What God Wants For Your Life

This is one of the better Pentecost sermons I’ve “heard” preached…

For one of the ancient teachers of the faith humility is the hallmark of the Christian life. Our capacity to own nothing and, at the end of our lives, to lay down everything that we have been given is indicative of how seriously we take the tenets of our faith. All we possess, we possess thanks to the grace of God and, at the end of life, the evidence of how deeply we believe that is the case is reflected in the way that we age and die.

Or, at least, that is what I took from a line or two that I read recently. The observation has me asking questions, which we can fruitfully explore with one another:

Is that experience of coming face to face with our convictions what old age, dotage, and death become for the Christian?

For the person of faith is it an encounter with our frailty, with our dust-ness (if I can put it that way)?

Is aging grace-fully in Christian terms the ability to say with this ancient teacher, “What I have does not belong to me and when it pleases God, I will return it freely, trusting it to the Giver.”

Are the aches and pains, the diminished strength, the failing memory, the endless indignities transformed by seeing them in that light?

In seeing those experiences as a matter of giving back to the Giver the gifts we were given at birth an adventure in trust?

In the midst of that adventure, do we find mystery in the misery?

Does our journey through that troublesome part of life become not a sad, slow diminishment, but a courageous march into the light where everything we possess is at once lost and overwhelmed in even greater light?

It does, it seems to me, if we trust in God and in the power of the Resurrection. In their absence, death is (as John’s Gospel puts it) the last enemy.

“That Old-Time Religion”…it’s a phrase that is often used to describe a spiritual life that is quaint, old-fashioned, and just a bit out of touch.

But it could also be direct, honest, uncompromising, and just plain funny.

The story is told of Uncle Bud Robinson, an evangelist who lived at the turn of the last century whose approach to preaching had just that flavor. During an “altar call” a woman came forward confiding to Uncle Bud, “I have a problem with my tongue and I want to lay it on the altar.”

Not one to miss an opportunity for giving direct, frank guidance, Uncle Bud responded, “Well, sister, there is 30 feet of prayer rail there and if you think it will fit, go right ahead.”

There is a time and a place for uncompromising honesty and a good laugh at our own frailty. It can open up the possibility of change.

“I don’t get it. I don’t want to get it.”

“You don’t get what?”

“The church is a terrible place. It should be a place of healing. It’s not. It’s a place of venal appetites, judgment, distancing —- there is no game played in the world that doesn’t have its ecclesiastical equivalent. The only difference is that more often than not the battles are over less power and less money.”

“It’s in the world, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s filled with sinners, right?”

“Right.”

“So you were expecting…?”

“Something better.”

“Well, that’s a work in progress. And that’s the church. I empowered the church to announce redemption, but truth be told the church is also in need of redemption. Why do you think I went to the Temple, read the Law, and (I think it’s fair to say) took a beating from the establishment of my own day?”

I just sit there.

“I’m sorry. The dreams and hopes surface time and again — the hoped for end becomes the dreamed of present. It’s inevitable, because you were made for more. And then there are all the games you are talking about…promises the church makes, promises it breaks, games it plays, language it uses (especially around ordination, but about membership in the church as well). The fact of the matter is, I called you to this and I made you for this.”

“The priesthood?”

“That and also the larger participation in my life. It is what I made you for?”

“So I can’t quit?”

“Well, no, to be honest, on one level you can’t. It’s the only game in town. Walking away from it is like walking away from breathing.”

“So what do I do with the anger?”

“Give it to me — or watch how I dealt with it. Did it hurt me? Yes. Did it grieve me? Yes. But even in its harshest, meanest moments, the cruelty of any child of God is a moment filled with the possibility of redemption — whether it leads to repentance or gives way to its own futility, spiraling out of control. To mend or to heal, even when you stand in what seems like a powerless position, requires living with the tattered, brutal ugliness of it all. You can live out of the anger — which you will feel keenly from time to time — or you can choose to see it with my eyes.”

“So do the occasions for anger ever go away? There is freedom in what you say — even power — but I know that the outrage will come back and there will be reason, even good reason to feel it anew.”

“No, sadly, my child, I cannot promise you that it will go away. Indeed, the more you walk in the light, the more likely you are to recognize the depth of the darkness. And let me caution you, again, you will find some of the worst darkness within the church itself. It is, then, that you will need to remember this conversation. There is and always is only one choice that you can make: the choice of intimacy, intimacy with me, with my purposes, and with the purposes of the Father.”

“So, I will be tempted to look elsewhere?”

“You will not only be tempted to look elsewhere, you will fail to recognize it as temptation.”

“So why even bother with the church, if it is such a stumbling block? Why not wipe it from the face of the earth, start again, declare your independence of it?”

“Because no human being, never mind men, women, and children, scattered across the centuries, can be expected to see me, feel me, touch me, me without seeing me in the flesh.”

“But you already assumed flesh and lived with us. That should be enough.”

“It isn’t. I dwell in you and you dwell in me. When you touch others, I use your hands, when you speak to others I use your tongue, when you listen to others I use your ears. The church, at its best, is the embodiment of my presence. It has no other purpose.”

“And when it betrays you?”

“Then it betrays me and the greatest pain I suffer is not the pain of betrayal, it is the way in which the church betrays those given to its care. It is your responsibility in those moments to remind the church of its calling, to challenge its faithfulness, to heal the wounds it inflicts, to repent for its failures.”

“Oh, so, on top of all of the grief it has caused me, I also need to apologize for its short-comings??”

“My dear child, the church’s sin and your own sin has the same roots, as does the sin of everyone called by my name. Its origins are not so easily severed from your own life and the first fruit of redemption is not the right to judge, it is the call to heal, to love as I have loved you.”

“So the anger never goes away?”

“No. But you will learn something new from it, draw new strength from it, and gain a new vision from it.”

“Why does it need to be that way?”

“Because your sin, the sin of the world, and the sins of the church are one in nature; and the healing that I do, the love that I share puts everyone touched by that love at enmity with the world’s sin.”

“So, the tension that I feel — the fear that this ‘new vision’ I’ve been given will evaporate with the next round of nonsense from the church is inevitable?”

“Inevitable? Yes. But it is more than that. It is both sign and inspiration. A sign of the redemptive work begun in you, a sign of the need in the world around you, and inspiration for the vision of what needs to be done.”

“You look like there is more.”

“Living with that tension — your awareness of it — even suffering at its hands — is also intimacy with me, with the Father, with the Spirit. My cross is not, in the first place, a symbol of suffering. It is not, in the first place, a symbol of sacrifice. It is the symbol of my love. It is about my longing for you, for everyone — inside and outside of the church. And from moment to moment my desire to love reaches across the soul wrenching destructive power of sin to heal. The cross represents the intersection of sin and my love and just as my body was nailed to it, the conflict between the two, and my triumph over sin lies at the center of my claim on your life. It is not a call to morbid self-abnegation. It is a call to embody my love.”

“But so much of this suffering seems pointless. What I have watched isn’t noble suffering or great sin. The sin is venal, stupid, and it masquerades as your church; and those who suffer, suffer to no point. Their pain makes no statement.”

“Did you expect it to make sense? Did my suffering make sense? The further from the truth one moves the less any action sense and the more important the masks become. Would evil parade through town with it’s own flag or with mine?”

“So I have to endure this nonsense?”

“No, you need to embrace it.”

“I don’t want to, I am tired of the absurdity, the stupidity of it all. I am not placed or empowered to change it. I am forever working on the fringes. There is a time to cut one’s losses; and I have enough clarity to move on with your work without this dead weight of a church wrapped around my neck.”

“Well, dear one, then you won’t be able to walk with me. And to cut yourself off from the nonsense, as you call it, is to cut yourself off from the journey.”

“What? Oh, I know, the whole pride thing.”

“Well, in part, yes. The judgment that the sin is out there always presents the peril of pride. The hardest part of fighting for what is right is fighting that fight knowing all along that the seeds of that sin are within you. So, apart from me it is always possible that you will confuse my word with your word. But you knew that.”

“Then there is more?”

“Yes, you see the struggle between sin and redemption is all there is to life. Societies and countries make some measure of what they think of as their own achievement. The world might even seem to make progress together — from time to time. But those efforts vanish sooner or later. What seemed important, defining, engrossing, all encompassing becomes a memory — at best — to those who follow. But the perennial struggle, the issue that has always been there and always will be is the one between sin and intimacy with me. between a rebellion against my purposes and deep abiding with them. Walk away from this and you walk away from everything, or — if you prefer — walk away from this and you will only run into it elsewhere.”

He paused for a long time and then added, “Unless of course you forget completely.”

“So this is as much about my own redemption as it is about anything else?”

“There never was any difference. The one sin is many sins, your sin the sin of others, theirs are yours, and only one love that is a love of all. Life offers itself up as endless complexities, line after line on newspapers, now pressing — pivotal — life-changing, then finally fading ink on yellowing paper, ashes, memories, whispers on the wind, then silence. There really is only one moment — defining, all encompassing, eternal.”

“It all has such a sense of loneliness, emptiness, darkness…”

“Oh….the darkness is there, to be sure and it weighs heavily. But remember, your life, your vocation is not the affirmation that darkness exists, it is a journey into the light.”
“So, this all started with my anger. What about it?”

“Use it as a tool of my redemptive purposes. Listen to it. Acknowledge the truths that it tells you. Minister out of those truths. Counter evil where you can. Nurture the light where possible. But hold it lightly, it teaches you something about your own failings as well. Remember, too, whenever and wherever sin is at work redemption is needed. It is not enough to rail against the darkness, you need to listen for the possibility of redemption and healing.”

The story of Nicodemus, heard anew. Let those who have ears to hear hear:

He is, out late at night, in a bad neighborhood. Nic is an expert, a leading Jew. That’s why he’s out at night. This guy has a controversial reputation.

The mission? Check his credentials.

The gambit? Give the man his due, he couldn’t do the things he’s been doing if he wasn’t a man of God, see what he says for himself.

But now, all of a sudden, he’s telling me, the credentials aren’t the issue. “I need to be what??? The h… you say, we have structures for this stuff.”

“Yes, but the structures don’t matter. It’s like the wind.”

“It’s what?”

“What matters is the will of God — the work of God’s Spirit. That will pretty much go where it wants to go — like the wind. And you can go along or not, believe or not, but in the end, God judges.”

“Aw, come on. We are the authority. We are the people of God. God put us here and we are in charge — sizing ‘em up, setting up, knocking ‘em down, blessing and cursing.”

“Sorry, Nic. It doesn’t work that way.”

“But we are the establishment.”

“Yes, but he is the last word.”

Satirist Garry Trudeau began his address to the 1991 graduating class of Yale University with these words:

Distinguished faculty, parents, friends, graduating seniors, Secret Service agents, class agents, people of class, people of color, colorful people, people of height, the vertically constrained, people of hair, the differently coiffed, the optically challenged, the temporarily sighted, the insightful, the out-of-sight, the out-of-towners, the Eurocentrics, the Afrocentrics, the Afrocentrics with Eurailpasses, the eccentrically inclined, the sexually disinclined, people of sex, sexy people, sexist pigs, animal companions, friends of the earth, friends of the boss, the temporarily employed, the differently employed, the differently optioned, people with options, people with stock options, the divestiturists, the deconstructionists, the home constructionists, the homeboys, the homeless, the temporarily housed at home, and, God save us, the permanently housed at home.

I missed commencement this year. I am sorry to have missed it. As with every year, there were students and colleagues — all of them very different — to whom I wanted to say, thank you.

Commencement is also a great time to say one last time, “God’s keeping.” It’s not a throw away line, it’s a prayer, which I hope will follow our students through the years ahead.

Commencement might not be a regular part of your life. If it isn’t, count your blessings, this is a terrible time of the year usually to wear academic regalia in Texas! But find a time to lighten up, laugh about our God given differences, give thanks for people around you, and bless them with a prayer for God’s keeping.

We celebrate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and we do so with good reason. But there is no Uncle’s Day…no day to honor or recognize the gifts that those dear to us — some of them related to us, some of them not — who have touched us and shaped the way that we view the world.

My Uncle Jake (Jacob J. Schmidt III) is one of those people. I say “is,” though he died a few weeks ago, because like others who touch and shape us, his life has made an impact upon me that lives on. I also use the present tense because I take seriously the conviction that he is alive.

One of the many gifts that my Uncle gave me and one which I don’t think that we talk about often enough was his singular, unshakeable resolve to do the right thing.

He fought in North Africa in the Army Air Corps and returned home to build and raise a family. He worked steadily, responsibly and honorably in a series of automobile dealerships as a mechanic and service manager. Out of concern for his community, he helped found and then provided leadership for the creation of a volunteer fire department; and he contributed regularly in many other ways to the neighborhood in which he lived.

But perhaps the most striking feature of that singular resolve was the care that he gave his wife, my aunt, over the last decade. Struggling with the vagaries of Alzheimers, my Aunt Mil slowly lost her ability to connect with the world around her. On one occasion, she even slapped my Uncle for being fresh when he tried to give her a gentle kiss on the cheek. (I joked with him that I was fairly sure it had been a long time since she had done that to him.)

In spite of the demands of caring for her, however, my Uncle kept his wife at home. Now the fact that he did and others do not is not my point here. There are endless variables involved in making decisions of this kind and no one can sit in judgment on the decisions others make in response to the demands of the illness my aunt suffered. But what did strike me was the resolve that marked his care for her. In one conversation some months ago, in a matter of fact way, he observed, “I said I would take care of her when I married her and that’s what I am going to do.”

Now my cousins will tell you that there was no little amount of “Dutch” in that declaration — which is the way my family has always labeled German intractability and they are right — it is shot straight through the family. But I know enough about my Uncle to know something else and so do they: My Uncle was a man of faith and his faith taught him that beyond the trials and injustices in this world there is a reckoning with what is and should be — call it the will of God, call it the right thing — he believed that the choices we make in this life are shaped by considerations beyond it.

It was that resolve that carried him through the years and sustained him in the final days of his life, during which his primary concern was to return home to care for his wife. He did for little more than a day and then died.

My aunt had a stroke this last week and she is fading fast. It may be that even Alzheimers cannot so completely destroy our powers of perception that she is unaware that the strong arms and firm resolve that was life of her life is gone.

Such is the gift — and the example — in what seems simple and strong.

I thought I was the “King of the Post-Mortem.” I am not. The Psalmist (Psalm 77) is:

You keep me from sleep
Troubled, I cannot speak.
I consider former days,
The years gone by;
All night, memories fill my heart,
I brood and question.

Will God always reject me?
Never again be pleased?
Has God stopped loving me
And cut me off forever?
Can God forget to pity,
Can anger block God’s mercy?

What is stunning about this psalm, however, is that what finally worries the king of worriers is not that his frailties are unforgiveable. What worries him is that if he isn’t forgiven, that might mean that God is not as good or as strong as he supposed. The very next line in his anguishing is:

It troubles me to think
The Almighty has grown weak.

But, no fear. The faithfulness of God is not in question. It is a matter of record:

I recall your awesome deeds,
Your wonders of old.
I reflect on all you have done,
On all your works.

After that realization, there is not another word from the King of Post-Mortems about his failings. He took refuge in God’s dependable grace. We can too.