IT'S NOT ABOUT US

It’s not about us. It really is not about us. We think it is. All too often we act as if it is; but it really isn’t, if we truly understand what our faith is all about. It’s really about everyone else. It’s not about us. Think about it as a mantra: “It’s not about us.” Repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until it finally begins to at least break the hard outer shell of our natural resistance. It’s not about us.

When it is about us, whenever we are about ourselves first, the other and/or others are a forgotten, neglected, overlooked or dismissed second. It is easy to do, of course, this thinking that what we are about, whatever it is we are about, is about us. Yes, whatever we do has to be about us, but only to a degree and not first and foremost. If it is totally not about us, we will not have anything to do with it.

For instance, when we engage in outreach ministries, those ministries are not about us. They are primarily about those to whom we minister. Yet we get something out of doing them else we would not do them. We are not that altruistic. No one of us is totally selfless. We can’t be. The self is part and parcel of the unselfish act of ministering to others. And so there is always a personal reward in doing for the other, ministering to the other, whatever that ministry entails.

The same is true, however, for whatever else we are about as a church: worship, education, fellowship, and so on that, on the surface, seem to be about us. We want our worship to be fulfilling and uplifting. We want our educational opportunities to challenge us and inform us so that we can better understand and thus live out our faith. We want our gathering experiences to enliven us and give us a sense of support and encouragement so to better live out our faith.

Yet whatever we do, it is not about us. It is about those who are not yet part of us, those who have not yet heard the Good News of Jesus Christ, those who really think that what we do is about us and not about them because that’s the message we seem to be giving and they seem to be hearing. And who can blame them? Perception is reality whether we like it or not.

The reality, the truth, is that to be engaged in Christian ministry the other comes first. The other must come first. What may be good for us may not be good for the other. That does not mean we do what we believe is wrong. What it means is that oftentimes we have to give in to our desire to please ourselves first and foremost and give it over to opening our hearts – and community – to others, especially to those outside.

None of this is anything new. It is simply a reminder of something we often forget, especially when in the process of dreaming about how we can become a better person, a better Christian, a better Christian community of faith. Whenever we put the other first, whoever that other is, whether inside or outside our faith community, we may not get the answer that is most pleasing. We will get the answer that is both most loving and the right one as well. 

PROPHET...AND FOR PROFIT

 For some crazy reason I can still remember taking a Latin vocabulary test way back when. My professor read off the English words he wanted is to translate into Latin one of which was profit. What he failed to do was spell profit. Those of us who had no idea what the Latin was for profit wrote propheta = prophet. When the tests came back, he humbly had to accept propheta. He wanted lucrum. How interesting! Back to that in a moment.

Were I to ask most anyone today to define prophet, my suspicion is that I would hear something like, “a person who foretells the future,” which would be wrong. No one can foretell what will be. A prophet is someone who speaks for God. Yes, Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and Amos usually did foretell the future, but it did not take anyone special to foretell what they foretold. All Isaiah, Amos and all the other prophets foretold was that if the people kept on sinning, their sins would come back to haunt them.

Not rocket science is it? The only future any of the prophets was concerned about was the immediate future. The people were disobeying their God and they knew it. And if they did not know it, the prophets were sent not only to remind them of their responsibilities and duties but also to warn them that if they kept on sinning, God would not protect them when it came time to pay the piper.

Again, not rocket science; moreover, we are all prophets in the same vein as an Amos. We warn those we love (prophesy to them) as those who loved us warned us (prophesied to us) that sin and selfishness always catch up to us and we will reap the results of those actions. God wants us, those who love us want us, and we ourselves should want to cease the sinfulness and get right with God and one another.

That is all prophecy is. It is not the foretelling of some distant future. Amos did not predict some far-off event several hundred years later. The Book of Revelation does not predict something about to happen 2000 years later. Amos was written to his contemporaries who were disobeying God. John wrote Revelation to those who were being or about to be persecuted. The Book of Revelation has no reference to any time other that to the time at hand when it was written.

That is not the same as saying it has no relevance. Just as Amos warned and reminded his people that they needed to amend their lives, so he reminds us today. As John encouraged the people who were being persecuted for their faith to remain strong and promised them God would see them through, so John reminds us today of God’s ever-present grace and strength when we find it difficult to live out the demands of our faith.

What is happening today is that there are those who are were like my classmates and me in that Latin class. They are distorting prophet for profit (Latin: lucrum from which we derive lucre, as in “filthy lucre”). To assert that Revelation was written about events that would take place 2000 years later is to say John was lying to the people of the seven churches to whom he wrote. It would be as if he were saying, “Times are tough. But have courage. In 2000 years God will make all this right.” It would be as if Amos said, “You better get right with God because in 1000 years your sins are going to catch up with you.” Nonsense!

We are all prophets when we live our lives as we should. There should be no profit, lucre, in being a prophet. In fact, it is often very painful in so many ways, as we have all learned from experience.

 

FORGETTING HOW TO DREAM

A friend of mine in Pennsylvania was sort of a recluse. He wandered in and out of his small apartment mostly to the grocery store, sometimes to church and, when he could not avoid it any longer because of his health, to the doctor. He spent much of his time thinking and writing, mostly poetry. On occasion I was a recipient of some of his poems. They come typed – typed, not computer-generated. He did not own one because he could not afford one.

David, as with all poets, lived in his own world, but he also had a way of seeing into our world and seeing what we sometimes cannot and often will not see. That’s the upside of poetry. The downside is that sometimes the words poets employ are so obtuse that even if we want to see with their eyes, we cannot because we cannot go where they are. Their words seem to block the path. But not always.

A while back David sent me a letter to which he added a page containing four short poems. One was titled simply, “Journal Entry”.  He writes: “Vision and dollars are in conflict: / When there are lots of dollars, / There is no vision; / When there are no dollars / There is lots of vision.”

That I can understand. It may have taken David’s poetry to paint the picture, but at least this time the words don’t obfuscate his meaning. He cannot be clearer can he? When one’s financial resources are slim, who does not dream about what life would be like if one only had a little more money? There is no telling what s/he would do, what deeds s/he would accomplish! On the other hand, when financial resources are abundant, one does not need to dream of what might be because one can have whatever one wants and have it right now. 

That is not to say that it is only the financially strapped who dream of what might be. Nor is it to say that the Bill Gates’ of this world live in and think about only the present. While David’s words may be a slight exaggeration of reality, sadly he was still not far off the mark. What is even sadder is when we have forgotten how to dream. The church, sadly, is all too often a vivid example of that.

Churches always seem to be one lost pledge away from debt, if they are not already there. Budgets are bare boned. There is no fluff. We want to dream of what we could be if we only had more people and more dollars, what it would be like if we had an unlimited source of funds. But we do not dream because we seem to have forgotten how.

What if, for instance -- to dream the impossible dream -- every person suddenly tithed, even half-tithed, gave 5%? Would we have even the foggiest vision of what to do with those financial resources? When dollars are scarce, we do not dream about what could be, should be, because we have forgotten how to dream. Might it be that dollars are scarce precisely because we do not have a vision of what can – and should – be? Perhaps we need to learn how to dream again. For when we do, not even the sky will be the limit and no dream will be impossible.

 

TORN BETWEEN TWO LOVES

E. B. White: “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. That makes it hard to plan the day.” It surely does, does it not?

It does because these two desires are all too often, if not polar opposites, certainly contradictory. When we enjoy what the world has to offer, we do not necessarily improve the world, make it better for everyone. In fact, in our enjoyment of the world we often do more harm than good. That is not a political observation but a proven and scientific fact. In our enjoyment of Mother Nature we have often destroyed much of what She has to offer for our enjoyment.

On the other hand, working to improve the world does not necessarily bring with it much joy. It takes hard work to clean streams, purify the environment and eradicate poverty and it takes even more in the way of personal sacrifice. As White suggests, working to improve the world takes work on a personal level, which means sacrifice, which means living with less. Less may indeed be more and, in fact, it truly is. But once we have gotten used to more, it is neither easy nor pleasurable to try to live with less. It is often a real pain.

Environmental issues aside, so it often seems with all of life, especially our lives as Christians.: it can be and often is a real pain. God created this world for our enjoyment and pleasure. God gave it to us to take care of and use well, certainly not to misuse or abuse. God also gave us the life we have, our personal lives, to enjoy. God did not create us to live in pain, to suffer and be miserable. Yet, often the pain and suffering that comes our way is the direct result of abusing or misusing the very life we have: our bodies, our minds, our beings.

We are torn between work and play. We would love to make our work into play, or at least come to the point where we really enjoy what we are doing. On the other hand we never have the desire to make our play into some form of work. Likewise, doing good is always pleasurable but it is also often painful, sometimes physically painful. We are often torn between doing a good deed that involves some pain, and not doing it in order to save ourselves the physical pain involved. Think Jesus on the cross.

Loving who we are, loving our vocation, our calling, makes the living out of that calling enjoyable even when it is difficult and painful. But not always; and that is the crux of the problem. That is, as the word crux means, the cross we choose to bear. If we could plan our day, we would love to make sure that all we say and do builds up and does not tear down. If we could remove any pain and suffering involved, we would love to do that as well. But we can do neither, not totally, and, given our sinfulness, not always. And so we rise in the morning knowing, as we plan our day, there will be crosses to bear, choices to be made, and that often we will be torn between two loves. That may not be a pleasant thought but it is also the truth from which we cannot run.