Christianity and Community

           The essence of Christianity is community.  If we don’t have each other, we don’t have much at all.  We need each other to get through the things that drive us crazy or cause us pain.  That isn’t a particularly new thing to say, we all know it.  We have all had times of loneliness when we didn’t know what we would do next.  It is at times like this that having somebody close to us makes a radical difference.  We don’t always know this.  It is hard to reach out when we are lonely.  Sometimes it takes another’s touch to reach us. 

            Rosie and I do meals-on-wheels every week.  One of our clients is a little old lady who is blind and who has a cat.  The cat is probably her only relationship.  She talks about her late husband every so often and we know that she misses him.  She always greets us with great joy, takes the meals that we offer and spends a few moments telling us that she hopes that we have a nice day.  That is always nice to hear, and I know that our touch of her makes her day a bit brighter.  That isn’t a small thing.  

            Meals-on-wheels is currently under threat.  There isn’t enough money because of the “sequester” to take care of all of the people on our route, to pay the tiny salaries of the people who run the program and to do what is necessary to keep the program viable.  That is really tragic.  We do what we do for free, as volunteers.  That is profoundly necessary, not only for the program, but for us.  We do what we do because it needs to be done, and for what it does for our day.  I can’t imagine how the program would survive if they paid people to deliver the meals.

            Jesus taught us to care for each other.  He brought his disciples into community so that they could take care of each other and take care of the people whom they met in their ministry.  There is a section in Luke’s Gospel when Jesus is described as walking along the road and he calls people to follow him. They all want to, but they also have excuses. There are things at that moment that are more important than following Jesus.  They sound like me.  I always seem to have something more important, too.  Jesus says to them, No one who puts his hand to the plow and then looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.  This sounds harsh, but it is simply the truth.  Jesus was trying to build community, to bring people together.  The Kingdom of God is always immediate.  It is always before us.  It always requires our attention.  When we have our eyes focused elsewhere, we miss what is essential.  That is what Jesus is trying to tell the people who want to follow him.  It is a full time job that takes all of our attention.  That’s why it isn’t easy.  But easy isn’t the issue.  If we want this world to be better and fairer for all of us, we desperately need community, and community demands our constant attention.  God bless us as we struggle with all of this and try to build community in a world that isn’t particularly interested.

Life, Death and God's Love

            There is a strange desire among humans to hear the voice of God speak clearly and with great power.  Television evangelists tell us all the time that God is condemning humanity for one fault or another.  We love abortion, homosexuality, etc, they say, and God visits us constantly with terrible storms, earthquakes or wars to punish us for our terrible sins.  I think if that were really the case, that the world would have been destroyed long, long ago.  We have come through massive, horrible experiences and have continued to live our lives.  I know that God’s love speaks more loudly than the devastation; and the hope that remains after destruction is greater than the incredible damage that we so frequently see around us.

            I know that God is a loving, forgiving God, who accepts humanity as belonging to him, faults and all and has worked constantly to redeem us from the things that plague us.  I don’t want to excuse our faults, but they pale in the light of the goodness that has also been created by human works and care.  Think of the way that we seem to come together to help storm victims and counsel those who have experienced tragedy.  We do that well, and I believe that is a God given virtue of humanity.

            I love Dylan Thomas’ poetry.  He captures the essence of life and doesn’t dismiss death by any measure.  In his elegy to his father, he fairly yells at him to “Go Not Gently into That Good Night”, and he speaks of a burned baby and its mother, also burned and dead in his marvelous poem “Ceremony after a Fire Raid” with great grief and yet with hope.   Thomas has always spoken to me of life and what it means.  His own life was a mess.  He was alcoholic and had titanic fights with his wife Caitlyn, but yet taught us all about the power of life and death.  

            I can hardly grasp what it meant to walk down the burned out streets of London after a Nazi fire raid and to see the burned corpses piled up on one another, or to think of the chaos after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 with the desperate people jumping to their death from awesome heights.  Thomas helps me with this by not dismissing death at all, but including it as a natural part of life.  When I watched the motion picture Titanic I was horrified by the loss of life and the destruction of so much.  When Leonardo Decaprio’s character slipped beneath the waves, we all cried, but when his love, the now ancient Rose years later dropped the incredibly valuable gem Star of the Sea into the ocean in memory of him, we saw hope emerge from the darkness of the water.  I am reminded in Thomas’ poetry of the hope that resides in all of us, even after tragedies. 

            I know that our soldiers come back from battles in Iraq or Afghanistan with unseen trauma that shows up as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and plagues them in their attempts to reconstruct their lives.  Hopefully, we are creating ways to counsel and help these good people so that their lives can be put back together and resumed with some measure of hope.  It is never easy to do any of this.  It requires people who have strong faith and commitment to each other to overcome the problems that arise.  And it also requires a loving God who gives us all the faith and hope to do what is necessary in this life to get us through to the next one.

            Walt Whitman, in his poem Assurances gives us a measure of what life and death means:

                        I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths of young men are

                             provided for, and that the deaths of young women and the deaths of

                            little children are provided for,

                        (Did you think Life was so well provided for, and Death the purport

                            of all life is not well provided for?)

                        I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter what the horrors of them,

                             no matter whose wife, child, husband, father, lover, has gone

                            down are provided for, to the minutest points,

                        I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen anywhere at any

                            time, is provided for in the inherences of things,

                        I do not think Life provides for all and for Time and Space, but I

                            believe Heavenly Death provides for all.

Forgiving Ourselves and Each Other

             None of us live perfect lives.  I have on occasion been an absolute jackass.  One New Year’s Eve, some of us who were celebrating, decided to call our parish priest at one o’clock in the morning to wish him a happy new year.  He wasn’t amused and told us all to go back to our partying and to leave him alone.  I felt terrible after we did this and I wondered what this had to do with anything at all in my life.  It certainly didn’t improve my standing with my Lord, who looks at behavior like this as outside the bounds.  It was a little thing in the grand scheme, but it affected me for a long time.

            When I read what Luke says about the Pharisee who invited Jesus into his home and the woman who came and anointed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair, I understand a little bit about how it is that God forgives the things that we all do.  The Pharisee had done things also, small things that he didn’t think rose to the level of sin, but the woman was almost apoplectic in her grief over her many sins.  Jesus forgave her all of it and the people around the table were amazed:  Who is this who can forgive sins?, they asked.   The answer, of course is that it is God who forgives us and is ready to accept us the way that we are, even though we have done things that have made ourselves and those around us uncomfortable.  Our sins are forgiven and we are received by our God as the beautiful, innocent people whom he made. 

            But God’s forgiveness is not often the issue with us.  It is the ability to forgive ourselves and others that is frequently the sticking point.  How would it look if we could do this?  The story of David and Bathsheba is a great case in point.  You all know the story, David sees the wife of Uriah the Hittite bathing of a neighboring roof.  He invites her over and has sex with her.  Bathsheba becomes pregnant.  David then tries to get her husband, Uriah, who is serving in the army to come home and sleep with his wife.  Uriah refuses because he doesn’t want to offend his men.  David then asks the commander of his troops to send Uriah into the most intense fighting, where Uriah is killed.  He then has Bathsheba brought to the palace and he makes her his wife. 

            Nathan the prophet is told this story by the Lord, and Nathan goes to David to confront him with his behavior.  He tells the story of the rich man and the poor man.  The poor man has one little ewe lamb which he has raised as his own.  The rich man has a vast herd of sheep.  When a visitor comes, the rich man takes the poor man’s little lamb and serves it to his visitor.  David is outraged by this story and says that the man who did this should die.  Nathan then says to David those poignant words:  You are the man!     He describes David’s behavior with Bathsheba and tells him how displeased that the Lord is with him because of his adultery.

            The legend is that David went back to his room and wrote Psalm 51, which is the great confessional psalm that we use on Ash Wednesday and which pours out our hearts in remorse over our sins.  I know this to be a beautiful story not only of confession, but primarily of forgiveness by God of the things that we have done to each other in the process of living our lives.  We can rest assured that our God in his incredible love has received us all back into his graces, despite our shortcomings. 

            The gospel of Luke goes on to say that Jesus went through the towns and villages healing and forgiving sins.  This is the primary work of God in the world.  We can join in this by forgiving ourselves and each other.  Life is too short to harbor grudges.

What Do We Do With Grief?

            Father Andrew Greeley died this week.  He was a great priest of the Roman Catholic Church who had a great deal to say to all of us about life and faith.  His books were on the best seller lists and they taught us all something profound about life and about God.  This all stemmed from Father Greeley’s own faith.  He leaves a legacy of truth and honor behind him.  He was often a critic of the church, he bravely stood up to his Roman Catholic friends and he confronted all of us with our hypocrisy and the way that we abuse our faith in the living of our lives.

            We also lost Jean Stapleton, who was memorable as Edith Bunker who with Carol O’Connor taught us so much about bigotry and family life.  Hers was a remarkable life.  She invented the caustic high-pitched voice that she used on the show and showed us another side of the Bunkers.  We loved her as we were often annoyed at Archie. 

            Andrew Greeley’s and Jean Stapleton’s deaths occur to me because of what I have been  reading in First Kings about Elijah and the widow in Zerephath when he brought her son back from death after he died and also in Luke’s gospel about the raising back to life by Jesus of the only son of the woman in Nain.  These risings from the dead prefigure Jesus’ own rising and give us a hint of what it is that God is trying to do in this world. 

            Death is something that we all will ultimately face in our own lives and in the lives of those whom we love.  It isn’t something that we keep in mind always, but it is a firm part of our existence.  The older that I get, the more often I am aware that losing friends and neighbors is a part of life.  Grief is no stranger to any of us. 

            What impresses me in these biblical stories is that God is moving not so much to restore life to those who have died (death is a natural part of life), but to sooth the grief of those who are mourning.  That is a wonderful and beautiful thing that God does in this world.  We have all had seasons of grief.  Grief is not something that simply leaves us after a period of time.  Sometimes we seem to inhabit our grief and it becomes a part of the way that we live.  Loneliness is also an accompaniment of grief.    What we watched in Boston after the bombing at the marathon and the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut was incredible grief of parents for their children and of relatives for their own.  The communities gathered around those people and gave them some measure of hope in those terrible times of grief. 

            I think that is one of the most important things that we do as a Christian community – to help each other in the terrible moments of our lives; to surround each other with love that is so deep that it sooths the grief that ultimately comes to all of us.

            Sometimes the grief isn’t really apparent.  We tend to hide it and cry our tears in private, so as not to bother anyone.  I know that is a mistake.  Making sure that others know what we are feeling and how our losses have affected our lives is very important.  It is the only way that we can help each other in these terrible moments.

            After Jesus was crucified, his followers descended into terrible grief.  They were lost without their leader and, even though they had repeatedly been told; had no idea whatsoever that resurrection was a possibility.  When Easter finally dawned and the Lord came out of the tomb, the disciples were not only astonished, they were comforted in their grief.  Life coming out of death is the message here.  We are not alone in this world, even when loneliness seems to conquer us.  Our God loves us and won’t let our living end.  I don’t know what that looks like.  I shy away from trying to describe what we call “eternal life” and “Heaven”, but I know that God has something in mind for all of us.  Will we see each other again?  I hope so, but I don’t really know.  What I do know is that our grief will be assuaged and our hopes fulfilled. 

            When our dog died, the veterinarian gave us a beautiful story about the rainbow bridge, which I am sure you have all heard or read; that our animals are waiting for us at that mythological place where we will see them again.  That isn’t a story that is proof of anything at all except that the vet wanted to help us with our moment of grief.   That is a beautiful thing to do, and it is what the Christian community is here to do for us all through our terrible times. 

            May God bless us as a community and help us to see the hope that is always present even in the certainty of death.  God’s hope abounds always and results in the joy of abundant Love.