SERVICE
One evening I gave voice to a lament and quickly regretted
the utterance. I was helping get two little children ready
for bed. Both had serious special needs – one, my son Sam,
so helpless at 12 as to be completely dependent for all his
needs for life, the other, dear foster child [name
withheld], so emotionally disturbed at eight that the term,
mere sociopath, describes our best hope for her future.
I lamented to Beth that, although I don’t mind performing
this nightly routine, the morning routine that follows, and
everything in between, these children aren’t the people
that will change the world. Here we are with so much
combined ability to teach and so much intellectual property
to convey and these are the ones we’re given to share it
with. This will never be an Eleanor Roosevelt or Winston
Churchill. (I could have chosen better examples, but those
are the names I blurted.)
Beth said something suitably humbling, which I’ve
forgotten, but it snapped me quickly to a composite image
of Yeshua (Jesus) and the work he did among people. Yeshua
carefully selected a dozen apostles of remarkable ability
in their day, with whom I can readily identify, but the
people upon whom he conferred his blessing and his
attention were the blind, the possessed, the crippled,
society’s castoffs, those utterly without hope – so much
like the children I tuck into bed each night. Fortunately
for me, he also gave some attention to that other group
utterly without hope, the most monstrously sinful.
Not long after contemplating this observation about Yeshua
I spent some time playing through a book of Negro
spirituals. I could have wondered why the Negroes of the
19th century, the most hopeless of Americans at the time,
were so able to identify with Yeshua and why they were able
to create such moving tributes to him. I could have
wondered, or worse still, not thought about it at all. But
the lesson of a few nights before made me aware both of the
question and the answer. The song, “Nobody Knows the
Trouble I Seen [nobody knows but Jesus]” is testimony
enough that the generations of people who delivered to us
America’s only real folk music had seen and truly
appreciated Yeshua’s gentle caring for people just like
them – society’s rejects.
Yeshua didn’t spend his time hobnobbing with the governors
and generals. He took pains to offend the priests and
intellectuals. He hand-picked his apostles and with
difficulty drilled some simple messages into their thick
heads so that people would be left behind capable of
telling the story. But he dwelt among and reached out to
the ones most like my own little charges.
It is so simple and yet so profound. As Yeshua said:
Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of
these, my brethren, you have done it unto me.
I myself once wrote: “A hundred years from now it will not
matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived
in, or the kind of car I drove… but the world may be
different because I was important in the life of a child.”
FORGIVENESS
Someone said forgiving is giving up the right to be angry
any more. In 1990 I picked up the phone and was told my
13-year-old daughter had been hit by a car. A driver from
out-of-town, about to enter a driveway on the left side of
the street, failed to yield to the bicycle crossing his
path. Ruth and her bike ended up beneath his bumper, ground
into the gravel-strewn pavement, but stopped just short of
being crushed beneath a wheel. She was impressively scraped
and bruised, and one knee required surgery to remove bone
fragments.
Both the accident and the surgery had a jarring effect on
her teen years, perhaps more than we suspect, perhaps less.
But here’s the lesson in forgiveness. I wanted the
(somewhat elderly) man to pay for everything. I wanted him
taken off the road. I wanted him to visit the child in the
hospital and say he was sorry. I wanted him to offer her a
new bike, for crying out loud. None of these happened. We
never met the man or heard from him again. He wasn’t
charged with failing to yield right-of-way. He simply left
town and he never contacted us.
I’m not bitter today. I’m disappointed in him and I’m
disappointed in our traffic laws. I have forgiven both,
however. I could have made it a personal campaign to lobby
the legislature for years until it might cave in and grant
some stricter rule about – about responsibility for hitting
bicycles, I suppose. That would have cost me years of
energy for no appreciable gain. I could have traveled to
his home and taken out some revenge on his property. That
would have brought nothing back to the way it was before.
So I learned to live with it.
As I told Ruth at the time, it would help explain
forgiveness if we assume for a moment that the man who hit
her lived in our neighborhood. Forgiveness wouldn’t oblige
me to go find him and embrace him. Forgiveness wouldn’t
mean I should return my child to the streets where he
drives and give him another crack at her. (If she had
resumed riding – and she never did to speak of, thanks to
the knee – I probably would have severely restricted her
range of travel.) Forgiveness means that, in my heart, I
carry no lasting animosity for the man. Forgiveness is as
much a release for me as it is for him.
You forgive the person and release yourself from the burden
of the anger. If you can reach him, you address the
individual and let him know that he has hurt you. You leave
it up to him whether and how to respond. You don’t withhold
your forgiveness until you get the desired response. If he
has the potential to hurt again, avoid any interaction that
will give him the opportunity. If there are laws
restricting his opportunity to repeat the offense, invoke
them. If you take steps to remove a hazardous person from
the streets, that has nothing to do with forgiveness or
lack of it. It’s merely a pragmatic and responsible step to
take. If he comes to you with any degree of contrition and
humility, accept it as it is given.
People seem most confused when they hear reports about the
prisoner who has seen the error of his ways. The prisoner
also is confused. You can regularly read a story in the
newspaper about a prisoner, often a murderer, who has found
God in prison and believes that the rest of his sentence
should now be commuted. He confuses forgiveness with
surcease of penance – that if society forgives him it will
show him by releasing him from prison. If he has committed
the crime that has led to his sentence, he accepted that
sentence the moment he committed the crime. He said, in
effect, I don’t care what it costs me, it’s worth it in
order to commit this crime. The victim of his crime may (or
may not) have forgiven him long before he found God in
prison. The crime deserves the sentence. His contrition
deserves forgiveness if it has not already been given. His
finding God in prison is an incomplete awakening if it
doesn’t also help him find the humility to accept the
remainder of his sentence as justly-imposed in the first
place. Forgiveness doesn’t equal excusing the perpetrator
from his penance (hence the word penitentiary).
When you have forgiven someone, it doesn’t mean you’ve
condoned that which gave rise to the need for forgiveness.
Nor does it mean that you approve of his continuing
actions. If your neighbor runs a legal but morally
objectionable business, you don’t have to approve of that
business. You may stand in judgment of the business and
condemn it, but you do not stand in judgment of the person.
Forgiving doesn’t mean that you must include him in your
social affairs. If a registered sex offender moves next
door, it is your duty to accept that his sentence has been
served, that you are also called upon to forgive his
offense against the community, but you’d better reject his
offer to babysit your children.
SERVITUDE AND
RESPONSIBILITY
No American faction (denomination) of Christianity seems
able to deal with Saint Paul’s lesson on being subject to
one another out of reverence for the Christ. American
preachers who are trying to be progressive on feminism find
it awkward and avoid it. Others use it as a justification
for wife-beating. Some have used it for centuries as a
justification of slavery.
It is utterly imperative to remember the times in which
Paul lived. Conquering armies enslaved the conquered.
Americans are horrified with this nation’s commerce in
human property and the enslavement of certain people
according to their race. Slaves, as Paul knew them, were
the unfortunate conquered of one country or another. Race
entered into it only incidentally. Sometimes the conquered
were those who had started out as the aggressors, who, to
their own amazement, were overpowered and enslaved by their
intended victims. Slavery was a feature of life throughout
the “civilized” world.
It is also imperative to realize that Paul’s world – he was
a Roman citizen and a Hebrew Pharisee – was a world run by
men. Paul had to deal with the world as it existed. Women
were property, although property with a voice and with some
feminine influence. It was Paul’s mission to nurture
congregations of believers. Paul was a profoundly
persuasive orator. I suspect that in all the world, with
his combination of skills and his freedom of movement
because of his position in two societies, Paul was the very
best God could have chosen to awaken the world to the
Gospels. God might have tapped him to preach against
slavery and in favor of women’s rights, but that would have
consumed all his energy and his talent would have been
wasted on something other than the Gospel message.
Where the Bible is history, it describes a world
where women had fewer “rights.” Some of the individual
writers of the Bible seemed pleased with that
phenomenon. But nowhere does God, father, son, or spirit,
declare that women are inferior. If you drop the feminist
perspective and read it without prejudice, you’ll see that
God dealt with the world as it existed. (And don’t be
bothered by the Adam-came-first scenario. So what Adam came
first! He came after bacteria. Does that make bacteria
superior to Adam?)
How did the Gospel message relate to a world where men
owned women and households owned slaves? Paul was not
justifying either. He was preaching how all three were
affected by the great commandments. John-Cedric, a priest
in the novel Fire, Wind &
Yesterday, preaches to a population nearly a
thousand years after Paul’s time, where women and slaves
were still property. The sermon follows the reading of
three lessons from the Bible:
From Micah 6:8 - “Our Lord has showed you, O Man, what is
good. And what does our Lord require of you? But that you
act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with your God.”
From Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, 5:21-33 & 6:5-9 -
“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives, be subject to your husbands, as you are to the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is
the head of the church, the body of which he is the savior.
Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives
ought to be, in everything, to their husbands. Husbands,
love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave
himself up for her… Husbands should love their wives as
they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves
himself. For… he nourishes and tenderly cares for his body,
just as Christ does for the church. For this reason a man
will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife,
and the two will become as one… Each of you should love his
wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband…
Slaves, obey your earthly masters… as you obey Christ, not
only while being watched and in order to please them, but
as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.
Render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not to
men and women, knowing that whatever good we do, we will
receive the same again from the Lord, whether slave or
free. And, masters, do the same to them. Stop threatening
them, for you know that both of you have the same master in
heaven, and with him there is no partiality.”
From Matthew 9:35 & 18:4 and Luke 9:48 - “If anyone
wants to be great, he must make himself last of all and
servant of all; for he who makes himself the least among
you all – he is the greatest before God.”
John-Cedric’s sermon: “These scriptures tell us all we need
to know of how we are to behave before God, and with one
another, and when alone. And in each case it is the same:
We must simply and always be humble. This does not call for
weakness, for that is not humbleness. Humility is so far
the opposite of weakness that one comes near resembling the
other, as the strong base of a reed comes close to the
delicate tip when the reed is bent into a circle. But
humility is ours only by strength, a strength that we have
only by the grace of God, and only when we claim it.
“By strength, and in the confidence that that strength
bestows, we can act justly. We can put aside spite and
vengeance and can be fair, because the thing that causes
most men to become unjust and to climb over their neighbors
in its quest is something that we already have. And that is
strength.
“Knowing that God is merciful unto us, what call do we have
not to show mercy as well? We are loved without reservation
by God. No matter what we do to him or against his
creation, he forgives it if we ask him to forgive. How,
then, can we presume to show no mercy? As we are loved, so
should we love, and with the greatest of tenderness for the
fragility of everyone and everything.
“To live other than this way is to assume the part that
belongs only to God, and even he does not act in a manner
contrary to his will for us. To live as God would have us
live requires that we give up the urge to alter the balance
of fairness, that we give up the lust to see anguish rather
than smiles on the faces of other men.
“If, then, we are willing to accept this relationship with
God and to follow these instructions, we will, without
effort, fall into the proper relationship with one another.
A wife will submit to her husband, if both love God,
because she will know that her husband loves her. And his
love means that, while under civil authority she belongs to
him as property, he will do all things for the good of them
both. This she knows, so she will submit, because in the
same sense he has submitted to her. Wives are to submit to
husbands, and slaves to masters, just as all people are to
submit to God. Good husbands also serve their wives and
good masters also serve their slaves just as God also
serves us.
“Slaves have a hard life, but then their reward is that
much more secure. For the good slave, although always with
the hope of honestly obtaining his freedom, understands his
place in the society of men. God did not create slavery. It
is the device of mankind. The slave, fairly obtained, is
his master’s possession, but his master has a duty to God
to take proper care of the people and things entrusted to
him. If the master does not, what should the slave do, who
fears God? He should still remain humble, for it is not the
master of the house that he serves in the end, it is God.
And even though the body of the slave suffers the master’s
abuse, even more does the soul of the master who brings on
the abuse.
“Let this console the slave whose trouble is great. And let
the slave who is abused, and the wife who is likewise
troubled for lack of an understanding master or husband,
contemplate the result that even he or she can wreak by
shining a loving face on the one who abuses. Love your
enemy, Yeshua said, and pray for those who persecute you.
And trust the hope that your gentleness will be the undoing
of the wicked, for gentleness is a powerful tool.
“Within ourselves, we must each cultivate that confidence
in God from which we gain the strength that gives us the
will to serve – when our weaker nature would rather be
served. It is God’s will that we serve one another, and
anyone can shut his eyes and imagine the kind of world that
would result if we all followed this very, very simple
command: Be just, be merciful, be humble, love God, love
all people without reservation, and serve rather than
demand to be served.
“I can tell you that the joy God places in your heart if
you merely attempt to live this way is like the fragrance
on the mists of heaven. I know, because I try, and I falter
at every step, but I know that my Lord is much pleased with
me, and that knowledge makes me spring forward to offer
more each day. I have the example of Yeshua, whose
corporeal body suffered greatly in this life, but whose
soul swelled with joy in the service he accomplished for
God his father. And Yeshua knew that heaven was his, the
crown of its king for him to put on, even as he toiled to
make men on earth understand these simple words: Be just,
and tender, be humble, love, and serve. Amen.”
2002
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