BELOVED
Texts – Isaiah 42: 1-9
Matthew 3: 13-17
A young woman was waiting for a bus in a rather bad area one evening when a rookie police officer approached her. “Would you like me to wait with you?” he asked. She replied, “Thank you, but that’s not necessary. I’m not afraid.” “Well, then,” the officer said with a sheepish grin on his face, “would you mind waiting with me?”
It’s a scary world out there. Always has been. John Calvin, the
great reformer of
“Innumerable are the evils that beset human life. Innumerable too are the deaths that threaten it . . . Wherever you turn not only are things hardly to be trusted, they openly menace and threaten immediate death. Embark on a ship. You are one step away from death. Mount a horse. If one foot slips, your life is in peril. Go through the city streets. You are subject to as many dangers as there are tiles on the roofs. Your house is continually in danger of fire, threaten(ing) in the daytime to impoverish you and at night even to collapse on you.”
Nice to know, isn’t it?, that the joys of home ownership haven’t changed all that much!
Oh, it is a scary world. Always has been. Probably always will be. The tsunami which capriciously snuffed out one hundred and fifty thousand human lives two weeks ago stands in a long line of disasters which have plagued our species from the very beginning. A scary world indeed.
We always ask “Why?” when such tragedies strike. The ancient Book of Job
is but one example. It captured then and still expresses now the quandary
that confronts us. He was a good man, a righteous man, but everything and
everyone he cared about was snatched away from him. Even
his children. “Your sons and daughters were at their meal and
drinking wine at their elder brother's home,” a messenger says to him,
“when suddenly from the wilderness a gale sprang up, and it battered all four
corners of the house which fell in on the young people. They are
dead. I alone escaped to tell you.” [Job
1: 18-19] In southern
“Why?” we ask when such tragedies occur, but it is not enough to ask why, nor is it enough to respond with curses and obscenities. James Carroll writes in the Boston Globe this week –
“Job is unforgotten not because of what he suffered but because of his refusal
to respond with curses and quitting. He rejects the possibility that the
human condition amounts to mere bedlam, nothing more. He condemns the
injustice of every further twist of his fate, and therefore justice itself
becomes his defining affirmation. His nobility lies in the simple act of
insisting, in the face of unearned suffering, that things were not meant to be
like this. A moral order emerges from his stand against (an) otherwise
victorious disorder, and what sets Job apart is the discovery, then, that moral
order is what counts. . . . Across
He has it about right I think.
Of course we ask “Why?” And of course we want to cry out and protest the obscenity of it all . . . But we also ask “How?” and “What?” How can I help? What can I do?
Last week I told you that gifts totaling $33,600 had come in not just from our
congregation but from all across our region to provide support to the work of
the
If we’re going to ask “Why?” when calamity strikes, should we not also ask the
same thing when grace abounds? Why should so many hundreds and hundreds
of people reach out to help women and men they have never met and will never
meet? People have stopped me on the road this week while I’ve been out
walking our dog or just strolling down
None of us have anything to gain from this. Those of us traveling tomorrow are simply the couriers of your generosity. The same is true of our Church’s role in this. This is not about getting credit. It is about all of us following the leading of our hearts and spontaneously giving to help a neighbor in need.
Yes, it is a scary world out there. There are pitfalls aplenty for each of us. But that is not the sum total of what awaits us. Do you remember John Newton’s words? “T’was grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.” Grace is what this extraordinary outpouring of compassion is about. Unmerited . . . unexpected . . . completely and totally “amazing” grace. We’d be complete fools, wouldn’t we?, if we didn’t pay at least as much attention to it as we do to the very real dangers which are around us?
“Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights,” the
old prophet said. “I have put my Spirit upon (this One) . . . to bring
forth justice to the nations.” [Isaiah 42:
1] And then he says, and mark it well – “I have given you as a
covenant to the people, a light to the world.” [v.6]
Yes, he speaks about God’s