Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Getting Angry with God


       I love the anger at God that is reflected in the Eleventh chapter of the Book of Numbers.  The followers of Moses are sick and tired of the years in the desert and are hungry for what they used to have in Egypt.  Listen to what they say:  If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.

That about says it.  All of this stupid manna!  That’s all that we have.  Why did we come out here in the desert to put up with this ridiculous deprivation?  They complain to Moses and he gets tired of listening to them.  So Moses goes to God and asks him why God has put all of this on his shoulders.  Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, 'Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child.  Moses is disgusted and wants some kind of an answer from God.

Have you ever felt like that?  Have you ever been so disgusted with your circumstances that you shook your fist at the skies and asked God to give you what you certainly didn’t have?

I have.  I remember visiting a woman in the last stages of cancer.  They had moved a hospital bed into her living room where I would see her.  She had a daughter who was about six months pregnant.  What her mother wanted above all things was to live to see her grandchild born.  But it didn’t work out that way.  She died when her daughter was eight months pregnant and she didn’t see the child born.  When she died, I was furious.  I remember after watching her die and spending some time with the family, I went out to my car, shook the steering wheel and yelled at God about what on earth was the problem.  “Would it have shaken creation to have her live a couple of months more so that she could have seen her grandchild born?"  I shouted at the skies and drove around town in a rage for about an hour.

Several months later, we baptized that new baby in the church.  I’ll never forget what happened.  When I moved toward the font to scoop up some water for the baptism, all of a sudden there was a warm glow in the church.  It seemed to me that a rich light was shining on all of us.  I know now that I was the only one who experienced this, but it certainly was not my imagination.  I know that it was the presence of that wonderful grandmother there at the baptism.  That for me was the answer to my angry prayer after the death.

God treats Moses the same way.  He doesn’t yell back at him.  He tells him to gather seventy elders and to have them take their place with him.  After he gathers them together and they go off by themselves, someone tells Moses that Eldad and Medad, who weren’t with the others were prophesying in the camp.  Joshua tells Moses to stop them.  Moses refuses to stop them saying to Joshua, would that all of my people were prophets!  So he let them go on.

In the Gospel of Mark,  John tells Jesus that they saw someone casting out demons in Jesus’ name and because he wasn’t a follower, they tried to stop him.  Jesus was eloquent.  He said:  Do not stop him;  For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.

How wonderful it would be if we could learn to live like that.  To accept all of those who work in the name of God the same way.  To stop fighting among ourselves over who is the greatest and to simply do what God is asking us to do.  To love one another as God loves us.  God loves us.  That has been taught to me so many times.  What does it take for me to get the message?  What does it take for all of us to get it?  That is the essence of the religion that we all profess.  To show the light of the love of God into this world, and to do it constantly with gifts of mercy to those around us who need them.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Humility and Acceptance


      Humility is a remarkable virtue.  It isn’t one that most of us cultivate, but it is probably the most wonderful characteristic that we can possess.  The problem with humility is that it doesn’t draw any attention to itself.  Humble people tend to remain in the background.  They don’t get credit for much of anything.  Often they are shy and aren’t in the forefront of what is going on around them.  This, unfortunately isn’t what a lot of us want.

We all want some measure of attention.  We learned this when we were little children.  Brothers and sisters vie for their parents attention.  Here I am!  Look at me!  Even our pets do this.  We presently have custody of our granddaughter’s little dog.  She constantly is trying to get our attention.  She stands in front of us and wags her tail.  Often we have no idea what she wants.  We take her out, we feed her, we do what we think will make her happy, but there she is again a moment later, standing in front of us wagging her tail.  Frustrating sometimes, but certainly in keeping with the way all of us act from time to time.  While we are taught to be humble, we love attention.

It is interesting that the lesson from Jeremiah and the Psalm cry out for attention from God because of persecution.  The authors want God to stand against those who are trying to destroy them.  In these passages, it isn’t enough that the author is saved from the trouble, he also wants the persecutors to be destroyed.  That is probably the height of arrogance.  Destroy those who don’t believe in God.  Protect me from their terrible persecution.

In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is trying to help his disciples understand what is going to happen to him.  He has told them about his own coming persecution.  He tells them that he will be arrested, crucified and that he will rise again.   This is the moment when Peter says to him, No, Lord, this must never happen to you!  Jesus told him at that moment to get behind me, Satan!

      Here, later in the Gospel, Jesus discovers that the disciples have been arguing among themselves about who is the greatest of them.  His answer to this is the essence of humility.  He puts a small child among them and says to them: Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.

Here is the answer to all of their arguing.  It is also useful for all of us to consider what it means for our own arrogance.  Do we think that we are better than others?  Or is it possible that God loves all of us dearly, and we are simply one of his children.  That is not something that we tend to think about a lot.  Often, we think that we are somehow set apart and better than others.

I’ve been somewhat amazed at the present turmoil in the Middle East that has been brought about by an ignorant video portraying the prophet Mohammad in very unflattering terms.  Many Muslims have seized this opportunity to attack the United States for what it believes is blasphemy against their religion.  Our response to all of this has been to denounce the video and worry that those who are attacking us don’t quite understand what is going on.  Perhaps we are the ones who don’t quite understand what is going on.

     Many of the people in the Middle East are somewhat tired of the efforts of the United States to control their countries.  We have spent a lot of money and the lives of our troops trying to bring what we call democracy to them.  Often, we don’t understand what that translates into for those people.  We have witnessed a remarkable event that we have called the “Arab Spring,” which has toppled dictators and sometimes installed radical Muslims in their place.  We aren’t always comfortable with how these things have turned out.  Instead of letting these people choose for themselves the kind of government that they want, we want to help them in their choice.  There is a lot of our own arrogance present in this kind of thinking.

Remember what Jesus is telling us.  Accepting a little child is tantamount to accepting him and the one who sent him.  We need to learn what our acceptance of them means.  It means giving them the benefit of the doubt and letting them grow into the mature people whom we can continue to love and respect.  As all of us with children know, that is sometimes difficult.  They don’t always behave the way that we would want them to behave.  Accepting them means accepting them and their behavior.  We need to let them grow, make mistakes and profit from them.  We don’t always need to call the shots.

      That is probably what we need to understand about the Middle East.   These countries are growing and developing themselves according to their own cultures.  Our own humility is what is at stake here.  Forcing results that only appeal to us is certainly not going to bring harmony to either us or them.  Accepting them is what we need to learn to do.  When we can do that, peace is the certain ultimate result.  No matter who benefits. We all will.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

God's Forgiveness and Our Forgiveness


         For twenty-two years, I was a part-time chaplain at Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh.  I had a group of six to eight men, all of whom had killed someone and who were spending the rest of their lives in prison.  In Pennsylvania, a life sentence is a life sentence.  They don’t let people out after twenty-five or thirty years as they do in a lot of other states.  All of the men in my group knew that and had settled in to their lot.  It wasn’t easy.  All of them carried the guilt of what they had done.  I had one man tell me over and over again when I would talk about forgiveness, “Listen, preacher, there are two people in the graveyard because of what I did.  God is never going to forgive that.”  That is the reality of how they all live every day.  Getting them to come to even a tiny understanding of what forgiveness meant was and remains a daunting job.

But forgiveness was theirs for the asking.  What I tried to help them all to comprehend was that forgiveness is the great gift that is given to all of us by the God who loves us all as God’s own children.  Do we make mistakes?  Certainly.  Is that the end of the story?  Hardly.

     At the moment there is a great argument raging in one of our Western Pennsylvania communities about a monument that has been erected to celebrate the Ten Commandments.  It is on public property and an organization protecting the First Amendment has raised a question about whether having the monument on public property violates the separation of church and state.

     A group of people in the community have rallied to “protect” the monument. They have had a march and a demonstration with signs and speeches that proclaim their love of God’s law.  I have wanted to ask those folks if they have kept all of those commandments;  or have they broken one or all of them.   Those men in my prison group had all broken at least one of the commandments, the one about not killing, and they were devastated for life.  All of us have that in common with them.  We have all broken the commandments.  The one thing that I know about the Ten Commandments that we all share is that we can’t keep them.  We break them over and over again.  But yet, we have a loving God who forgives us what we have done and makes us whole again, even after we have broken the law of laws.

Jesus had his disciples gathered together in Caesarea Philippi.  He asked them who people were saying that he was.  The disciples answered him that some say that he was John the Baptist, some Elijah or one of the prophets.  He then asked them, “Who do you say that I am.”  Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”  Jesus then told them not to tell anyone about him.  He went on to tell them that the Son of Man had to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the elders, be killed and then after three days to rise again.  Peter took him aside and rebuked him.  That is when Jesus told Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!  You are setting your mind not on Divine things, but on human things.”

I would have been with Peter on this one.  How could any of them understood what Jesus was saying?  Which of us understands resurrection?  Which of us really understands forgiveness?  That is what the men in my prison group were all struggling with.  Those us us who are not incarcerated also struggle with it.  Forgiveness is not an easy concept to get our minds around.  But it is true.  We are all forgiven by our loving God of what we have done.  Our God longs to gather us all in his arms as the children that he created.  That doesn’t alter the consequences of what we have done.  We create chaos and we must live with it.  But God’s love is eternal.  That we can count on. And because of that we can forgive one another.  That is the greatest gift of all.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Caring for Rich and Poor Alike


     The suffragan bishop of the diocese died a number of years ago and the funeral was held in the Cathedral.  The place was filled with laypeople and clergy and the family sat in the front rows on the right side.  Everything went beautifully until communion time.  The family left their pews to go and receive the sacrament and a Pittsburgh street person came slowly down the aisle of the church, finally sitting in the now vacated pews that had been occupied by the family.  Two morning coated ushers quickly responded to this and told the man that he couldn’t sit there.  He obediently left the family pews and went across the aisle to the pews vacated by the clergy who had left them to go to the altar for communion.  Again the ushers told the man that he couldn’t sit there and that he would again have to leave.  He ambled down the aisle and finally found an empty pew left vacant between the clergy and the lay people behind them.  He slipped in there.

But the story wasn’t over.  Two clergy came down the aisle with communion for a disabled woman in the pew behind the man.  Again the ushers told him that he would have to move.  He continued his way down the aisle.  Somebody in my row asked, “who was that?”  Somebody answered quickly, “It is the Lord”.

I’ve always loved that story because it illustrates so elegantly what James is trying to say in his second chapter when he talks about how we treat the rich and the poor who come into our assemblies.  We certainly treat them differently, don’t we.  The ones with the gold rings get the good seats and we don’t quite know what to do with those with the dirty clothes.  This is in direct contradiction of what Jesus told us to do about those in need in this world.  In Mark’s gospel, there is the story of the Syrophoenician woman who had the ailing daughter.  She was denied by Jesus at first, when Jesus said that it wasn’t right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs, she told him that even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall to the floor.  Jesus heard her plea and healed her daughter, even though she wasn’t of his faith.  He also healed the decrepit deaf man who was brought to him.

With his life and his deeds, Jesus illustrated for us the way that we are to treat each other.  That wealth or poverty ought not to have any place in our decisions of who to help.   Need was the only criteria.

Once again a terrible storm has devastated the Gulf coast.  These are the same people whose homes were destroyed by Katrina a decade ago.  It is necessary for us to help them with everything that we have to make their lives better and their suffering less.  Their wealth or poverty ought not to figure in the decision.  The only thing that we should consider is the terrible need.

Thank God that we can provide help in these terrible times.  It is a mark of the worth of our people that we can do this.