe so would Jesus. Nothing really gets done and changes in the lives of people are not made unless it is through the power of love. That was and still is Jesus’ message – and always will be. We know that to be true because we have experienced that in our daily lives. We are who we have become because others have loved us into our being. We have done the same for them through the might of love for them, not the might of power over them.

In truth, just as it took me a long time to realize Jesus’ primary audience and why it took so long for them to get his message, so it takes a long time for us to get Jesus’ message. When we do, we begin to change at least our lives and the ones of those we love.

A THOUSAND INVISIBLE THREADS

Over the years teaching high school students and even with my own children, one of the most difficult concepts they had was comprehending how everything they do, somehow in some way sooner or later, has an effect on everyone else. They just did not seem to feel that they were that important or that their actions were all that significant to anyone else, sometimes even to them.

Of course, they were not the only ones who had such a problem. It’s not a teenage problem. If we are honest, we will have to admit that most of us tend to live in our own little corners of the world and like it that way. And in those corners we sometimes allow ourselves to become so isolated that we cannot comprehend how anything we do will have much effect on anyone else let alone the rest of the world.

Herman Melville once observed: "We cannot live for ourselves. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these fibers our actions run as causes and return as results." It truly is sometimes difficult to comprehend how our small, insignificant lives and what we do in those lives can have any real effect on anyone else let alone the rest of the world.

Because of that we all too easily either make light of our own actions – good or bad or in-between – or down play their significance until they come back to either honor us or haunt us. Then, for better or for worse, it is too late. Would that we would be more aware of just how connected, interconnected, we are one to another. Imagine what that would mean to us and to the world!

Imagine what it would mean to us, to those closest to us, to everyone else, if, before we did or said anything, we first comprehended – or at least tried to – the consequences of our actions. Imagine! It would mean that the good we do would certainly be done better enabling more and better results to occur. It would mean that the bad we do would either not take place at all or, if it did, would be less consequential. Imagine!

But we don't do that imagining because it is too difficult to comprehend. It takes too much work. It places too much responsibility on our own shoulders and in our own consciences. At least that is my excuse. Excuses, good or bad, are simply that. They still cannot deny the reality of our interconnectedness. We may not see those thousands of invisible threads, but they are there and they are real. The bad that we did hurt more than those we intended it to hurt and the good we did helped more than the person or persons we were helping.

It is only when we, you and I, begin to become more aware of our individual responsibilities one to another and beyond and begin to take those responsibilities much more seriously in our daily lives that our lives and those of others will change for the better. Like those invisible threads the change may be imperceptible and, for the most part most of the time they will be, but they will also be real, very real. And that is what ultimately matters.

LOOKING FOR HOPE

I have never been to the Holy Land but hope to get there some day. An old professor of mine said that once you have been there, once you have walked the highways and byways that Jesus walked, your life, and especially your preaching, will never be the same. You will be able to understand Scripture from a completely different perspective. After fifty₊ years of preaching, I hope I will not be too late when I finally arrive.

One of my clergy colleagues was fortunate to make such a trip. After he returned home, I  

asked him about his trip, what was most memorable. Aside from all the biblical and historical sights, he said what most impressed him were the people, especially the pilgrims like him who came to the Holy Land. He said that what they all seemed to be looking for was hope.

Looking for hope: a reason to make a pilgrimage to the holiest of cities, the birth place of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Pilgrims of every race and nationality and perhaps of every religion, and even those with no formal faith, all come. And, if my colleague is right, they all come for the same reason, whether they realize it or not: they come expectantly, looking to find something to hold on to, something to hope for, something to help make sense  out of their lives.

That is not to say that their lives are empty of meaning, that all who walk the streets of Jerusalem have lost any sense of meaning in their lives. That certainly is not true. But I think it is true to say that all of us, whether in the Holy Land or not, are looking for something. We may not know what it is that we are looking for, not able to describe or define it even to ourselves. If the truth be known, we are restless, never fully settled in our lives.

Those who go to the Holy Land deep down know why they are truly going: to find what they are restless for: God. As St. Augustine once said, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in You, O Lord." People go to the Holy Land because there, more than anywhere else, there is that sense of the holy, of The Holy. And they hope to find that Holy, hope that in doing so they might be able to fill the void in their lives that they sense is there, that makes them restless.

We don't have to go the Holy Land to either look for or to find hope. And the Holy Land is not the only place in the world where hope can be found. God does not abide only in the Holy Land, in one place only. God lives and moves and has God’s being where we live and move and have our being. The Holy Land is special because it is God's special place. But wherever we are is special to God because that is where we are and that is where God is also.

Perhaps one becomes more aware of God in the Holy Land. I won’t argue with that having never been there. Perhaps what I need, perhaps what we all need to become more aware of God wherever we are. Then we will find, perhaps at last, the hope that we are looking for at that moment in time.