PUNCTUATING IT

There’s a story told – a short one --- about an English professor who wrote the words "A woman without her man is nothing" on the blackboard. He then directed the students to punctuate it correctly. The men wrote: "A woman, without her man, is nothing." The women wrote: "A woman: Without her, man is nothing."

It’s all a matter of perspective, is it not? Two people can read the same sentence and understand it in a different manner, often in a completely opposite manner, as the story reflects. Two people can look at the same sight and one can see something the other simply does not, and vice versa. That is normal. That is human. That is expected giving who we are as people: diverse, complex, different. Thank God for that! Life would be so dull and boring if we all thought and acted alike.

But because of our differences, because no two people are alike, there are bound to be disagreements, sometimes very serious disagreements on some very serious issues. Nations have been known to go to war over such differences. Add religious differences into the mix and there can be chaos. One does not have to be a serious student of history to know what havoc has been wreaked over the millennia because one side of an issue believed the other was totally in error and the only way to eradicate the error was to eradicate the perpetrator of the error. Think Crusades.

Fortunately that does not happen very often, even though once is still too often. What happens more frequently is a personal insistence that our way is the right way if not the only way, that we have a lock on the truth, and that those who disagree with us are in error. It is not a matter of perspective, we say; it is a matter of right vs. wrong. That attitude is often even more destructive than war because it is a war that cannot be won: there are only losers who engage is such battles.

There is a lot of debate going on in this country about a multitude of issues, some very serious issues, issues which I will not go into at the moment. But we all know what they are and we know that we are all part of the discussion. Much of the discussions and debates are being punctuated by those who punctuate the same sentence differently, by those who see the same issue from a different perspective. That is fine and that is to be expected and that is even as it should be given who we are: all sorts and conditions of people.

What also should be and must not be forgotten is the realization, by those present and discussing/arguing/debating/voting and those of us who will only hear or read about what goes on, that we are a nation were perspectives vary, where opinions are strong and where punctuation is important, yet, in spite of it all, we remain one however tenuous that oneness seems to be at the moment.

How we punctuate the point of view is not as important as realizing and living with the truth that no one has a lock on the whole truth. There is always another perspective and there indeed can be more than one way to correctly punctuate the same sentence.

GETTING TO GIVE

In one of his sermons the late Harry Emerson Fosdick made the following observation: "The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are made of the same water. It flows down, clean and cool, from the heights of Hermon and the roots of the cedars of Lebanon. The Sea of Galilee makes beauty of it for the Sea of Galilee has an outlet. It gets to give. It gathers in its riches that it may pour them out again to fertilize the Jordan Plain. But the Dead Sea with the same water makes horror, for the Dead Sea has no outlet. It gets to keep."

Both giving and keeping are in our hands. We get to give and we get to keep. No one can make us do either. The choice is always ours. And it is always a free-will choice: to freely give and to freely keep. There is nothing and no one that can force us to do either. We in the preaching profession love to quote Scripture where it says that we should give, that we should tithe, even, because it is better to give than to receive.

That is all true. But no one has to listen to Scripture or even believe what is there to know the truth about something. I have always believed that if I have to quote a Scripture passage to prove my point, my point isn't worth trying to prove. It has to stand on its own, make sense on its own, convince on its own.

And so it is with giving. Giving to others of what we have must make sense all on its own. We must be convinced not only that it is better to give than to receive, but it is even better still to give than to keep.

They only way that we can come to that conclusion is by experiencing it for ourselves. Fosdick's analogy is wonderful and makes wonderful sense. But the analogy must become real in our own lives. In fact, it has become real, too. Think about it. We all know the joy there is in giving. It always feels good all over to give of ourselves, to give something of ourselves, to give of our possessions. Giving always gives us pleasure.

And it feels even better to give when we do not want nor expect something to be given to us in return. It's the grandparent in us. Grandmas and Grandpas love to give to the grandkids. It is pure and total joy. They expect nothing in return. What they receive in return is the love of the grandchild which is beyond even joy. I certainly know this from experience. The joy cannot be described. It can only be enjoyed.

On the other hand, we all know the sadness there is in keeping. When we hoard our possessions, when we pile one thing upon another, we never find happiness and joy. Momentary joy and happiness perhaps. But it is only momentary. Why? Because when joy only comes from the piling up of possessions, we have to acquire another something to add to the pile. And it is never enough. The joy comes when we can take from that pile and give it away. Even greater joy comes when we take the money we would spend on ourselves and use it to give joy to someone else even if that someone else is anonymous.

We all have with us the potential to be like the Sea of Galilee or the Dead Sea. When we get to give, we live. When we keep, we’re, well dead.

IMAGINE

It’s been almost fifty years since John Lennon asked us to imagine a world with no countries and thus “nothing to live or die for”, a world with “all the people living in peace.” Yes, imagine that! I did. And I imagine millions of others did to, maybe billions. But the sad truth is that is probably all we did: we imagined such a world and then quickly convinced ourselves that such a world could never exist.

Several weeks ago Bishop Michael Curry, preaching at the Royal Wedding, asked us to imagine a world “where love is the way”. For when love is the way of this world, truly the way of this world, “no child will go to bed hungry…justice will roll down like a mighty stream and righteousness like an ever-flowing brook…poverty will become history…the earth will be a sanctuary.” Again, imagine that!

And, once again as we did all those years ago, for one brief moment we actually did imagine such a world. And, once again, I suspect we have all moved on because we still do not believe such a world is possible especially given the divisiveness that is so very, very – and tragically and sadly – rampant in this country of ours.

But we cannot and must not give up or give in. For what we imagine to become real, we have to actually do something to make those imaginary dreams become realities. Dreams do not come to fruition on their own. We have to do what needs to be done to make them come true. Otherwise they will simply remain wonderful dreams that momentarily give us pause and be uplifted. But that is all.

We need to be reminded of what we can be, can become, should be and should become as John Lennon and Michael Curry have done. Now it is up to us both individually and together to actually make what we imagine to become real. That will not be easy. It will never be easy given our proclivity to look out for ourselves first and foremost to the detriment of everyone and everything else.

I mean, how do we think we got into this mess in the first place, got to the point where we need to be reminded to open our minds and hearts to imagine what should be but what isn’t? And we’ve wallowed in this mess both because we have convinced ourselves that nothing can really be done about it and, worse, because we have been unwilling to do much on our part – except hope and wish and dream and imagine.

The sad – and tragic – part for me is that those who can do the most and do it most quickly to begin to bring about the world Lennon and Curry ask us to imagine are our politicians. But they really do not care. They say they do, but they do not. Actions speak louder than words. Their only real care is getting re-elected. Even so, that is no excuse for me, for any of us, for not doing our small part, whatever that is, to do what we can to make this country, this world, what we imagine it can and should be.

JUST A PRACTICING SINNER AM I

If the truth were told, I would have to admit that I am a practicing sinner. Well, no use beating around the bush: I am a practicing sinner. I practice sinning every day. But, then, I am not alone. Everyone I know is a practicing sinner. Fortunately and thankfully that is all we are. It could be worse. We could be full-fledged sinners.

The fortunate part is we are still learning how to sin. We have to learn how to sin. Sinning does not come naturally. We were not born sinners. We were born innocent. We learned how to sin and we had some pretty good teachers: our parents, siblings, grandparents. We watched how they sinned and we learned.

To be sure, they did not realize they were helping us become learned in the ways of sin and selfishness. They never deliberately set out to teach us to think of ourselves first and others second. But they did and we saw how they did and we learned and now we teach our children, our brothers and sisters, our friends and neighbors. As has been said, and truthfully and tragically so, we have to learn how to hate. Hate does not come naturally and neither does sinning.

But, again, the fortunate and thankful part is that we do not have sinning down pat. A true sinner is one who puts himself or herself above everyone else, including God, and does everything from a purely selfish motive with no concern about the consequences not only to others but also to self, even if those consequences be one’s eternal damnation. The truth is, and again very fortunately and very thankfully, we do not even come close to being such a person.

Yes, there are times when we are mighty selfish and deliberately so. There are times when we choose to be very, very sinful. All sin is by choice, of course. We never sin accidentally. We choose to be selfish, know we are selfish and know what we are saying and doing are wrong. But we do it anyway. That is what it is sinful. Yet we never go so far into ourselves that we exclude everyone else. The thankful part is that we stop short of being totally selfish.

What keeps us on the straight and narrow path, if sometimes only on the berm of the road, is the grace of God. Left to our own devises we could and perhaps would wander off into only God knows where. For that we must be thankful. But it is not simply the grace of God that keeps our sinning to a level we can live with – if we could not live with it, we would cease. It is also the help and support and prayers of our faith community that keep us from becoming unhinged and going off on our own and “to hell with everyone.”

None of this means that just because we are all only practicing sinners and not total sinners, only partially selfish and not purely so, that we are allowed us to be passé about it and somehow be off the hook as it were. We cannot. We must not. It does mean, however, that we cannot call another a sinner while failing to use the same term to describe ourselves. We must always strive to be less sinful and more loving, which, of course, also takes practice

ABSENCE

No one seems to know who it was who astutely observed that absence makes the heart grow fonder. It was no doubt someone who was away from his/her beloved and suddenly realized just how deep that love truly was. And that love grew even deeper as the length of the absence was extended. If no one had ever made that observation before, each one of us could have. We’ve all been there. Sometimes we truly need to be away from the one we love in order to realize just how deep our love truly is. This is true not only of our relationships with people but also with places and times as well.

On the other hand, the obverse can be just as true. For instance, there are times in our lives when the present may not be what we remember the past to have been. And so we read into the past, because we are absent from it, perhaps more than was there. We long to go back to the old days, the old place, the former times and circumstances because we perceive them to have been so grand and glorious – or at least better than what now is. Perhaps they truly were. Perhaps.

Yet there is one absence from which there is no return. We can neither go back in time nor can the future fill the void. The absence is permanent and all we have left to hold onto are the memories of the one we loved and who loved us. Such is the reality of the death of someone we love. We will be absent from the other until we meet again in eternity. In the meantime there is a void that will not be filled. Again, what is true about the absence of a beloved is also true about other past loves: other people, other places, other times.

It is trite even though it is often also quite true that time heals the wounds of the separation. Time does, but it also leaves a scar. The wound of the temporal loss of the loved one may be healed. It is no longer an open wound. The pain is gone, or at least most of it, but the scar remains, the reminder of the loved one whom we can no longer hold and hold onto to see us through our dark nights and lonely days. When we rub that scar, some pain comes back to the surface, if only for the moment.

Some may be tempted to insist that God, our faith in God, fills the gap that is left in our hearts and lives. But we know this is only partially true. God is always with us even during those dark nights of the soul. But God does not completely fill the void. God allows some emptiness to exist, I think, so that we do not forget the one who is now absent, even as painful as that sometimes truly is.

Absence, if nothing else, allows us to be thankful for what was, to remember the other, to remember the past, to remember what was important and meaningful and to do so with gratitude even as painful as that will be at times to do. The truth is that absence is painful because who or what is gone was and still remains a very important part of who we are. If there is no pain, not even a twinge, then it means that we know we have moved on with our lives. Thankfulness for the one who is now absent, for that which is now absent, is not so much a cross we must bear as it is a reason to give thanks for the gift that was once given and still is part of us.

ALTARS ARE EVERYWHERE

Barbara Brown Taylor in her magnificent book An Altar in the World makes this observation: “To detach the walking from the destination is in fact one of the best ways to recognize the altars you are passing right by all the time.” In today’s world that is not always easy to do. Even more the thought probably never occurs to us so much in a hurry that we all seem to be.

The destination, the end of the journey, almost always seems to be foremost on our mind from the time we set out till the time we arrive. Everything and everyone else along the way are rarely ever observed. Granted, when driving we should never take our eyes off the road. But the point is that there is so much to see between here and there and that we are in so much of hurry to get there that we never consider the thought of taking more time to get there so that we can see what is along the way.

And what we would see along the way, no matter how long or how short the journey, are altars to God, places to worship, places and people to see God and God at work. We know this to be true whenever we have taken the time to get somewhere and pull off the road to see the wonders of creation. When we get back into the car we sometimes wonder why we don’t do this more often.

Those altars, of course, are not simply places here and there along the way. They are everywhere , everywhere we look. But we first have to stop and look and then look deeper. A casual look around, a quick glance, won’t do it. Just as a first impression of another doesn’t really tell us much if anything about that person and, in fact, may be the complete opposite of what we think we see, so, too, do quick glances.

We know all this, of course. We know we need to slow down. We know we almost always move too fast through life. We often wonder why we are in such a hurry to get somewhere especially when we have more than enough time to do so. Yes, yes, yes: there are times when we just do not have time to stop and smell the roses, to see God in all of God’s creation. I get that. We all get that.

Yet the truth still remains, as Taylor reminds, there are two parts to any journey: the destination itself and what awaits us once we arrive and the trip along the way there. I wonder what life, my life, everyone else’s life, would be like today had we taken our time over the years getting to our many and varied destination to stop at those altars we’ve hurriedly passed along the way.

I have to believe that our own lives and the world itself would be so much better. We would be so much more at peace with ourselves and with one another because we would have seen both our God in all of creation and, more importantly, in one another. The truth is creation is God’s altar and so is each one of us.

---

 [

IT'S ALL GOD'S FAULT

Let’s cut to the chase: the mess in this world is all God’s fault. Tsunamis, hurricanes tornadoes and their aftermath: it’s all God’s fault. If God had not created the world the way it is, such disasters would not occur. Murder, mayhem and the multitude of other sins that abound, all that is also God’s fault. If God had not created us with free will, none of this would happen. So we are off the hook.

Not so fast. Yes, in the Grand Scheme of things, whatever that Scheme is, and God only knows what it is, it is God’s fault that bad things, both natural and intentional, do happen. Why nature acts the way it does and if there might have been a different way of creating that precluded natural disasters no one knows, not even the best and the brightest. Only the Creator knows.

What we know is that natural disasters like tsunamis and hurricanes do occur. We can also waste our time wondering why they are part of God’s created order, which certainly sounds like a contradiction in terms. How can a hurricane that causes so much disorder be considered part of an ordered universe? See what I mean? Nevertheless, if it makes us feel good, let’s say all natural disasters are all God’s fault.

That said, what we also know is that we do not have to fall victim to them. God may be blamed for hurricanes that destroy much of a city because it was the result of the way God created this universe. It was not God’s fault, however, that people built where they should not or that the levees were not strong enough or high enough to protect the people and the land. It was and is ours.

When we freely do that which is sinful and/or foolish, it may be God’s fault that we are able to do so because God created us with free will. But we know we do not have to engage in foolish and sinful behavior if we do not want to. It is our fault when we do and we know it. It would certainly make us feel much better if we could blame God for such behavior or at least hold Gold partially responsible.

In fact, I believe that the main reason why God forgives our sins is that God created us sin-enabled. God knew we would sin when God created us with free will. We do not have to sin. We do not have to build where we should not, under-protect what we should, kill when we should not, not love when we should. But we freely choose to act the way we do and God in God’s infinite love forgives us.

It may be God’s fault that hurricanes are able to devastate and we are able to sin, but it is our fault if we do not do what we can to prevent both the devastation of the natural order and the sins of the human order. In both cases it is easy to play the blame game. We can cut God some slack and we can cut ourselves the same, neither of which addresses the main point, namely, free will notwithstanding, that we take responsibility for our sins both of commission and omission. Until we are ready and willing to do so, we will continue to find and makes excuses for our failures and nothing will change, at least not for the better.