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?

HOPE IS FOR THE DEAD

The great spiritual writer and thinker – and one who certainly lived what he wrote and thought because he truly believed – Thomas Merton: "Hope then is a gift...total, unexpected, incomprehensible, undeserved...but to meet it, we have to descend into nothingness. It is the acceptance of life in the midst of death, not because we have courage, or light, or wisdom to accept, but because by some miracle the God of life himself accepts to live, in us, at the very moment we descend into death."

I don’t know about you, but I never looked at hope like that before. In other words, hope is for the dead, not for the living. While we have life in us, there is no need to hope. We are alive. It is when we are dead that we need to have hope. And because we are dead, because there is no life in us, hope, as Merton says, is a "gift... total, unexpected, incomprehensible and undeserved."

That means we have to reserve the word "hope" to very few occasions in our lives. Hoping to win the lottery, to make an "A" on the exam, to get that job: those are all desires of the living. Most of the work of bringing about those desires is up to us. But when we are dead, it is all up to God. When the doctor says "there is no hope," that's when we begin to find hope, in and through God. It is when God, the God of life, not the God of death, accepts to live in us that we truly find hope. But it is only when we "descend into death."

All of that may seem rather profound, theologically deep. And it is, if you think about it. It is for me now that I have been thinking about it. The word "hope" like the word "love" -- and maybe even like the word "faith” (I'll have to think about that more) -- is bandied about rather blithely without ever really understanding what is being said.

The commitment of love comes from the very depths of our being and demands the very soul of our being. Anything less isn't love. It may approach love, but it isn't love and we dare not call it such. Think of Jesus's death on the cross because of his love for us: that kind of depth (that came in death!). So, too, with hope. It comes from the very depths of our being and demands that we give that being over to God. The reason we dare to hope is that life, this part of our life, is now out of our hands. We can do no more. All we can do is give our life over to God and hope that God will bring new life.

We have all discovered this because we have all died at one time or another. When we gave the moment, the situation, the person, the life over to God because we could do no more, because we were dead, we were totally, unexpectedly, incomprehensibly, undeservedly surprised by the presence of God. But not until then.

We do take God for granted -- until we're dead, dead to whatever has been holding us back from God: pride, doubt, self-sufficiency. And God lets us be that way, maybe the better to surprise us by his grace and love in the midst of our despair, depression and, ultimately, death. Personally, I would rather have hope come more easily. But then, I'm not God.

SOMETHING ALWAYS HAPPENS

We are all wounded. It goes with being human, being alive. We will always be wounded. Heal one wound and another opens up. Several wounds may be festering at the same time. The bleeding never stops until we die. Until then we are a mess of wounds, often a bloody mess.

The wounds are usually more spiritual, psychological, than they are physical. Would that all our wounds be only physical. We could deal with those even if they could not all be healed. It's the other wounds that are the real stinkers. They make the physical wounds even worse. Many physical wounds are simply that: physical. If there is a psychological scar attached, it is usually the result of our own foolishness and nothing more deep-seated than that. Break a leg: we know why. Injure our back: we know why.

But there are some wounds whose reason is beyond our comprehension. For those, we find a reason, a spiritual one: sin. The fundamentalists are good in this area. Their standard reason for anyone being sick is that the person has sinned. Cancer, MS, diabetes, etc., are all the result of personal sin. Repent of that sin and one will be healed. And in a way the fundamentalists are correct. Sometimes our own sinfulness causes injury to our physical being. A smoker who gets lung cancer knows the reason for the cancer. But for the most part, no one deliberately sets out to do something sinful so that the action will cause a debilitating and life-threatening disease.

Yet, even though personal sin is not the cause of breast cancer, for instance, if one wants to be healed of that cancer, one must want to be healed and must believe that healing is possible. If we believe breast cancer is an automatic death sentence for us, it is; and there is nothing that the medical profession can do about it.

On the other hand, the medical profession can determine that there is no cure for our disease and we can still be healed -- physically and spiritually. But the spiritual always comes first. We must want to get better before we can get better. And it does not matter what the cause of our illness was -- sin, foolishness, or the luck of the draw. It is only after we are wounded that the healing process begins.  We are wounded: now what? Now let the healing begin. And once we want to be healed, once we begin to pray for healing, something always happens.

What happens is not always what we pray for, the outcome we may desire. But something, some good, always happens. Prayer brings God directly into our lives because we have personally asked God to be directly involved in the healing process. God never says "no" to that prayer.

How God answers our prayer is up to God. Without God we will surely bleed to death, physically and spiritually. Even with God, we will never be free of wounds, given our humanity; but we will always be healing, getting better spiritually, if not always physically. Something always happens when we let God into our lives, something good, no matter how wounded we are.

GARAGE SALES / GARBAGE SALES

 Rummage sales, garage sales, are all the same to me. They are ways of getting rid of garbage, stuff we don't want, junk that is cluttering up our life, our house, our space. We all have garbage in our lives, literally and figuratively. Garage sales are one way to get rid of the garbage and come out with a financial profit – although we never get back what the stuff cost us in the first place – which brings up the question of why what is now so needless was once so necessary. But that may be getting a little too personal.

I once heard someone describe the ministry to the dying as helping them get rid of garbage. Over the years that has been my experience as well. I have ministered to a number of people in the throes of death who were still hanging on. They could not die or would not die. More often than not they would not let go of life until they had said the last "good-by" to the last loved one.

But so many others would not let go of life until they had gotten rid of the garbage they had been carrying around for many, many years. It had loaded them down in life, kept them from living in peace, and now was preventing them from dying in peace. It was only when they dumped the garbage, usually by some sort of final confession, that they could die in peace. The constant and surprising part of it was that the garbage was usually no big deal. But it was to them.

That is why in death it is now nothing more than garbage. It was once a big deal, perhaps a very big deal. It was once important, even very important. Now, in death, it has no value. It is just cluttering up their lives, preventing them from entering into God's fuller life in death.

All garbage was once somehow in some way important and in no way garbage. Now it is not to the person for whom it is now garbage. But, as garage sales remind us, our garbage is now someone else's treasure. That's why garage sales work. True garbage goes to the dump. The rest we recycle.

We all carry around garbage which, while we are carrying it, seems important, even seems like a treasure. But what it is doing is keeping us from one another, from another.

Garbage is something that has lost its value for us. The problem is that sometimes we do not recognize that what we still think is valuable is not. We're still hanging on to it, whatever that "it" is – past slights, prejudices, bigotries, old ways that don't work, traditions that have seen their day, the past.

No one of us is immune. We all carry excess baggage, baggage filled with garbage. Not a nice thought, I know. But it's summer. And we all know what garbage smells like in summer. Maybe it's a good time to look into our lives to recognize the garbage and get rid of it. Take it to the dump. It can't be and shouldn't be recycled. Why wait until we are dying to unload what we should have unloaded years before? Why waste our time and our life carrying around garbage?

 

ANGELS EVERYWHERE

A story (not mine, but I wish): When an ice cream sundae cost much less, a boy entered a coffee shop and sat at a table. A waitress put a glass of water in front of him. "How much is an ice cream sundae?" he asked. "Fifty cents," replied the waitress.

The little boy pulled his hand out of his pocket and studied a number of coins in it. "How much is a dish of plain ice cream?" Some people were now waiting for a table, and the waitress was impatient. "Thirty-five cents," she said angrily. The little boy again counted his coins. "I'll have the plain ice cream." The waitress brought the ice cream and walked away. The boy finished, paid the cashier, and departed. When the waitress came back, she swallowed hard at what she saw. There, placed neatly beside the empty dish, were two nickels and five pennies – her ti

A powerful story, that's why I wish I could claim it. But it is also a powerful reminder to me that it is so easy to judge another person, to make judgments about another person, simply because of first impressions; or even worse, because we are having a bad day.

Even worse than that is to have already pre-judged a person sight unseen. We do that, too, like the waitress. She worked for tips. Little boys don't tip well. And boys-being-boys, well, they are often more trouble than they are worth, especially if a big tipper is waiting for their booth.

The wonderful part of it all, even the humor of it all, especially because the joke is on us, the ones who pre-judge, is that the victim of our prejudice is not the victim. We are. And it is only when we realize this that we learn any lesson.

The Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that we often entertain angels unaware. We also often abuse them unaware. And when the table is turned, we are the ones who really feel the pain. The little boy was probably unaware of the waitress's impatience with him, upset because he was taking her time and thus losing her money.

But angels are like that. They somehow see through us, put up with us, so that we can see through our own impatience – or whatever it is that for the moment blinds us to the real person in front of us – and see.

Prejudice makes us blind. The only way we can regain our sight is to be healed, to have someone open our eyes. If the story is true, as I suspect it is, it was probably told by the waitress on herself. She was not proud of the way she treated the little boy, but she was thankful that he taught her an important lesson. She could not undo the past. But she could go into the future having learned a lesson taught by an angel who looked like anything but.

But, again, angels never do look like anything we would expect. That is why we encounter them unaware and why the lessons they teach are so profound, so moving and usually so life-changing.