ENJOYING WHAT GOD'S DONE FOR US

My favorite contemporary theologian, the late Robert Capon, in his last tome, The Fingerprints of God, reminds us, as the title indicates, that God's fingerprints can be found everywhere one looks from the beginning of time and not just at certain specific moments in history.

When we read Scripture, we are wont to believe God's interaction into history is sort of the hit-and-miss variety. God shows up at the beginning and creates the world, intervenes in the Garden, comes back around Noah's time, takes a long break until he makes a pact with Abraham -- and that is only for starters. As for God's being seen elsewhere in the world, or anywhere in the world, or at all, well...only for those who have the eyes of faith to see.

For it is faith that gives us those all-seeing eyes, gives us the ability to see God at work in our lives and all around us, gives us the ability to enjoy what God has already done for us and is still doing for us day in and day out -- which is precisely Capon's definition of faith. He says that "faith doesn't do anything; it simply enables believers to enjoy what Jesus has already done for them." The emphasis is on "enjoy" and on "already done." What God is still doing for us is icing on the cake, if you will.

What God, Jesus, has already done for us is forgive us for sins committed past, present and future. Faith says that we do not have to do anything to have our sins forgiven. In fact, we cannot do anything. Either God forgives our sins in Jesus or we are stuck with them. Anything we might do or want to do or think we have to do to get God to forgive our sins will always come up short and will never be enough.

And if that were the case, if we had to do something to obtain forgiveness, then faith in God would not be enjoyable in the least, and neither would trying to live a faith-filled live -- because that would be an impossibility. We would be worrying every minute of every day that we weren't getting it right, which, of course, is impossible to do anyway.

Thus, in order to enjoy this life God has given us, we have faith that however much we mess up -- and we all mess up big time at times -- we can go on knowing that we have already been forgiven in and through Jesus. That doesn’t justify the messing-up. It simply allows us to be able to pick ourselves up and move on rather than getting stuck in remorse and even fear of some kind of retribution on God’s part.

Capon's irreverent view of this life (and for which I have always enjoyed reading his works) is one giant cocktail party where everyone is toasting God's love and forgiveness. Not a bad picture even if, personally, cocktail parties leave much to be desired. One big pizza party would be more to my liking and imagining, but you get the point.

Because of Jesus's birth, life, death and resurrection and our faith in that, all we have to do is enjoy the fact that we are forgiven sinners. I'll have a slice of pizza to that, or maybe even two. And you?

FIRE AND WATER

Recently I have been rereading Ronald Rolheiser's The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. It is probably the best work on spirituality that I have ever read. That is why it deserves a reread. There is just too much there to comprehend the first time through.

Rolheiser maintains that in each one of us there is a never-ending desire, a fundamental dis-ease, that will not allow us to be satisfied, ever. It is akin to running with wolves, having a fire in the belly. We cannot explain it; we just know it is there. Spirituality, he says, is what we do with this unrest, this dis-ease, this fire, this desire to keep on running, never standing still, if you will.

But as with any fire, if it gets out of control, we can be consumed by whatever it is that is driving us. So there is a need to have water ready to toss on the fire, not to put it out, but to keep it under control. Spirituality is about how we channel our desires, whatever they are and however we define or understand them, so that we do not get out of control, subsumed, consumed, by our desires. That, in a way, is what sin is all about: it is about giving in to an all-consuming desire to do or say something even though we know that to do so is wrong.

The opposite of being spiritual is to have no energy, to be unable to do anything, to lose all zest for living, to be a couch potato. Spirituality, then, has to keep us glued together so that we do not roll up into a ball and die. A healthy spirituality keeps us, he says, both energized and glued together.

A healthy spirituality does that. I don't know about you, but it seems that sometimes I am either so glued together that I am stuck or so loose that I am not sure which way to turn. Most of the time I am somewhere in the middle, neither stuck nor loose. Spirituality is about making choices. Healthy spirituality is about making the right choices, or at least making more right choices than wrong choices.

This drive, which Rolheiser calls "eros," is soul, soul that gives us energy. But it is also the glue that keeps us together. It puts fire in our veins and keeps us energized; and it adds water to the mix and keeps us glued together. There is chaos and there is order. It is the creative tension between the two, between fire and water that both keeps us alive and keeps us safe.

All this, I suspect, sounds rather esoteric, and maybe so.  Our own spirituality is something we never quite get a handle on. We know what it is even if we cannot define it or even describe it. We know when we are on fire and we know when we seem stuck in the mud. And we often do not know what to do about either.

And this is only for starters! We do have to recognize what is going on inside us if we want to even begin to understand ourselves. If there is any consolation, even the greatest saints had problems with their spiritual lives. So will/do we.

LEARNING HOW TO RECEIVE

The church is really good at reminding us that it is better to give than to receive. We take up collections every Sunday, have special offerings to purchase a new organ or to build a home for a family. We ask for funds on a regular basis for the Rector to use for helping others and ask for donations to support children in other lands so that they can have a decent education -- and the list seems go on and on and on.

We have bake sales and bazaars, book sales and rummage sales, car washes and spaghetti dinners, and anything else anyone can think of to raise needed monies for needed causes. Then, of course, there is the annual Every Member Canvas that is fast approaching.

All this is not a criticism. It is simply the truth. There are better ways, I suspect, to raise funds, but that is not my issue at the moment. Nor do I wish to debate the fact that it is better to give than to receive. It truly is and we all know it.

But sometimes we can get the impression that there is something wrong in receiving; we sometimes give that impression as well. We sometimes believe that if we are on the receiving end of someone else's giving, we are somehow inferior to, that we are of lesser worth than, the giver. That is nonsense, of course, but we do sometimes give that impression as givers and have that feeling as receivers.

We also often feel that when given a gift, we have to reciprocate somehow in some way. We find it difficult, at times, believing that a gift is given with no strings attached, that it is given simply out of the love.

Neither giving nor receiving comes easy. Why that is true, I am not sure. But I do find it to be true. As children we have to be taught to share our toys with others. In fact, as children we find it easier to take than to give, to hoard rather than to share. It takes a lot of time and teaching for us to realize how good it is to share what we have, share from our abundance with those who have less.

What we then assume is that because it is good to give, it must be bad, or at least not as good, to receive. So now we have to learn how to receive and learn that it is just as good to receive as it is to give and that there is nothing wrong with being on the receiving end. That is a truly difficult lesson to learn.

We are on the receiving end more often than we think. We receive gifts of love, kindness and caring; we receive homecooked meals and calls and letters. We receive everyday gifts every day. We receive perhaps as much as we give, and maybe even more.

What we fail to understand, I think, is that a gift is a gift is a gift. Difference in kind or degree or need makes no difference. It makes no difference if I need a meal because I can no longer cook than if I need a hug because I just need one. Gifts are gifts. It does not really matter who gives them or how much we need them. We simply need to receive them thankfully and joyfully.

STAYING GROUNDED

It's hard to be humble when everyone thinks you're wonderful. I am not speaking of myself, of course. Yeah, right. I suspect that we all have a little trouble with humility now and then. We all like to think or want to think that we are a little better than we are and certainly better than others think we are or perceive us to be. It certainly helps when we are having a bad day for whatever reason we are.

It is easy to live under the illusion that because we are not all that bad, that we are pretty good, that we are even wonderful and that God loves us just as we are. The truth is that we are pretty good and sometimes do wondrous things and that God always loves us. In fact, as the late evangelist Luis Palau once very astutely observed, "God is not disillusioned with us."

Oh, that was only the first part of his observation. The second half? "He never had any illusions to begin with." Talk about a blow to our pride. Palau hits us over the head with a sledgehammer with that. But we need to be reminded that we need to stay grounded. God knows us better than we know ourselves. We are mere mortals after all. We are God's gift and we are God's gift to the world -- just like everyone else.

I remember way back when I was first ordained. Humility was not one of my virtues even though I thought I was ever so humble. You see, I had all the answers and I knew I had all the answers. All you had to do was ask me and I would and could tell you what was wrong with the church and what should be done. In fact, there were times when I stood in the pulpit and smugly pontificated about some issue. I had a lot to learn and a lot of growing up to do. I am ever thankful to all those kind and loving people who hit me over the head with a sledgehammer when I became too full of myself.

All this reminded me of what a mother of another newly ordained priest said to her son as he was basking in all the praise people were heaping on him. She said, "I used to think priests knew everything. Now I worry because you are a priest and I know you don't know anything." That was a sledgehammer if I ever heard one! Now I have to wonder if my own mother thought the same thing about me. She probably did but was too kind to say it. She simply prayed every day that I would not make a fool of myself and save her from the embarrassment I might cause to the family.

Of course, now that I am older and wiser and more mature and have over fifty years of experience, I definitely have all the answers. Just ask me. Come to think of it, isn’t that what my audacity in writing and sending reflections like this seems somehow in some way to indicate?

Seriously, it is so easy to live with the delusion that we are wiser than we really are or worse than we really are. When I think about it, I am not sure which is worse. Staying grounded, being honest with ourselves both about our failings and shortcomings and our God-given gifts is a never-ending battle. It is only through the grace of God that our pride does not do us in more often than it should.

TWO DOGS

George Bernard Shaw: "A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, 'The one I feed the most.'"

Whenever we do something wrong and then begin to wonder why in the world we did it, our only response -- and most honest response -- is to admit that we must have been feeding the wrong dog. We feed both evil and good, both right and wrong. More often than not we are not all that aware of what we are doing. It is only after we have been caught in the bad or been complimented for the good we did that we come to realize that we made what happened happen.

Good feeds off good and evil feeds off evil. It always has and always will for both. The evil of Hitler's Germany began with a single wrong and escalated into the killing of millions of innocent people by other people who, had they been asked before the evil began, would have insisted with every fiber of their being that they would never do such a thing, not participate in such atrocities, not in a million years they wouldn't. But they did, did they not?

How did they come to the point were doing evil took over their lives? They fed it and fed on it so much so that, in the end, it may not even have occurred to them that what they were doing was evil. They had come to convince themselves that what the evil they were doing was, if fact, a good.

Now we may protest and say that they were only fooling themselves, maybe even lying. Anyone in his right mind would know that Dachau was immoral. If that is true, then what happened is that their feeding of evil, slowly but surely, came to cloud their thinking. Evil overcame good because evil and not good was being fed.

The opposite is also true. We can overcome evil by feeding good with good, by doing good. Remaining strong in the face of evil is not easy. It is always easier to give in. That is why feeding the good dog can never be taken for granted. When we become lax in our attention to doing good, we will stop doing good, stop feeding the good dog and start feeding the bad one.

We know that. But knowing is not enough. Ask anyone who is caught in an evil act why he did it, his first response will not be "because I wanted to." It will be "I don't know. I don't know how I ended up in this mess." Upon reflection he would have to admit that he had been feeding the wrong dog and may not have been as aware of what he was doing as he should have been.

We all make excuses for our sinful deeds, make them to others and make them to ourselves. It may be human nature, and I suspect it is. Nevertheless, we must not take lightly anything we do, good or bad, about which dog we feed.

BE EVEN MORE CAREFUL

We've all heard the old warning about being careful about what we pray for lest that that prayer be answered. We also know the reality of that warning. We've all had prayers answered in the way and to the degree we prayed. And we were surprised because even though we believe in the efficacy of prayer, we sometimes pray hesitatingly. We pray not really believing that our what-seems-outrageous request will be granted by God simply because it seems a little outrageous in the first place.

When our prayer is granted, we are blown away and not only do not know what to say but are almost overwhelmed by the responsibilities that come with the granted prayer. That is not to say that we wish God had not answered our prayer. It is to say that sometimes, after the fact, we come to the realization that more was involved than a simple prayer request and a simple answer to that request by God. That does not mean that strings are attached to our prayer being answered. It is to say that it actually seems that way.

But that does not stop our asking. Even though we don't always, if ever, fully understand all the consequences of having a prayer answered, we will still ask because what we ask for is very, very important to us. Maybe we should be careful in what we pray for; but given the alternative, we will all take that chance.

It may be difficult enough dealing with the consequences of an answered prayer, what is even more eye-opening is the fact that sometimes the answer to our prayer is the one praying. So we are warned: be careful how you pray: you may be the answer.

The fact is, I think, we are always the answer, or at least part of the answer. God answers our prayers because we ask, even if we ask for something for someone we know nothing about except that the person needs prayers. Every Sunday we pray for a lot of people most of whom none of us know personally and know not why the persons are being prayed for in particular. Our task is simply to pray. Prayers for healing, for instance, are answered because we pray for someone's healing. We are part of the answer.

Again, sometimes we are the answer. In the incident where Philip comes up to Jesus to tell him that the people are hungry and need to be fed, he is making a request to Jesus: a prayer. What is Jesus's response? "You feed them, Philip. You answer your own prayer."

Philip did not see himself as the answer to his own prayer. He was so overwhelmed by the need -- to feed over 5000 people -- that he could not see how anything but a miracle could accomplish the deed. Jesus fed the people, of course. But Philip could have fed them in the same way Jesus did. The difference was that Jesus saw Philip as the answer to the prayer and Philip saw someone else as being that answer; so Jesus fed them.

My suspicion is that we are the answer to our own prayers more often than we suspect. Perhaps we need to be careful not only about what we pray for but even more careful how we pray.

WHY?

Why is it that when we can afford to eat anything we want, we can't; and when we can eat anything we want, we can't afford to? I am blessed. I can afford to eat out whenever I want, but I cannot eat out whenever I want because I will eventually look like the Goodyear Blimp and die of a heart attack. Yet, when I was younger and could eat more because my metabolism was better, I could not afford to eat out. The money just was not there to do so.

Why is it that we are better grandparents than we are parents? Not only do we have more time to spend with our grandchildren, we actually want to spend time with them. There were times when I did not want to be around my daughters at all, like at least once a month -- and sometimes more. They were not pleasant creatures. I loved them dearly, and still do, but they were impossible sometimes. Grandchildren, on the other hand, are simply wonderful all the time.

If I were to hazard a guess as to why this is true, I would say that God created life so that there would be a balance throughout. Obviously, it sometimes seems as if we are on some sort of divine seesaw: the times we are up we would rather be down, and vice versa. The times we would like some peace of mind we get chaos, and the times when we can endure chaos because we have the time, we get peace of mind.

The way to deal with it, or at least one of the ways, is to, as they used to say, "go with the flow." No use fighting the rapids because you'll lose. But the rapids eventually cease and the river of life becomes calm again -- until the next set of rapids. Then the cycle starts all over again. It is not a vicious cycle as it sometimes seems, but simply the cycle of life as we experience it.

Throughout it all, thankfully, especially when we least understand why things are the way they are, God is right there. God never leaves us even though we sometimes feel that we are battling the rapids alone. Of course, it is usually only when we've made it through the rapids that we realized that God was the one who got us through safe and sound. Would that we would have realized and sensed God's presence when the rapids were at their worst -- like when the house is overrun with teenage daughters! Sometimes it’s simply too difficult to do so.

Ahh, it's grandparent-time and been grandparent-time for a while now. I have shot the rapids and survived. And even if I can't eat all the food I can afford to buy, I'll enjoy what I can eat and save the money for our grandchildren's education.  And even more in, to spoil them as best my wife and I can, much to their delight and their parents’ sometimes displeasure.  But, then, spoiling grandchildren are a parent’s revenge.

Come to think of it, I guess there are good reasons why God made it so that I can't (and shouldn’t for all kinds of reasons) eat all that I can afford to eat: Grandchildren.  They are a blessing and, thankfully, not in disguise. They are right there, if only in our hearts and minds, to help understand the wonderful and joyful ways God works in our lives.