Tuesday, July 29, 2014

A Great Loss

            My dear friend Robert Sutherland Lord died this week.   It would be impossible to honor his life to the extent that his remarkable talent needs to be extolled.  He was an elegant organist who played for services throughout my ministry at Christ Church in Pittsburgh and directed our choir.  He also was the University Organist at the University of Pittsburgh and played the Heinz Chapel organ for many, many weddings and other occasions.  I officiated at some of the weddings that took place in that remarkable monument. 

            He conducted our choir with great beauty.  Every Good Friday, the choir would sing the Gabriel Faure Requiem, which is an elegant piece of music and a great way for us to observe this solemn occasion.  Bob’s musical discernment was always appropriate for our worship and helped us all get closer to our Savior.   

            What I remember most about Bob was his humility.  He was a scholar of incredible scope, knowing more than anyone about the music of Jean Langlais and Charles Tournemire, about whom he published extensively.  Bob had an exceptional ability to create improvisations on the organ that were frequently times of wonder.  I can remember moments when Bob would improvise during the distribution of the elements at communion on themes that I had raised in my sermon.  Often he would touch me deeply with these intimate and subtle musical treats. 

            Every Christmas, Bob and Martha would host a choir party at their home.  This was always a very happy occasion.  Martha loved to cook and her kitchen was always full of not only choir members, but with awesome creations that would grace the table for what was always a bountiful feast.  Bob had an organ in his living room and would play for us and the choir would sing in what became for us all a highlight of that deeply meaningful season. 


            I will miss him greatly, not only his music, but his personality.  God bless him in his eternal life with the God whom he loved so very much.

Friday, July 25, 2014

Faith in a World of Trouble

            It isn’t hard to look at the news these days and to think that we live in perilous times.  There doesn’t seem to be a day that goes by that doesn’t involve one nation or another crossing swords with each other; or some kind of terrible plane crash that takes many lives; or even the crime in our streets that seems at times to be of epic proportions.  Why can’t we seem to live together without creating so much violence?  Some of this is the fault of the news media that seems to be focused mainly on OMG moments in our culture.  Breaking News! seems to be the order of the day.  What newscast goes on without some kind of event that is designed to get our attention, or to create a large headline.  It seems to be what the media is all about. 

            I don’t think that the times are as dire as it would appear.  When the followers of Jesus began their work after the resurrection, there were no guarantees of their safety.  As a matter of fact, most of them were killed in the furtherance of their ministry.  Only John, who died on Patmos after writing Revelation seems to have escaped being killed for his faith.  I am particularly struck by Paul’s experience, finally arrested, imprisoned and ultimately beheaded, he left behind him a remarkable collection of statements that tell of a faith that is beyond what most of us understand.  I look at what he wrote in the eighth chapter of Romans: 

                            For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are
                         accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.  No, in all these
                         things we are more than conquerors through him who
                         loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life,
                         nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come,
                         nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all
                         creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God
                         in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Romans 8:37-39

            That is a lesson for me as I look at my more or less comfortable life and consider all of the people around me who are in one kind of difficulty or another.  All of these nations at war; all of these people in peril or who have lost loved ones; all of them are still within the love of God that Paul speaks about in this passage.  Nothing can separate us from the Love of God, says Paul.  This was a message to his followers who were being pursued for their faith constantly.  It is also a message to all of us who are living in a difficult world.   We are loved infinitely by our God who sent Jesus to live among us and to die at our hand so that that Love could be clearly seen.  It is easy to forget the resurrection when we only look at death.  There is more to this creation than simply living life in this world.  We are meant for better things.  That is what the followers of Jesus clearly knew when they went out to do their work.  It is what we need to remember also as we do ours.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Wheat and Weeds

            The story of Jacob’s ladder is a story of grace.  Jacob was a very bad man, he conned his brother, his father, his erstwhile father-in-law, and really thought nothing of it.  Yet, here he is sleeping out in the open with a stone for a pillow and he has a dream of a ladder reaching to heaven and God on the top of it telling Jacob that he will be the father of many nations and that God will be with him wherever he goes.  This God does, despite all of the nasty things that Jacob has done.

            The reason that I love this story is because it the story of all of us and it is a good background for Jesus’ parable of the good seed sown in the field and the weeds that spring up among the good plants.  Like all of us, the farmer’s servants want to go and destroy the weeds, but the farmer says:

                         No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the
                         wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together
                         until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers,
                         Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be
                         burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.  

            If that isn’t a perfect description of the state of the world, I have never heard one.  When I look at the Middle East, or at the Ukraine; or at the children struggling to come into this country across the Mexican border, I know that I am looking at a collection of wheat and weeds and I mostly have a hard time separating the one from the other.  Our politicians try to tell us to gather the weeds and then they identify them for us.  This always takes the form of political ideology and doesn’t help very much.  We are tempted to use our military force or our money or something else to remedy what we see as the problem, but we don’t understand that the wheat and the weeds are growing together and in getting rid of the weeds, we will also uproot some of the wheat.  Jesus is trying to help his followers to understand that we live in a world where the weeds and the wheat are tightly entwined; just like the evil and the goodness in our lives.  When we try too hard to uproot the weeds, we also will destroy a lot of what is good.

            It seems to me that we need to work hard to understand the circumstances that face us in this world, and try to see that sometimes what we think are weeds are really wheat that is trying to grow.  The quick solutions that are often proposed to “fix” the world are generally self-serving and don’t fix much of anything except our own desires.  Jesus is telling his followers to sit a little looser to the problems that we see and to offer them in prayer to our God that like Jacob and his many faults, the goodness of God may be allowed to shine through, despite the presence of what seems to be so obviously wrong.  

            I have been to the Middle East and have heard the cries of both Israelis and Palestinians and I don’t think that either side is free of fault.  They continue to struggle and to blame and to say that they want peace, but yet do very little to bring it about.  A two state solution may be desirable for many people in the world, but neither side in that dispute seems to want it enough to allow it to happen.  In God’s time, the wheat will be separated from the weeds and goodness will prevail.  In the meantime, we need to work to see that justice is done in these places as best we can, hopefully without ruining the harvest that God wants so desperately to happen.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

How Faith Works

             Our wonderful daughter Heather had a flood in her house a month or so ago after a bad rainstorm caused water to come into her garage and basement and to make the whole house unlivable.  She and her daughter and sons were essentially homeless for at least six weeks.  Fortunately, she is surrounded by an excellent community of caring people who got to work, cleaned out the debris from the house, found ways to begin to reconstruct the place and now it is essentially back to normal and she is going to try to put it on the market for sale. 

            Rosie and I had a part in the encouragement of her in all of this and in providing a small part of the cost for the work; but the accolades belong to the friends who took time in their own lives to come to her rescue and do what they could to make things right for her.  They personified what being a Christian means in the middle of trouble in a community.  They were the assets that Heather was able to draw on to get her life back to some semblance of normality.  They are the ones whom we need to applaud. 

            In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says to his followers: Come unto me all of you who are burdened and heavy laden and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.  These are the words that resonate in my heart when I think of what those people did for our daughter.  As Christians, they came together to make her burden light when it was otherwise overwhelming.  I have no words of thanks that are adequate for what they did for her.

            Most of the time, we cruise through our normal lives with burdens that are moderate to light.  Sometimes, though what we discover is that we have been given much more than we can carry.  This is the time that community really matters, and the faith that we hold dear comes into play.  It is easy to play at Christianity, but when the chips are down and the world needs what we can do to help, our faith demands that we come to the fore and do our part to make life easier for those around us.  We are not always sufficiently aware of those who are real heroes.  These are the ones who step up in difficult situations and redeem that which has been lost.  That is what the community surrounding Heather did so very well.  Thank God for them and their faith that made such a remarkable difference.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Religion and The Public Square

            Religion is often a mess.  Certainly what is playing out in our courts isn’t very helpful to anyone.  The religious people at a firm called Hobby Lobby have said that they won’t pay for contraception for their employees as mandated by the Affordable Care Act.  The Supreme Court has agreed with them and has made very cloudy what will come next.  There is likely to be a myriad of lawsuits claiming religious exemption from not only the Affordable Care Act, but from any number of laws.  We are in for a lot of argument and discussion over the role of religion in our lives and in our laws.

            There is certainly nothing new here.  Religion has been a difficult companion over the years.  It has differed from faith in significant ways by codifying what behavior is appropriate by its followers and differentiating the members of one religion from another.  In the Middle East, currently there is violence and war over religion and how the borders of the countries have been drawn by merely political means.  It is little wonder that the Shia and Sunni sects of Islam are at war with each other and are trying as hard as they can to get their own way and their own land.  This conflict is centuries old, dating from the earliest moments of Islam. 

            From the fourth century onward, after Constantine made Christianity legitimate, our religion has marched in front of armies and made itself a requirement under penalty.  Many of the wars that have been fought have had a religious base to them.  Certainly the Crusades are examples as Christians tried to purge the Holy Land of Muslim invaders.  I know what the response of Jesus would likely have been to the atrocities that were perpetrated by his followers in these times.  Our Lord was not a person of violence.  When one of his disciples cut off the ear of one of the soldiers who arrested Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, he healed the man immediately and cautioned his disciples not to fight with a sword.  Jesus was a man of peace, who called all of us to peace, no matter what was happening in the world. 

            This didn’t always end very well.  Certainly, Jesus’ pacifism was one of the things that brought him to the cross; and there is a legion of martyrs who followed their Lord as Christianity began to spread in the world. 

            In the Gospel, Jesus has been talking about John the Baptist.  He has asked the crowds who they expected to see when they went out into the desert.  John was dressed roughly and looked wild.  Jesus says that he was denounced by the crowds because of his appearance and the fact that he neither ate or drank; but when Jesus came among them eating and drinking, he was denounced as a glutton and a drunkard and a friend of tax collectors and sinners.  He points out to his listeners that even when great deeds were done, they were not recognized.  It is only after the resurrection, when people began to understand the reality of Jesus ministry to this world that in retrospect his deeds began to be seen as magnificent and full of wonder.  That is why we have the stories in Holy Scripture of who Jesus was and what he did for all of humanity.  It is all of humanity that was the recipient of Jesus’ deeds.  It was not only those who followed him, it was also those who opposed, and indeed who crucified him who are the object of God’s infinite love.  At the end of the Eleventh chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells all of us:  Come unto me all you who are weary and who carry heavy burdens and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light!

            Those of us who would push their religion upon others need to hear what our Lord is saying.  Following Jesus is for those of us who find life difficult and full of trouble.  In the Lord’s presence is rest, refreshment and a totality of Love.  That is what the world needs most, not more law. Not more adjustments to make the religious people happy.