Healing the World

Sunday 5/29/2016 7:32 AM

I live in a culture obsessed with individualism. Individual rights and freedoms are protected and cherished while any idea suggesting a responsibility to our community that involves the giving up of individual rights for the good of others results in accusations of one being a socialist a communist, or a Marxist. This idea has also crept into the church. One’s faith is considered to be a private affair between oneself and God. It is believed that one can worship God by oneself at home and still be a good Christian. Any suggestion of being responsible to a larger community of faith or that of being subject to the discipline of a church body is met with resistance, the church often being accused of simply wanting to exert their power or of wanting the money of their parishioners.

Jesus summarized the law by saying we are to love God above all and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. James emphasizes the importance of works of mercy accompanying our faith. It is one thing to say we love God but he suggests that a litmus test for our love of God is to see if we are showing love for our neighbor through concrete acts of mercy, of giving of ourselves for the good of others.

Today I read a quote by Kent Groff, from his book, Journeyman. He writes, “Without the discipline of community, solitude degenerates into self-absorption and isolation; without the discipline of solitude, community degenerates into codependency and enmeshment. … The community of faith is where we learn the language of love. And the church uses two kinds of language – the verbal language of liturgy, scripture, and sermon, and the body language of sacraments, gestures, and social outreach. … Being a part of a life-giving faith community is like a healthy foot getting directional signals from the rest of the body. A life-giving church is one where human brokenness is lifted up like bread and wine to be held, and touched, and blessed – to heal the world.”

Sometimes I feel as if the church stresses solitude to the detriment of community. We have become self-absorbed and isolated from the community in which we live. We build both literal and figurative walls around our church to protect ourselves from what we consider to be the evil world around us. We isolate ourselves from the brokenness around us, rationalizing to ourselves that the problems are too big for us to solve alone. We huddle in groups of like-minded people while we drink our coffee after worship while a visitor that is different from us stands alone, observing us.

I believe we need to have more stress on our responsibility to our community, to show the love of God and the richness of his mercy through our actions to those who are not like us. We need to have the courage to reach out to touch the brokenness that is so evident in our world and, as Groff suggests, to lift it up “like bread and wine to be held, and touched, and blessed – to heal the world.”

Living with Randomness and Chaos

Saturday 5/7/2016 6:49 AM

I often hear people saying that God has a wonderful plan for their lives. Their concept of what that wonderful plan entails usually involves them having what they consider to be the perfect life: a good job, healthy relationships, good health, and so on. They see their life as something like a road that God has traced into a map book, a unique plan just for them. The difficulty with that type of thinking is that when life turns ugly and their wonderful plan isn’t coming to fruition they think they have somehow “backslidden” and do their best to get back onto the road of God’s will.

When I look at the world and people’s lives it seems to be quite haphazard. Success and failure, sickness and health, and safety and tragedy all seem to visit a person randomly rather than causally. A person with little skill or experience may be at the right place at the right time and get their dream job while someone else, with more talent, and experience galore is passed by because they are not rightly connected with those making decisions. One of two people walking next to each other down a sidewalk stops to tie his shoe while the other continues on and is killed by a collapsing crane at a construction site. It is difficult to explain that kind of randomness in the world. Christians often say it was God’s will but that kind of talk rings hollow to those affected by the tragedy or by those who do not believe. After all, what kind of malicious being is that kind of a god who would allow such a thing?

Our universe and the world in which we live seem to be chaotic, driven by randomness and chance. As one who believes in God, how am I to live and cope in such a world and maintain my faith? If my life isn’t mapped out perfectly, but driven by randomness, what path am I too take? Joyce Rupp writes these words in her book The Cup of Our Life. “Guidance is about hearing the inner voice in us that keeps us closely connected with God’s ways, giving us direction for our lives. It’s not that our lives are all mapped out for us by God. The path is rarely a clear, visible, neatly defined one. No, rather Divine Wisdom helps us to discover, each step of the way, how we are to be a loving person in our world with our chipped, flawed condition.” I believe Rupp would argue that I do not have a specific path to follow in order to be in God’s will. If I remain closely connected to God I can choose whatever path I wish, if I walk that path with love for others, knowing that God accompanies me along the way. That kind of perspective is one that provides a great deal of freedom and peace.