That's Gratitude For You

There are some people where it really doesn't matter how much you do for them, they simply remain ungrateful. After providing a free place to live, employment possibilities, childcare and a variety of services they go to their friends and talk about how we never do anything for them. It is one of the most sad conditions I have witnessed. So lost from who they really are, so caught in their own vice that they couldn't recognize the good in this world if Jesus stood before them and blinked.

Well, maybe then they would.

However, gratitude is the sign of accepted grace. For the Christian, gratitude is the attitude of a person saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. A life lived in gratitude lives to pass on the gifts once and constantly received. In this gift giving we come to understand why it is better to give then receive, we come to understand the grace given to us more intimately, we start to understand why it is so deeply disappointing to God when a person refuses to give to others out of selfishness and then we can stand in more awe of him who died for us, ungrateful and entitled as we act, so that we have the opportunity to change.

Family Emotion

The family in modern America is broken. This is maybe the most clear when seen in our homeless population. In 2004 the unaccompanied homeless youth population in Illinois was just shy of 25,000 people (Unaccompanied Homeless Youth in Illinois: 2005, University of Illinois at Chicago). Nearly 30% of these youth give family conflict as the reason for their homelessness. Often forgiveness is forgone on both sides. A father cannot forgive his son for being gay. A daughter cannot forgive her mother for trying to protect her from a narcissistic boyfriend.

These issues are complex and because they are family issues, often the emotions are very intense. The intensity may be more of an indicator of how much we need each other than how close we are. Whatever the case, there are two things we must do. Listen. Shut up and listen. Secondly, teach our young people to forgive and model that forgiveness by forgiving them.

The family has always been broken and it is not exclusive to modern America, but I wonder if we are becoming less likely to forgive in a culture of fear that is in America today. It says something about our society when children are the new face of homelessness. God commands us over and over again to take care of the widow and the orphan or judgment will be inevitable. Judgment would not be revenge God exacts on us, but evil will collapse under its own weight and not caring for the fatherless and the widow simply exposes the condition of our hearts and the condition does not look good.

When the family is broken, the church needs to step up. But maybe the church has stepped up.

Thy Kingdom Come

Oscar Romero once wrote that the Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. We really just might be, as the old euphemism goes, the blind leading the blind. That is humbling.

Interestingly, in Deuteronomy Moses is described as the humblest man that ever lived. Later, Jesus would be born in a manger and live out a life of humility. Moses humility not only came from the amount of times he messed up or lost his temper, but was also forced to lead people beyond what he could see, trying hard to trust that God was leading them to a new kingdom while tripping over his own tongue time and again.

On the other hand, Jesus knew what he was working towards. His vision of the Kingdom was crystal clear. You can see it in how he treated people marginalized by society. The poor, the blind, the hungry and those condemned by prejudice like the Samaritan woman at the well.

I have begun discussions with my pastor about ideas for race relations on the South Side of Chicago. It is my prayer that those involved can stay humble enough to know that the vision really is beyond us and we must always put others before ourselves as we listen to the painful stories of racism and oppression. I also pray that I stay humble, pushing without thinking I know exactly how this is suppose to go and begin the conversation rather than dominate it.

Different Crosses

I cannot remember who or what I was listening to the other day, it could have even been the guest preacher at my church, I'm not sure but there is something that has struck me. Sometimes our cross to bear is not knowing, sitting between what has been and what will be, waiting in anticipation and maybe even some trepidation of what will be. So often when thinking about taking up our cross I think about those things that are big, painful or life altering. But not every cross weighs the same or works in the same way.

The cross of living in transition is not heavy. When God calls for patience it is easy to say okay...for awhile anyway. But carry anything that is of some weight over a long stretch of time and it's not long before your arms feel like they will fall off. You may start off strong but all human strength will wane under the burden of any cross. Or the cross is like grinder baseball. Small bunts, steels and hits that slowly grind you into the dirt as the opponent beats you by one. Grinder baseball takes an impressive display of patience.

So I wait, waiting to hear if the Field Ed. Committee at the Seminary will accept my appeal and give me the credits I need to graduate. Until then I am uncertain if I am still an official student or not, if I can start to pursue things I have felt pulled towards the last four years but have waited for after graduation.

For now, it's a matter of the will to practice patience and not get antsy and swing at a bad pitch. So I sing with the song writer:

God wraps himself in human skin for those who want to touch.
And God let them drive the nails in for those of us who knew way too much.
And I'd like to say I'm faithful to the task at hand,
Speaking gospel to a handful and others with their list of demands.

It's cold this year and I'm late on my dues.
It's cold this year but that's nothing new.
My heart's electric with your love again.
So it's on to Bethlehem.*

Bill Mallonee "On To Bethlehem" from the import CD "'Cross the Big Pond"

Sermon On Ruth 1

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Institutionalized

The word Institution is a complicated word. The institutions of society provide us with order and vehicles for us to belong to something larger than ourselves or even give meaning behind what we do. The church, the school, the nation are all powerful motivating institutions in our world today.

If a person is institutionalized we often think they are in the crazy house, loony bin or whatever crass description of a mental hospital we can give. It is often one of the greatest shames in our society, a person is so insane they must be locked up. Partly because we still think mental illness is a state of mind we choose, if the person would only have more faith they would not have been crazy. Obviously untrue but it is easier to believe we are strong enough to choose not to be crazy than be vulnerable and accept the fear that it may happen to us someday.

But there is another way to be institutionalized. Red (Morgan Freeman) in Shawshank Redemption, talked about how an institution can manipulate a person to such a degree the person loses his/her sense of self apart from the institution. In other words, your identity is highjacked and lost should you ever be ripped away from the institution (the old librarian convict in Shawshank committed suicide because he no longer knew himself outside of prison after serving a life sentence and getting out early). It is a crisis of identity.

Often times we see this in ministry. Though a single person is more at risk because there is nobody to keep the person grounded or from working 120 hours a week, even a married person can allow an institution to highjack their own identity. But God never asks this of us. Our only true identity is in Christ alone.

As Oscar Romero prayed, "We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest."

You Don't Deserve "It"

Do we deserve it? I suppose I should define "it." "It" is our status in our culture, our wealth, our security. "It" is what they are selling on TV and can buy through e-bay and Google. Do we deserve "it."

The poor don't have "it." They see "it" and often get close to "it" but are never really within arms reach of "it" as it shimmers and shines, mocking those who don't have what "it" takes.

But for most of us we are all to willing to give up what "it" takes. Our houses are cluttered, our garbage runneth over, plastic doohickeys and gluttonous closets full of clothes we will never wear...all to show "it" off.

But are we willing to give "it" up? So often we believe we deserve all the "it" we have received and bought. That we earned it through years of school and hard work and discipline. Pride fills us up to believe so but pride is a shrewd fox with a viper's venom.

As long as we believe we have earned "it" we can blame those without "it" for not having "it" because they did not earn "it." Lazy bastards, though we would never say that out loud. But they did not choose where they were born. They did not ask to be born into poverty, to start 10 feet behind the starting line and asked to run the same race, to receive a poor education in a poor neighborhood. They did not ask to be children in a place where violence lives to take all of "it" away. They do not deserve this, but they might just deserve "it."

But do we? In our cluttered houses, our garbage that runneth over, and our gluttonous closets. Do we deserve "it." No, no we did not ask to be born to rich parents, to nice neighborhoods with good schools, it was a blessing, a grace given to us by God. A grace not to be accumulated and gorged upon but to be shared and given away.

Do we deserve "it"? Not when we turn blind eyes and deaf ears upon people who God loves too.

These Waters

So I am here. Among the poor, the intelligent, the hardly lucky, the hardly privileged I stand out rich, ignorant, lucky and privileged. Is it my skin tone? Can I reconcile that it just might be? But I am not responsible for where I came from. I did not decide who my parents would be.

Forgive me for my excuses.

But it's the poor's fault for being poor. Is it the widow's fault for being a widow? Is it the fault of those without a father that they are fatherless?

Yet we blame the poor, shake our heads at them from afar and click our tongues, condemning laziness, stupidity and dumb in people we have turned a deaf ear to; people we do not know. Did they choose who their parents would be? Did they choose where they would be born?

Jesus did not shake his head from afar and condemn us even when we deserved it. No. He jumped into these waters, he listened to our stories, spoke to our hearts, sometimes cryptically, always in love. He drowned in these waters so the water would not drown us. He rose out of the deep so we would not sink to the depths.

Then he asked us to do the same.

The Adventurer

In his song Strange Waters, Bruce Cockburn sings about all that he has witnessed and like prophets of old, is asking for some peace among the injustice of the world. I find myself in places that seem like strange waters, places I do not seem to belong, and yet find that I do. I guess that is the adventure, finding out who we are and not whe we believe ourselves to be.
There will always be an antithesis between who God intended us to be and who we believe ourselves to be. Until we arrive at that place when perfection is restored and Jesus Christ begins his earthly and eternal reign in full there will always be that itch we just can't scratch, like we're always on the verge of knowing and being known and yet always keeping him at arms length.
I suppose that is what draws us to cling to this world. It is an effort to scratch, to know and be known. So I seek to let go, to release and see if I do take flight. It will not be once, however. I am certain this will be a series of small choices that lead finger by finger to my flight and be of no glory to me, but the one who has saved me and made me who I am.