Life is Short

Life is short and we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. So be swift to love. Make haste to be kind. And the blessing of God be with you.

I had the privilege of introducing this blessing to a congregation where I was serving. They thought I was brilliant. It became Jay’s blessing, despite how many times I told them that it had been used in many churches, and that the prayer apparently was originally crafted in the 19^th century by a Swiss philosopher, poet and critic named Henri Frederic Amiel. None of that seemed convincing, and I’ve had worse things happen in church than getting credit for something I didn’t do. Regardless of source, I have been struck with how this prayer resonates with people. I have wondered why it is so engaging.

It may be the directness of its start. The older we get, the more we recognize the fleeting aspect of life. That’s hardly news, as the psalmist notes that even those who stand erect are but a puff of wind (39:5), or that our days are like a passing shadow (144:4). Accordingly, we recognize the wisdom of the collect heard yesterday in church (see above) which offers prayer that we may pass through things temporal without losing sight of things that are eternal.

Think with me about the things that are temporal. They are fleeting. Early in my ministry, in the cocky snarkiness that can mark those who have been recently ordained, I made a slightly derisive comment about someone who was only serving in an interim capacity in a church, bless their heart. The wise person who heard the comment responded: “Jay, we’re all interim.” I’ve not forgotten that. It’s useful to keep that temporal aspect in mind. It can help us through rough passages. “This too shall pass.” It can also help with some immunity to hubris. It can prevent us from giving our hearts to that which will not ultimately satisfy our hearts.

It does not mean we focus only on pie in the sky and forget about the ministry we’re given to do right now. C.S.Lewis put it this way: “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next.” He said: “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

Think with me about the things that are eternal. In St. Paul’s famous hymn in I Corinthians 13, he concludes by saying that in the end, faith, hope and love will abide but the greatest of these is love. In some respects, faith and hope are by definition temporal. There will come a time when we no longer walk by faith, but by sight. Hope anticipates something that will come, with the implication that there will be a time when hope will not be necessary. But love does not end. Someone once posed this question about heaven: “Will everyone I love be there?” A wise person responded: “Even better. You will love everyone who is there.”

Think this week about how you might focus on the eternal. It matters. More from C.S.Lewis: “It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one.” Maybe that kind of eternal focus will come with a prayer for vision, maybe a repetition of this week’s collect. Maybe it will come with a prayerful act of love, unconditionally offered, expecting nothing in return. Life is indeed short, but whatever time we have is filled with opportunity to be swift to love, and to make haste to be kind. Those opportunities when met have lasting value.

-Jay Sidebotham

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RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

Learn more in our digital brochure.

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It’s okay

He came pretty regularly to church, at the outset mostly for the sake of wife and kids. We had any number of conversations about why faith didn’t make sense to him. It might have been generous to call him an agnostic. He was one of the smartest people I’d met in church, a well-read philosophy major. I was no match for the intellectual sparring, but he kept coming to church.

After a while, he made an appointment to tell me that he had come to a place where faith actually did make sense. He seemed to affirm the adage that faith is more often caught than taught. Slowly, over time, after hanging around the community, he was becoming a believer, in his own way. He offered his synopsis of the gospel. He said that the gospel sounded to him like this: I’m not okay. You’re not okay. And that’s okay.

I wanted to fine-tune that. But I believed he had grasped a basic truth. Maybe without knowing it, he was underscoring the message of the collect we read in church yesterday (above).

In a nutshell, the collect says we need help. The collect says that God knows our necessities, our ignorance, our weakness, our unworthiness, our blindness. An interesting if not entirely chipper assessment of the human condition. The collect also suggests that God, the fountain of all wisdom, is not surprised by any of this. God knows all this about us. And God hangs in there with us anyway.

We’ve been reading Paul’s letter to the Romans on Sundays. One of the key points the apostle makes in that letter is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. No exceptions. But that’s not the whole story, because Paul describes in soaring language the marvel and mystery that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing, not even our deficits. We call that grace. It’s amazing.

Here’s one way to know what love is. It’s when someone in your life knows the bad or dumb things you’ve done, knows your quirks and deficits, and loves you still. Parents on a good day show that kind of love. Spouses can do that. It doesn’t happen enough in church, where contrary to the gospel, we often act like we expect people to have it all together. We are often less than gentle with other people’s failings, even if we coddle our own.

Our faith tells us about the wideness of God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea. To the extent that we’re able to grasp that, to believe that, to trust that, we have heard the gospel. We are saved from the ways in which our world makes everything conditional, the persistent ways that our world tells us we don’t measure up, tells us we’re just not good enough.

When I began my course of study at Union Seminary, we had a week of orientation. I’d been out of school for a while and I was excited about a return to serious academic work. Heady stuff. One of the speakers at orientation was James Forbes, seminary professor who went on to be Senior Pastor at Riverside Church. He said he had just one bit of advice for us students. Memorize Psalm 139. He said it would change our lives. I thought: I didn’t come to this high-falutin’place to memorize bible verses. I did that in Sunday School.

But I took him up on it. Years later, I can still recite a good amount of the chapter. Have a look at that psalm this week and think about why he recommended it. Think about how it might be transformative. The premise of the psalm, thousands of years old, says that God knows us better than ourselves. (Just a few of the verses are printed above) God knows all the ways we fall short. With all that knowledge, God still is with us and for us. On some holy level, in some divine economy, it’s all okay.

I believe that good news a fair amount of the time. Sometimes I find it hard to believe and I don’t act as if it is true. But to the extent I can embrace that good news, it provides a way to live in the world, a break from all the ways that I regard love as conditional. It means that my necessities, my weakness, ignorance, unworthiness do not define or limit me. I hope I can receive the grace to live into that truth, and to regard others with a bit of the grace that God extends to me.

-Jay Sidebotham

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

Learn more in our digital brochure.

RenewalWorks – Digital Catalog

Clueless

Truth be told, we wouldn’t pray yesterday’s collect (above) if we weren’t somewhat clueless. Printed below that collect, I’ve included the popular prayer about unknowing, written by Thomas Merton. I’m guessing that its popularity springs from the fact that we all know something about not knowing where we’re headed. Accordingly, we ask for help, that we might know and understand what to do, and know how to accomplish.

My first instinct is to challenge the collect. The fact is, we know what to do. It’s clear in scripture. Micah puts it this way: He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6.8) Very clear. Maybe not easy, but clear. Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God and neighbor. Most religious traditions have some version of the Golden Rule, which is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Rabbi Hillel famously said that all the other commandments are just commentary on that one rule. We might add to that the Hippocratic Oath, which I’ve often asked Sunday School teachers to embrace: Do no harm. What we ought to do seems to be spelled out pretty clearly.

G.K.Chesterton said: The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult and left untried. The Nike slogan comes to mind: Just do it. I laughed when I saw a t-shirt on a person who maybe had eaten a few too many cheeseburgers. It showed the Nike logo upside down with the words: Don’t want to.

We may know what we ought to do. But it is entirely possible we may not understand what we ought to do. The kind of life to which we are called, the kind of love we are called to show, may be beyond comprehension. Grace is truly amazing. As the hymn speaks of the wideness of God’s mercy, the hymn text says that the love of God is broader than the measure of our minds. In the course of our lives, we rarely experience the kind of unconditional love we are called to know and show. We come to life, to our relationships with mixed motives, with the underlying question: What’s in it for me? So maybe we do need help to know and understand what that love looks like.

And if we need help with that kind of understanding, we most certainly need help accomplishing it, in putting it to work. Where do we find that help? For starters, it’s worth noting that we can’t do it on our own. When we commit to the promises of the baptismal covenant (another place where it’s stated pretty clearly what we are to do. See page 304 in the Book of Common Prayer), we say that we will with God’s help. That help may come in our communities. On a good day, we can find help in the body of Christ, in the church.

I invite you to see how you can live this prayer, yesterday’s collect, in your life this week. Consider what you are being called to do. Is that clear to you? Where does the call to love God and neighbor intersect with your circumstances, with your daily rhythm? What are the opportunities to put love to work in your world? And then ask for the grace to accomplish that, to live into that call. Seek that grace from the one from whose love we can never be separated.

-Jay Sidebotham

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

Learn more in our digital brochure.

RenewalWorks – Digital Catalog

Standing on shoulders

Over the years, as I served as parish priest, I would chaperone lock-ins, events by which any number of rambunctious young people spend the night in the church. These events were wildly popular. Emphasis on wild. Sleep was apparently not on the agenda. I recall that each time I led one of these things, about 3am in the morning, I thought about alternative careers. Starbucks barista looked pretty good in those early morning hours. My role in this event was to make sure that everyone was safe, that no laws were broken, that the church was still standing in the morning.

In the course of these events, I made efforts to bring some spiritual component to the gathering, which sometimes was met with eye rolls from the teenagers, along with other forms of resistance. These efforts were not always successful.

One particular lock-in was held on the weekend closest to All Saints Day. I gathered the young people for a midnight eucharist. Because that was way past my bed-time, I invited the young people to offer the homily, answering this question: Who has been a saint in your life?

As we went around the circle, young people again and again cited a grandparent as a saint, a role model. The stories were sweet and powerful. I was impressed that I didn’t hear names you might expect: Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi. I mostly heard about saints who never gained fame. But they had shaped these young peoples’ lives. They had provided a foundation for these young people to grow spiritually. It made the lock-in effort totally worth it.

Spiritually speaking, we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before, who have modeled for us what it means to put faith to work in the world. That goes all the way back to the characters in the Hebrew Scriptures. (For instance, Abraham has always been a teacher and guide for me.) And throughout the centuries, saints have shown us what courage looks like in the face of great opposition, resistance and persecution. Some were world famous. Others, not so much. I wonder which biblical characters, which saints throughout church history, have been that kind of guide for you.

The collect heard in church yesterday speaks of the foundation of apostles and prophets, folks who have paved the way, shown the way, lived the way of love. The collect continues to use the metaphor we noted last week, making reference to a foundation, a holy construction project. We find ourselves living our life of faith in a great communion of time, a great global communion. Yesterday’s collect asks that we’ll do so in a spirit of unity (even if it’s not a spirit of agreement or uniformity or unanimity). We’re asked to recognize how others have helped us grow in faith, how others have helped us build our faith.

Take time today to think about who those people have been in your life. On whose shoulders do you stand? Offer thanks for them. If they are still around, you might want to send a note of thanks for their help along the way. I’m certain that would be well-received. It might be a source of great encouragement.

Then think and pray about how you might be part of this building process, how you can help someone else. Who might that be in your life this week?

As I write, I’m waiting to hear about the arrival of my third grandchild. I hope and pray that I can help that person build a life of faith. I hope and pray they will have people in their life who will do that. And I hope and pray they survive any future lock-in, and that they will show mercy to their chaperones.

-Jay Sidebotham

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

Learn more in our digital brochure.

RenewalWorks – Digital Catalog