EVERYTHING WORTH WHILE TAKES TIME

Every once in a while I find myself in a hurry. My wife thinks it's more often than that. Be that as it may, sometimes I want to get things done as fast as I can so that I can move on to something else -- and get that done as fast as I can. So sometimes I have to ask myself, "What's the hurry?"

Even if I cannot find an answer to that question, I often have to remind myself that, given modern inventions, I can do so much more in so much less a time than I used to -- like writing and sending this reflection. Not only do computers beat even electric typewriters by a mile, there are high-speed copying machines that make mimeographs obsolete. Look what email has done to snail mail, much to the U.S. Post Office’s chagrin and profit loss and debt.

There are some things, however, that cannot be rushed. I suspect, just thinking without much reflecting, that the most important things in life simply cannot be hurried. They take time. As much as I want winter to end and spring to come, winter ends on time and spring comes on time no matter what I do. As much as I want a cut to heal as fast as possible, it heals in its own time. Life moves at its own pace.

For whatever reason I have been reflecting on resurrection and new life, perhaps because we have recently moved and everything is new. It is sort of a resurrection for us. And so in thinking about resurrection, it is helpful to be mindful that although resurrection always happens in one way or another, resurrection also happens in its own time and at its own pace and there is nothing much we can do about it except bide our time and wait for it to happen -- and then enjoy.

God is always in charge of all resurrections and God has chosen, it seems to me, to allow them to come upon us gradually but never unexpectedly. Spring comes, not all of a sudden, but slowly. The leaves do not appear in full bloom one day after budding. They drop from the trees in the fall just as slowly, allowing us to prepare for the coming next season. Would we enjoy it otherwise?

The difficult part for those of us in a hurry is that we sometimes do not understand that resurrection, like all of life, is a journey from one point to the next and that we cannot get from one to the other without making that journey no matter how long and perhaps painful it may be. The pain endured, necessary as it is, also helps us enjoy the resurrection experience even more.

Knowing all that does not make the pain any less or the journey shorter. Spring comes when spring is to come no matter what the groundhog sees or says in February. Good Friday brought Easter Sunday but it did not skip over Saturday.

We know all that, of course. But sometimes, if you are like me, we need reminded. I need my wife to ask, "What's the hurry?" otherwise I might never slow down and enjoy the journey. You too?

BAD THINGS HAPPEN

Bad things happen. That is a fact of this life. Bad things happen to everyone, good people and bad people alike. There is no discrimination. Some people suffer more bad in their lives than do others. But the amount of bad that happens to us is not in direct proportion to the deliberate bad we do. Good people are not spared their share of the bad just because they are good. And bad people do not receive a disproportionate share of the bad just because they are bad.

In fact, I have seen -- at least outwardly -- more good people suffering worse fates than I have seen bad people. Of course, outward judgements are simply that. One never knows for sure. Nevertheless, it is still true that bad things happen to all of us. Trees fall onto the roofs of good and bad alike. Flying rocks crack the windshields of both. Cancer strikes where it wills.

No one deserves to have bad things happen, accidental bad things. When we do something foolish and something bad results, we know whom to blame. But falling trees and flying rocks and infectious cancer have no cause-and-effect relationship when it comes to whom they will strike. Bad things happen to everyone.

Years ago Rabbi Harold Kushner was in town in which I was serving to speak to a group of clergy. The Rabbi and his wife suffered a tragic bad in their lives when a son died young. This event prompted Rabbi Kushner to reflect on the event and then write his reflections in his best seller, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Notice, he did not ask why bad things happen. But, in a way, he does. His conclusion is that bad things happen because God is not all-powerful. For if God were, God would not allow bad to happen to anyone, unless it was deserved because of one's foolishness.

But that is the point. Because God has created us with free will, God allows us to do foolish things which will result in bad things happening to us and even to others who do not deserve it. We drive 100 miles per hour and kill ourselves and kill other innocent people as well. God chooses not to stop us from hurting ourselves and hurting others because God chose to create us with free will. God could have chosen otherwise. I don't like that. I wish God would prevent my foolishness.

Thus, when undeserved bad happens to good people, it is not because God cannot stop it. It is because God created the universe that way. However, God did not create us the way God did without also resolving the problem. The resolution is resurrection. There is always resurrection. We can recover from the bad that happens either in this life or in the life to come or both.

If we do not believe in resurrection, we are out of luck. I feel for those who do not because they have nothing left except to endure the bad and perhaps curse God in the process. I can bless and praise God even when bad things happen because I believe there is always resurrection, some how in some way, in this life or in the life to come, there is always resurrection. Believe it!

FRIENDSHIP

Stephen Dietz, playwright: "What do we affect during our lifetime? What, ultimately, is our legacy? I believe, in most cases, our legacy is our friends. We write our history onto them, and they walk with us through our days like time capsules, filled with our mutual past, the fragments of our hearts and minds. Our friends get our uncensored questions and our yet-to-be reasoned opinions. Our friends grant us the chance to make our grand, embarrassing, contradictory pronouncements about the world. They get the very best, and are stuck with the absolute worst, we have to offer. Our friends get our rough drafts. Over time, they both open our eyes and break our hearts."

Years ago Emerson wrote: "Make yourself necessary to someone. In a chaotic world, friendship is the most elegant, most lasting way to be useful. We are, each of us, a living testament to our friends' compassion and tolerance, humor and wisdom, patience and grit. Friendship, not technology, is the only thing capable of showing us the enormousness of the world."

Friends; friendship; church: maybe the Quakers understand it best, understand what a church community, at its best, is all about, when they call themselves a Society of Friends. In a group of friends we find all sorts and conditions of people: people who don't look alike, think alike, share the same politics; people who come from different backgrounds, different places, different ways of thinking. It is our differences that make us one more than what we have in common. It is in and through those differences that we are able to grow as a person. They open our hearts and minds when we allow them in and do not if we do not.

It is our differences, the recognizing of our differences, the accepting of our differences, that allows friends to be friends. It is this that enables us to listen to the other, and while we may disagree, still be friends even as we point out our disagreement. To do so is definitely not easy. Perhaps that is why we seem to be so divided these days: we only allow those into our lives who agree with us, who we deem to be like us. And for that we are paying a very steep price, it seems to me. So sad.

Perhaps this is even more true when it comes to a community of faith, a church. For that is what we hold in common and what brings us together. All else is mere baggage. We are first, last and always a Christian. As Christians, we are friends: people who are compassionate and tolerant, wise and patient. We get through the bad times with one another and rejoice with one another in the good. Whatever else we are only describes us better. It does not define us any more.

What brings us together for worship and fellowship, for ministry and learning, for all that we do and all that we are -- what brings us together again and again and again, and what makes us want to gather again and again is that we are friends in Jesus Christ. That covers a multitude of foolishness, unreasonableness and even bad behavior on our part. It doesn’t justify our actions or make them acceptable. It is simply the truth. Thank God for our friends.

 

 

THE GLORY OF THE U. S. A.

July 4 is a National Celebration and for my wife and me it is also now a Family Celebration after so many, many years away from family. We moved again for the last time, we trust and hope and pray, to be near our youngest and her family. We are looking forward to hot dogs and potato salad and all the rest; sparklers and cherry bombs and neighborhood celebration.

And what a neighborhood!: all sorts and conditions of people: young and old, working and retired; all kinds of nationalities and skin color; dozens of stories of successes and failures, ups and downs. This neighborhood is a microcosm of this great country in which we all live and move and have our being.

Of course, every neighborhood Arlena and I have lived in over the years has been much the same whether in mill towns in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, booming communities in the Northwest and Middle America: everywhere one and the same, but each different in their own way. We have been blessed by all those we have met over the years and hope we have in some way blessed them as well.

I thought about all this as we are settling into our new home in our new community as I thought about the Fourth of July. It brought to mind an episode of the old Night Court we saw a while back while binging on the series. It was about a large group of people, all immigrants from all over the world who were in court to be sworn in a US citizens. Judge Harry walked into his courtroom, looked around and shout “We are the world!”

And that we are. And that is what is the true glory of the United States of America. We are who we are, the greatest nation in the world, because each one of us, some how in some way, is an immigrant. Each of us, personally or through our immigrant descendants, has brought something to this country to make it better, to make it what it is. We don’t have to make American great again, it already is. We just have to keep making it better and better for everyone.

Sadly, I believe, so many have forgotten how blessed we are to live in this country. Why do so many want to come here? Why did my grandparents want to migrate from Italy to come here and raise a family? Why did the descendants of all our neighbors wherever we have lived, and some of them themselves, come here to live and work and find a new and better life?

Why? Because they somehow knew they would be accepted and believed in their hearts that they could add even a tiny bit to the greatness of this country. The glory of the United States is that we truly are the world in microcosm. Yes, we will disagree on many issues, but one truth we cannot disagree about and for which we should be proud and for which we should celebrate each day is that We Are the World. Let the fireworks begin!

NOT HAVING TO GET IT RIGHT

My favorite Anglican theologian was the late Robert Capon. He, more than any other human being, is the reason for my "migration" -- the word we use in ecumenical circles -- to the Episcopal Church. (But that's another story.) If the truth be told, Capon was a closet Lutheran, and maybe so am I. It's called guilt by association. Lutherans believe that we are saved by grace through faith. That was the basis of all Capon's writings.

I would go one step further and say that, yes, believers are saved by grace. So are non-believers. That is what Christmas-Easter is all about, what Jesus's birth-life-death-resurrection are all about. Jesus was born among us to live, die and be raised up so that we, too, could live, die and be raised up. If he had not been, we would not be, could not be. It’s as simple and as profound as that.

That is precisely Capon's theology: there is nothing we can do to get to heaven when we die: nothing. Try as we might, be good as we can, we will never make it on our own. Conversely, be as bad as we can, we will never lose it on our own. Life-in-death is God's free gift to us. It comes through the grace of God and through and by nothing else. It is as simple and as profound as that.

Now there are those – many of those – who do not want to hear or even believe it, who would call Capon (and me) a heretic. So be it. But they are the ones who want to believe that we can earn our way into heaven. We cannot. It is simple and profound as that.

But somehow we still think we can, believe we have to. We spend so much of our time trying to get it right. We think that if we say the right prayers, believe the right dogma, live the right way, get it all right, we will get to heaven. We won't because we never ever get it all right. Most of the time, I suspect, when we try to define our faith, we come out as heretics.  We have to rely on the grace of God. It is simple and as profound as that.

That does not mean that we should not try, that we should not make the best effort at praying well, understanding our faith better, doing what we know we should. We should. What it does mean is that, in the end, it is only through God's grace that in death we will find life, and only through God's grace. It is as simple and as profound as that.

That's the beauty of it all. That is the reason for the joy that should be in our hearts each and every day. Jesus's birth among us was the first step in this process that removed the need for always having to get it right. The Old Law, the Law of the Old Testament, was full of ways to get it right. Jesus came to tell us that while the Old Law was good, that we should do all we could to get it right, it would never get us where we wanted to go. Only his death and resurrection would. It is as simple and as profound as that.

We say we believe that truth even though we somehow really don't believe it. We still think our salvation is somehow dependent on us, on our getting it right. It isn't. It never was and never will be. Christmas-Easter is about not having to always get it right.  It’s as simple and as profound as that.

WORDS OF LOVE

The tongue: the deadliest weapon in the world. The old schoolyard adage "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" is a lie. We can recover from physical wounds. The pain will eventually go away or at least abate enough to allow us to live well enough. But the damage our words inflict on another seems never to go away. Oh, we bury it deep inside our hearts and minds, but it resurfaces every so often and rekindles the pain that we thought had ended.

Added to the pain that words inflict is the knowledge that we sometimes utter those words without thinking. They roll off our lips before we can stop them. We can pull back our fist, we can drop the club, we can put away our weapons before we do any damage. There seems to be something in us with the ability to hold us back from doing damage with sticks and stones. But there seems to be less of that something when it comes to the words that come from our mouths.

I know I don't always curb my tongue even when I know better. And when I do not, I hurt others more than I will ever know just as others have hurt me by their words more than they will ever know. What I need, maybe what we all need, is the wisdom to know what to say, the courage to say it, and the strength to say nothing when nothing is what should be said.

There is a solution, of course, albeit not an easy one. It takes work, especially if we are prone to speaking before we think. It takes practice and it takes patience. It demands a change of heart and even a change of life. And that does not come easily and it comes, more often than not, painfully. It often comes only after we have hurt too many people with our words, people we truly love. The pain that we suffer is often more than the pain we caused by our words as it truly should be,

Granted, we will never totally succeed in being totally loving in word and in action given our human sinfulness. It will always be a struggle, more for some than others. But no one is immune from uttering words that in hindsight one wished one had not. That is not an excuse for opening our mouths when they should have remained shut. It is simply the truth about our humanity.

This is no perfect time or perfect season when words of love should easily flow from our lips and acts of love flow from our hearts. But, perhaps, summer being here, when life slows down just a little, perhaps we could be a little more intentional about what we do and what we say, think a little before we open our mouths. Maybe, as the sun warms our bodies, we can let it also warm our hearts and minds.

Summer is as good a time as any and probably better than most to make and take the time to learn how to be more intentional in what we say, to think before we open our mouths, to make sure that all our words are words of love. We teach others by our words just as much as we teach by example. It is an awesome responsibility, one that we dare not ever take lightly.

NINE LITTLE WORDS

A while back the Gallup people did a study in which they asked one simple question: "What word or phrase would you most like to hear sincerely uttered to you?" The first two responses were not surprising. In order they were: 1) "I love you"; 2) "I forgive you." We all want to know we are loved and we all want to be forgiven by those whom we may have hurt or truly have hurt. The third response was: "Supper is ready."

It probably should not have been so surprising because it is all so logical. We do not sit down to share a meal with someone we don't love and cannot forgive. But if we can share a meal, look across the table at the other, then there is at least a modicum of love and forgiveness present. Sadly, of course, sometimes we simply tolerate the other sitting across the table from us, and vice versa. But it is at least a beginning to true love and true forgiveness. We need to start somewhere!

Even more, if you think about it, those three phrases, those nine little words, are really a short summary of what our life of faith is about. As Christians the first order of business, if you will, is to love the other person. Once we love another, then we can forgive another. But we cannot forgive someone if we don't love that person. Loving comes first. And because we are all and always sinners, because, for whatever reason we seem to be able to hurt the ones we love, and, in fact, do hurt them, we will always be in need of forgiveness and always need to forgive.

Then we can sit at table with the ones we love and have forgiven and who love and have forgiven us. Again, we cannot and will not share a meal with someone whom we have refused to forgive. Others will never sit down to share a meal with us if they cannot find it in their hearts to forgive us. There is no love without forgiveness and no forgiveness without love.

That is why the Eucharist is such a wonderful symbol of who we are as Christians. We come together each week to share a meal with people we love, whom we have sinned against and who have sinned against us; whom we have forgiven and who have forgiven us. We share that meal as a sign of our love. We know that it is through the grace and  strength we receive from the Eucharist we share that we can continue to say over and over again, "I love you. I forgive you."

Supper is always ready and we all look forward to sharing that meal, that Eucharist. But the question remains: Are there those with whom we refuse to share a meal, to share the Eucharist? If there are, then we need to recognize the fact that there is some unfinished business in our faith lives, some words we still have to find in our hearts to accept and on our lips to say: "I love you and I forgive you."

Once we have found the grace and strength to do that, to say that, then we can ask together, "Is supper ready?" Then we can sit down together in love and forgiveness, but not until then. Nine little words but deep and meaningful words. Is there anyone in our lives who needs to hear them?