Perspective

Richard John Neuhaus (Death on a Friday Afternoon, 2000:5-6) has penned the
following words:



"We contemplate for a time the meaning of Good Friday, and then return to
what is called the real world of work and shopping and commuter trains and
homes. As we come out of a movie theater and shake our heads to clear our minds
of another world where we lived for a time in suspended disbelief, as we
reorient ourselves to reality, so we leave our contemplation—we leave the church
building, we close the book---where for a time another reality seemed possible,
believable, even real. But, we tell ourselves, the real world is a world
elsewhere. It is the world of deadlines to be met, of appointments to be kept,
of taxes to be paid, of children to be educated. From here, from this moment at
the cross, it is a distant country. “Father, forgive them, for they have
forgotten the way home. They have misplaced the real world.” Here, at the cross,
is the real world, here is the axis mundi (i.e. the axis of the world)."



Neuhaus is writing about Holy Week, that time just before Easter, when our
attention is drawn to Jesus’ last week and particularly to his death. But Jesus’
death is a piece with his life and ministry. Jesus lived to show us that what we
think is the most real – the world of schedules and taxes, TV programs and
computer games, getting that degree and pursuing a career and family, is not the
ultimate reality. It isn’t unreal, Jesus was very much emerged in the day in and
day out struggle and drama which is our life in this world, but Jesus had a
different perspective. Jesus wants us to see the ultimate reality of the
spiritual and the personal. In a world where we are captives of a
consumer-driven, efficiency-minded, results-oriented culture that often even
invades the church, Jesus wants to call us to a different perspective, a
different reality. This isn’t a reality that denies this world, but one that
makes every effort for a balanced life in which the life of the soul,
relationships and possessions are held together in a richer, fuller
perspective.



Occasionally we are reminded of this. Sometimes it happens when we gather
together in church and the Gospel is really heard or when we begin to examine
our lives and stop to reflect on what is really important, or all too often, it
happens when we are confronted with the crises of life and we are forced to look
deep into our inner being to see what there is there that we can really hold on
to. Too often we go through life living or surviving on the surface, not really
knowing or experiencing the depth of life. We are like stones skimmed across a
lake, barely touching the surface. The real world goes undetected, hidden under
the many layers of culture that surround us.



Even our religious or “spiritual” life doesn’t really help us since most of
us have become consumers of religion rather than cultivators of a spiritual
life. As consumers we grab onto the quick fix and the least demanding. We look
for some secret technique or the most recent, best-selling inspirational
devotional. But, like most fads, they quickly leave us sated and wanting to move
on to something else that we hope will scratch our spiritual itch.



But the spiritual life, life in that reality that Jesus came to show us and
tell us about, the REAL reality requires more from us. It requires discipline
and the willingness to sacrifice. Good athletes know the importance of
discipline and sacrifice. Unspectacular training and diet are foundational. They
are accepted and undertaken because the prize is worth it.



Jesus calls us to see that what is really REAL, what is ultimately important,
is to cultivate the life of the soul and meaningful relationships and treat our
possessions as stewards who know their value, importance, but also their
limitation.



In a couple of weeks, March 9 to be precise, the season of Lent begins. It
isn’t so much about giving up chocolate or coffee or something else that we
like, as it is about gaining perspective on the need for balance in life. And at
the heart of that balance is our relationship with God. So let me encourage you
to commit yourself to a Lenten journey. Find a guide or talk to your pastor or
to someone you feel is a maturing follower of Jesus for some help. You can
contact me for some suggestions if you like. My prayer for you and for me is
that we will learn to really see and learn to live in the real world that God
intends for us to know. Peace.

Waiting, Work and Hope

Let me be honest, I’m not very good at waiting. Admittedly, I have gotten a lot better, but I still have a long way to go. I get up in the morning and although I like to grind my coffee beans, boil the water and filter a good strong cup of coffee, I can’t usually wait. So in my impatience, I pop a K-cup into my Keurig and within a minute or so, I have my coffee. Better than instant, but not as good as my usual dripped coffee. But I find it hard to wait.

There are other things that are hard to wait for –  my turn in line, test results, seeing loved ones, waiting for the newest gadget to hit the stores. Now, some waiting is good. Waiting can build character and patience. It gives us time to think and to weigh the issues involved. It helps us avoid rushing into things by carefully considering the implications and consequences of our actions and our choices. There is something to be said for deferred gratification and careful planning. Waiting can be good.

But there are other things, bigger, more pressing things that I find it hard to wait for. It is hard to wait for things like: ending hunger in a nation of plenty, clean water for all people, affordable health care for all, decent and dignifying jobs for all who want them, decent and affordable housing, healthier marriages and families, the end of injustice, just politicians and equitable systems that benefit all people not just the mighty or the wealthy or the ones who are well-connected or know how to manipulate the system. I wait. And I wait.

Of course, that is what life is often like in a fallen world – a world waiting and groaning for its and our redemption (to paraphrase Paul’s words in Romans 8). Jesus and the long prophetic tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures remind us that we are waiting for God’s ultimate Kingdom to come and while we wait, we experience all the tension and travail that often accompanies waiting. Yes, the Kingdom of God has broken into our world in Jesus. Yes, the Kingdom of God is working itself out whenever God’s will is understand and embraced and put into action. But yet, we still wait for the Kingdom’s full realization.

And while we wait, we work. It is easy to get discouraged and angry and throw up our hands and say: “Forget it!” (or something stronger!). But those whose hearts are gripped by the compassion and vision of Christ, refuse to become victims of despair. They have glimpsed something and experienced something of the possibilities of the Kingdom and have to respond. Our work can take many forms. It can be serving, marching, protesting, making donations, writing letters and making phone calls, it can be speaking out against practices, structures, systems, persons that dehumanize and betray the dignity of human life as God intended it. But it seems to me that one of the key ways in which we work against the injustices and demonization in the world is by prayer. The theologian Karl Barth once wrote about the revolutionary nature of prayer. He said: “To clasp hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” William Ramsey, a former Archbishop of the Church of England, reminds us that: “The church is called to be a community which speaks to the world in God’s name and speaks to God from the middle of the world’s darkness and frustration. The prayer with beautiful buildings and lovely music must be a prayer which also speaks from the places where men and women work, or lack work, and are sad and hungry, suffer and die. To be near to the love of God is to be near, as Jesus showed, to the darkness of the world. This is the ‘place of prayer’” Prayer is not a passive exercise, a folding of the hands and a closing of the eyes. It is taking up arms against the darkness of the world and embracing the world with the compassion and heart of God.

And what keeps us going? What keeps us from giving up or getting tired of waiting? It is hope.

As we look at the life of Jesus we see that he tasted failure, sorrow, loneliness and brokenness. And Jesus didn’t really promise much less for those who were to follow him. This is what life is like in a broken world and a world that so often forgets its God-oriented purpose. But Jesus not only endured, but triumphed through hope in the goodness, sovereignty, presence, plan and promises of God.

God’s spirit makes that hope real in our lives by changing our hearts and perspectives and helps us to see God’s future -- a future described in the vivid images of the closing chapters of Isaiah and Revelation among other places. Christians are witnesses in the world to God’s shalom (peace, wholeness, well-being) for the created cosmos. It is a future with hope (cf. Jeremiah 19:4-5,7,11),  a good future.

Just as there cannot be any love without God, there can be no hope without God, for all hope is rooted in God and the promises of God. The writer of the book of Hebrews says that hope is the anchor of the soul. Without it, life is a long journey into darkness. And so we wait in hope, we work in hope, we are inspired by hope. This is true at the personal, social and global level. Hope that both looks back at Jesus’ life, ministry and resurrection, and a hope that looks forward, moves forward, revolutionizing and transforming the present.

One of my favorite quotes on hope was given to me years ago by one of my students. I have kept it with me over the years and have drawn encouragement from it. It by the Brazilian theologian/philosopher Rubem Alves: “Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance to it.” Anyone feel like dancing? Don’t give up.

Work and Identity

Many of us, when we are introduced to someone, pretty soon are identifying ourselves by what we do? I’m a student, a nurse, a pharmacist, a pastor, etc. Yes, these may be things that we do, but they really aren’t who we are, our identity. Yes, they are often the way we identify ourselves in a society that encourages people to find their identity in a job that demands a 24/7 preoccupation. Psychologists tell us that a fundamental drive is the fear of insignificance. In Western culture the popular mark of a significant person is a hard worker, someone with a successful career.  And in the current climate where people so often lose their job, it is easy to feel worthless or that that we have lost our identity. But our identity, our true identity, isn’t found in what we do. I think that we intrinsically know this. Maybe this is why for many people there is so much monotony, boredom, repetition and dissatisfaction associated with their work. For many people, it does not fill them or satisfy them. That is because, no matter what we do, work does not justify our existence. This is why it is important to distinguish work, a job, from vocation, that is, a “calling.” Vocation comes from the Latin word vocatio, and literally means a summons or an invitation. In the Christian understanding, vocation has to do with our God-given identity – who we are called to be in Christ. And because that is who we fundamentally are, it’s possible to lose a job but not our identity. Who we are is more than a job we do.

If we understand this more basic, fundamental, defining understanding of our identity, work, like all aspects of life can be a means through which we can know and love God more deeply. In the end, what we do is not as important as how, for whom, and to what end you do it. The Apostle Paul reminds us: “whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Now, of course, there are some things that we can do that clearly do not glorify God because they are contrary to who God is and what he calls us to be in Christ and what God desires for the creation. And realistically one of those things that might not glorify God is the mind-numbing, totally unsatisfying job you may feel you are stuck in. If that is your situation, there are some personal discernment questions you have to ask yourself – am I here because I am too afraid or too lazy to risk looking for something else? Am I here because I really have no other choices? Am I here because I should be and I have found this work unfulfilling because somehow I have left God out of it? Sometimes we need help making this discernment. But maybe the job I’m in isn’t all that satisfying, but is there a way that I can do it that will enable me to be a greater witness to God’s grace and life? Maybe the job is simply a way to earn a salary that frees me up for other areas of service? We should never live to simply work, we work to live and with that life we find ways of serving God and others.

Work, when it is meaningful is both challenging and stressful. As followers of Jesus, we can learn to hold our jobs, our careers with a “light touch” and enjoy a sense of personal peace in those places we find ourselves. We know that our identity is not in what we do, but in who we are. We are God’s children, made in God’s image, people of inestimable worth. And because we know that, it is much more important to be focused on how, for whom, and to what end you do our work.

Healing Through Caring

The late English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist Malcolm Muggeridge tells in his book Something Beautiful for God (1971:91-92) about a conversation he once had with Mother Teresa about what her community tries to offer the dying on the streets of Calcutta. She replied: "We want to make them feel that they are wanted, we want them to know that there are people who really love them, who really want them….It is not very often things they need. What they need much more is what we offer them. In these twenty years of work amongst the people, I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience. Nowadays we have found medicine for leprosy and lepers can be cured. There’s medicine for TB and consumptives can be cured. For all kinds of diseases there are medicines and cures. But for being unwanted, except there are willing hands to serve and there’s a loving heart to love, I don’t think this terrible disease can ever be cured."

Did we get that? Mother Teresa said:  “…it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.” And it isn’t just the poor and dying on the streets of Calcutta that are afflicted with this disease. We find it in the affluent homes and cities in our country, and often in the places we frequent – our schools, our streets, churches, clubs, stores, our homes, and the list goes on. Maybe we ourselves have felt that way and hoped desperately that someone would reach out to us and help us to know that we were loved and wanted.

As followers of Jesus we are called to care and comfort those around us. The word comfort means “strength or strong together.” But all too often we stay to ourselves or our own. “It doesn’t concern me” is a common response. Sometimes it is because we are afraid; sometimes it is because we are too focused on other things – school, work, building a family, doing church, playing,  that we don’t feel we have the time to reach out. But when we take the risk: to listen, feel, reach out and be compassionate, to suffer together with the other, when we care enough to face the loneliness and pain of another, we are not only fulfilling the call of Christ to love as he loved, we also find something new within ourselves. Henri Nouwen wrote: “Comfort is the great gift that creates community. Those who come together in mutual vulnerability are bound together by a new strength that makes them into one body.” This is the church, this is the Body of Christ – people who come together in mutual vulnerability – “vulnerability”, because they come together in caring, comforting, healing, risking love. In their coming together in their vulnerability, they are bound together by a new strength.

So many churches measure their success in how many people are filling the pews, how great their worship is, or how big their budget is. But the real measure of success among the people of God is how much do we really love and care. The church is to be a place of healing – healing through caring.

All of us need, and I hope find, people who make us feel wanted and also help us become people who make others feel wanted, friends who love, people who create an atmosphere of warmth and genuine trust which enables us and others to love in return.

I think Mother Teresa was right: “…except there are willing hands to serve and there’s a loving heart to love, I don’t think this terrible disease can ever be cured.” Are you and I becoming those hands and hearts to the people around us? Because, unless we are, this disease will continue to claim the lives of people who are crying out for help. Maybe we can start with those in our families or in our classes or at our work. But wherever we start, we need to reach out.

Thinking About Love

Today is Valentine’s Day and while I’m not a real big fan of the ways the day has become commercialized and how it seems that for many people it has become a way of atoning for failing to express their love to their significant other the other 364 days of the year, it is a celebration of romantic love and a helpful reminder that we need to express that love. So, for those of you who gave flowers or candy or both, cooked a meal, sent a card or made a call to show your love, well done! And I hope that it is also a good reminder to continue to show your love throughout the year.

But while we are thinking about love, let’s admit it: “love” is a very chameleon word. It takes on so many different meanings in our society. I’ll let you enumerate the many ways the word seems to be used, but we know that it can mean everything from “like” to “lust” to “sacrifice.” For the Christian, the thing that helps us define love is Jesus and what Jesus has to say about God, whom the Bible describes as “Love.” In other words, all love, be it genuine romantic love, family love, or love for others in general, has its basis in God’s love whether we acknowledge it or not. The hunger for love and the capacity to show love is part of what it means to be made in the divine image.

The problem with love is that we are often limiting it or conditioning it. Sometimes it is hard to love others because we haven’t learned to love ourselves as loved by God. But as we come to know God’s love it deepens and transforms our love in all those areas of life where we seek to love.

If you are still struggling with God’s love for you, take a look at this poem written by Sue Garmon. Allow its images and language to break through the defenses you may have erected against God’s love, consciously or unconsciously. And as you see how much you are loved, allow that love to show through your life.


Lord, thank you
for not giving up on me.
Thank you
for not washing your hands of me.
Thank you
for not turning your back on me and my brokenness.

Lord, thank you
for not considering me
a hopeless case;
for not shrugging your shoulders
and walking away
from my innumerable failures,
great and small.

Lord, thank you
for believing in me
when I can’t believe in myself.

Thank you
for hoping in me
when I can’t hope in myself.
Thank you
for trusting me
when I can’t trust myself.

Thank you, Lord,
for being my Father
who believes in me,
who hopes in me,
who trusts me
and loves me
forever and ever---
no matter what.

Lord, forgive me for thinking
that your love for me
and my love for you
can be measured
with the same
yardstick.

Your love for me
doesn’t depend
on what I do for you.
Your love for me
doesn’t falter
in the face
of silence.
Your love for me
doesn’t shrivel
in the face
of my refusal to respond.

Your love for me
doesn’t use me,
force me,
manipulate me
or coerce me.
Your love for me
is free,
and it sets me free.

Forgive me, Lord,
for trying to do to you
what your love won’t allow you
to do to me.

And even now
you say to me,
“Throw away
that yardstick!”

Lord, I’m so happy
that you’re God!

Especially Graced

Today is one of those especially graced day. Every day is graced in that it is a gift, but today I feel  especially graced. I got to spend the morning with our youngest granddaughter who will be four later this month. We went to the zoo and then to McDonalds for her to climb and socialize in the play area. On the way to and from the zoo I got the opportunity to introduce her to the world of folk music, particularly Peter, Paul and Mary. She listened and tried to join in the singing of Kum Ba Yah, If I Had a Hammer, We Shall Overcome and Puff, the Magic Dragon. Some of the songs she has heard her older sisters sing. I’m sure that a lot of it went over her heard or in one ear and out the other, but you never know. Hopefully she was a bit more sensitized to freedom songs. But as I was listening to Puff, the Magic Dragon, I was reminded of how the song is a celebration of the imagination and a sad  lament on how it is often lost when we get older. Angelina has a great imagination and I hope she never loses it. But it’s an uphill struggle. The world, as the poet says, is too much with us. As we grow, we get jaded to the wonder of the world around us. Yes, there is so much evil in the world and so much childish stuff that we have to put off as we “grow up”, but I think we really lose something when we have lost our sense of wonder.

      This reminded me of something Brennan Manning talks about in his book, Souvenirs of Solitude: Finding Rest in Abba’s Embrace. In a chapter entitled “Christmas Reflections at O’Hare” he relates a time when he and many other passengers were stranded in Chicago’s O’Hare airport because of a  winter storm (been there, done that). As he looked around he saw that many of the passengers shared his turmoil and growing anger. But across the aisle from him he saw a middle-aged black woman cradling a child. And she was laughing! Intrigued, Manning crossed the aisle and found himself staring at the woman. She was rubbing her fingers across the child’s lips as he blew mightily “brrh, brrh.” She looked up. Manning spoke: “Ma’am, you’re the only person in this place who seems to be together. Would you mind telling me why you’re so happy?” “Sho,” she said, “Christmas is coming and dat Jesus---He make me laugh!”

     Manning thanked her, recrossed the aisle and slumped into his seat. “Dat Jesus—He make me  laugh!” he repeated to himself. And then he raises some questions that we might do well to ask ourselves. He asked: Am I getting too serious about life? In the hurly burly of the marketplace have I let my childlike sense of wonder fade? Have I stopped looking at sunsets and rainbows? Am I so lost in preaching, teaching, writing, traveling that I no longer hear the sound of rain on the roof? How long since I stopped making snowballs and flying kites?

     He goes on to remind us that Christmas is the good news that God has invade our world and life cannot/should not ever be seen the same way again. God comes into history and comes daily in  mystery. And this God will one day come in glory. These are his words: “God is saying in Jesus that in the end everything will be all right. Nothing can harm you permanently, no suffering is irrevocable, no loss is lasting, no defeat is more than transitory, no disappointment is conclusive. Jesus did not deny the reality of suffering, discouragement, disappointment, frustration, and death; He simply stated that the kingdom of God would conquer all of these horrors, that the Father’s love is so prodigal that no evil could possibly resist it.”

     If, Manning challenges us, we can accept the mystery of Bethlehem, our lives can be filed with the laughter  of God. And there can be a rebirth of wonder in our lives.

     Oh, and the second reason today is an especially graced day? It is my wife’s birthday. And each  and every day her presence reminds me of how rich my life is and I am struck by how great a gift God gave me when I found Connie. But that is a story for another time.

 Blessings.

Grace, Love and Me

The German theologian and cultural historian, Eugen Biser, reduces the troubles that most of us face to three basic problems: over-activity, loneliness, and angst (anxiety). I don’t know about you, but I’ve been there and maybe a good deal of the time that describes me. And the only real cure is love -- to be loved and to love ourselves and others. When we love and are loved, our over-activity can be seen for what it is – often fear or a need to prove our worth and value by doing, and we can rightly prioritize the many activities in our life so that we aren’t over-extended or burning the candle at both ends. Our loneliness can be transformed into intimacy and our anxiety into peace and courage.  

      Kathleen Norris, relates a simple but profound story in her book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (p.150): “One morning this past spring I noticed a young couple with an infant at an airport  departure gate. The baby was staring intently at other people, and as soon as he recognized a human face, no matter whose it was, no matter if it was young or old, pretty or ugly, bored or happy or worried-looking, he would respond with absolute delight. It was beautiful to see. Our drab departure gate had become the gate of heaven. And as I watched that baby play with any adult who would allow it, I felt awe-struck as Jacob (Genesis 28:10-19), because I realized that this is how God looks at us, staring into our faces in order to be delighted, to see the creature he made and called good, along with the rest of creation. And, as Psalm 139 puts it, darkness is as nothing to God, who can look right through whatever evil we’ve done in our lives to the creature made in the divine image. I suspect that only God, and well-loved infants can see this way.” 

     Our tired, lonely, anxious spirits need love as much as our bodies need air. I know that I do. And the good news is that God loves you. He delights in you, just as that baby delighted in every face he saw. It is hard sometimes to accept that. We know what darkness lurks in our heart. We know how unlovely we have been or can be. Honestly, I am not always sure that I could love someone like me. But God does.  

     Jesus knew the Father’s love and he said: “As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my  love” (John 15:9). We are loved unconditionally and completely. God’s love is a boundless,  bottomless love. But we often suffer from amnesia. We forget that we are loved. And often that is  because we allow other things to come between us and God’s love. The secret to living in that love is to stay connected with Jesus where we experience the love between the Father and the Son. To remain in that love and to grow in it is more than just thinking about it occasionally, like on Sunday morning or when we are at fellowship or when someone jars our memory. To remain in that love means that the love of God is the foundation of our lives, it is our home, our security, our joy. And if it is, we grow in that love and it not only helps us to deal with our fears and our loneliness and our anxiety, it also helps us to love others. And in loving others we begin to heal and transform our world, one person at a time. John Vanier reminds us what love is when he describes love as “revealing to someone else that  person’s own beauty.” God has shown that love to us in Christ and we show it others. Love means showing the other person how special, how beautiful, how precious they are. They can’t really  discover that alone. Another person is needed.  

     We all need love. A man was standing in a grocery checkout line with quite a few other people. He was getting impatient. Others in the line began to complain and gripe. The man looked at the front of  the line at a couple there and they were smiling. “Of course, they’re smiling,” he thought to himself, “they are at the front of the line.” But when he got to the front of the line, he noticed that the checkout clerk had made a sign out of a piece of cardboard and put it in front of her. It said, “We have been  made with love; please treat us accordingly.” Wouldn’t it be great to mentally see that hanging on every person we meet and also be seen on me by every person who sees me? God has made us with love and we are all precious. And one of the great privileges I have in life is to treat each person I meet as loved and a person of worth and dignity. And as I have the opportunity to tell them why – they are loved by a gracious God with a bottomless, unbounded, unconditional love.