"Surprise"
Luke 1:26-29
Who knows what each day will bring.
A heart attack.
A lottery win.
An accident.
A burst pipe.
A new job possibility.
A visit from an angel.
None of us knows.
We go about our business.
We expect it to be just another,
normal day.
Wake up.
Take a shower.
Eat breakfast.
Read the obituaries in the newspaper,
make sure you aren’t there;
then read the comics,
(make sure you aren’t there)
then go back and read the trivial stuff
on the front page.
Brush your teeth.
Go to work
or school.
Function adequately.
Come home.
Do chores
desk work
or homework.
Relax.
Eat supper.
Hear everyone’s news
if there are others in your home.
Watch KU basketball.
Go to bed,
or fall asleep while watching TV.
Wake up the next morning
to more of the same
do it all over again.
Predictable routine.
We don’t mind routine.
In fact, we count on it.
We like the way our lives play out by a certain, daily rhythm,
until
until something happens
that makes our routine skip a beat.
Once in a while,
our self-fashioned world
gets thrown out of orbit.
Something shifts.
Our poles get reversed.
Time gets wrinkled.
A little--or large--monkey wrench get’s thrown in the works.
Something happens that
as Jerry Lee Lewis used to sing
makes us feel like
“There’s a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”
A car accident.
One of the kids or grandkids gets sick.
Scary sick.
A bomb gets launched in our direction.
A sudden change in the weather.
A flat tire
while you’re going 70.
Finding out you’re pregnant.
Something, like that couple up in Kansas City
he worked the night shift
she was at home with their one year old daughter
but she had bought a box of wine
and drank the whole thing herself
as well as downing antidepressants
and he came home in the morning
to find the one year old girl gone
and no one knows where she is
or what happened to her.
No one wakes up
at the top of their expected, routine day
and says:
“Something life-changing is going to happen to me today.”
It’s OK to have something different in the day.
But not that different.
Nothing that will change your day to night.
Nothing that will make your river flow upstream.
Nothing that will make your sun rise in the west
and set in the east.
Nothing that will ask more of you
than your current level of functioning would allow.
Nothing that will make you find out
what you’re really made of.
Nobody wants something like that
suddenly thrown into their day.
In Nazareth there is a huge cathedral.
HUGE!
It was built during the time of the Crusades.
It’s called the Church of the Annunciation.
Outside, there is a courtyard,
probably as big as the entire property of this church.
It’s a tile mosaic.
Hundreds of millions,
of tiny tiles
laid by the crusaders.
Inside, a beautiful,
wide open sanctuary.
There are two levels.
The lower level is like a grotto.
Large enough to seat maybe a hundred people.
The rest must stand,
up above
looking down.
Down in the grotto,
inside that HUGE and ornate cathedral,
is what’s left of Mary’s home
or what is assumed to be Mary’s home.
It is one of the holy places for Christians.
A magnificent cathedral
both inside and out.
For what?
To commemorate what?
The day the angel
surprised a teenaged girl named Mary.
It shouldn’t be named the Church of the Annunciation.
It should be named the Church of the Big Surprise!
The surprise that forever changed the life of Mary.
The surprise that not only put a wrinkle in her day,
it was a wrinkle
that would never be ironed out.
Imagine,
Mary’s mother comes in that day and says,
“Are you all right, dear; you look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
“No,” Mary replies. “It was more like an angel.”
“Yeah, right,” her mother laughs. “You and that fanciful head of yours.”
Imagine the surprise Mary’s mother gets,
when she finds out Mary was telling the truth.
Interesting,
we don’t read anywhere in the Bible,
about Mary’s mother
and how she dealt with her daughter’s surprise.
That’s the trouble with surprises like that.
They don’t just affect the one who got surprised.
The ripples go farther out than that.
Every surprise,
on Mary’s level of surprise,
always affects many others.
For Mary
her surprise affected the whole world.
Her surprise broke the time barrier.
It has spread its ripples through two thousand years.
What happened to a middle eastern girl
has caused an impact across every cultural boundary.
Mary’s surprise not only changed Mary.
It changed the world.
But it wasn’t just a visit that was the surprise.
If it was just a visit by an angel,
that would be one thing.
But it wasn’t just a visit.
It was a visit with a declaration.
It was a declaration about a mission.
It was a mission that was the surprise.
It was a surprise that changed the world.
The mission was to carry and give birth to a baby boy.
A baby who would grow up
to be the Savior of the world.
The surprise is,
you never walk away from a visit with God,
or one of the angels
and stay the same.
The surprise is
your life shifts.
Something is demanded of you.
Everything will be different
from that day forward.
As Jacob found out
after wrestling with God
after being touched by God,
that his hip would never be same.
You never walk away from an encounter with God
without a limp.
Your personal mission
the one you fashioned for yourself
the one you thought was your own
the one you even thought was given you by God
the one your daily routine is designed around
that mission
could be gone.
In one single moment.
A new mission will take its place.
God’s mission.
The mission that is authentically
and really
from God.
And maybe,
that’s why we’re secretly afraid of God.
We’re afraid if we get too close to God
we will have to change.
Our mission will have to change.
Our reason for being will have to go.
We don’t want any surprises
on God’s scale of things.
We don’t want to change.
We like our lives.
We don’t want to see any burning bushes
like Moses saw.
We’d rather tend our sheep
out in the middle of nowhere
than lead a people
on a crazy journey
across a desert peninsula
to God-knows-where.
We don’t want to hear the surprise voice of God
asking us to take our family
and leave for another land,
not knowing where, exactly that is,
like Abraham.
We’d rather stay settled.
Deeply rooted in place.
We want to live out our lives
with our own people
in the way we choose
in the place we choose.
We don’t want to hear the voice
of some crusty old, curmudgeon prophet
sent by God
making a surprise visit to our family
and find out the surprise is
that God wants you to be King
as young David found out.
We’d rather play our flute
to the sheep
kill a wolf every now and then
but let that be the limit of our activity
or courage.
We’d rather not take on leadership
that asks more of us than we want
or feel we’re ready
to give.
We just want to do this much
and no more.
We don’t want to be knocked off our horse
by a bright light
and a strange voice
asking us why we’re fighting
what we know is the right thing to do
like Paul was.
We don’t want to find out
that everything we’ve been doing
up to that point in our lives
has been wrong.
We’d rather fight the demons
of our own creating
call the people we don’t like
or don’t agree with
the devil
and chase them down
so we can ram our religious ways
down their throats.
We’d rather stroke the institutions
rather than live by faith
led by a free God
who wants to give us a new name
and a new mission.
Maybe you think what’s being asked of you
is way too much,
beyond your capabilities.
At least,
beyond your willingness.
But that doesn’t matter to God,
and God’s surprising choices.
God doesn’t wait for your approval.
God simply comes
and thrusts you into a position
which you would not normally choose on your own.
We, really,
deep down,
don’t want God making those kinds of choices for us.
Mary is no different.
She is “thoroughly shaken”
by the angels visit
and God’s surprise mission.
She was “wondering what was behind” words like that.
She wondered,
as we all would
what impact those surprising words would mean for her life.
How would they change her?
How would they shape her life
from that day forward?
Because the surprise
was not just that one time visit.
As Jacob and Moses and Abraham and David and Paul and Mary found out,
there is no job description.
That’s part of God’s surprise.
The job description
for what God was asking Jacob, Moses, Abraham, David, and Mary to do
was written out as each day went by
after that initial visit.
None of them knew,
exactly,
what God was asking of them.
or,
how that surprising mission from God
would affect each day.
They didn’t know
until they got up each day.
All routines are out the window.
In place of routines
there is God.
A fellow Presbyterian Pastor I knew,
up in Nebraska,
Wally Easter was his name
was as short as I am tall.
He was a wonderful, witty man.
When he was on the nominating committee of presbytery,
looking for people to fill committee positions,
he would call a person
and say to them:
“Just say, ‘yes’ and I’ll tell you what you agreed to later.”
That’s why we don’t want to get too close
to God.
That’s why we don’t want to see any
angels.
Even though our culture is angel ga-ga these days;
benign little figurines,
chubby cherubs,
with tiny wings
that would barely be enough
to flutter around
infantile in their appearance
unable to
protect you from mayhem.
That’s not an angel.
When you read the Bible,
you find out the angels are the ones who are fearsome
fall on your face fearful
who often bring danger
and a dangerous
life changing message.
Angels are the ones
whose surprise visits
come with an open-ended job description,
with a sword in the hand
on which we are to pledge our lives
and
on which we are asked to simply say,
“YES”
and then,
forever after,
when you are questioning God, saying
“What exactly did I sign up for?” or
more blatantly:
“I did not sign up for this!”
God will reply,
“Ah, ah, ah; you said, ‘Yes.’”
And we think to ourselves,
“I will never say ‘yes’ to God again.”
Now,
with a sigh of relief,
we realize not all of us are needed by God
to be a Mary,
or a Moses
or a David
or a Paul.
Those were people God chose
to carry out a special mission.
Not special people.
Ordinary people.
People like you and I.
It was the surprise,
It was the mission,
given by God
that was extraordinary
not the person.
And yet,
guess what?
Surprise!
God has visited each of us.
That’s why you are here today.
Because,
somewhere,
somehow,
God got through to you.
God touched your life.
Deep down
something shifted.
God said, “I need you.
I want you to be a disciple of my Son, Jesus.”
God said, “Don’t think about it;
Just say ‘Yes.’
You’ll find out later what it means
to say that ‘yes.’”
Did you think God was going to just let you go on
with your mediocre life?
Did you think God would not come back at you
with some demands?
Did you think you understood the job description
when you first said, “Yes?”
Did you think your life would not change that much,
when you said “yes” to discipleship?
Did you think you would never be confronted,
or have to face anything of any difficulty?
Did you think you wouldn’t have to make any tough choices?
Surprise!
Monday, November 28, 2011
Monday, November 21, 2011
The Password
"The Password"
Psalm 100
When I was a kid, my brothers and I and an odd collection of neighborhood kids liked to make forts. We weren't into making tree forts. That was OK by me. I'm afraid of heights, oddly enough. I think it's part of God's odd sense of humor to make a tall person afraid of heights. Instead of tree forts, we made tunnel forts. We'd dig like a pack of prairie dogs until we had hollowed out an underground den.
We thought our dug out caves were really cool. My father, seeing the backyard dug up and a pile of dirt on the grass, didn't share our opinion. We'd have to fill it all in and go dig up one of the other kid's backyard; which would create the same reaction with that kid's father.
It was our club and only boys could be members. We made up passwords that only the guys in the club knew. But every once in a while the girls would find out the password. There was a leak in our secret club, and then we'd have to change the password. There was no way we were letting a girl in our cave. That is, unless we beat her over the head with a stick and dragged her in by her hair, just like the cavemen supposedly used to do.
That memory came flooding back as I read through Psalm 100 in different translations. Instead of the verse that reads:
Be thankful...as you enter His temple
Eugene Peterson, in The Message has:
Enter with the password: "Thank you."
"Thank you," is one of the most important passwords in our relationship with God. It opens up the way into God's heart. It is the only proper response for all that God brings our way in life. It's the password anyone can use. Thankfully God doesn't discriminate like we did in our childhood clubs.
But yet, saying that particular password is hard for a lot of people. There is something within them that keeps the vocal chords from uttering the word that gains a person entrance to worship and into the presence of God. It has astounded me how many letters used to come to Dear Abby about an experience of thanklessness. Someone gave something to someone else--a favor or a gift--and no "thank you" was given in return. Some of the events of thanklessness had happened years before the letter was written to Dear Abby. Evidently, not being able to say the password, "thank you," creates long held grudges.
That’s why I want to focus our attention on Psalm 100. It has always been one of my favorites from childhood. I have always liked the Psalm because it has an uplifting and celebrative tone. Right at the start the Psalm says to make a joyful noise to the Lord. In The Message it has, “On your feet now--applaud God!” That always captured my attention as a kid because we weren’t allowed to make much noise, let alone shout.
When all the cousins got together at my grandparent’s house for Christmas, we had a lot of fun tormenting my grandparent’s chihuahua. It was constantly yipping. Remember those Taco Bell commercials where the chihuahua would say cool things like, “Gooey cheese,” or, “Drop the chiluppa.” Not my grandparent’s dog. It would just bark, all the time.
So we’d use the dog kind of like a hockey puck, sliding it back and forth to each other on the wood floor. We would laugh and scream as it tried to get a grip with it’s claws. That is until our grandfather would come down the hall and yell, “Can’t you kids be quiet; you’re hurting grandpa’s ears.” We’d shut up for about a minute and then be back at it again, sliding their dog across the floor.
As a kid, you’re always being told to shut up and be quiet. But here in Psalm 100, I saw permission being given to shout and make noise before God. That’s why I grew up believing that God was not an adult. God was a kid who liked noise--lots of it. Later, as I thought about that, I also realized that being thankful before God should be a noisy, fun, and emotional outlet. Being thankful to God is not a tight-lipped, “thank you,” but a big THANK YOU that is shouted and sung. It is a thank you that is expressed in outbursts of emotional praise to God.
Luigi Tarisio was found dead one morning in his home. His home was almost empty of any human comforts. Astonishingly, though, Tarisio had a collection of 246 violins. He had collected them all his life. They were mostly crammed into a little attic. He had written that he hardly every played them, but was, “keeping them safe.” One of the greatest violins in his collection was a Stradivarius. It had remained silent for 147 years. Instruments that had been designed to sing and make beautiful music had been purposely, yet tragically, silent.
How many thank you’s have been kept in your storage, unspoken, unshouted, unnoised, unsung? That which makes for a thankful heart, according to the 100th Psalm is a willingness to make noise. It is a willingness, even a joy, to be vocal in your expressions of thankfulness. It is a willingness to get emotional.
I read recently that doctors who deal with cancer patients have identified what they call, “the cancer personality.” A majority of people who get cancer have a personality that is passive and emotionless. The doctor’s theory is that a lifetime of pent-up emotions causes the release of a variety of hormones that weaken the body’s immune system. Instead of seeking out tiny cancers and killing them, their bodies let them get away and grow and spread.
This Psalm 100 shows us the healthy way of expressing our emotions through thankfulness. Say the password in a loud, singing, praising "thank you!" So, go ahead. Show God your thankfulness. Don't let anyone tell you you're hurting God's ears.
Another great part about Psalm 100 that fits here with what I just said is we are told to make this joyful noise with other thankful people. The worship that Jesus and the people of Jesus' time were used to was a noisy, group activity. People would parade into the temple. The parade would start outside the city of Jerusalem. It would gain in numbers and in noise the closer it got to the temple. Notice the many different forms of the plural pronoun occurring in Psalm 100: us, we, everyone, and the plural form of you.
Joy, thanksgiving, and gladness are always a group activity. Saying the password is not a me thing; it is a we thing. Mark Twain once said, "...to get the full value of joy, we must have somebody to share it with." People say, "I can worship just as well by myself. I don't have to come to church." But think of all the multiplied gladness that one individual is missing. Think how small that one "thank you" is, and how much larger it becomes when it is joined with all the other voices of worshippers who are singing and shouting their "thank you" to God.
In his book, The Secret of Staying in Love, John Powel wrote:
Very few of us ever even approach the realization of our full potential. I accept the estimate that the average person accomplishes 10% of his promise, sees only 10% of the beauty around him, hears only 10% of the music and poetry of the universe, smells only a tenth of the world's fragrance, and tastes only a tenth of the deliciousness of being alive. He is only open to 10% of his emotions, tenderness, wonder, and awe. His mind embraces only a small part of the thoughts, reflections, and understanding of which he is capable.
After reading that, I thought to myself, if that is so, left to ourselves we are missing a lot. But if we join ourselves to the company of thankful people, our 10% is joined to another's 10% and so on. Our experiences of the world grow by the number of people we are with. There's a lot of truth behind the saying, "The more, the merrier." Our expressions of thankfulness, added to others expressions of thanksgiving, become a huge exclamation of this very special password. So join the parade! Express yourselves in the "we" of gladness.
And lastly, Psalm 100 tells us that what makes for a thankful person is never forgetting that God is good. That's the way the Psalm ends: The Lord is good! There may be times in our lives when we question the goodness of God. When bad or hurtful things happen to us, we wonder what good could come of it.
Or, from a different angle, we wonder how God could put up with the waywardness of the people of the world. Once in a fit of temper, Martin Luther shouted, “If I were God and the world had treated me as it has treated Him, I would have kicked the wretched thing to pieces long ago.” Psalm 100 answers Martin Luther’s perturbance with the simple point that the reason God doesn’t do that is because, “God is good, all-generous in love.”
Remember that in Hebrew poetry, ideas are rhymed, rather than words. In one line, a statement will be made; and then in the second line, the first line will be restated in a different way. The second line may fill out the first, or contrast the first. So in this last verse of the Psalm, the psalmist writes, “God is good.” Then in the second line the idea is restated: “His love and loyalty will last forever.” Love and loyalty, the psalmist is saying, demonstrates God’s goodness.
Bible commentator, C.H. Dodd once wrote, “All God’s activity is loving activity. If God creates, God creates in love; if God rules, God rules in love; if God judges, God judges in love.” So, if something bad or painful happens in your life, know that God is moving quickly with love, and in love, to make something good happen out of those experiences.
And when you think of any experiences of disloyalty you have lived through, it is certainly comforting to know that God’s goodness is expressed in undivided loyalty. In the days of sailing ships there were few precautions. If a vessel lost its sails, masts, or riggings in battle or a storm, it was hopelessly disabled. The most welcome sight a ship in distress could receive was that of another ship bearing three flags with the letter symbols, B, N, and C. These three flags flown together were the international sea code for “I will not abandon you.” God’s goodness, says Psalm 100, is demonstrated by the fact that we will never be abandoned. God will never leave us to face life alone. Even though we may experience extreme disloyalty, God will never forsake us.
When you realize that about God, and experience it, you can’t help but say to God, “Thank you. Thank you God, for not leaving me alone, for hanging in there with me, for walking beside me, and even carrying me when I couldn’t go on by myself.” The thankful heart is the one that always remembers God is good: loving and loyal in all His dealings with us.
We do have much to say “Thank you,” for. It is the password among all passwords. But as I have tried to make clear, it isn’t as much the things that you are thankful for. It’s the attitude with which you bring to life. It’s a condition of the heart that gets emotional with thanks to God. It’s a mutual spirit, shared with other thankful souls that heightens our own individual thanksgivings. It’s an assurance of mind that God is good and all things work for God’s good for those who love him. Make this password a word that dwells in and unlocks your heart.
Psalm 100
When I was a kid, my brothers and I and an odd collection of neighborhood kids liked to make forts. We weren't into making tree forts. That was OK by me. I'm afraid of heights, oddly enough. I think it's part of God's odd sense of humor to make a tall person afraid of heights. Instead of tree forts, we made tunnel forts. We'd dig like a pack of prairie dogs until we had hollowed out an underground den.
We thought our dug out caves were really cool. My father, seeing the backyard dug up and a pile of dirt on the grass, didn't share our opinion. We'd have to fill it all in and go dig up one of the other kid's backyard; which would create the same reaction with that kid's father.
It was our club and only boys could be members. We made up passwords that only the guys in the club knew. But every once in a while the girls would find out the password. There was a leak in our secret club, and then we'd have to change the password. There was no way we were letting a girl in our cave. That is, unless we beat her over the head with a stick and dragged her in by her hair, just like the cavemen supposedly used to do.
That memory came flooding back as I read through Psalm 100 in different translations. Instead of the verse that reads:
Be thankful...as you enter His temple
Eugene Peterson, in The Message has:
Enter with the password: "Thank you."
"Thank you," is one of the most important passwords in our relationship with God. It opens up the way into God's heart. It is the only proper response for all that God brings our way in life. It's the password anyone can use. Thankfully God doesn't discriminate like we did in our childhood clubs.
But yet, saying that particular password is hard for a lot of people. There is something within them that keeps the vocal chords from uttering the word that gains a person entrance to worship and into the presence of God. It has astounded me how many letters used to come to Dear Abby about an experience of thanklessness. Someone gave something to someone else--a favor or a gift--and no "thank you" was given in return. Some of the events of thanklessness had happened years before the letter was written to Dear Abby. Evidently, not being able to say the password, "thank you," creates long held grudges.
That’s why I want to focus our attention on Psalm 100. It has always been one of my favorites from childhood. I have always liked the Psalm because it has an uplifting and celebrative tone. Right at the start the Psalm says to make a joyful noise to the Lord. In The Message it has, “On your feet now--applaud God!” That always captured my attention as a kid because we weren’t allowed to make much noise, let alone shout.
When all the cousins got together at my grandparent’s house for Christmas, we had a lot of fun tormenting my grandparent’s chihuahua. It was constantly yipping. Remember those Taco Bell commercials where the chihuahua would say cool things like, “Gooey cheese,” or, “Drop the chiluppa.” Not my grandparent’s dog. It would just bark, all the time.
So we’d use the dog kind of like a hockey puck, sliding it back and forth to each other on the wood floor. We would laugh and scream as it tried to get a grip with it’s claws. That is until our grandfather would come down the hall and yell, “Can’t you kids be quiet; you’re hurting grandpa’s ears.” We’d shut up for about a minute and then be back at it again, sliding their dog across the floor.
As a kid, you’re always being told to shut up and be quiet. But here in Psalm 100, I saw permission being given to shout and make noise before God. That’s why I grew up believing that God was not an adult. God was a kid who liked noise--lots of it. Later, as I thought about that, I also realized that being thankful before God should be a noisy, fun, and emotional outlet. Being thankful to God is not a tight-lipped, “thank you,” but a big THANK YOU that is shouted and sung. It is a thank you that is expressed in outbursts of emotional praise to God.
Luigi Tarisio was found dead one morning in his home. His home was almost empty of any human comforts. Astonishingly, though, Tarisio had a collection of 246 violins. He had collected them all his life. They were mostly crammed into a little attic. He had written that he hardly every played them, but was, “keeping them safe.” One of the greatest violins in his collection was a Stradivarius. It had remained silent for 147 years. Instruments that had been designed to sing and make beautiful music had been purposely, yet tragically, silent.
How many thank you’s have been kept in your storage, unspoken, unshouted, unnoised, unsung? That which makes for a thankful heart, according to the 100th Psalm is a willingness to make noise. It is a willingness, even a joy, to be vocal in your expressions of thankfulness. It is a willingness to get emotional.
I read recently that doctors who deal with cancer patients have identified what they call, “the cancer personality.” A majority of people who get cancer have a personality that is passive and emotionless. The doctor’s theory is that a lifetime of pent-up emotions causes the release of a variety of hormones that weaken the body’s immune system. Instead of seeking out tiny cancers and killing them, their bodies let them get away and grow and spread.
This Psalm 100 shows us the healthy way of expressing our emotions through thankfulness. Say the password in a loud, singing, praising "thank you!" So, go ahead. Show God your thankfulness. Don't let anyone tell you you're hurting God's ears.
Another great part about Psalm 100 that fits here with what I just said is we are told to make this joyful noise with other thankful people. The worship that Jesus and the people of Jesus' time were used to was a noisy, group activity. People would parade into the temple. The parade would start outside the city of Jerusalem. It would gain in numbers and in noise the closer it got to the temple. Notice the many different forms of the plural pronoun occurring in Psalm 100: us, we, everyone, and the plural form of you.
Joy, thanksgiving, and gladness are always a group activity. Saying the password is not a me thing; it is a we thing. Mark Twain once said, "...to get the full value of joy, we must have somebody to share it with." People say, "I can worship just as well by myself. I don't have to come to church." But think of all the multiplied gladness that one individual is missing. Think how small that one "thank you" is, and how much larger it becomes when it is joined with all the other voices of worshippers who are singing and shouting their "thank you" to God.
In his book, The Secret of Staying in Love, John Powel wrote:
Very few of us ever even approach the realization of our full potential. I accept the estimate that the average person accomplishes 10% of his promise, sees only 10% of the beauty around him, hears only 10% of the music and poetry of the universe, smells only a tenth of the world's fragrance, and tastes only a tenth of the deliciousness of being alive. He is only open to 10% of his emotions, tenderness, wonder, and awe. His mind embraces only a small part of the thoughts, reflections, and understanding of which he is capable.
After reading that, I thought to myself, if that is so, left to ourselves we are missing a lot. But if we join ourselves to the company of thankful people, our 10% is joined to another's 10% and so on. Our experiences of the world grow by the number of people we are with. There's a lot of truth behind the saying, "The more, the merrier." Our expressions of thankfulness, added to others expressions of thanksgiving, become a huge exclamation of this very special password. So join the parade! Express yourselves in the "we" of gladness.
And lastly, Psalm 100 tells us that what makes for a thankful person is never forgetting that God is good. That's the way the Psalm ends: The Lord is good! There may be times in our lives when we question the goodness of God. When bad or hurtful things happen to us, we wonder what good could come of it.
Or, from a different angle, we wonder how God could put up with the waywardness of the people of the world. Once in a fit of temper, Martin Luther shouted, “If I were God and the world had treated me as it has treated Him, I would have kicked the wretched thing to pieces long ago.” Psalm 100 answers Martin Luther’s perturbance with the simple point that the reason God doesn’t do that is because, “God is good, all-generous in love.”
Remember that in Hebrew poetry, ideas are rhymed, rather than words. In one line, a statement will be made; and then in the second line, the first line will be restated in a different way. The second line may fill out the first, or contrast the first. So in this last verse of the Psalm, the psalmist writes, “God is good.” Then in the second line the idea is restated: “His love and loyalty will last forever.” Love and loyalty, the psalmist is saying, demonstrates God’s goodness.
Bible commentator, C.H. Dodd once wrote, “All God’s activity is loving activity. If God creates, God creates in love; if God rules, God rules in love; if God judges, God judges in love.” So, if something bad or painful happens in your life, know that God is moving quickly with love, and in love, to make something good happen out of those experiences.
And when you think of any experiences of disloyalty you have lived through, it is certainly comforting to know that God’s goodness is expressed in undivided loyalty. In the days of sailing ships there were few precautions. If a vessel lost its sails, masts, or riggings in battle or a storm, it was hopelessly disabled. The most welcome sight a ship in distress could receive was that of another ship bearing three flags with the letter symbols, B, N, and C. These three flags flown together were the international sea code for “I will not abandon you.” God’s goodness, says Psalm 100, is demonstrated by the fact that we will never be abandoned. God will never leave us to face life alone. Even though we may experience extreme disloyalty, God will never forsake us.
When you realize that about God, and experience it, you can’t help but say to God, “Thank you. Thank you God, for not leaving me alone, for hanging in there with me, for walking beside me, and even carrying me when I couldn’t go on by myself.” The thankful heart is the one that always remembers God is good: loving and loyal in all His dealings with us.
We do have much to say “Thank you,” for. It is the password among all passwords. But as I have tried to make clear, it isn’t as much the things that you are thankful for. It’s the attitude with which you bring to life. It’s a condition of the heart that gets emotional with thanks to God. It’s a mutual spirit, shared with other thankful souls that heightens our own individual thanksgivings. It’s an assurance of mind that God is good and all things work for God’s good for those who love him. Make this password a word that dwells in and unlocks your heart.
Monday, November 14, 2011
We Just Can't Afford It
"We Just Can't Afford It"
Matthew 25:14-18
My sister came and stood beside me, taking my arm as we watched our mother’s casket being lowered into the vault. I took some weight off the crutch that served as my right leg. I leaned into her, and held on. We didn’t say anything for a long time. The men worked around us, as if we weren’t there, pulling the straps up once the coffin was in place, lowering the lid of the vault, clanging it in place. They did all this without speaking a word to each other, having done it so many times before. For my sister and me, it was the first time we had witnessed such a thing.
When we heard the engine of the front end loader start up and then make its way over to push the dirt into the grave hole, my sister gave me a look and a closed lip half smile that was wordlessly asking me if I was ready to go.
The others had long since gone. There weren’t many--about a dozen or so old ladies who knew our mom. My sister’s two girls (who were now playing hide and seek amongst the headstones). The funeral director. And a minister he had arranged to do mom’s service.
It all seemed so surreal. Kind of like mom’s life. I can’t remember a word the minister said. My sister’s girls were poking each other and making each other giggle during the simple graveside service. The funeral director was looking like, well, like a funeral director. A painted on expression that undoubtedly had been perfected to mask his real thoughts. Like he’d rather be golfing or sailing or being anywhere than where he was at that moment.
And those other women. They all looked like bag ladies like my mother had become. They had on layers of clothes in no particular progression. One lady wore a navy blue skirt (backwards, with the zipper in the front), a short-sleeved and a dingy white blouse that looked like it had caught more food than got to her mouth. On top of that was an unbuttoned red plaid flannel shirt. And over all that mess, a black, front buttoning sweater with only two buttons left, and half a leather patch dangling at one elbow. The other leather patch was totally MIA.
They all looked the same. Like some secret society that wore similar Goodwill outfits, and disheveled, finger-combed greasy hair. Maybe being a bag lady was being part of a secret society. The looks on their faces were hiding truths that would probably never be told to anyone outside their tight confederacy. My mother went to the grave carrying their secrets. They would probably go to theirs carrying hers. I stared at them all during the service, realizing there was so much about my mother’s later years I would never know. Their smug and icy expressions back at me verified that thought.
There was something else about the looks they were giving me that I couldn’t analyze. They knew something. It was like they wanted to say something, to tell me something, but it wasn’t their place, or it wasn’t the right time. After the brief service was over the women all flitted in every direction, each one blending with others on the street that adjoined the cemetery, becoming needles in a very large haystack.
“Are you going to miss her?” my sister asked as we walked towards her car. An odd question I thought. Not because the question itself was odd, but because of the mixture of emotions any of my answers evoked. How do you miss someone who lived a bag lady existence who happened to be your mother?
To say that we grew up poor would be a gross understatement. My father died, or left--I’m still not sure which--soon after my sister was born. My mother never talked about him. She wouldn’t allow us to ask questions about him. At some point we gave up caring to know anything about him. Whatever happened, I don’t remember my mother being happy about anything. She gave up on life. She raised my sister and me mostly because she had to, not because there was any particular joy in it.
“Am I going to miss my mother?” I wondered at my sister’s question. I remembered all that life was, or wasn’t, for she and I growing up with our mother. I thought about what it was like living in a tenement building with no heat. The only warmth we enjoyed in the winter was that from the apartments below and beside us that leached through the floor and the walls. I remember having to sit on wooden crates for chairs that my mother pulled out of the trash behind the grocery stores. I remembered the big cardboard box we used for a table to eat our meals and do our homework. I remembered that was the only “furniture” we had. I remember us all sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags that had been donated to us by the Salvation Army.
I remembered always wearing Goodwill bought clothes. Mom always got my sister and me clothes that were at least two sizes too large so we could “grow into them.” And nothing ever matched. After a while we got over the embarrassment of looking like we did at school. My sister and I finally stopped complaining to mom because she always said, “We just can’t afford it.” And we knew we couldn’t.
As I pegged alongside my sister toward her car, our childhood poverty was most painfully symbolized by the loss of my right leg. When I was 12 years old I was playing with some friends. We were jumping off the loading dock platforms at the industrial park near our tenement building. On one particular jump, I landed wrong and broke one of the bones in my thigh. I was sure it was broken.
But like my mother always said, we couldn’t afford a doctor, let alone hospital costs. She told me to just lie still for a week or so until the bone could start mending itself. But I couldn’t stay down. I couldn’t miss that much school. Yet the more I was on the leg, the worse it felt. She finally broke down and took me to one of those charity hospitals. When the doctors saw what color my leg was, they knew they were going to have to amputate it. Gangrene had already set in. It smelled as bad as it looked.
My mom couldn’t afford the rooming-in-fee at the hospital, so the day after the operation she took me home to take care of me there. The doctor showed her how to change the dressing and watch the draining tubes. We’d ride the bus back to the hospital a couple of times a month until the doctors decided it was healed. We couldn’t afford any artificial leg, so I just learned to walk with crutches.
From then on, I vowed to myself that I would get myself and my sister out of that place. I was going to make something of myself so that neither I nor my sister would have to live like that again. We would wear store bought clothes. We would have real furniture made of wood and upholstery. We would sleep on beds. We would eat fresh food--not stuff that had been scraped off people’s plates and thrown out the back door of downtown restaurants.
“Am I going to miss her?” I finally replied to my sister at the car, coming out of my thoughts and memories. “I don’t know. Do you remember how we’d find her, still living in that flat we grew up in?” I asked as I flopped backwards into the front passenger seat. My sister took my crutches and threw them in the back with the kids. They promptly began using them as imaginary machine guns, blasting everything in sight out the back window of the minivan.
“Yeah, I remember,” my sister nodded as she got in and started up the car. “She’d be wearing newspapers for underwear, even after I had bought her some. I’d ask her where the undies were that I had bought her, and she’d tell me she gave them all to her friends.”
“Why wouldn’t she move in with you or I?” I asked, not expecting an answer. Both my sister and I had pleaded with her to move out of that place and stay with one of us. But she couldn’t bear leaving her friends--other women who had given up on life and resigned themselves to living on other people’s throwaways.
Then she dropped off the radar. She had moved out of the flat, unable to pay her bills and blended into the street people. Once in a while she would turn up at a mission or flop house, and my sister (who looked for her more than I did) would discover her. But the last few years were a painful mystery of wondering. Wondering where she was. Wondering how she was. Wondering if she was still alive. When we got the call from the police that they had found our mother dead in a cardboard box, our wondering stopped. Luckily she had some ID in her few putrid belongings.
“Hey,” my sister interrupted my blank staring, and patted me on the shoulder with a free hand as she drove with the other. “You have nothing to feel guilty or ashamed about. You’ve worked hard, putting yourself through school, getting us both out of a terrible life.” She paused, giving me a reassuring smile, still rubbing my shoulder. Then she said, “The way I feel about it, her death has brought a climax to a wretched time of our lives. It brings to an end having to search for her and, when finding her, having to witness the continuing terrible choices she made in living. We had no control over those choices--never could, no matter how much we wished it otherwise.”
“You’re right,” I exhaled, shaking my head. “I guess we keep building on what we’ve made of ourselves despite her, and the poverty of our past.” She gave me a nod and we drove on in silence, except the rat-a-tat-tatting coming from the imaginary machine gunners in the back seat.
A week later, my sister and I had an appointment with a lawyer who had contacted us after our mother died. He had called to tell us that our mother had a will and wanted to go over it with us. We had no idea she had a will, or how it was this lawyer was in charge of it. We joked our way to his office about who was going to inherit the wooden crate chairs and cardboard table; or, who would get her sleeping bag.
The lawyer was all business, and seemed anxious to get on with his duty. We listened to him explain some details from notes that were attached to the will. “Evidently,” he said with a nasal drone, “your mother’s father left her a sum of money when he died. Let’s see,” he said shuffling papers about. “That was in 1951. The notes are not clear, but it looks to have been around $100,000. She invested the entire sum, and evidently got some good advice about that investment.”
I shot a quick glance at my sister and began to feel the room spin and I had the sensation of falling. “Today,” the lawyer continued, “your mother’s assets are worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million.”
What I had just heard hit me in the chest like the blast from both barrels of a shot gun. My thoughts were a mass of bewilderment and anger as I stared open-mouthed at my sister. She was wearing the same expression, tears of confusion beginning to stream down her cheeks. I slowly looked down at where my right leg should have been and then up at the lawyer. All I could hear, echoing down through my mind as if they were coming from a distant tunnel, were those oft spoken words in my mother’s voice, “We just can’t afford it.”
Matthew 25:14-18
My sister came and stood beside me, taking my arm as we watched our mother’s casket being lowered into the vault. I took some weight off the crutch that served as my right leg. I leaned into her, and held on. We didn’t say anything for a long time. The men worked around us, as if we weren’t there, pulling the straps up once the coffin was in place, lowering the lid of the vault, clanging it in place. They did all this without speaking a word to each other, having done it so many times before. For my sister and me, it was the first time we had witnessed such a thing.
When we heard the engine of the front end loader start up and then make its way over to push the dirt into the grave hole, my sister gave me a look and a closed lip half smile that was wordlessly asking me if I was ready to go.
The others had long since gone. There weren’t many--about a dozen or so old ladies who knew our mom. My sister’s two girls (who were now playing hide and seek amongst the headstones). The funeral director. And a minister he had arranged to do mom’s service.
It all seemed so surreal. Kind of like mom’s life. I can’t remember a word the minister said. My sister’s girls were poking each other and making each other giggle during the simple graveside service. The funeral director was looking like, well, like a funeral director. A painted on expression that undoubtedly had been perfected to mask his real thoughts. Like he’d rather be golfing or sailing or being anywhere than where he was at that moment.
And those other women. They all looked like bag ladies like my mother had become. They had on layers of clothes in no particular progression. One lady wore a navy blue skirt (backwards, with the zipper in the front), a short-sleeved and a dingy white blouse that looked like it had caught more food than got to her mouth. On top of that was an unbuttoned red plaid flannel shirt. And over all that mess, a black, front buttoning sweater with only two buttons left, and half a leather patch dangling at one elbow. The other leather patch was totally MIA.
They all looked the same. Like some secret society that wore similar Goodwill outfits, and disheveled, finger-combed greasy hair. Maybe being a bag lady was being part of a secret society. The looks on their faces were hiding truths that would probably never be told to anyone outside their tight confederacy. My mother went to the grave carrying their secrets. They would probably go to theirs carrying hers. I stared at them all during the service, realizing there was so much about my mother’s later years I would never know. Their smug and icy expressions back at me verified that thought.
There was something else about the looks they were giving me that I couldn’t analyze. They knew something. It was like they wanted to say something, to tell me something, but it wasn’t their place, or it wasn’t the right time. After the brief service was over the women all flitted in every direction, each one blending with others on the street that adjoined the cemetery, becoming needles in a very large haystack.
“Are you going to miss her?” my sister asked as we walked towards her car. An odd question I thought. Not because the question itself was odd, but because of the mixture of emotions any of my answers evoked. How do you miss someone who lived a bag lady existence who happened to be your mother?
To say that we grew up poor would be a gross understatement. My father died, or left--I’m still not sure which--soon after my sister was born. My mother never talked about him. She wouldn’t allow us to ask questions about him. At some point we gave up caring to know anything about him. Whatever happened, I don’t remember my mother being happy about anything. She gave up on life. She raised my sister and me mostly because she had to, not because there was any particular joy in it.
“Am I going to miss my mother?” I wondered at my sister’s question. I remembered all that life was, or wasn’t, for she and I growing up with our mother. I thought about what it was like living in a tenement building with no heat. The only warmth we enjoyed in the winter was that from the apartments below and beside us that leached through the floor and the walls. I remember having to sit on wooden crates for chairs that my mother pulled out of the trash behind the grocery stores. I remembered the big cardboard box we used for a table to eat our meals and do our homework. I remembered that was the only “furniture” we had. I remember us all sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags that had been donated to us by the Salvation Army.
I remembered always wearing Goodwill bought clothes. Mom always got my sister and me clothes that were at least two sizes too large so we could “grow into them.” And nothing ever matched. After a while we got over the embarrassment of looking like we did at school. My sister and I finally stopped complaining to mom because she always said, “We just can’t afford it.” And we knew we couldn’t.
As I pegged alongside my sister toward her car, our childhood poverty was most painfully symbolized by the loss of my right leg. When I was 12 years old I was playing with some friends. We were jumping off the loading dock platforms at the industrial park near our tenement building. On one particular jump, I landed wrong and broke one of the bones in my thigh. I was sure it was broken.
But like my mother always said, we couldn’t afford a doctor, let alone hospital costs. She told me to just lie still for a week or so until the bone could start mending itself. But I couldn’t stay down. I couldn’t miss that much school. Yet the more I was on the leg, the worse it felt. She finally broke down and took me to one of those charity hospitals. When the doctors saw what color my leg was, they knew they were going to have to amputate it. Gangrene had already set in. It smelled as bad as it looked.
My mom couldn’t afford the rooming-in-fee at the hospital, so the day after the operation she took me home to take care of me there. The doctor showed her how to change the dressing and watch the draining tubes. We’d ride the bus back to the hospital a couple of times a month until the doctors decided it was healed. We couldn’t afford any artificial leg, so I just learned to walk with crutches.
From then on, I vowed to myself that I would get myself and my sister out of that place. I was going to make something of myself so that neither I nor my sister would have to live like that again. We would wear store bought clothes. We would have real furniture made of wood and upholstery. We would sleep on beds. We would eat fresh food--not stuff that had been scraped off people’s plates and thrown out the back door of downtown restaurants.
“Am I going to miss her?” I finally replied to my sister at the car, coming out of my thoughts and memories. “I don’t know. Do you remember how we’d find her, still living in that flat we grew up in?” I asked as I flopped backwards into the front passenger seat. My sister took my crutches and threw them in the back with the kids. They promptly began using them as imaginary machine guns, blasting everything in sight out the back window of the minivan.
“Yeah, I remember,” my sister nodded as she got in and started up the car. “She’d be wearing newspapers for underwear, even after I had bought her some. I’d ask her where the undies were that I had bought her, and she’d tell me she gave them all to her friends.”
“Why wouldn’t she move in with you or I?” I asked, not expecting an answer. Both my sister and I had pleaded with her to move out of that place and stay with one of us. But she couldn’t bear leaving her friends--other women who had given up on life and resigned themselves to living on other people’s throwaways.
Then she dropped off the radar. She had moved out of the flat, unable to pay her bills and blended into the street people. Once in a while she would turn up at a mission or flop house, and my sister (who looked for her more than I did) would discover her. But the last few years were a painful mystery of wondering. Wondering where she was. Wondering how she was. Wondering if she was still alive. When we got the call from the police that they had found our mother dead in a cardboard box, our wondering stopped. Luckily she had some ID in her few putrid belongings.
“Hey,” my sister interrupted my blank staring, and patted me on the shoulder with a free hand as she drove with the other. “You have nothing to feel guilty or ashamed about. You’ve worked hard, putting yourself through school, getting us both out of a terrible life.” She paused, giving me a reassuring smile, still rubbing my shoulder. Then she said, “The way I feel about it, her death has brought a climax to a wretched time of our lives. It brings to an end having to search for her and, when finding her, having to witness the continuing terrible choices she made in living. We had no control over those choices--never could, no matter how much we wished it otherwise.”
“You’re right,” I exhaled, shaking my head. “I guess we keep building on what we’ve made of ourselves despite her, and the poverty of our past.” She gave me a nod and we drove on in silence, except the rat-a-tat-tatting coming from the imaginary machine gunners in the back seat.
A week later, my sister and I had an appointment with a lawyer who had contacted us after our mother died. He had called to tell us that our mother had a will and wanted to go over it with us. We had no idea she had a will, or how it was this lawyer was in charge of it. We joked our way to his office about who was going to inherit the wooden crate chairs and cardboard table; or, who would get her sleeping bag.
The lawyer was all business, and seemed anxious to get on with his duty. We listened to him explain some details from notes that were attached to the will. “Evidently,” he said with a nasal drone, “your mother’s father left her a sum of money when he died. Let’s see,” he said shuffling papers about. “That was in 1951. The notes are not clear, but it looks to have been around $100,000. She invested the entire sum, and evidently got some good advice about that investment.”
I shot a quick glance at my sister and began to feel the room spin and I had the sensation of falling. “Today,” the lawyer continued, “your mother’s assets are worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million.”
What I had just heard hit me in the chest like the blast from both barrels of a shot gun. My thoughts were a mass of bewilderment and anger as I stared open-mouthed at my sister. She was wearing the same expression, tears of confusion beginning to stream down her cheeks. I slowly looked down at where my right leg should have been and then up at the lawyer. All I could hear, echoing down through my mind as if they were coming from a distant tunnel, were those oft spoken words in my mother’s voice, “We just can’t afford it.”
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