an outlet of encouragement, explanation, and exhortation
A friend of mine was recently in Houston. His report:
A street person asked me for change. I asked him if he could direct me to the best nearby restaurants. He knew every one, but confided that the cafeteria in the Presbyterian Hospital had the best deals. I gave him $5.
This is magnificent! Exchange. Dignity. Wow.
God’s kingdom is one where love and justice and holiness reign unhindered.
The trouble with politicians today, my friend said to me the other evening, ‘is that they always tell us that if we vote for them things will get better. If only they’d tell us the truth that the world is a dangerous place, that there are lots of wicked people trying to exploit each other, and that they will do their best to steer us through – then we might believe them.’ ‘Yes,’ another friend chipped in, ‘and that’s what happens in the church as well. We are so eager to tell people that God loves them, that everything’s going to be all right, that God welcomes wicked people as well as good ones -and then ordinary Christians have to live in the real world where people lie and cheat and grab what they want. Somehow it doesn’t fit.’
…But now for the good news – though it wasn’t good news for the people who were originally invited. God was sending out new messengers, to the wrong parts of town, to tell everyone and anyone to come to the party. And they came in droves. We don’t have to look far in Matthew’s gospel to see who they were. The tax-collectors, the prostitutes, the riff-raff, the nobodies, the blind and lame, the people who thought they’d been forgotten. They were thrilled that God’s message was for them after all.
But there was a difference between this wide-open invitation and the message so many want to hear today. We want to hear that everyone is all right exactly as they are; that God loves us as we are and doesn’t want us to change. People often say this when they want to justify particular types of behavior, but the argument doesn’t work. When the blind and lame came to Jesus, he didn’t say, ‘You’re all right as you are’. He healed them. They wouldn’t have been satisfied with anything less. When the prostitutes and extortioners came to Jesus (or, for that matter-, to John the Baptist), he didn’t say, ‘You’re all right as you are. His love reached them where they were, but his love refused to let them stay as they were. Love wants the best for the beloved. Their lives were transformed, healed, changed.
Actually, nobody really believes that God wants everyone, to stay exactly as they are. God loves serial killers and child molesters; God loves ruthless and arrogant businessmen; God loves manipulative mothers who damage their children’s emotions for life. But the point of God’s love is that he wants them to change. He hates what they’re doing and the effect it has on everyone else – and on themselves, too. Ultimately, if he’s a good God, he cannot allow that sort of behaviour, and that sort of person, if they don’t change, to remain forever in the party he’s throwing for his Son.
That is the point of the end of the story, which is otherwise very puzzling. Of course, within the story itself it sounds quite arbitrary. Where did all these other guests get their wedding costumes from? If the servants just herded them in, how did they have time to change their clothes? Why should this one man be thrown out because he didn’t have the right thing to wear? Isn’t that just the sort of social exclusion that the gospel rejects?
Well yes of course, at that level. But that’s not how parables work. The point of the story is that Jesus is telling the truth, the truth that political and religious leaders often like to hide: the truth that God’s kingdom is a kingdom on which love and justice and truth and mercy and holiness reign unhindered. They are the clothes you need to wear for the wedding. And if you refuse to put them on, you are saying you don’t want to stay at the party. That is the reality. If we don’t have the courage to say so, we are deceiving ourselves, and everyone who listens to us.
Addiction cannot be defeated by the human will acting on its own, nor by the human will opting out and turning everything over to divine will. Instead, the power of grace flows most fully when human will chooses to act in harmony with divine will. In practical terms, the means staying in a situation, being willing to confront it as it is, remaining responsible for the choices one makes in response to it, but at the same time turning to God’s grace, protection, and guidance as the ground for one’s choices and behavior. It is the difference between testing God by avoiding one’s own responsibilities and trusting God as one acts responsibly. Responsible human freedom thus becomes authentic spiritual surrender, and authentic spiritual surrender is nothing other than responsible human freedom. Here, in the condition of humble dignity, the power of addiction can be overcome.
Addiction and Grace; Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions
Henri Nouwen:
Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place.
Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation.
I listened to a TED talk by Ken Robinson this evening who quoted a poem by W.B. Yeats, He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven.
HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Robinson referred his listeners to children who relate to adults by spreading their dreams beneath our feet. It seemed to me a fitting consideration for all of our significant relationships. The more significant, the more dreams are exposed to tread. And so I’m sharing it with you. One furthering of the idea, perhaps… Is it central to the ideal of hospitality to tread lightly on others dreams? I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Addendum. A couple of weeks ago, a group of us from church ate at our favorite hamburger joint after a softball game. Four of us sat with my granddaughter Kylie, who is three years old and, in her words, almost grown up now. Her father likes to put a packet of pepper into his ketchup and dip his fries. Kylie the almost-grown-up-3-year-old likes this flavor and likes to imitate this very grown up habit (along with eating Thai Chili-Lime Cashews from Trader Joe’s, but that’s another story). So, mingling with us other grownups she casually picked up a packet and emptied it into her ketchup. Unfortunately, it was salt instead of pepper. The four of us “grownups” at the table all instinctively reached out and spoke up to try to stop her mistake – that’s not pepper! – startling her from her nearly grown-up reverie. We were too late. Someone picked up the ketchup and attempted to shake the salt from the top. Kylie shrank back. After a time, she started crying uncontrollably. We all felt bad. No had spoken in anger. It was just that we stepped all over her dream of being grown up, and she was terribly embarrassed. The petals of the blossoming rose retracted a bit. Could we have that little episode back to do over?
Author Hal Borland often wrote articles and editorial commentary on nature. He once wrote: “Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.”
I saw this in a a recent A.Word.A.Day email from Wordsmith.org. General revelation…
© 2024 Expressions of Faith
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑