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.