Beyond Understanding

Scripture: Isaiah 40:1-5, Mark 1:1-8


Bill Watterson, the author of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, once said: “The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.” Indeed, I often wonder what a rational, clear-thinking alien would make of our countless peculiar behaviors. What would such a creature think of pumpkin carving, neckties, catch-and-release fishing, the seventh-inning stretch, riding stationary bicycles, running marathons for fun, or bringing cats and dogs into our homes so we can feed them and have them ruin our rugs and furniture? In fact, as I reflect on these things I have no idea what to make of them, either.

I found myself conducting this little thought experiment the other day when I was listening to a radio station that is currently devoting all of its air time to holiday music. I wondered: if an alien were sitting beside me and listening, what would he think Christmas is about? I imagined our visitor saying something like this:

“These songs appear to tell a story but its plot line is unclear to me. The principal player in the drama might be an infant, a boy who plays the drum, three kings, several singing chipmunks, a snowman who has eyes made of coal, a mutant reindeer, or a large bearded man who watches people when they’re sleeping and can read their minds. The story clearly revolves around gifts, although I cannot comprehend why anyone would want most of them, such as those lords who are leaping up and down. I cannot even tell where the tale takes place, at various times it appearing to occur in a little town in the desert, a toy factory in the arctic, decked halls, grandma’s house, or a city shaken by the cacophonous noise of silver bells. As far as I can discern, the story is completely incoherent and has no meaning whatsoever.”

We all recognize the problem I’m describing. And many of us try to counter these confounding cultural influences by making declarations about the true meaning of Christmas. Before this season is over, someone will tell you that the true meaning of Christmas can be found in children or family or tradition or generosity or helping those less fortunate. A real rabble-rouser might even suggest to you that Christmas is about celebrating the birth of Jesus. Of course, all of these have some kernel of truth in them. But I want to invite you to consider this possibility: if we’re after the true meaning of Christmas, then we have to think much, much bigger than these statements suggest. Indeed, we have to think so big that we will we encounter the limits of what we are capable of understanding.

In order to clarify what I’m getting at, I’d like to talk about just one of the characteristics shared by the various gospel renditions of the birth of Jesus. It is a characteristic that has immense theological importance, even though it tends to fall outside of our twenty-first-century conversations about Christmas, and certainly doesn’t make itself manifest in the lyrics of such seasonal classics as “Jingle Bell Rock” or “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Clause.” The aspect of these stories I will ask you to focus on is this: all of the gospel writers place considerable emphasis on the idea that the birth of Jesus fulfilled a prophecy—a very, very old prophecy. For example, parts of the book of Isaiah are dated to seven or eight hundred years before the birth of Christ.

Of course, the gospel most interested in connecting the birth of Jesus with the fulfillment of these ancient prophecies is that of Matthew, who in telling the story refers to passages from Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, and Jeremiah. Matthew also makes less explicit allusions to various Mosaic texts and even invokes a prophecy of uncertain origin: “He will be called a Nazarene.” The gospel of Luke includes some similar references, although here the notion that Jesus fulfills the messianic prophecy is conveyed through the voices of various players in the drama: Gabriel, Zechariah, the angel who appears to the shepherds, Simeon, and Anna. The gospel of John includes quotations from Isaiah that parallel those we find in Matthew. And similar allusions appear at the beginning of the gospel of Mark—even though that gospel includes no birth narrative but rather starts by moving swiftly from Jesus’ baptism to the inauguration of his ministry. What—first and foremost and perhaps above all other things—did the gospel writers want us to know about Jesus coming into this world? That it accomplished something that had been foretold for generations and generations and that had been in the making since the very beginning of time.

Now, this is the point in the sermon when most preachers would probably extol you to find a few minutes in the coming days to interrupt your busy Christmas preparations in order to ponder the dimensions of this idea. But, unfortunately for you, I am not most preachers. We’re therefore going to do it at this very moment. So fasten your seatbelt, take a deep breath, clear your mind, and try to get your head around the bigness of what the gospel writers are trying to tell you here.

Imagine a plan so vast, so intricate, and so complex that it requires all of time to unfold. Imagine an act of creation that carries with it such dazzling possibilities that we end up with Siberian tigers and the music of Bach, Mount Everest and the Pythagorean Theorem, the Amazon basin and the plays of Shakespeare, hummingbirds and calculus. Imagine that in the midst of all this richness there is a signal event of such transformative importance that God whispers of it to His chosen prophets—not because it is imminent, but because it is a wonder exceeding all other wonders. We might sometimes think to ourselves that God is pretty good at keeping secrets—perhaps even too good for our taste. But this was a secret of such surpassing significance that word got out early.

What an amazing, attention-grabbing, humbling word it is. It is the word of God made into—of all improbable things—the warm, soft flesh of a baby. It is the word that the God who created the universe itself loves you and chases you and calls you into the shelter underneath His wings. It is the word that you cannot have suffering, cannot have anxiety, cannot have disappointment, cannot have pain that is bigger than the one who made you and who will see you through it. It is a word that ushers us into a life that is grateful and faithful and forgiving and relentless in the granting of mercy and the demanding of justice. It is a word that can lead you into a courage that passes all understanding; a resolve that passes all understanding; a peace that passes all understanding; a joy that passes all understanding—a sweet, sweet joy, indeed.

Ah, joy to the world—the Lord is come! Let earth receive her king. Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing. And heaven and nature sing. And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing.

And the people said: Amen.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Scripture: 2 Corinthians 9:6-15


The tiny rural Michigan community where I grew up had an area we affectionately called “downtown.” Downtown consisted of the following enterprises: There was Dick’s Bait and Tackle, which was reassuringly owned by a guy named Dick, and which sold not just bait and tackle but also candy that, over time, had come to taste like minnows. There was a hardware store that had a display cabinet of pocket knives that, as a little kid, I lusted after to no avail. And there was a pharmacy that had a counter where malts and cherry Cokes were served by a young woman with whom, when I achieved adolescence, I came to develop a relationship similar to the one I had earlier suffered through with the pocket knives.

A mile or so away in one direction there was a saloon with a couple of pool tables—a single-room dive that I once heard my mother call “the bad part of town.” And a mile or so in the other direction there was a big old barn, in front of which stood a sign bearing the single word “Antiques.” The place was filled to the rafters with furniture, decorations, books, wooden and metal toys, mechanical banks, bottles of patent medicine—all manner of stuff. Many a rainy Sunday afternoon included a trip to the antiques store, an odyssey my father always initiated with a stale joke about going to see what was “new.”

In one of my first visits to the store, I noticed a throw pillow that had embroidered upon it the following couplet: “I slept and dreamt that life was beauty / I woke and found that life was duty.” That I can still recite the message verbatim after more than forty years tells you something about how badly it traumatized me. Indeed, it seemed to me a singularly distressing note on which to doze off at night. And it did not surprise me, and it will not surprise you, that in all my years of stopping by the antiques store—with different merchandise coming and going—this particular item remained on the shelf. It appears that no one wished to drift off into dreamland freshly reminded of the notion that our existence consists of nothing more than drudgery and obligation.

Nevertheless, duty obviously has a strong moral claim upon us. After all, duties arise from a variety of compelling sources, such as our promises, our beliefs, and our relationships. And, most relevant for today’s purposes, duty can also arise from a sense of gratitude. Jesus powerfully captures this idea in these familiar words: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” (Luke 12:48) Indeed, gratitude may move us to offer up much even when we have been given little. “Truly,” Jesus declares after the woman gives her last two copper coins, “this poor widow has put in more than everyone else; for they have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had.” (Luke 21:3) Extravagant generosity comes in all shapes and sizes; but I would suggest to you that it is intimately, if not inextricably, linked with a mindset of extravagant gratitude.

So, in some places the gospels direct us to feel gratitude and to act generously for the simple reason that this is how God wants us to behave. But, as the Bible makes clear from its opening chapters, God understands that we are a free-willed, independent, and headstrong species who tend to resist straightforward directives, like "don't eat that apple" or "here, follow these commandments." God therefore coaxes us into that grateful and generous state of mind in countless subtle ways. (I sometimes call this God's divine and sacred sneakiness.) Today, I want to suggest to you that one of those ways is through the very nature of life itself—the delicate, tentative, finite nature of life itself.

This came home to me recently when Lisa and J.J. and I went for a Sunday afternoon walk in the fall woods. The trees had changed colors and had the path was covered with a thick carpet of fallen leaves. It was the sort of peaceful autumn day that will make a philosopher out of you, and so my mind turned to one of my favorite poems by Robert Frost. It goes like this:

Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Lisa and J.J. and I were surrounded by what happens after “leaf subsides to leaf.” And all around us was abundant evidence that gold is, indeed, nature’s “hardest hue to hold.”

In the fall, in our neck of the woods, we pause to celebrate those colors precisely because we understand that they will not last--we will not have them forever. In our best and most alert moments, it is this same awareness that prompts us to call a friend we haven’t talked to in a while; to listen extra closely to what our children have to say; to prolong our hugging of a loved one; to forgive someone who has offended us; to smell the flowers, pet the dogs, watch the birds, and hear the music; to join the dance. The fall stage of the cycle of life reminds us that everything we have is fragile, and therefore precious, and therefore worthy of thanksgiving—extravagant thanksgiving.

That is the place to which our passage today calls us. “Look,” the scripture says to us, “don’t give of yourselves hesitantly or out of a sense of duty. Do it cheerfully! Do it because sharing abundantly of your time and your talents and your gifts and your service and your love and your grace and your empathy and your humor will enrich you beyond your wildest dreams! Do it because that is how we give praise to and celebrate the indescribable blessings that God has bestowed upon us.” And do it now, because time is fleeting; because life doesn’t wait around; because nothing gold can stay.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux once declared: “What I know of the divine science and holy scripture I learnt in the woods and fields.” On a pleasant weekend afternoon, with a cool breeze rustling through the leaves, the woods and fields taught me a lesson about being thankful for this life. But they taught me another lesson as well. They taught me to remember that God does most of His work out of sight; that underneath the leafy paths and the crazy clutter of fallen limbs God was making something beautiful and new; and that paths we have not encountered, through gates we cannot conceive, will someday lead us to places we cannot imagine.

For this, too—for this, especially—a thanksgiving, a thanksgiving.

And the people said: Amen.

Rachel's Wells

Scripture: Romans 12:1-8

We often treat this passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans as a reassuring feel-good text. In these verses, Paul offers the comforting observation that each of us has our own unique talents. Sure, we should make the most of them for the betterment of our fellow human beings and for the glory of God. But we needn’t trouble ourselves about the fact that faith calls others to engage in activities that don’t resonate with us or that we wouldn’t do competently.

In this respect, the text appeals to us because it affirms something we understand about ourselves, something elegantly expressed by that prominent philosopher, Clint Eastwood, when he declared: “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Paul’s statements comport with our suspicion that for some of us to try to engage in certain activities would be, at best, futile and pointless and, at worst, embarrassing and counterproductive. I think it was the author Robert Heinlein who made the famous observation that you should “never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.”

Well, I acknowledge that this passage from Paul’s letter can and should offer us some consolation. And I certainly don’t want to imply that this is in actuality a feel-bad text, although in the history of Christian theology some have managed to interpret it that way. But I do want to suggest that Paul’s message has a great deal more complexity than we might notice on first reading. And I want to try to persuade you that this passage presents us with a serious challenge—indeed, with several serious challenges—that can dramatically change how we think about our lives and, more importantly, how we live them.

One of those challenges is pretty easy to spot and I’ve already alluded to it. The text plainly urges each of us to find and fulfill our special role in the order of things. The scripture leaves plenty of room here, acknowledging that this role might be met through leadership or generosity or compassion or encouragement or teaching or ministering or, presumably, dozens of other activities. Of course, we know that when those seemingly limited roles are played to capacity the world stands up and takes notice and changes, even if not as much as we might hope. Just consider the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., the compassion of Albert Schweitzer, the ministry of John Wesley. Mother Theresa, whose simple acts of caring for the poor transformed countless lives, once said “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do all small things with great love.” If we will leave the wings and walk onto the stage we will discover that there are no bit players in this drama.

The second challenge is subtler, although still explicit in the text. In verse 3, Paul warns us not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. He reiterates this later in verse 16, when he says “do not be haughty” and “do not claim to be wiser than you are.” We can see why this presents some challenges in this context. Our ego may keep us from recognizing that our highest and best use in the service of our faith may not be the one we envisioned or wanted. Or our ego may seduce us into pursuing higher goals out of lower motivations, like pride and self-aggrandizement. Or our ego may keep us from acknowledging, honoring, and fostering the special contributions of others. Our egos can even prompt us to judge the egos of our brothers and sisters. This evil is wonderfully captured by Ambrose Bierce’s definition of an egoist: an egoist, he said, “is someone more interested in himself than in me.”

But these verses pose another challenge to us as well, one much subtler and more deeply embedded in the text, although unquestionably present. And I want to suggest to you that this challenge turns on the difference between being and doing. In order to tease out what I’m getting at I want to start by moving away from one controversial topic, religion, and into another, politics. I will do so with the sincere hope and prayer that I will not offend anyone or, at least, that I will offend everyone equally and in a completely non-partisan way.

A few months ago, a certain congressman from New York got himself into some serious trouble by committing an indiscretion that became public. He was not the first political figure to have done so and I can confidently predict—without making any claims to the gift of prophecy—that he will not be the last. The incident prompted a great deal of speculation as to why people who are smart and savvy engage in conduct that is so short-sighted and, well, stupid. And the incident inspired—as such incidents always do—efforts to explain why some smart and savvy people make these kinds of mistakes and others do not.

In the course of skimming the newspaper coverage of this debate I ran across one proposed explanation that particularly intrigued me. A psychologist who was interviewed about the controversy distinguished between people who seek political power because they want to be something and people who seek political power because they want to do something. She suggested that people who strive to be something—to have a title, hold an office, or enjoy the benefits of a prestigious label—tend to be inwardly focused and therefore more likely to indulge their whims and impulses. In contrast, people who strive to do something—to serve the public good, work a change in policy, or improve the lot of their constituents—tend to be outwardly focused and therefore less likely to wander into this sort of mischief. Of course, I am omitting lots of detail; and, in all candor, I’m not sure we need a nuanced analysis to explain why some politicians get themselves into problems that others don’t. But I do think that this distinction gets at something terribly important and that relates directly to the text before us.

In this scripture, Paul does not invite us to become something. He does not tell us to go forth and claim the title of leader or teacher or minister or prophet. Rather, Paul invites us to do something. He invites us to find the activity, the direction, and the way of going through life that God has set aside for us—and then to pursue it. This poses a serious challenge for us because the world—the world to which Paul says we must not conform—reinforces throughout our lives that what matters is what we are. Indeed, this starts very early. How many of you remember being asked as a child “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and feeling like an idiot because the question seemed so weighty and the answer so elusive. In the end, though, to use Elbert Hubbard’s often quoted remark, “God will not look [us] over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars.”

Indeed, it is what we do that speaks most clearly and loudly to who we are. I thought about that last week when I read an article in the New York Times by columnist Nicholas Kristoff, who told the story of one Rachel Beckwith. Kristoff said that, in the midst of this summer of grim news, Rachel had restored his faith in humanity.

Rachel lived near Seattle and, very early in life, felt a calling to try to make the world a better place. At age 5, she learned in school about an organization called “Locks of Love,” which accepts donations of hair to make wigs for children suffering from cancer and other diseases. Rachel told her mother that she wanted “to help the cancer kids”; her mother allowed her to cut off her beautiful long hair and to send it to the organization; a few years later, her hair finally grown back, Rachel did it again.

Then, when she was 8, Rachel learned that some children in the world do not have clean water to drink. She was appalled at the idea. So she decided to skip her ninth birthday party and instead to ask all of her friends to donate nine dollars to an organization called charity:water, which digs wells in African communities. She set up a birthday page at the charity:water website and worked toward her goal of $300. When her birthday arrived on June 12, Rachel was disappointed to learn that she had come up about eighty dollars short.

About a month later, tragedy struck Rachel’s own life. While her family was out for a ride a truck violently collided with their car. The rest of the family was unhurt. But Rachel was left unconscious and in critical condition.

In a show of support, friends and family and members of Rachel’s church began donating to her charity:water birthday page. Money poured in. Contributions passed her goal of $300. They got to $1000, then $10,000, then $50,000. At that point, her parents were able to whisper to her—unsure whether she could hear them—that she had passed the amount of money that had been raised for this charity by pop singer Justin Bieber.

Rachel never regained consciousness and passed away. Her parents had her hair donated, one final time, to Locks of Love. Her organs were given to help other children live. It was just as Rachel would have wanted it.

Now, the story might have ended there. But stories about people like Rachel often have lots of chapters. And this one does, too.

After her death, word about Rachel and her cause spread and money continued to come in—from all over the world, even from Africa, the country we was trying to help. As of last week, when Kristoff wrote his article, Rachel Beckwith had raised more than $850,000 for charity:water. When I checked the site this morning, the figure was just shy of $1.2 million.

Next year, on the anniversary of her daughter’s death, Rachel’s mother plans to visit Africa. She wants to seee the work that Rachel’s generosity and selflessness helped accomplish. There should be a lot to look at.

We might say lots of things about who we think Rachel Beckwith was. She was special. She was an inspiration. She was a role model. She was an angel, and, if heaven is anything like how I imagine it, she still is.

But what will stay with us is not who Rachel was. What will stay with us is what Rachel did. We will remember Rachel’s locks of hair. We will remember Rachel’s charity birthday page. We will remember Rachel’s wells.

And, lo, the people heard the word of the Lord.

And they saw the works of the people of the Lord.

And, yet again, it was a little child who led them.

Amen.

Summer Reading

Scripture: Romans 8:26-27 and 35-39

An anthology of faith-related humor includes this gem:

Jesus said unto his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” And his disciples answered unto Him, “Master, Thou art the supreme eschatological manifestation of omnipotent ecclesiastical authority, the absolute, divine, sacerdotal monarch.”
And Jesus said unto them, “What?”

I love this joke because it parodies our efforts, often futile, to capture and express in words that which can be neither captured nor expressed. And, as the joke highlights, those efforts do not go any better simply because we deploy words with a greater number of syllables. Gustave Flaubert, who probably used language as well as anyone, described the frustrating limitations of speech this way: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

The Bible contends with this challenge from its first page to its last. It has as its subject matter nothing less than the origin of the universe, the meaning of existence, the question of mortality, and the nature of God. But it has at its disposal nothing more than words. So in aid of this vast project it marshals every linguistic device imaginable: parables and poems; stories and histories; laws and letters; songs and proverbs.

And the Bible uses lots of words: a typical English translation contains more than seven-hundred-thousand of them. Of course, what makes those words special is their quality—the spirit and wisdom and divine presence that infuse and inform them—not their quantity. In this respect, it may be useful to remember that the Internal Revenue Code includes more than a million words, and yet no one has ever turned there for inspiration.

Sometimes, as in this passage from Romans, the Bible explicitly acknowledges that language can fail us. When we are struggling, Paul tells us, the Spirit will intercede “with sighs too deep for words.” It is a lovely phrase, I think. I suspect that, at one time or another, we have all felt grief too deep for words, love too deep for words, worry too deep for words, relief too deep for words, pain too deep for words, or joy too deep for words. How characteristic of the Holy Scriptures to find words to describe an experience that words cannot describe.

There was a time, in the history of the Christian faith, when those words belonged exclusively to the clergy. They were maintained in ancient languages and handwritten texts unavailable to most people. It took an inventor named Guttenberg, an upstart named Luther, and a revolution within the church to make those words accessible. Now translated into every imaginable language, the Bible remains the best selling text in the history of the world.

There is no way to measure this accurately, but the Bible is probably also the most frequently quoted text in the history of the world. Alas, this is not entirely good news. It almost certainly has the distinction of being misquoted—and quoted out of context—more often than any other book. Furthermore, some passages have so thoroughly infiltrated our secular speech that we lose sight of their biblical origins—for example, “the blind leading the blind,” “the straight and narrow,” “his head on a platter,” “nothing but skin and bones,” “the skin of my teeth,” “a sign of the times,” “go the extra mile,” “the twinkling of an eye,” “an eye for an eye,” “out of the mouths of babes,” “a drop in the bucket,” and—not often associated with sacred verse—“eat, drink, and be merry.”

That we forget where these expressions came from may signal a broader issue, which is that some of us probably do not spend as much time with our Bibles as we should. You may have heard the joke about the little girl who was asked by her pastor if she knew what was in the Bible. “I know exactly!” she responded. “Okay,” the pastor challenged, “tell me exactly what’s in your Bible.” She thought for a second and replied: “A copy of my birth certificate, an old church bulletin, a gum wrapper, and the crossword puzzle my dad filled in while you were preaching last Sunday."

On the other hand, I know many people of faith who take Bible study very seriously. They focus on a particular book. They read commentaries, scholarly articles, and other secondary sources. Some of them even delve into Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic to gain a deeper understanding of what the text wants to say to us.

Today, I want to offer a suggestion that I think applies whether you are relatively new to Bible study or highly experienced at it: take the time this summer to commit some verses (or, if you already do this, some more verses) to memory. I fear that in our twenty-first-century sophistication we might not see this as a good use of time. Memorizing Bible verses may strike us as old-fashioned or as something our great-grandparents had their children do when they were caught stealing from the cookie jar.

The old Christmas movie, The Homecoming, has some gentle fun with this idea. You may recall that the film is set in the Depression-era south and was the pilot for the popular television show The Waltons. In one memorable scene, a missionary has come to the Waltons’ hometown to deliver Christmas presents to underprivileged children. The missionary announces that she will give a present to any child who can recite a Bible verse. This poses a dilemma for the Walton siblings because their mother has strictly forbidden them from accepting charity, but, because of their upbringing, they have huge stores of scripture committed to memory.

After resisting briefly, the Walton kids start giving verses to other children to use. When one young boy asks Mary Ellen Walton for some help, she suggests “What has man profited if he gains the whole world and loses a soul.” The boy stares back at her blankly at her and says “Too hard to remember.” She responds “Jesus wept,” spins him around, and sends him on his way.

Indeed, depending on your memory and the time you have to devote to it some verses may be too hard to remember. I certainly understand the vagaries of memory. I recently discovered that, through repeated exposure, I had unintentionally memorized a few poems by Robert Frost. Unfortunately, I learned that the same held true with respect to the theme song of Gilligan's Island.

Anyway, to use another expression of biblical origin, if you seek you will find, and an appropriate verse will come to you. Perhaps you will want to memorize something on the longer end, like the twenty-third psalm or this this beautiful passage from today’s text: “[N]either death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

But there are many shorter verses that might speak to you. Here are a few suggestions, in declining order of length, for your consideration:

“Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5)

“Be strong and courageous, do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” (Joshua 1)

“Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6)

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11)

“Keep alert, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong.” (I Cor. 16)

“Surely, the Lord is in this place, and I did not even know it.” (Genesis 28)

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Hebrews 13)

“Do not let the sun go down on your anger.” (Epehsians 4)

“People are slaves to whatever masters them.” (2 Peter 2)

“Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you.” (James 4)

“I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Phil. 4)

“Be doers of the word.” (James 1)

“God is love.” (1 John 4)

So that is your summer reading assignment. Find some verses that speak to you. Make them your own. Hold them close. Keep them at hand.

You may discover that they are just what you need the next time you find yourself in one of those places where all other words seem inapt, inadequate, and idle.

For, in the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was God.

Amen.

The Faces of Forgiveness

Scripture: Acts 7:54-60

Our faith assigns a high value to the virtue of forgiveness.

Jesus emphasized its importance several times in the Sermon on the Mount. He gave it a central place in the prayer that he taught us. He displayed it, and asked the Father for it on our behalf, in the very throes of death. Indeed, I do not believe that in the history of the world a more tragic or more beautiful sentence was ever uttered than this: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Our faith similarly reveres stories in which someone demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to forgive. We encounter one in this scripture: Stephen, suffering under the blows of the stones that will kill him, pleads for mercy on behalf of his assailants. Under the circumstances described here, we might expect Stephen to call out in anger with cries of condemnation or warnings of divine vengeance. Instead, his dying words echo those of the Messiah he had chosen to follow.

I recently had a powerful experience that involved a story of remarkable forgiveness. For reasons with which I will not bore you, on May 1st of this year I found myself in the magnificent St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York. That happened to be the day on which the Catholic Church celebrated the beatification of Pope John Paul II—an important step in the process of declaring him a saint. Cardinal Egan, who was leading the mass, knew John Paul II and had many stories to tell about him. But he focused his remarks on a story of forgiveness.

As you will recall, in 1981 an assassination attempt was made on the Pope and he was seriously wounded. As soon as he was well enough to do so, he made a public statement declaring his forgiveness for the man who had shot him. And then—to give life to his words—John Paul II went to visit the man in prison. For more than twenty minutes, he spoke quietly to this declared terrorist, at one point softly wrapping his hands around the hands that had pumped four bullets into his body.

Such stories and scriptural passages provide us with a specific image of what forgiveness looks like. It is instantaneous, complete, and unconditional. It absolves the offender of wrongdoing, almost as though the offense never occurred. In the same vein, the great preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher once declared that “Forgiveness ought to be like a canceled note—torn in two, and burned up, so that it can never be shown against one.”

I am going to call that kind of forgiveness “absolute forgiveness” and I am going to start with an obvious point about it. We ordinary human beings—who are not Stephen or a saint or the Savior of Mankind—have a hard time getting there. We struggle to forgive and forget. As the old saying goes, we want to “bury the hatchet … but mark the spot.”

That great Texas theologian, Lyle Lovett, has some fun with our human reluctance to forgive in a song called “God Will.” It goes like this:

Who keeps on trusting you when you’ve been cheating and spending your nights on the town?

And who keeps on saying that he still wants you when you’re through running around?
And who keeps on loving you when you’ve been lying, saying things ain’t what they seem?

Well, God does.

But I don’t.

And God will.

But I won’t.

And that’s the difference between God and me.

Not the only difference, certainly, but a common and conspicuous one.

Unfortunately, this way of thinking leaves us with a dilemma. It tells us that only absolute forgiveness matters. It tells us that, if we offer those who have injured us anything less or different, then we must count ourselves among the unforgiving wretches of the earth. It tells us that forgiveness is all or nothing.

I want to invite you to consider whether the gospels actually endorse this all-or-nothing perspective. Now, please don’t get me wrong. I am not questioning whether the gospels recognize absolute forgiveness as sacred, beautiful, and ideal; obviously, they do. Rather, I am questioning whether the gospels say that absolute forgiveness is the only kind that Jesus recognized or that makes a difference in the world.

In my opinion, this question is terribly important to our spiritual well-being, to our psychological health, and, in fact, to the very institution of forgiveness. I believe that some (perhaps many) people despair over their ability to forgive because—in their effort to be good Christians—they conclude that nothing short of absolute forgiveness counts. At the same time, they do not, and feel they cannot, experience the kind of instantaneous, complete, and unconditional forgiveness that our faith celebrates. As a result, they cannot figure out what to do next; they grow increasingly despondent over the issue; and, at some point, they simply give up and declare forgiveness impossible.

I think this is bad for the heart, the mind, and the soul. I also think it reflects a misunderstanding of what Jesus asks of us.

Let’s start with a fairly straightforward observation: we do not ordinarily think of Christian virtues in all-or-nothing terms. Take, for example, the virtue of self-sacrificial charity. It is true that when the rich young man asked what he needed to do to inherit eternal life Jesus answered by saying “Sell all that you have and distribute the money to the poor.” And it is true that charity of this magnitude has a special purity and sanctity to it. But it is also true that when members of my church donate food to Faith in Action, give clothes to the Salvation Army, visit the sick, offer their blood to the Red Cross, sing in the choir, and volunteer their time at the Jackson Interfaith Shelter I do not view them as uncharitable Philistines because they failed to give away everything they own.

Similarly, we do not ordinarily limit the category of valuable faith experiences to those that occur dramatically and suddenly. So it is true that some conversions happen at a single, miraculous, attention-grabbing instant—like the voice and flash that threw Saul of Tarsus to the ground. And it is true that such amazing transformations have an honored place in our religion. But it is also true most of us experience our faith as a slow-going marathon rather than as a sprinting leap across the finish line.

Of course, that does not render the way we run our race spiritually unworthy. Many years ago, I ran a marathon as a fundraiser for the Leukemia Society. The Society sponsored a dinner the night before at which a former Olympic runner gave an inspirational speech. He said something like this: “I know some of you will complete this race in just a few hours. But the runners I respect the most are those of you who will take five or six hours or more to finish. You will have to show patience, determination, and grit that a faster guy like me could probably never muster. I can run toward the finish line. But you will have to stay pointed in the right direction, keep putting one foot in front of the other, and believe.”

Since so many dimensions of our faith work this way, it is little wonder that forgiveness sometimes only comes to us as the result of a journey, a process, rather than by way of a total and immediate shift in consciousness. Indeed, there are a number of passages in the gospels in which Jesus describes or exhibits forgiveness as a process—often a process that emphasizes the repentance of the one who seeks forgiveness. For example, in the seventeenth chapter of Luke, Jesus says: “If your brother sins against you, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turns again to you saying, ‘I repent,’ you shall forgive him.” You will note that Jesus does not shrug off such forgiveness as unworthy of the name simply because it anticipates a show of regret and reformation on the part of the offender.

This connection between forgiveness and repentance was a favorite theme of the great Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer warned against a state of mind where forgiveness is gleefully received without any apparent cost to the beneficiary. He cautioned that such behavior can so “cheapen” forgiveness that it becomes trivial. That is the point of a wonderful joke told by the comedian Emo Phillips: “When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized the Lord doesn’t work that way. So I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.”

Over and over again, Jesus implored us to have forgiving hearts. He displayed the spirit of absolute forgiveness for all of us to see. But he also recognized that forgiveness sometimes comes through the passage of time and as the result of a process—a process that includes remorse and repentance on the part of the one who inflicted the injury.

Because that process gets worked out between human beings it will often prove harder and sloppier than we might wish. But that should not surprise us. Indeed, I am aware of very little within the realm of human relationships that qualifies as neat, tidy, and wholly rational. This is one of the many reasons that forgiveness offers us such a rich occasion for prayer.

Let me return to where I started and put it even more bluntly. As Jesus declared from the cross, we do not know what we are doing. We do not know what we are doing. Who could possibly argue with that?

We blunder our way through childhood and youth and we do not know what we are doing. We fall in love and we do not know what we are doing. We go to work and we do not know what we are doing. We raise children and we do not know what we are doing. We vote and argue and dream and falter and buy and sell and applaud and condemn and we do not know what we are doing—particularly when we condemn. Funny, isn’t it, that Jesus tells us that we must not judge and that we must forgive and we spend most of our lives getting that job description exactly backwards.

But of course we do. We’re human. So we need forgiveness. And we need to forgive.

Praise the one who sees us for who we are. Praise the one who knows us for what we are. Praise the one who gives us the capacity to forgive and the resolve to try to be forgivable. Praise the one who forgives us as we would be forgiven.

Say alleluia.

Say amen.

A Brief Introduction to the Human Condition

Scripture: Genesis 2 and 3

It is impossible to overstate the influence that the story of Adam and Eve has had on Western culture. It serves as the focus of the greatest epic poem written in the English language—John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It provides the subject matter for countless masterpieces of Renaissance art, including works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Tintoretto, Titian, and Masaccio—about whom I’ll have more to say later. Indeed, their pervasive presence in Renaissance art leads me to wonder whether Adam and Eve fled Eden for Tuscany, a notion that might explain why my Italian in-laws are constantly urging me to eat something.

But the story of Adam and Eve has not been reserved to the lofty bastions of high art. For better or worse, it permeates our popular culture as well. It has been parodied in countless jokes and cartoons. It shows up in the lyrics of songs by everyone from Paul Anka to Gary Puckett to Bob Marley to Bruce Springsteen.

Clearly, and I guess ironically, we find this story irresistible. But this familiarity brings with it the risk that we will not just secularize, but trivialize, this important piece of scripture. That would be a terrible shame, because—as is true of so many passages in the Book of Genesis—this is not just a story about where we came from. This is a story about who we are. Indeed, I want to suggest to you that this passage is nothing less than a brief introduction to the human condition.

Of course, we all recognize the tragic human weakness of Adam and Eve. God gave them a single rule—and they could not follow it. Little wonder that God did not meet with much better success in persuading humankind to follow the ten rules he later delivered to Moses.

After Adam and Eve disobeyed this command they heard the sound of God walking in the garden, felt ashamed, and tried to hide. As I have observed before, trying to hide from God is surely one of the stupidest ideas ever. It is right up there with the idea that the earth is flat, the idea that the world is the fixed center of the universe, and the idea I had in high school that I could persuade a girl to go out with me by observing that she had the same name as my dog.

Then, when God found Adam and Eve and confronted them with their transgression, they did not accept responsibility. They did not ask for forgiveness or express regret or demonstrate repentance. They just tried to lay the blame on others.

Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the snake. In fact, have you noticed that the snake is the only player in this drama who didn’t argue with God and blame somebody else? I thought about titling this sermon “On the Moral Superiority of Snakes” but I did not want to generate unnecessary controversy.

We can see so much of ourselves in Adam and Eve. They don’t like being told what to do. They try to hide from the consequences of their misconduct. They dodge responsibility. They blame others for their failings.

But the story does not portray them as one-dimensional troublemakers. If it did, the story wouldn't be so engaging. To the contrary, their decision to eat the apple seems driven by a complicated collection of motivations: aspiration; imagination; curiosity. It may help us to appreciate the full humanity of Adam and Eve to remember that, in other contexts, we think of those motives as virtues.

In Milton’s memorable words, Adam and Eve were “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” They had a choice. It was the basic choice inherent in the human condition, and, as the old hymn says, that “choice goes by forever, twixt that darkness and that light.”

Over time, we have made Adam and Eve into symbols—even into caricatures. But it is important to recognize that this is not how the Bible gives them to us. The Bible presents them as fully human: at once extravagantly noble and catastrophically weak. And it is only when we can see them as fully human that we can begin to imagine the unspeakable pain and horror they must have experienced when they were cast from Eden and separated from the place that God had made for them.

I suppose that is why I find Masaccio’s famous fresco in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence among the most powerful renderings of this story. Adam bends over, his head in his hands, his muscles tight with sobbing. Eve throws her head back, her mouth agape and gasping, her eyes clenched shut. It is the perfect expression of inexpressible despair. I cannot look at it without remembering W. H. Auden’s observation about the Old Masters of painting: “about suffering they were never wrong.”

And this, too, is part of the story’s brief introduction to the human condition. From the beginning of time, we have gotten ourselves into places where we have felt hopelessly separated from the things we treasure, even from God, perhaps especially from God. Then we have looked around and asked ourselves—as Adam and Eve surely must have asked themselves—how did I get here? How did my mortality and my weakness bring me so far away from where I belong?

Those are the questions posed by this story. Those are the questions posed by this season of Lent. They are hard questions.

This week's New Yorker includes a fascinating article about one G. Stanley Hall, the founder of gerontology and a character of major proportions. The piece describes a questionnaire that Hall sent around to all the "mostly eminent and some very distinguished old people" he could think of. Among other things, he asked them: How do you keep well? What temptations do you feel? Are you troubled with regrets? The article rightly points out that these are still our questions. Indeed, I think they have been our questions since that first morning east of Paradise.

But there is good news. The truth reflected in the story of Adam and Eve may be fundamental but it is not final. It tells us alot about who we are. But it tells us very little about who we might yet become. For that, we need to look to a different story--the story of an obscure itinerant preacher from the town of Nazareth. It is, as they say, the greatest story ever told.

Certainly, it is a story about betrayal and pain and suffering. But it is also a story about mercy and forgiveness and rebirth. It is a story about peace and reassurance and comfort. It is a story about redeeming sacrifice and everlasting love and amazing, amazing grace.

It is a story about hope, even in a world battered with hate and violence and natural disasters and political upheavels, even here, even now, even this far from a place called Eden.

Praise God that it is so.

Amen.

Caritate Dei

My friend and colleague the Rev. Tom Macaulay preached a wonderful sermon today in which he told a story about a man who had fallen on hard times. Desperate for food, the man took refuge in the soup line of a local church. After he'd been fed, he asked what would be expected in return. Would he have to scrub the floor? Do the dishes? Listen to a sermon about being grateful?

No, none of that, the woman he asked replied. When he looked puzzled she pointed to a sign over the door, which read "Caritate Dei." He asked what it meant. The woman responded that it meant that the church had fed him out of "love for God."

It is a great story, and my dim memory of Latin--largely unused for the past thirty years--suggests that this is an apt translation of the phrase. But, unless I'm wrong, there is another as well: the "love of God," or, if you will, "God's love."

If this is correct, then Caritate Dei is a delightful latinate pun. It means both that God shows love for us and that we show love for God. The symmetry is perfect linguistically; we should aspire to make it perfect behaviorally.

I am not confident that this is good Latin. But I am completely confident that this is good theology.

Final Examination

Scripture: John 1

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, I took a class from an English professor who loved to tell stories about the prominent American poet Robert Frost. Frost had served on the faculty at Michigan many years before, and my professor had suffered through a number of difficult encounters with him. When Frost first joined the faculty, my professor gathered up some poems he had written and took them to the great man for his evaluation. Frost perused them quickly and—handing them back with palpable scorn—asked “Have you tried writing prose?”

Indeed, stories of Frost’s crustiness—or, if you prefer, frostiness—abound. He once gave a public reading of his well-known poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which ends with the memorable lines “But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.” As soon as he finished, a hand shot up in the audience. “What were the promises?” a young man asked. “If I had wanted you to know,” Frost responded, “I would have told you.”

Frost’s response to the young man comes into my mind sometimes when I am reading the Bible. I encounter an instructional passage that raises numerous unanswered questions. Or I run across a story that appears to omit an important detail or that leaves me wondering what happened next. The knots in which I tie myself are undone by a still, small voice that whispers “If I had wanted you to know, I would have told you.”

Fortunately, some of the Bible’s messages come to us with unmistakable clarity. One of those, of course, is that we are called into the service of our fellow human beings. The scriptures repeatedly urge us to shelter the homeless and feed the hungry and clothe the impoverished and visit the sick and lonely.

Years ago, I read a story about a congregation that had become bitterly divided over nuanced issues of biblical interpretation, the structure of the worship service, and matters of church polity. When these controversies erupted at yet another meeting of the church leadership, one wise old soul rose to his feet. He cleared his throat and quietly asked to be heard.

He said, “I have a suggestion. Obviously, all these things matter. But they are also subjects of disagreement. What we cannot disagree about is that Jesus told us to care for the poor. So I’d like to propose that we focus our energy on serving the poor in the name of the Lord. Then, when we’ve got that under control and there are no more poor people who need our love and support, we can return to these other important questions.” The leadership agreed; the church changed course; the controversies vaporized; and, as you might imagine, their work continues.

I think the Bible offers us another message of unmistakable clarity, although it is a bit more abstract. That message is: go forth and bring light into the world. Indeed, it could be argued that no symbol plays as prominent a role in the scriptures as does that of light.

The scriptures are bookended with images of light. The first words spoken by God in the first chapter of the book of Genesis are “let there be light.” And the last chapter of the Revelation to John declares that, in the end, “there will be no more night” because the “light of the Lord” will prevail forever and ever.

Of course, the scriptures repeatedly refer to Jesus as “the light.” This theme is particularly prominent in the gospel of John, which begins by describing Jesus as “the true light, which enlightens everyone.” In other passages in John, Jesus proclaims that he is “the light of the world” and that whoever follows him “will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” In the twelfth chapter, Jesus urges us to “believe in the light, so that we may become children of the light.”

Paul loves this invitation to become “children of the light”—it is a phrase he uses frequently in his letters. It is as though Paul never ceases to be amazed by the proposition that the Son of the Living God implores people not just to recognize the light that he brought into the world but to find, embrace, and share the divine spark that they have within themselves. Perhaps we never cease to be amazed by it, either.

Light turns out to be a particularly rich metaphor when we seek to describe the human capacity for goodness. After all, sometimes our light shines brightly; sometimes it flickers a little low. Sometimes our light overcomes the darkness; sometimes the shadows subdue it to a dull sputter. Sometimes we are lifted onto a lamp stand; sometimes it seems as though the whole world conspires to manufacture bushel baskets to toss over us.

And we know that there are many different kinds of light. There are the magnificently bright stars in the African sky. There is the peaceful glow of a single candle. There is the radiant shimmer of the sun coming up over the horizon. There is the tiny glimmer in an infant’s eyes. All lights; all different; all blessings.

* * *

The English professor I mentioned earlier scared us half to death near the end of the term. He announced that he planned to give us the same examination that Robert Frost had given students when he taught at Michigan. After months of hearing stories about how Frost did not suffer fools gladly we were beside ourselves with worry.

On the day of the examination, our professor strode into the room and told us the exam was about to begin. He picked up the chalk and wrote a single sentence on the blackboard. The sentence said: “Show me that you have learned something.”

This is, indeed, one of the Bible’s unmistakably clear messages. Bring out your light. Let it shine. Do not worry about whether it is the biggest or the brightest or the most colorful or the most consistent. Just own it as a blessing. And then put it to use.

It is our way of saying to the Lord: I am listening.

I am trying.

I have learned something.

Amen.