NO DIRT IN THE SKY, NO BREAD IN THE BASKET

When I was growing up in the 1940’s outside of Pittsburgh, those who worked downtown had to take two white shirts to work: by noon their collars were black from pollution. As a youngster in the 1950’s I watched my Mom sweep the porch and wash the window sills on a daily basis: we lived on a hill above two power plants that spewed pollution from burning coal. As a young priest in the 70’s I served two steel mill towns whose coke plant stacks blew out pollution on a daily basis, so much so that I had to turn on windshield wipers to get the soot off the windows.

Few citizens complained: “No dirt in the sky, no bread in the basket” they said. And they were right. They also knew that the air they were breathing was not healthy. They – individuals, government, industry – reluctantly got together and cleaned up the air as best they could. No longer would street lights need to be turned on at 3:00 or two shirts taken to work. But it took time because the environment was not on the front page back then; bread in the basket was.

And it still is. Almost every area of the country, the world, in fact, has a recognized environmental problem, in fact, several problems. But, of course, the solutions tend to take bread out of too many baskets. And so they are fought and delayed and railed against, as, sadly, they always have been.

The solutions today are no less difficult than they were forty, fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. The difference today, I believe, is that we have become more conscious of the fact that we have been called to be stewards of God’s creation, responsible for the maintenance of this planet. The Genesis story is a reminder that everything God created is good – and will always be and that as the highest creatures of God’s creation we are ultimately responsible for keeping the good good.

As with peace or love or joy, as with all of life, it all begins with each one of us individually. I cannot clean up the world and neither can you. But I can keep my corner of the world clean. I can waste less, want less, even need less. Sacrifice is always involved. But as the word sacrifice reminds us, to sacrifice means to make sacred, make holy: we understand the holiness of creation as we keep it holy. But, as we very well know, sacrifice is never easy. That is why it tends to have an adverse connotation rather than a positive one.

When we use less, demand less, certainly waste less, we leave more for those who already have less than they need and we leave something for our children and their children. What we discover in the process is that we can have both no dirt in the air as well as bread in the basket – and the air will smell better and the bread will be fresher and will taste better because we can smell it better, and there will be enough for all – more than enough, as a matter of fact!

PRAYER WAITING

My all-time favorite preacher was The Rev. Will B. Dunn, a character created by the late Doug Marlette for his Kudzu comic strip. Will was no ordinary preacher, mind you. He was with it, always up to date, in tune with the signs of the times. He also had a way of commenting not only on the signs of the times in general but on organized religion in particular. I miss him.

An example: Will is on his knees praying. He only got on his knees when he was desperate, otherwise he assumed God would take care of him, preacher of the Word of God that he was Will begs: “Lord, I beseech thee…Grant me…” But he is interrupted by a “click, click” “Uh, sure, I can hold” he says. Then with a scowl on his face, he says, “I hate prayer waiting.”

Don’t we all? I mean, when I am at prayer, I want God’s undivided attention. And, more importantly, I want a response right now: no prayer waiting and no answer-prayer waiting for me. But wait I must, must we all. God always hears our prayers. We know that. We always have God’s undivided attention. Whether or not God has our undivided attention when God is trying to get God’s message across to us is another matter, maybe an even more important matter, but always another matter when Item One on our agenda is Prayer Answered. 

God knows our needs even before we ask. God even knows our wants. What God wants, I think, is for us to recognize those needs, distinguish them from our wants, and then reflect on what we will do to help fulfill those needs, Most of the time God allows us to take care of those needs on our own. God simply gives us the grace to recognize the need from the want and the strength to do our part.

But our prayers are always answered. They are not always answered in the manner or the means we would like. But they are answered. God never leaves us hanging forever: for a while, perhaps, but not forever. My suspicion is that the time between making our needs known to God and God’s response is to be used by us to do what we can do to respond to those needs.

When we have done all that we can do, at least our doing our part, God will do God’s part, but not before. When those in real need came to Jesus, they knew they had a need – to see, to walk, to be healed in one way or another. They had done all they could. Now they were putting the rest into God’s, God’s Son’s hands.

Prayer waiting just might be an apt way to describe prayer. We need to wait a while, take time to get in touch with ourselves so that we can wait on God. Maybe one of the reasons why it seems that it takes so long for God to get around to us is that we don’t give God the time to get to us.

PUTTING THE GOD-IN-US TO DEATH

The Genesis story reminds us that we are made in the image and likeness of God. I will not get into a debate right here about the gender of God or even about what God looks like. It’s a moot point. No one knows. And it is usually beside the point anyway. God is God. Because we are made in God’s image and likeness, we are to be like God and what we do is to reflect what God would do were God doing what we are doing.

For when we do Godlike deeds, what we are doing is keeping God alive in us and God alive in the world around us. The problem we encounter is that we tend to do some ungodlike deeds: we call them sins. The other problem is that we sometimes take all the credit for the deeds that we do, sometimes, even, the Godlike ones, failing to give God the credit for our being able to do the good we do. Sometimes our ego gets in the way.

It often happens, as someone wisely observed, that we put the image of God in us to death. When pride takes over, there is no room for God in our lives, none at all. We become the god of our lives because we did it, not God, not someone else.

The remedy to pride, of course, is humility. Unfortunately, humility can be as false as pride is real. That is the Uriah Heep self-effacing humility that makes everyone around us ill. And there is the self-serving humility that is used as an excuse to excuse us from doing what we should be doing. And there is real, honest humility.

Norman Vincent Peale once observed that people with real humility don’t think less of themselves; they just think of themselves less. That is difficult for a person whose pride leads her/him to believe that s/he is totally or mostly responsible for whatever is being praised. It is also impossible for those who use a false humility to escape responsibility.

Real Christian humility is an acknowledgement that God is truly seen is us, in what we say and do, how we live our lives. True humility is the awareness of how fragile we are, how easy it is for us to succumb to pride, how thankful we should be for the honor of making Gid known to others by our very lives. True humility understands how easy it is for us to put the God-who-lives-in-us to death.

The truly humble person thinks of others first, realizing that each one of us is called to follow Jesus’ example: and that is to live a life of service to others. In living that life there is a priority order: first, to serve God; second, to serve others; finally, to serve ourselves: love God, love neighbor, love self. If we live our life of service in that order, it becomes difficult for us to spend a lot of time thinking about ourselves.

When a humble person thinks about Good Old Number One, that person knows that God is Number One, others are Number Two, and self is Number Three. The temptation, of course, is always to reverse the order, and, sadly, we often do.

PRACTICING CHRISTIAN

No one of us gets it right all the time. We make mistakes even when we think we have covered all the angles and have what we are about to do down pat. It’s human nature. And no one of us is as pure as the driven snow, as they say. We are all sinners to one degree or another. Perhaps we can, and probably should, take a bit of satisfaction in knowing that our sins are not all that bad; but they are sins nevertheless.

What all this means is that we are still in the learning process not only about what it means to be a Christian but also what it means to be a human being. Every day scientists are learning more and more about how our physical body works. They are learning how to repair joints that used to take weeks now take place as same-day surgery. My cataract surgeries were same-day. When I was ordained 50+ years ago, it was a two-week procedure demanding the patient stay rigid in bed with sandbags to hold the head in place. The list is endless.

In the same way we are constantly learning how our spiritual body works, that is, if we make the effort to pause and think how far we have come in that area as we have grown up physically. What we once thought was no big deal, we now know that it is. For instance: bullying, teasing, name-calling. As kids we did it to others and they did it to us. We hurt them and they hurt us and we sort of thought it was okay. But it wasn’t and isn’t and never will be.

Physical pain hurts but not as much as spiritual pain. Stones may break my bones but the bones will heal. Spoken words last a lifetime and the pain never really goes away. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that is how we learn. It is not that we have to practice hurting someone or being hurt in order to learn. It is that so often that is the only way we learn, namely, the hard way.

The grace in all this is that we do learn and that we continually do so. We grow in an understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to be a Christian. We will never get it right all the time. We will continue to make mistakes and we will continue to hurt ourselves and others in word and in deed, but less so. That doesn’t make our failures okay. They are still failures but at least we have learned from them.

But, then, that’s how we learn, isn’t it? Practice is supposed to make perfect and it does, but not all of the time. We can and should rejoice when we get it right and be thankful. Then, too, we should pause and reflect what went wrong when we did not, when we said or did something we knew we should not but did it anyway. We and the world we live in would be a wonderful place if we got it right the second time and from then on.

But in the meantime, we have to keep practicing, keep living and learning what it means to be fully alive physically and spiritually.

ON NOT SETTING LIMITS

Our greatest gift, and oftentimes our greatest gripe, is our free will. We human beings differ from every other creature because we are endowed with the ability to freely choose to do or not to do whatever it is we may desire to do. Yes, our “animal” instincts are often at work, saving us in those moments when we have neither the time to think nor perhaps even to freely choose how we will respond. Thus, there are times when reflecting back on what just happened, we are either thankful for those instincts or chagrined that we acted in the manner we did.

The truth is that were we to be given the choice between being devoid of free will or having to acknowledge our guilt for a foolish or sinful action, in the end we will gladly choose the latter over the former. Of course, we were and are not given that choice. That is not the way we were created. Thus, because of our free will no one and nothing can be held accountable for our actions, good or bad, except we ourselves.

We know that, much as we might like to find a scapegoat for our sinfulness. Given that freedom and given our human nature, we simply have to live with the truth that we freely do that which we should not and freely choose not to do that which we should. The saving grace is God’s grace and forgiveness. It allows us to pick ourselves up after our failures and go on knowing God will help us be stronger the next time, if we are willing to do our part.

The real issue in this life, it seems to me, is not our sinfulness so much as it is our freely choosing to limit our love, which, in essence is he basis for everything we do or do not do. To paraphrase something Charles Schwab once observed, when we put a limit on what we will do, we put a limit and what we can do. As we know, there is a difference between being unwilling to do something and being unable to do something. I have the will to play the piano but I am unable to do so because I simply do not have the God-given gifts needed to be able to do so. I have the ability to help someone in need but may I not have the will to do so.

So it is for each and every one of us. While our abilities as individuals are limited since no one of us is God, our abilities as a world community are limitless. It is our will, both individual and collective, that puts limits on what we will do and not our ability to do whatever it is that needs to be done. More often than not, if not all the time, whenever we say that we cannot do something, what we are in fact saying is that we really do not have the will to do it: we do not want to.

There is a vast difference between “I can’t” and “I won’t”, between “we can’t” and “we won’t.” Whenever we find ourselves saying “I can’t” or “we can’t”, perhaps we need to step back and ask if what we truly mean is “I won’t” or “we won’t”. Then we need to ask ourselves why we are unwilling to do that which we know we can do and which must be done. We may not like to ask or answer that question and our free will gives us the freedom not to, but we must. We must not, we must not limit ourselves to that which we are willing to do.