Love now

We Americans are living in unsettled times. Our country and churches are full of fury, factionalism and fragmentation. Many celebrate, but many others lament the actions of those in authority.  

I weep for our divided country and church. 

Whatever the issues and our positions on them, I think all of us would do well to pause and remember that before all the other claims on our loyalties, we belong to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In baptism, St. Paul writes, we died to sin and death and were raised to new life in Christ.

In our diversity, including in our opinions on the great issues of the day, we belong to Christ and are valued members of his one eternal body.

In our liturgy of Holy Baptism, we Episcopalians make a statement of faith, drawn from Ephesians, which sums up our essential Christian unity, regardless of denomination, unity that is deeper than our divisions:

“There is one Body and one Spirit; there is one hope in God’s call to us; one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism; one God and Father of all.”

We are one in Christ now and always, one in his love for us and in our love for one another.

And he shows his love, which the gospels call agape, on the cross for the salvation of all, even the very religious authorities who called for his death and the soldiers who accomplished it.

As he loved us, so we are to love one another and all people, even those with whom we profoundly disagree, people who inflame our anger, our rage.

When I was away in North Carolina recently, I found a café in a grocery store where daily I read my Bible, prayed and wrote in my journal. I would occasionally look up and watch people. A few of them declared their political loyalty on their hats and shirts (and in the parking lot on their car bumpers and fluttering from flags in their truck beds).

At first, I was angry and expressed that feeling in my journal. Then, God the Holy Spirit spoke to me, challenging me to love my neighbor as myself, as Jesus taught, lived and died that love. 

I did something I was unable to do on my own when I saw those shoppers in their red hats and shirts, I smiled, said hello and prayed silently for God to bless them.

Wouldn’t America, wouldn’t the Body of Christ, with all the differences in theology, politics and more, be a much better place if we practiced the love of Jesus, with the help of God’s grace? Wouldn’t it be worth a try?

Love the other, especially the one with whom we so bitterly disagree, whom we might even see as the enemy. This person is first the child of God and loved by him. Love that person, if only with a smile, a hello and a prayer for Gods’ blessings upon him or her. 

And you and I will start to change the world by making it a little less cruel, a little more kind.

 

 

Finding refuge

Where is your refuge, that place of relief from life’s pressures, of rest and renewal and of peace?

For my wife and me, one refuge is in the mountains of western North Carolina at the John C. Campbell Folk School, which was started in the 19th century to train impoverished people to make and sell crafts to support themselves and their families.

The school still teaches and promotes arts and crafts—basket-making, blacksmithing, weaving and more.  I have studied writing and storytelling here; for my wife, painting and other visual arts. 

We are at Campbell for a week with our oldest grandchildren, who are learning blacksmithing, jewelry making and wood burning and carving.  

Here, I’m surrounded by the Appalachians. At dawn, the sun rises and spreads its light, like honey on toast, over the mountains and onto the meadows, gardens and campus.  

It is quiet in the early morning, apart from the the meadowlarks, cardinals, robins and assorted other birds, whose chirping, squeaking and trilling welcome the new day. My heart fills with the joy of living. In these stunning surroundings, I read, pray, write or just sit and let my usually active mind and body idle.  

Daily, from the onslaught of news, we know the world is a frightening place, and our lives are full, frenetic, and stressful, in part because of what we do to care for others in Christ’s name.

We long to feel human again, to restore our bodies and souls, and to find new strength to meet our challenges. 

 

I hope you will seek and find a refuge for your good and that of others to whom you are close, just as Jesus did when he went to the mountains to be alone with his Father in heaven. 

Perhaps your refuge will be in the mountains, or on a nearby lake or in your garden. That place will be holy to you, for there you will remember that you are more than what you do, or what you have or what you have accomplished. 

You are the child of God. And God delights in you. Just sit back in your refuge and know that you are his, and always will be, and as the medieval saint Julian of Norwich writes, All is well, and all will be well. In all manner of things, all will be well.

Huh?

 

Do you like mysteries? I do, especially the Scandinavia-crime-noir kind. Here’s a mystery for you:  There’s a mystery that’s not a mystery.

Huh?

This Sunday, I’ll celebrate the Holy Eucharist and preach at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Joplin. I’ll be the guest priest on the Feast of the Trinity, the Sunday when many rectors plan vacation rather than preach to a congregation about the Trinity—one God in three persons.

Yes, huh?

The doctrine of the Trinity expresses the mystery of our human experience of God. In the Holy Scriptures, you won’t find an explicit statement of this central teaching of the Christian church, but you will find an implicit one.

In the first person of the Trinity, we experience God as Father, Creator. We enjoy the gift of life only because God, in his love, willed us out of nothingness and into being as the unique people we are. And God surrounded us with the goodness of creation. Indeed, as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in “God’s Grandeur,” that the “world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil….”

In the second person of the Trinity, God became a human being. “The word was made flesh and dwelled among us full of grace and truth,” Jesus says in the Gospel of St. John. And in his Son, God the Father—-once again, in love—comes to save us, to take our brokenness and make us whole as individuals and as a world. Faith in Jesus Christ is the love that saves.

And in the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, Jesus fulfils his promise in the gospel that he will not leave us alone, without comfort and power for living but will give us the gift of his Holy Spirit, God with us always in this world and in the world to come, continuing the work of healing or sanctification.

The mystery is that we believe in one God in three persons. The huh? of the Trinity. But there’s no mystery in God loving us fully, as the Bible shows, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

So, that huh? Is really, Aha!

Managing Mosquitos

Today, our lawn was sprayed for mosquitos. Penny and I’d tried everything to solve the problem. Now, though, with this regular treatment, we’ve learned how to manage it.   We all have a mosquito problem—one more tormenting than anything that buzzes, bites, and or raises red bumps on the skin.   This mosquito problem, as I’ve long thought about it, is what theologians call theodicy, the existence of evil, pain, suffering, and death. These human realities raise the question, why does an all-good, all-loving God allow bad things to happen to good people?   Or, to put it another way, God, why are there mosquitos?   I don’t know the answer. But I do know, or believe, that God is incapable of willing evil or of sending bad things upon us and others to punish us. And he suffers with us because of them. He does not condemn those of us who might lose faith in him and in his goodness because of them. He understands us and goes on loving us and seeking us to be in a relationship with him.     For my part, despite life’s tragedies, I still believe in God and his goodness. On balance, life is more good than bad.    We humans have been asking, “Why? God. Why war? Why Covid? Why another school shooting? We’ve been asking Why since the beginning of creation; the Genesis story of the Fall is an early attempt at an answer: bad things happen because of that first human’s sin.    We’ll go on asking and discovering that there’s no adequate answer. And like Job and the Psalmist and even Jesus on the cross— “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?”—we’ll feel angry and disappointed with God. We’ll complain against him. We might even give up on God.    So, if we can never know why bad things happen to good people, in this world anyway, what if we ask instead, How? How can we live with—and through—them? How can we learn from our experience? How can we become better human beings because of it—more sensitive to the heartache of others? How can we tangibly help someone going through dark times? How might we grow in our relationship with Christ?   I can’t know exactly why God made mosquitos, but I can know how to manage them, both the ones that bite the skin and those that bite the soul.

 

From Other to Another

Jesus weeps. 

We all weep because of the two recent, horrific mass shootings, one in California and the other in New York, where people were murdered because they were the Other.

In one incident, victims were targeted because of their political ideology; in the second, because of the color of their skin.  

Both instances stand in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus. 

Jesus, God as a human being, came to us, the Other, and loved us, even sacrificing his life on the cross to show us that love is more powerful than the hate and violence that nailed him there.

On Sunday at St. James Episcopal Church, Springfield, I heard a powerful sermon by theologian Dr. Chris Dodson based on Peter’s vision. In it a piece of sail cloth descended from heaven. It teemed with all manner of unclean creatures, which faithful, law-abiding Jews were forbidden even to touch, because these animals were deemed to be the Other.

And yet, in the dream, God tells Peter to take up and eat, because there is no Other in the eyes of our loving, creator God, and in a further message from God to Peter, the Gentiles or non-Jews, who were once anathema to the faithful, are to be welcomed fully as members of Christ’s body.

For me, the message of Jesus’ Gospel is that God loves everyone. No exceptions. 

And his ministry, which is described in the Gospels, shows him always reaching out in saving love to Others: foreigners, tax collectors, sinners of all kinds. 

In Christ the Other is simply Another—another fellow human being; another child of God; another brother or sister in Christ; another to be loved. And love is doing the best for the full flourishing of An-Other. 

Hymn 529 from The Episcopal Church Hymnal puts it this way: “In Christ there is no east or west. In him no south or north, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide world.”

Christ suffered for all. He died and rose again from the dead for all. And through us, his followers, and our ministries, he serves all, alive in us and through us in our acts of unconditional love. 

I give God thanks for communities of faith, agencies and ministries throughout America and worldwide that express God’s love—welcoming, respecting, valuing and serving all human beings. 

Jesus weeps at the hatred and violence in the world, and he suffers with the victims, but he rejoices when we love, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, tutoring a struggling student, supporting the vulnerable young and elderly. 

In these tangible acts of service, we advance  God’s kingdom of love and light against the forces of evil, sin, darkness and death. And with them, more of God’s kingdom emerges in this world. 

Thanks be to God.