Change wafts over our heads and fills our lungs with thoughts that this world won’t hold up much longer. Change creates anxiety and that explosion of worry darkens our souls with impending thoughts of only worse and worse circumstances until all hell finally breaks loose. Anxiety is turned into apocalypticism by Bible scholars who can’t imagine God still at work in any other mode than as an agent for destruction. Too bad … I like what Wendell Berry does with the same elements of worry - seeing past it all to the world’s glory as it faithfully greets the Creator singing God’s song.

His advice to such dreary Christian Chicken Littles? Do something! Make an impact upon the world for good … superb, Brother Berry! Preach on!

“The Future” by Wendell Berry
From Given © Shoemaker Hoard. Reprinted with permission.

The Future

For God’s sake, be done
with this jabber of “a better world.”
What blasphemy! No “futuristic”
twit or child thereof ever
in embodied light will see
a better world than this, though they
foretell inevitably a worse.
Do something! Go cut the weeds
beside the oblivious road. Pick up
the cans and bottles, old tires,
and dead predictions. No future
can be stuffed into this presence
except by being dead. The day is
clear and bright, and overhead
the sun not yet half finished
with his daily praise.

I’ve got the drive from Kansas City to Quitman down pat. From Kansas to Texas in a day behind the wheel. Give or take a few klicks, it’s 475 miles and I figure I’ll get an exact measurement on my next trip. In fact, I’ll check my exact mileage on the way down and stay alert to find the exact mid-point on my way back … something to kill time and mark distance. Something for the brain to do while my butt goes numb. Like watching for the odometer to roll over from five nines to a one and five zeroes … something I missed on last my drive to Texas. Who knows? Maybe numbness traveled up my spinal cord all the way to my aforementioned brain.

My dad marvels that I can do the trip with no apparent after-effects. I’ve learned not to mention the soreness in my after-effect because he doesn’t need me pointing out the obvious and that kind of comment makes my mother frown in the manner I’ve known my whole life. No one cares about my after-effect so I stay mum about my bum.

Some wonder why I drive in lieu of flying. Normal people fly places and to spend a whole day behind the wheel seems like a poorly thought out plan. Here’s my reasoning:  I’m already an hour from my own airport and by the time I pad the time needed to board the plane to jump through all the security hoops at the airport and stand in the cattle lines waiting to get to my seat and jockey for my allotted skimpy overhead storage, I would be almost to Oklahoma before the plane could lift off the runway. The flight’s not all that long, but then I’d have to rent a car and drive two more hours to get to my folks’ house. See what I mean, it’s one or the other and I wouldn’t save a dime or the time that would tilt flying over driving. So I drive.

It’s eight hours of driving if you don’t stop for anything other than emptying one tank and filling the other. “Making good time” is accomplished by eating a burger behind the wheel, but only when the gas tank needs filling. Neither my wife nor my kids want to do this, so of course, if they’re along, it’s a nine-hour drive.

Alone, I bring a couple of books on tape to listen to along with a mix of blues and either Clapton or Los Lonely Boys or both to add a good rhythm to the drive. I open the sunroof and turn up the sound and try not to drive faster than the troopers will allow.

Here’s the other trick I use:  I don’t think of the trip as a whole, only in measured segments. Kansas City to Joplin. Joplin to Big Cabin. Big Cabin to Muskogee. Muskogee past the lake district to McAlester. The Indian Nation Turnpike where I can zoom along at 75 mph or better to Hugo and across the state line. State line to Paris. Paris to Sulphur Springs. Then the final half hour includes crossing the best bass fishing lake in Texas and into Quitman. Not much of a trick but necessary to keep the boredom from turning into despair.

Halfway points are powerful business, don’t you know? Most of my friends would claim they’re at the halfway point in life although if we were to apply some scientific method to study this issue, we’d learn all too late that we can see the sign markers for halfway in our rearview mirrors - we just don’t know it yet.

Halfway through a semester is marked by mid-terms. Halfway through a round of golf is a driveby to the clubhouse and maybe a quick sandwich before teeing it up again on Hole Ten. Halfway through the summer is a solstice but hardly noticable to the average person.

I’m halfway through my sabbatical this week. Where did it go, this first half? Overly critical questions bubble up in my brain asking me whether I’ve done half of what I intended to do. Have I read enough? Have I written a single blessed word as I said I would? Have I rested enough? If this is halfway in time, but not halfway in accomplishment, what rest will there be in the last six and a half weeks?

In my readings, I’ve learned there is a whole rich field of psychology dealing with halfway points. Mostly in life, careers, and family. Almost all of it is fought in the soul and in the brain.

Here’s my promise … I won’t vow I’ll get all the things done I claimed I’d do. Sabbaticals are about breaking free, not about producing more “things.” If I write, I write. If I read book after book after book, so be it. If I study all I said I’d like to study, put a big gold star after my name and pat me on the head.

In the language of the sabbath woven into the heart of a sabbatical, there’s no shame in slowing down to rest and recharge. Sabbaticals aren’t really about any of those things, they’re about rekindling the fire. That’s what I will pay attention to in these less-than-seven weeks ahead.

Pastor Larry Bethune once wrote of a church member who claimed she regularly received letters from God and oddly she would bring them to church to read them to whomever she could get to listen to her. Over the many years she was there, she read letters from God about how hot the Cold War was (remember the Cold War?) and she claimed the arms race was ticking steadily down on the doomsday clock (not to worry, you can relax because scientists recently moved the hand of the clock back from 5 to 6 minutes before midnight). God wrote her how the homeless were growing in number. But God also had other things in mind in her “letters from God.”

God once wrote her how the church needed to straighten up and study the Scriptures more and come to Bible study on Sunday mornings - all that was understood because this woman was the Sunday School Director - it made perfect sense God would expect her to tote the message to the church as it was one of the duties of her job!

Like most of us at one time or another, Pastor Larry claimed he wished God would drop him a line every now and then, or at least give him a call or appear out of thin air to talk for a while. Even an angel on his shoulder or a burning potted plant would be nice, he claimed.

Go ahead and confess, haven’t you ever wished God would write you a letter every now and then? We’re in a time of intriguing conversations about our church these days. If God took the time to drop us a note, what would God write if God were doing such things? Maybe a simple but direct answer from God in prayer would be enough.

Admittedly there’s mystery about this invasion of God’s Spirit and none of us can explain in certain terms because the nature of the Spirit is elusive … invisible, yet real, like the wind that blows through the trees or your breath that unconsciously flows in and out in constant rhythm as your brain gives it direction. In Hebrew the word ruach, which we translate “spirit,” is also the word for “wind” and “breath.”

The Spirit brings not only new life, it brings a new community.Maybe the whole scene we read is so bizarre it’s just too much to comprehend. How about a modern-day playful teaser of the miracle at Pentecost? Imagine what it would be like if, in a single moment, everybody (young & old, female and male, rich & poor, parents and kids, Republicans, Democrats, Tea Baggers & Libertarians, fundamentalists & evangelical charismatics, Jews & Muslims, heterosexual & homosexual, poorly educated and highly educated, red, yellow, black, brown & white, blue-hairs, pink-hairs, Peter Pan cuts, comb-overs and no-hairs) EVERYBODY! - what if everybody in a single moment could really hear one another and accept and embrace one another? And what if in that moment NO ONE reacted with shame or condemnation? What if judgmental words like approve & disapprove, good or bad, right or wrong, left or right, were not expressed and all of us listened so completely we heard and truly understood one another?

The people caught up in this Spirit firestorm at Pentecost asked, “How is it we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” They spoke different languages. They wore different clothes. They ate different foods. They had different colored skin. Some of them came from nations that had sworn themselves as enemies to one another. But the God of Pentecost swept all those differences aside and brought all these people together in the gospel. All those important differences were of no importance to God.
 
The “roll call of nations” is usually taken to mean that people from everywhere were there. People of every tongue and tribe, we would suggest. The fractured, alienated peoples of the earth, broken into so many different languages and cultures after the debacle at Babel were healed when the Spirit descended at Pentecost. That’s usually how we interpret this story. But Tom Long, Professor of Preaching, has pointed out that this Pentecost assemblage was not only a diverse ethnic gathering … Medes, Persians, Elamites, Cappadocians, Phrygians … but a historically impossible gathering as well! These Medes would have had a tough time getting to Jerusalem from Mesopotamia, not only because they had to travel hundreds of miles but because they would have had to travel a few hundred years as well. The Medes had been extinct as a nation for at least two centuries! And those Elamites? They’re mentioned in the Old Testament in Ezra 2, but not again. The Elamites were lost in the past.
 
See? We not only have a gathering of people from the north and the south, but also from the living and the dead.Professor Long suggests a reporting of Pentecost as something like this:  “You should have been there! We had a huge number of visitors for the service. Some were all the way from Montana! Some were from San Antonio and Houston and even some from Dallas, not to mention a whole van load of Assyrians, a couple of Babylonians and even a nice little Hittite couple.”

This strange playful story is Luke’s way of saying that when God’s Spirit was poured out at Pentecost, it was poured not just on a few, but on us all. The Spirit was given not just to the people who happened to speak Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek and happened to be living in Jerusalem in the first century. The Spirit was given to people of every century and every place. We were all there … the ancestors whom we lovingly remember as well as the ones we’d like to forget … we were all there together, all made one in God’s Spirit and empowered to “be the presence of Christ” in our communities.

Carlyle Marney claimed that the activity of Pentecost means revolution, conversion and change. Pentecost is the ever-constant sign that God is present in the world working out the redemption of all creation. Pentecost means change and that can be unsettling to those of us who want everything to remain constant and unchanging. Pentecost means being seized by God, surprised by God, controlled by God. Pentecost means letting go and letting God, even when there’s a sizable amount of risk involved. Even when there’s a chance we will suffer for our faith. The United Church of Christ has a lovely slogan that I think has effectively communicated this very thing:  God is Still Speaking. That’s a lovely & generous confession to illuminate the world and how we share this world with others.

Arthur Waskow, Director of the Shalom Center, said once, “In Jewish life, Shabbat is the time when you stop doing something - you study Torah, you sing, you dance, you celebrate, and you reflect on what the previous six days have been. If there were a single piece of Jewish wisdom that was most important to impart to the human race at this very moment in history, it would be the importance of Shabbat. I mean the generally profound sense of pausing to be, to reflect and to break the addiction of working, producing, making, inventing.”
 
Further he adds, “Artists have said to me, ‘There’s a moment in painting when you’re laying brush stroke after brush stroke and each one’s beautiful and each one enhances the painting. Then comes the moment when you put one more brush stroke on and it would seem that brush stroke was just as beautiful as any one before it, but suddenly you have ruined the painting.’”
 
Waskow explains, “You’ve got to know when to stop, when to catch your breath and say ‘Whoosh! This one’s over! I’ll put up another canvas. But in the meantime, I have to pause long enough to digest what I’ve done. Otherwise, I destroy it.’”
 
The church I serve allows ministers to take a sabbatical leave after seven years of employment. I’m halfway through my ninth year and will be taking a sabbatical this summer. During this time, I will be away from my usual ministry duties and alternating work and rest. I have a couple of learning goals - work that is difficult to tend to during a normal schedule of ministry. I also plan to exercise and rest as well, heeding the advice of my many colleagues who’ve done this at some point, remembering that part of the work of sabbatical periods is to tend to the overwrought needs of ministry.
 
I remember reading an article that Pastor Buckner Fanning wrote a while back, recalling the ancient tradition concerning the Apostle John who was pastor in Ephesus and his hobby of raising pigeons. It is said on one occasion a person passed his house as he was returning from hunting and saw Pastor John playing with one of his birds.
 
The man gently chided the pastor for spending his time so frivolously. John looked at the hunter’s bow and remarked that the string was loose. “Yes, I always loosen the string when it’s not in use. If it stayed tight all the time it would loose its power.”
 
John responded, “That’s exactly what I’m doing right now. I’m relaxing the bow of my mind so I will be better able to shoot the arrows of divine truth.”
 
There’s a deep truth that all of us need to heed regarding the incessant demands on our time, our addiction to hurry and our need to be busy. Hobbies, vacations and wholesome recreation are vital to a well-balanced Christian life, for all will lose our effectiveness if we keep the bows of life tightly strung for too long.
 
These past six weeks, my pastoral colleague’s been out recuperating from her recent surgery. I watched as she tried to disengage from her work and from all of us in order to rest and heal. It’s obvious being away is not that easy. Feel free to write me but don’t expect me to answer.
 
Awhile back, I received a brief note from Marv Knox, Editor of the Baptist Standard, the state paper for Baptists in Texas. Marv wrote me about the time Willie Morris and Eudora Welty went for a drive, a habit they tried to do on occasion as a way for them to talk while they explored the country roads outside Jackson, Mississippi. Eudora was way up in years by them, and as they were driving along, Willie turned down an unfamiliar country lane. Welty asked, “Where are we going?” Morris replied “It’s called the Road to Paradise. I thought we’d see where it leads.” To which she replied, “We’d be fools not to!”
 
On our journey through life, let’s agree we’re going to pause every now and then to smell the flowers. Let’s agree we’ll turn down the throttle of our many obligations to enjoy one another and savor our friendships. Let’s agree we’ll try to stop the incessant hum of the world so we can pay attention to the footsteps of God that are right under our feet believing God may be leading us on some grand adventure we’re too busy to notice.

The few times I’ve gone radio scanning on AM radio have been, well, scary. AM radio is either music or talk, most of which is hard to take, and it’s fully possible to ruin a good drive through the countryside by listening in on the desolate world of AM radio. If it’s music, there are usually only a few styles of music available - this maxim is truer the farther you are from a major city. Drive out in the country and the range of choices gets unbelievably small. But there are plenty of talk stations and they’re scary because they’re almost always by loud-talking folks hyped up on some energy drink - folks who talk faster than humanly possible. Who talks that fast and that anxiously with anything worth listening to? Most of the time, it’s either bad religion or some right-wing shock jock. Either way is scarier than hell.

The right-wing raving lunatics on AM radio are scaremongers who pump anxiety into the world with their speculation and conspiracy theories. Liberals can do this too, but they’re not usually so loud in doing so and eventually they talk themselves down off the ledge. I’m not talking about the mainliners who are regarded as conservatives without being crazy (of whom there are precious few); I’m talking about the fringe element, some who have been accused recently as being seditionists.

We’re living in weird political times where even good-hearted Christians post on Facebook page their sweet prayers about how God has taken their favorite actors or actresses and their favorite musicians and, oh by the way, “my President is Barack Obama,” insinuating that perhaps God could take out the President too. That form of hate speech masquerades as humor but should be seen as the hate speech it is. As one of my preacher buddies would remind us, “All humor is serious,” and should be taken as such.

But far worse than the scary political speech is bad religion. I drove one day across Missouri where all I could get was AM radio and not being close to any cities, I heard a range of radio preachers whose version of the good news was hateful pronoucements of God’s vengeful wrath they would love to unleash on God’s behalf if given half a nod by God to do so.

A couple of weeks ago, pastor-buddy Marcus McFaul and I were driving west on I-10, headed off to three days of foolishness in the desert land of the Big Bend National Park and we landed on a preacher while channel surfing the AM dial. Actually, the preacher was a pretty good preacher so we listened along. “Not exactly how we would have said it,” we boasted to one another (you understand that we preachers do this with one another, don’t you?) as if any one preacher is actually better than another one.

He was from a different theology and from a different style of preaching, but still it was obvious the minister had prepared and had done a diligent amount of study. There were illustrations that supported the man’s themes and they were woven into the sermon in a thoughtful, but clumsy, way.

The announcer informed the audience that the sermon was one in a series of sermons the pastor had been preaching recently on “Spiritual Maturity.” This was that kind of sermon series where the church rolls their eyes that everything has to be counted as though the preacher was a kindergarten teacher counting the class as they came in from recess each “point” made in its order but not necessarily illustrative of the larger theme. The sermon titles weren’t an acronym for anything simplistic nor were they alliterative titles all sounding alike but the list itself was the first hint of the boredom to come and a sure indicator of the pastor’s lack of imagination.

Mind you this was the Sunday after Easter … We assumed this was his sermon for the day kicking off just such a series as the high, holy week of Easter had come and gone and the church was settling back into its old routines as though Easter had not occurred, as most churches seem to do. At the end of the sermon Marcus guessed he was a Presbyterian and almost on cue a melodic voice came on announcing this was so! Marcus beamed with his insightful observation.

Then the ton of bricks hit us as the announcer proclaimed this was a tape-delayed sermon from Easter morning! The sad part was that there was no mention of this in the sermon. No Mary going to the tomb in the early light of dawn. No weeping women tagging along. No angels announcing, “He is not here.” No Peter, no sleepy disciples … no nothing! We had just heard an Easter sermon with no mention of the resurrection!

It was apparent this good soul had themes larger than the resurrection.

Before Al Gore won his Oscar and became a big star in Hollywood … before the late Jerry Falwell claimed “Satan is using the talk about global warming among evangelicals to distract Christians away from preaching the gospel and toward environmentalism” … before the Exxon Mobil Corp. gave $16 million to 43 ideological groups between 1998 and 2005 in an effort to mislead the public by discrediting the science behind global warming  … before any these things were said or done, the Bible was speaking eloquently, even poetically about creation care.

There is a collection of psalms known as “creation psalms” written to extol the beauty and grandeur of all God has created and all that we enjoy as our earthly home.

Psalm 8:3-4a - When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established (ordained); What are human beings, that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

Psalm 19:1 - The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

Psalm 65:9-10 - You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it. You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges, softening it with showers, and blessing its growth.

But that’s not all the Bible has to say on the subject. Go all the way back to the Bible’s beginning to the book of Genesis. There we find the story and intent of creation. In the first creation story in Genesis 1, God says, “Let us make humankind in our own image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over (them) …’”

And it seems that’s where the trouble began. The idea of dominion settled into the minds and hearts of the people of God believing God gave them the freedom, nay the right, to subdue and plunder the earth. Maybe political pundit Ann Coulter was closer to the truth than we like to admit when she cynically remarked, “God said: ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’”

Maybe that’s why when Jesus was asked to describe hell he called it “Gehenna.” Gehenna is not this visionary place beyond the grave as a place where lost souls are burned for eternity.  Gehenna was valley just south of Jerusalem infamous during the Jewish monarchy period for the practice of child sacrifices by fire. While the term had a deep significance in describing a place where the dead were burned, it was also a trash dump for the rubbish generated by the residents of Jerusalem. Jesus’ description of hell was a garbage heap! That meaning seems to say that when we destroy the creation, we’re creating a hell on earth and how then can it reveal the glory of God?

And in the midst of this transcendent dream scene John had in a moment of worship, he sees the wiping away of the old world and God’s re-creation of “a new heaven and a new earth.”

From a Papillon-like penal colony on the island of Patmos, John has a vision of worship and the exaltation of God and in the midst of his worship he envisions this astounding scene from Revelation 5 where the voices of a mass choir of singing angels breaks out in full voice, “Worthy is the lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” They are uncountable simply out of sheer magnificence and John doesn’t even try to count them; instead, he describes them as, “… myriads and myriads and thousands and thousands.”

And in response to the moving nature of the majesty of their singing, the earth itself cries out an antiphonal response. “Every creature in heaven and on earth and in the sea, all that is in them sing:  ‘To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!’” Then the four living creatures add the coda: “Amen!” And the elders gathered around the throne of God fall down and worship.

This is not the first time we get the idea that the earth itself is involved in worship. It’s a distinctly Hebrew point of view that appreciates nature and senses that the trees and the mountains and the skies and the flowers and the sea creatures and the birds of the air are all a part of a holy choir that sings every moment of every day. Remember what Jesus said as he entered the city a week before his execution to the throngs of people who lined the path leading to the Temple? The Pharisees tried their best to restore calm by telling Jesus to order them quiet. Their voices could not be stilled, he said, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19:40b, NRSV). Jesus was tapping into that old Hebrew understanding that the created order was still mysteriously tied to the heartbeat of the Creator.

French paleontologist and Christian mystic Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin asked, “Is life an open road or a blind alley?” In answering his own question, he observed, “Man has every right to be anxious about his fate so long as he feels himself to be lost and lonely in the midst of the mass of created things. But let him once discover that his fate is bound up with the fate of nature itself, and immediately, joyously, he will begin again his forward march.”

Some mistakenly regard this understanding of the relationship between the Creator God and the creation as pantheism, the belief that God and the created order are one and the same. But what this seems to suggest is rather panentheism, the belief that God is immanent within the universe, while also transcending it. In panentheism, God is seen as creator and the animating force behind the creation. A deeper and more appreciative understanding of the relationship between the Divine and the creation seems to be in order. Our Native American tribes held the earth in reverence and seemed more connected to its beauty in a holistic way. That tradition would suggest we need to learn the truth about what is happening to the earth so we can make wise choices about its care.  For too long, the earth has suffered from the mismanagement that our dominion thinking has caused.

A Christian theology of creation care is simultaneously personal and corporate. It is grounded on the teachings of the Bible. And it’s something that’s considered both globally and locally. Professor Richard Wilson prods us to change by giving us two different methodologies upon which to act. The watchword of our time is “think globally, act locally.” That’s a terrific approach to getting started! But we could just as easily reverse that thinking. Sometimes doing something tangible at the local level can stimulate our thinking at the global level. Sometimes making the slightest of changes can set loose other changes that would necessarily mean changes at a deeper level. What is important, Wilson says, is to see our work as a part of what God is doing as a part of redemption and reconciliation.

A poetic way of thinking about Earth Day today is to see the creation, the entirety of it, (not just those beautiful places where the nature shines) as God’s body. If we could take it in and see it as something God has created and given to all of us that inhabit it, would it make a difference? Would it be something we could see as a part of our fellowship with God that we would faithfully tend to it if we could see it as God’s body? I think it would make a world of difference.

Like many of you, I admire words and how even the simplest of thoughts can be strung together until their beauty shines brighter than the sum total of the words themselves.

I’ve come to love reading Mary Pipher - known widely for her courageous exploration of how fragile young girls can be in their journey to womanhood. Pipher is a psychotherapist with a poet’s heart.

Recently, I read a Mary Pipher book I enthusiastically recommend, Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World. After Pipher experienced what some would call a mental breakdown triggered by her own wild success as an author, she had to retreat in order to save herself. Here’s a snippet from the last chapter of her story of recovery:

“At sixty, I am still ahead of the horses, as my grandfather used to say. But I am aware that I have only a finite number left of Thanksgivings, full moons or spring flowers. That realization makes me sad, but it also makes me notice. I don’t often squander much time or let beauty pass me by.

I heard recently that Japanese companies offer employees what is called heartache leave - days off after they break up with a partner. With a young person it is only one day; for older people, heartache leave is longer. At this stage of my life, every day is a kind of heartache leave. I am always losing someone or something I love.

But here are the gifts of this stage of life:  A deep reverence for all living creatures. The realization I have been useful. The freedom to do as I please. The knowledge that I am loved. The acceptance of my place in time.

I do not fear death, but I hate to think of abandoning people who love me. I wish I could always be here to watch over my generations of family. I especially want to be part of my grandchildren’s lives as long as I can. I want to take them to see the Sandhill cranes, read them the books I loved as a girl, teach them the constellations and the names of butterflies. I want to give them what my grandmothers gave me - a deep sense that I was loved and understood …

Not all adults have grandchildren or find them fulfilling. The key to happiness is not so much grandchildren as it is Generativity. This was Erik Erikson’s term for a sense that our work will leave a good and useful legacy for the generations to come. Many people without children or grandchildren experience this through their professions, their avocations and their commitments to their communities. The fullness of life comes from an identity built on giving and on joy. This is the great trick at this stage in the life cycle - finding useful work that gives us pleasure.

I luxuriate in my life, and it will be hard to say good-bye. Yet death is the greatest democrat. In the end we are all equals. There is a comfort in knowing that I face what every human being who has ever lived faced in his or her time. I expect to return to the great commons where all our ancestors will be waiting to greet us. I predict that whatever comes after death will be better than I can possibly imagine …

All transformations are returns. After setting forth on a voyage of discovery, being chased by monsters, encountering great suffering and beauty, getting lost and being pummeled by storms, we find our way back to our original place and realize that the truth has always been there waiting for us. We connect with that which we knew before we were born. We can resume our ordinary lives with eyes unclouded by longing.” 

The fifteenth chapter of Luke is a pivotal and compelling bit of storytelling because there are three stories told sequentially, each illustrating the same lesson. In many ways, Luke 15 has been considered “a gospel within the gospel” because it so typifies the message that Jesus embodied. The three stories he are told in response to how he is received by the Pharisees who note that, ” … a lot of men and women of doubtful reputation were hanging around Jesus, listening intently … the Pharisees and religion scholars growled, ‘He takes in sinners and eats with them, treating them like old friends,’” (Luke 15:1-3).

The notion of grace and forgiveness is uniquely divine. Only in the mind of God could such an idea come among us. It’s not in our nature to think up the idea of grace. In order to see that the divine message of grace gets shared, we have to treat the subject with care so that our own fallen natures don’t corrupt that which is divine.

The church has always wanted to intervene with the idea of grace and forgiveness by making the church a ticket booth to God’s grace. In order to receive grace, you need a ticket that only the church can dispense. That’s the human twist we give to grace:  We take that which is free and liberating and we make it cost something. In order to obtain the ticket of salvation, you must meet the prior approval of the church. We question whether the grace of God is enough for certain sins. We expect that you clean up appropriately before receiving God’s grace and afterwards that you meet our expectations of behavior and belief. That’s why Jesus had to tell these stories … about a lost coin, a lost sheep, and ultimately a lost son. Why, we’ve even gotten the nature of the stories confused. They are not stories of things that are lost; they are stories of things that are found.

Jesus wanted in the deepest way possible for the Pharisees to discover how they had missed the point of the message. The point was God is out on the front porch looking for any sinner who realizes they need acceptance and forgiveness. He is out there waiting and willing to offer grace to them all, no matter how lost they have been. He has already paid the price for their sins … all they need to do is simply come home and receive it. That’s our message, too, if we are willing to hear it for ourselves.

We see ourselves mirrored in the lives of the two sons. We’re either the younger lost son who took everything that was due him and left, or we’re the older son who obediently stayed at home and yet resented the father who gladly welcomed the wayward boy. We’re both lost and broken and we come to realize it, or we’re lost even while we’re obediently trying to earn our acceptance by being good enough. I guess ultimately in the good grace of God, there is even a grace for us lost older sons who are lost in our goodness, our niceness, and our morality.

That’s what Robert Capon calls, “being a bookkeeper.” He says, “The human race is positively addicted to keeping records and remembering scores.”  You stay at home, near God, where it is safe and predictable. What you don’t realize is that, given time, your bookkeeping behavior has, in fact, become your god, and you, too, are far away from “home.”

Grace is a kind of mercy that we in the church have had a notoriously difficult time handling. We’ve taken that which is free and we’ve made it something to earn. It’s sad in a way because we first come to God seeking forgiveness and the desire to be whole. And then, after experiencing the liberation that only God can bring, we go out and get lost all over again.

Seminary Professor Tom Long tells of the seminary student of his who went jogging with his father in their urban neighborhood. As they ran, the son shared what he was learning in seminary about urban ministry, and his father, who was the pastor in the inner city, related experiences of his own with his son. About halfway into their run, they decided to call a local pizzeria to order their lunch to coincide with their arrival back home. A phone booth (remember those?) was on the corner and as they stopped, a homeless man approached them and asked for spare change. The father reached into both pockets and pulled out all the change he had, offered it to the man and said, “Take what you need.”

The homeless man, hardly believing his good fortune, said, “Okay, I’ll take it all,” and scooped the coins into his own hands. It only took a second for the father to realize he now had no change for the phone so he called out, “Pardon me, I need to make a call. Can you spare some change?” The homeless man turned and held out the two handfuls of coins and said smilingly, “Here, take what you need.”

Professor Long claims we’re all homeless prodigals and beggars. “Head home,” he says, “and expect nothing. Be astonished beyond all measure when the dancing begins, the banquet table is set and the Voice of God says, ‘Here, take what you need.’”

I say words at my share of funerals, memorial services and gravesides. Sometimes they’re over folks I know and other times they’re for total strangers. It’s part of the work I do as a pastor. I am both minister, priest and friend in those moments. I’ve adopted the attitude of Thomas Lynch, Milford Michigan’s poet-undertaker whose newest book is titled, Apparitions and Late Fictions: A Novella & Stories (2010). In an interview, he once said:

“In The Undertaking, I followed that up by saying something like, ‘A dentist is a dentist, but he has no particular fondness for root canals or bad gums.’ That is sort of his office in brief, to take care of that, but what I wanted to point out is that it is not death-death as a subject is dull, mum, it says nothing-but all the meanings attached to the dead that are the basic stuff of human beings.”

Despite what you think about death and the whole experience of grief and strange, mixed feelings at a funeral, I typically don’t mind the role I play by helping put words to what some are feeling and others are thinking. In most accounts, I see myself putting a big frame around what’s happened so that the experience itself is sharpen in focus. I think “last words” are important to the grieving because they are ways spoken to describe what large looming event has happened that they can’t quite name themselves.

A while back I ran across a poem by Nöel Coward that seems to capture or perhaps re-captures the feeling that one has lost something significant …

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

“Nothing Is Lost” by Nöel Coward, from Nöel Coward Collected Verse © Methuen Publishing, Ltd., 2000. Reprinted with permission

In 1867, Mark Twain joined a group of religious pilgrims and boarded the Quaker City, a retired Civil War side-wheel steamer with auxiliary sails coming off commissioned duty by the Union Navy in the War Between the States. When the war ended, the ship was retrofitted as a cruise ship for a five-month cross-Atlantic journey that visited various ports of call along the Mediterranean Sea until it reached Palestine, its ultimate destination. Not yet Israel, not even British Palestine, what we call “the Holy Land” was mostly populated by Muslims and Arab Christians and was still a part of the fragmenting Ottoman Empire.