Present Yourself to God

A man with a terrible stuttering problem applied for a job selling bibles door-to-door.  The boss was not sure the candidate would be at all successful, but decided to give him chance so he sent off the stuttering man with a case of bibles.   A few hours later, the salesman returned and asked for a second case.  Two hours after that he was back for a third.  By the end of the day he has set a company record for most bibles sold in a single day.  “How did you do it,” the boss asked?  “Weeellll,” said the stuttering salesman, “IIIII assskkked iffff theyyyy wanttttted toooo buuuuyyy aaaa bibbbbleee orrrr havvveee mmmeee rrrread itttt toooo themmmmm.”

The church where I grew up gave a bible to each youngster in the third grade.  I still have mine.  It is the Revised Standard Version.  On the cover is printed “Holy Bible” and my name is engraved in the lower right hand corner.  The second page is a fancy looking certificate on which is printed:

The Holy Bible

presented to

Someone took the time to fill in a dedication.  It reads,

Keith Emerson

by Westminster Presbyterian Church

II Timothy 2:15

May 25, 1969

II Timothy 2:15 reads, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed.”  I suppose whoever filled in the page on my personalized bible could have cited any other number of verses, but because he or she chose this one it has always been one of my favorite in scripture.  Ever since third grade, it has served as my personal mission statement.  I have spent a lifetime trying to figure out what it means to present myself to God.  Here are a few things I have learned over the years.

Early on I figured out that it is important to present yourself to God by going to church.  That seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it!  I was fortunate as a young person and as a college student in that I enjoyed Sunday worship.  Ever since graduation I have worked in a church in some capacity, so I have had a little more incentive to show up than most people.  But even when I am on vacation I try to find a church to attend.  Since being given that bible I have not gone more than three weeks in a row without going to church. 

As a boy I remember absolutely hating two things about Sunday mornings: having my father put a tie on me and then brushing back my hair.  He was a little rough doing both, probably because he enjoyed it even less than I did.  I am not sure when “dressing up” for church began to wane as a practice, but certainly it has.  The old standard was that you presented yourself to God by putting on your “Sunday best.”  By the time I joined the Episcopal Church I realized some other standard was in play.  It was easy to spot the folks who only attended at Christmas and Easter because the women wore mink coats.  Church, I learned, was not a place to show off.

Today I say that if you want to present yourself to God, the best way to do it – at least in terms of what you wear – is to dress neatly and modestly.  Several years ago I was a chaplain for a senior high youth conference.  One chaplain’s session we got into a very interesting discussion about clothes as it relates to living out the faith.  A very attractive young woman wearing a very tight fitting spaghetti-strap t-shirt announced that she was proud of her body and wanted to show it off through what she wore.  I pointed out that tight-fitting and revealing clothes had a certain affect on the opposite sex.  “Well, boys just need to get their minds out of the gutter,” she said.  “Young woman,” I replied, “that is not how the male brain works.”  If you want to present yourself to God, the best way to dress is neatly and modestly.

So, one thing I did from an early age to present myself to God was to go to church.  Another thing I did was to read the bible.  Our church’s youth minister offered a weekly bible study, which I attended faithfully.  In addition, I read the bible on my own every day, and I mean every day!  I think I went something like 12 years without missing a single day.  Don’t get me wrong, there were times that I just went through the motions, but at least I had a consistent discipline.  It is a discipline I maintain even to this day, although there is usually a day or two each week that my schedule overtakes the time I try to set aside.

Very few things nurture the Christian faith and life like reading the bible on your own and in a group setting.  I am particularly pleased that so many of you attend the monthly women’s study group, the weekly Wednesday bible study, or have expressed an interest in the upcoming Alpha course.  I am excited to hear stories about how our children are taking to the weekly bible stories they are learning in the Godly Play class.  Scripture and prayer are like oxygen for of a healthy, vital, dynamic faith community.  Without them as a consistent and substantive part of our common life, we are just running on fumes. 

Today’s Gospel reading highlights another important aspect of presenting yourself to God – gratitude.  Are you thankful for what you have?  Are you even aware of the many blessings in your life?  No poetry today, but I continue to enjoy reading Mary Oliver’s poems.  She has an amazing ability to notice everything that is going on around her and to take it into her soul: poems about turtles and moths and oak trees and a cup of tea.  Nothing is too small or innocuous to escape her notice and all of it elicits in her a sense of gratitude. 

Perhaps her witness was with me on Thursday.  It was my 54^th birthday and I spent the entire day at an exhausting meeting in Williamsburg.  I lost count of the people who wished me a happy birthday and then asked what I was going to do to celebrate.  “Well,” I said, “I am going to go home and collapse.”  And that is what I did.  To be honest, there was a part of me that was very sad I was not going to do something special, and as a result I was nursing a good case of the blues.  Well, when I got home I found waiting for me multiple birthday cards handmade by the children in our Sunday School class.  One had handprints and names of all the children and it now graces my refrigerator.  Holly pulled this off and told me how excited the kids were to make cards when they found out it was my birthday.  I have to tell you I felt like the luckiest person on the planet!  What a blessing it is to have children in our parish who want to do something special for me.  So today – like every day – I bring to God my gratitude for life’s many blessings.

As I have grown in the Episcopal tradition I have come to appreciate how the Baptismal Covenant articulates what it means to present yourself to God as a worker who has no need to be ashamed.  Through the covenant we turn away from Satan, the evils of this world, and our own sinful desires and pledge our allegiance to Jesus Christ as our Savior, our Lord, and our Guide.  We commit ourselves to a Christian community – its worship, prayer, and study, to being an ambassador of the faith wherever we are, and to serving the needs of others.  If we live into this covenant than we will have no need to be ashamed when we present ourselves to God.

The problem is we often miss the mark.  The Greek word for sin comes from a term used to describe an archer shooting an arrow.  Sin has to do with missing the target.  Sometimes we simply aim at something other than the bull’s-eye, other times we miss what we aim at; our actions, while well-intentioned, have unintended consequences.  But there is another way to miss the mark.  You can draw back the bowstring part way, but not enough to get the arrow all the way there.  You aimed at the target, but you really didn’t try all that hard to hit it.  You did it half-hearted.  You just went through the motions.  Your effort was not your best, not even close.

Do you remember how II Timothy 2:15 begins?  “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved.”  We in the Christian tradition hold that we are saved by grace apart from works.  It is comforting to know that, rather than standing or falling on our own merits, we rest in God’s love and mercy.  Doing your best is not about earning a heavenly reward, but rather a reflection of what you want to offer to God in response to who God is and what God has done for you.  When Paul tells Timothy to do his best he is saying don’t let the arrow fall short of the mark.  Miss high, miss wide, but don’t miss because you really didn’t try.

What are some things you think are important in presenting yourself to God and are you doing your best to do them?

 

Jeremiah & Images of Hope

For the past few Sundays our Old Testament readings have been taken from the Book of the prophet Jeremiah.  His public ministry spanned tumultuous years in Israel’s history which culminated in the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 586 BC. 

Prior to that, Israel underwent significant religious and political reforms under King Josiah.  Jeremiah was critical of both, saying of the religious reforms that they changed things on the surface, but did not emanate from a changed heart.  His most scathing words were aimed at the politics of his day.  Swept up by a sense of nationalism, Israel sought to take advantage of what it perceived to be the weakness of other major powers in the region – Egypt to the south, Assyria to the north, and Babylon to the east of them.  Josiah sought to regain land lost 100 years earlier.  Jeremiah was highly critical of what he saw as over-reaching.  After Josiah died in a battle with the Egyptians, successive Israeli kings, severely weakened, vacillated between going it alone or making a pact with one power over and against another.  With great consistency Jeremiah was critical of these moves.

As a reward for his words, the prophet was ignored, ostracized, ridiculed, beaten, imprisoned, and even dropped into a well and left to die.  Last week’s reading found Jeremiah under house arrest because he proclaimed loud and long that the besieging Babylonian army was going to destroy Jerusalem.  Apparently his cousin Anathoth took these words to heart because he came to Jeremiah with a proposition.  He wanted Jeremiah to buy his family’s ancestral land.  In essence, Anathoth wanted to liquidate everything he could and get out while the getting was good.  Jeremiah bought the land through a very public transaction process and used the occasion to proclaim that a time would come when houses would have value and fields would be harvested: bold words from one whose city was under siege.

All of this brings us to today’s readings from the Book of Lamentations – a series of poems attributed to Jeremiah written from the depths of despair and anguish after the fall of Jerusalem.  If you had a chance to glance at Friday’s e-news letter you might have seen a painting of Jeremiah by the Russian artist Ilya Repin.  In it Jeremiah is leaning against the only part of the Temple wall not to be destroyed.  All around him lay fallen stone and snapped timbers.  In the background we see billows of smoke rising from various parts of the city that are on fire.  There is a look of shock, of horror, of terror on Jeremiah’s face that mirrors the look we saw on peoples’ faces at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon twelve years ago.  Not only did the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem and the Temple, they led off into captivity anyone who had any value; leaving behind only the elderly and the infirmed. 

It is from this awful experience that today’s readings come from the Book of Lamentations.  Just five chapters long, it is comprised of a series of poems that constitute a mournful cry.  But even in this dark time through his dark words, Jeremiah manages to proclaim one of the greatest articulations of hope in our faith tradition: 

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,

his mercies never come to an end;

    they are new every morning;
       great is his faithfulness.

Alexander Pope famously wrote that hope springs eternal in the human breast, but in the Christian tradition, hope (like faith and love) is a gift from God; something implanted in us that emerges in us when we are cast down to the depths.  Like Jeremiah, perhaps you know what it is to have everything stripped away, to be down to nothing, and at that moment to know within you a spark, a flicker, an unwavering light that tells you this is not the end, but rather is the bedrock from which will rise a new beginning.

In the Jewish calendar, last Tuesday at sunset began of the ninth day of the month of Av – Tisha B’Av.  It is the historical date for the destruction of the Temple.  It is a day of mourning marked by reading the Book of Lamentations, eating an egg dipped in ashes, and fasting for twenty-four hours.  It is also a day grounded in the hope that from the temple ashes will rise a new, magnificent edifice.  As the prophet Isaiah wrote, “One who mourns Jerusalem will merit seeing her happiness” (66:10).

All week long I have been meditating on the image of an egg dipped in ashes and then eaten.  The egg represents life.  The ashes stand for the Temple ruins, but ultimately for any and every precious thing in our lives that has been lost or destroyed.  In life there simply is no way to remain immune from suffering and loss.  No one’s egg remains unsoiled forever.  The process of eating the ashened egg suggests that we cannot walk away from life’s challenges and defeats, that we somehow must take them into ourselves, that we must acknowledge them as part and parcel of who we are.  But I think the act of eating life and death also does another thing.  It takes both to that place inside us where hope abides, where hope endures. 

That is one symbol of hope that I encountered this week.  Let me tell you about two others that crossed my path.

One came from an article by Heidi Grogan where she described the raku angel her husband gave to her and the particular process this type of pottery goes through in order to produce its brilliant, liquid-looking colors.  At its creation, the angel was fired in a kiln heated to 1800⁰F.  Glowing hot as it was pulled from the oven, it was transferred into a metal can filled with combustible materials; things like newspapers, old leaves, and even garbage.  The heat of the angel caused all this material to catch fire, and there sealed in the burning debris it remained until it cooled.  When it emerged from this process the paints that had been applied prior to kilning shown forth in unpredictable, metallic-looking colors and patterns.  The brilliance of the finished product would not have come to life without the horrific process it went through.  What does that suggest about hope in the midst of challenge?

But this angel’s journey was not finished.  Grogan relates that one day while dusting, she accidently knocked it off the mantel where it graced the room, sending it crashing to the floor below and shattering it into many pieces.  She came home the next day to find her husband patiently at work gluing the pieces back together.  “When I am done,” he said, “I will paint all the fracture lines.”  “No,” she responded, “I want to let her scares be.” 

It seems to me that hope does not look like rushing forward to restore what once was.  Rather, it is intertwined with waiting; waiting for what will be to emerge.  A sense of hope allows us time to discover what God imagines for us – be it from the fire of a kiln and refuse or from the restoration of brokenness. 

The other image of hope I encountered this week comes from a Wendell Berry poem called The Sycamore:

In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Over all its scars has come the seamless white
of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history
healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
In all the country there is no other like it.
I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling
the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place and feeds upon it,
and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

“It bears the gnarls of its history healed over.”  “It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.”  It stands as a powerful symbol of hope.

In the coming weeks we will see how the surly and contentious prophet Jeremiah himself becomes a voice of hope.  He will send this message to those taken captive:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.  Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.  But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Jeremiah will proclaim that there is a way to be God’s people in this new and alien place.  He detects the hand of God present in all that has happened, is happening, and will happen.  God’s people are the egg dipped in ashes and eaten.  They are the angel made brilliant by fire and repaired after shattering.  They are the mighty sycamore whose thriving contains within it mangles of what it has suffered. 

Hope is good company when you are entertaining lament.  It gives us the courage we need to dream of a better day.  From the depths we may cry out words that express our deepest pain.  But from that place we also find these words:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,

his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning;

       great is his faithfulness.

Empathy in the Heart & Sympathy from the Head

There is a genre of humor known as the “reversal joke.”  It begins with a statement about what life is like in one place and then a second statement about how life is exactly the opposite somewhere else.  The Ukrainian comedian Yakov Smirnoff is the current master of the reversal joke.  Here are three of his best lines:

In America, you have remote controls.

   In Russia, remote controls you.

In America, you try to find Waldo

   In Russia, Waldo finds you.

In America, you can always find a party.

   In Russia, Party finds you.

Reversal jokes.  It might be fair to label the reading we just heard a “reversal parable,” but there is nothing funny about it.  Its premise is pretty straight-forward: everything about this life will be reversed in the age to come.  The rich man will find the tables turned.  He will suffer physical pain and deprivation for eternity while the destitute and diseased beggar from this world will be blessed with all the comforts of Heaven. 

It interests me that once he is in Hades twice the rich man mentions Lazarus by name.  The implication is that he knew Lazarus in the previous life.  He knew his name and surely knew of his plight.  He was not unaware, but rather indifferent.  Dressed in the most expensive cloths and eating lavish meals at every sitting, not once was he moved to help the man laying by the gate of his home; a man whose name he knew.  It truly is ponderous how someone with so much could do so little for a person so close in such great need. 

I am confident that if any of you saw someone laying of the ground propped up against one of our church walls this morning - a person who was in obvious need of food, water, and medical attention – I am confident you would do something to help that person, especially if you knew him or her by name.  Adam Smith, the great Scottish moral philosopher, once wrote, “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”  The flip side of this statement holds none of us could be at peace knowing that a person just outside the door was suffering and in pain.

The reason for this is at our core we are moral people.  At a certain point in our development as a species we gained the capacity for empathy and sympathy.  Empathy involves sharing in the feelings of another because you have been there yourself, or at least have been in a similar situation.  Sympathy involves understanding the feelings of another even though you don’t personally share in them.  You empathize with someone because at one time or another you walked the same path they are on.  When you sympathize you stand apart from the other but still appreciate the position he or she is in.  You image something of what it would be like to walk in the other person’s shoes.

I can empathize with a person who is divorced or who lost their father early in life because I have experienced both.  I can sympathize with a person who is homeless or an addict because I have an understanding of each while never experiencing either personally.

Both capacities are important if we are going to live morally in this world.  The most fundamental ethical obligation of the Christian tradition is the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Every great religious tradition teaches this very basic imperative.  It asks us to imagine ourselves as the other.  It calls us to empathy, to sympathy, and to action.

Frans de Waal, a professor at Emory University who specializes in primate behavior, has detected elements of sympathy, empathy, and other forms of moral behavior in many different animals.  He argues that any species with a social arrangement cannot exist without rudiments of sympathy and empathy.  He argues that as animal brains become more complex they acquire additional layers of moral capacity.  de Waal says that we are not selfish spheres covered by a thin layer of moral veneer, but rather more like one of those nesting dolls.  If you open up one moral doll there is another inside it and inside that is another and then another.  At the core is something all social animals share, which de Waal calls the “emotional contagion.”  All the surrounding dolls add to moral capacity and make each species distinct from others, with human beings being capable of mastering complex moral dilemmas.

It is an interesting theory that debunks an earlier view of human nature, often supported by the church.  The old view held that humans are brutish animals kept in line (barely at times) by the teachings of religion; that we are just 10 Commandments removed from anarchy.  de Waals’ work suggests moral and amoral behavior have developed in us side by side.  We are a complex mixture of self-interest and social connectedness.  We can exhibit both selflessness and aggression, cooperation and competition.  Our empathetic nature seeks emotional connection with others.  Our sympathetic nature generates concern for their well-being.  The teachings of our faith, stories like the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, become a significant moral layer added on top of millennia of moral development and point us toward a way of being that is necessary and beneficial to all. 

If we read carefully today’s parable we will see that it has two distinct parts with a transition in between.  The first part is the reversal where the rich man suffers in Hades while Lazarus receives the comforts of Heaven.  The transition comes when the rich man asks Abraham to comfort him and Abraham’s explanation of why he can’t.  The second part of the parable revolves around the rich man’s request to send Lazarus back to his family to warn his brothers what will happen to them if they don’t change.  This too Abraham cannot do.  Besides, says Abraham, they already have the teachings of Moses and prophets.  They have what they need in order to know what to do and how to act, but they choose to ignore it and to do what they like.

The second part of the parable reminds us that if we want to influence the moral life of people around us then we have to be living examples of the morality we hope to encourage.  Do you want your children to be truthful?  If so, don’t lie.  Do you want your children to respect the dignity of every human being?  If so, you must live out what it means to be respectful of every person in every situation.  Do you want your children to be forgiving?  If so, then you must forgive.  Do you want your children to care about the needs of others?  Then you must show them how to act out of empathy and sympathy.

Empathy.  A few years ago a woman was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Ever since, she and her family have participated in The Walk for a Cure.  Sympathy.  We all have access to clean, reliable drinking water.  Upon learning that parts of the world don’t, we raised $1,500 last Lent so that a village could have a well.  Our faith and our nature call us to respond to the needs we feel – to be empathetic.  They also call on us to respond to the needs we know and understand – to be sympathetic.  One is a response of the heart, the other of the head.  The connections we make – no matter how thin or short – matter.  They endure from this world into the next.  The connections we shun – the times we isolate and insolate ourselves from the needs of others – matter too.  They also endure from this world to the next.  May your heart always move you and may your head always guide you to do for others what your would have them do for you if your places were reversed.

 

Being Shrewd about People & Things

A well-dressed man walks into a New York City bank and asks to speak with a loan officer.  He says he is travelling to Europe on business for two weeks and needs to borrow $5,000.  The officer tells him that the bank will need some kind of security for the loan.  “No problem,” the man says as he hands over the keys to a Bentley parked in front of the bank.  Everything checks out and the bank agrees to the loan.  An employee drives the car into the bank’s underground garage and parks it there for safekeeping.  Two weeks later, the man returns to repay the loan along with interest, which comes to $15.41.  The banker says, “We appreciate your business, but I am a little puzzled: why would someone of your obvious means want to borrow such a small amount of money for such a short period of time?”   The man looks the banker in the eyes and says, “Where else in Manhattan can I park my car for two weeks for just fifteen dollars and change?”

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines ‘shrewd’ as “having or showing an ability to understand things and to make good judgments: mentally sharp or clever” and adds, “marked by clever discerning awareness and hardheaded acumen.”  Closely related to the word ‘shrew’, being ‘shrewd’ carries with it something of a negative connotation.  It hints that someone got over on another person or group in a way that, while legal, may not exactly be ethical, moral, or kind. 

Many bibles title the gospel reading we just heard “The Parable of the Shrewd Manager.”  Commentaries explore in great length why this servant’s questionable behavior is praised first by the rich man in the story, but ultimately by Jesus himself.  I admit some parables are more easily understood than others, but each parable is meant to convey a singular truth, often in a startling way.  All the other extemporaneous details, if focused on too closely, detract and distract us from the simple point.

Reflecting on this parable back in the 13^th century, the great theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that the heart of sin is to love things and use people, when we ought to love people and use things.  The shrewd manager caught pilfering his master’s property figures this out and does whatever he can with whatever he has to build better relationships with the people in his life.  The parable – convoluted though it may be – teaches a fundamental truth: God created people to be loved and things we have we have to help us do it.  Sin comes about when we get it turned around.  And, apparently, it is human nature to do just that.

I came across the following testimonial earlier in the week:

My friend bought a much larger house than he should have.  His cars were always the latest model.  The restaurants he ate at were high end.  The lucrative sounding investments he made were entrusted to people who loved money more than honesty and eventually it all came crashing down.

My friend’s life of creature comforts and successful appearances crumbled.  He went broke and depression led him to take his life, leaving teenagers without their dad.

It’s easy to get fooled into thinking that money and things bring happiness, but they don’t.

I think Jesus is so down on possessions because he figures the less you have the less likely it is you will love those things more than the people in your life.  But this does not seem like a practical approach to life in 21^st century America.  Ours is a world of conveniences and comforts.  We are not likely to divest ourselves of all but the bare necessities, especially if we are doing so in a desperate attempt to get our priorities in order.  In this life we are going to have things – lots of things, in fact.  The challenge is to love others more than we love our things. 

One person who got it right was Randy Pausch, a computer science professor and author of The Last Lecture, which is an account of a college course he taught after he had been diagnosed with untreatable pancreatic cancer.   Pausch tells a story about a time he bought a brand new car, drove it off the lot, and went straight to pick up his sister and her two children.  When he got to their house, his sitter – the children’s mother – sternly lectured them to be careful in ‘Uncle Randy’s’ spotless new car.  She didn’t want them to damage or dirty it in any way.  The kids were on pins and needles, clearly uncomfortable.  So Pausch took out a soft drink can, opened it up, and poured the contents on the driver’s seat.   “There,” he said, “Now my car isn’t new anymore.”  What motivated him to do such a crazy thing?  He wanted to demonstrate to his sister that he valued her kids, not his car.  He loved them.  The car was just something he used to drive them from point A to point B.

Here are two practical things you might do to help you use things in order to love the people that matter in your life.  The first is this: value things that remind you of the people you love.  Whatever things you value in life, let them tie you to the people with whom you associate it. 

Those of you who have been in my house know that I made the curious decision to decorate my entire home using the colors in my parents’ wedding china.  The china graces my dining room and I bring it out for dinner on special events like Christmas and Thanksgiving.  I value the china because I love my mother and father.  It connects me to them and to my sisters through memories of meals we shared.  The china has monetary value, to be sure, but its real worth to me cannot be measured in dollars.  Its real worth comes through its association with those I love.  Without that association the china would be just more stuff I carry around.  I am sure you have possessions that convey the presence of those who have touched your lives.  Use those things to stay connected to those you love. 

Last Sunday we heard Jesus tell a parable about a woman who, upon losing a coin, cleans the entire house until she finds it.  And when she finds it she calls together her friends to rejoice.  That coin would have been one of a set of perhaps ten given to her on her wedding day.  Its value laid not in its worth, but in its connections.  Jesus understood this kind of attachment and told a story to celebrate it.  So let the things you have remind you of the people you love.

And here is the second thing you can do: use the things you have to serve the people you love.  You can use your car to give a ride to a friend who can’t drive.  You can use your kitchen and cookware to make a meal for someone who is recovering from illness or surgery.  You can invest some money in a micro-loan project like Kiva, which allows you to choose people from all over the world who are looking to borrow a little bit of money in order to make their dream of a better life come true.  Prayerfully consider how you might shift from hoarding what you have to helping others through what you have.  It is not a one-time step you take and have down, but rather a disposition of the heart and soul lived out as a life-long journey.

Shrewd: “having or showing an ability to understand things and to make good judgments: mentally sharp or clever.”  Be shrewd with what you have using it in ways to build love and relationships with others.  Nothing you have in life matters more than the people in your life.  It is a shrewd person who figures this out.

Affinity

“This man welcomes sinners and eats meals with them.”

The this man is Jesus.  The people criticizing him are Pharisees and Scribes.  They were devoted to living their lives by an exacting code of religious laws relating morality and ritual purity.  Just as with the American tax code, there was just too much in these laws for the average person to know and understand.  That is where Scribes came in.  It was their job to know the codes and to them the Pharisees often turned for advice and guidance.  The sinners they are complaining about basically are folks who didn’t understand the law, couldn’t understand it, or didn’t follow it to with the fidelity of Pharisees and Scribes. 

Beyond the way they were separated from average folks by their religious practices, Pharisees and Scribes were well-educated, well-off, and moved in the upper echelon of society’s social circles.  These differences were centuries old and at some point became codified by the dogma and teaching of the Temple and synagogue.  As differences became more and more pronounced commonalities were lost.  That Jesus could associate with this other group mystified and annoyed the religious elite.  That a person so obviously blessed by God welcomed them into his company brought great joy to the ‘sinners.’

We humans have an affinity for people who are like us.  It has always been this way and probably always will.  The challenge is for various individuals and groups to maintain enough connection that each can see in the other a shared humanity and a common dignity.  The danger is that diverse people and groups become so separated that one or both cannot begin to fathom the other having any redeeming value.  When the Pharisees and Scribes murmur that Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them it is evident that they have crossed over into that dangerous territory.

It is not at all hard to do.  It becomes easier and easier to push the other away; to distance ourselves from those who differ from us.  It takes great effort and no small amount of determination to bridge that divide.

Several years ago I read a book by Richard Lischer called Open Secrets: A Spiritual Journey through a Country Church.  It is Lischer’s account of his first call as a pastor to a small, rural Lutheran church in central Illinois.  The book details how his expectations of ordained ministry differed from reality and it highlights the culture shock he experienced by entering into a farming community that was “as tightly sealed as a jar of home-canned pickles.”  Here is Lischer’s description of a time early after his arrival when a group of men from the parish point out on a map where various members live:

As Lenard gave me the rundown on each of our households, he confirmed a suspicion that had been growing in me…: Approximately 75 percent of my members bore the same last name, Semanns.

“That would be Milford’s place.  Him and Clara moved there when his father quit farming.  You want to see a man plow a straight furrow, you watch old Ben.”  Lenard and Gus exchanged knowing looks.  Then they shared the same look with Ben Jordon and Ronnie Semanns, who passed it between them like a secrete handshake.  “You want to see the crookedest furrow in the county, then I believe you’d have to visit Martin’s place in the spring.”  The four laughed uproariously…

[I said] “You know Semanns is the right name for farmers, isn’t it… you know, since it means ‘seed’ in Latin.”  The four look at me without expression.

The young pastor and parishioners could be more different from each other, but not by much.  Lischer grew in a large, affluent suburb, attended a cathedral-size parish, went to college, graduated from seminary, and earned a Ph.D.  He was an articulate intellectual who had traveled the world.  Many in the small church had never left the county in which they were born.  They were plain-speaking people of the earth who were good with their hands.  The relationship between new pastor and parish had many of the same dynamics present in what separated the Pharisees and Scribes from the ‘sinners.’

To help those elitists break through their blindness Jesus tells a parable of a shepherd who goes out to look for a lost sheep.  The implication is that he is God’s shepherd and the ‘sinners’ are the lost sheep.  It is interesting that Jesus chose to tell a story about shepherd.  While this image is used often in the Old Testament as a metaphor either for God or for religious leaders, by Jesus’ day shepherding as an occupation had acquired a less than flattering reputation.  Shepherds were viewed by most as being “shiftless, thieving, trespassing hirelings.”  Shepherds were lumped in with such low-life characters as camel drivers, sailors, gamblers, and tax collectors. 

Through his parable Jesus is forcing the religious leaders to consider the dignity and humanity of a person they would normally dismiss out of hand.  If he were telling the story today, say, to a banker, Jesus might talk about an auto mechanic and to an auto mechanic he might talk about a banker.  Jesus challenged the Pharisees and Scribes and he challenges us to open our eyes to see in the other the image of God, the child of God’s own heart.  It is much easier to see that in people who are like us, but much more rewarding to find it those who are not.

Richard Lischer’s experience comes back to me often as I read the poetry of R.S. Thomas.  You may recall I mentioned he was an Anglican priest who passed away in the year 2000.  He carried out most of his ministry in a small town in the Welsh countryside.  Many of his poems describe the ways he is different culturally from his parishioners.  Thomas struggles to find the commonalities, but as he finds them they make his way into his poetry.  Here one of his works titled Affinity:

Consider this man in the field beneath,

Gaitered with mud, lost in his own breath,

Without joy, without sorrow,

Without children, without wife,

Stumbling insensitively from furrow to furrow,

A vague somnambulist; but hold your tears,

For his name also is written in the Book of Life.



Ransack your brainbox, pull out the drawers

That rot in your heart’s dust, and what have you to give

To enrich his spirit or the way he lives?

From the standpoint of education or caste or creed

Is there anything to show that your essential need

Is less than his, who has the world for church,

And stands bare-headed in the woods’ wide porch

Morning and evening to hear God’s choir

Scatter their praises?  Don’t be taken in

By stinking garments or an aimless grin;

He also is human, and the same small star,

That lights you homeward, has inflamed his mind

With the old hunger, born of his kind.

Over the three years that Richard Lischer served his initial appointment he discovered an affinity with all those Semanns family members and finding bonds across the divide enriched his life, his faith, and his ministry in countless ways.  He writes this about the last Sunday he was with them:

When I was a boy and later a seminarian, I would have sworn that each person makes the race [of faith] alone, like a long-distance runner who has separated from the pack and runs at his own pace.  Religion was the most refined form of privacy available to me.

But now, as I looked out upon this cloud of upturned faces… I was embraced by a wholeness I never before experienced.  It seemed to me that I was looking at the church as God sees it, not as a series of individual quirks and opinions, but as a single heart of love and sorrow.

For the first few weeks when I started to volunteer at our Food Pantry I had a difficult time being comfortable in the presence of the rabble that constitute our clients.  They were just so different from me and from the people whose company I keep.  I marveled at how the others – especially Nancy Bangley and Nancy Meakin – were able to be open and available to each person.  Gradually, little by little, I loosened up. 

One evening I was helping a gentleman who looked to be a little order than me.  He had dots of white paint all over his skin and cloths.  “Have you been painting today?”  I asked him.  “Yes,” he said, “I have been fixing up my elderly neighbor’s porch because she can’t do it and can’t afford to pay to do it.  So I am helping her out.”  Until that moment I am ashamed to say it did not occur to me that a person coming to our Food Pantry might actually be doing something to help someone else, but in an instance I gained a sense of affinity with this one gentleman.  He was kind and generous, as I try to be.  He enjoyed working with his hands, as I do.  And, apparently, like me, he has trouble keeping paint on a brush and off himself.  That one encounter opened for me a door and on the other side of the door I began to see the humanity and dignity of the clients we serve.  It is a moment of grace for which I am deeply grateful.

No ifs, ands, or buts about it, we who try to follow Jesus as our Lord must follow his example of crossing whatever may divide us from those who differ from us – be it culture or caste – in order to find in each other what God sees in all of us – a child of God’s own heart.  As I said, it wonderful when we find this in people who are like us, but even more rewarding when we find it in those who are not.