LIVING WITH UNCERTAINTY

Most people I know are quite comfortable living in a confusing and uncertain world where one does not always have all the answers. I find myself in this position most of the time, but not always. There are times in my life when I do not like the uncertain nature about life. There are times when I want to know what is the absolute right thing to do, what is the absolute right answer.

And because I cannot separate my faith from the rest of my life, the questions always boil down to one: What is it that God would have me do in this situation? Sometimes after much thought and prayer, I know what God would have me do. Now that does not mean that I will always do it. It only means that I know beforehand what I should do. I know that I should turn the other cheek. That does not mean that I always will.

Yet there are other times in my life when I just do not know what is right, what it is that God wills, what it is I should do. I know that there are those who believe that they have a lock on the truth, that they know what it is that God wants, and that they can quote chapter and verse to prove it. And then they do. The problem is that it is not that simple. For as soon as we use scripture to back up one belief, we can't play loose with it when it comes to other situations.

If, for instance, one believes a certain action is immoral and then cites chapter and verse, one must also say that women are forbidden to talk in church, divorce is wrong and we should stone our children when they disobey us – also citing chapter and verse. We hold that war is immoral. But then, is it? They killed people by the tens of thousands, if you go by the numbers, in the Old Testament, and did so in the name of God. They, and we, were also told that we shall not kill and should turn the other cheek. We can't pick and choose our sins or have our actions be sins on one occasion and justifiable on another depending on circumstances. But we do!

That is not to say that anything goes. It does not. But it also does not allow us to state that one sin is worse than another. Yet we do. We insist that killing is worse than stealing. And even killing and stealing have their degrees of guilt. But to restate what I have said so often, difference in degree makes no difference. We are all sinners. A sin is a sin is a sin and it does not matter the sin.

What matters and what is truly important, is that we clean up our own house before we start to try to clean up someone else's. It also means that there are times when we may even be uncertain not only about what needs to be swept clean but where to begin and what to do next.

We live in a sinful and confusing world where the temptation is for the quick fix and the simple answer. There is no quick fix, at least for the great issues of our time. There is, however a very simple solution but one that is not easy to live out: love everyone all the time. We're not there yet. In the meantime, the struggle goes on. With God's love and grace we will grow stronger and better each day.

ON NOT BEING SATISFIED

Psychiatrist Gerald May: "We have this idea that everyone should be totally independent, totally whole, totally together spiritually, totally fulfilled. This is a myth. In reality, our lack of fulfillment is the most precious gift we have. It is the source of our passion, our creativity, our search for God. All of the best of life comes out of our human yearning, our not being satisfied."

One can read what May says with mixed feelings. It can be a case of good news and bad news. The good news is that     our frustrations with our failures are part of our natural longing to be fulfilled, to be satisfied, to finally find what we are looking for. The bad news is that we may never know what we are looking for, cannot even define what it is that would satisfy and fulfill us. That could lead us to simply being satisfied with the status quo and never striving for anything more than what is. It can allow us to accept our failures as part of human nature, a what-did-you-expect-from-a-limited-sinful-human-being-? approach to life. It can do that.

But there is that part of us which prevents this in all of us. It is that search for God or, rather, our desire to draw closer and closer to our Creator. That desire, I think, is innate. It arises from the fact that it is God who has created us and that godliness is part of our being and we want to know and understand what all that means.

As Christians we are quite aware that we always fall short of perfection in our lives. We also will not allow ourselves to be satisfied with anything less than with what we know is to be our goal in this life. And that is to be as God-like as Jesus was as frightening as that can sometimes be when we actually are like that. Knowing that we will never totally arrive at that point in our life in this life does not deter us from trying every day to be better than we were yesterday and to be even better tomorrow. And when we fail to accomplish this today, we know tomorrow is another day and another opportunity to be a better person than we were today.

Nevertheless, knowing all this, there is still that nagging feeling, as May intimates, that there is always that possibility that we will find a way to be perfect, to be fulfilled, to be physically and spiritually altogether. If that were not possible, we would never begin to try in the first place. We don’t start off on any adventure or project knowing that we will absolutely fail. Perhaps the reason for our making the attempt each day to be as perfect and fulfilled as possible is that our Creator is perfect and we have that part of God in us that believes perfection is possible.

What all this means to me is that life will always be a struggle between being satisfied with what-is and never being satisfied because what-is is not enough and what-we-want-to-be is an impossibility – in this life, of course. Perfection and complete satisfaction only come, of course, in eternity.

In the meantime, the grace of God, which is the Holy Spirit living in and working through us, keeps us never being satisfied with what is, no matter how good it is, because we know we can always do and be better. And it keeps us from being dejected by our failures because we know we have tried our best even though we have come up short. I guess it means that there is good news in the bad news and bad news in the good news and that no matter what, God always loves us and will never abandon us. Never.

FULL-SERVICE OR SELF-SERVE?

When I was growing up, all gas stations were service stations. When you drove in, one, and sometimes two people came out to fill your tank, wash your windows, check the oil and battery and whatever else they thought needed to be checked. If there was something wrong, they worked on your car right there. And if you wanted something to eat or drink while they were working on your car, there were candy and pop machines available, but no more than that.

Not so today. Today, we can buy all the food we want, even stuff for the laundry, but we have to fill our own tanks, wash our own windows, check our own oil. If my observations are valid, most people are like me: we fill our tank and our stomach and forget about everything else. We're too much in a hurry any more. Back then it was full service for your car. Today, what is offered is full service for your stomach and barely lip service for your car.

Today my body may be taken care of but my car gets neglected, except for the gas. Today it is all self-serve. I would prefer the full service. That way I do not neglect what I often do now. When left to my own desires and devices, what most needs to be taken care of often, my car, gets neglected and what needs to be neglected, my stomach, often gets full treatment. At least that is what is being offered. It is truly a crazy world we live in these days, isn't it?

Gas stations - service stations are almost a metaphor on all of life, perhaps especially our lives as Christians, as people of faith. Today, instead of taking care of all that needs to be done, we tend to the most immediate need. Instead of allowing other people to help us do what has to be done for us, we try t do it all by ourselves. We want to be self-service Christians.

That was never the way it was, nor is it the way it should be. God did not create us to be alone. God created us one for another, to help one another -- and not just when the other is in desperate need to be helped. In the old days I hardly ever needed oil and my windows did not always need to be washed. But the oil was always checked and the windows were always washed, needed or not.

In the age of self-serve only immediate needs seem to be the concern. We do not allow others into our lives except when there is an emergency. We'll take care of ourselves, thank you. But we don't do a very good job. We neglect to check what needs to be checked. Then when the oil runs out and the engine develops problems, we wonder how we got into so much of a mess and worry how we'll get ourselves out of the mess, all of which is our own doing; all of which could have been avoided had we not been so self-serving.

When we gather to worship, we are reminded that we are here one for another at all times and not just in emergencies. Our faith is a full-service faith: gathered together we remind ourselves that we are here to serve one another and not ourselves alone. 

NO EXCEPTIONS

Every once in a while on my travels I come upon a billboard with these words: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” That is true from several perspective even though, when I read those words, I often cringe because the people who pay for the billboard really do not fully understand what those words mean. Their understanding is that only baptized Christians can enter heaven, which makes one wonder what they do with Mary and Joseph and Moses and anyone else who has never heard about Jesus?

Even so, those words are true. First of all, if one’s vision of heaven is life after physical death here on earth, one certainly will have to be born again to enter heaven. There is no other way. We must first die and then be born again to live the new and eternal life God freely offers to each and everyone of us, Mary and Joseph and Moses an all those Chinese non-Christians, etc., etc., etc. No one excepted and no exceptions on how to get into heaven. The billboard people just don’t or won’t understand.

What I think they, and maybe you and I, don’t fully understand is those words are true right here and right now in our own lives. Jesus came among us not to die so that we can get to heaven when we die, because that is God’s free gift to us: unmerited and undeserved on our part. Rather Jesus came to bring about the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, here on earth. And we do that by living out what he taught us, fulfilling in our very lives his one very simple message: love God above all else and love our neighbors as we love ourself.

To do that we have to be born again, and maybe again and again and again. While in the womb and once out of the womb, the only person we were concerned about was ourself. Life centered around everyone fulfilling our needs whatever they were, food and security being at the top of the list. It took a while before we learned and understood that others were just as important as we were. That was a born-again experience. And it was a difficult lesson to learn. We had to die to our selfishness in order to be born anew into the life of God’s kingdom even if, back then, we didn’t have a clue what that is. That’s the way it was for us and for every human being. No exceptions.

That’s the way it still is. God’s kingdom is alive here on earth. Sometimes it is very alive and well and at other times not so. It is alive and well when we live our lives in love and care and concern for others. It is not well when we revert to putting ourself and our wants over the needs of others. Unfortunately, and I think this is what the billboard people do not understand, we need to understand that the kingdom of God is not just lived in the life to come through death, but it is here on earth and it is to be lived out by each and everyone of us if it is to be lived in its fulness.

And, unfortunately again, and this time for all of us, if I may be judgmental, we fail everyday to live out our life as our faith in Jesus asks us to do: to the fullest. And so every night at the end of the day we can and should reflect on how well or how poorly we helped make God’s kingdom a reality where we live and move and have our being. And then off to sleep to rise again the next day, born again, to live and love as best we can.

Yet none of this can happen if we believe that the kingdom of God is somewhere out there and not right here on earth. God is in charge of what happens when we die. We are in charge of what happens while we are very much alive. It is up to us to make the kingdom of God here on earth what God wants and expects and even demands that it be. It won’t be easy as we know all too well. But to do that, sinful human beings that we are, we must be born again each and every day. And for that there are no exceptions.

WHAT IF GOD TOOK THE SUMMER OFF?

 ...or the month or the week or the day of the hour or the minute or even the second? What if God said, "I need a vacation from all this God-business, of listening to and helping answer prayers and all the rest of the stuff I do. I think I'll take some time off and let them fend for themselves for a little while."? What if?

I know what you're thinking: "Here comes the guilt trip. In fact, he's already started it with that question. Of course, God doesn't take time off. God doesn't leave us to fend for ourselves, not even for a moment. That is not God's way." So you are thinking.

Guilt trip? Maybe. But guilt trips are never very effective precisely because of their very nature. They appeal to our heart and not our head, to our emotions and not to our intellect. Yes, we do much of what we do not because our head says we should. Often it does not. But our heart says otherwise. If the Good Samaritan had used his head, he would have quickly passed on by.

Yet, on the other hand, we often do things we would rather not do, like study for an exam, but do so because we know in our head that we simply must if we want the results of what passing the exam will bring.

Of course, there are times when we don't do things we know we should do because we just don't feel like it. We should get up and go to church even though we feel like sleeping in, but we just don't feel like it. Momentary guilt sets in. But we overcome it and turn over onto the other side and say to ourselves: "Next Sunday." Then when next Sunday comes, we so often repeat the scenario. We take another trip down Somnolence Lane, Guilt Trip Lane notwithstanding.

The reason why God doesn't take time off from being God is that, I think, God loves being God. God could not take it for even one millisecond to be out of our lives, uninvolved in our lives. We, on the other hand?

That is not to say that we take ourselves out of God's life because we roll over in bed instead of getting out of it and going to church. Sometimes that is just what we need, maybe even what God needs for us that particular Sunday morning. And sometimes, well, let's not get into that. It would sound too much like a guilt trip, certainly very judgmental.

So let's get to the heart of the matter: as a former pastor my need to see you on Sunday, not from an ego standpoint (well, maybe a little) was great. When you were not there, I missed you. In the same way, when you are not in church, others miss you. God does not take time off from us because God would miss us no matter how much we drive God up the wall at times. We are part of God's family.

A church community is a family. And when part of the family is missing when the family gathers to celebrate, we cannot celebrate as fully as we could and should. More guilt trip? Only if you think so. If so, then what?