FEAR AND HATE

Years ago when I was the Ecumenical Officer in the Diocese, I attended the National Workshops on Christian Unity. The purpose of these gatherings is to promote Christian unity among the various denominations throughout the country. This disunity is truly a scandal as we are to be one in Christ. Of course, the greater scandal is that this disunity has caused fear and hatred among Christians.

The theme for one of those gatherings was to address this issue: “Perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 4:10). Over the years we have come closer to one another but we are not one. There is still that fear that in doing so, we will lose something of who we are. Of course, trying to decide what that something is leaves one wondering why that is so important to us.

We have come a long way over the years. While we may fear the unknown, and rightly so, we have not degenerated into hate. Franciscan Richard Rohr in one of his recent mediations reflected that fear is almost always behind hate. If we are afraid of someone, truly afraid, that fear easily becomes hate. Why has there been and still is such a hatred of the Jewish people? Because people were and are afraid of them? Why? Because they have been and are so successful as the world deems success: power, money, etc.?

In our political arena if we can generate fear of those opposed to us, fear that they will cause our lifestyle to go to hell in a handcart and worse, we can easily come to hate them, and make no bones about it. That in and of itself is frightening. Past and present history tells us what happens when people begin to hate one another. Mass shootings, bombings, wars are all the result of a hate for those being attacked. And that hate was the result of a fear that was somehow fostered in the minds of the attackers.

Fear has to be nipped in the bud before it turns into hate. And the only way to do that is through love. We may never arrive at John’s hope that all fear will be cast out because we will never perfectly love. That only comes in the life to come. But in the here-and-now, even an imperfect love is better that no love and certainly better that hate.

But how do you even begin to love who cause you to fear? How do you love the fear-mongers, especially those who know exactly what they are doing? Unlike my colleagues at the National Workshop, they want to divide, not become one. They don’t want to work and sacrifice, even compromise, for the sake of oneness and love for one another. They want you to be afraid the enemy will take away what you have and not work together to make things better for everyone.

It's a hard call because it is indeed hard. My only solution is to pray for those who are afraid and especially for those inciting the fear that can only lead to hatred. I hard to do that, but I have no choice. It is what my faith calls me to do.

GRACE AND MERCY

A wise person once observed that grace is when God gives us something that we do not deserve and mercy is when God does not give us what we do deserve. But, then, none of us needed a wise person to make this observation for us. We have observed up front and personal in our own lives, most probably on a daily basis. The sad truth is that we are usually not aware of most, if any, of this.

We are blessed, you and I, and abundantly so. And, for the most part, we take these blessing for granted. Now we will not be so bold to assert that we deserve these blessings from God, although we sometimes act as if we do. It seems it is only on those rare occasions when we stop, step back and reflect about just how blessed we really are that we realize that we have done little or nothing to deserve what we have received except for the grace of God.

Why are we so blessed, so graced, while so many others around us and around the world are not? They did not do anything to cause their loss of blessings and we really did nothing to merit ours. All we can do is be thankful, grateful and humbled by how blessed we are and do all we can to help those who seem, and certainly are, so deserving of God’s grace but are not. That is not so say they are not blessed. It is to say that when we compare our blessings with so many others, there is no comparison and it simply does not seem fair.

The other side of the coin, if you will, is the realization that God, in God’s infinite mercy, has spared us from much pain and suffering that we truly did deserve – and continues to do so. It is almost as if we have a guardian angel steering us away from the places and people that will lead us down the wrong path and cause us pain and suffering. Even more, when we ignore those angelic warnings and get ourselves into a real mess, for some reason God spares us from much, if not all, of the pain we deserved.

God’s mercy saves us from ourselves. And like the realization of just how blessed we are by God’s grace, it is only when we stop and reflect how often God has spared us from the pain and suffering our words and actions truly merited that we are thankful and grateful and humbled. Again, it does not seem fair that others suffer more than they deserve while God’s mercy saves from the suffering we truly do deserve.

Grace and mercy: God’s constant gifts that, if you are like me, we tend to take for granted and overlook. My guess is that God does not expect us to be constantly aware of God’s grace and mercy but simply to pause every once in a while to reflect just how active God has been as is in our lives every day. What God does expect, or at least hope for, is that we are thankful, grateful and humbled. It’s the least we can do. But it is a starter. At this moment in time, if we’ve never or hardly ever reflected on God’s grace and mercy, it may be enough, may be. Enough said.

IT’S ALL QUITE SIMPLE

A group of us usually gather at a local restaurant after the early Sunday Eucharist. A few weeks ago I was seated next to our Senior Warden who proceeded to tell me a joke she had just shared with our Rector. Let me share it with you even if you have already heard it because it made me think about what it means to be a Christian. Here goes:

Forrest Gump is standing at the Pearly Gates waiting to get in. St. Peter tells him he has to answer three questions in order to get in. The first question: How many days of the week begin with “T”? Forrest’s response: “Two – today and tomorrow?” St. Peter reluctantly agreed. Second question: How many seconds in a year? Forrest’s response: “Twelve – January second, February second…” Not the answer he was expecting but another reluctant agreement from St. Peter. Third and final question: What is God’s first name? Answer: “Andy.” St. Peter was at a loss to understand. Forrest broke out into song to explain: “Andy walks with me. Andy talks with me…” St. Peter opened the gates to Forrest.

Okay, corny joke and a long way to get to my point. Forrest’s answers were so simple even if the second question needed a computer and the last one could only be answered by “God only knows.” But the simple truth, as Forrest would probably tell us, is that living out our faith and understanding what it means to live out our faith is not rocket science. It’s simple – and is the whole message of the entire Bible summed up in one sentence: love God above all else and love your neighbor as you love yourself.

That doesn’t mean it is easy, as we have all learned through daily living. We inherently know what we are to do, how we are to live, as followers of Jesus. And we strive to live that life each and every day. And each and every day we fail to one degree or another. No one of us is perfect nor does God expect us to be perfect. What God expects of us and we should expect of ourselves is to be as good as we can.

I recently looked over the catalogue from my seminary to see what the theologians were studying these days. They are getting a great education just as I believe I had. But all those years studying scripture, moral theology, the sacraments and even canon law and everything I learned and those seminarians are learning today boils down to that one sentence, no more and no less.

And when they and I stand in the pulpit to proclaim the Gospel message, everything we say boils down to that message. If it is something else, if the words are contrary to that message, Jesus’ message, then we are failing to do what we have been ordained to do. And when we, priest and people, live contrary to that message, we fail to live out what we have proclaimed by our baptism that we are commissioned to do. But when we do, as we have learned when we do, we find life and we find life in its abundance. Isn’t that why we keep trying to live it as best we can even as we fail every day?

WONDERFULLY HARD

My Old Testament professor, who was also the Hebrew teacher, told us that we need not learn that language if we never intended to be scholars. Since I only wanted to be a simple parish priest, I did not. In hindsight, I wish I had at least learned to read Hebrew, but that’s water over the dam. Thus, when it comes to defining Hebrew words, I have to trust those who know – which is simply an introduction to my reflection.

I learned that the Hebrew word for hard is the same word for wonderful. Imagine that! Something that is hard is also wonderful. It is wonderfully hard. If you think about, it has a ring of truth. If something is easy for us, we usually don’t give it much thought and we probably don’t take as much delight in it as we could or should. We just take whatever pleasure or joy that the task gives for granted and move on.

But if some task is hard, whatever the task, we have to concentrate on what we are doing simply because the task at hand is indeed hard, difficult. It takes serious attention if we want to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. Otherwise, we will make a mess of what we are doing and will probably never complete the task. We know this to be true because we have learned the hard way.

Yet, when we have given it our all, when we have been fully physically and mentally present at the task at hand and done what needed to be done, we came away with a wonderful feeling of accomplishment even if we are bone tired and exhausted from our efforts. We also know this is true because we have learned from our experiences that it is the truth.

When something is wonderfully hard, there is an inner peace and enjoyment that is difficult if not impossible to put into words; nor do we have the need to do so. Why? Because the experience and the effort was and always will be very personal. Yes, others may and probably will have benefited from our efforts, and that is one of the driving forces for our actions. But we did not set out to do what we did simply because we were looking for some personal satisfaction. We did what we did because, in our eyes, it had to be done.

It is only when we have completed the task at hand that we can sit back and reflect. What we learn is that we accomplished what we did, as hard and as difficult as it was, because of the grace of God; the grace that put us in the position to be able to do what needed to be done; the grace and strength to accomplish the deed; the grace to make the effort when so much of us wanted to walk away and let another take up the difficult task.

We truly learn the hard way. We learn that the hard way is probably the only way to learn and that is why we need the grace of God to do what needs to be done and why we can say to ourselves afterwards, “That was a wonderfully hard experience!”

THE EMPTY TOMB

The symbol for Christmas is the star – or the manger or, in the secular world, the tree. The symbol for Good Friday is the cross, either bare or with a corpus-in-agony on it. The symbol for Easter is an empty tomb. Nothingness and yet everythingness. As Frederick Buechner writes: “You can’t depict or domesticate emptiness. You can’t make it into pageants and string it with lights. It doesn’t move people to give presents to each other or sing old songs. It ebbs and flows all around us, the Eastertide….

“He rose. A few saw him briefly and talked to him. If it is true, there is nothing left to say. If it is not true, there is nothing left to say. For believers and unbelievers both, life has never been the same again. For some, neither has death. What is left now is the emptiness. There are those who, like Magdalen, will never stop searching it till they find his face.”  (Whistling in the Dark)

And there will be those who will spend their lives whistling in the dark because of their refusal to open their eyes and see something, nay everything, in the emptiness of the tomb. For when our eyes are opened, we see not the darkness of a tomb, empty or otherwise; rather, we see the brightness of the glory of God in all of creation. More importantly, we find the face of Christ when we see that face in and on the face of every person our eyes behold.

If all that is true, there is nothing left to say, as Buechner says. All that needs to be said is said. Our search for the one who once occupied that now-empty tomb has ended. We have found him. We see him. We encounter him every time we open our eyes to the light. If it is not true, if the tomb was never empty, then there is not much that one can say or even needs to say. So the question asked to believer and unbeliever alike is quite simple: “When the stone is rolled back, what do you see?”

The problem for non-believers is that they don’t believe; but that’s their problem. They have to deal with it and answer for it. But at least what they can and do say is that they do not see what we claim to see. Our problem is greater. We know what we see when we look into that empty tomb. We see resurrection and new life – for Jesus, for us, for everyone. Our search is over. We see the face of Jesus everywhere we look – when we open our eyes to see.

The temptation is not to, to shut our eyes to the brightness of the empty tomb and the responsibility that emptiness brings to our own lives. There are times when we in fact do give into that temptation and begin to act as if, as if, the tomb was never empty, even as we know it was and is.

The Feast of the Empty Tomb, Easter, is the celebration of our discovery of the fullness of life itself, our life now and the life of the community of believers whose lives are now living proof to the resurrection. “The tomb is empty. Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!” No more can be said. No more needs to be said except “Alleluia!” and the living out of that Alleluia in our daily lives.